Month: April 2020

Chapter 3 of Shadows and Loss

<- Parlour Games | ->

In the Ashes

A couple of days had passed since the violence at the Ladybird Room and the pack were at work trying to rebuild the gym and repair the damage wrought by the brawl with the Jacks and the kuruth that followed. Franco found his injuries from the silver blades were finally starting to heal, painfully slowly and with the first hints of wicked scars but at least he could pull his weight to fix his own gym. Jayden, Carter and Terry helped whenever they could, though Terry kept a wary distance from both Jayden and Franco, the events of the brawl still fresh in his mind.

About an hour after sunset, as the gibbous moon was just starting to rise above the tenements, someone came knocking on the door of the closed gym. A wiry man in a long trenchcoat, close-cropped beard giving his face a skeletal cast in the twilight. He introduced himself as “Rojas. Detective Rojas” and had some questions about the burned pickup in Montgomery and the bodies left in it. Franco and Jayden could smell the wolf in him as he spoke, leading to Franco making a selection of bad dog puns before dropping all pretence.

Rojas was happy to be straight with the two urdur. He had caught their scents at the wreck in Montgomery and wanted to size them up and hear what happened that lead. So they told him, about Megan Blaine and the Jacks, about the Ladybird Room and Mr G, and about how it all ended. Rojas was sceptical until Franco showed him the truth in his Renown brands, the lunes had believed them even if he did not. That impressed Rojas, and he seemed satisfied with how they had handled themselves. He left the pack with a number to contact him on if needed, and a warning not to cause any problems south of Rosewater street.

Help Wanted

A few days later, Jayden received a call from potential client. They met in the Pequods on Lincoln Square to discuss things. Her name was Laura Griffin and she spent much of the interview clutching at the coffee mug like a lifeline as she told her story. It had started with odd noises, tapping in the pipes and scratching at doors. She had told herself it was just the sounds of an old house or local animals, but there were also the dreams. She was in bed, unable to move as an emaciated black-eyed figure leaned over her, reaching closer and closer until she woke in cold sweats and dread. Sleeping pills kept the dreams away but left her unrested and exhausted. She didn’t know what else to do, was getting desperate for this to end so when she found Jayden’s business card she had to try.

Jayden listened as Ms Griffin told her tale and, deciding to ease her into things, explained the possibility of sleep paralysis and asked her to record herself sleeping that night. They would review the footage the next day and then know if it was something uncommon but mundane, or of his more esoteric skills would be required. Ms Griffin seemed a little unsure, but she agreed to the request and departed. Jayden and Franco waited until she was gone before letting the thin veneer of professionalism slip and planning an evening of karaoke at Ollie T’s to relax.

While waiting to hear from Ms. Griffin the next day, Franco suggested declaring a Sacred Hunt against whatever was behind the haunting. He had been itching to try out the Rite that Brihaz had taught him. Jayden agreed and the two mock-brawled and psyched themselves up in preparation for the Hunt. They met Griffin again at Pequods the next evening, unsettlingly intense and wired with the adrenaline of the Hunt.

On the Hunt

The timelapse video of Ms. Griffin’s attempts to sleep showed her thrashing and turning in her bed, barely keeping still throughout the night. No signs of sleep paralysis. Jayden apologised for the intrusion but he would need to investigate her house, Griffin agreed, finished her coffee and lead them there. The house was an old townhouse of the sort found throughout north Blackmouth, built well over a century ago in the rebirth of Blackmouth after the fire of 1814, and recently renovated and repaired as the slow creep of gentrification swept into the west side of Merritt.

Griffin left Franco and Jayden on the doorstep for a minute before letting them in, the sounds of an excitable dog carrying from the closed kitchen door. She apologised that he didn’t get on with strangers, and lead the way into the house. Everything seemed normal, at last until they got to the bedroom and caught a scent. Like the faint remnants of fresh blood. Griffin seemed unaware of it but it clung in the nostrils of both Franco and Jayden, stirring up old memories of the Hunt and the Kill. It was unavoidable once noticed, it was seeping into the rest of the house but permeated the bedroom and was strongest by the great bay windows that dominated the room, yet did not seem to be coming from there.

