A Place to Belong: Chapter 7

Chapter VII

Where I Hunt

Baroness Natalia Sharpe had her hands around my neck, her fingers pressing and twisting as I gritting my teeth as we struggled. 

“Would you stop squirming?” she hissed at me. “You don’t even need to breathe anymore, just sit still and let me fix your tie!” 

“I can tie a bowtie myself!” I shot back, keeping my voice low, but I tried my best not to squirm as her fingers continued their precise work. 

“I’ve seen the way you tie a bowtie,” she said, her tone flat and dry. “It’s one of the few points in your life where you’re not meticulous in your observation and fall back into your mortal flaw of the ‘fuck it, good enough’ mentality that plagued you back then.”

Biting back my retort, I reflected on her words. She wasn’t wrong, and over the past couple weeks of working together, she’d shown me exactly where my new kindred abilities could overcome and overwhelm my old mortal failings. My apartment is much cleaner now, mostly because I’m not eating an assortment of snacks or cooking and creating a mess that attracted pests. Now the only food I keep in my apartment has been for my cats. The boys were a little wary of me when I originally came home and blacked out every window in our normally bright and open home, but I created zones for them where they could enjoy the sun without putting me at risk. 

Without the stress of keeping the apartment clean, I managed to reduce a lot of my flaws in that area. Plus, short of me spilling anything on my clothing, washing them became rather moot. Normally it was to keep the dirt and grime from my body from building up in the fabric, but I no longer sweat, my skin no longer flakes or produces oil, and my hair no longer grows or falls out. This took laundry out of the equation for most aspects of my life, outside freshening up the clothing itself or cleaning up the occasional hairball mess that ended up on my blankets. 

But my blind spots didn’t vanish with these stressors reduced. My time blindness seemed to get even worse, especially when it came to keeping my obligations with my mortal life. Part of that was because one of my friends, who was the most responsible among us, was the one who kept our calendar, but she had become somewhat flakey as of late. The other part was that now with a whole new world of interests and abilities open before me, I was beginning to stretch my wings into avenues that drew my attention away from my mortal existence. 

“You need to keep your connections,” Natalia had told me, as she sent me home from the Chantry one Tuesday night when I’d planned on staying over through the Daysleep to work into Wednesday. She’d kept better track of my gaming schedule than I had and kicked me out, nearly forcing me to race the sun. “Think of your mortal life like a control group for your sanity. If you become Grey, what becomes of Bryan?”

“Who cares what becomes of Bryan if Grey can succeed?” I’d asked, feeling frustrated at her demanding tone. 

“The people waiting for you to run that game,” she’d retorted, raising her eyebrow almost scoldingly. “And if you halfass your efforts there, I’ll know. And I’ll make you go home early again to fix your plans.” 

I’d spent hours the next few weeks creating a new roadmap for the game, finding a few flaws in my main roadmap along the way. Fiction sometimes gives us a better insight into reality than we give it credit for. This was a lesson that shouldn’t have come as such a shock to me considering I’d recently become a vampire. 

“Are you ready to hunt?” Natalia asked me, hooking her arm in mine as she adjusted her glasses. 

“With the camouflage in place,” I said, reaching up and touching the perfectly tied bowtie tenderly, not wanting to unmake her hard work. “It would be a waste not to see what’s on the game trails.”

Grinning at my comment, she stepped forward and I opened the heavy wooden door to the ballroom. Congressmen, senators, and an assortment of CEOs milled about before us, all paler under the bright lights than any vampire I’d ever met. Several of them were unknown to me, and I made a mental note to get my hands on the guest list so I could match each name to a face and mix them into my growing plans. A few I recognized as potential projects, though I was still determining their worth. Beyond that, there were those that I’d already had under my thumb. 

“Good evening, Congressman Koch,” I said as I passed a man much thinner now than he’d been when I’d first laid eyes on him. At my direction, he’d purchased a suit that fit him properly and was a much more appealing looking puppet than I could have hoped for. He turned, his expression a bit vacant, but that was to be expected. 

On his arm was a woman who stood a few inches taller than him and looked much younger than she had the past few years she had felt trapped married to him. Now, she practically beamed when she saw me, the complete opposite of her husband in every way. Sandra Koch spread her arms wide and moved to wrap them around me. I activated the Blush of Life as Natalia had taught me, creating a facsimile of warmth and vitality that did not truly exist in my shell of a body just moments before her flesh touched mine. 

“Mr. Cardinal!” Sandra said, excitedly as she hugged me. “I am so excited to see you here. It has been too long since you’d come to visit us. It’s been almost a month, hasn’t it?”

Allen Koch nodded, a bit more eagerly than he probably meant to. 

