September 17th, Monday - Shelly D’arcourt
The annoying buzzing of an alarm clock finally breaks through the haze of fog filling Shelly’s skull, setting up an answering throbbing pain that brings a moan to her lips.
She reaches out blindly, and hears the crunch as she brings her hand down on the clock a little harder than she had planned to.
She lays there, her eyes closed tight, and tries to catalog all the aches and pains of her body. She feels too light, almost as if she’s floating a few inches above the mattress. She reaches out and makes sure that she can actually feel the mattress below her, to check and make sure she’s not actually floating. Her jaw aches, her fangs throbbing in a bad case of “blue fangs,” as she’s jokingly called it before. She feels nauseous, the room swimming around her.
“Fuck me,” she mutters. She opens her eyes, groaning as the ceiling above her twirls for a long moment before finally settling down.
Last night is a blurred dream, and all the pieces of the puzzle are adding up to a picture that is not making her too happy.
She sits up, and notices the note next to her ruined alarm clock. ‘You’re off work for the next few days. Clean yourself up. -Alanna’
“Shit.” She crumbles the note and tosses it over her shoulder and into the garbage can. She can imagine how pissed her boss must be, if what she thinks happened did. ‘Question is, how bad was it?’
She walks over to her desk, and wakes her computer. She turns on the webcam, and takes a look at herself on the screen.
Her eyes are still dilated, almost no color showing in them. Dark bruises under her eyes and fever spots burning her cheeks show up against the unhealthy pallor of her skin - a more sickly shade of pale than normal. Her neck has the slightly darker spots that pass for a hicky on her. She checks both sides, and sighs with relief when she spots no fang marks.
She stands and walks toward the bathroom, stripping her clothes and letting them drop wherever they land on the way. She starts the water in the shower, turning it as hot as it can go. She winces as the pipes make their grumbling unhappiness known, the sound painfully echoing in the dull throb between her ears.
She walks back to her computer, turning this way and that to look for anything worth noticing on her body. Her pale skin is almost completely unblemished, just the dark mark of a hicky on the curve of one adolescently perky breast and the tattooed black runes across her back marking her. Her skin is cold and shares the unhealthy grayish pallor that her face has, she must have burned a lot of blood last night.
She takes her time in the shower; letting the steaming hot water beat against her and wash away some of the remaining funk of last night. The heat of the water soaks into her body, the feeling rather sublime. It doesn’t do anything for the pangs of hunger twisting deep inside her, but for a moment the heat makes her feel alive again.
When the hot water is finally gone, she turns off the shower and walks back to the computer, wrapping a towel around her and another around her hair.
She sits with a sigh, and opens her IM program. She scans through, looking for someone who might be able to fill in some of the blanks for last night.
She fires off some questions at a few of the people who are online, and when she’s satisfied that she’s done all she can there, she turns to drying off and getting dressed.
She forgoes any underwear, sliding into a pair of jeans that would be way too tight if she still needed to breath. Being dead did have some advantages - after all - and wearing uncomfortable clothes was one of smaller ones.
She has to take a minute rooting though the piles of clothes on the floor to find the Mickey Mouse t-shirt she’s looking for. It’s just a simple white t-shirt, but so worn that it’s one of the softest and most comfortable shirts she owns.
The beep of an incoming email pulls her attention back to her desk. She wanders over to it, dropping the towel she’d been using to dry her hair.
She opens her mail to find a short message waiting for her from one of her hacker friends. Found this. Looks like you were having fun. Jealous, you should’ve called me. -Ace Attached is a link to MeVid.
She clicks the link, opening the movie in her browser.
It’s a bad cellphone video, and it doesn’t take her long to realize that it was filmed in the Power Plant – which brings another groan to her lips. She’s dancing with Casey and Harmony, and from the looks on their faces and the people in the background surrounding them it’s obvious that she’s got them all under the thrall of her pheromones.
From the look on her own face, it’s also quite clear that the bad feeling she had was correct. She’s seen the look on plenty of mortals… she’s doped up on vampire venom. For it to actually affect her, it’s got to be some really strong venom, or…_
She shudders as the thought passes through her mind. ‘No. No way is she back in town. Please please please… let her not be back in town.’
On the screen, the three of them are all over each other, stopping just short of actually having sex right there on the club’s dance floor. Luckily a fight breaks it up before that happens, and the video ends.
Shelly sits there for a minute, staring at the still screen in front of her. ‘Marc is going to kill me. That wasn’t exactly keeping a low profile.’
For the past few weeks, she had been helping Marc keep an eye on Veronica Carlin-Kane and her friends, ever since Veronica’s rescue in a brilliant Police raid. A police raid that stunk to high heaven, according to one of their oldest friends who just happened to be at the spearhead of it.
