Taylor lay on his pile of blankets & furs in his Secret Place. Well, to be perfectly honest it wasn't a secret now; 'lina had seen it, & that was fine, because a boi could get lonely all by himself, & besides, hadn't he decorated it so pretty?
Taylor had made do with what he could. Some of his decor was from Above, a few items he had pilfered from The Big House (schala's place) & various things he'd taken from victims, or from stores & clubs. This drumkit, for example? Well, Taylor WAS a drummer, & he missed his kit from home. So he'd walked into a music store one night.
Now, he didn't understand french exactly, but he could read minds & the gestures were clear anough.
"We're closing. Get out!"
"Why yes, you are!" Taylor had agreed enthusiastically, & gone back to looking at things. This kit had caught his eye. Mother of pearl shelling...rototoms...sizzle as well as the usual ride, crash & high-hat cymbals. Taylor smiled. He was in love again. "I'll take these." he said to the angry Frenchman, & he smiled sunnily.
After a little while the Frenchman had smiled too, & let Taylor pack up the drums & walk out with them. That was Taylor's odd power over living humans- somehow his marvelling-at-it-all agape grin was infectuous. He had a weird & powerful charisma; he could make humans do anything. Thus far none of his victims had had to be attacked- he simply fell in love with them, & they came with him.
Due to the fact Taylor'd been turned by the usually glutted Dave-- who he'd nearly drained to death in the desperation of his first-feed -- and topped off by a full-fed Kirke (rare for Kirke indeed, up to that point in time) Taylor needed very little blood to survive. He had not yet tasted death under his fangs. He didn't need to. He could stop drinking when he was sated. Why drink beyond one's fill?
The rest of Taylor's "toys" besides his rescued aboveground bric-a-brac he found here Below, & Below was the catacombs, the old Plece de Greve, a mass charnel of old Paris. There were thousands upon thousands of old skeletons, stacked&packed in mud so high in some places they were veritably a solid wall. Taylor had been slowly excavating such a wall.He had found old coins, tools, jewelry. Some of these alone would have been worth their weight in antique value, but Taylor only saved the stuff he found interesting or aesthetic to him personally.
Mostly, Taylor excavated bones.
He liked skulls best of all; he had quite a pile of them, all further decorated by his own handiwork- painted upon or collaged by lick&stick magazine photos because, well, skulls could be so gloomy sometimes.
Had taylor ever seen ossuary art, like the church of Kutna Hora or the capuchin crypts of Santa Maria della Concezione before? Was he aware of the macabre nature of his particular form of feng shui?
No, chances are he was just making due with whatever he could dig up, so to speak.
Unlike his funereal Kindred, Taylor was about the happiest, least fatalistic blooddrinker one could meet. He was more passive than his Sire, the angstridden Kirke, & not at all discontent with his untimely death & new shadowy existence. Pisces perkygoff to the max. Taylor was in love with it all. Taylor was in love with everything.
Chances are, just before death & subsequent undeath had transmuted him, Taylor Hawkins had lost it. Just lost his cookies;his boss, his friend Dave had betrayed him, Dave had lured him halfway across the world & then nearly killed him. Dave had learned no grace & very little self control; to Dave, his death under Kasilyn's fangs had been rape, had been painful & traumatic entirely; Dave could not have seduced a victim & then gently sipped from them had he wanted to, he simply had no idea it could be done. and so Dave's attack on Taylor had been brutal; tho he'd managed to stop drinking well before it would have been fatal, he had almost crushed Taylor's windpipe in the feeding.
& so Taylor may've died anyway, might have damaged some brain cells due to lack of oxygen even before Cronus found him & drained him to the point of near death.
It would have explained a few things, anyway.
Most vampyres grow jaded quickly, cease to be amazed by their new vision & other heightened senses, but not so Taylor. He had never outgrown the wow! stage. He was like a happy, hyper child on LSD; everything held endless fasination for him.
Like the relic he'd found now.
