#wodmeetcute

Los Angeles, California, 2000s 

 The vampire Audrey had never been to Los Angeles, an oversight on the coquettish, dark-haired, green eyed, and lightly olive coloured (though Audrey swears sometimes she thinks looking in a mirror she is growing paler and more like marble every night – perhaps a trick of the light, or a defence mechanism in her head… after all they’ve been subjected to the vampire would say they cannot assume any real fault for it). She really never intended to go that far down the Pacific coast anyway, San Francisco is just fine to her, or, going back to New York, or France, maybe this time she would wander as far as the country of Egypt or India, but no, not this night. 

Audrey is no man of cloth or prophetess though she has met a handful of those… allegedly. Audrey knows when to do as she is commanded, and moreover when is a good time to flee the scene, and when violence outside of to Audrey at least the violence inherent in the blood of Cain vampires very survival depends upon, where precisely is the line between one's survival and monstrousness Audrey’s read enough human and cainite speculation on the subject to have an informed opinion on this of course. Audrey believes most earnestly their otherness, monstrousness, queerness –  as in unusualness is inseparable from their vampiric nature, Audrey’s unabashed and unashamed bisexuality she believes is the modern human word for it,  and biromanticism. Audrey is not even sure she believes the story of Cain and all those after, it seems too clean to Audrey, and far too simplistic, and although Audrey is fairly certain she would be the vampiric equivalent of excommunicated for heresy (absurd given the Catholic God perhaps has the least amount of scientific backing for his existence), but, Audrey does not believe in the end times or, as Prince Sebastian Lacroix put it in their terms, Gehenna.In any case, to Los Angeles it is, everyone knows the consequences of disobedience to a Prince are unkind at best, second final oblivion at worst. 

Los Angeles is a fine city, Audrey only slightly unnerved by how new and clean the night skyline looks compared to San Francisco or New Orleans. All cities have ghastly stories beneath them, the clean and bright ones especially. When she arrives she is met personally by the Ventrue, and the Prince, Sebastian Lacroix. She makes a fast acquaintance of him, an even faster friend, and an even faster bed buddy, Lacroix of all people knows how this goes she could half guess he has done it with reason one hundred times before, he pays her hefty tab. Of course Audrey regrets none of it, why should she? The consequences after all of not kneeling to one's Prince and superiors, is often death. Though she could be in love with Lacroix were he less controlling and perhaps kinder, he is attractive for a Ventrue, the clan represented by a sword, the sharp ones.  Audrey is a rose herself, a Toreador, often derided as overly sentimental or emotional that or they are assumed to be the kind ones. How little some other vampires know, really. Audrey sees beauty everywhere – it sometimes comes at a cost. Audrey had come to Los Angeles out of necessity now it seems she stays out of a morbid longing for the picturesque and some tender curiosity. 

Once Audrey makes herself presentable and put together again, the dark-haired coquette keeps her head down and observes. Something about a Sarcophogus, the Sabbat death cult and the Anarchs, often hypocrites, starting trouble. Audrey thinks little of it. This particular accident is not hers after all. Audrey is out on a balcony observing the skyline again when she can actually be bothered to pay attention to her own. The woman is blonde, with big makeup, bigger hair, and if may as well have stepped out of an 80s disco.

 “Pardon me, Madam,” Audrey starts, in a whisper. “I do not think we’ve met, though I dare say I’ve met plenty… like you,” the Toreador jests, mostly.

“Oh,” the blonde chuckles softly. “Circe,” and she offers Audrey her hand. Audrey isn’t sure what to do, exactly; it must be an American thing. She opts for two cheek kisses as the French do instead. 

Circe, the Malkavian laughs, but Audrey can sense no malice in it. “Careful, Vanitas, people will talk,” Circe observes with an honesty deeply unfamiliar to Audrey. 

He opens his mouth to keep whining, but Darren huffs and acquiesces, and between the two of them, they manage to wrench the screeching metal in a tight protesting circle. The circular door opens with a rush of even hotter air from the tunnel below. Cherry wrinkles his nose.

‘Might have to do us and gear separate to get down the hole,’ he clicks on a flashlight and shines it down, peering around; chirps, ‘looks like it opens up inside, though.’

Darren’s pale eyes flick down towards the ladder, ‘You first.’ His voice is quiet, and hard.