On a hunch, Jayden cast his senses across the Gauntlet into the Hisil and saw nightmares. The shadow reflection of the room was warped to grotesque proportions, the ceiling looming cavernously tall while the angles and corners twisted and misaligned. Blood and oily black liquid seeped and trickled from long cobweb cracks and jagged rents in the corners of windows and mirrors. Griffin’s bed was a torturer’s plaything of spikes and blades, rusted with old blood and dried tears and seething with host of motes of inky darkness and shattered bone that supped on the blood and tears coating the torture bed. The smell of blood filled the Shadow, sweet and rich as a fresh kill and wafting from the yawning portal the bay windows had become, beyond which lay a twisted vista of towering crags and twisted trees. Jayden took time to study the room and cast his ithaeur’s eyes over the spirits. The inky motes were some kind of hursihim, barely sapient little fear spirits feeding on the detritus of Griffin’s nightmares, but there was something else. A drifting translucent shape like a sheet of ill-shaped fabric hanging on the end of the torturer’s bed. Jayden had taken it for a hursih or an unformed mote until it moved, and the shadow of eyes swept the bed with a cold, hungry intelligence. An ensih, perhaps. Something sapient enough to lead this motley choir or to talk to, but he could not do so across the Gauntlet. They would need to Step Sideways and visit the Shadow in person to face this thing.

Meanwhile, Franco was trying to stop Jayden from walking into anything in his otherworld trance. He had tried to convince Ms Griffin to give them a little space to work but she was understandably hesitant to leave two strangers alone in her bedroom. He was in the middle of a third explanation that this was just how Jayden worked and he would have some answers soon when Jayden brought himself out of his trance to deliver a verdict to Ms Griffin. The good news was that the problem seemed to be connected to the house rather than Griffin herself, so he advised her to sleep elsewhere for a couple of days. The bad news was that he did not know yet know how to deal with this night mare but he should have a solution with a day or two’s research and investigation. He had always been good at this part of the work back before the Change, and Griffin bought his earnest charm. She would do that and look forward to hearing from Jayden soon once he had a proper solution.

The Other Side

It was Franco that noticed the car as they were walking back. It had been there when they arrived, but the guy in the driver’s seat half-watching Griffin’s house hadn’t been. They passed it by and slipped into an alleyway to get the measure of the man. A jowly older man with a heavy moustache, sitting calmly in a dark-bodied sedan, reading a book and glancing now and again toward Griffin’s home. Jayden peeked across the Gauntlet but saw nothing unusual there, so Franco took a note of the plates. Perhaps it was time to give Det. Rojas a call.

Rojas picked up after the third ring and took very little convincing to assist by looking up the licence plate. He was happy to build rapport with Dukuz-Mah Ur by helping their hunt. In the meantime, Jayden decided to seek some advice from his ersatz mentor so the two headed for Ashton Park, the heart of the territory claimed by the Blackwood pack. There they met Elias, a member of the Blackwoods and an acquaintance of Jayden, who apologised that Valentina was out of the city “on one of her wanders”. He offered some advice in her stead when Jayden explained the situation, suggesting that a it was unlikely that the spirits he had seen were powerful enough to wreak such changes in the Shadow in such a short time. Either they had been there longer than it seemed, or something more potent was influencing things.

They heard back from Rojas as they headed back to their own territory. The car they had spotted was registered to Jon Miller, a private investigator based in Providence, Rhode Island. Rojas said he would keep digging just in case he found something interesting but Miller appeared at first glance to be very ordinary.

Heading to the Forgotten Room, Kayden and Franco used the resonance of the locus to cross into the Hisil and made their way to the shadow reflection of Ms. Griffin’s house. As soon as they entered the twisted bedroom, the translucent form of the nightmare spirit stirred. It draped itself about Jayden’s cloak and asked why wolves were here, insisting it was breaking none of their laws and merely feeding on the bounty provided to it. Jayden called it a minnow, a scavenger feeding on the leavings of actual predators but it shrugged and drifted away.

Franco, meanwhile, was studying the yawning vista spread out beyond the windows, and only these windows. The other rooms of the house showed the bustling, frenetic shadow of the street beyond, only those in the bedroom showed this view. Out of curiosity he opened the windows. The scent of fresh blood that pervaded the room grew sharper and sweeter still and Franco could feel something pulling at him, drawing him out, toward the expansive otherworld beyond. Jayden joined him and the two let themselves be pulled out, wrenched bodily across the gulf beyond and down into somewhere else.