Since they’d been looking into it, they found that there was a deeper plot going on, and that Veronica was at the center of it. The girl was in trouble she didn’t even know of yet, though it appeared as though some of her friends might know.
Shelly had wrapped Harmony around her finger at a previous party at the Power Plant, but she didn’t quite know enough information to fill in any important blanks. Casey seemed to be the one who knew things, but at the same time she had the aura of someone who had Power, so Marc had warned her to stay away from her.
Which is of course the reason she accidentally bumped into Casey at one of their school dances that Shelly had crashed. Not only did she accidentally run into the girl, but she even accidentally called the girl by her name. She had tried to cover the slip, saying that she was a friend of Harmony, but she didn’t think it worked as well as she had hoped. As always, the only kind of luck she had was the bad sort.
And now after last night…
Shelly sighs, and picks up her cellphone. She considers for a second, and then decides to call the backdoor number that will go straight to Marc’s voicemail, instead of calling him direct.
She waits for the beep. “Marc, this is Shelly. Something went down at the club last night. I was drugged, and kinda had an… encounter with Veronica’s friends. It’s not good. I’ll send you the details through email. Call me.”
She forwards him the link to MeVid, stripping off the message from Ace and his email information. She grabs some socks and her combat boots, her mind trying to tamp down on the Thirst aching through her body. One of the pimps she’d had a run in with a few weeks ago hadn’t taken her warnings to heart, and put one of his girls back in the hospital. Easy way to kill two birds with one stone, taking care of him.
She grabbed the keys to her VW Bug, and started for the door – interrupted by another incoming email beep.
She hesitated, but walked back over to her laptop. She checked her mail, and saw the new message. It was from a contact of hers in the Court. Not someone she normally talked to, which worried her.
She opened it to find an attached picture that chilled her blood, metaphorically speaking. It was a young blonde girl, captured without her noticing outside the Power Plant. It was a face she would never forget, and it put the nail in the coffin of the fear she’d been harboring all night.
Her sire was back in town.
Shit.
A few hours later, Shelly was crouched against the wall of her blood room. She was stripped naked, her pearlescent pale skin streaked and spotted with crimson gore. Her clothes and shoes were neatly piled on a shelf high enough to stay clean. The room was Spartan, tiled floor and walls with bathroom tiles. The floor sloped down to the center of the room where a heavy duty drain was installed, and was brightly lit with plenty of fluorescent bulbs. A hose and a few shower heads decorated the walls, and another shelf with a bucket, bottles of bleach and some kind of compound used to clean organic mess at crime-scenes that cost a ton, but was worth it. Shampoo and body soap looked out of place next to her clothes, making the room seem like some kind of highschool shower room right out of hell.
The dead body across from her didn’t help that image any. A hint of steam from the small swirls of blood that ran towards the drain floated in the air. Shelly’s eyes were on the pimp’s body, but they weren’t focused on the present. Her bare feet and naked skin didn’t feel the cold chill of the room. The pains of the Thirst were gone, and with the absence her mind was allowed to wander.
It was clear to her now that her sire was behind last night’s little escapade. It’s what Elle did, it’s who she was. Shelly didn’t know a lot about her sire, but what she did know scared her. Even the oldest vampires of the Court knew Elle, claimed that she was old before they were even turned. She was a near mythological figure, a boogeyman to scare even the most wayward Blooded.
Elle was a daughter of Chaos. She worshipped at the altar of Janus, Coyote, Loki. She was not mad, and yet her actions could not be explained by the wisest as anything other than insanity. She had attempted to bring about the Apocalypse, simply because she was bored if you could believe her. And yet she had also helped destroy some of the most powerful and vicious Vampire warlords the world had ever seen.
Everything she did, she did to further her own inexplicable causes. Even that of turning Shelly.
Shelly had been a few months shy of 16, a wild child and black sheep of her family. Her father had all but publically disowned her, and even her mother had turned from her, not even caring if she was coming or going. Her older sister Ivy was the only one who cared for her, trying to get her to calm down and stop acting out.
Shelly looked up to Ivy in the deepest way. Her sister was pretty, was smart, and so very popular. Her boyfriend Marc was the older brother she didn’t have, even if she did try pressing his buttons by flirting with him all of the time. Not that it was completely innocent flirting, Shelly’s life was a hedonistic journey that included sex with pretty much anyone willing.
Ivy had just broken up with Marc, the Valentine’s Day before graduation. She was planning on moving to go to college somewhere out of state, and thought it would be best to get it over with now instead of waiting. It wasn’t long after that a horrible murder of a student shut down their school for a while, and with their parents out on an international trip, it was just Ivy and Shelly at home alone.
At least until someone threw a brick through their window. It was probably directed at her, she had made plenty of enemies on the streets and with different school kids. She had slept with enough people that there were various boyfriends and girlfriends who were out to make her life hell.