He had found a skull earlier? not like any of the others, nope, it was big, it was longer- it was some kinda animal skull, doncha know? But he had lost it in a cave-in, they happened sometimes (especially when one pulled things out haphazardly- from the bottom, even). But NEAR the cave-in, oh, he'd found this. It was this he turned over & over as he lay on his makeshift bed, pondering.
The medallion was shiny, oh yeh, a great reddish stone in its center with a flaw in it, so that sometimes it looked like a opalesque rainbowy "phantom" but mostly, as tho the thing was a ruby eye. The metalwork around it was black, & hanging from it, almost like an afterthought, was a yellowed fangtooth, with scrimshaw etchings of weird runes all down it.
Put me on, the medallion seemed to say to him quietly.
"Oh no." Taylor embarassed himself by answering aloud, "I'm just not the 'big clunky jewelry' type, y'know?"
Put me ON. The voice was insistent, & yet mellow. Perfectly reasonable sounding voice. It was such a perfectly reasonable request, surely. Why not put the necklace on? If only for a minute..just to see how it looked. He could always change his mind & take it off again.....
Taylor put the medallion on.
For the next half hour or so, anyone seeing him would have thought Taylor'd gone mad. He howled & shrieked & ran in circles, beating himself against the walls of the catacomb, dragging himself across the ground. He all but hung himself, attaching the necklace-chord to things & then pulling at it; he bit at the chord incessantly,gnawing like a rat. But somehow he could not, would not simply pull the chord back over his neck & be free of the thing that way.
Finally, crazed, bloody, panting & foaming like a dog, he weakened, came to a stop. He scrabbled across the floor, whining & scratching at the chord as if to tear it. Then he lay still, eyes wide with shock.
Finally, said the voice of the medallion, now in Taylor's head quite clearly, I thought you'd never stop that. Did I not tell you resistance was futile?
"Leave me alone." Taylor whimpered.
Nonsense,said the voice, there are great things we can do together.
"fuck you." Taylor hissed, & then yelped as if he'd been slapped. He listened to the voice, droning on with its plans.
"Why?" he asked, finally.
The voice told him why.
"But that seems pretty damn pointless. I mean, you told me yourself jus' a minute ago that was all solved ages back..." "...yes, but..." "well, I don't know" "Ha!oh com'ON! Get over yourself." "you're kidding me, right? oh puh-lease!"
A half an hour of Taylor's arguing later, & the medallion was in complete agreement Taylor was not what it needed. Take me to your leader, it suggested.
Taylor made a face. "I don't HAVE a leader." he retorted, sulkily.
---~*~---
Kirke was in Pere Lachaise. He was spying on a certain grave; well no, the grave itself he could give a rat's ass about, it was the activity around the grave that held his interest. He s n i f f ed the air,licked his lips. And stared & stared.
The tomb was for no one particularly famous- some reporter? or something? he'd gotten to meet the king of somewhere-or-another & subsequently been shot. The tomb art portrayed this- it was a figure of a man, lying down, his hat at his feet. Kirke had heard the whole story once... he'd wondered tho, as had obviously the girls Kirke was spying on now, if the man buried there had been as generously well hung in life as the sculptor had portrayed him...
Kirke was content to simply watch the girls, he had fed earlier, & fully, at that. He had to wonder a bit why he needed & wanted to feed so full of late. In the past he had fought his Thirst to the point of unhealthinees to himself- empathy had stayed his fangs from killing. It had been powerfully hard in those days to pull away before his drinking killed his prey, hard to draw back from the rising ecstasy the onset of their deaths caused in the drinking bloodsucker. But it had gotten even harder now. He found he couldn't fight this anymore- there was a weird new distance in him, almost a harshness. And he loved the rush too much now- Dave- of all people!- had been right; he'd been a fool to deprive himself of it!
Dave...
It had been so weird! but dave had called Kirke earlier that night. He'd just... Kirke was sitting on a fence by this one street, & a payphone had just started ringing. Out of curiousity, he'd picked it up. "Bon jour?" he said cautiously.
"See? I told you!" it was Kasilyn's voice to someone on her end, then to Kirke she'd said "bon JOUR! It's night you silly, jour means day! Here, he wants to talk to you..." and then Dave was there on the line. "Kurt?"
