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It was the yearly coven gathering where all the Lords brought their latest work before Miranda for review, and the only tolerable part of the whole charade was how disgusted the jumped-up bitch was with his own pathetic findings. Karl went back to the pew he claimed for himself hours ago, hands thrust in pockets and a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. It wouldn’t do to tip Miranda off to how much he did not give a fuck , after all.
He threw himself down onto the bench, sending plumes of dust whirling up, and propped his feet on the back of the pew ahead of him, pleased to see his boots thoroughly encrusted with oil and mud. He couldn’t tell the bitch to fuck herself in word, but in deed he could make his feelings known.
(Not that it made a bit of difference, in the end. His leash was still in Miranda’s fist.)
“Let us hope that Alcina’s labors have borne more promising fruit. You may bring your work forth.” Miranda sighed, her patience clearly worn thin. Smirking, the nine-and-a-half-foot bootlicking bane of Karl’s unnatural existence slipped from the ravaged chapel that served as their meeting ground, returning moments later with her three research subjects in tow.
Karl finally sat straight in his pew and stared hard at the three girls clustered around Dimitrescu’s skirts, all of them golden-eyed and alert and stunningly normal . No soldats or lycans, these, but something approaching human.
“Fuck every god.” Karl muttered, impressed in spite of himself. She’d done it. The colossal bitch had finally done it: three girls implanted, meaning three potential vessels and three shots at resurrecting Miranda’s worm-meat brat. Karl’s pulse pounded, and he didn’t even dare try to contemplate what this might mean for the long-term survival of their little freakshow.
Up at her pulpit Miranda crooked a golden finger at Dimitrescu, beckoning like an indulgent whore, an absolving goddess. Even from where he sat, Karl could see the cold gleam of excitement in the dead eyes behind her mask.
“Well, Alcina, bring them forth. Let me examine your triumphs.”
The bloodsucking bitch preened and gently nudged the girls–the specimens – forward, and Karl nearly laughed at the perverse display before him. Just another proud mama shoving her brood towards the pastor on a Sunday morning, three more lambs for the slaughter.
The poor fucking things. Karl knew that Dimitrescu had sourced the raw materials from among the daughters of the village, even recognized the little redhead as having once belonged to his foreman’s brood, but now the waifs wouldn’t even have the comfort of being dead, and safely beyond Miranda’s reach.
Karl shook his head and watched as the three specimens cautiously approached Miranda, huddled together in a defensive knot and clinging to each other’s sleeves. They peered around with eyes as new and wary as a fawn’s, constantly glancing back over their shoulders to where the big bitch stood at the end of the aisle, watching with unmistakable pride. To Karl’s astonishment, Dimitrescu’s smug smile softened into something small and warm, and she nodded once in reassurance. The blonde one returned that smile, unpracticed but genuine.
Curious.
“Come, children, and let me see you.” Miranda said, cool and maternal and hateful. The trio of experiments exchanged a glance between them–sweet fuck, Dimitrescu did damn good work if they kept cognition on top of typical functionality– and then the stocky brunette squared her shoulders and stepped forward, a proper little soldier going over the top.
Miranda leaned close and took the square jaw between thumb and forefinger, tilted the head this way and that, passed a golden finger before golden eyes. Karl half expected her to pry open the jaws to examine the teeth, but Miranda soon moved on to the blonde and the redhead. The first submitted patiently to the examination, the second squirmed and giggled and grabbed at Miranda’s hand, examined the golden claws with open curiosity.
They were like babies, all three of them. Karl’s throat suddenly got tight, and he wanted to lunge at Miranda, kill the bitch before she could kill them–but they were dead already, the girls they had been, dead the minute they crossed Dimitrescu’s threshold. What Miranda examined now was just so much animated meat. He had to remember that.
“Beautiful work, Alcina. Excellent reflexes, each of them well-oriented and aware, and the implantation sites are healing well. You’ve brought your research notes, yes?”
“Of course, Mother Miranda.”
The three specimens visibly perked up as Dimitrescu approached, eager as puppies seeing their dam, and the redhead clapped and squealed,
“ Mamă!”
