Two

Miriam survived, god only knew how and her doctors wouldn't stop telling her that she was healing remarkably fast. The police questioned her about what happened but she couldn't remember much, couldn't even remember why they'd left the bar, only being hit by the car and a man with blue eyes dead beside her before the ambulance arrived. The police told her there hadn't been anyone matching that description at the scene, and Samantha wasn't much help because she was struggling to sort her own memories out between the shock and alcohol she'd had that night.

Miriam knew the man with the blue eyes had existed though, she could feel it in her bones, in her soul, something she couldn't explain but just knew. It felt like an irresistibly urge, a desire to find and know who he had been but she didn't know where to look. Eventually she dismissed the feelings as stress following the accident and she pushed them out as she tried to get one with her life. Things almost seemed to be returning to normal after a while, she was back at work and aside from some scars she was just as healthy as before the car hit her.

Days turned into weeks, people's concern about her faded and her confidence grew until eventually she was laughing and joining Samantha for dinner or drinks after work as they used to. That evening they were in a restaurant, gossiping about one of their new co-workers before Miriam excused herself to use the bathroom, which she found easily enough given the number of times they'd frequented the establishment.

It was as she was washing her hands that it happened, warm water running over her fingers as someone else's closed around her mouth from behind her, silencing her screams. A needle pricked her skin, a sharp stinging sensation before an overwhelming feeling of lethargy took over her. She collapsed to the floor, passed out and unable to fight back when her attacker picked her up and threw her over his shoulder.

o0o

"Suppose we should've seen this coming," Damsel murmured from her seat beside Nines, her arms crossed over her chest and a look of disdain on her features at having to endure the suffering of being in the same room as LaCroix. She raised a hand in front of her face, blocking the splatter of blood when the axe swung down and beheaded the man in the feather jacket who had been kneeling on the stage.

"I know Malks are mad and all, but openly embracing someone without permission strikes me as fucking stupid rather than crazy." She spat her sentence out as if it left a dirty taste in her mouth.

"Nines..." Skelter started and he leant over, whispering in his ear as the other man stared intently at the stage, at the pile of ashes on one end and the girl bound at the other with the yellow and blue eyes, pitch black hair and sickly grey skin of someone who'd just been turned and hadn't drank yet. "That's the girl from that car crash all those weeks ago."

"Shit..." A sigh tore from Nines' lips.

Damsel turned to face the two men and frowned. "I thought she died? No way a kine should've survived that." When Nines didn't reply her features turned suspicious, damn her and that she could read him too well. "What did you do?"

"I'll tell you later-"

"You turned her into a ghoul, didn't you?" Skelter interrupted a little too loudly, drawing a look of annoyance from LaCroix while he pranced around on stage spouting off his speech. "The fuck, man? What the hell where you thinking?"

"I'll explain later." Each word left his lips punctuated, irritated while his narrowed blue eyes watched the girl on stage and the idiot in the black suit.

Both his companions looked as if they'd quite rather discuss this now, but they let it go for the time being when LaCroix's speech reached a climax. The blond had turned to the black haired woman on the stage and it was then Nines realised he was going to kill her too. Rage welled up inside him, hot and ugly, boiling the supernatural Brujah blood in his veins. He was protesting in seconds, fury coursing through him and before he really knew what he was doing he was on his feet, his voice filling the theatre when he yelled, "This is bullshit!"

The hands of his friends were on his shoulders in moments, trying to restrain him but the anger in him made him stronger and he'd break free from them if he had too. Muscles stretched taut under his clothes, fists clenched into tight balls so that sharp nails dug into skin, eyes narrowed and teeth and fangs bared as he dared the prince to make his move, play his cards. One long moment stretched between the two men while their eyes bored into each other, a silent conversation judging how far the other would dare move to stretch the tenuous peace that existed between them.

Finally, one of them caved – and it wasn't Nines. The prince dismissed his executioner, spared the girls life. With hindsight, and in days to come, they both would come to regret that decision.

o0o

Her dreams were more like nightmares, so vivid she swore they were real. Someone was biting into her neck, drinking her blood, draining her dry but she couldn't fight back. It felt... bizarre, neither good nor bad but mingled with the strange sensation of knowing she was dying. Except she didn't, when she was drained, when she knew she shouldn't be alive a breath of life filled her. Yet it wasn't really life but a pale reflection of it, accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of thirst, of hunger for blood.

