undertaker

Pretorius won’t see her vision. “They ain’t gonna let you’s go medieval, Tress. They’s put you in their fuckin’ garden, ‘fore they let you oust how many bodies get put down. The real number.”

Not the ones of the paperwork, and the statistics they post on the on the cloud of technology. Maybe she’s got some humane way to pile ‘em up and make fertiliser outta them, who the fuck knows? "If they's wanted that, they'd have done it. Centuries ago. I's been around a while, kid. I tell you, they got no interest in changin' nowt about their comfy little seats up on th' hightower."

It’s her dream, and he ain’t never really enjoyed tearing down the ones with some electricity in their skulls. Just them shmucks with too much privledge, hoarding it from the rest of them who don't get no chance to make somethin' outta the scraps.

Another kiss punctuates Tressa's words, and she can't believe how much she'd missed the cool touch of her skin. "Yeah, I bet so." She looks down to the ring on her hand, twirling it as she'd done so many times when she'd run into a puzzle with her family. She takes Tressa's hand in her own and runs her thumb across her knuckles.

The banality of regimented and routine immortality- taking minutes at the vampire stock report meetings - exactly the root problem of the regret that had forged in her a tether so strong and so violent that she'd considered sleeping off a century underground just to see if anybody would wake her up. Even the promise of Estela's eventual return had almost not been enough to stave off that indulgence in remorse - that she had traded Ice Cream and Ignorance for eternity as a glorified secretary to the upwardly motivated undead.

That resentful train of thought is interrupted twofold; once by hungry kisses - kisses deepened and fluttering their heart because of the sugarspice of the blood sitting below the flesh as Tressa's lips hug on Estela's and her filed nails trail along cheeks she hasn't touched - well, ever, technically.

Then the second thing, as her eyes dip to the ring on Estela's finger, and a pit forms in her stomach because hers will be nowhere. Truth told, she does know exactly where it is, but therein lies the problem; she waits to let Estela bring it up, or even notice it - to give her chance to concoct explanation.

"It's boring! It's boring and you shouldn't have come back because I think you're probably stuck here now." But she grabs for her face again and kisses her again, prolonging distraction. "But I'm glad you did, I've been so completely bored."

"Keep your voice down," she hisses, stalking over to the car that the other beckoned her from, "Why should I?" Annalise's arms folded across her chest, brow raising as she watched her carefully, even if the accent served to pull a small amused smile from her.

She couldn't risk being caught now, just because this one was speaking without thinking of who could overhear them, so it didn't take much convincing for Annalise to climb into the passenger seat. "Where are we going?"

"I'm sure you've noticed it - you can still feel me. That means you, like me, have a problem."

Tressa clips her sunglasses onto her shirt. "You didn't eat all your veggies. It's okay - I get it, cold feet. I didn't either, but now things have taken a bit of a tits-up turn and I have a few things I need to rectify, and I'd like a hand doing so."

'Cause he's an absentee sire, through and through. "So they don't mean nothin' to you then." The stench of stale death lingers, and Garrick glances around the tin-lined room as if it's a tomb. Then he watches her work; an undertaker that isn't masked up from the risk of a plague, or spitting nonsensical prayers to the already been and gone. It's modern, and graphic and somehow still more delicate than he's ever fuckin' seen. She's precise, an' he's impressed. But he ain't letting it distract him from the reason he's there in the first place. "Yer useful to them, but what they doin' for you? 'Cause way I see it, when I'm finished with them, there ain't going to be nowt left for you to be protected by, not in this city, anyhow."

But he understands that he's just one man, and Pret's an army across the globe. He can't offer her much, either. Just freedom, and cutting the bars of the cage she ain't paid attention to yet.

Only takes one person, and a good cause to get people listening.

She sighs, moving on to the leg after checking a set of gauges. "I'd be useful to anybody. Nobody except them have asked. I'm not trying to get in the middle of some undead dick-swinging contest- I've seen how those end and it's never in favor of the little guy until there's about... like, a thousand really loud little guys."

She watches as Tressa pockets the necklace, nose wrinkling in frustration as she does so. The good thing is: she doesn't care to have it, doesn't want it. But there's also a level where she wants to make sure nothing else here is taken from her.

"Um-"

Tressa thinks for a moment - it's a long moment to her, but really, she's rifling through a thousand memories - some fractured, others foggy - for how best to parse what she should be saying here.

"I think... you should be the one going through these. I'm not that kind of detective, and, well... you know, we in the death business have a thing about letting people have their grief - for my part, I'll source the necklace, and see if I can dredge anything up about where it came from - you never know... Think fast!"

