Chapter 45: Warehouse Aftermath

--- Eric Campbell ---

He crashed into the water, putting out the flames that had wrapped around him, eating away at his body even as his magic pushed them back and he boiled as much blood as possible to heal the damage. A process that left him in a very painful limbo of being burned alive and regenerating from it, a state that left him oh so grateful for the river no matter how cold it was.

Struggling for the surface he managed to break free with a gasping breath, before treading the water in spite of his ever growing exhaustion and the hunger he knew was as much for blood as it was actual food.

He turned to look at the warehouse that he’d managed to use the last of his magic to burn himself a path out of, the entire structure now on fire in a way that normally would’ve taken hours to achieve, parts of the building already collapsing under the damage.

(Fuck… Hope Alex doesn’t take this out of my pay…) The tired laugh he let out caused him more pain than anything else.

While he knew the older man wouldn’t be happy about this, he also knew once he explained the situation Alex would be glad he simply survived whatever that monster had been doing in there. (Too bad I still don’t know what that is… maybe Cat will…)

A little too tired to think about it himself, he shrugged off the burned remnants of the coat that hadn’t survived the explosion even with half a dozen of his fireproof enchantments weaved into it, before swimming for the nearest dock.

“Fuck!” He hissed and moaned upon pulling himself out of the water, the sudden shift of pressure doing his broken leg absolutely no favors.

Upon actually looking at his leg he probably would’ve thrown up if he hadn’t seen more than one dismembered body during the Rift Riots, as he still couldn’t help but grimace as he saw the mangled mess. (Yeah… ain’t running home on this thing…) “Really hope Alex can fix this…”

As he started the painful process of crawling to the nearest car in the hopes of hot wiring it and getting himself back to the hotel, he consoled himself with the thought that, (At least that bastard was alone.)

--- Jessica ---

Landing atop a nearby roof, she brushed off the cinders that had attempted to eat away at her uniform, once more wishing Nicholas hadn’t accidentally wasted the entirety of their spare uniform budget, forcing the company to cut corners by ordering the ones that were not fire resistant.

Once her remaining clothing was safed she turned back to watch the warehouse burn as the bone armor she’d used to survive the initial explosion retracted back into her skin where her body broke it back down into the magic that flowed in her veins.

(Well, while I doubt this is what our employers wanted, at the very least they can’t say we didn’t accomplish our task.) She sighed, the night of dealing with Mathias having worn her down in a way that very little in her life actually could.

The only reason she wasn’t worried about being reprimanded or worse receiving a demerit on her record for this mess, was because she’d swiped one of the corpses Mathias had been playing with, (and I can just pin all of this on Mathias. No one will even blink an eye at that.)

He’d deserve it too, given how he didn’t bother hiding his plans to torture her to death, if not worse.

Down below a corpse stumbled out of the fire, one that was still walking in spite of being on fire. (What’s the saying? ‘Speak of the devil and he shall appear’…)

She grew the bone claws on her hand to get a better grip on the body she’d extracted from the warehouse before leaping into the air and promptly landing in front of the half incinerated corpse making its way across the parking lot.

“Good, you're still alive.” She told Mathias as she gave him and his charred flesh a once over, noting how the monster was missing an arm. “For a moment I was worried for Nicholas.”

“Fuck… you… bitch…” Mathias spat, the ash on his skin slowly flaking away as it was replaced with fresher skin, albeit at a rate far slower than what Nicholas could manage without the violence that sustained the monster in front of her.

“That sounds extremely hostile.” She frowned, reaching into her coat and pulling out a small black cylinder covered in circuitry with a set of needles on one end. “Well, unfortunately my orders clearly state that should you engage in unacceptable levels of hostility to your fellow employees I am to restrain you.”

Mathias eye’s glowed like hellfire. “Don’t… you… fucking-”

She quickly stepped towards his missing limb before driving the needles into Mathias’s neck, causing the monster’s entire body to tense before beginning to shake in a mix of impotent rage and whatever mix of chemicals was in the cylinder that could overwhelm even Nicholas’s healing factor.

Slowly Mathias fell to his knees, glaring at her with an absolute loathing that once hurt but had faded around the man’s sixth attempt at torturing her before the guards could stop him.

Deciding to be petty for once, given the sheer amount of stress the monster had given her over the night, she leaned in and said, “Oh, and just to remind you… Nicholas is ours and we will never let you hurt him.”

The look he gave her could’ve killed, and in spite of the chemical’s running through his system she still felt her heartbeat stutter, stopping for just a moment before her own healing factor forced it to beat once more as her body began to instinctively grow her bone armor.

