Author's notes: Sorry for the delay, ladies and gentlemen, but I really wanted to write a good and long chapter, for once. I provably won't be writing chapters this long in a while, so read, enjoy and... For God's sake, REVIEW! I LOVE REVIEWS! I WANT REVIEWS!
WARNING! Gory scenes. This chapter contains detailed gore that may be considered as... Let's say unpleasant... For certain individuals.
Disclaimer: Why do I always have to write these? Doesn't anybody care about my health? Well, I own nothing. NOTHING! If I owned Harry Potter or Vampire: the Masquerade, this story wouldn't be fanfic, and it would be safely protected with author copyrights, federal and international laws and its only copy would be secured inside a indestructible safe protected with heavy machine gun turrets and voice, digital print, retina checks and and coded hyper security system that I don't know if even exists.
The district I was in now had never had a very good reputation, but... This... Was something utterly unexpected. What could have made a whole district so much? The Nosferatu disk didn't say anything about that... Had the district started its rundown spiral because of the giant attacks wizarding newspapers reported? Or because of the tornadoes the muggle ones stated?
According to what I had learned, this area had been one of the firsts to become a wizards / dark wizards battlefield, and still was. It was obvious the war hadn't been good for the quarter, but that much? I certainly wouldn't like to see what kind of battle could run a whole district this down in so little time. I kept walking while I furtively examined what had become of the area.
Decayed buildings painted with the local gangs' logos, drug dealers selling their customers Ms. Death in blue pills in the abundant shadows and secluded corners... A high percentage of the city's homeless population illegally residing those buildings so rundown not even their rightful owners cared about what happened there... Low life 'ladies' showing off more skin than justice would allow a non-adult to see... Yonkies lying on the different buildings' front door stairs... More vagabonds sitting around improvised fireplaces on the streets, wrapping and warming themselves with the heat provided by old newspapers...
Thieves, muggers, robbers and assassins, amongst other society scum of likes, stalking their next preys from the shadows... No wonder why the taxi driver had advised me against this destination and why he had rejected to leave me closer from the point I had asked him for! Even I, being a vampire and capable of starting a massacre right there if needed, felt a bit intimidated by that place.
It didn't take me long to understand why my contact had decided to install herself in a district like that one: the environment was just ideal for her... Nutritional... Tendencies: nobody would be too surprised if someone disappeared there. If she was careful enough, she'd be able to even have free meals thanks to the locals' criminal customs. Sometimes, I felt... Disgusted... When I thought about such things.
Not that I condemned or felt repulsed by what she did: were I in her shoes, I'd surely end up doing just the same to survive. What made me feel awkward and wonder just how much humanity remained within me was that, somehow, I had come to think of her feeding needs as something... Somebody shut me up before I say 'natural'... Most kindred found it disgusting, why didn't I mind anymore?
"Hey, honey, looking for a date?" Apparently, I had approached one of the local 'professionals' too much and, since my clothes revealed I wasn't exactly like her neighbors, she had decided I was a customer. The woman was wearing high heeled boots and a very tight black leather catsuit with its fly on the front, half opened, leaving an exaggerated V that she was trying me to notice by leaning towards her possible customer to let me have a peek. She was really trying hard to get me aroused.
"Hmm..." I carefully sniffed her blood scent: no trace of non-human blood... Prey. Amazing as it may be, neither her aura or scent alerted me of her having any disease... Prey. I could smell she had a healthy amount of blood; not too properly fed, but healthy enough... Prey! Hell, I HAD had a feast at Hogwarts that same night, but the use of thaumaturgy and, especially, Domination (which I couldn't control too well, causing me to burn my blood faster) had left me slightly hungry. The prostitute had managed to accomplish arousing me... The wrong way. "I may be, but I'm afraid you might be a little out of my reach..." It wasn't that I wished to spend too much, after all.