Cherry smiles and nods, even though he wants to roll his eyes; just like working at Starbucks, he thinks. He takes off his guns, pack, and axe, and when Darren doesn’t offer to hold them, dumps them in the dirt. Then, he climbs onto the ladder, and into the hole. The rungs are similarly rusty, and the concrete scrapes at the padding on his shoulders as he shimmies downwards. He sees nothing at either end of the murky blackness when he shines his light around, and flashes an OK sign in view of the overhead spotlight. (Dropping loaded guns down a hole to be caught at the bottom isn’t exactly safe, but neither is vampire hunting. Cherry is glad they’re both on the same page there.) He catches his weapons, his pack, followed by Darren’s, before the light is blocked out by the other hunter’s descent.

The flash light is clipped to the barrel of his shotgun then, while Darren taps on a shoulder light. The sound echoes in the cramped tunnel, and they’re lucky that they’re both short men.

They follow the tunnel south for about five minutes in silence before Cherry feels the need to pipe up, whispering, ‘Wonder what this bunker was for before the licks got their hands on it.’ He squints at underfoot claw marks.

‘Nothing,’ Darren grunts, ‘they had it made.’

‘It’s gotta’ve changed hands then, cuz, like-’

Darren cuts him off silently, rapidly throwing up the hand signal for halt, followed by listen. Cherry shuts up. Tightens his grip on his gun. Listens.

Something stumbling, or dragging. Something wetly sniffing, and getting closer. Even when it comes into view, Cherry can’t put a name to the malformed thing that approaches them. It is mostly drooling mouth, supported by two bulky legs, and counterweighted by a heavy muscular tail. It breathes like a brachycephalic dog, and has eyes like one too, protruding and crusty. Cherry lets out a smothered giggle in place of screeching, and raises his gun.

Darren hisses, ‘It’s armoured.’ And it is. Hairy plates shift on its back as it moves, galloping towards them now. Its legs curl, and the pair have less than a second to react before the thing is hurling itself towards them.

Cherry ducks, rolling on the hard tunnel floor. The thing flies over him, open mouthed and snarling, and attaches itself to Darren. He’s ready with a huge knife, plunging it into the bottom of the thing's jaw over and over, but it doesn’t let go of the clamp it has on his shoulder. Cherry pushes a cold pulse of vitae through his veins without thinking, grabs the monster by its thrashing tail, and yanks it off of his temporary partner in one powerful movement. He kicks the thing belly up, already thrashing and bleeding through it’s mangled jaw, and levels his shotgun at its soft belly. The noise the blast makes in the cramped bunker tunnel makes him wish he was wearing ear protection, but it’s nothing that blood can’t also fix.

Cherry breathes, and stares at the pool of hot meat scraps that had just attacked them. When he glances up, Darren is looking at him with the same amount of disgust that he had regarded the dead creature with.

‘Its warm,’ he starts, unsure and sickened.

‘Blood slaves tend to be,’ Darren sneers quietly, touching the punctures in his armour.

‘God, that was a ghoul?’ Cherry racks his gun and grimaces, ‘actually... no, that makes sense. I do know someone who could probably help get it back to normal. Whatever that is… I dunno. Croc, maybe? Uh, pitbull? If we can spare any, I can probably help ‘em.’

Darren’s face becomes steel, ‘No mercy for blood slaves.’

Cherry feels a trickle of cold run down his spine, and he thinks maybe he understands the looks Darren has been giving him.

The shorter man continues, with a little less venom, ‘...No use trying to retrain the animal ones anyway. Corrupted, body and mind.’

‘If I knock one out and you put a bullet between its eyes, I’m gonna-’

Cherry is cut off again by a noise echoing out from deeper in the bunker. He swallows, dragging his eyes away from the dead ghoul.

‘They’ll’ve heard the shot. C’mon.’

Deep into the bowels of the structure, the pair encounter half a dozen other animal war ghouls. And true to his word, Darren executes each one, to Cherry’s mounting distress. When another goes down with a distinctly dog-like yelp, he can’t keep it in.

‘Welcome to Darren’s kill shelter, 100% of abused animals get a bullet, guaranteed!’

‘Happily,’ Darren growls, wiping bloody chunks of matted fur and skin off of his face, ‘that’s what you do with a nest of poisoned monsters.’