Then the voices started, a cacophony in her mind of hundreds of different personalities, as if her own had been shattered into pieces and every part of her had turned into their own individual being. But it felt... normal. As if she'd always been this way, and in some ways she supposed she had but never to this extent before.

Her eyes fluttered open and she realised very quickly she hadn't been dreaming, the voices in her head made that quite obvious. What followed she had a hard time understanding but men had broken down the door to the room she was in, grabbed her and the man in the corner – who was he? He looked oddly familiar with that feather jacket. And then she was being thrown into a truck, grabbed again and pushed to her knees on what looked like a stage with her hands bound behind her back. Again she thought, am I going to die? They killed the man in the feather jacket so she supposed she was next too, but someone interrupted, someone with piercing blue eyes that she could just make out between the haze in her mind from her thirst and the voices in her head.

He saved her, she presumed, but she didn't have time to thank him before she was dumped on the steps of a theatre with vague instructions from a blond haired man as to what she was meant to do. A deep laugh filled her ears and she turned to face the sound, the voices in her mind unifying to allow her to function. They were still there, still hundreds of them squashed into one head but working together to imitate someone of sane mind.

"Hah hah!" The laughing man found this situation hilarious apparently. "What a shit show, they just dump you out here on the street and leave you to fend for yourself!"

"We don't understand the dark play they showed tonight," Miriam replied and her words felt oddly normal, as if she should have been speaking this way all her life.

"Huh? What you going on about, kid?" His beard was oddly hypnotising, she noted, it seemed to have a life of it's own.

"They smashed with the axe on the birds neck, but we escaped, flew free from the cage and the jailer!"

Another bout of laughter took over the man and when he composed himself again he exclaimed, "And you're a fucking Malkavian, bet it was that idiot Wyatt who turned you, right? Couldn't tell from the back row but guess he got his way at last."

She frowned, confusion evident in her yellow and blue eyes. "We don't understand the words that spew from your grey matter."

"Don't worry, kid, you can ask the Anarch's about it sometime if you survive this mess." A pause, and he chuckled once more as he appraised her. "Man are you fucked though. You better let me show you the ropes."

"We can display ropes all day but we relish the offer to be shown the proper arrangement from you," she replied. Strange, she thought, her words seemed to make sense in her mind – but it appeared that others didn't see it that way.

o0o

"Spill it, Nines," Damsel demanded when they were back in the Last Round, her feet dangling from the chair she sat on that was too high for her to reach the floor. "What happened that night?"

"You know most of it," Nines replied disinterestedly, leaning on the counter of the bar, his thick arms corded with muscle. "I took Wyatt with me to dementate those two girls into forgetting what they saw."

"And somewhere 'dementate them into forgetting' turned into 'making one of them a ghoul'," Damsel finished. "I'm finding it hard to understand that leap in logic."

"The girl with the black hair and myself got hit by a car, she was dying and she knew I'd been following her yet she still tried to see if I was alive, to help me." He frowned at the memory playing in his mind. "It was a stupid decision, but at the time... she didn't deserve to die, and she seemed like a better person than most of the pieces of shit that call themselves humans in this city."

"And bless your bleeding heart, you had to go and save her," Skelter started, his back against the bar while his arms crossed over his chest. "Sure you weren't bit by a Toreador all those years ago?"

Nines shot him a glower. "I know it was a stupid decision, do I look like an idiot?"

"I'm starting to wonder..." Damsel murmured with a roll of her eyes. "Thank god she didn't do anything stupid enough to get the Camarilla involved. Making a ghoul and sending her off into the world to fend for herself with your own blood flowing through her veins... She could have done any number of dumb shit that would have 'broken the Masquerade.'" She phrased the last bit laced in sarcasm, her fingers making quotation marks in the air that clearly showed her derision for the Camarilla's rules.

"Not that it really matters now Wyatt's turned her." Skelter shrugged, drumming his fingers on his biceps. "Guess the idiot finally got what he wanted, he wouldn't stop talking about how he wanted to turn that girl."

"Crazy attracts crazy," a new voice added and the three of them glanced up to see Jack approaching, a familiar grin on his lips. "That girl's fucking batshit, told me she's been schizophrenic for years when she was human and phew! You should see her now she's got Malkav blood." A chuckle tore from his throat. "Always said Malkavian's only turn people who are already half as mad as they are."

"Better mad than dead," Nines offered softly.