Hands on her shoulders, she greets her with a kiss - something she's longed to do from the moment they'd parted ways at the airport. The taste of her is exactly as she remembered it, but she doesn't push for much more than a simple greeting.

But she smiles, thoughts drifting elsewhere for only a few short-cropped seconds before she runs fingers over soft lines and curves and lets their dark eyes focus in on each other. Her smile is wide. "We have so much to talk about," she says. "I don't know where to start."

Because she doesn't, she realizes, as she searches the beautiful woman's face. Tressa can name every member of Pretorius. Every important vampire from every other vampire clan in this city, and even some outside of its bounds. She can recount each and every case of death with which she's dealt in the last year.

But the girl with whom she shares a ring? Those memories had been so rooted, so tightly grasped. And now, seeing her here, in the flesh, who could blame her for clutching them so?

She entertains, briefly, the fantasy of hunting the caster down, holding them at knifepoint in a candle-stale room, and lecturing them, at length, with diagrams, on every much, much cooler curse they could have inflicted on this town instead. Cait would bet good money there is some thematic calling at the root of this one, some neat symbolic cleverness the witch responsible thought was terribly on-the-nose, and the bet alone is enough to make her want to roll her eyes hard enough to dislodge them.

Something tugs at the corner of her lips at Tressa's inquiry about planning.

"No, Tressa, I am not plotting - I mean planning - anything."

She's being cheeky and she gives no fucks about hiding it. Cait has plenty of enemies nipping at her heels, an entire winter she now intends to investigate for her own private amusement, magic to be cast - and, beneath all of it, of course, her own magic. Tenebris'. To be fed. And fed. And fed. Until her bones have been whittled to thread.

"I have new abilities, as you may have heard." Conversational. Almost cheerful. "There are a few new cantrips I have been itching to test in the wild. Let me know if you know of anyone willing to be a guinea pig." A small pause. "Otherwise, I may have to make do with unwilling ones."

She looks down at Tressa as if she's considering making her one of said guinea pigs. There's a flash of something at the corner of Cait's mouth that is not, in any working sense of the word, a smile. Cait would love to use the new cantrip to slip into Tressa's dreams and conjure up the ambitions she suspects the vampire is keeping quiet about. Cait has, after all, had vanishingly few opportunities to test it on vampires; or, perhaps, not so vanishingly few, when one considers the enormous effort Cait has, historically, put into avoiding them.

Anyway. She mirrors the movement and scoops some snow for herself. Relishes the chill that pricks her fingers.

"Anything of note happen to you while I was away?" Still stuck behind the prison bars of the sun rays? Tragic. And then, because she has to ask, of course she has to ask: "How has Estela been?"

Because some part of Cait, despite herself, despite the silences she has kept and the doors she has shut, is still tied to the Garnett coven and the witches who count themselves among it. She would like, in her sideways, suspicious-of-her-own-sentiment way, to know how her old coven-mates are doing. She would like, in particular, to know if Estela has come into her magic yet - or whether the potential of it still terrifies her the way it terrified her the last time Cait had occasion to look.

"Yeah most people who give a shit know you have new abilities - was it Siberia? Do they have a gulag?" It's a tongue in cheek question. She wonders what drew Siltshore back exactly. Is it that the city's a weird deadzone now? She's not tried to leave - hasn't seen the point given what tends to come back to her from the fringes at either of her jobs. There's a slim but eager part of her that wants to volunteer. The existence of the paracausal has never quite settled in as reality to her - even given its connections to people both dear and ire to her. Still, she shrugs. "Have at it, hoss."

It's uncharacteristically casual for her, but the winter has been long, exhausting and lonely - Jude's death had spearheaded it, and she doesn't trust his return either, even if she believes him. What dies ought to stay dead. Hypocritical for a vampire, maybe, but she's not perfect.

She counts the question's answers on her fingers. "Best friend died. Werewolves had a rave and it was kind of lame. Winter came, never left, best friend came back. Conclave shook things up - got real pissy about some treaty violations. Lot of leadership shake-ups lately is the word on the street."

She narrows her eyes. "She's fine. And safe. And hopefully far away from here."

The ring on her finger hides another detail to that story - a promise that doesn't care about distance. "Haven't been able to talk to her very reliably in all this, but she's doing better than this place, tell you that much."

She'd packed bags, she'd planned, she'd made sure the ring was securely on her finger - only to get waylaid by walking street lamps and slobbering mailboxes trying their damnedest to eat her.

Estela wanted no part of this chaos.

And she certainly wasn't going to entertain much of it, or waste time trying to study something when it had a taste for flesh. When she finally arrives at the funeral home, she uses her old key to let herself inside and takes a breath. She expects it to be warm and inviting, a comfort, but she finds it just as icy as it is inside as it is out.