‘The best cure for poison! Euthanasia!’ Cherry says hysterically, reloading his own gun.

‘Glad you agree.’

‘Urgh,’ Cherry barely resists stamping his feet, ‘at least if we find any human ghouls, we try and help those.’

Darren’s eyes seem almost to glow, two pinpricks in the dark behind his flashlight. ‘Your sympathy for your fellow carcass suckers wont spare them the angels fire.’

Cherry stops for a beat, chest heaving and sizing up the other man, as the cogs turn in his head. He could never have been said to be smart, but he wasn’t completely stupid.

‘...Fuck me. You’re one of those psycho hunters,’ he breathes.

Darren watches him silently from the shadows.

‘Girl, if you turn on me the second we’re done here I am soooo leaving you a bad review on the network. You’ll never work in this town again, mister.’

He thinks for a second that the Wayward didn’t catch his sarcasm. It's hard to tell. But then he rolls his eyes, and opens his mouth to say something.

Cherry will never find out what that was, because a furious scream rattles out from the next room over, piercing the conversation as the watertight door swings open. A snarling animal crashes through, but is held back at the threshold by a leash of its own hair, grasped in the boney mantid claws of a very angry woman. Tears streak satiny lines in the short space between her bulbous eyes and her chin, against spiny skin that is stretched elastic, back and taut.

‘Get out!’ she howls, ‘I’ll let go.’

Cherry’s aim flickers between the straining, swiping beast, and the-…

‘Lick?’ he calls to Darren, not taking his eyes off the threat.

‘Ghoul,’ the imbued barks, unleashing a burst of rifle-fire into the meaty leonine head of the monster. A bullet pierces the things lolling tongue, but the shots otherwise bounce off it’s fortified skin. The woman startles and releases her grip, and the animal ghoul is loose, lunging straight for Darren. He strikes it in the face with the butt of his rifle. It roars, blood bursting from a ruptured eyeball and spittle spraying the air. It knocks him in the side with a huge paw and he collides with the concrete wall, already tensed to spring back up. Cherry drops his gun and throws himself across the room, swinging his axe in a wide arc. He buries it in the war ghoul’s back. It hisses, kicking out at him with a back paw, landing squarely on his chest like a sledgehammer. He hangs on to the handle of the axe, and the beast kicks him again, and again, and again. He feels a rib crack. One more kick is enough to send him backwards, his grip dragging the cutting edge out of the things shoulders in a deep, ragged gash. It bellows, reverberating in the cramped room. Cherry thinks he would probably be crying too, if his spine was poking out. When it turns to swipe at him, he brings the axe down on it’s claw, and it jerks away, clumsily backing up against the wall. There’s pure animal fear in its eyes, warring with the loyalty pumping through its veins. Cherry feels his heart pang. He glances around, for half a second, looking for Darren, the other ghoul, and sees movement in the room beyond the metal door. Panic rises in his throat. A low snarl is the only warning he gets before the beast takes advantage of his distraction and tackles him, knocking him flat and snapping it’s jaw inches from his face. With one hand, he struggles to keep it off of him, tears pricking in his eyes as it’s weight bashes against the break in his chest. With the other, he inches, reaching towards his dropped gun. In a moment, he snatches it, shoving the barrel in it’s open mouth, and pulls the trigger.

The shot is deafening. Metallic white noise rings in Cherry’s ears, and he feels something wet splatter his face. When he finally opens his eyes, he realises he’s covered in the thing’s brains. He heaves, and has to push it’s body off of him before he can roll over and try not to vomit. Sound returns slowly. Gagging hurts. He has no choice but to will the dregs of vitae in his body to his broken bone and hope it knits back together in a way that he wont have to re-break later. He wipes chunks of brain out of his eyelashes, and strains to make out the vague piercing sounds from the room over.

‘Darren?’ he calls. His voice is underwater.

No reply – that he can hear, anyway. He pushes himself to his feet, shotgun in one hand, axe in the other, and stumbles to the door, blood dripping down his chin.

What he finds makes his stomach drop. Darren stands over the ghouled woman, her fleshcrafted arms scrabbling behind her, trying to get away. Her legs are broken in multiple places. Even as the hunters watch, the vampiric blood in her body struggles to fix the mangled bones, just as Cherry’s had done moments earlier. But Darren doesn’t let it. He stamps down on her ankle with his heavy boot, and Cherry is glad he can only vaguely hear the snap. He does hear her scream. He inches forward, until Darren warns him off, head shaking in the torchlight.