They were in a great empty room of stained tiles. A single hospital gurney lay in the centre of the expanse, surrounded by legions of machines that traced the rhythms of life in light and sound. Lying on the bed was the half-seen shadow of a figure, utterly dwarfed by its surroundings. In the centre of the figure’s chest was a black tear and into it flowed faint crimson trails of blood-scent from the bedroom. Jayden cast his gaze across the Gauntlet and saw a hospital ward with a single inhabitant, a young woman wrapped in bandages and casts and surrounded by ventilators and other devices keeping her alive. Her chart listed her name as Jaime Scott, her injuries matched a hit and run, and the date of admission as a week prior. Around the time Griffin’s dreams began.

After making their way back to the Forgotten Room and crossing back to the physical world, the pair started searching for news articles about hit and runs in the past week. It did not take long to find something but it was not quite what they expected. The story described a young woman hit by a vehicle in Fallon Heights, no names listed but the date fitted, and there was a video showing dashcam footage from another car in the area. It showed a dark-haired young woman, features blurred for anonymity, running out of an alleyway into traffic, eyes fixed on something behind her. She clips a protruding parking sign, careers with the impact into the traffic and is struck by a black sedan, rolling over the bonnet and landing head-first on the asphalt. Traffic screeches to a halt around her and in the last frames of the video the driver of the sedan steps out to check on her, and it is not Griffin.

Using the video and Franco’s native knowledge of the streets of the city, they work their way to the site of the accident, unsure exactly what they will find after a week. No unusual scents or markings, and nothing untoward lurking in Twilight or on the other side of the Gauntlet. No witnesses, except one. Jayden studied the parking sign and whispered a word of wakefulness to the mote that sumbered with in. It stirred into brief awareness, enough to tell them what the girl had run from. A man, bristled with facial hair. The PI?

---

People Appearing

• Franco Larsen – Glad to assist Jayden’s investigations, he got a hat just for it.
• Jayden Clearwater – Following the threads of investigation.
• Terry Burton – Assisted repairing the gym, kept a safe distance from Franco and Jayden
• Carter Johnson (First Appearance) – Assisted repairing the gym.
• James Rojas (First Appearance) – Investigated the burned pickup, as a cop and to get a measure of these new wolves.
• Laura Griffin (First Appearance) – Hired Jayden to deal with paranormal events tormenting her.
• Jon Miller (First Appearance) – Rhode Island PI, spotted watching Griffin’s home.
• Valentina Blackwood (Mentioned) – Ersatz mentor to Jayden.
• Elias Blackwood (First Appearance) – Urban shaman of the Blackwood pack, gave Elias a little advice.
• Brihaz (Mentioned) – Spirit friend of Franco.
• Four-Ways-Sworn (Mentioned) – Spirit that claims rulership of the Shadow reflection of Merritt’s streets.
• Cold-Caress-Kiss (First Appearance) – Nightmare spirit feeding on Ms Griffin’s fears.
• Jaime Scott (First Appearance) – Victim of a traffic accident. What was she running from?

Locations

• Larsen’s Gym – Closed to the public, still under repair.
• Pequods in Lincoln Square.
• Ollie T’s
• Ms. Griffin’s home at the corner of Machen and Elsworth.
• Aston Park after dark.
• Providence, RI (mentioned).
• The Forgotten Room.
• The Hisil reflections of Griffin’s home and Morningside Hospital.
• An alley off Lincoln Street.

Chapter 2 of Shadows and Loss

<- One Quiet Evening | Thread and Chains ->

The Unfortunate Mr Rosetti

After clearing up the gym as best they could, Franco and Jayden took the remains of their victims and of Megan Blaine to the pickup under the cover of night. They drove the lot to a forgettable alley in the Montgomery Projects where Jayden could get a good look at the bodies and see what answers he could uncover from Ms. Blaine. Her body was fresh, no more than a day dead, the soft tissues were entirely missing without any disturbance of the skin save for two large wounds that resembled deep knife wounds and smelled most strongly of the acrid scent Franco had noticed. The three suits had nothing in their pockets save rolls of small-denomination bills and a single playing card – a Jack of the same style as the one in Ms Blaine’s purse. No leads, but at least it went a little way toward funds for repairing the gym. They set the pickup and bodies alight and walked into the night to seek further leads.

