Avoidance
By day six, Carmilla was starting to worry that she would still be tied to the chair when her period started.
She had dressed to kill - metaphorically, not literally - and that meant no underwear. To see Laura's face when she realised... and instead, this happened. In all her years, the vampire had never gone without blood before a full moon; she idly wondered whether or not her body would retain blood under her current circumstances. Not that she was going to say anything about it to the creampuff, or whoever else was guarding her at the time. Who was guarding her right now? Carmilla twisted her neck enough to look behind her, and saw the ginger scientist sitting on the edge of Laura's bed, watching her, wooden stake in hand.
"Woah," LaFontaine said as their eyes searched her face, "How you doing? You're starting to look a little... ashen."
Carmilla faced forward again. "'That would be the 'starve me until I confess' part of your childish plan," she replied with as much sarcasm as she could muster. Blood was the only thing that kept her going during the daylight hours, and home refridgerators had only been around for about a century. She had gotten used to the convenience; the weakness she was feeling now was typical of her younger days.
"What if we fed you? Would you talk then?"
"Would you untie me?"
"Well, no," LaFontaine admitted.
"Then what, spoon-feed me like an infant? I'd rather starve."
"Why? What information is worth starving to death for? Would you actually die if-"
"If I'm not going to talk about it, I'm sure as hell not going to give you a crash course in vampire biology."
Carmilla could almost feel the disappointment that no doubt decorated the redhead's face, but at least it shut them up and allowed her to try and sleep. It was getting more difficult as her hunger grew, but she figured that the more rest she got, the longer she could maintain a semblance of consciousness before the inevitable torpor. Not only might it answer the crimson horror that was bearing down on her, but it meant more time with Laura. These sleepy hours were usually spent trying to figure the girl out.
There was also the question as to why the girl still mattered to her in the first place. The vampire had already identified the start of it: Laura had sniped at her well enough to get her hackles up and tear into Lois Lane in response. Despite which, the teenager had insisted that even Carmilla deserved better. Foolishly naive, utterly appropriate for a child, yet her conviction was... impressive. And so stubborn, it would get her killed, if the dreams were any indication. In a moment of weakness, the vampire had fetched the charm, only for Laura to not wear it. When, exactly, had she decided Carmilla was a vampire? How much 'video evidence' had it taken for her to even consider the possibility?
Why hadn't she been horrified?
Carmilla being a vampire hadn't seemed as important as the missing girls, beyond suggesting a motive. Is that where Laura thought she was getting the blood from? How much had the girl actually found out? Perhaps she should watch those stupid videos... assuming she gets the chance. Starving would be preferable to the bloody coffin.
The Tremere were playing it quiet, trying not to attract the attention of the Toreador that ruled every noteworthy city in France. The Ventrue were all but absent, leaving the Brujah and Nosferatu clans - and the occasional Malkavian - to ride the coattails of the Toreador. The more time Vale spent underneath Paris, the more he wondered where the Nosferatu were. The Sewer Rats were reviled far more in the old world than the new, no more so than by the Degenerates. It probably said something that Cainite society as a whole considered remaining the most human to be degenerate, but that did not make the Toreador any less dangerous, as some preferred to believe. The Tremere were not the type to fool themselves, and they were trying to deal with the unwelcome Lasombra in-house.
The Nosferatu had a particular talent for hiding, born from the varied grotesqueries of their appearance. Vale didn't care, knowing their other shared trait: the discovery and selective sharing of information, for an appropriate price. Even if the Sabbat had Nosferatu antitribu among their ranks, sect loyalties did not stop them from talking to each other. Right now, Vale wanted to know where the Tremere chantry in Paris was located... but after three nights of searching the catacombs, sewers and metro tunnels, not one Sewer Rat had revealed itself. At the very least, the Lasombra would have expected one to pop up just to tell him to remove himself from their domain, by now.
Either they were staying out of the way - of him or the Tremere, Vale could not guess - or their population had dwindled since he was last here. He preferred the theory of relocation to destruction, but considered it too optimistic. Regardless, the undead warlocks were not cooperating. Remaining out of sight from the mortals should have been an invitation to engage him with all the thaumaturgy at their disposal, but they were waiting him out.
Frustrating.
Vale headed as far east as he could before climbing to street level. The last two arrondissements were there, with a heavy population comprised of the working class and several flavours of migrants. If there were any Sabbat in Paris, they would likely be on this side of the city, but the Lasrombra was only interested in feeding. He had one last recourse left to him if he wished to finish his business here, and he wanted to top up the tank before getting into a probably hostile situation.
As he wandered the narrow streets, he felt the smartphone buzz in his pocket. Fishing it out, he entered the password to unlock the device and discovered a message from the Nosferatu who has keeping him informed on the Silas situation. The first bit of news was that there had been no new videos since the students that captured Carmilla had chosen to starve her for information. I bet that went well, the Lasombra thought. She probably frenzied, broke free and went on a feeding spree. The second bit of news made him pause: the lack of new material had apparently bored one of Laura's viewers to the point that they had started uploading her videos to youtube. The Nosferatu had blocked them, citing copyright issues, but that a larger effort was underway to handle the problem. There were no details on what said effort entailed.