Something's wrong here, too.

The city outside has descended into chaos, though, but not here. Embrace is cool as a cucumber, even here in the dark, where Tressa lounges in her dark office, feet on her desk, reading by cande-light on account of the power.

The call of her name spooks her, and she looks up from the book in her hand, leaning to crane her head and see through the office door, down the hall.

"Estela?!"

She likes the immortality, but don't got a torch for the rest of them. He's aware that's him, all the same.

She catches on fast, too. She's got spunk.

"You ain't doin' anything yet." He points at her from behind as she walks ahead. She's gotta know how big the spiderweb runs. It's old — ugly. Both older and uglier than him, even. Ain't no point talking about what could be, if her mind's been all fogged up by them shmucks. He ain't forgetting she could be playin' a game here, either.

He don't take much issue with her really, but he'll rid a problem before it comes one, if she's thinkin' she'll get clever about feeding it back to high and mighty sitting on the throne of bones. Take him back to jukeboxes, biscuits and when the city's made damn sense. Hooligans pulled down them banners, and set fire to those suits. Levelled the field some. "I'm just askin', doll."

Garrick doesn't think speculation fits any descriptor. It's an idea; tear it down, build it up. Give the power back to the folk like Tressa, and Saint Cormac, who got new ideas, and new minds that don't think like the rest of him. Him, neither. Where traditions exist that they've never heard of, things that don't matter. Blood is blood, ain't nobody measuring it by worthiness, or rights. Whether fuckin' wet wipes like Pretorius want to hold court about the next generation of deadfolk, others are doing it, anyway. No permission needed. Garrick ain't wanting an army of them, just a bit of even standing across the oceans; the water don't ask, before it sinks thousands. It's hungry, and it feeds.

Just like they do. No fuckin' stopping it.

He did it to Lara. Long while back. His comeuppance ain't got nothing to do with them.

He looks beyond her shoulder, to the suite behind. Then back to her, "If them shmucks had told you, no, when you and that sire of yours went to them. You gone take than as final?" Ain't no searchin' for another way. "Ain't no need for them, is there? Plenty other clans, with less puppet strings you could've got your kicks with." He don't much like half of them, but they don't all bat the same ancient laws around like scripture. Smirking, his intentions are out in the open, now. "Plenty room for new ones, too, ay?"

She turns, stepping to the slab in the middle of the suite and pulling the sheet down on a body halfway through it's prep. Spinning a scalpel in her fingers she considers his question for a moment. "If my absentee parent of a sire had been told no, we'd already discussed the next step. It would have happened anyway."

She nicks the femoral artery, clamps what she needs to clamp, and runs a bit of tubing. It's the carotid next.

"I get what you're implying - red tape, gatekeeping, telling people what they are or are not meant to be. They aren't things I'm..." She stops, plopping the scalpel blade in her mouth while she considers how to word things. "They aren't things I'm not sympathetic to." She starts a switch, the sharp bite of glutaraldehyde and phenol faint as they push the humours out of the body with a mechanical whir, draining stale, dead blood down the runner and into the drain.

"Tressa." Leiry's latest dead'un when it came to newbloods of ancient groups, apparently. He's heard of her through the grapevine as an undertaker of sorts, and then through a gallery lad who dropped her name. She went to the highers too with her sire, and got it all approved like it's some modern century ritual. She looks at home, in her plastics and wrappings. But old blood bristles his nose, long past its due.

They're talking 'cause he wants to figure out what she stands for, and how deeply rooted these new fangs are when it comes to Pret.

Garrick ain't one to mince his words, on a good night. So, he'll be damned if he cares about formalities in a funeral parlour. "You like them stick up their arse lot who went and said you could die, ay?" What a bunch of lily-livered shmucks.

He's following her through the dark corridor, listening to know if there's anyone else in her company beside the corpses that don't talk. If he really wanted to get the attention of the old hag up top, he'd gut this girl and start a civil war in the city.

Be like New York had been, sending bloody messages back and forth like love letters.

"Say someone wanted to bring down the tower and get buildin' a new one, how's you feel about that?"

At his second question, she raises a brow. "Oh - a plot. We're plotting."

She eyes him, searches her memory - no, wracks it - to make sure there isn't a conversation here half-started that she isn't recalling.

"Is this like an ancient animosity thing or are you just bored? I can understand and appreciate both, by the way." She stops in the doorway that leads down into the suite, turning to face him, head tilting. "Just want to know if this is absurd or insane and yes, there is a difference."

