Chapter Text
23 October 2016
The thick layer of snow that covered the paved roads was not enough to silence the fast footsteps of the creatures roaming through them with feverish craving. A pack of ravenous Lycans had picked up a trail of fresh blood, and woe to the wretched who owned such a delicacy. Strangely enough, there had been no hunting in the village that night. The bloody trail began at the foot of a dead mutation of several shots in the path that connected the old dam with the mill - clearly guessing that one of those crazy mutts had had the misfortune to end up shot while trying to attack some distracted villager. Unfortunately, the one who had been victorious in the heat of the confrontation had also been wounded during the same.
Following their instinct, the Lycans let the so flavorful trail led them to such an appetizing prey.
Once they reached the mill, the beasts tried to enter - scratching and hitting the planks that served as a door to the ruined tower. Their lethal paws pounced furiously over and over on the smug wood, yet they were unable to open a hole large enough to allow them entry. Filled with rage, they began to call out to one another, howling frantically and throwing themselves without hesitation against the decaying structure.
They could smell it - feel it.
The beating heart of their prey was in that tower, singing a delicious symphony of blazing crimson blood and fresh flesh.
In the silence of the night, a breath barely perceptible to the fined ears of the creatures was replaced by a dark grunt which was no longer human. Suddenly, the howling stopped. There was something inside that ruined place, dangerous enough to silence the starving chant of until that moment the biggest nocturnal predators in the area.
And it was looking forward to getting out.
Pain was unbearable. Travelling from the leg wound to her head, it exploded and reached each of the woman’s cells. She could feel each of her nerve endings ache - change and change again, over, and over.
After what seemed like hours of suffering, she opened her eyes. Contorting barely on the floor, she couldn’t see anything apart from some red spots moving in her close field of vision on an abyssal background. At first, she innocently believed her sight must have been damaged - but she soon realized that those things were howling and wouldn’t shut up, making her feel like her ears were going to explode. She angrily tore out her gag and spat dark blood on the floor while her bones seemed to struggle to come out of her flesh, the muscles tightened so heavily that her lungs did not have enough space to breathe.
The pain of the leg wound was infinitesimally insignificant compared to what she felt at the time.
Fever and the nightmares had caused her to drop her shotgun a few meters away - the same one that had finished a Lycan just a few hours before. As she could, the woman tried to crawl down the damp mill floor to get to it in a desperate attempt to end that eternal and burning suffering. The pain suddenly increased exponentially and making her broken scream ignite the icy night air around her.
Without strength, she merely stopped trying - resting her body face up and letting bitter tears run down her skin. She felt her heart pumping in her ears, envenomed blood running through her veins and burning below the feverish flesh. She looked up painstakingly, a great black and dark vastness in which she only saw those red spots moving from one side to the other. In her delirium, it looked like 15 or 20 - and they were moving viciously fast.
The woman hardly swallowed as she realized that - somehow - she was able to see those beasts through the walls of the mill, same defeated walls once abandoned that would not protect her for much longer.
Anger, despair, and an unfathomable sadness. The powerlessness of being alone and abandoned, about to see her life skewed by the vicious claws of those corrupt creatures while absolutely no one in that cursed valley allowed themselves to remember her. Hushed tears started running down her swollen cheeks. A spark of voracious tenacity caught on her chest, perhaps motivated by the same searing pain that barely let her breathe.
No, her life couldn’t end like this. Boom. Boom. A new heartbeat. A new purpose.
She had to kill them. Every single one of those damn bastards that were waiting for her out there.
She growled.
24 October 2016
"Well, well... What a wonderful way to fuck such an early morning.”
Heisenberg’s ironic words did not even bother the scandalous crows, who reveled in such an unexpected feast of rotting flesh - the scene itself a whole show worthy of the maximum expression of the macabre. Dismembered Lycans were piling up around him - scratches and bites left no doubt something substantially big had finished with them. Easily, much to his regret. Most of them had limbs torn and scattered by what was once the entrance of the mill to a trail heading towards Moreau’s lair. The Lord clenched his jaw in a grimace of utter dissatisfaction as a hideous whiff of rotting fish flooded his nostrils.