‘Want to know why we had to kill all those animals?’ he looks down on the ghoul with blistering disgust, ‘she worked at a rescue centre. She stole them for her master. To fill with poison, and twist into those things.’

Cherry winces, ‘It’s not her fault,’ he says weakly, ‘it’s the bloodsucker.’

‘She’ll kill you,’ the woman on the ground spits out between faltering breaths, ‘you ruined everything.’

Darren cocks his head, and watches with a stony expression as the ghoul backs up across the room, dragging her legs. She makes it to another watertight door, and fumbles with the lever for a hurried moment, before dragging herself through. Cherry moves to follow, but Darren stops him with another curt hand signal.

‘Dude,’ Cherry whispers, frantic energy beating through him in place of vitae.

Darren holds, like he’s listening. Cherry doesn’t hear anything, except the dragging of a body along concrete, and his own hammering pulse. He deliberates, and pulls an autoinjector out of a pouch, slamming it down between the armoured sections of his thigh. After several more long moments, Darren drops his hand.

‘Go.’

The blood trail isn’t hard to follow. It leads them down another short tunnel, and into what had been a hidden hollow cut into the walls of the bunker. There, the ghoul has pulled herself up the sides of a large crate, and is crying as she tries to shake something inside awake.

Darren pounces, grabbing the ghoul by her broken ankle, and wrenching her towards himself.

Cherry moves in on the crate. The dishevelled, half awake, dirt covered vampire inside blinks at him with dizzied alarm. It looks like a gaunt man with a shaggy mop of dark hair. Before it can wake up any further, Cherry introduces it to the fun end of his shotgun. He succeeds in blowing a fist sized hole out of the corner of it’s head, but it keeps moving, trying to crawl out of the crate. He snatches it by the arm, and it twists, grabbing him back, it’s fingers prodding for the bare flesh of his hands: - and sinking in. The vampire wriggles and pulls, and Cherry’s skin is stretched and distorted with it – it is agony.

‘Oh, you motherfucker-,’ he swears, and jerks his arm back, holding it close to his body and curling around it. He struggles to aim his next shot with one hand, and puts a crater in the vampire’s shoulder. It snarls and rushes him, toppling them both over the side of the crate and back against the low wall. He struggles to push it away, but its no use: his hand feels like its been skinned, and he’s out of vitae. Fangs pierce his neck above his armour and his knees buckle. Darren shouts something, but Cherry can’t make it out over the ringing in his ears and the sudden overwhelming bliss of the bite. He feels lighter, floating – and a dull, familiar, stabbing pain, a needle wrapped in cotton wool.

And then it’s gone all at once, as quickly as it came, because the vampire falls off of him, confusion crowding what’s left of it’s face. Being half awake probably doesn’t help. It’s legs go out from underneath it steadily, until it is doubled over on the floor, and it looks to it’s own hands like those are somehow what betrayed it.

‘W-what-?’ the vampire says, in a voice like small tumbled rocks.

Cherry takes out another autoinjector and punches it into his thigh.

‘Dumb fucking lick.’

He drags himself to his feet, and readies his axe, raising it above the vampire, who has progressed to trying to vomit up the poison. It is a practised swing that neatly separates head from body.

‘Could’a stepped in any time,’ Cherry grouses, as the vampire’s slightly rotted head rolls from one side of the hollow to the other.

‘I was hoping you’d kill each other,’ Darren says plainly. At his feet lies the body of the ghouled woman – sans a face. Oh, there it is, dripping from Darren’s fists. Cherry’s stomach would turn, but he no longer has the energy for revulsion.

‘Love you too,’ he replies, exhausted, with as much toxin in his words as there is in his bloodstream, ‘but if you didn’t notice, sweetpea, this,’ he kicks the vampire’s corpse, ‘was not our guy. That was a shitty little fledgeling. So, like, d’you wanna plan the next steps with backup, or on your own?’

Darren regards him coolly, distractedly. Listening to angelic voices in his head, or simply calculating how likely he’d be able to get through the next part on his own. His flitting stare is uncomfortable and backlit with sacrosanct fire.

After several beats too long, Cherry sighs and gingerly touches the open bite wound trickling hot blood down his neck.