Ballroom Blitz

A man in biker clothes crouches in the bushes near a mostly abandoned house, nerves racing and eyes darting all over the dark horizon. He mimed wiping sweat off his thinned black hairline, although he lost the ability to sweat decades ago, and anxiously scratched at his close-shaved beard.

Don Phillips wasn't the bravest Kindred around. He wasn't a slouch by any means, but he would rather avoid conflict, especially when punching up. But sometimes the lingering convictions he still held himself to would get the better of his sense, just like this night.

Within that abandoned house, there were two terrified teenagers. They were Thinbloods, unfortunate vampires too low on the blood chain to be like the rest of them, and something that terrified a lot of the dumbasses in power. These two in particular had barely been Kindred for a month and had already gotten the attention of a Scourge, a Camarilla stooge who was about to execute them for the crime of being unlucky.

Don wasn't the bravest Kindred around, but when he picked up a tip like that, he wasn't the type of person to sit on his hands.

The hard part was the damn waiting. It had already passed midnight, and there was nothing in the area, just barely off of the highway beyond Fife. But he knew it was coming, if a scourge was making enough moves to get noticed, they weren't half-assing it. 

He wasn't sure whether to expect a mass of shadows to appear out of nowhere, or for the front door to mysteriously open on its own or if there'd just be brute force at play. But he definitely wasn't expecting to hear the sound of a gun cock behind him.

"So, whatcha doin' out here pal?" And he definitely wasn't expecting to make conversation.

Turning around, he saw a very tall and averagely thin woman wearing rugged jeans and a brown fur-lined jacket, with long red hair and emerald eyes barely peeking from under stylish shades, and a shotgun not aimed towards him, but absolutely at the ready.

"And before you feed me any cover story nonsense, I can smell your blood-sucking ass a mile away." She added on, a toothy grin gleaming in the moonlight.

Of all the nights he had to run into a fucking werewolf, why'd it have to be this one?

"Might be hard to believe, but I'm trying to stop a murder." Don answered, his natural gruff tones choking out his nerves.

The woman in front of him gave a gesture saying 'Go on'. 

"There's a pair of kids in that house, they're vampires like me, but got the short end of the stick, and now someone's out for their head, and I'm trying to make sure that doesn't happen."

"And why do you care, big guy?" She asked, eyes analytical and sharp.

"Never liked the idea of people getting the axe before they have a chance. Especially when it comes down to superstition or something crazy like that." 

The woman looked him over for a few seconds which felt like an eternity, before beginning an interrogation. "Have they fucked up at all yet?"

"Not that I've heard. They're thinbloods, doubt that means shit to you, but they don't always work like the rest of us, so the inherent 'badness' ain't a guarantee."

"Is that what's got them on the chopping block? The thin blood shit?"

Don nods in response.

"Who's after them?"

"Guh, there's some shit to explain. Um, essentially a black-ops assassin from one of our...political parties? Groups? Whatever, a bunch of controlling assholes who really want them dead."

"Hmm...another one of you?"

"I mean, I'm not in the same group, but yeah, another vampire."

The woman looked him over for a minute that felt like an hour, then cracked her smile wider.

"Congrats, you're going from bloodsucker to bait tonight." She chuckled and held out her hand to Don.

"Pardon?" Don asked, confused and slightly offended.

"Oh, don't get me wrong, I could maul you and whatever vamp is coming this way in the time it'd take me to smoke. But, upfront and personal ain't my style. So, you'll be the bait, I'll help you out, and so long as you don't do anything stupid we both go home happy. What do ya say?"

Don still wasn't sure what to do. He wasn't about to trust a werewolf this soon, but it was quite the advantage. He had planned on just stalling the scourge long enough for the kids to get away, he was only a knife in a veritable gunfight. This was someone handing him a bomb. Whether or not it'd blow up on him too, it'd clear the field.

He took her hand, with the two engaging in a bit of a grip strength contest as she pulled Don up from his crouched, stealthy position.

"Crimson McNabb. You?"

"Don Phillips. Not gonna lie, less furry than I expected."