When Mathias finally fell onto his face, she could feel the power that had been acting on her heart let itself go, but even then she didn’t let her armor retract. Having once more been reminded that Mathias was the most dangerous member of the company because he would kill any of them if crossed.

Inhaling and exhaling she turned back to the burning building, and stood there for a moment trying to get her fear under control.

When she finally felt able she pulled out the cell phone that the director had entrusted to her as the most trustworthy of the company before calling the company for retrieval. Fully aware that between the recent crises caused by the sky cracking and the company’s own contacts the local firefighters would find themselves delayed until she gave the all clear.

All in all, while it wasn’t her place to decide so she was thinking this night wasn’t worth it. (I would’ve much preferred a nice slow night of filling out paperwork? I could’ve spent the night explaining away why Vanessa decided to poison a guard or why Cyn decided to trap someone in a living nightmare…)

At the very least she’d have a small mountain of relaxing paperwork to fill out for all of this once she got home. (I hope everyone

--- Alexander Pierce ---

(I really miss when running a gang didn’t require so much paperwork…) He groaned, filling out another set of forms that would authorize someone to do something or transfer some other Bloodline asset to a new subsidy to cover up the fact that they were all owned by one organization.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Back before they’d grown to such a scale, and before the modern age filled everything with bureaucracy, all he’d had to do was tell someone to do something and they could take care of it. Now however everything was a game of shuffling paperwork that made him long for the days where the only papers he had to go over belonged to either academics or ancient books barely held together by magic.

(At the very least this is a suitable distraction from everything going on with young Aurelio…)

Cleo, a young woman who’d joined the family a decade prior, suddenly barged into his office. “Alex!”

“What’s wrong?” He frowned with no small amount of concern, because while all of his family was welcome into his study whenever they needed him, very rarely did they do so with such urgency.

“It’s Eric.”

The blood in his veins instantly boiled as he moved at a speed few of the young bloods could imagine let alone manage. All while using the connection their blood provided to all of their kin to track down his nephew to the medical bay where he instantly threw the doors open to the room the boy was in. “Eric!”

“Hey, Alex…” His nephew waved, looking notably worse for wear both with how pale he was and the leg that was… mangled.

“What happened?” He asked, quickly pulling on his magic to use Eric’s own blood to examine the injury. Something he’d normally avoid for politeness sake, but felt could be understandably set aside. (His knee has been practically ground to dust…)

He reinforced the spell siphoning the young man’s pain without a word.

Eric sighed, running a hand down his face and clearly craving one of his cigarettes. Which is why Alex tossed him the spare pack he kept in his coat given how the brand was shared amongst half their kin’s smokers.

“Thanks.” Eric smiled before lighting the cigarette and inhaling deeply. “Well, the warehouse was a nightmarish shit show.”

“How bad exactly?” He frowned, because while he normally sent Catherine and Eric together on anything that looked dangerous, he hadn’t been able to this time due to how overwhelmed Catherine was with Hunter work ever since the sky cracked.

“Bad enough that you should’ve sent Cat and she should’ve called a few of her ‘Hunter’ friends.” Eric told him bluntly, forcing him to grimace. “There weren’t any survivors, be they kin or employees, or whoever got trapped in that hell hole.”

He felt a hole open up beneath him. “No… there, there must’ve been at least-”

Eric shook his head.

(Tricia, Anthony, Harrison, Frankie, Raphael-)

Eric coughed, interrupting his mourning of so many young bloods lost far too soon. “It probably doesn’t make things any better, but I… the thing that killed them… I killed it using a Blood Rattle.”

“You used their blood?” He blinked.

He’d been teaching Eric how to, but the boy hadn’t yet learned how to truly grasp the depths of their Bloodline (no) their family’s power.

“Yeah, I uh, when I saw what the place had become I… I turned it into a death rattle, you always said it was easier with the dead.” Eric explained with a grimace.

He nodded in understanding, because as dark as it was it was significantly easier to use the blood of others when they weren’t using it. (But that still leaves the question,) “What could possibly require that much power to kill?” Because Eric was not weak even if he was several decades younger than Alex.

“At first the warehouse was… I can only describe it as a maze of meat, with so much Madness flowing that it felt ten times bigger… near the center of it I found this… monster that looked human, but absolutely was not.” Eric told him with a grim look. “The thing… Not even the Pale Wolf’s whistle made me feel the way this thing did… It had to die, but… even pulling on just a bit of their blood wasn’t enough… I… I had to burn all of their blood to put it down in the explosion… if not for how much fireproofing I give myself I probably would’ve burned too.”