How he hated having to abandon the suffocating heat of his Factory to enter the damp grounds of that slimy imbecile.
"Tsk, what a waste." He said as he kicked away the bleeding torso of one of the mutts. "It certainly ain't the most appropriate place to enjoy a good hunt.”
Heisenberg watched the scene a little more, not sure whether to be raring or enraged. It wasn’t exactly more trouble he needed at the time, of course - not when Miranda kept meddling in his affairs too often while the rest of the Lords made a special effort not to have to do shit. The sudden sound of bone fracturing combined with insatiable grunts made him look over his shoulder. He took another deep shot at his cigar while the few Vârcolacs - a little present he had borrowed from Moreau - who accompanied him frolicked and dismembered the remains of their fellow beings.
Stupid brainless aberrations.
One of them, nevertheless, sniffed a substantially smaller bloody trail heading for the dam. Heisenberg crouched right next to the mutated creature’s dripping, stinking jaw, and smiled at its hair bristling. It had detected fear.
“Looks like our unwanted guest ain't used to its hunting ground, huh?" He rose, and sighed as his limping bones creaked. "Let’s hope it didn’t drink in the wrong puddle and now it’s nothing but mush in that asshole fish’s stomach."
Obviously, whatever had killed the Lycans wasn’t human - at least, not anymore. Such a crystalline conclusion only infuriated him even more, not very sure whether because of such an unexpected coincidental or simply because he had not the remotest idea of what could be capable of skewing with such precision the life of those evil dogs. Would any of Miranda’s experiments have escaped the clutches of that psycho witch? Heisenberg laughed softly and took another hit to her cigar as he imagined the woman’s furious face at the prospect of losing one of her precious toys.
Truth was that were fewer and fewer unfortunates left in that village, and it was difficult to find new subjects to experiment. Miranda’s lack of self-control would complicate matters in the near future, but now that was irrelevant.
The priority was to find the criature before its overeating alerted someone. Heisenberg breathed as much air as he could without suppress a grimace of disgust. He was used to the smothering heat, the sulfur saturating everything and hitting her lungs with devastating force. Smelling the fresh air was like saturating his senses with a too cloying sweet. Still, it wasn’t hard for him to identify the smell. So embedded in the air around him that it went completely unnoticed at first, but once he noticed it he could not think of anything else. It was a mixture of ash bark, honey, and wild roses, all linked in a single essence with blood and gunpowder.
Too intense, his mind protested hopelessly and he grunted in response. He wouldn’t be surprised if that thing was able to attract all the Lycans from miles away using those pheromones.
Even he was struggling to stay sane, and that was a real problem. Feeling how his heart - rather, the parasite that replaced it- was speeding up and pumping fiery lava through his veins, Heisenberg ordered the rest of the pack to go back to their nests. Lycans and Vârcolacs soon obeyed the command, leaving him absolutely alone contemplating the snowy horizon and the winding path that led to Moreau's swamp.
"For your sake, I hope you don’t disappoint me, beast.” He murmured, initiating the step.
"Shit. This is certainly - ” His words died on his dry lips as his mind processed the scene " - unforeseen."
Of all the farfetched things Heisenberg had vaguely imagined he could find, the Lord had to admit that none of them passed by a naked woman - covered in blood and dirt, tied with a rusty chain to the pier that welcomed Moreau’s personal pool. Young, early 20s. It was hard to identify her features because of the dirt covering it, but her white wet hair was impossible to ignore. An albino, he thought as he approached slowly and studied her apparently slow breathing. Another new mystery to investigate, since he wasn’t aware of any in his records of the people from the village - and the accuracy of them was unquestionable, reviewed by Miranda herself.
A simple way to keep future subjects identified.
For a moment, Heisenberg allowed himself to imagine that the poor wretch could had been running away from the beast and tied herself up to prevent it from taking her. He shook his head, disgusted by his own ingenuity. The trail - that essence of corrupted rot - was not impregnated in her.
It came from her.
He grunted, sure that woman was the magnificent heinousness that had skewed two dozen of his best Lycans the night before. Heisenberg’s eyes flashed amber reflections of curiosity as they caressed her skin, running up and down. She was intact, without a minimum redness or scratch. All the blood that stained her and her surroundings appeared to be from her fellow victims.