"Oh, come on..." I might be wishing to keep as much of my money as I could, but the woman wanted some too. Feeling that she had a good business at hand, she leaned closer and sneaked an arm around my neck, letting me have a full sight of her upper cleavage... And a better position to smell her blood: AB, if I wasn't mistaken. "If you gave me a little present," she raised her other hand in front of my face and put together her thumb and index finger. "So little as, say, twenty pounds or so -I'm just giving an example- I'd be soooo happy..."
Just twenty? What a bargain! For a blood pack with half the blood I was going to drain her I usually had to spend fifty bucks... I reached for my wallet and gave her the amount she had asked me for. "I warn you: I tend to bite." Obviously, the hooker hadn't understood the truth that laid behind my warning, for she simply laughed and pulled me into the nearest darkened alley.
"Come on, I'm sure you're a biiig boy... Show me what's you've got," she purred. I hugged her to make sure her knees wouldn't fail when I was having my supper, kissed her on the mouth and prolonged our kiss to build up her passion.
I massaged the woman's back with my hands, trailing kisses from her mouth to her chin and throat, following the jugular vein. I reached her collar bone and followed it towards her shoulder while she unzipped her suit enough to reveal everything from her shoulders to her breasts' upper half.
"Hey, it was you who payed, honey... Mmh..." Smiling, I continued my kissing ministrations from there up her neck's side, alternating kisses with feather nibbles; until I reached the point I had previously discovered where her vein was the nearest to her skin... There didn't seem to be any nearby nerve...
I reached my right hand to the back of her head and my left one to her upper back. Once I was sure dinner wouldn't fall, my fangs pierced through her skin, sinking into her warm body. Slightly bitter, but intoxicatingly warm and metallic liquid started flowing into my mouth immediately. So, she truly was AB, after all... I kept sucking until my hunger subsided, confident that my prey'd be able to satiate the not so big need I had without endangering her health.
When I was done, I carefully placed the unconscious human on the ground. Thinking twice about leaving her as she was, I zipped her suit up in order to preserve her body heath a bit better. Afterwards, I got up and started walking the street down again: the meeting point was just around the next corner. I kept walking, passed a silent, auraless, shadowy place and reached the point to find... Nothing. I'd have to wait...
Or maybe not: it didn't take long for me to hear slow, unsteady footsteps behind me. As if to erase any doubt of the steps' owner's identity from my mind, a rotting smell reached my nostrils and an incoherent, throaty mumbling came from the mouth of whoever was behind me. "So, Pisha, have you decided to let our meeting commence? Or have you decided I'm not welcome in your territory anymore?"
"Gwahuahuu..." I turned to see a middle aged, toothless man. His unshaved and dirty face, along with his clothings didn't reveal any health issue and, if it weren't because of his absence of aura, no heart beats and no capability to speak, you'd say I was just before some random wanderer, who was only minding his business.
In some way, he was: this wanderer corpse's only business now was doing what his mistress told him to do. He couldn't understand me, nor could I receive any coherent word from his part, but his mistress saw what he saw and heard what he heard.
No teeth or long nails: this zombie's function wasn't to fight or scare me out. Then, he was either the official welcoming committee, or a bait to lead me into an ambush. There was only one way to find out, though. "Please, lead the way." The undead man walked past me and started moving ill-balanced through the different rundown streets. Following him, I started extending my senses in order to try and feel Pisha's aura before I met her: I wanted to know if we were still in good terms or, as she told me it might happen next time we met, she now considered me an enemy.
We entered one of the buildings that looked the most likely to collapse just because of a gentle breeze and the zombie guided me through the different hallways, letting itself fall to the lower levels each time it arrived any hole on the floor. We were now inside the third basement. "Uawahhgwah..." It pulled a broken table that was on the nearest wall, revealing a...
No... Damn it! It was... a very narrow ventilation pipe, about two feet wide per one and a half tall. I'd be able to fit, but it was just so... Suddenly, the walls around me appeared to start advancing to the room's center. The room now seemed narrow and closed, and the only useful exit was through a tinier place: I couldn't bring myself to find the hole from where I had jumped here...