She snickered. "Shows what you know, we aren't always beasted up, we shift."

"Wait, if you were hunting for me, why not be shifted already?"

"Makes it harder to use this, for one," she began, tapping the barrel of the shotgun against her shoulder. "And it's harder to ride my motorcycle."

"Oh shit you ride? What kinda wheels do you have?" Don asked, a light of excitement growing in his eyes.

"Ah just a Hesketh V1000. I've wanted more, but it was a hand-me-down from an uncle."

"That's sick, I got a Speed Trip-" he began, before getting shushed. The Motorhead conversation would have to wait.

Crimson smelled a pungent scent in the air, far worse than any Don or the Thinbloods gave off. Kindred smelled of wanton destruction, mixed with the taint of a soul's corruption. This was that doubled, with a more corruptive, rotting, disgusting punch to it. And it was getting closer.

"It's show time, bait."

A black car drove up to the house, with its headlights off. From the driver's seat came a tall, broad man, almost a stereotypical musclehead minion, with a long trenchcoat hiding his frame.

Don waited back in the bushes, knowing he'd be able to close the distance to the door. Crimson had made her way to the back of the house, waiting for any secret minions to get the drop on them. It's how she'd fight, after all. The Thinbloods were still waiting inside, having gotten a text earlier that evening that someone would help them get away, but still scared and uncertain.

No one was expecting a voice to come from the roof.

"Oye! Walking corpse!" 

The young voice belonged to a bronze-skinned woman, with curly mahogany hair and bioluminescently glowing hazel eyes, wearing a bright turquoise shirt and black hoodie with worn jeans.

"You're on reservation land, cabrón. Even in the night, your kind has no jurisdiction here. Take one step closer, and I'll exercise mine."

"How many people are gonna show up!?" Don shouted internally, especially since the woman seemed to be a garden-variety human, save for the fact no one had spotted her.

Crimson merely chuckled and shook her head, before hearing a rustling towards the side of the house as another putrid stench hit her nose. With an ephemeral shimmer, all traces of her presence vanish.

The scourge, for his part, doesn't say a word or even emote. He merely steps forward, reaching for his modified gun.

"It's your funeral," she says, as bioluminescent lines appear on her right hand. "And Roxana Reyes shall be your undertaker!" She points down, and the scourge finds himself unable to draw his pistol.

This is followed by enough weight coming down on him to push his feet an inch into the dirt, as immense pressure builds on his back.

"You've got a lot of ghosts at your back, cabrón. You must've killed so easily, but now you'll feel the weight of their lives!" The pressure increased, but the scourge was beginning to muscle through it, long-dead veins bulging from the force, Vitae pounding hard.

Don begins to wonder if he and Crimson will even have to do anything, but then he sees the gun still being drawn and knows he'll have to act.

Crimson makes her way around the side of the house, undetected, and sees a slowly moving figure in the dark. It is how she'd attack, after all.

The figure in the dark goes to enter the house through a window, and the shotgun is drawn.

"Howdy, pal!"

The shotgun fires, the pistol is drawn, and Don lunges forward at the scourge. He cannot fire off a shot at Roxana before Don's leap sends him like a bullet toward his head, a Vitae-enhanced fist knocking the thug a solid three feet flying to the side.

"End of the line, jackass!" Don declared as the Scourge picked himself back up.

"Oye! Get out of the way, vampire! This is between me and that clown!" Roxana shouted from the roof.

"Back off kid! I was here first and you're out of your league! Just leave the vampire to the vampire."

"Vampire? That tombstone-headed jackass ain't a vampire!" She said incredulously. 

"How the fuck can you tell?" Don returned, even more incredulously.

"I deal in spirits, pendejo! You lot at least got a different signal, he's got nothin'!" She explained as a flock of spectral hawks began to form around her.

Don was confused by this but began to steel himself as the scourge stood to face him down once more. Then, the sound of the shotgun echoes once more, and Crimson leaps back from the side of the house into the main area, reloading. 

With a third shot, she jumps to a point where she's back-to-back with Don. "Hey, so, weird question, you guys can regenerate right?"