It was like a flipping a fucking switch: the moment the word was spoken Miranda went rigid, her eyes flashing, and Karl swore the temperature of the room plummeted. He knew Dimitrescu felt it too, could see the whites of her eyes and she glanced between Miranda and the little redhead. She was afraid , Karl realized.
The moment stretched, taut as a garrotte, and Miranda turned her terrible eyes onto Dimitrescu.
“Alcina, what have you done?”
Karl didn’t see her move. One moment she was there at the pulpit, the next she was on the redheaded girl, gouging deep into her cheek with shining claws, her great black wings unfurling to blot out the sun. The girl shrieked like a rabbit dying in a snare, her face running black with rotten blood, and Karl watched in fascination as Dimitrescu gave a wordless cry of horror.
One by one Miranda hooked her claws into the flesh of the girls, tearing deep into them until they screamed and reached for Dimitrescu in terror, babbling in pain and fear. With each supplication Dimitrescu lunged forward, only to bring herself up short at the last moment. She was frantic to get to the three girls, but not stupid; Miranda was hoping she’d lose her composure, give her an excuse to do worse.
“ Ruined , all of them. They have imprinted on you; how could you fail so catastrophically?”
“Mother Miranda, please –”
Karl looked on, stunned, as Dimitrescu stepped toward Miranda with her hands held out in supplication. She seemed to fold in on herself, her eyes darting between Miranda and the girls. It made Karl’s guts churn to see Dimitrescu cringing like this; it was unnatural.
“It was an unintentional side effect of the procedure, Mother Miranda, nothing more. I would never seek to undermine you.” Dimitrescu said, her composure betrayed by the quaver in her voice.
“Intentional or not, Alcina, the specimens are useless to me now that they have fixated on you. They will have to be disposed of.”
“ No! ”
Dimitrescu lunged forward, snatching the cowering girls away from Miranda with her eyes blazing and her lips skinned back from her teeth in a snarl, and before Karl could think about it he was vaulting over the pew onto the battleground. Brawny bitch though she was, Dimitrescu had just openly challenged Miranda, and she didn’t have a hope in hell of surviving her wrath alone. None of them did.
“I agree with Lady Dimitrescu, Mother Miranda.”
You’d think he’d grown a second head, with the way the two women turned to stare at Karl. He fought to keep his face a neutral mask of scientific curiosity, as though he wasn’t putting his own dick on the chopping block here. Miranda turned those eyes on him and Karl immediately felt the prickle of sweat break out on his brow, the phantom of claws cold on the back of his neck.
“Explain yourself, Lord Heisenberg. Your reasoning had better be sound.”
Karl gave himself a moment to gird his loins, psychologically speaking, and plunged ahead with his mind barely scrambling ahead of his mouth and all their half-lives riding on how well he sold the upcoming bullshit.
“Dimitrescu bungled the job by letting the vessels imprint on her, it’s true.” He began, biting back a grin as Dimitrescu snarled silently in his direction. “But this is a huge step forward regardless. You saw yourself that all three of them are alert, respond to stimuli, and even retain some language. And it’s only been what? A month?”
He looked to Dimitrescu, who was glancing between him and Miranda with clear confusion under all that outrage and fear. He caught her eyes over the rim of his glasses, just moment, and tilted his head a fraction to her. Go on, then.
“Three weeks, four days, and seven hours.” she said, flicking her eyes over to Miranda. Karl didn’t pause long enough to examine the knowledge that Dimitrescu knew how long the girls had been revived down to the hour, instead facing Miranda with his mask of curiosity firmly in place again.
“Not even a month, and the subjects are already at this level of development. It would be a waste to destroy them now, when we could learn so much from watching them develop.”
Behind the mask the icy eyes narrowed at Karl, and it seemed to him like the unseen claws were digging in at the base of his skull as Miranda contemplated him.
“I do not have time to waste on nurturing failures.” she intoned, and Karl felt rather than saw Dimitrescu flinch behind him. He wanted to snarl at her, demand to know why the fuck were any of them still alive if she didn’t have time for fuckups, but he held his tongue. The three girls were quietly sobbing still, all of them staring pitifully up at Dimitrescu who stared back at them with something raw and desperate in her eyes.
