Authors: Ryan T. Nelson
"Yes, crap nuggets." She sat up and failed in an attempt to glare at me. It's difficult to glare when you're grinning like a fool. "Why didn't you tell me that was going to happen?"
"I told you not to jump high didn't I?" I helped her up and took a step back. "Watch me." I bent my knees and leaped, shooting twenty five feet into the air, nearly straight up. I kept my arms out slightly for balance and my knees tucked up and as I came down I bent my knees to absorb the shock that I hardly felt. My boots had landed precisely back in the prints I had left in the grass from my launch point.
"And that," I told her. "Is with my own strength severely lessened by what I gave to you. You should be able to do twice that if you really tried but you still haven't perfected the landing yet."
She giggled suddenly, hopping five feet into the air over and over. "This is amazing," she crowed. "Oh my god, Gabriel, how do you just get used to this kind of thing? Isn't it just amazing to you what you can do?"
I shrugged. "I'm over three centuries old Rachel. I hardly even notice it anymore. Eventually it'll become more common place to you too but," I paused and watched her giddy expression and wished for a moment I still had that sense of joy and awe in my own abilities. "Never lose that, Rachel. It'll keep you sane to think of how much fun it is to be what you are now." I didn't mean to be a kill joy. Really I didn't. You have to understand how hard it was for me to see my first Child after I had spent so long insisting that I would never create a Child of my own. Did that make me a hypocrite or a martyr? I had broken my vow to myself, but I did it to save a life.
Rachel saved me from musing for too long by smacking me across the back of the head. With her strength still unsure however the end result was that I was sent into an uncontrolled somersault across the moor. My head rang like she had struck a giant gong and I was pretty sure she would have killed me if I had been human. As it was I was extremely disoriented for a minute as she dropped to her knees next to me, apologizing profusely.
"Oh my God, are you ok? I didn't mean to hit you that hard." I held up my hand and she fell silent.
"Remind me, to never piss you off in the future ok? You're going to be dangerous once I teach you to fight a bit."
"Dammit, Gabe. You scared the shit out of me.
"Hey considering you almost took my head off I think I'm allowed a joke or two." She subsided and sank back on her heels, wiping the tears from her face with both hands. I sat up and double checked that everything was healing the way it was supposed to before I stood and helped her to her feet again.
"Look we've got two hours to kill before we can even start to approach the Hall. Tradition dictates that we wait until after the treaty was originally signed to arrive. That was at around eight in the morning. If we wait till seven to start walking we should get there by 9 or so. That's a decent time to arrive."
"Why's that?" she sniffled.
"We should always be fashionably late." I grinned and clapped my hands. "So come on. Jump again. Try a little higher this time and don't forget to keep your knees in. You want to land on your feet..."
25
"This is a stupid plan, Gabe."
"It is not it's a brilliant plan."
"It's about as brilliant as lighting up a smoke on the Hindenburg."
"So a warm happy fun time sitting in front of the fire?" Ok even I knew that was a weird stretch and the look she shot me told me exactly what she thought of my joke. "Ok that was bad. But seriously. We don't have a lot of choices and we might want to stop talking verbally sometime soon. We're going to be getting close enough for them to hear us anytime now."
"They're still a mile away, their hearing is that good?"
"So will yours be in about three hours." I could slowly
feel my strength returning but I would still need to feed again before I was really at a hundred percent. "Look we don't have a choice but to approach the Hall on foot. That's the way things go." I switched to telepathic communication
.
"But this is a perfect plan. I use my Kargoni abilities to approach in disguise. That way they don't realize it's me until after I'm already inside."
She frowned and her brow furrowed in concentration as she attempted to respond to me in kind, something she still had a great deal of trouble with. Switching mental gears was not nearly as simple as it seemed, and telepathic powers were usually the most difficult to train. Hers seemed unusually strong for a fledgling even if she barely knew how to use them.
"Didn't you say that a Vasith was kept on guard at the entrance to verify anyone approaching was who they said they were?"
"So?"
"Won't that be a problem when you get there and they can tell you aren't Grim?
"
She glanced at me walking at her side in the hulking form of the Old Wolf
.
"You don't even smell like a wolf."
"And how would you know what a wolf smells like?
"
I couldn't help it, I arched an eyebrow at her again. I really needed to break myself of that habit, it was getting on my nerves.
"My nose kicked in two hours ago Gabriel. I could smell Ghost and Grim all
over the front of the ambulance and you don't smell anything like a werewolf. How are you going to explain that when we get close enough to the Vayun for them to get a whiff of you?