The Lord stood still, undaunted. Letting his heightened senses do the work for him, confirming that they were both completely alone. The dark waters remained silent, vague waves here and there because of the small snowflakes that were occasionally dropped. The bitter pestilence to decay remained equally intense - not much, not little. Moreau did not seem to be in the vicinity. Deeply inspiring, Heisenberg decided to intervene before other unexpected guests could witness such a particular discovery.
"What are you, pretty one?" The woman didn’t answer, of course. Still, something inside his mind besought him to keep talking. "Let's see how much of an aberration you have inside that small body of yours.”
He knelt before her and with a snap of his gloomy fingers make the chains curl over her passed out limbs, joining her hands and feet in an unbreakable bond. A simple safety measure. It was impossible for her in her current state to do the Lord considerable harm, yet he had no way of checking her abilities - much less risking her running away. To his surprise, blue flames stuck in his surprised expression as he looked back at the strange woman’s face.
She had opened her eyes, and was watching him with an ethereal peace.
She had heard him arrive - the tinkling of metal always accompanying his movements.
She could feel the pungent smell of a cigar smoke and a deep aroma of sulphur entering her raspy throat and burning her as it passed into her overtired lungs.
In fact, she had heard everything since before he arrived at the pier - heavy steps crawling with a familiar cadence along the gravel trail.
The woman frowned slightly at the picturesque figure standing beside her. A tall, scruffy man with gray hair - such a colour could deceive about his age, but the posture and defiant attitude he detached did not. Dark glasses that hid his eyes, and a huge deviant hammer. His build seemed athletic, strong - though that didn’t stop her from wondering how a normal person could be able to lift such a strange artifact, or what its use might even be.
"Go." She whispered with a broken voice. "I do not know exactly what or whom I had killed during the night, but I don’t think you want to end up like those poor ill-fated."
Patches of shos burst into her memory in lacerating stabs. Screams, grunts, blood, cries drowned in the night... a red nothing that blinded her vision and drove her to keep killing. Chills shook her body under the watchful eye of Heisenberg, who could perfectly see the unforgiving shadow of fear clouding her glacial gaze.
"Wow, that’s a few manners. Anyone would expect a little more courtesy in a situation like this, kleines Mädchen."
His voice was low, but soft. The woman, considerably surprised by his playful tone and foreign tongue, failed to suppress her angry sigh. She was accustomed to the twangy raspy contempt in the words of the villagers - his, was totally different. She could say that even seductive, although in those fevrish moments she wasn’t exactly in her right mind.
"You won’t care so much about courtesy when I pull your arms out of your body and throw them into that swamp to feed whatever lives down there." She almost barked. "Don’t ask me how I know that. I’m telling you for your own good. You better go. Now"
She casually looked at him a little more. The smoke of the cigar he was smoking prevented her from appreciating his facial features, and that frustrated her considerably. The man said nothing for a long time, while her patience began to crack.
Really feelingt the urge to take his cigar out of his scarred hands. We tore it off. And fingers too. Eyes for looking at us like that -
No. A painful hiss echoed between her lips as she clenched her jaw tightly in a frantic plea to try to silence the voice of the creature that now parasitized her mind. Its thirst for blood, until now controlled, began to sprout with renewed vigor. She kept telling herself she had to keep control - that she couldn’t let anger control her impulses so easily. Heisenberg so clearly noticed the struggle that seemed to be going on in her head, and out of the blue he grabbed firmly her chin and lifted it up so he could look her straight in the eye.
A chill ran through her body seeing the crazy satisfaction that emanated from his perverse grin.
"It’s touching that you care about me, woman. But you’re looking at the wrong monster." She frowned again, confused. "Come on, sweetie. We both know your deafening instincts are screaming that I’m not a mere mortal. Besides, even if you truly wanted to, I doubt my chains would allow you to do anything in your present state.”
“I don’t care about you, ciudat!" She exclaimed as he laughed even more. "It’s my own conscience that keeps me up at night. I don’t want to hurt anyone else, much less an old man with a particular desire to die prematurely!”