“Think of them as prototypes; no machine runs perfectly off the original build. We can figure out where Dimitrescu went wrong, then correct it and rebuild from there.”
“If it pleases you, Mother Miranda, you need not concern yourself with the observations.” Dimitrescu broke in, finding her voice at last. She was all obedience and submission as she looked to Miranda, but Karl saw that she was silently herding the three girls behind her, shielding them from Miranda’s gaze.
“Do not presume to know what I will and will not concern myself with, Alcina.” Miranda snapped back, but there was something sullen in her tone, the quirk of her mouth. The bitch was sulking, refusing to play with her toys at all now that someone else had set up a tea party with them.
“Of course, Mother Miranda…but I wish to mitigate the damage done in some way, if I can. I will administer all tests, submit regular reports on their progress…but please, do not destroy them. Leave them in my care. Please .”
For one perilous moment Karl wanted to cackle, struck as he was by the absurdity of the situation. A hellish parody of family life, with a little brother teaming up with his snotty big sister to beg mother-dearest to let them keep the mangy strays they’d found. Fuck, how was this his life?
The moment spun out in frigid silence, but for the pounding of Karl’s pulse in his ears. He didn't dare take his eyes off Miranda to gauge what Dimitrescu was doing– you didn’t turn your back on a rabid thing, be it a dog or a woman. Miranda looked long at Karl and Dimitrescu, her face impassive save for the faint curl of disgust at the corner of her mouth. Finally, she waved her hand dismissively at Dimitrescu and broke the stare-down with a long, disappointed sigh.
“Very well. Keep your blunders, Alcina, and do what you will with them. Eat them or chain them naked to the foot of your bed, it matters little enough to me. But leave your notes here, so that I may salvage something from your failure.”
Dimitrescu did not need to be told twice. With relief that Karl could practically feel, she murmured some piece of ass-kissing and collected the three girls hiding behind her skirts, sweeping them up as easily as kittens and ducking out through the chapel door without a backward glance. Karl stood stunned for a minute, unable to believe that Miranda had fallen for that shit. Sure, she would probably find a way to hurt Dimitrescu for accidentally claiming something Miranda considered hers, but she let the three girls walk away alive and relatively unharmed, and Karl himself was still standing.
Fuck. Maybe there was a god after all.
Karl passed the remainder of the coven meeting in a kind of giddy fugue state, not absorbing a single word of the admonishment Miranda doled out to him and Donna and Moreau. It was the same shit as always, how their work was pitiful and worthless and how they must apply themselves to the cause, how they owed their rotten lives to her, blah blah blah. Karl couldn’t even find it in him to roll his eyes, because for the first time in decades he had won . After all the years fighting tooth and nail to keep his people from the meatgrinder of Miranda’s ambitions, all the families broken and all the familiar corpses on his dissection table, Karl had finally gone toe to toe with the monster that ruined his life and wrenched three lives from her hands.
The girls were, realistically speaking, three parasitic entities riding around in stolen bodies, Karl knew that. But there was consciousness in their eyes, and they had clearly formed some kind of bond amongst themselves and with Dimitrescu. There were scraps of people in there, somewhere, and perhaps one day…
Well. Better to not think that sort of thing too loudly in Miranda’s presence. He hadn’t yet worked out if the bitch could read minds through the Cadou or not, and he wasn’t about to test his luck now.
Miranda finally dismissed Karl and the rest of the freaks from her presence, already turning her back on them and disappearing deeper into the ruined chapel before they could even say goodbye . Karl bounded to his feet and immediately made for the exit, brushing aside Moreau’s attempt at greeting him and punting Donna’s fucking doll out of his way. He wrenched open the door and breathed deep of the spring air, feeling like he’d just escaped certain death.
The entire farce had lasted the span of the night, and now the horizon was turning silver with the rising sun. Karl stared into the dawn, breathing deeply and evenly to calm his still racing heart. It was so early that the birds hadn’t even begun singing yet, and in the quiet Karl’s ears picked up on someone speaking, and the sound of crying.
It sounded familiar.
