Night's Omen

Rochelle only arched her brows as he named his profession. Like she'd needed him to say it; she was thankful Poppy had already gone to her room, though she didn't doubt that her daughter hadn't heard him, especially not from the colourful stream of thought she picked up off of her. The bond was strange and unique between them - all of them were fairly weak vampires, but their power seemed to be attached to emotion. Poppy could see auras, but she was empathetic enough to let them change her - Posey could relive memories, but she was empathetic enough to have them control her, and Rochelle, well - as the sire could do much the same with both, except with far better control.

Still, they were low on the list of priorities of 'bad vampires that needed slaying' from most hunters.

"Coffee is disgusting," she said. "If your nose were as strong as mine, you'd understand more why I believe it is, I imagine," she mused, taking another experamental sip from her beverage. It was just right that time, and she let out a little sigh in relief.

Posey chose that moment to come through the front door, and rushed into the kitchen where Chris was. "Back!" she cried, cheeks flushed as her natural ivory hue had returned, replacing the green complexion she'd been getting from being riddled with hunger pangs. "I hope she didn't bother you?" she said, leaning down next to Chris to hear what he had to say on the matter. She didn't get too close, of course - didn't want to get her face ripped off, but still.

"I've done no such thing," her mother said indignantly.

Posey let out an exasperated sigh and sat down in the chair closest to Chris, angling her body more towards him. "I'm sorry I did that. I know you probably didn't enjoy it, but this was the only place I could think that would be safe," she said, voice trailing off. "We can go any time you like," she added. "I can get us back to your car, either with my own or... faster," she said, settling on that as a good vocabulary choice for 'teleporting'.

Somehow, it wasn't so surprising that this woman agreed with what his mother had believed, considering just how much of a 'mom' she felt like.  It was wrong that she was a vampire, as well.  Everything was wrong about this.  She was either smart enough not to make personal inquiries with him, or had been able to glean enough from his mind to know better, but she didn't say anything about his mother, and perhaps that was the best.  He could have just as easily plunged back into himself and completely undone all the calm he'd achieved since then as talk with her about the woman.  It was hard to say which was more likely at that point.

This was definitely the best Posey had looked since he'd met her, but considering what that had entailed, it wasn't surprising.  What had she done to make that happen so fast, though?  Of course, he already knew.  She was a vampire.  That meant blood, but whose blood?  This was why he killed them.  They were dangerous.

But these didn't seem dangerous at all.  Was it really just that good of an act?  It had to be, there was no way any vampires were this normal, this human.  Why hadn't they just eaten him by now, though?  Posey could have done it in the forest without him even struggling.  Why hadn't she, when she'd needed it so badly?  It made no sense!

"Who did you eat?" he asked, not even focusing on what she'd said about leaving and him being safe here.  He believed that, but it still didn't make sense to him.  "And why haven't any of you eaten me yet?  You're vampires."

Posey's brows raised suddenly, and Rochelle made a displeased noise, exiting quickly from the room. Posey meanwhile reeled back, hand on her hip as her mouth opened in surprise. It didn't take long for the shock of his rude question to wear off as she narrowed her eyes - who was she kidding? He'd had a moment of weakness, that was all, what had she honestly expected to happen?

"I didn't eat anyone," she snapped, taking a step back from him. She glared at him a moment longer and then turned, graceful as ever, and went to the refrigerator to rummage for a small juice box. She ripped the plastic off of the straw and crammed it into her mouth, sucking down the apple juice and brushing passed him without another word.

She turned at the doorway and took the straw out of her mouth to talk, and her voice came out both hurt and indignant. "Your prejudice blinds your common sense. I've never killed a human in my life, nor has Poppy or Rochelle. You can't judge us based on what the rest of them do. My bloodline alone has been chased and persecuted for years, nearly wiped out by two berserk Silver vampires who decided to cleanse the Earth of our timid and unobtrusive ways. We're no better than humans to them, and yet to you, still cold and powerful killers. You need to educate yourself a little more on the breed as a whole and the history behind it - We don't fit anywhere it seems," she snapped.

She thundered up the stairs to her room, slamming her door hard behind her.

It was probably for the best that, even though he seemed to be recovering from his 'moment of weakness', it hadn't passed, because he was actually taken aback by her reaction and what she had to say.  It meant that he didn't jump to defend himself, get angry or even turn violent.  She was a vampire after all, so it wouldn't have been so unlikely.  He couldn't even get himself to scoff at her saying she hadn't ever killed a human, even if he found that hard to believe out of a vampire. 