My veins dilated and, though kindred don't need to breathe, I started hyperventilating uncontrollably. The beast hadn't done anything to increase this sensation, as strange as it may seem, but it was pleased and fast asleep from the recent extra meal it had had. "You... You don't expect me to go through there, do you?"
As if to respond to my question, Pisha retired her hold onto the corpse, letting it fall flat dead once again... And leaving me in my predicament. "Great, just great!" I swallowed hard, walked towards the opening I feared, crawled and looked inside... "Why can't it be a pack of very pissed werewolves?" Sighing, I crawled into the metallic opening and started advancing, ever so slowly, between the restrictive and rusty metallic walls that now surrounded me... Imprisoned me...
The beast was now struggling as hard as if I were deathly threatened. It tried co either take over or cut me off of my surroundings. Wasn't the situation bad enough as it was? Why did the beast have to wake up and get the matters worse?
Dragging myself along the ruined ventilation system resulted to be both easier and more frustrating than I had first expected: it was rather easy to find the correct path inside the mace those pipes formed because Pisha's aura was straight ahead, so there was no way I could get lost.
The irritating part was that, apparently, Pisha wasn't in the same building her zombie had led me to, so I had to crawl all the way through the narrow, dark and rusted ventilation system to get to her. The silence was deafening and the fact of being caged down there, between four metallic walls that didn't even let me room to turn back, below several feet of soil, below the pavement, without seeing any possible exit... Pisha'd best have a good excuse: I felt homicidal.
After advancing through the pipe for what seemed like ages, though, my homicidal tendencies gradually started fading away at remembering that I had been the one who had contacted her and that Pisha had always preferred to hide in places of difficult access (at least, it had been so when I met her five years ago). The ventilation system thing was something I just should have expected... I dragged myself forward a little bit more.
Plus, Pisha was a two hundred and thirty five years old Nagaraja, which meant she had had time to polish her necromancy skills and learn other ways to defend herself along the way. Attempting to kill the Nagaraja would suppose to have to go through hordes of her zombies just to end up injured, tired and fighting an older, perfectly healthy kindred (if I survived that much, that is). Not too smart. I extended my arms, put them on the metallic surface ahead of me and pulled. Two feet less of tunnel ahead.
I repeated the process once more. Twice. Thrice... Eight times. Nine. Ten. Eleven... This was getting old, and the uptenth times cursed claustrophobia didn't lessen... I had passed, at least two turns to the left and three to the right; plus five branches which I had passed without hesitation: Pisha's aura was ahead, and the rotting stench that came from these parallel tunnels made me think they were traps for undesired visitors.
And I, surely, wasn't: Pisha had been able to kill me whenever she wanted for a long while by now. What was making me think so? Well, the noises and smell behind me were a clear indication that she had one of her... Servants... Both watching me closely and sort of pushing me forward. She could have a single corpse appear in front of me all of a sudden and I wouldn't stand a chance. If a doctor were to look for my heart, he'd find it in my stomach. I pulled further.
And found my pass blocked by something. I couldn't see what it was, so I reached for thaumaturgy and used ignem to lit a tiny flame in the palm of my hand... The fire allowed me to see a skinless, half devoured face staring me blankly. My natural reaction to such a vision left me with a terrible headache and surrounded by the echoes of something colliding with metal. "Ouch!"
Once I managed to calm myself down (which, by the way, didn't take so long), I realized I had lost the concentration on ignem and, thus, the fire had disappeared, leaving me in the darkness again. Neither corpse before or behind me had attacked.
I lit the fire again and watched intently the cadaverous barricade blocking my pass: a middle aged woman. Judging by the absolute lack of skin and the little amount of flesh left, she had been devoured until only the muscles her mistress would need the zombie to have in order to work were left. Her half eaten right arm was resting between us, "Warhgouh..." her right hand was pointing to the opening to her left, my right. Once I moved the fire towards said opening, I heard a dumb thud: Pisha had removed her control over the middle aged corpse because it had already accomplished its mission.