"What? I mean, like, slowly? Why?" He questioned, as he saw a shambling form come from the side of the house.

"Okay cause he ain't, but he's still movin' around!" Crimson said, sounding almost exhilarated, as the shambling body stepped into the porch light, showing its lack of an upper skull or chest region, riddled with holes from the shotgun shell, but moving forward nonetheless.

From the darkness and woods around the house, more and more suited shambling bodies began to gather around the house, with the scourge at the epicenter. Roxana jumps down to get on level with the others, drawing two small knives from her pockets. 

"So, vampire and werewolf teaming up? You guys know how to deal with them best?"

"I think it's still related to vampires," Don began. "When I heard about the scourge, I thought it was going to be Seattle's, but Bremerton is Camarilla too, and they're run by the goddamn Hecata."

"Gods above, it's a freakin' infestation," Crimson muttered, rolling her eyes. "Mind explaining the vocabulary?" She said, wiping drool from her mouth.

"They're a clan of necromancers! Their zombies are annoying as hell, but they aren't exactly miracles. Hit them hard enough or in the right spot, and they're down for keeps." Don explained, letting the vitae rush through his system.

"That's the plan then? Hit 'em hard and fast?" Roxana asked, taking a low crouch.

"I'll handle the scourge, he's gotta have some kind of authority. You two focus on the zombies for now." Don said.

"Don't hog all the fun now." Crimson chided, reloading the spent shot.

With a collective tensing, the three broke. Don lunged forward once more and began a new assault right in the scourge's gut. The large 'man' was more prepared this time, taking it head-on. Crimson made a sharp whistle, and her shotgun gained a similar glow that she had earlier, and Roxana covered her own body with the lines of bioluminescence.

The scourge did his best to get his own strikes in on Don, but he was as good at evading as he was at attacking. A lifetime, and unlifetime, of fights wrote those instincts into his DNA, and the vampiric gift of Potence made his punches hit all the harder. He may not like to fight, but he's been in more than enough scraps with knuckleheads like these, he knew the moves to make.

Roxana was new to her magic. As a recently awakened Dreamspeaker, she had a wide world to step into and had only managed to take the first two steps. But, it didn't take an expert to know that these abominations were against everything she held dear.

She knew better than to immediately get within biting distance of goddamn zombies, and so sent forward her hawk-like apparitions. As they sailed in the air, their spiritual feathers and talons turned steel, and their path of flight turned into the sonic speed of a bullet. Each one not only cut through petrified flesh but also was able to sever the tether that kept them reanimated. But, she only had four hawks, and there were still half-a-dozen zombies left on her side.

However, she wielded more than her twin knives, one obsidian and the other damascened, she wielded her pride as Roxana Reyes. She mustered her strength and ran forward, using a spin kick to get the foremost one off balance before cutting its thread. As the others came closer, she weaved and bobbed around, finding the right time to slice through another two. But, her training was still new, which included physical activity, and she was starting to feel the ache in her body.

This ache wasn't helped when she moved too far too fast and ended up slipping on a patch of mud without a way to recover, falling to the ground as one of the remaining zombies pounced on her. However, as it tried to bite into her flesh, her form glitched a bit and burst into a cloud of spiritual moths. The moths flit around the three remaining zombies, collecting over the one that had attacked her as she rematerializes and stomps its face into the mud patch, slicing at its connecting thread as well.

While she was exhausted and strained, this display gave her enough time to collect her thoughts and summon two final hawks to take care of the last two. While they were weaker due to time constraints, they still had enough power to finish off the fodder.

Crimson, for her efforts, was having a marvelous time. It was so rare that she was able to let loose like this. Two shots here, another two there, and two more just for the fun of it, abominations and corruptions dropping at her feet. It was taking all of her willpower to not cackle and slobber as the creature within was as satiated as the human shell outside it. But, she too found the number of undead monsters outnumbering her ammunition and was having to get creative.

Most spirits had never really liked her. Perhaps it was her fondness for civilization, her tenuous relationship with tradition, or the fact that nature's "gift" to her was a curse she had to fix herself later in life, but they went so far as to call her a cursed child. A Spirit Eater. That didn't mean she hadn't made some friends in the past, however. She just had to go about it a bit differently.