Maybe it was true, but if it was, he really didn't want to know about it.  He had enough trouble with the mission he'd taken on for his family, especially since his brother had gone, that he didn't need it to complicate itself further.  He didn't need to be doubting whether or not killing each vampire he took on was right or wrong.  That kind of doubt was going to get him killed faster than he was already working to accomplish that, intentional or not. 

He hadn't dug himself in any deeper with her by arguing, but he hadn't said anything at all while she snapped at him, which couldn't have really helped his situation.  She took off out of the room and upstairs to slam her door behind herself, and he was left alone in the vampire family's kitchen.  Alone again, but he was feeling a little more together.  It wasn't all there, but with the walk he had ahead of himself, he'd have time to pick up the pieces while he searched out his car.

Damn, that was going to be a long walk.

He considered whether or not he should say anything to any of them, but considering how Poppy had acted since he arrived and how Rochelle had dipped out of the room right before Posey went off, he was figuring that none of them wanted to talk to him.  That was fine, he was used to it.  Not exactly from vampires, but what difference did it make?  He wasn't supposed to be friendly with them, anyway.  He knew how to handle being alone (most of the time), and now that he'd had his freak-out session, his defenses were starting to pull themselves back together.  He could wait until he was alone someplace he knew was safe to break down a little again, but this wasn't the time or place.  He needed to avoid any further 'incidents', because that was just unacceptable.

He stayed in the awkward, lonely kitchen for a moment before he slipped out the back, trying to avoid any further attention.  He didn't need anything else to happen to mess everything up more than it already was.

Poppy jumped, the blue ballpoint pen skipping in her hand as she heard her sister's door slam shut. She sat up, examining the little squiggle she'd made in her journal, and then shut the book with a quiet snap of the pages, the pen discarded. She stood from her desk and walked to her bedroom window at the sound of the back door opening, and cleared her light yellow curtains back to watch the human as he walked and grumbled. She tipped her head to the side a little, but even from where she stood, she could still see nothing but a torrent of anger and pain whipping around him. It made her bite her lower lip, but she didn't really want to let him walk back to the car alone - that was where he was headed, no doubt.

With a sigh, she closed her eyes, feeling the breeze of the world rush by her. When she opened them, she stood only a few paces behind him, though her gait was as steady as his. She moved rather silently though, like a whisper, as was her way. Poppy didn't make waves.

"She's telling the truth, you know. It's why she was in such a panic to get out of the woods there - that vampire who attacked her was probably the last thing on her mind. She's more afraid of them," she said softly, watching his aura and waiting for him to react to her sudden presence. She was ready if he drew a weapon, though she was more willing to vanish than to try and fight. She didn't know how, not really.

There was no denying, not in the least, that Poppy had scared the hell out of him when she spoke up like that.  He'd thought he was alone, and he hadn't heard her leave the house, so having her so close and then speaking nearly gave him a heart attack.  Had he been as high-strung as usual, he might have drawn a weapon and reacted more strongly, but he flinched and twisted around anyway. 

Finding Poppy there wasn't expected. 

"Do you always sneak up on people?" he asked, though he was somewhat lacking in his usual venom.  God, he was going to sleep like the dead when he finally made it to someplace that resembled a bed.  The back of his car might do if he didn't make it back to his room.  That looked possible.

He started walking again, assuming that if she was going to attack him, she would have instead of talking to him, and really, he didn't care if she wanted to.  At least he wouldn't have to walk to his car.  "Who's 'them'?"  Did she mean Mayhem? 

Oh.  He'd forgotten that he was looking for Mayhem.  He didn't have the energy or the force of will to keep looking that day, but he'd forgotten nonetheless.

Poppy sighed a little, such a human thing to do, and walked with him, bringing herself to his side slowly but surely. "The rest of the vampires. A lot of older ones live in Mayhem, including some of the ones that had a good sport of picking off Mira vampires one by one, until there were almost none left." She spoke sadly, but Poppy had done a great deal of studying, and knew her lineage rather well.

"I know that you think we're all evil, but really, some of us who choose to still have souls. It isn't my fault I became a vampire, no more than it is hers, or Rochelle's. Sometimes getting caught in a metaphysical crossfire gives you new perspective on things around you; in our case, a new reverence for life."

She fell silent for a moment, surprised he wasn't instantly arguing with her, but she figured that would be a good opportunity to continue before he started to. "I'm not telling you to offer hugs and lollipops to every vampire you see. Hardly. Posey's a little more innocent than I am - what I'm saying - no, asking, Chris, is that you don't isolate people who can help you."

She stopped suddenly. "Oh, for Christ's sake, where is your car? You realize we're miles from where you found Posey, don't you? Ugh, let me just take you there," she snapped, the soft and melodic tone of her voice replaced more or less by what sounded like an impatient teenager. She held out her hand, palm up.