Without any other ideas, they tried the number on the card again. A landline. Who used a landline these days? But that meant they could look him up in phone records, so they did and found a Gregor Rosetti and the number listed with an address for a small apartment in the backstreets of Fallon Heights. The scoped out the area and Jayden headed to the front door while Franco scaled the fire escape and lurked near the windows in Urhan form to better sniff out what was going on.

Jayden was able to talk his way in by claiming Megan was a client of his and he was concerned because he had not heard from her in several days. Rosetti, a wiry nervous wreck of a young man, was happy to be able to speak up, concerned as he was about her. With only a little prompting from Jayden, he talked about the Ladybird Room, his own experience of losing money and having to work as a dealer to make it back, with a side hustle of giving people cards to get them in. He was sure something unpleasant was going on, organised crime or something similar, but “Mr G” had made it clear he had not had a choice.

All was going so well until he caught sight of the huge wolf watching from the fire escape, one paw scrabbling at the window to open enough of a gap to catch the scents of the room. Rosetti stammered, stumbled and collapsed as fear-fuelled adrenaline accelerated the effects of the venom that Franco smelled in his veins. The same smell that had been in Blaine’s body and on the fangs of the suits. Only Jayden’s quick thinking and an unconventional application of Essence manipulation saved Rosetti’s life and the two slipped away while he was still unconscious, taking with them several Ladybird Room playing cards from the set on Rosetti’s kitchen counter.

At the Ladybird Room

The Ladybird Room turned out to be a nondescript door in a forgettable alley on the northern edge of Fallon Heights. The goon on the door had long hair but otherwise dressed identically to the three suits who had attacked the guys in the gym earlier that evening, but a flash of one of the cards from Rosetti’s deck opened the door without him taking a second look at the wolves in human clothing.

Inside the door was a study in old money written in shades of red and black. Two dozen people were gathered about antique tables, crimson-backed cards and crumpled dollar bills splayed out on worn black leather and of age-stained mahogany. Several more of the suited men stood at the fringes of the room, one serving drinks from behind a long hardwood bar while his comrades leaned by doors or against the curtains of burgundy velvet that lined the walls. Soft classical music wafts through air thick with tobacco smoke, old beer and the stink of desperation. A few heads turned as the door opened but most were too invested in their games to pay it any heed.

Jayden and Franco split up, found seats at games and started to play to lose, hoping to attract Mr G’s attention and be offered the same deal as Rosetti. An hour of ‘terrible luck’ later and one of the suits rested a meaty hand on Jayden’s shoulder, inviting him into the back room to speak to the boss. Mr G. turned out to be a beetle-eyed old man so corpulent that he barely fitted behind the heavy desk that dominated the back room, and he offered Jayden a chance to work off the extensive debt he owed the house, starting in two weeks time when the Ladybird Room would next open.

They discussed the plan over a drink afterward and decided that twoweeks was too long to leave things, so instead would come back the next morning and get the drop on whoever might be there, when there were less of the Herd present to see things they should not.

The next morning, it took several minutes of knocking to get attention of one of the suits inside. In a moment of low cunning, he invited Franco in to look for the mobile phone he said he had misplaced the night before, inviting him to join them for ‘breakfast’. Any intention of taking advantage of this poor lost intruder quickly disappeared as Franco unleashed the wolf and tore the door open for Jayden to join him inside. And all was chaos and destruction. The suits dogpiling Jayden only succeeded in provoking him into rage and the end of those who attacked him, while the others assaulted Franco with silver blades and cut burning wounds into his flesh, only for him to dive headlong into kuruth.

Even armed with silver, the suits were naught to the power of two enraged uratha and the room was soon quiet save for Mr G in the next room, watching and fuming. He cursed them in English and the First Tongue before exploding out of his skin into an immense nightmare of chitin, claws and hissing chelicerae. Blood, pain and vengeance filled the air. The thing that had been Mr G crushed Jayden in an immense claw, shearing bone and flesh like paper before tossing him the length of the room, before gutting Franco with a misshapen collection of secondary limbs. In fury, Franco tore the offending claws from G’s thorax, but before they hit the ground they had been caught by Jayden and driven deep into the spider-thing’s body, smashing his chitinous carapace apart and shattering into a thousand fragmentary spider things. The rage destroyed it all, room and spiders and all.