With a mighty HACK, a mass of bile and thick saliva comes from Crimson's mouth, as a clutch of spectral centipedes writhed around the ground where it landed. "Sorry, can't be this pretty all night." Her grin grew more monstrous and malevolent, her eyes gaining a sadistic gleam. She lets out a stream of guttural growls and words, and slams her foot into the puddle, mixing it with the dirt beneath her feet, as vines grow and twist around the feet of the zombies, worming their way across and into their thin and fragile flesh.

Loading her final two shots into her shotgun, she spits onto the shells before closing the chamber, with hornet spirits filling the chamber alongside the rounds. "No hard feelings, right guys?" With the zombies locked in place, she fires both shots. From blasting through the first zombie, the spirits summoned strain to move the trajectory, zipping their way through the remaining ones in turn. 

While the effectiveness is greatly diminished by the time it pierces the last ones, the addition of the hornet spirits put in the work of severing their necromanced strings, returning the corpses to little more than that.

With each corpse that dropped, the scourge was growing more and more sluggish. Before, Don's punches landed like they were hitting brick, now it felt like a punching bag and was moving about as quickly as one. "Maybe they were all tied together?" He thought, as his strikes began to tear and break skin. "A cart pulled by horses, and horses kept in line by the cart. This ain't amateur hour, that's for sure."

But, the scourge still had enough power to get one lucky hit in, as its own empowered body struck Don right in the stomach, and sent him flying back further than Don had sent him back before. However, before the scourge could keep up any attack, the ground beneath him churned, as the vines from before moved to fully encase his legs.

"Sorry big guy, but these babies haven't eaten their fill yet!" Crimson growled out, breath growing ragged and eyes small and manic, as spectral centipedes crawled over his body and began to nibble at his form, causing slight physical damage to appear as well.

"And neither have they!" Roxana boasted as she witnessed the horde of horrified ghosts tied to him, enacting her spell to weigh him down once more, now hitting stronger than ever since he had already been exhausted.

Held still at the feet, weighed down at the back, Don sees his perfect setup. He leaps back to the front of the house, and uses the door as a launch board, as he fires himself straight forward at the scourge. This time, he holds nothing back, pushing his blood to the limit and risking the frenzied mayhem of the beast.

Every reanimated cell in his body pushes power to his fist as he dives in and, using the momentum of the leap, pierces right through the scourge's chest, holding out his heart, leaking viscous black ichor, on the other side, before crushing it with one final clench.

Pulling his arm back out the other side, the body of the scourge falls, false life leaving his body. While there is a tense moment as Don's head pounds and his stomach twists, he is able to remain grounded in the current moment, resisting the call of the Beast within.

The spirits release themselves, as Crimson and Roxana's magic fades from the area.

"Fuck yeah! Victory for the Vampire-Werewolf-Mage team-up!" Roxana proudly declared, whooping into the night.

"I'll say, thought that was gonna end up being a shit show. So, what's your story, kid?" Crimson began, as Don walked towards the house.

The door was demolished from his leap, just barely hanging onto the hinges as it was bent in the middle. But, from the entrance to the house, two young faces sheepishly peeked onto the scene. Exhausted and slightly beaten, Don cracks a grin and a soft chuckle. "Keep heading towards Tacoma, and go to this place called Cafe Azure. The owner can help you out."

Their faces light up for a moment as they step out into the open until one of them looks on in terror. "LOOK OUT!" He shouts towards the other two, as Roxana and Crimson are barely able to react in time as the Scourge stands once more.

It's not often people expect the living dead to carry a dead man's switch.

The heart-pumping black ichor dissolves into more of the putrid oil, as a circle of space around the scourge's body becomes withered and dead in a matter of seconds. "Jesus, it's killing the land!" Roxana said in shock, seeing spirits both animalistic and human fleeing from the area.

"Get away from that!" Don shouted, running to pull them both back. "Those necromancers, they do shadow shit too! It's like death itself!" 

As he gets close though, Crimson holds up her hand. "All of you." Her voice is low and guttural.