He listened to her, which was more than he'd usually have done, but he really didn't have the energy to spare arguing.  He was bound to argue SOMETHING, but he was going to choose his battles for once instead of snapping at everything.  He honestly didn't know how long the walk was to his car, but he knew it was far, so he was going to take it easy lest he end up sleeping on a bench somewhere. 

She didn't seem to have anything to say that he hadn't already gathered from Posey, though she had more details, but it didn't help his situation any.  She was still suggesting that he start taking good and bad into account where vampires were concerned, which was only going to make his life more difficult. 

Wait, help?  What was she talking about? 

"Help?  Who's going to help me?" he demanded, his voice only just starting to sound more like himself.  He could promise to leave her family alone in his purge of the vampires in the area if that was what she wanted, since they were so eerily human that it flipped him out, but he didn't know what else she wanted.  Why else was she telling him all this?  "If I choose to 'isolate' people, it's my problem.  Popularity gets people killed."

He wasn't losing someone else he cared about, because he wasn't going to care anymore.  It made perfect sense to him.

When she stopped, he assumed that she was giving up, but she only complained about how far his car was, then claimed it was miles.  Well, that was going to suck.  "I can manage.  Nobody asked you to follow me.  Go back to your book."

For a half-second, Poppy wanted to disorientate him so badly that she could taste it. She wouldn't be the one to defect from the little harmonic balance that the family had going, though, at least not right then. She let out an angry, indignant breath. "I can see why she likes you; you're as stubborn as she is," she snapped.

There was a lot more Poppy wanted to say; none of it was nice, so she settled for a shocking sort of stillness that only a vampire could hold, and then vanished. She returned home, but didn't go inside yet, opting to sit out on the porch swing to try and still her temper. She was peaceful, yes, but she was still female, and when she got frustrated she could barely resist the urge to scream. She was thankful for the immortal blood she had, it had taught her temperance when she normally would have been losing her marbles.

She rose slowly after a moment and went inside the conventional way, locking the door behind her. She supposed she should sleep, since she knew that Chris wouldn't be. It brought a little smug smile to her face, but she mentally scolded herself for being glad about his situation. His aura was so muddled... She hoped he would get out of the forest in one piece.

He really didn't need any help getting disoriented and all messed up, especially when he was only just starting to get a grip on himself, but if Poppy would have done it, he'd have just dealt with it and hated vampires more for it.  That would have just messed with the argument Posey was having with him about Miras being 'good vampires'.  Poppy was better for deciding against it.

She was probably also better for leaving him where he was.  He wasn't really in any mood to be any good socially, not with the way this evening had been going and his state of mind, and she wasn't exactly helping things.  Just her being a vampire didn't help, so there wasn't much to be done there. 

Leaving meant that he still had a long walk ahead of him, and he'd refused his 'lift' there.  Oh, well.  It wasn't like he wanted a vampire's help, anyway.  Right.  He'd be reconsidering after a mile or three, he knew that.

Sure enough, he was, especially when he realized that he really hadn't been to this part of town yet.  He wasn't exactly sure where he was going, and was pretty positive he'd screwed something up along the way.  He hoped the cops in this area weren't a hassle, because the second he found a bench, he was sleeping.

Right around 4 AM, Chris would probably wake up to a shock as Angela Arun's body slammed into the back of the bench he'd been sleeping on. She rolled over it ungracefully, across him, and landed on her face on the concrete. "Mother. FUCKER!" she roared, moving out of the way as a very quick vampire first went straight for her spine. A metallic ting was heard and sparks were seen as the knife the vampire was using wedged itself into the concrete - damn superhuman strength.

She took the advantage of the youngling's sudden confoundedness at his abilities (he was fresh; months old by her calculations), to whip out one of her Vida knives. She gave his knee a kick so hard she heard the bones break, and swung her own blade downward, thrusting it into the side of his face.

It didn't take much.

Angela was panting - she was a little angry about that, wiping sweat out of her dark hair. The blood on the knife was discarded as easily as she squatted down to rub it on the grass. She already had purple bruises forming on her arms, and she could feel her muscles in her legs aching from chasing the fuck across the park, but still - so worth it.

"That's one down, one hundred billion to go," she muttered. She hadn't even noticed Chris yet, not really - she figured that the body on the bench was a dead one, in all honesty. That vampire had been using the park as his stomping ground, and she'd waited there all fucking night for him to show up. She'd probably inadvertently saved Chris from being chewed up in his sleep, actually.

She made a thoughtful sort of noise as she kicked the body over onto its back, tilting her head a little. She knew him - they'd gone to high school together. He was actually more of Jared's friend than hers, and that notion made her lip curl in a little sneer. She spit on the dead body, cursing the day she'd ever met Bastian. He was so dead to her.