As Vale tapped out his acknowledgement of this latest news, a large man in rough clothes approached him and spoke. "Hmm?" he answered without looking up, until the man placed a heavy hand on his shoulder and spoke again. His other hand held a knife, pointed at the Lasombra's stomach.
"Ah, je vois," he said, locking and pocketing the phone before adding with a sharp grin, "Vous ferez bien."
As he snatched the hand with the knife and squeezed until fingers started popping, his other hand grabbed the man by the hair, pulling his head aside enough to expose his neck enough to bite down on. The pain and fear kept the blood pumping until the pleasure of the Kiss took over, with little change in effect.
The man was dead by the time Vale stopped, but he had not drained him completely. Licking the twin punctures until they closed, he threw the corpse down so that the skull cracked against the street. Fishing the knife from broken fingers, he stabbed where he had just fed from before rolling the body so that the wound would empty what little was left into the street drain. That should satisfy the Masquerade, he thought, assuming they even recognise this for what it was.
The Lasombra started walking in a new direction as he finished his message to the Nosferatu, then experimented with the map function to verify that he was indeed heading to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Families had to pay to keep their dead relatives interred there, and there was a burial waiting list. Vale found the whole thing rediculously amusing. Even the family mausoleums were crowded, but there was enough space to sit in privacy. It was also a good place to summon Decius. It did not take much light to banish an Abyssal entity back to where it came from, which was why it had played no part in the catacombs trap Vale had laid. In the mausoleum, it could safely keep watch while he meditated.
His new plan involved infiltrating the hub of Camarilla territory and finding the most dangerous Toreador in Paris, save for Villon himself, and he needed to avail himself of every advantage he had.
Most Camarilla princes always had a sheriff as their right hand, an enforcer and his or her subordinates, called scourges, to handle the phsyical and typically violent aspect of ruling a city of Cainites... or Kindred, as the sect preferred to refer to their own kind as. Vale considered it a hypocricy, inventing a new name to distance themselves from the myth of their origin; and their end, which was getting harder to ignore or suppress during these final nights. Hauling in Cainites that spoke of Gehenna without extreme discretion was an increasingly common task since the events of 1999.
Prince Villon, being the most prideful of his peers and a sophisticated bully to boot, did not have a mere sheriff and scourges. He had the Masque. To their credit, they were the best at what they do. The leader of the Masque had staked Vale and nearly taken his head off with a garrotte, before delivering him to the Tremere that had been a Nazi doctor when he was alive. He had escaped trial and execution thanks to the Embrace of a Tremere, but that had merely refocused his medical attention from Jews to Cainites. Vale had been the last of his victims, experimented on as he lay in torpor. The Lasombra wished he could claim to have brought the justice Markus Mueller deserved when he had drained him dry and reduced his body to ash; but the doctor's soul had not been so easy to consume, and Vale's soul had been stained by it, beyond the simple monstrosity of diablerie. That, and the revelation he had experienced when he found what Mueller had sought in Paris, had changed everything.
Facing west and sitting crosslegged in the mausoleum with Decius exploring the interior surfaces, the Lasombra summoned a Shroud of Night: a cloud of tangible, viscous darkness that smothered light and sound. For Vale's enemies, it was akin to being immersed in tar; for himself, a protective coccoon that shut out the world and allowed him to focus inward. Lasombra methuselahs and some elders could do what he intended with a mere act of will, but with little more than a century under his belt, most of it being utterly incapable of what he intended, Vale was a layman compared to them.
About an hour passed before he felt it. He stood, and Decius automatically ceased its vigil to join its master and settle across the Cainite's shoulders and biceps under his trenchcoat. With a single step forward, Vale left his Shroud and entered the Abyss.
Night Sight was of no use in a realm entirely comprised of darkness - according to some, the darkness that preceded God's light - but with it, the Lasombra could see into the shadows of the physical world. His Shroud had been extinguised when he left the mausoleum, but he could still glimpse the interior of the structure from where he stood. He willed himself forward for the briefest moment, and what he could see passed too quickly to identify. The closer he got to his destination, the slower these leaps became. It would not do to spend too much time in the Abyss, for coelesced intelligences like Decius roamed the darkness, and some would think to possess any physical being they came across, if they could not be fought off. Vale wanted to spend the majority of his time spying, not travelling. Fortunately, travel through the Abyss was quite a shortcut through the physical world, and it was less than six kilometers between the cemetery and the Avenue des Champs-Elysees as the crow flies.
