Disclaimer: see chapter one
A/N: Many apologies to my reviewers for the long delay. I really hate writer's block. That, along with an inexcusable lack of motivation to write, caused this huge delay.
Break-ins and BodyguardsIn the western sky above the ocean, the bottom edge of the bright disk known as the sun began lowering itself out of sight, like a man slipping under the covers of his bed after a hard day's work. Blood-red streaks colored the sky from the vanishing rays of light, and tinged the silver-blue car on the street below a faint pink. It didn't do much to further illuminate the accompanying red motorbike or the red-caped figure riding it.
Abruptly, about the time the last sliver of the sun's rays disappeared over the water, the car turned down a private road, followed by the person on the bike. This particular road was lined on both sides by trees of every sort—the skeletal forms of several deciduous species that had lost their leaves due to early winter's touch were side by side with various green-needled pines, spruces, hemlocks and firs. And they didn't stop at the massive gate and wall that forced the car and bike to come to a halt. They continued on, out of the line of site.
The red-caped figure rode up to the very bars, then looked to the pillar holding the left half of the gate. A small screen was set into the grey concrete, and next to that screen was a red button. Whoever it was reached out a gloved hand and depressed the button. Immediately the impassive face of a security guard appeared. A teenaged male voice issued out from under the biker's red helmet. "Mr. Spencer is expecting us." The security guard didn't so much as blink. His only response was unseen, but the results of whatever action he took were plain, as the enormous gate ponderously opened an inch at a time to admit the vehicles, which revved up and shot forward into the opening. Behind them, the black bars swung firmly shut once more.
As the HIVE were making their way to Felix Spencer's mansion in their own vehicle, Elm slipped off into the world of dreams…
Elm was in a thick, dark forest. The ground was littered with fallen leaves, and little else. No grasses or ferns, which meant the sun probably never penetrated all the way down here. When he looked up, he saw the crowns of the trees were so far up, it made him dizzy just thinking about that height. No climbing, then, as the lowest branches were way beyond his reach. Even with his staff fully extended in his upraised arm, with him standing on the tips of his toes, he didn't come anywhere close to those massive limbs.
Just as he had come to this conclusion, he heard a faint roar in the distance, accompanied by crackling sounds. Lots of animals started scurrying past him and away from the noise, from tiny squirrels and chipmunks to deer, wolves and even a few bears. He didn't have to wait long to find out what it was all about, as a nearly overpowering wave of heat washed over him. Elm staggered for a few moments, regaining his bearings, then his eyes widened as the realization of what that heat meant. The forest was on fire! He should have known from all the forest creatures fleeing it.
He turned to flee as well, but it wasn't long before the flames started surrounding him, despite his rapid pace. He broke into a flat-out run, but it was too late. He skidded to a halt as a burning branch fell right in his path, and he looked in despair all around him, at the fire rapidly consuming the trees, and starting to reach for him with greedy fingers of flame. He beat at his cloak to put out the sparks that landed on it, but it was in vain.
Just as he was about to be consumed, Elm was surrounded by a black, shielding dome, and felt a hand grab his left shoulder. He sank into the ground out of sight, but before his mind could wrap itself around that, he was coming back up—in a very different location. Here, the only fire was a small campfire, and the trees weren't nearly so thick.
"Huh?" He turned to face his rescuer, who turned out to be a pale girl in a cloak similar to his, except that hers was dark blue. "I take it you rescued me." She nodded once without saying anything, then turned back to face the campfire, which now had two other people nearing it. One was an indistinct figure, but the other was very clear. "Mom? But—you're dead!" She shook her head and smiled at him.
"Not as much as you might think…"
The three woke once again, and though their hearts weren't racing, they all felt distinctly puzzled.
Spencer Mansion, 1 hour after sunsetElm's first inkling that the HIVE members weren't what he thought came when Mammoth broke in the door to the mansion. But he dismissed it, remembering that he'd seen police do the same thing on occasion, though admittedly it was on TV, not real life.