Karl was never one to ignore his curiosity, even if it led him dick-first into trouble. So he followed the muffled voice and the criers around the flank of the church, into a forest of birch and oak that offered rudimentary shelter from the wider world. Cat-quiet, Karl waded through the underbrush until he found a small clearing and the source of the noise.
Dimitrescu was sitting with her legs tucked beneath her in the long grass, arms wrapped tight around the three terrified and crying girls. She was crooning something to them in a jumble of English and Romanian, tears carving twin tracks in her makeup as she clearly struggled to keep her shit together for the three girls.
“Shhh, fetele mele curajoase…I have you, yes, you are safe now…”
She muttered more of the same to them, her voice low and soft and soothing. It was almost enough for Karl to mistake her for someone with a heart. The subjects clearly thought Dimitrescu was safe, judging by the way they all nuzzled up under her double-chin and kept chanting the word Mamă like a prayer. She responded with equal affection, smoothing tangled hair and kissing foreheads and dabbing blood from young faces with her handkerchief.
Whatever process had led to the girls bonding with Dimitrescu had clearly not been one-sided,
Karl realized. And wasn’t that
interesting
.
His thoughts were interrupted when the brunette tucked in the crook of Dimitrescu’s left arm lifted her nose to the air and began sniffing intently. Narrowing her eyes, the girl snapped her head over to where Karl was standing (hip deep in a bush, not even hiding, fuck ). She flailed wildly and yelled, pointing in his general direction.
“Uite Mamă, măgar !”
Dimitrescu’s head whipped around and she locked eyes with Karl, looking damn near feral as she bowed herself protectively over the three girls she held. For their part, the three young women squirmed until they were all glaring at him as well, and caught in those golden stares Karl couldn’t help but admit there was a family resemblance between the four.
“Heisenberg.” Dimitrescu spat, clearly pissed that he had caught her in this little domestic breakdown. Slowly, carefully, Karl raised his empty hands where the bitch could see them and tried to exert an air of casual confidence.
(And look as unappetizing to three baby vampires as possible.)
“Is that any way to greet the man who saved your ass back there?” he drawled, because where Alcina Dimitrescu was concerned, nothing would keep Karl from antagonizing her. Not even imminent death. She scowled at him, her face a mess of smeared mascara and tears, and somehow Karl felt relieved to see it. Anything was better than that cringing desperation back in the church.
“I did not ask you to interfere. I had things perfectly under control.” she said, grating the words out from tightly clenched teeth. Picking up on her irritation, the girls all began to growl in chorus, sounding like a pack of chainsaws. Karl was sorely tempted to ask if that was why she allowed Miranda to carve into the girls like a Sunday roast, but decided to offer the branch of peace instead.
“Sure. Of course.” he said, pausing awkwardly as he searched for something pleasant to say. He drew a blank, and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
Karl turned in and took a few steps away from the pack of women (a family , however fucked up the origins), suddenly tired from the events of the night. There was a new bottle of whiskey from the Duke waiting for him at his factory, and Karl didn’t intend to sleep until that fucker was bone dry.
He made it perhaps three meters from the clearing when Dimitrescu called after him, her voice clear and cutting in the morning chill.
“Karl.”
He froze. He could count on one hand the times Dimitrescu had referred to him by his Christian name. They were really in uncharted territory if she was pulling it out now. He turned back and approached Dimitrescu and her brood once more, waiting for her to get to the point. For her part, Dimitrescu sat and looked uneasily at him, still holding the girls close to her. She opened her mouth and hesitated, searching the air before her for the right words. Finally, she squared her shoulders, grimaced, and spoke.
“Karl…I repay my debts. Remember that, for I will not say it a second time.”
Karl was conscious of his jaw sagging open slightly, and snapped it shut before she could notice. Dimitrescu held his gaze meaningfully for a heartbeat, then two, before turning her gaze back to the anxious blonde who tugged at her collar. Immediately her ferocious expression softened, and she kissed the girl’s crown with all gentleness.
“Now go. My daughters need to rest.” she said. Still stunned, Karl nodded once before wheeling around and wading back to the main path. He searched his pockets for the stub of cigar he’d stashed there earlier, then struck a match and puffed thoughtfully in the newborn dawn for a long while.
Repaid her debts, did she?
Karl could most definitely work with that.