Kirke became aware he wasn't breathing; he corrected this. "Davey-boi!" his voice cracked in an adolescent squeak, he coughed, & his own gravelly singsong was back, "I thought you were pissed as fuck at me. Swore revenge in seven different flavors."
Dave sounded teary, penitent. "I miss you, Kurt. and Taylor. Look. I asked Kasi to help me..now I gotta ask you the same." Kirke switched hands, giving the phone the benefit of his good ear. He said nothing, waited to hear what Dave had to say.
"I want to come back," Dave said, "I need to come back, to see you guys..I don't know why you've stayed in Paris, but I can't be without you. I was hoping you'd be willing to beg cronus on my behalf..I swear to you Kurt, I swear I won't cause anymore trouble. I'll swear fealty to him, I'll apologize, I'll crawl in on hands & knees if need be..."
Kirke was not convinced. & he was glad for his new coldness, elsewise he too would be all tears- he was not impressed tho, either. Undeath had turned Dave all but evil; Kirke had to assume tho that either Kasi couldn't hear Dave's constant interanl conniving, or that possibly, somehow the kid HAD had a change of heart.
There were a few ways to test this tho.
"Chains." Kirke heard himself saying.
"What??" Dave blatted,with a hint of his old indignance.
"Chains," Kirke reiterated, "tell Kasi she's to bring you in chains. I'm gonna test how strong they are myself just to be sure you haven't mindfucked her somehow. It would be so much easier to believe you Dave, if you'd be willing to place yourself in a situation where you can't try any tricky moves. And easier to convince cronus to only punish you if we can catch you easily when you fuck up."
Kirke said when, not if. He had no reason to trust Dave. He knew full well of the ritual Kasi& Dave had done. Had known it the very second his link to Dave had severed.
There was a muffled silence on the line; Dave with his hand over the receiver, no doubt, telling all this to Kasi & voicing his protests. Finally, Dave came on again. Mumbled a reluctant assent to Kirke's terms. "If Cronus will see you," Kirke told him, "IF Cronus accepts your acquiescence and IF you behave, you'll be let out on your own again eventually. But I warn you, Davey-boi, none of your tricks. I'll do anything I can to prevent him killing you. But my alternative would be leaving you locked up...& I'm told starvation is a pretty convincing way to make a vampyre be good. You'd just wish you HAD been torched by the time you came to regret your actions..."
Dave was crying this time, Kirke could hear him. He swore he would be good. Kirke had finally decided to believe him. And ended the conversation quickly after that.
Before he could change his mind.
---~*~---
---~*~---
"Some are born to sweet delight," Kirke said cruelly, looking down at the boy in the Doors T-shirt struggling in his grip, "some are born to endless night." And, baring his fangs, he lunged.
When it was over, he licked his lips & wiped his mouth. He simply couldn't bring himself to feel pity for the Doors fans that were his primary food source at this time. Perhaps it was the harsh words the shade of Jimbo had had for him on the astral plane? Or maybe it was just Jim's words, period. There was something pretentious to the point of Gothic about the kind of people who dug the Doors so special as to mill around a thirty-years-dead man's grave. They had a tendency to wax funereal poetry not even half as good as the Lizard King's atrocities, and Kirke sincerely believed that awful prose was an unforgiveable crime. Not as bad as rape or murder, granted, but unforgiveable all the same. "s'a Blake quote, y'know," he said to the boy, checking his pulse. Kirke had managed to stop for once. This boy would live to recite again. "Jim stole a lot of his shit from Blake. Even the bit about the doors of perception. You might try reading some...broaden your outlook. Now, run to the hospital & demand a transfusion- statt. You may yet survive this night." And with a burst of celerity, Kirke was off- to fast for the human's eye to see.
A minute or so later he was back in the streets. For once, Kirke wanted to find Taylor, but that one had become completely elusive. He knew Taylor was supposed to have some secret little den down in the catacombs, but the idea of crawling thru those stinking sewers in search of it did not appeal to him. It was easy to lose a scent in those miles of maze-like tunnelling. & easier still to lose your lunch at the stench of old rot and wet garbage. So Kirke waited, hoping to find the fledgling when he went out to feed.