For some reason, no alarms sounded as the splinters that had been the door flew everywhere, which struck Elm as ominous somehow. He suppressed the shiver that ran down his spine and continued forward with the others, electing to take point.
When he rounded the corner in the hallway, muffled sounds of fighting reached his ears, and his grip on the staff tightened. A particularly loud thud caused him to jump slightly, and he cautiously crept forward toward the source of the commotion, a door at the end of the hall. The HIVE was right behind him.
Upon reaching the door, he cautiously reached a hand out, twisted the handle, and ever so slowly opened the door, praying it wouldn't betray his presence with a squeak of protest.
All Elm saw were two men, apparently unarmed, doing their best to beat each other senseless. One man, a massive being who could have passed for a professional wrestler, drove his fist into the other man's jaw. But instead of being knocked out, the small, wiry man simply shook his head and attacked right back, delivering a kick that actually propelled his opponent into the wall, where he left a dent in the shape of his body. But it was the huge man's turn to shrug off the powerful attack.
Elm cautiously waved at the team behind him to stay back. Something about this whole fight struck him as off somehow, especially when the large man somehow sliced the other across the chest with a weapon he couldn't see. Elm frowned when this did not seem to affect the fight in any way, and extended his empathic sense to try and make a little sense of this bizarre situation. What he felt shocked him to the very core of his being. The small man felt similar to that…that thing that had attacked the Abbot family.
And the large man also felt off, but in a different way. He was full of a sort of battle-rage. Not blood lust, as the other; it felt almost like a berserk warrior, or a hunter when its prey turns and fights back. It was an almost mindless desire for violence, but not quite—there was a calculating, reasoning side to it as well, a consciousness that was almost—but not quite—human. And when he turned his attention back to the small man, he sensed the same near-human aura. What were these people?
The biggest shock of all came when the big man grabbed the other, put him in a headlock, and twisted. A loud snap filled the room, and Elm didn't need his Empathy to know that that man was now dead. But instead of simply collapsing to the floor, his body burst into flame, and the victor quickly let go before he got burnt. He cocked his head, as if listening to something in the distance, let out a deep, animalistic growl that made Elm's blood run cold, and exited through another door.
Spencer Mansion, a quarter-hour before the HIVE's arrival
The Teen Titans filed into the small room. Their host currently had his back to them, studying a painting filled with all sorts of creatures that looked like they could come out of a fantasy novel, mainly werewolves and vampires locked in an eternal struggle for power and control. To the left of the painting, several edged weapons were hung on the wall, the most prominent being the huge, double-edged broadsword, alongside the curved form of a Turkish scimitar.
Felix Spencer waited a few moments, then, "Please, have a seat," he said without turning.
All of them took the offer, except Robin, whose mask wrinkled in a frown. "All right, you said you had information for us on the kidnappings. Let's have it."
Spencer shook his head. "So impatient, the youth of today." He still refused to turn, so all the Titans could see of him were his impressive height, thin build, and short, raven-black hair. And speaking of ravens…
"It was pointless of us to come, if you aren't willing to talk." This statement came from Raven, who was hovering in the air with her legs folded in front of her. The dark blue fabric of her cloak hung down from her back, and the hood was down, showing clearly her lavender-colored eyes and black hair tinted with a trace of purple, as well as the red gem in the center of her forehead. Her pale face showed no emotion whatsoever, as was usual.
"Is that so?" he asked, in his high tenor voice, and rotated on the spot.
This movement revealed a tan face, with piercing blue eyes combined with a big, pointed noise that instead of looking ridiculous as it should have, gave him a rather predatory appearance, like a hawk about to swoop down out of the sky after a tasty morsel.
The green-skinned, green-haired, green-eyed Beast Boy visibly shrank back from such a menacing visage, Cyborg blinked with the one human eye on his dark face, and Starfire let out a small 'eep' and jumped back behind her chair, peeking up so that her only visible features were the vivid red of her hair and the otherworldly green orbs that were her eyes. Her orange skin was completely hidden behind the huge mass of the chair, which she could have picked up with one hand if she hadn't been so startled. Robin may or may not have been taken aback by the man's appearance, but he showed no reaction other than to scowl at the businessman.