"
I growled inaudibly to anyone but her.
"I hate when
there’s a flaw in my plans."
She laughed mentally, quiet the trick but I could feel the amusement in her thoughts
.
"Gabriel in a hundred years you're leaving all the planning to me. So far all of your plans have had some major flaws."
I declined to answer, choosing instead to sulk in silence while I rearranged my features to something common and
non-wolf like. Which was not as simple as it sounded. Werewolves didn't have identifying characteristics typically. The only way we could tell a wolf apart from a Vampire or a human was by smell. My hair darkened and got considerably shorter, withdrawing into my scalp until it was a military style crew cut. My nose grew a bump as if it had been broken in the past and my eyes grew slightly wider apart and darkened to a deep blue.
My height stayed the same but by the time I was done I looked completely different and not like any specific individual. I guess that made more sense too to appear as someone random as opposed to someone people would know.
We kept silent, verbally and mentally as we crossed the last mile to the Hall. The great stone edifice rose up out of the moor. Straight, boxy and with little ornamentation or decoration. Vampires and werewolves back then hadn't been as interested in appearances. Most things were built for functionality and who cared if it was comfortable or pretty.
Bah. They learned eventually to take a greater pride in the things they built but during war times and the early peace I guess they had far more important things to worry about. The first of the Vayun was behind us and we were approaching the second. I could see the rest of the clan spread out around the Hall but none of them seemed to take much interest in us. Disguise was working reasonably well so far at least. They were looking for Gabriel Winters, not the disguise I had created so they let us proceed unmolested.
The entire worlds population of vampires wasn't much more than a half a million. Our numbers were kept small intentionally even though we could easily swell into the millions. The problem was making sure to turn Children that would keep the secret of our existence first of all. And secondly to ensure they didn't try to build an army of their own and wrest control from the heads in charge. As with any race, the people in power tended to want to say in power. Even with our small numbers however it was highly unlikely to know each and every vampire on site so my unknown appearance continued to raise no red flags until we reached the massive wooden doors leading into the Hall.
Standing at the entrance was a single Vasith. He would easily be able to discern my true identity, as Rachel warned me and I needed to stop him from sounding any alarm.
As we reached within ten feet of him I suddenly dropped my disguise, letting my features rearrange themselves to where they were supposed to be and with my hair still growing out to its original waist length I leaped.
Even in my weakened state I was still considerably stronger than any basic Vasith on a physical confrontation. The poor man barely had time to register that I was in the air before I was on top of him. My right knee drove into his chest and carried us both to the ground with a muffled thump as Rachel squeaked in surprise behind me and I drove my hand down, crushing his windpipe.
I stood, leaving him gurgling on the ground as he struggled to breathe.
"Gabriel!" Rachel cried.
"Oh he'll be fine. He'll pass out from lack of oxygen but he'll heal before he could ever actually die and start breathing again. No worries. Come on, let's get inside before the Vayun behind us get here." Indeed a half dozen of the nearest of the Wind Clan were quickly approaching. My attack on the Vasith and Rachel's cry being more than sufficient to warn them that something was very much amiss.
Rachel ran ahead of me and slammed her shoulder into the ten foot tall wooden set of double doors that covered the entrance to Brotherhood Hall. Still getting a bit used to her strength the doors flew open rather harder than she had intended, but just as hard as I had expected. I wanted to make an entrance and she made damned certain of that when the doors came open with a booming crash and every single eye in the room turned to us as I strode in behind her with all the confidence and arrogance that I didn't feel.
Here was where things truly would get dicey. This could save us or kill us right here and now and acting afraid would only make things worse. "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury," I yelled as I walked in. "Rumors of my death may have been greatly exaggerated."
"Really?" Rachel muttered back to me. "That's what you're going with?"
"Gimme a break, I'm making this up as I go."
"I can tell."
"Rachel?"
"Yeah?"
"Shut up."
She shut up. I made sure to keep my tone light so she wouldn't take too much offense but she understood the seriousness of the situation so she kept her lips closed. That did not prevent her from rattling off a list of jokes at my expense in my head. A quick glare stopped that though and we continued walking until we were in the center of the room standing directly on the seal of the Brotherhood set in gold into the stone floor.
The room was roughly the size of a high school football stadium. The ceiling hung a hundred feet over our heads and the walls were lined with a series of balcony seating at various levels. The rooms design allowed for acoustics and the general sharpness of Wolf and Vampire hearing to allow anyone to speak from the seal and be heard clearly anywhere in the room. Don't ask me to explain how the acoustics worked. It was a rectangular room, as far as I knew it shouldn't work that well. But it did and that's all there was to it.