Heisenberg gave her a loud dry laugh that ended up being more like a grunt. He had not overlooked her insult, nor did he loose his grip.
“No shitty conscience in this place, woman. Just us, and believe me -" Her breath burned strongly in her chest as she felt the cold metal of the chains harden its grip considerably. " - my hands are far more stained than yours.”
She stood up slightly once his warning has ended, leaning on her elbows while the chains seemed to relax its embrace around her. The ground creaked under their bodies, and they both slid our gazes to the rotten wood that was barely holding their weight. She stared at him then, studying his every reaction to her words.
"Are you going to kill me?"
The man almost seemed to take it as a personal offense, though it did not last long as his bitter laughter returned almost silently. While he seemed to consider her question, the woman pondered her options. She didn’t know the man, but her blood seemed to sing at the slightest chance of interaction with him. The way his body curved predatory over her, the wrinkles that furrowed his scarred face... everything was disturbingly familiar. She searched her memories, eagerly looking for any trace of that peculiar individual. Her interactions with the people from the village had been sparse and rarely productive, provided it was not to exchange some skins and hunted prey she needed to survive in the forest.
On the other hand, he was nothing like any villager she’d ever seen.
“Don’t be stupid. You won’t be any fun if you are dead.” He finally said, although she felt there was something else.
That surprised her, of course. He seemed sincere, unfortunately for her, and now she was the one who couldn’t help but laugh before such an absurd response.
“For what it's worth, I’m not going to kill you. You also seem to be fun to mess with, too.” She retorted.
He raised his eyebrows and took another hit to his cigar - pretty sure in her mind that the man had to believe she was hopelessly crazy.
“Such a spoiled lady, huh? Well, you could always get the beast out, but considering the feast you threw back there... In my opinion, you only have two options." The man shrugged, downplaying. "I can leave you here and hope that the rest of the soulless crap that populate this forgotten land finish you and then take you with me -”
The woman vehemently denied, upset.
"Take me with you? But what -"
"Or you can accept the hand I so generously offer you right now. I can give you a warm place to stay and maybe the best deal anyone can ever offer you. You decide, woman.”
"I don’t even know you. Why should I trust you?"
Heisenberg was particularly offended by such an assertion, but he concealed it rather well among witty, scathing words.
"Yeah, well, I don’t know what fucking dump you came out of, but that’s clear to me. I’m kind of a Lord around here, you know?" He tilted his head, looking at her over his dark specs. "You could always ask for shitty references to the rest of the brainless assholes living in the village."
She looked at him for a few seconds. No one walked through the Lord's territory without fear of what might lurk in the shadows - at least no one who was familiar with Miranda’s cult. Heisenberg was fascinated by how this woman looked like she had just emerged from a perfect shell, placed right in front of him almost as if she had fallen from the sky. She did not seem to be particularly aware of the customs that reigned in the valley, but she spoke and developed with an ease worthy of someone like him.
In fact, he had clearly read the anger in the way his fists had closed in anger at mentioning Miranda's followers.
She, on the other hand, was more confused than ever. If this man was able to offer her such an opportunity, he was a powerful one. But that also meant that maybe, and only maybe, she could use him to find out more about what was going on in the village and, of course, what was happening to her. She fixed into his eyes again through his dark glasses. Without realizing it, the woman sketched a mischievous smile.
"I hope you have an armoured room that can resist a monster, because otherwise you will have very serious problems."
The man laughed eagerly and held out his hand as the chains left her aching limbs. She looked at them, curiously, and then looked back at him. Heisenber just shrugged and smiled - she knew he wouldn’t tell her anything else for the moment. How had he done that without touching her? More questions crowded into her subconscious, while she merely tried to silence them. At least, the other voice - the beast, the one asking for blood - seemed to be quiet. For now.
"Oh, of course. I have the best room you can imagine. Well, more than a room, it would be something like a huge skeleton of scorching metal. With butlers included." He laughed, enjoying a macabre joke that only he seemed to understand.
She took his hand and got up. The woman noticed before, but she decided not to mention it - they were full of scars, like a hunter does when accidentally cuts himself with his skinning knife.