"Fascinating," Raven said in her typical deadpan tone of voice. "How do you produce that effect?"
He raised his eyebrows. "I don't do it deliberately. It just seems to happen to everyone I meet. Everyone but you, anyway."
"I'm sure…"
Robin shook his head, annoyance creeping into his voice. "You still haven't answered the question. Are you going to give us the information we came for?"
The man directed his gaze in the leader's direction, and though Robin felt an urge to hide under his red cape, he stood his ground.
"Whoever said that's the purpose I summoned you here for?" They all stared at him in shocked silence, mouths dropping almost literally to the floor. Finally, Cyborg managed to recover enough to protest weakly. "Summoned?"
He was not to be answered, because at that moment, a screeching alarm ripped through the building, startling even Raven, who tumbled to the floor in a heap and lost control of her powers for a split second, as the shards of a nearby lamp that had only moments ago been whole could attest to. However, Spencer only looked resigned, and when the horrible noise finally stopped, he sighed. "If I survive this, then I'll give you whatever information I have. So you'd better do your level best to protect me…"
"You men, you knew this was coming?" Robin asked angrily. Spencer nodded solemnly. Robin turned to his team and ordered them to prepare for battle. In compliance with his own command, he drew his bo-staff and fully extended it. He also drew out a handful of disks and turned to face the huge doors, just as someone began pounding on them.
Cyborg made the motion to crack his knuckles, as if he were still completely human, then extended one arm, the hand being swallowed by the wrist as a blue glow built up on the end of the limb. Starfire floated up a few feet from the floor, her eyes and hands glowing bright green. Raven also rose, chanting her signature words "Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos" over and over to gather black energy to her hands. Beast Boy took a battle stance and prepared to shift.
Finally, the doors gave, and a tide of enemies poured through like water bursting from a dam.
Cyborg let loose with his sonic cannon, halting the advance as the blue energy from his body knocked the leading ones back against their fellows. But they soon surged forward again, those that had been hit none the worse for the hits they had taken. Robin threw his disks, which impacted at the leaders' feet and encased them in solid blocks of ice. The mob pressed forward anyway, shoving aside their frozen comrades. One block fell to the floor and shattered, with the woman encased still inside. Upon impact she was consumed by flames that appeared seemingly out of nowhere, leaving only a pile of ash mixed with melted ice.
The same thing happened to the ones hit by Starfire's flurry of starbolts—they spontaneously combusted and left nothing of themselves but ashes. She stopped hurling the green balls of energy, confused at the result, but she was not the only one surprised. Evidently, their would-be assailants had been unprepared for what they would face, and rapidly retreated. There were a few moments of silence, deafening after the tumult of the fight.
"What are they?" Robin demanded to know, breaking the silence by addressing Spencer. However, it was not he who answered, but Raven.
"Hominis Nocturna." They all stared at her in incomprehension. Beast Boy scratched his head. "Uh, what was that?"
The one-word answer she gave had them staring once again, this time in disbelief. "Vampires."
Beast Boy would have laughed, but Robin cut in, his face a picture of thoughtful contemplation. "No, wait, it makes sense. Starfire, your bolts are based on solar power, right?" She nodded. "The stories all say that sunlight is the ultimate weakness of Vampires. One touch, and they're gone. And the burning when they die, that also confirms it."
Beast Boy was utterly terrified, evidenced by his shaking like a leaf, and the others didn't look so thrilled, either.
The HIVE stopped momentarily to consult Gizmo's map. "Let's see. The entrance to the stinkin' vault should be in a room somewhere near our current location." He scrutinized the map closely, then smirked. "Right there!" He pointed to the wall on the team's left, and everyone could see that the hall branched off in that direction just a few feet from their location.