Well, it wasn't as if I had a saying about the route to follow... I decided to turn off the fire before continuing and advanced to my right. The faint contact between the signalization zombie and my left knee as I did so sent chills through my spine. From my new position, though, the beast within howled in joy: ahead, the pipe's surface was tainted with light and scent of recently spilled blood. The exit was nearby. I wanted out, right then. I sped forward.
WARNING! GORY SCENES AHEAD! STOP READING IF YOU FIND GORE DISTURBING OR YOU ARE UNDERAGE. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
"That's better." The words escaped my lips as soon as I got out of the trillion times damned ventilation system. Chewing, liquid spilling and bone breaking sounds could be heard from not too far away. I glanced around to see Pisha's new residence: bare brick walls covered with dust, half eaten corpses from previous meals on the floor, lined on the walls (some had already started their decomposition process, sending waves of rotting stench to the air) and a single doorless doorframe that led to the room's only exit: a hallway.
Feeling better than a few seconds before, I proceeded forward, through the corridor, and passed the curtain on its end to meet my hostess...
There she was: white blueish skin under a skin tight green dress, middle back long hair tied up in a ponytail; lower arms, hands and all of her torso spilled with blood. She was just before a table were a man on his early twenties was lying still. She was bent over the young man, her face on... In... His stomach, making slurping sounds and causing blood to flow freely out of the recent corpse's tummy. "Bon appéttit."
At hearing my voice, the Nagaraja stopped munching, stood up and swallowed the intestine piece that hung from her mouth. "Thank you." Her eyes didn't betray surprise or displeasure by my presence. "I'd invite you to join me but, fortunately for you, I'm the only one here who needs to eat flesh to avoid rotting."
Small talk. Well, I supposed I had time for it. "What can I say? I'm lucky -am I interrupting you?" Diplomacy and politeness would have to be my weapons if I wanted the Nagaraja to accept helping me: Voldemort's killings might be a very tempting offer to one of her clan. I didn't have such a good bargaining position... Pisha smiled and tore her meal's trousers off. I won't describe what she did with that particular clothe out of her way, but she did find a good mouthful of... Flesh... That the man would never need as a zombie.
I felt glad not to be classified as lunch by the kindred before me. "Not if you don't mind if I continue having my supper." I waved her to continue and she inserted her hand into the cadaver's stomach to the elbow. "Say... You were just an outcast neonate when we last met. Have you been accepted into your clan's pyramid, yet?" With the last word, she yanked something from inside the corpse's thorax and blood started overflowing his stomach as she extracted the guy's heart.
"Oh, yeah, they've even declared me fully fledged." Seeing that Pisha had her mouth too occupied to talk right then, I took the opportunity to continue speaking and redirect the subject slightly to try and make this simple message reach her mind: doing business with me is good. "I wouldn't have made it if it weren't for the items you gave me, though. Had to use the Odious Chalice more than once to avoid frenzying. What about you?" The Nagaraja had just gulped the heart and was now licking her fingers.
"Well, the Voce di Morte and the fetish statue you retrieved for me have really proved very useful for me to progress in my investigations, as you may have noticed." Puzzled, I gave the kindred a quizzical look. She shrugged and proceeded to drink up the red liquid in the man's stomach. It didn't take her more than a few seconds. "Well, as you have surely realized, my newest zombies don't need to have a full body: I can eat up the muscles I don't need them to have. Furthermore, I have found in the book an interesting page that explains how to really control the zombies instead of just commanding them what to do."
Pisha sat the corpse up and used her claws (yes, kindred nails can become so hard they can be considered claws) to open its cranium, revealing its contents. The female necrofagus pouted, disappointed at what she saw. "Dry already? I didn't realize he had bled so much..."
"Here," I took the Odious Chalice out of its plastic bag and handed the obscure item to the Nagaraja, "it's O+." Pisha smiled, took the Chalice, squeezed it over the dead brain and stopped only once her meal was wet enough for her taste.