"Here, cover yourself with this.” The man removed his raincoat, placing it gently on her shoulders. His body heat enveloped her, and his piercing scent saturated her senses as she settled the garment.
She could feel his eyes sparingly running through her body, analysing each of the still visible parts of her skin. His look was not obscene, almost as if he passionately worshipped what he was seeing. She couldn’t help but blush.
“Do you like what you see?” She said, proud.
The man stepped towards her, forcing her to lift her head.
“I can’t say I mind you going naked, but I can understand that you ain't immune to frostbite." He casually suggested. "It would be shameful to survive a pack of Lycans and let the cold kill ya, wouldn’t you agree?”
The name was strange in her ears, but so familiar in his lips that she could almost taste the image of the bloody jaws trying to close around her trachea the night before - while powerful claws twice the size of their heads slit them without any scruples. The memory bombarded her mind, awakening mixed feelings. The woman took a hand to the side of her head, while her angry look settled on the man. Lycans. The word had awakened something in her.
A vomiting feeling of recognition.
"Those beasts. You know what they are." He nodded slowly, and she swallowed with difficulty. "They’re razing the village, you know that? You... What are you, exactly?"
She almost hissed her words. He had begun to calmly walk towards the road while she was trying to clear her thoughts. Upon hearing the question, Heisenberg stopped and turned around - a predatory smile never abandoning his lips.
"Your blood does not sing the answer, precious? Nah, I guess whatever it is the mold has not finished spoiling that beautiful flesh of yours.” He opened one of his arms and with the other held his hat against his chest, making an exaggerated bow. "Name is Heisenberg. Karl Heisenberg.”
Another heartbeat. She took her hand to her chest, feeling her heart pressing against her rib cage and the beast resting in the darkness roared in its awakening. The woman bit her tongue, nailing her incisors with a harrowing force that spurred a spring of blood into her mouth. When she stood up again, she noticed he had taken off his glasses. A lightning just went through her spasmodic heart, making her pulse insane.
Those eyes.
She had seen them many times, in her dreams. The eyes of a wild animal, a natural predator at the top of the food chain for which everything was an appetizing prey. They glowed in an intense amber-coloured tone, completely hiding the hazel hiding underneath. Like the eyes of a ravenous wolf, she thought. What was that connection they both felt, that forced them to want to get into each other’s skin? Her blood was racing back through her body, and she could also feel a nice tingling under her skin. Oh, how she craved that feeling.
I should be scared.
I should turn around and run away without looking back.
I should be thinking about the monster that had been created inside myself instead of feeling fascination for the one right in front of me.
Oh, she should have done a lot of things, and none of them was really what she did.
"My name is Jenica. I hope the deal you’re planning on offering me doesn’t include being your experiment." Staring deeply into his eyes, she repeated his exaggerated reverence. "Because if it is, I swear I will take that huge hammer you carry and crush all your joints until you beg me to let you die.”
Her eyes were two pure springs of sharpened ice, changing iridiscent tones slightly according to her emotions. Two magnetic wells that seemed to be able to rip off pieces of your soul with overwhelming ease. Heisenberg was forced to look away, taking refuge in an involuntary check of his surroundings while the woman’s threatening words echoed his own thoughts. Don’t mess with food, fool. The Lord glanced at her sideways, watching the girl scowl at some battle that was undoubtedly fought in her confused brain.
She was very different from those fearful bastards from the village, and his conscience didn’t seem to like it.
As all those thoughts were spinning in his head, Jenica had been watching him. Seeing that he was not following her, she stood right in front of the Lord - took the almost consumed cigar without saying anything and took a deep puff, returning it to his lips after a few seconds. Heisenberg bitten hard at the rolled-up pack of dry tobacco that she had so mockingly dared to snatch from him, as if that would prevent her from taking it off again. Jenica smiled at the childish reaction, and sighed looking at the horizon.
“Well, shall we go?” She smiled at him and bowed slightly, letting the Lord show her the way.
What the hell? This damned woman is either very brave, or very stupid. Heisenberg thought as she adjusted her step to his own, starting the way back to the Factory.