Chapter Text
As a sword was drawn in New Orleans, Louisiana, a thread was cut without explanation in a basem*nt of Vatican City. The thread was one of many coiled tightly around a meter and a half long staff embedded into the stone floor. But it was not the first to fall, other brown-red thread identical to it laid around the floor.
As it split, another presence filled the room.
A being carried on more wings than a flock of birds entered the room as it split. Each of its dozen mouths fell silent from their eternity of prayer as it laid still. Like a serpent whose task has been fulfilled. It reached out with hundreds of hands to touch it with eggshell tenderness.
The angel wept. Oh, how it wept. With eyes the color of purest white, red tears streamed down its form and fell up towards the Heavens.
And the Heavens wept in return.
--
The being known as Erin’s guardian angel was surprised when she found herself on Earth again. In Aurelius Sonnestern’s kitchen no less. The priest was surprised as well. He was holding a steak he’d just gotten out of the oven.
“My God, Michelle!” Father Sonnestern exclaimed, barely recovering his composure in time to save his dinner, “I thought I told you to knock! Suddenly appearing in my house stopped being entertaining a long time ago.” He carefully set the tray down before looking up at Michelle.
He froze when he saw her.
“…” Michelle reached up and dabbed at the tears around her face. Whispers from on high filled her, “She’s found her birthright.” Her dispassionate tone clashed with the tears, “This is your fault.”
Sonnestern blanched. Stared. Ran a hand over gray hair that seemed to thin faster every decade, “There must be a-”
Michelle just shook her head. Sonnestern spat a curse and started thinking.
“Aurelius.” Michelle intoned.
“How?” Sonnestern asked, bewildered, “It’s in Italy, it should be in-”
“An issue of man,” Michelle said in an accusatory tone, “A leaky ship that rots away by the century because of individuals like you. And now by fate or severe misfortune it has found its way back to our charge.” She locked eyes with him and he broke the gaze almost immediately, “What shall you do.” It wasn’t a question. It was a challenge.
“...Explain.” Father Sonnestern said after an arduous pause. He nodded to himself as he said it like that would make it more plausible, “Michelle, we can get through to her if we’re just honest. Honest about what happened-”
“Sonnestern.” Michelle said, eyes boring into him, “For two decades I have left you to your methods. All that I’ve asked is that you allow me to monitor her. For two decades they have failed. Erin whether through her nature or the way you nurtured her is out of your control. She is treading a dangerous border.” She shook her head and stepped closer as she continued to speak. Sonnestern backed up as Michelle walked towards him, “I would ask you if you understand the danger posed here, but it does not matter. You are out of time. As we speak your brothers make preparations.”
She stopped as he backed into the counter. Without warning she then reached over and set the landline beside one of his hands.
“Make the call.” Michelle said sympathetically, “Even you know it is a better fate than your clergy finding her.”
Sonnestern stood in grim silence for a long while. Then he paced. He picked at his nails. He slammed cabinets as he got a drink. He screamed.
Then he made the call.
--
Kincaid answered after two rings. Since he got one of those new cell phone he’d been priding himself on answering before three. This time he’d set it on the nightstand of the German hotel he was staying at. He was currently working a desk job; which for Kincaid composed of making a sniper’s perch out of the desk and chair that came with his room.
He sat in the chair, a suppressed Remington M700 sat on the desk propped up by a bipod, and both looked out through the window out into the landscape of Berlin.
“One sec,” He said before tucking the phone between his shoulder and ear as he watched a vampire feign sipping wine through a 16x magnification scope. The party was a Red Court affair taking place on the roof of a highrise a few hundred meters away. Kincaid had picked the glass up while he was here, decided it was time for an upgrade to a Schmidt-Bender for his work rifle. It had sighted well and he’d zeroed it perfectly for his wood-core FMJ rounds at 300 meters, “Go for Kay.”
“It’s Aurelius.” Sonnestern’s voice made Kincaid’s brow raise. Now that was a voice he never thought he’d hear again. He hadn’t heard from him in something like… twenty, twenty-five years?
“How bad?” Kincaid asked without missing a beat. “Assuming it’s what we talked about last.”
“Somehow she found it, she’s drawn it.” Sonnestern said, a bout of static from a sigh, clouding the speaker, “Other than that I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Kincaid asked with a scoff, “Ain’t it your job to know?”
“I. Don’t. Know.” Sonnestern said emphatically, his teeth grinding nearly audible through the speaker. “She’s rebellious, independent. It’s hard to keep an eye on her when we don’t live under the same roof.”