Directly in front of the seal were the Council Seats. Five plush chairs, raised on a Dias some twenty feet into the air looked down on us where we stood. The seats along the other three walls were filled with vampires representing all four clans and numerous wolves from the various packs. Silence
reigned supreme as Rachel and I came to a stop.
I kept my eyes on the five seats on front of me, ignoring all the other eyes in the room as Rachel looked around nervously at everyone else. Facing the seats, the one on my far left held Lord Kargon, an exceptionally old Vampire and head of the Kargoni Shape Shifters. He seemed rather androgynous in appearance, tall, willowy and ethereally beautiful. He kinda reminded me of Hugo Weaving playing Elrond in the Lord of the Rings movies except his hair was a pale blond color.
To his left sat Keilyn, Head of the Vasith Clan. A powerful telepath her body appeared emaciated. So long had she focused on her mental powers that she had long since allowed her body to deteriorate through lack of use. Some said she didn't even hunt to feed anymore, she just used her mental powers to coerce a random human to approach so she could feed, erase their memory and send them on their way.
On her other side sat a single empty chair with a depiction of a cloud burned into the back. The chair for the head of the Vayun. Threntü really was dead. Tradition demanded that if he was still alive they couldn't begin the meeting without him present. Since they had obviously been meeting there was only one conclusion.
Grim had said it several times. I had believed him in an initial manner but seeing that kind of proof, short of his body lying at me feet... I wasn't sure how to feel or what I even should feel at first.
I shoved it away however as an image caught my eye. For a second. For a fraction of a second I could have sworn that I saw a figure standing behind and just to the side of the chair. Like the old advisors that would stand and whisper in their kings ear while he thought hard on important issues of the kingdom. And like the fictional, evil, advisor plotting against his king this shadowy figure filled me with a sense of foreboding.
Then the image was gone and once again I was looking at an empty chair and blank wall behind it. I blinked for a second, confused and a little shaken by the apparition until Rachel looked back at me and jerked her head in the direction of the Council Heads.
I shook myself as Grim cleared his throat and leaned forward in his seat on the far right. Next to him sat Shad, the head of the Shadu and head of the Vampiric version of Internal Affairs. The Shadow Vampire was so old that even in his shade form he was strong against light. A young Vampire of his clan, in that room would have been severely burned and injured by appearing in his shade form. He sat there as a lump of featureless black in the shape of a human figure in his chair, eyes as impossible to read as a silhouette.
"Is there a reason you have interrupted this meeting Gabriel?" Grim asked.
"You could say that. How long has the old
windbags’ death been kept from the rest of the Brotherhood?"
Grim snorted but thankfully did not start laughing in the middle of the meeting. "You are referring to Threntü Vayun?"
"Yeah. Wind Clan, Wind Bag. It fits if you think about it." I was being deliberately rude and I knew it. I didn't really intend to but authority always rubbed me the wrong way and these four were the ultimate authority in the vampire and werewolf world. Hence I tended to speak without thinking through the consequences of what I said.
"I try not to think about what oddities run through that twisted little brain of yours Gabriel Winters."
I bowed mockingly. "Thank you."
"Why have you breached this meeting and interrupted us?" I turned my attention to Shad and nodded to him. I had always liked Shad reasonably well despite the fact that he was a terrifying son-of-a-bitch.
"Why didn't you answer my question?"
"Because you have broken into a meeting not meant for you and are therefore not in a position to be demanding answers or information from anyone."
I shrugged. True enough.
"Then I shall do you the courtesy or answering your inquiry first. I am here to seek inclusion within the Brotherhood of Vampires and Werewolves, as is allowed by the conditional clauses set forth in the original treaty five centuries past."
A general murmur of disquiet ran through the crowd. Like the wave at a baseball game it spread quickly and as the volume level slowly rose, Grim stood and loudly cleared his throat. Silence fell as quickly as someone hitting the mute button on a television remote and I grinned, my expression hidden from the crowd. Only Grim could silence a room like that with nothing but a cleared throat.
"To seek inclusion by right, you would need to be the head of a new can. We all know that part of the reason for this meeting is to discuss the existence of your fifth vampiric power. Are you going to claim that you have finally Sired a Child of your own?"
Here was where it got difficult. In her brief introduction to being a vampire I had tested Rachel. She did exhibit all of the powers I had but the Fifth had been hit or miss. It took practice and she simply hadn't had the required time to hone her skills in any way. An hours’ worth of practice was not enough by any stretch. I reached into my pocket and drew out my Zippo.