“Yes, I’d say twenty seven days to be precise,” he nodded, his eyes lingering on my wrist a bit longer than they should. I smiled to myself, noting that my ghoul did need a bit of a refresher. It was getting harder and harder to keep track of who needed what now that my network of ghouls has been growing. 

“I should put you in my calendar,” I smiled warmly at them both. “Would dinner tomorrow be possible? I should be in your area.”

“Yes,” Allen responded, almost immediately. Sandra gave him a look, her smile hardening slightly, but softened again when she turned back to me. 

“It is our anniversary, but Allen has been just such a different man since meeting you, I can hardly deny him,” she said, her eyes were warm though her expression was still a bit tight. 

“Well, I can always just come by for a brief nightcap,” I smiled at her. “And perhaps drop off an anniversary gift for you both. I would hate to intrude on your night. Though, I’ve been meaning to ask, how’s Peter doing?”

Sandra’s face fell slightly, but she recovered quickly. 

“As well as can be expected,” she said, somberly. “I still don’t know what possessed that boy to walk over a dozen miles across brambles and blacktop with no shoes on. He’s still limping, though the doctors say he should physically recover. Unfortunately, he’s still rambling about monsters in the dark and mind control. He’s seeing a therapist, but I don’t know what else to do…” 

I reached out and took her hand gently, letting the false warmth of my body flow into my voice. 

“You have faith,” I said to her, smiling warmly. “You have faith and believe that God will look down on good people and reach out to help.”

Sandra was nearly in tears at my words, smiling and thanking me before ushered off by her husband at my subtle cue. With that conversation over, I straightened up and smoothed out my silk shirt, this one completely carmine red, though I still wore a black suit. 

“You know, with that skill to erase memories I taught you, you could eliminate that boy as a threat to you,” Natalia said, pressing her body against mine, playing the role of eye candy well, while remaining the most powerful and dangerous person in the room. 

“I need him to remain crazy,” I told her softly, my words practically subaudible, though with the ability to enhance our senses that she trained me in as well, we barely needed to make noise to hear each others’ words. “If he were to recover, even without his memory, Sandra would be able to focus on just how strange it is that her womanizing, misogynistic husband had suddenly become a much more doting and compassionate man.” 

“Stretch her thin, keep her distracted, and position yourself as the caring family friend,” Natalia said, almost sounding impressed. “Then if the boy starts blaming you for his condition?”

“Oedipus complex,” I said with a shrug. “Young handsome man getting close to his mother, play up the jealousy that her attention goes anywhere but to him, gaslight him into believing it, and watch his mind crack.” 

“Devious,” Natalia said, though the sense of being impressed seemed to vanish. “What is the purpose of that?”

“Two-fold,” I said, leading her towards the bar where we’d pick up a pair of glasses of red wine and pretend to sip at them the entire night. “First, it puts some level of shame on the family that I can be generously amiable about overlooking. The supportive friend who helped them weather the tragic mental break of their only child.” 

“I don’t see why that matters to you,” Natalia said. “The Grey Cardinal doesn’t care about accolades and attention.” 

“I don’t,” I agreed. “I care about the introductions I’ll get from the Koch family to others, and the glowing references I’ll receive. Mostly to other people who value their privacy and anonymity as much as I do.” 

“Thus getting your influence into groups that prefer not to meet new people,” the note of pride returning to her voice. “And here I was thinking that you were being petty and just wanted to see the boy suffer and watch his mind break.” 

“That was the second fold,” I said, plainly. “I hate him and want to ruin his reputation without harming my own, or ruining the access from his family.” 

I looked over at her judging expression and just shrugged. 

“What? I never do anything for just one reason,” I said, handing her a glass of a rich red wine that neither of us could fully enjoy the bouquet of in our condition. “And sometimes that reason is petty and personal. Do you disapprove?”

“Partially,” Natalia admitted, clinking her glass to mine, her every move building me up in the eyes of those around me. A beautiful woman standing close, her emerald green dress matching her eyes as it hugged her frame as though it were a second skin, showing off enough elements of the first to be both appropriate and mouthwatering in equal measure. 

“But not fully,” I said, eyeing her. “Then, would I approve of your secondary reason for being here tonight?”

“What do you mean?” her voice seemed to remain neutral, but there was a flat tone to it that told me more than she probably meant to let me in on. 

“I’m your childer, which explains your interest in training me, but why would the Baroness be so interested in a neonate Tremere?” I asked, cocking my head and vocalizing so low that even with her enhanced senses she had to lean in to hear me. “And why is the Baroness so interested in the miniature machinations of a kindred less than three months old? You’re playing the side piece in this game, like making the Queen a Pawn instead of the other way around. I’m not the only one asking these questions. Yet you persist. What’s the second angle?”