People Appearing

• Franco Larsen – solved problems in the most direct way possible.
• Jayden Clearwater – talked his way to the Ladybird Room, and to talk to its boss.
• Gregor Rosetti (First Identifed) – terrified that poor Megan had got into trouble, afraid for his own skin, dying.
• Several men with spiders in their heads.
• Gamblers and dealers in the Ladybird Room
• Mr G. – Had more than just a spider in his head.

Locations

• A dead-end alley in Montgomery Projects.
• An apartment in Fallon Heights.
• The Ladybird Room.

Chapter 1 of Shadows and Loss

| Parlor Games ->

Discovery

It started mid evening. Franco was closing up the gym after the last of the attendees had finished for the day, helped out by Terry, off-duty and looking for something to do. They had just started to lock up when Franco noticed it. The high pitched whine of an alarm insistently telling a driver who wasn’t there that they’d left their keys in the ignition. There was a pickup sitting down the road, just short of the junction, too clean and new to be local. Franco decided to take a look, catching the scent of something sharp under the lingering diesel fumes coming from a crumpled garbage bag in the truck’s bed. The bag was too small to be a body so he split it open to get a better look and was greeted with crumpled remains, emaciated skin and bone still wearing a nice cocktail dress, blonde hair framing an eyeless face, all fuming with that acrid acid stink.

While Terry finished losing his lunch, Franco turned to the rest of the truck. It was as empty as a rental, except for a woman’s purse stuffed under the driver’s seat. Inside was an ID for a Megan Blaine, with a face that shared the same bone structure and hair as the remains in the bag, as well as a single playing card with a name ‘Gregor R.’ and a phone number. Terry called a friend in BPD dispatch to run the plates on the truck while Franco tried the number on the card. The pickup’s plates came back clean and listed as owned by a Jack Weatherall of 823 Rosewater Street, while Franco got a jittery man on the other end who denied knowing anything and hung up quickly.

Attention

Without any more leads, the two went to get Jayden to get an expert’s opinion. This was the sort of thing he was supposed to know about. Franco rebagged the remains of Ms Blaine and placed her in the footwell of the truck, locked it and took the keys to secure the evidence. Wisely done, for as he, Terry and Jayden returned to the gym they saw people lurking by the pickup. A trio of big guys in dark suits and shades stood around the abandoned vehicle, paying no heed to passers by as they watched the surrounding buildings. After a several minutes they turned as one and headed for the gym, where one of their number demanded the keys to the truck with thick, slurring speech. Franco played innocent but the men were insistent and soon became violent.

A brawl erupted as the men pushed into the gym to reclaim the keys. The pack limited themselves to fists and improvised weapons, giving as good as they got until a lucky blow from Franco shattered one of the suits’ glasses to reveal eyeless sockets beneath, a hundred pinpricks of crimson glittering deep in the recesses of the skull. With his disguise shattered, the leader growled a gutteral order to kill and the suits shifted tactics, grappling and biting with long arthropoid fangs from mouths split open too wide for mere human, each bite pumping burning venom into their foes.

Rage stirred in Jayden at this monstrous inhumanity and the wolf came out, sending the suits skittering back in knowing fear. Franco followed suit and the two tore the three things that pretended to be men apart, one claw shearing a skull open to reveal a bloated spider-thing squatting in the partially hollowed cranium. A second blow eviscerated the thing before it could escape.

Even as their foes lay in ruin at his feet, Jayden could not pull himself from kuruth and descended into the hard rage. Franco tried to fight back or to escape and found himself falling into the rage as well.

The two awoke in the mangled ruin of the gym. Wood splintered, metal shattered and the hot wet taste of fresh meat in their mouths. Jayden retched and felt two human fingers fall into his hand, one still bearing Franco’s wedding ring.

People Appearing

• Franco Larsen (First Appearance) – Trying not to get involved until someone dumped a body on his turf.
• Terry Burton (First Appearance) – Unready for the horror and destruction that comes with facing prey.
• Jayden Clearwater (First Appearance) – Lost himself in the rage.
• Megan Blaine (First Appearance) – Her remains found bagged in an abandoned pickup.
• “Gregor R.”(First Appearance) – A voice on the other end of a phone. Nervous, anxious, afraid.
• Three large men in dark suits with spiders inside their skulls.

Locations

• Larsen’s Gym – a small gym in Merritt, north Blackmouth.