The entire avenue and the buildings that flanked it were an elysium, neutral ground where Kindred could mingle and snipe at each other in a social setting. Physical violence and use of disciplines were forbidden, and the punishments for breaking these laws (if caught) could be severe. From the Abyss, very little could be seen of a street so well-lit, which was the biggest clue that Vale had reached it. From the doors of unlit rooms, under furniture, between books and behind the shelves on which they stood, Vale listened for what was missing. Bodies were noisy structures, heartbeats and bloodflow, digestion and belching, breathing and sneezing and hiccuping... and dark when looked at from the inside. Bones and organs and everything not close enough to the skin for light to reach. Cainite hearts do not beat, blood is not digested so much as distributed, and breath is only required for speech.
Vale searched for the quieter ghosts that flitted across his vision. When he found them, he listened to the voices, then moved on to hear new ones. From room to room, building to building, he drifted until he found the shadow and voice of Villon. He had never met the prince, but he did recognise the seneschal of a nightclub he had visited in the past. The Lasombra's French was not that good, but he knew enough to understand the context in which the seneschal used 'prince' to know who he talking to. Would the prince be able to sense his scrutiny despite where he was spying from? It was probably best to assume as much. He backed off as far as he dared; Villon did not seem to be going anywhere. If Vale could keep tabs on him until he met with his glorified sheriff, then follow him until he is alone...
"Qui est la?"
Perhaps not.
"Je sais que quelqu'un nous regarde. Tres stupide, pour tenter d'espionner un prince."
The Lasombra chose to improvise rather than retreat. "Bon nuit, prince Villon."
The shadowy insides of the Toreador prince turned slightly in his direction. "Please stop raping my language with your unpracticed tongue."
Vale shifted slightly and spoke again. As before, Villon turned in the direction from which his voice now echoes. "It is passable enough to fool the average Frenchman, and your disdain of all others is well known." Another shift, another reaction. "I wonder which came first, your xenophobia or theirs."
The prince's tone turned angry, having realised the nature of his conversational companion. "The Sabbat is not welcome in my city."
"The Sabbat is not present," the Lasombra answered with equal emnity, before calming and shifting again with every sentence. "I have no intentions on you or your city. You may attempt to use your Presence to draw me out or send me away, but summoning your sheriff might prove more informative."
"Why should I indulge a Lasombra who refuses to present himself appropriately to the prince of the city, as tradition demands?"
"Since the Burning Times, I considered such social niceties to be so much bullshit. The Sabbat was the better answer, until the hypocracy set in; and the Masquerade is the Camarilla's best redeeming virtue. Summon the head of the Masque, and you will learn a truth that should interest you. In return, I would learn a truth from you... or him. Otherwise, do as you wish, but... you are a Toreador, and you are a prince. Both enjoy little intrigues such as this, do they not?"
The newcomer entered the hall and bowed low before Villon. "Mon prince."
"Nous avons unvisiteur indesirable," the prince replied.
Said visitor took that as his cue. "Good evening, Jean Paul."
The sheriff spun faster than the eye could follow to the shadow that was the source of the new voice. Villon observed his reaction dispassionately, before asking, "Peut-etre quevous avezune explication acette intrusion?"
"I would greet you face to face," Vale added before Jean Paul could answer, resuming the habit of shifting from shadow to shadow, "But I fear that if I stick it my neck out, you will garrotte me and deliver me to the nearest Tremere. Again."
The Masque leader frowned as the name of the Tremere in question came to mind; then his eyebrows rose as the name of the Lasombra followed. "Trahern Valley."
"Once upon a time."
"Il parle de docteur Mueller?"
"...Oui, mon prince."
"We were all dreaming of Parisian streets running red with blood," Vale explained. "After the Week of Nightmares and how it ended for the Ravnos, a dream shared across all clans needed to be investigated. Any disruption I caused to the city was for the sake of learning the truth, before I was interrupted. Jean Paul's ghoul was a tasty treat, but I must admit, the Kindred himself was too fast for me. First came the stake, then the garrotte to the bone. A tortuous method of execution that I assume the prince approves of. Instead, your sheriff handed the Tremere a new test subject. I vaguely recall such behaviour to be frowned upon, back when the Tremere were stealing the gift of Caine from the Gangrel... the Tzimisce... the Salubri."
"Le resultataurait ete le meme," Jean Paul insisted.
"MaisMuellera rencontrela mortfinale, a la place," Villon stated. "Auxmains de ceLasombra?" He observed the single not of his sheriff before continuing in English. "While the Ventrue are more willing to court the Tremere, I prefer to remain in their good graces. That is not easily done when one of their own meets Final Death in my city." A trace of genuine anger tainted the end of his statement, and the sheriff bowed his head.
Vale was more concerned with what his words implied. "Then the prince does not allow a Tremere chantry in his city?"
"Is that the truth you seek?" The prince asked.
"It is."
"There will never be a Tremere chantry in Paris."
The Lasombra counted the seconds before stating, "Then you have no idea where the Tremere currently in Paris can be located."
That got a rise out of both of them.