"I'll check the room," Elm volunteered, and before anyone could stop him, he hurried around the corner…and saw the splintered remnants of what should have been a massive set of doors. He also noticed that, scattered here and there around the entrance, there were little piles of ash. Elm's brow wrinkled in a confused frown, and he shook his head.
He opened his mouth and began turning to call the others, when he noticed the room's inhabitants. There were six in total, which amounted to six pairs of eyes that fixed their gazes upon him. He stared back silently for a few moments, then nervously cleared his throat. "Ehem. Uh, hi." He halfheartedly lifted one corner of his mouth in an attempt to relieve the tension, but without success. The smile died before it was fully formed, and he started to slowly back away, even after he was out of sight.
His back ran up against something soft, and he whirled at the soft cry. He'd bumped into Jinx, who'd evidently decided to follow him around the corner. "Sorry. I guess I'm kinda nervous. Having six people stare at you like that is just…" a shudder ran through his wiry frame, and the quick glance over his shoulder betrayed just how unnerved he had been.
"Well, if the room's occupied, we'll just have to force our way through…" The team, who'd been eavesdropping, came into sight. Mammoth cracked his knuckles and grinned in anticipation, Gizmo displayed a smirk, and even Elm felt a slight lightening in the rigid tension that gripped his body. They all moved boldly forward, but were brought up short by the sight of another group coming from the opposite direction; a large group.
"What are you people?" Elm blurted out without thinking. He couldn't help it—the strange auras they gave off were baffling to his sense of Empathy.
It was the other group's turn to be brought up short, as if they hadn't noticed the HIVE. In that moment, Elm winced at the sharp spike in the peculiar hunger/thirst given off by the mob. The unblinking stares compounded his uneasiness, which in turn transferred itself to his teammates.
With barely a moment's warning, the mob surged forward, and there was no more time to feel uneasy.
Not five minutes after Raven's frightening revelation and Robin's unexpected confirmation of it, someone else appeared at the doorway. Apparently he didn't notice them, as he bent his head and kneeled down to inspect the mess that had been the door, revealing the bright red color of his hair, with several curious streaks of white.
Something stirred in Raven's memory at the sight of him, and she narrowed her eyes as he fingered one of the piles of ash. The other hand still held onto his weapon, a staff not unlike Robin's, except it was a steely-grey color.
He straightened up, shaking his head in what must have been confusion, and turned it down the hall, as if to call to someone. Evidently, he wasn't alone.
But then he finally spotted them, and his eyes widened—and the memory sprang to the fore of Raven's mind. That clear blue eye on the left, and the green one on the right, she would recognize them anywhere!
She almost jumped when he cleared his throat and greeted them. She thought furiously, but before she was able to formulate a reply, he backed away out of sight."Raven?" This time she did start, breaking another nearby lamp. "What is it?" Robin asked.
She blinked. "That boy…I recognize him. I've seen him—"
But the weren't to find out where she'd seen him, because at that moment, a horde of people, presumably Vampires, rushed past the doorway, and sounds of fighting broke out in the hallway.
They didn't have to wait long to find out who they were fighting, when a familiar-looking rocket blasted a hole in the Vampire ranks, (as well as the floor beneath them).
"Gizmo…" Cyborg said through a scowl. He narrowed his human eye, and the robotic one took on a more menacing shade of red at the memory of that little punk hacking his systems. Only Starfire's hand on his shoulder restrained him from wading into the melee.
"Let them fight it out," Robin told him. "Make them come to us."
Mammoth drove a massive fist into one person's rib cage. Several ribs snapped, but the man shrugged it off and returned the favor. Mammoth slammed to the floor and slid, not really hurt, but a bit dismayed that he had so little effect. The man he'd punched grinned, exposing several prominent teeth that could only be described as fangs. "You have no idea what's happening here."
Mammoth snarled. "Maybe not, but I can still do this." He gathered himself and launched at the man, wrapping his arms around the guy's neck. They both tumbled to the ground in a jumble of limbs, and the man tried to push him off, but to no effect. The harder he pushed, the tighter Mammoth squeezed, until man's spine audibly snapped.