Except not. And that's what sucked the most.

He couldn't have honestly said that he would have been against being chewed up in his sleep.  Maybe it would have been quick that way.  He'd care more after he was awake.

After he was done cursing and being pissed over tumbling off of the bench, and scrambling out of the way of their fight while he grabbed for weapons that....weren't there.  FUCK!

FuckfuckfuckmotherfuckerFUCK!

He glanced around fast, looking for something he might even be able to USE.  Short of diving for the knife that the vampire had gotten stuck in the concrete, which he knew wasn't going to happen, he was pretty much useless.  That was nice.  He thought fast, trying to remember what happened to his gun, and he knew he'd been waving it around when he first started freaking out.  After that...he wasn't so sure.

DAMN IT.

It wasn't like it mattered, since the girl killed the vamp pretty quickly, and he couldn't say he disagreed with her handling of the body.  Actually, it was refreshing, given his discussions of the night before.  "Nicely done, I officially feel useless.  Thanks, though," he told her, trying not to sound too peeved over having been unarmed.  At least he got up off of the ground.

Angela jumped in surprise, obviously, when Chris got up off the ground. "Damn, I thought you were dead," was all she said for a minute. She shifty-eyed the situation, and was about to give him a good blow to the head before she took off when he congratulated her on her disposal of the vampire. She paused - he was human, she could tell that much now that she was paying attention.

"Thanks," she grunted as an afterthought. She gestured to the bench with her first and middle fingers, the other three curled around the knife still lightly, letting it droop a little in her palm. "Sorry about your, ah, bed?" she said, voice lifting at the end as though to make it a question. She blew brown strands of wet hair out of her eyes and resumed what she'd been doing before, which was putting her knives away before someone showed up, sort of like this, to catch her in the act.

She knelt down and began rummaging through the vampire's pockets, because Angela wasn't above pillaging at all - it was commonly frowned upon, but she wasn't a Single Earth goer, so she didn't quite give a fuck about what they said or did. She particularly did it just to spite Jacob, because she knew he wouldn't approve of it, and she wasn't thrilled with him at the moment.

Men just complicated her life, no matter what their station was in regards to her. Boyfriend, friend, accidental vampire acquaintance.. whatever the case was, there was something in the air when it came to them. Speaking of men -

"So," she said, standing up to wedge four hundred-dollar bills into her pocket. "You look a little too well-groomed to be sleeping on a bench." That, unmistakably, was not a question, but rather a statement. "S'your story?"

He couldn't help a cynical sort of smile when she said she thought he was dead, though he was surprised he startled her.  He'd have thought she'd be keyed up and noticing everything around her at this point.  Mistakes happened, however, and that was a tactical reason why he missed his brother.  They'd made a good team, and now he was alone and never had anyone to watch his back.  That was going to screw him over royally one of these days.

For the most part, he just watched her.  He didn't know the vampire, he had no reason to get involved with it, but he sure as hell wasn't going to be sleeping again in the next few minutes, especially on that uncomfortable damn bench.  He busied himself stretching out sore muscles while she tore through the vampire's pockets, and shrugged when she said he looked a little too well-groomed to be sleeping on a bench.  That was definitely unexpected, since she'd thought he was dead a few minutes earlier, and he HAD had a pretty rough night.  'Well-groomed' wouldn't have been his words of choice, but he supposed she had a point.  So far as he knew, he didn't stink yet.

"Lost my car outside Mayhem, and pretty much lost Mayhem at this point.  I chased off the 'helpful' leech," he explained pretty simply, as though it wasn't all that strange.  "I'm new enough to the area that I really don't know where I'm going, I was tired, so I figured I'd sleep my bad mood off and keep looking in the morning."

Angela stared at him. "Helpful leech? Was that supposed to make sense?" she asked, though her expression was sort of blank. She blinked a few times, and then went back to what she was doing - she took a personal inventory of what she had on her, and then moved around a little to make sure nothing was broken. The bruises would be gone in a few days, at least.

"Are you sure you didn't crack your face on the pavement when I got thrown into your bench?" she asked hesitantly, lifting a leg up, again somewhat ungracefully, to slide the blade she'd been using back into a strap where it was kept. It was funny to see how, well, human Angela was moving, considering what she'd just done. The truth was that she'd learned to have a very convincing cover for what she did when she was around other people, hunters or no. Not everyone needed to know that she was a Witch, as though the last name didn't give it away.

"I can probably get you to your car, if you can remember anything about where it was," she said, tapping her fingers to her chin, nevermind the dirt and blood that was drying on them. She'd take a shower when she got home; it wasn't priority at the moment.