These past few weeks have been total insanity. Even Serendipity would agree, I think. With Ayume and Antonia gone, I took the opportunity to do some research on a few things, and then I headed out into Baltimore to take care of a few more things. The ladies had the BMW, so I took the Ducati. Franka hated that thing, but there was just something about a motorcycle that felt right to me. I come from an era when the most common means of transportation was horseback, and I guess the closest thing to that in these modern nights was my Ducati.
Antonia was, in a lot of ways, exactly what I was hoping to find when I came to Baltimore. A Lasombra that hadn't been corrupted by sabbat teachings, one that I could teach instead. My position as Sheriff had given me the ability to spare her existence when we discovered her, and at the time the only reason I had done so was because she knew enough to claim that she was Sabbat, but not enough to know that telling that fact to an Archon on a Camarilla Elysium was an almost guaranteed way to get killed. It turns out that her sire abandonded her soon after she was embraced.
I hit the accelerator on the bike as I took the winding road that led from the mansion to the city proper. Speed may kill, but it also lets me think. I had a lot of thinking to do.
The Sheriff's position itself had come as something of a shock. One minute, Prince Baltimore was hitting me hard enough to make me wonder how someone had gotten a train into the Elysium, and the next minute he was telling me that I was his new Sheriff. I didn't have much to complain about in that regard, aside from the fact that everything seemed to be going wrong in this city at once, and we still had no idea what had caused the mass disappearance of the city's former kindred population. Well, that and the fact that apparently Archon Eden had decided that I was his personal attack dog.
The Ohio trip had turned into a total clusterfuck. We were sent there, officially, to hunt down and kill an independent Gangrel that had made a habit of embracing kids. We didn't even make it off the runway we touched down on before things went wrong. Burning planes, gun fights, dead and captured ghouls, a justicar, and an independent Gangrel that was dead before we got there. I haven't even begun to figure out what really went on that night, but I needed to, and quickly. It seems that someone had been watching.
World Nightly News, a tabloid publication, has been a thorn in our side lately. They've been getting a little bit too close to the truth, and somehow they were able to find out about the airport debacle and report on it. To top that off, some of Chi-Mer's ghouls were now in the custody of the US army, from what I had been told. None of this was anything resembling good, and of course, since I'm the Sheriff, it's my job to figure out how to set it right. This was in addition to dealing with the ghost of a nun that possesses true faith and has been haunting our Elysium, figuring out where the hell the local Sabbat were holed up at, teaching Antonia, assisting the Tremere with the rebuilding of both their chancery and their library, and determining exactly what was going on with Testament. At least the freakish "keeper" had been dealt with. I think we scared it off rather than actually killing it though. Hard to say for sure - I'm not exactly an expert on things that bleed ice and light when you open up their belly with a shotgun blast.
Here it is. Druid Hill, one of the nastier areas of Baltimore. I was in need of a set of fingerbones, and I figure that the best place to get them would be from someone who was better off dead anyway. I parked the Ducati somewhere conspicuous but away from police cameras and waited, just out of sight. I pulled the shadows to me for added concealment. It didn't take long for the expensive bike to attract the wrong - or right, in this case - kind of attention. I waited for the crackhead to begin trying to hotwire my motorcycle before I stepped out of the shadows and put a 9mm to his head. The Lemat was far too unique for a job like this.
"Did you find something you like?"
"Easy man, easy man!! I was just admiring, you know? Just admiring the ride, is all!" He tried to turn his head to face me, but I jammed the barrel of the gun into the back of his skull and he thought better of that.
"And I suppose you were trying to get to the ignition wires so you could admire those too, right?"
"Alright brother, alright! I'm just out here trying to make some extra money, you know? A little bit of extra green to feed the kids, right? You know how it is!"
"More likely you were trying to find the money to feed your addiction."
"Whatever you say man, whatever you say! Just don't shoot me! Look, I got a few rocks in my pocket, you can take 'em if you want 'em!"
I reached my free hand into the crackhead's coat pocket and threw the baggie into the nearest sewer in disgust. "Do you want to get out of this without getting shot?"
"Yeah man! I'll do anything you want me to, just don't shoot me!" He had started shaking, but I couldn't tell if it was from fear or withdraw. Probably both.
"Fine. Start walking. If you turn around, I shoot you. If you don't do exactly what I say, I shoot you."
Wordlessly, the crackhead started walking towards a back alley behind a no-tell motel, out of sight of the main road and the parking lot. "Put your hands up and stand up against the wall." He did as he was told while I put the 9mm away and pulled out a plastic baggie and a hatchet. I took the back end of the hatchet to the back of his skull. He slumped to the ground, unconscious or dead, I couldn't tell and honestly didn't care.
Back when I was a boy, there was a common punishment for thieves. I never quite understood why it had been done away with in modern nights... a few minutes later, I put the two severed hands into the plastic baggie and threw the hatchet into the same sewer that I had thrown the bag of crack. Baltimore City's water usage would wash any traces of blood off of the hatchet, if the cops even bothered to look in a sewer for a weapon that had been used to assault a crackhead, which was doubtful. I hopped back on the bike and headed towards the Tremere chantry. The hands, or at least the finger bones, were for them.
And besides that, I wanted to discuss the letter in my pocket with Testament, as well as the symbol that had been burned into my front door.
No comments:
Post a Comment