“We’re in a pyramid,” Natalia reminded me, a smile playing on her lips. “There are more than just two angles in a pyramid. But I can name a few for you.” 

She placed her glass down on the bar, taking mine from my hand and placing it next to hers. Her cold hand slid into mine, pulling me out onto the dancefloor, her body pressing to mine in an intimate way that some Europeans decided to make socially acceptable a few hundred years ago. The music swelled, but her voice wasn’t drowned out. In fact, I heard her clearer than before, despite her mouth never moving. 

“Yes, you are my childer,” I heard her thoughts merging into mine. “It is my obligation to train you, teach you the ways of our kind, and ensure that you do not breach our Masquerade, the only thing those dusty old bones got right when building our society in the shadows of the past. 

“Secondly, I’ve told my council that my interest in you was plotting how best to use you in my State, which is not in any way a complete lie. I have a job for you, and you’ll need to be tested before you can join the Coterie I’m designing for you, since you’ll need more than just your own strengths to handle what’s coming.

“Thirdly,” her leg wrapped around mine, pulling her body taut against mine, lifting her petite frame up until her lips were brushing against my cheek. “There are quite a few others interested in you. Your mind… your body… and by keeping my interest in you plain and obvious, even if it gets questionable reactions, it stakes my claim on you and keeps the vultures at bay.” 

I turned my head and looked deep into her emerald eyes, glinting with hunger and possession, and for the first time over the weeks I’d spent training with Natalia, learning from her, I got a glimpse of the beast that whispered in her mind like the one that was constantly whispering in mine. 

“Protecting your investment by making others think that your interest in me is more… carnal?” I asked, unphased by her physical display. 

She laughed, the sound sweet and melodic, and completely fake. As she slid back and finished the dance with me, I saw the gleam of pride enter her eyes. 

“Very good, Grey,” she said, the movements of her body still as sensual as before, but now I could tell the mechanics of it, the false emotion hiding the tactical decisions. “You learned quickly how to read the falsehoods in our bodies. Seduction is a weapon used by many of our kind. While I’m sure there are a few that genuinely would want you as a plaything, you’d be tossed aside quickly. As for myself, I’d never allow myself to get so involved with a childer. It seems… Incestuous.” 

“Agreed,” I nodded at her as the dance finished. We must have looked like quite the pair out on the floor: moving so in sync with each other, communicating with just our eyes, thoughts flickering between our minds as easily as glances. I opened my mouth and spoke to her rather than talking with my mind. 

“While the wine was delicious, shall we find something a bit more… substantial, my dear?” I asked, holding out my arm to her like a proper gentleman. 

“What a wonderful idea, darling,” she said to me, her voice replacing the music that had stopped. “Why don’t we go speak with that lovely young couple over there, the one with the start up.” 

Natalia motioned at a young blonde woman in her early thirties I recognized as a local councilwoman and her husband, a tech entrepreneur of little, but growing renown. Neither was a major player in their industry, but then again, neither was I. I felt Natalia’s arm pull me in closer to her as her false smile illuminated her face. She began to speak animatedly with the woman as I shook the man’s hand. Small talk was made, networks expanded, donations promised, and hunger slaked. By the end of the party we had a few more links in our chain to lock down control of this region. 

All the while, through the fake smiles, the rich talk and richer blood, my eyes lingered on the aetherial beauty of my sire, a weapon she wielded to befuddle and to attract, like a flytrap’s intoxicating aroma. She looked at me with pride, watching my plans unfold like a loving mother watching a toddler learning to walk. 

She belittles us! My beast was practically screaming, mirroring the rage that burned within my chest. We are but a game to her! A toy! Not a protege! She is simply killing time! Bored! We are an experiment! A case study!

I let it rage, and I ignored it, feeding enough to quiet it in the back of my mind. Already I knew what I was to this beautiful, powerful woman. I was the same thing every ambitious man was to an established woman. 

A trinket. A curiosity. A novelty. Whatever she wanted to portray me as in her mind, I was temporary and under no illusions to the contrary. She saved me not because of me, but because of the fourth angle she had chosen not to mention. Never would she mention this fourth angle. The reason for every move she made, every decision was motivated by the mysterious man with the red stone around his neck who had taken my life. 

He was her everything, and I was a stepping stone to her goal. 

Her greatest mistake, however, was believing me so dependent upon her praise and approval that I’d never notice that she was playing me. Or that I’d not only recognize that fact, but also learn to play her back. As we shared our prey, we looked at each other, neither of us fooling the other, I was sure, that the hunt never ended. 

We were always hunting. 

We were always being hunted. 

There was only one way to keep the fangs out of our own necks: trust that those around you will always behave in a manner befitting their best interest, and be something that serves their best interest until they’re no longer capable of serving yours.