The spontaneous combustion of the body caused him to yelp and scramble backwards, into Elm, disrupting his attack. His staff slipped a few inches in his grasp, and instead of merely knocking his target out with a blow to the head, the end of the weapon impacted with their neck—and sliced right through it.
The fire didn't faze him; after all, he'd seen it twice now, but when he got a good look at the end of his staff, his eyes widened and his jaw dropped; a spear-point extended from the tip!
The sight shocked him to such a degree it absorbed all his attention. He never saw the blow that knocked him into the wall. As he slid down the surface to collapse on the floor, his last sight before blacking out was a pale girl in a blue cloak rushing through the doorway…
Beast Boy rolled his eyes at Raven, running after her into the hall. Starfire released Cyborg, and they, along with Robin, also followed, leaving Felix Spencer alone in the room for a moment. But the moment passed; someone (two someones, actually) emerged from the raging battle in the hall.
Neither the woman nor the man were in any way remarkable in appearance. Nevertheless, despite their appearances, they projected the same predatory attitude as the businessman staring at them from across the room.
"So, here's the traitor," the man spoke in a grating voice, one that made him sound as if he needed to clear his throat. "So, how do you enjoy consorting with mortals and-" his nostrils flared as if he thought the next word was some sort of curse, "Werewolves?"
Spencer glared. "At least I don't have to watch my back every moment, waiting for someone to plant a silver dagger in it. Believe it or not, they actually trust one another."
"Oh? Was it that?" the intruder sneered. "Or was it the way they could feed you, without you having to prey on your precious mortals?" The sneer twisted even further, into a snarl. "You always were too soft-hearted for your own good."
By this time, about a dozen or so scruffy-looking individuals had managed to tear themselves away from the fight, gathering themselves around the first intruders. The man who'd been talking to Spencer grinned in a decidedly unpleasant way. "Get him!" he ordered, and they eagerly rushed to obey their leader.
In a blur of motion, Spencer reached behind and grabbed two throwing knives in each hand and hurling them at his attackers. Each knife caught one in the chest, right in their hearts, and he was rewarded with four pillars of flame. He used the momentary hesitation of the remaining aggressors to his advantage, reaching back for another weapon, and coming up with the scimitar. Now he rushed them, and before they knew it, he was among them.
He decapitated one, then turned to a second before the flames had consumed the first, and did the same to her. The third managed to get his hands up in a hasty attempt at defense, but he too was dispatched in short order.
Then, as if on some unheard cue, the last five rushed him all at once, and he was disarmed just a few seconds later, though at a cost of two more lives.
Now he was pinned to the floor, with one person restraining his arms, one his legs, and the other kicked away the sword.
"So, the mighty Felix Spencer has fallen." The leader drew the short dagger out of the sheath on his right hip and walked up to the helpless man on the floor. He kneeled next to the captive. "Have a nice trip to hell for your treachery!" And with those words, he plunged the dagger into the man's heart.
He stood up and watched with a satisfied smirk as the flames flared and died, but the expression vanished when he felt the press of a cold circle of metal on the back of his neck. "Thank you so much for doing the dirty work. Isard Triton sends her thanks." Four shots later, and the only one in the room left alive was the woman who'd come in with the leader.
She calmly holstered her handgun, gazed for a moment at her handiwork, then walked up to the painting, pulled one side of it out from the wall like a door, and stepped behind it. A moment later, it drifted back into place, and the room was empty once more.
Thus occurred one of the final battles of the Liken/Nocturna war, an ageless struggle for supremacy that hearkened back to the dawn of their two races. And despite their nearly overwhelming losses that day, the creatures of the night defeated their foes, the werewolves, and drove them into hiding. The Vampires were finally able to begin consolidating their power, and not much more than a decade later, the vast majority of the Earth's surface belonged to them. As their control became more absolute, however, a few of them began turning on one another, and armed resistance was never completely stamped out.
But all that's another story, after I had more fully developed the power within me, the power to control the elements themselves…