Whoever it was, it brought Marc over to stay with them. He was involved in some weird stuff that was going on, a thread that would lead him to where he was now, running the “Bump In The Night” division of Arkham PD.
Shelly had planned to try and get them back together. She loved her sister, had thought she was making a big mistake by breaking up with Marc. And she cared for Marc too, and her brother in all but blood was hurting at the breakup. It was up to her to get them back together.
Shelly didn’t know when she had caught the eye of Elle, or how long and deep the plans that led up to that night were. How much of her own plans might have been influenced by the ancient power the vampire had, she might never know.
The bottle of wine showed up on her doorstep, with a simple card that only said ‘To: Shelly, thanks for the fun.’
It gave her the idea, and she rooted through her father’s wine rack to find the best stuff he had. The bottle she had found, she opened for herself. The night was one long seduction, candlelight and dinner cooked for the two pained lovers. Shelly had gotten a camcorder when she was still the darling child of her parents, and it had been her constant companion through her turbulent adolescence.
Wine and food lulled their senses, as Shelly played back memory after memory that the two of them shared. Her own bottle of wine was almost empty now, and it wouldn’t be for some time later that she found out who tainted it with Vampire’s blood, where it was already changing her into something else.
She felt the effects of the change without realizing it, and her fledgling vampiric powers were being birthed, the pheromones that allowed them to hunt so easily filling the room and opening the minds of Ivy and Marc.
She didn’t remember when the mood turned so intimate, but between the wine and pheromones and everything else, it was bound to. Shelly broke out videos she had secretly taped, videos of Ivy and Marc together in ways that would have caused her father to pop an aneurism. She had many tapes of herself with her various lovers or by herself, but these videos of Marc and Ivy together, and those she had of Ivy alone were her most secret possessions.
She had lusted after her sister for years and after Marc as well. The night became not just a plan to seduce the two of them into getting back together, but a seduction of each of them individually with her as well. And with her new – unknown – powers, it was all too easy.
She still had the video of that night. She had switched to a blank tape and started filming once Ivy and Marc kissed, setup the tripod and joined them. The three of them spent the next few hours trying to slake their lust with each other’s bodies.
It only ended when Shelly, the blood inside her burning as she Turned, bit into her sister’s neck in search of the blood she could sense was just under the skin.
Luckily Shelly managed not to kill her, but her sister still carried the pale scar as a reminder of that night. Marc managed to separate them and lock Shelly up, at least until she managed to free herself and run into the night.
It was a long time before she learned what had happened, even longer struggling against it before getting the runes of power tattooed on her, helping keep her humanity in check.
It was after that, when Elle finally came into her life. She swept into Shelly’s life, admitting it was her blood in the wine, her plan to change the young girl. She taught Shelly for two years before suddenly disappearing as suddenly as she had appeared. Shelly still bore the psychic scars of her sire’s tutelage, and was no closer than anyone else to understanding her.
A small sound pierces her thoughts, bringing her back to the present. She had no idea how long she had crouched there motionless, as though carved from marble. It always bothered people how motionless she was when she didn’t purposely remember to move as those who were still living.
The body in the corner moved feebly. Its head rose unsteadily, turning side to side as it tried to find the source of the blood it could smell, the blood that would stop the hurting inside of it.
Shelly rose silently, the dried blood cracking and flaking off her as she finally moved. She reached carefully for something that lay on top of her clothes, and stalked towards the body, keeping her hand behind her back.
The pimp sat up, watching her walk towards him. A smile crossed his lips as he watched her lithe nakedness move in the bright light. “My god, the power I feel. I never knew…”
She straddled him, her left hand curling around the back of his neck. She leaned close to him, and whispered in his ear, “And you never will.”
Her right hand flashes around, the gold and iron blade biting deep into the center of his chest. She didn’t aim for his heart, but rather a point lower than his solar plexus and above his belly button, the point some referred to as the “Seat-of-the-Soul” chakra point.
He didn’t get the chance to do anything other than scream out a single note of pain, his body bursting into a stinging cloud of dust around her. She knew it would later turn to the slimy mess of ectoplasm before evaporating completely.
She stood and threw his clothes into the bucket - she’d burn them later - then walked over to the knobs for the shower heads, tossing the blade onto the shelf as she did. It didn’t bother her, turning her victims before killing them with the blade. It took longer, but was much easier to clean up that way – a bit of wisdom from her sire. Of course, she only used it on those she didn’t intend to survive her feeding from, so it wasn’t used too often.
The water sluiced down, washing away the blood covering her and the remains of her kill. If only it could wash away the anxiety she felt as well. Elle was back in town, and obviously looking to play again. Hopefully they’d all survive it.