“Not sure how interested I am then. Never liked the unpredictability of youth,” The assassin said as he focused on his target. The hard part about this was not only the other partygoers but also the three bodyguards. Each stayed within a foot of their vampire boss in a triangle formation meaning the shot was rarely clean, “Plus, I’m working right now-”
“By God, Kincaid, The Church will pay-”
“And you know jack sh*t.” Kincaid continued, “And even if you did, it didn’t work out so well last time around did it? Don’t remember the Church trying to make it up to me the last time they called me to clean up their mess.”
A faster rush of static, “The Church will pay however much you want and provide however much support-” Sonnestern’s voice was beginning to clip the microphone to his phone.
Kincaid just started laughing, “Perché dovrei volere aiuto da un ratto come... te?” He responded in rusty Italian.
Sonnestern shouted something unintelligible before there was a crash and the line went dead.
“Prick.” He said with a sigh as he lifted his head to set the phone back.
Barely a moment passed after he turned his cell phone off that Kincaid felt Death in the room.
Without hesitating he dove from his chair behind the bed and came up with his rifle raised. Handgun might be more maneuverable but a full-power round like 7.62 NATO has the kinetic energy to drop even large game-
But instead of a vampire’s bodyguard, or even a vampire, there was a woman standing in the middle of his hotel room. She was dressed simply and comfortably in layers of white, yellow, and beige and strappy sandals. One could assume she was a school administrator or a local government worker. Practically identical to when he’d met her along with Sonnestern decades ago.
“Put it down.” Michelle intoned, her head tilting as she looked at his rifle, “Unless you truly believe a spike of wood and copper will kill something older than Time.”
“Hey, you’d be surprised how often it does.” The assassin replied with a grim smile, “Now, you’re interrupting my work. Don’t know if you heard but I already told Sonnestern to kick rocks.”
“I don’t believe he portrayed the urgency of the matter at hand.” She said, walking over to the window to look out across Berlin. The muzzle of Kincaid’s rifle followed the whole time, “I don’t believe you understand the impact of you failing to accept.”
Kincaid’s eyes narrowed, “Threats are a bad look even if you’re from Upstairs, seraphim.”
“I’m of little threat to you, you’re aware of that.” Michelle said, continuing to look out across the window with a frown on her face, “That girl though? She can be a real threat. She’s unstable. Erratic. Youthful with all its ego. She craves violence and hunts monsters for sport and profit. She craves answers about who she is even more.” She turned her head to look at Kincaid and when she did there was a glint in her eye, “Now she’s been pointed towards her past. Where do you think that will lead her Kincaid? Do you want to chance being hunted by someone like you?”
Kincaid had no response. He just kept the rifle trained on the angel as she gazed out the window for a minute more before she turned and headed for the door, “Save what remains of her soul. Before she damns many more. Including yours.”
“...I’m not breaking my contract, even if-” Kincaid started to say, walking after her to keep his gun on her. As he did he caught a glance out the window. He stopped. Lifted the magnified scope up to his eye.
Fire. Fire consumed the roof. Like a massive torch in the night somehow an inferno was raging atop the roof of the building and nowhere else. People were still scrambling to escape down the stairwell but many more had already fallen prey to it. One among them was the twisted grotesque body of the vampire whose corpse was still clearly visible in the center of the blaze.
Kincaid stared as Michelle opened the door to his room to leave, “You are now freed of your contract. Now please accept this missive of God.” The angel said before leaving, the door clicking closed behind her like a gun co*cking against the side of Kincaid’s head.
--
“I’m sorry, sir,” The Greek woman in the airline uniform said from behind the counter, in accented English, as she examined a computer monitor “But your connecting flight from Berlin to New York has been delayed. Apparently a hotel fire is having to be put out via helicopter crowding the airspace…”
A note of reflexive annoyance ran through Sanya’s body but he had to remind himself this was just how it worked. Apparently. He gripped the duffel bag in his right hand tighter like it might’ve disappeared since last he death-gripped it in his large mitts.“I am guessing there is alternative?”
The lady behind the counter nodded and tapped away at her keyboard for a moment, “Yes… It’ll add an extra layover though.”
“Where?” Sanya asked, more out of curiosity than concern. He hadn’t meant to go to New York after all. Just like he hadn’t meant to go to Athens. Or Quebec. Or most bizarrely Bath, England. Fighting it and trying to go where he thought he was supposed to didn’t seem to help much; if anything it just made it more frustrating. He’d still end up in these seemingly random places no matter how many people he complained to in his poor English. Even when he ended up in Russian-speaking countries it didn’t help.
Somehow the Sword he’d recently come to carry made him feel more like a cork in a river instead of a “Knight of the Cross”.
“New Orleans, USA.” She said as the tickets were spat out with a mechanical *CHUNK* from the ticket dispenser, “Ever been?”
He frowned as he took the tickets, “No. But I think I will get to know it well.”