"No one is innocent," Dave had once told him as he'd tried to lecture dave on the importance of taking only rightful prey, "even a newborn baby dreams dreams of greed." And slowly Kirke was coming to understand those words. The meeting the night before had gone bizarrely- Dave had come as requested, as Kasi's slave. Unfortunately at that same time Taylor had been there- allegedly under the influence of some mysterious medallion he'd found. It had taken a bit of scaring for Cronus to get a sincere enough apology from Dave- Dave's stubborn sense of pride & indignation had made it hard to accept him on his own terms. But finally Dave had cracked, dropping to the floor & crying in frustration, unsure what he had to do to prove himself. That alone had proven him, & just as he'd been about to get up, finally forgiven, all hell had broken loose. Well, Taylor's angry side, anyway.
Dave was the one person Taylor did NOT forgive for what had happened. It had taken Kasi prying Taylor off with total intent to kill him, to snap Taylor out of his Frenzy, but for those few seconds, Taylor had had at dave, who was not expecting the attack, & was thus completely defenseless. Kirke too had been pissed, tho Cronus had defended & calmed the now-befuddled Taylor, who'd fallen peacefully asleep mere moments after savaging Dave.
Kirke even now wasn't completely convinced it had been the medallion's influence alone had caused Taylor to attack. He was pretty convinced Taylor had wanted to hurt Dave. In fact, Kirke believed that gentle Taylor, Taylor who had never killed a single human victim, had had full intent to kill Dave, & may've succeeded had no one intervened. And so, reluctantly, Kirke knew it was time to have a talk with Taylor. He was Kirke's Childe, after all, for better or for worse. His only Childe now. Dave had denounced him. And sooner or later, when Dave had recovered, he planned to have a talk with Dave about that, as well.
---~*~---
Dave, meanwhile, was back in Boston. Letting kasi lick his wounds, & hoping like hell she wouldn't bite him. She'd owned up to the fact that she was more than a little responsible for his death and, like Taylor before him when Cronus confessed similar, Dave couldn't find it in himself to hate her for it. It scared him tho- right into a bad anxiety attack.
"Listen", Dave told her when the shaking subsided, "all my life I've been afraid of my own death." He told her it had all started when as a teen he'd stared at his own reflexion in the mirror so long he'd just driven himself mad. A horrid creeping chill had entered him- almost the stellar opposite of an orgasm, filling him, instead of with pleasure, from brain to groin with unspeakable dread. He'd get dizzy, near to pass out. And nausea so bad...
"It got worse later," he confessed,"came to a kind of stage fright. and a fear of heights- you know I can't climb things like other vamps can. Imagine me in airplanes!- I always dreaded that this would be the flight that would horribly crash. The one people'd be reading about in the papers the next day.
"Other things too," he added, "I'd be up sleepless nights, afraid I was gonna die, afraid I was gonna go insane. Or worse , that I already HAD gone insane- that I'd committed unspeakable social blunders I'd totally forgotten & now not only was I ostracized, but that no one was gonna have the decency to even remind me what I'd done."
Kasi wanted to understand Dave- in an abstract way she loved him very much. He could be a lot of fun to play with- except that annoying fear of being bitten, which she HAD to fix soon! And of course she didn't mind his bouncing-off-the-wall bloodthirstiness- it was vamps like stoic uncle Kirke & hidebound old Cronus who didn't get what vampirism was about. She wanted to comfort dave somehow, but had no idea how. "But you already ARE dead," she said, toying with one of her piercings, "why are you still freaking out about it? You got thru it just fine." maybe what HE needs is some piercings, she thought, might get him over the fear of being bit. Where to pierce him & how came to her, & she chuckled at the thought of it. "But I didn't, Kas," Dave said earnestly, I've been wacko. Kurt's pissed at me- I know he is- and Taylor wanted to kill me."