"Get the fuck out of here, now!" Despite the fury in her eyes, a monstrous grin had unwillingly wormed onto her face, thick, foaming saliva drooling from between jagged teeth.

It was bad enough that she had to choke down the stench of the vampires, whatever crazy zombie the scourge was, along with the actual zombies he dragged along with him. But this final transformation was the tipping point. Such a vile perversion of what was not just once a mortal life, but of nature itself, stinking of pure destruction and corruption. Intentional or not, this was the pure essence of the Wyrm, and the Wyld within her could no longer hold out.

It was her time to Rage.

No one had to hear this information, however, as they all got the supernatural shiver of fear that emanated in waves from Crimson, and saw the putrid radius of corruption begin to revive not only the central scourge but the other zombies as well.

"You two, head to the highway, you'll spot my bike!" Don shouted to the thin bloods.

"Ay ay, I got my car down that way too, head there!" Roxana offered.

Either way, the two of them began to run, with Roxana following shortly after.

"Crimson, will you be-"

"NOT THE FUCKING TIME!" She growled as her back began to lurch, and her limbs began to extend. Don, however, swallowed his nerves.

"I'll come back here first thing tomorrow night." Those were his last words as he ran. He wasn't sure if he'd find a corpse, a crime scene, or nothing at all, but he wasn't about to leave her fully alone.

"Heh, brave, stupid little vampire." Crimson grinned as the monstrosity within her won over with a resonant, echoing, haunting howl.

As the other four of them ran, Roxana was the only one who made a mistake. She looked back.

For one single second, she saw the pure rage of a werewolf on display. Well, she wasn't so sure if were"wolf" was the most accurate description. The monster she saw against that horde of undead looked enough like a maned wolf, a canid if not a literal wolf, but the limbs were far too long and ended with sharp, thin fingers. This was matched with a jaw almost permanently curved into a grin, with obsidian black eyes and a wild mane, flowing like tendrils. To Roxana, it looked more like a canine-hyena-witch than anything else, but she knew the most important thing: it was dangerous.

She looked back away before the carnage began, but the howls and cackles heard through the forest painted enough of a terrifying picture.

In the end, they all got away. Don led their return to Tacoma as Roxana ferried the refugees in her car, and then made sure she had returned, as far as she let him go anyways. He questioned returning back to the scene, but the sun was set to rise.

The following night, as the elegant Hannah Winther informed him that the two thinbloods were safe, sound, and to be brought into the fold of Tacoma, Don set back out. 

With each mile that passed, he grew more and more tense and worried. He wasn't the bravest, after all. But, nonetheless, he returned to the scene, tracing his steps up to the bush, hiding to make sure that some messed up wolf-thing wasn't still roaming around.

He wasn't sure what kind of scene was going to play out, but he wasn't expecting to see a perfectly clean and healthy front yard in front of the house, with a newly repaired door. And he definitely wasn't expecting to feel the point of two fingers against the back of his skull.

"Man, you are kinda shit at sneaking."

Instead of directly repeating the events of last night, he rolls his eyes and stands tall, looking a very tired and tousled, yet still cocky-faced, woman in the eye. "Yeah well, you're a bit stacked in the hunting department."

"Those kids make it back safe?" She barely had enough energy to stand, but supplanted that by leaning against a tree for support.

"Yep, and we'll make sure they're taken care of. Got a whole community of people like those kids. They'll be fine."

"Y'know, you seem like a pretty chill guy. You'll have to teach me whatever the hell is going on with that stuff, like weird necromancers? What's up with that!?"

Don snickers in response. "Buy me a drink and I might."

"Oh fuck you, I know you guys can't eat!"

"Doesn't mean I don't like the feeling!"

"Oh, the FEELING!" Crimson wiggled her fingers in sarcasm.

"Well, what about you? Gonna tell me about whatever happened last night?"

She scoffs. "Only if you want nightmares."

"We don't dream."

"HA! We'll see about that!" She holds out a hand, and Don takes it, helping her steady on her feet, as the pair return to their bikes and ride to an eventful evening.