“That’s… a lot of fire.” He admitted, knowing how much fire his nephew could produce with just his blood let alone that of a dozen of his kin.

“Kept it contained to the warehouse to keep it from spreading and to make sure both that monster and whatever it was creating burned. While my own enchantments were burned out I torched a hole through to the river before diving in and hot wiring a car here.” Eric concluded his tale.

He frowned considering what he’d been told as he went back to work doing what he could for his nephew’s leg. (Thinking of,)“your leg… was that the explosion or…?”

“The monster was a sadist, kept going on about pain and… yeah… bought me the time to boil everyone’s blood at the very least.” Eric sighed, the young man’s face twitching as he felt the bones in his leg moving.

“That’s terrible…” Enough so that he would’ve hunted the beast down if Eric hadn’t killed it, no matter how much that amount of power would’ve irritated the Wolves or the Arcane. (But if it reached that point, Eric would’ve died too…)

He looked at his nephew, the boy’s eyes clenched as the last of the bones that could be fixed were snapped into place. “You… you did good tonight… Unfortunately, we’ll need to pull a favor with the Arcane to finish healing your leg but at the very least it won’t get any worse, and you should be on your feet in a week or two.”

That had been something they’d had to learn during the Riots, prior to that they’d thought of healing magic as a cure all, not even considering what the limits could be. (We’ve learned since then though…)

“Hey, don’t look so down. Like you said, I'll be good as new within a couple weeks.” Eric tried to console him. “And, for once I’ll have the badass story about killing a monster instead of Cat… You think she’ll count me as a Hunter, or still be all stuck up about that?”

“Maybe…” He admitted, with just a touch of amusement.

Sadly, it was just that touch because while his nephew had tried to reassure him, all it did was remind him of the many stories Catherine had told them over the years of the many monsters she and her fellows had hunted. Stories that had one vital lesson weaved throughout all of them.

There were always monsters in the dark, more than you thought, and far more terrifying than the last. Meaning (it’s fully possible that there’s more than one of these monsters out there, and that this wasn’t even the most terrifying of their lot…)

--- Cynthia ---

“Helping… Helping… I am helping!”

She idly kicked her legs back and forth, her mind not really with her body at the moment, even as she remained aware of the silly guards watching her.

(Vanessa hissed at the Creep thrice her size as she clawed and climbed across its flesh, moving swiftly enough that the beast’s attempts to throw her off were dealing more damage to it than to her.

All the while the poison in her veins began to eat away at her flesh from the inside out.)

(No. Bad Mr. Malice.) She thought, reaching out and pinning the wriggling insect like poison hurting Vanessa in place before taking a look at a regenerating Nicholas to figure out how to undo the damage.

She ignored that meanie Mathias like usual, because no matter how much help everyone said he could be she didn’t want to be friends with someone who bullied her big brother. Which is why she left him where she found him without a second thought towards his condition. (Bad kids have to sit in time out.)

With an idea of what people were supposed to look like -thanks to her big brother- she went ahead and fixed everything that Vanessa’s poison had damaged while still leaving just enough wiggle room that she wouldn’t outright lose her powers like the time she’d messed up with Jessica.

She’d felt so bad when her other sister was left in the hospital for so long.

Thinking about it, she went ahead and took a look at Jessica too -the distance between them far easier to manage than she let people think- because while the poison in her was actually a very nice lady, that didn’t change the fact that twisting Anima and Malice together wasn’t exactly good for a person’s body.

A mask of bones covering that of a really pretty lady looked her way with a gentle smile before kindly stepping out of the way rather than trying to bite and sting her like Vanessa’s creepy crawly thing. In fact, unlike the bug clinging to Vanessa, the nice bone lady even pointed out the various bits and pieces of Jessica’s body that were being worn down by all of her transformations over these last few weeks.

(Thank you pretty lady!) She told the nice bone lady, earning a giggle from the spirit as she fixed Jessica’s body and helped heal her.

“Helping… Helping… I am helping!” She sang as her various tendrils shifted through the material plane around her, not really focused on her body but fully aware of the silly guards clinging to their weapons as if that would protect them on the day she had enough and finally decided to slaughter all of them and burn the entire company to the ground for everything they’d done to her family. (I just need to wait for big sis to finish waking up~)

She smiled a smile that her damaged face couldn’t make. “Helping… Helping… I aM HeLlpINg~”