"Thank you." She handed me the Chalice back and as I was returning it into the bag, she greedily devoured the gray matter as if it were her favorite kind of jelly. "Ahhh... Much better..." Pisha's skin color faded into a more healthy one and I could feel in her aura the satisfaction of being full: she had finished, for now. "Right now, I've centered my studies into some of the charms and rituals of modern wizarding society. Mmm... Do you wish to do business again?"
Time to start showing one's cards... "Well, that's exactly why I've contacted you: I need to find and learn how to destroy certain objects related to your specialization field." Wrong words: Pisha's expression didn't change at all; but her aura proved she was preparing to use her powers. The Nagaraja wasn't exactly pleased that I wished to destroy something she might want to study. "Objects that are maintaining someone alive even after his death. He's an enemy of my clan and I can't defeat him until these objects have been neutralized," I quickly added.
Pisha didn't move, nor did anything that I could hear. The only audible sound was produced by the constant, although thin, flow of blood that was falling from the corpse between us down his arm. When the blood arrived the body's index finger, it fell, drop by drop, into a nearly full jar that was awaiting on the floor. "What objects are we talking about?"
"Horcruxes." Pisha's aura shrank as she relaxed.
"Horcruxes?" She started laughing slightly, "And here I was thinking you'd ask me to destroy a Soul Catcher or a Life Reaver; maybe even a Death Seal..."
"So... You don't mind if an horcrux is destroyed?" The Nagaraja's aura couldn't conceal the amusement she felt at my ignorance. Why did every elder kindred seem to know exactly what I was going to say or do even before I had thought about it? Damn it!
"It seems you don't fully understand what you're facing." You don't understand... You don't know... "Do you know what an horcrux is?" Always the same.
"It's piece of one's soul hidden into an object that makes its owner come back to life even after death, isn't it?" So frustrating...
"Sort of." Well... At least, she wasn't going to give me a lecture about my ignorance...
"Then, why don't you mind them?" This seemed to me, at least, the best thing I could say.
"Because I already have my sire's annotations about them: kindred cannot make horcruxes, and an horcrux only serves to he who has created it. But... There aren't many people who'd wish to rip a piece of their soul apart... Nor there are too many people who'd wish to risk to destroy one..."
Hey, stop there! Risk? What was the threat of attempting to break one of those things? "Why?" I had to know.
"Souls are not destroyed that easily: just a mere fragment is enough to cause great injuries, or even death, to anyone who tries to destroy it..."
Excellent. Excellent, just my luck! Now I had to do something that would bring me my Final Death... "So, they are indestructible?"
Pisha's blood stained finger went to her cheek and her head titled to the side as she tried to remember something. "No... I reckon someone came to me searching for something he needed to do so... A human... I don't remember well his full name, although I believe it started by Richard... He always called himself 'auror' Broadsword..."
Broadsword? Richard Broadsword... Where had I heard that name? Damn it, I was sure I had heard, at least, a similar name... Bah! Nonsense to keep wondering about that: for the time being, I just needed one thing: "Do you know how to find an horcrux?"
"Yes. I'll give you information of the whereabouts of every horcrux that I find and how to destroy them in exchange for information of equal value to my studies."
"Such as?" Pisha laughed. Why do they always have to find everything I say so damn funny?
"I believe you misunderstood me here, mister Kellehan. This time, I won't be telling you exactly what I want: you'll have to surprise me." While she was talking, the Nagaraja had been walking towards my position, all the way swaying her hips a little too... Much.
Having seen her eating made me feel more and more caged as she did so. "I see. So... You're looking for charms and rituals of the modern wizarding society related to the Death, is that correct?"
The amusement in her aura told me Pisha was receiving exactly the reaction she wished. "Indeed. Do you accept these terms?"
In my mind, the answer was simple and clear: her conditions were really good for me. "Pisha, you've got a deal."
And... That's it for chapter 9. I'll try to upload the next one ASAP. Of course, reviews will help me write faster...