In her absence, the Mausoleum has become a lone-standing synecdoche for the ghosts of her past - for the bones she put in the ground herself, for every door she sealed with her own name on it. And as she stalks back toward her home, each step kicking up dirt like an upturned grave, she hears Tressa’s question and the word Allegation without it even being said. Capital A. Italicized. Hovering. Tressa should know. This whole damn town should know. You cannot keep a good woman down. You can hardly keep a bad one down. She - and specifically, she as in Cait - will simply find another floor to stand on. 

She comes to a halt a half-step from where Tressa is standing - a step respectful only in as much as it is the precise distance from which it is rudest to refuse to come any closer - and tips her chin in something that is not, but might pass for, a greeting.

"I've been told," she says, evenly, "that the terms of exile no longer apply." It is the truth and it is not. A vote shifting here, a seat shifting there.  "I have to assume the matter is settled, since I am standing here. Or perhaps I'll be struck down in my sleep tonight." A breath. The dry small flutter of teeth that, on a kinder woman, might pass for a smile. "Which would be, in its way, funny."

She says it dryly, because Cait does not, in any working sense of the word, believe that anything in this town has the spine to strike her down. And if they had tried? Well, she would have pried her way back regardless. Exile is a vote; home is a covenant.

She begins to walk the perimeter without inviting Tressa to follow, though she does not, particularly, forbid it. She's checking on what she's left behind. Eyes on the runes - there, the one she set the night before she left, still holding; there, the older one Brennan laid down a decade before she was born, still humming faintly to itself like an old man whistling. The greenhouse breathes its slow green breath at the western edge, and Cait notes with love that she refuses to call love, that she will sleep beside it tonight. The plants will be glad of her. 

Her gaze drifts - briefly, almost incidentally - to the line of light along Tressa's jaw, the soft inappropriate daylight she should not, by all the older rules, be standing in. "Strange winter, isn't it," she says, mildly. "Rules getting loose all over town."

So she shrugs. If Caitlin's absolved, she's absolved. If she isn't, what exactly is anybody to do? Tattle?

The Warlock begins meandering, and Tressa follows after a bit. At the mention of spines, she can't help but quietly scoff - perhaps for the same reason Caitlin's tone comes across so cold and stark. There are many people- herself included despite their thin, thin mutual interest in amiability and shared interest in death- who could benefit from causing her death. She wonders if she could do it. She arrives at no, mostly because a vampire is an apex predator only so long as:

- A) they have the element of surprise. Tressa lurches at Caitlin's neck, hungry for the feather in her cap that taking down the world's first Warlock would land her with. Caitlin, having seen this a mile ahead, plants a sliver of rosewood in her chest, and Tressa passes from this world like the refrain on a Kansas track. - B) Magic is not in play. Tressa blinks behind Caitlin at a speed no mortal could hope to track, hissing at the witch - well, Warlock, apparently - before promptly being exploded into a mist of red fog, landing Caitlin with little more than an terse conversation with a breathtakingly anxious drycleaner. - C) They have a good reason to want to be. Tressa, standing triumphant over Caitlin's body answers the text, smiling when she sees Estela's beautiful face smiling back from its icon. The resulting text, along with the breakup text that immediately follows it, sees her lighting a cigarette for the first and last time in her life as she watches the sun come up the next morning and she bursts into flames.

All of these scenarios play out in her mind's eyes while she watches Caitlin appraise her surroundings, reminded of her own homecoming earlier in the year, wrestling her father's business back from unappreciative vampires of a different sort.

The note in her voice at commentary on the season stops her briefly in her tracks though. Does she know what's happening? Tressa can't put it past her, but she's not about to press the issue by asking. "Seems so. Hope you were planning on really digging in here when you came back, because it seems like we're all stuck here. Not that most people seem to care."

Caitlin won't care either, soon enough. "Maybe rules aren't really all they're chalked up to be - surely you out of everybody appreciate that."

His hand does go to the finger bone around his neck, though, fiddling with it. "I have this, I think it's a magic thing, from the people I was staying with for a while. But I don't know what it does or if I can use it or anything." He also doesn't wanna take it off. It feels important.

Her hands are all over his face and he lets it happen, trying to keep speaking through it, though its garbled and muffled in different ways. "Tressa - Tress! Come on, I'm good. Fully healthy human, I'm pretty sure." Stretching his jaw, he rubs at it after she stops. "Wanna run some tests?"

She leers at him - this... not Jude Jude, and appraises his everything. His expressions His fidgets. The thrum of his heart. The way his body has the imperceptible shiver that can only be described as the innate frailty of the living. It's strange how much he is Jude without actually being Jude.

