CVU2

Chapter 2: Part 2

Five years prior Zvera Comprachicos, Daughter of the Dacic Scourge chief among her titles, did not end her semester as a foreign exchange student to the school of Belie with perfect grades. It was the kind of school where the demerits were obvious: one could tell that she must have done poorly simply by observing that she had been half-decapitated and had had her hands chopped off with her own sword.

As a titled Daughter in her tribe she had been groomed for command from an early age, and she had been given two hunting companions at Belie's school in Toronto, Tzaraa bat Mazikin and Karet ben Shedim. An inseparable couple of vampiric lovers, Zvera's companions had met the vogelfrei first in the course of the hunt that Belie had arranged as a teaching exercise - and they had both been crushed.

Karet's heart had been grazed by a broken rib, and he'd had to watch the enemy smash his lover's skull into a new shape before putting a hole through her middle with a stomping foot. That head strike had been the most serious wound of the clash - until Zvera had dueled the fleeing vagabond, lost her sword, lost her hands, then almost lost her head. The vogelfrei had thankfully lost the sword before zipping off.

When Zvera regained consciousness, four months after losing so much of her true blood, Tzaraa was still in her coma. Karet had been impatiently waiting, for Zvera was the one to speak to anyone higher according to the sense of 'manners' any civilized creature of vampiric society knew.

He had kept his silence respectfully, all for naught.

It had been agony for Karet to hear the decision from Zvera's betters, clearly agony for Zvera herself when she had told him, shortly before she had left Toronto with scars still fading on her neck and wrists: the vogelfrei made by accident just half a year before their fight in Toronto had been chased north and his living family destroyed. Further action was deemed unnecessary, as he would most likely die up there.

The destruction of the young monster's family was a surprise, an apparent departure from the informal strigoi law of damnatio memoriae. Whatever their fights in life the undead were not to continue the struggles of the living, and so the Ashkenazi Belie sat at tables with Heydrich in Europe along with Zvera's elders, who had been called Gypsies in older days. Slavers and enslaved, tyrants and peasants, Nazi and untermensch - past the threshold of death, none of it mattered. A vampire of the modern society never had to worry about protecting living relatives because nearly all of them could be threatened in this way; a civilized vampire was also bound to never help their relatives in their petty and brief mortal affairs, as that might threaten other mortals to be protected by the old law.

But for a bastard, a vogelfrei sired without sanction, none of that tradition applied. This troublemaker, the first long-lived vogelfrei of the human's third millennium (in the silly faith of the Missing Corpse) was some Canadian, an incel engineer loner. He'd been bitten by a strigoi while out jogging one night in Quebec: his female sire had been hunted by Micmac tutelaries, and she decided to create a diversion, sure that the hunters would chase down and destroy the newly-turned young man while she slipped away.

Her ruse had worked for herself, but the diversion was still undead and unstaked. And six months after the transforming bite he put a daughter of the Comprachicos nobility in a coma.

As frustrated as Karet ever grew it was never with his immediate superior when he walked in this territory, who almost never acknowledged the chain of command when they were together. Zvera didn't talk or act like most nobles he knew of, and she was as personally furious with the vogelfrei for what he had done to Tzaraa as the lady's own lover.

Eighteen months after their failed hunt Tzaraa had awoken. She was blind, and still blind today when Zvera and Karet left the docks at Jersey City to get some silence and find a good place to drink. With the sun still overhead they could still almost enjoy beer without an extra ingredient.

Counter-magic could make Tzaraa see again until the next dawn, but a vampire who needed help to see every night was still practically blind, not fit for most of the service that would be expected of her. There was a strong possibility that Tzaraa's curse would lift when the vogelfrei was permanently destroyed, and that was the experiment that all three of them wanted to make. Trusting some First Nations or Inuit tutelaries to eventually finish him off in the far north was extremely unsatisfactory, and years had passed without Tzaraa regaining her sight.

But if he was back, and making trouble for the right people, they'd be able to go after him again.