Kasi didn't like being reminded of that. "Taylor fuck with you again & I rip his lungs out," she said, without a hint of menace, "tell you what?we can hang em on the wall." "I don't want Taylor's lungs," Dave said, "I want Taylor. He should've been mine by rights. I pay his wages. I'm the one who's been his friend."
Kasi raised an eyebrow. Don't tell me he gay too? she thought, then, nah. He got them healthy responses. On that whim, she started teasing him, touching him playfully. Yup. His responses seemed healthy enough. "To own?" she said, "you want him to own. Well, ok, why not bloodbond him?" worked for me, she might've added as an afterthought- ohh, Dave was purely hers now, if only he knew- but she chose not to.
Dave pondered this. "Might be worth my while..." he considered. Dave had only changed nominally, after all.
---~*~---
Taylor was all the way down by the Eiffel Tower, sitting in a WC and playing with a wooden puzzle that had caught his undivided attention. He was not so happy & spunky as once he was- the medallion that had messed with him had left him wary & befuddled and was bringing to him the gradual awareness that his brave new world was not 100% as bright & beautiful as he'd once thought.He was surly as well- he had been really annoyed that Dave had been there at all, & his sides were sore where Kasi had grabbed him to pull him off. She'd had as much intent to kill him as he'd had to kill Dave just then, after all. Taylor hadn't bothered to lock the bathroom door. He was crouching on the floor playing,and what he'd do, pretty much, is when someone entered to use the facilities he'd merely bare his fangs & snarl at them. That tended to disappear them pretty quickly.
All of them excpet the pair of Tremere sitting on the Tower itself. Now, Taylor wasn't aware of them- yet. But they were awfully aware of him.
L'Sect Rouge, a Tremere pack who met secretly on the outskirts of Paris, had been aware of Kirke O'Bain since he'd first arrived in France in the care & company of Cronus Vladislas some time back. They had noted the creation of Kirke's tiny brood, knew what little there was to know of Grohl & Hawkins. If Kirke had not had such powerful allies these Tremere would have slit his throat within the first hour he'd set foot in Paris.
They were terribly aware of the tattoo Kirke had scrimshawed in his neck by his second-Sire, Sabria F'asayle. And tho Sabria had seemed to Kirke anyway hidebound to vampyric tradition & had inferred some sort of noble heirloom, truth was she was one of the last of her particular line. When Ra'sayle had fallen in fights between Camarilla & Sabbat, she had had to flee- was considered by some Tremere as rogue as her caitiff protege Kirke. She was a gypsy, a refugee, & had asked no Tremere elder permission to mark the childe thusly, had done no ritual to purify his tainted blood.
L'Sect Rouge found Kirke an abomination, & longed to wipe him & his bastard Childer off the face of the earth.
But Cronus's influence & power had stayed their hand& thus far they'd been content to stay on the outskirts & bitch about all of this- but now they were growing bolder. Rumor had surfaced that this one- this stinking little sewer rat fledgling they had cornered in a urinal, of all places- this Childe had somehow unearthed the eye of Agamoto.
It was one of their own whose fang graced the nasty bit of jewelry- it had been wrenched from the mouth of the sorcerer-candobolist Etienne Agrippe before he'd been burnt to death. The runes upon the tooth both prevented Etienne from rising as a Wraith to take his revenge, & to prevent his restless shade from ever resting in peace.
It had been Etienne's skull Taylor had found, the one he'd mistook for an animal's. If only he knew. But he was about to be told.
The WC door swung open with a bang. Taylor looked up from his puzzle with an expression caught between a snarl & a quizzical look. Two vampires, so similar as to be twins, sidled in & shut the door behind them. "'allo, little one." said the darker haired one of the pair. "Miet," said the other, "sweet,sweet. Surely his blood will be as honey upon my tongue." "And sweet will be his screams as we do our work upon him," added the first, "but before we get to such confection, surely he must tell us something?" That one reached out to touch Taylor, lifting Taylor's head to look in his eyes with a cruel claw-flick to Taylor's chin. "Hello?" Taylor asked, staring at them with confusion & slowly dawning terror. They fell upon him.