Tressa leans in to peer at the necklace' pendulum. "Is that a carpal bone?" Curiouser and curiouser.

She doesn't touch it though - doesn't dare touch it, actually. That's how they get you. Its more interesting to pinch and pull at his weird new face. Until he pulls away anyways, and she regards him and his offer with a judicious glare. "Sure."

She doesn't get far in trying to go through the organization that Heron laid out - nor figuring out the names, dates, and numbers that are scrawled on the label - because Tressa picks up a necklace and a photo. Frowning, she turns her head from where she's still crouched on her knees.

"What?"

Fang-bang..? Her nose wrinkles as she realizes what Tressa means, "Fuck no. She hated all of you guys." But Tressa laughs, and that makes Althea get up to see the photo in question and her cheeks color red - not in embarrassment, but shame and anger. How long..? What is a means to an end or..?

She leaves her to ponder over the picture as she eyes the necklace, and nods when Althea asks. "Yeah. I don't know much about it, just that it takes a witch and a lot of blood."

Tressa's brows crease inwards, and she eyes the hand. Her features bunch up. "I don't tend to answer microaggressions with a handshake." A tight lipped smile is all Zoe gets. "Oh, Van Brunt. Werewolf family. House burned down a year ago. The spoiled rich kid thing makes sense now."

She plays in this girl's face now - churlish and well aware that they're on neutral ground - supernatural kayfabe is in effect. "I'm Shaw. And no, I can't taste it. But I'm not here to taste it, I'm here to find dinner."

"If you know my family, I'm sure you're aware of what we are capable of." Her fist comes down hard on the bar top, hard enough to garner attention. She can't crash out here, not with so many people who could get caught in the cross hairs of it all. The bartender gives a glance over to her, his coworker leaning in to whisper something in his ear as they have a near silent exchange for a moment seemingly arguing over who is coming over.

When one of them finally does she gives her order, another bottle to the VIP booth towards the back, top shelf, clearly a display for the money fueled power she holds in this situation. She offers a tight lipped smile and then glances at the vampire a final time, upper lip near pulled into a snarl. "Enjoy your night, leech." She bites out before heading back towards the swirl of bodies.

Whoever named Embrace ain't ever died.

Front door's locked, an' he can see that red beeping camera device like a mechanical eye, staring at him from above his head; it's probably warning him he's about to set off every alarm if he pushes the door through.

Fire exit, it is.

He ain't sure if Tressa's around every night, working down in the gully of the death house, but if she is. She'll have to have heard a fist thump in quick succession on the metal door, a good heads up for what he's prepared to do, if he has to. Saint Cormac's said the girl's a shmuck recruit, and he's for the people enough, still, to warn them that he's got plans to tear down the tower, brick by brick.

Give the lass a chance to dip, or choose another side.

All them newblooded dead don't care about traditions, anyhow. Ain't nobody getting permission these days to blood another, over putting boots on necks and saying they're gonna do it regardless. Ain't no need for old, ancient customs that are only for a lil more control of the people in their clutches. Status, not protection. Ain't none of them gonna stick their neck out for the other, not really.

They ain't lived as long as they have doing that. Just eat coin, and stick their finger in another damn pie.

If Garrick's gonna rewrite the branch of the dead, he's tearing it from the fuckin' roots.

After a few moments, Garrick batters the exit door a second time, until the metal creaks uncomfortably under his strength. He glances up to check for any other cameras that might catch that in the shadowed alley. But then, he listens for movements on the other side of it; he swears he hears a door squeaking, deep within.

That was before Port Leiry had gone upside down.

Now, one must call before one comes to call, because the open door policy is suspended while werewolves are extra crazy and hunters are spinning donuts in the streets like it's open season on anything without a pulse.

Also apparently the dead are coming back, if Jude 'Now I have a Chiseled Jawline' Grigsby is anything to go by.

But the dead - the actual dead - they don't really ever stop being born, and so while the policy's different, the all hours nature of the business isn't. That's why Tressa Shaw nearly misses the the alert on her phone that somebody's banging on the doors. That and the trap metal blasting in the basement while she carefully siphons organs with rhythmic bobs of her head.

When the back door opens, she's only half-kitted; gloves removed, goggles perched atop her head, hair pulled up. She stares at a face that's familiar only in the academic sense - in that she knows he exists and she knows they are, nominally, batting for the same coach.

"Garrick." She smiles, and then steps to turn sideways, inviting him in.

What she says next, it's not bitchy - or at least it's not meant to be - it's just they've never interacted once for this long, and with the silence from Pret leadership since the post-Conclave shakeups, she's not quite sure she has a terribly well-founded guess of her own.

"Why are we talking?"