Reuben: 2/23/97 (11/7/96)
I sat down on my bed next to Dog and scratched behind his ears. "What do you think of this Torres fellow?" I asked.
*He seems OK to me, but I haven't looked very closely. A little harder. Ah. That's it.*
"So you just love me for my scratching skills, is that it?" I said with a grin.
*Nope. There's quite a bit more about you that I like.* He got up and gave me a big lick on the cheek.
"Ugh! Thanks, I think." I was wiping off my cheek when there was a frantic knock at the door. I opened it up, and Kasee was there in the hallway.
"Reuben! Come to the library! Quick!"
Oh hell. What was it now? I poked my head into the living room - no sign of Daedelus or Torres - and walked over to the library. Kasee, Renee, and John were there, whispering fiercely, Nicole was sitting in the corner, staring vacantly, and Mary looked like she was scanning the bookshelves for something. I said, "What's up?"
John looked at me solemnly. "Torres is a leech."
That took a moment to sink in. A leech. That would be what garous call a...vampire! By all that's holy, we had a vampire in the Chantry? John wanted to kill him outright, but Renee reminded him of his last encounter with a vampire - one he almost didn't survive. As we argued back and forth what to do, but the problem was solved for us when we heard from the living room, "I will contact you if I have any further questions," followed by the sound of a door closing.
Renee and I walked out into the living room to see Daedelus standing there, fuming. "I do NOT like to be called a liar," he muttered.
Renee asked, "Well, did you lie to him?"
"Well, not really. I mean, I didn't think it was a lie."
As we discussed Daedelus' maligned dignity, Kasee suddenly turned her head and walked over to the front door. She peeked through the peephole, then pulled the door open and gave a squeak of surprise. She turned back to us. "Torres was there and he was scratching something on the door, but when I opened the door he just poof! Disappeared but he left this mark on the door."
She opened the door wider and we saw that there was an eye circumscribed by a triangle carved into the door. We examined it, but it appeared to be an integral part of the door now, not just carved into it. Daedelus stared at it for a moment, then said, "It's not a correspondence effect, I don't think." I checked, and it didn't feel like it had a prime pattern feel to it, either. I wanted to study it more closely, but I knew better than to draw it outright - symbols have power, and it's not wise to mess with unknown symbols.
Daedelus suggested that he could take a picture of it and I could study it in the Digital Web in safety. I was a little leery, but agreed. He took a picture, fed it to his computer, then had me stand next to him. "Hold on," he said as he started typing. The sound of his typing seemed to fade as the screen of his laptop got bigger and bigger until it was as if I had been drawn into the computer. I realized that I was now in the Digital Web.
It looked like something out of "Tron" - lights whizzing past, and everything had a strange, neon look to it. Daedelus said, "Wait a sec. OK, here it is." And with that the image that Torres had placed on our door popped up in front of us, six feet tall. I wracked my brains, studying every turn and corner of the thing for at least an hour, but the only thing I could determine with any certainty was that whatever it was, it was unrelated to traditional sphere magic. Did the vampires have their own ways of manipulating reality? Beats me. I didn't much care for that thought, though.
I told Daedelus I had found all that I could and he nodded. He started typing again (where had that laptop come from? It wasn't there a second ago), and with the same pulling sensation we were back in the Chantry. I steadied myself on the sofa. Man, I'd rather step sideways - it was easier on the stomach.
I was just starting to get my bearings again when there was a horrific woman's scream from the library. As one, we all ran there. When I got there, what I saw scared the hell out of me. A giant wolf-man creature covered in some sort of slime was lifting Nicole over its head, shaking her, while they both screamed at the top of their lungs. The combination of the noise and suddenly seeing this monster in our house shook me up for a few moments, and I passed out. When I came back to, it had thrown Nicole down and shifted to wolf form, upon which it promptly collapsed. I kicked myself mentally. That wasn't a monster, that was John! What the hell had he been doing to Nicole? I rushed across the room and knelt with Renee to survey the damage.
Nicole was unconscious and pretty badly beaten up. She had some internal bleeding, a couple of broken ribs, and severe lacerations from John's claws on her upper body. I did a quick stabilization of her, healing what I could quickly, and making sure we didn't lose her. As Renee and I healed her, I realized that not only was the pseudo-leprosy fading, the damage it had done was healing without any help from me. What had happened here?
We turned our attention to John. Oddly enough, he seemed OK, just unconscious. Kasee stared at Nicole for a minute, then whispered, "Wow."
"What is it?" Renee asked.
"Nicole's aura is pure white. The only time I've ever seen that is when I look at baby's auras."
Renee looked up. "What about John's aura?"
Kasee looked intently at John and said, "It's like he's barely there. Just a minute..." And she disappeared.
Renee looked at me, questioning. "She stepped sideways," I supplied. John started to stir, rolling over onto his stomach and looking at us. He whined softly, and struggled as if to stand up, then sighed. Renee looked worried. "John, can you shift back to human form?" The wolf shook its head and whined again.
Kasee reappeared where she had been standing. "REUBEN!"
"What? What? What did you see?"
She pointed at John. "Remember the black spiral that I saw around Stephanie, Tiffany, and Nicole? There's something just like it in the Umbra - attached to Wolfie!"
Oh shit. I started to get a picture of what had happened. The garou had somehow attempted to retrieve Nicole's soul from the other side of the Shroud - at the peril of his own soul. Now he was in the same predicament that she had been.
I had no clue what to do. I needed to call Forteau. I had to wait, though, while Cab called her mentor and Renee called Raoul (calling the corax was a good idea - of all of the people we could contact, he would know best what to do). When Renee was done, I picked up the phone and dialed Mr. Forteau's number. He picked it up after two rings.
"Mr. Forteau? This is Reuben. We have a problem here."
"Well, what is it? I was rather busy, you see, and..."
I gave a brief explanation of what the garou had done, and asked if he had any idea how to remove the tendril that now extended off into the Umbra, beyond the Shroud.
"Well, the answer is simple my boy. All you have to do is kill the werewolf."
"WHAT? I can't do that! There must be something we can do."
"Well, my advice is to kill the werewolf. That would be easiest."
"Mr. Forteau, I won't kill my friend. Is there someone I can call?"
"Well, there is a garou shaman who might help you - his name is Grandpa. You could call him - then kill the werewolf."
I was beginning to sense a theme here. "Sure, right, OK. Thanks Mr. Forteau." I hung up.
I sat down on the sofa in the living room, perplexed. "What's wrong, Reuben?" Renee asked.
"Well, Forteau suggested we call Grandpa. But he also kept saying that we should kill the werewolf. That's not like him at all - he never had anything bad to say about the garou when I worked with him. Had quite a few good things to say, in fact. I wonder..."
"What do you wonder?"
"Remember we saw two Forteaus dueling in the Umbra? Well, what if the one that won isn't the Forteau that I used to know? Who would it be, then?"
As I finished speaking, I heard the sound of a motorcycle pulling up outside.