Second chapter as promised, so ya better drop yer stones, leave a comment and join the Discord.
Discord: discord/ydnYFQynZ2
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Vampire Rule N°31: Don't let people know that ending your cockroach-like existence is as easy as opening the curtains.
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The night was young at Mariposa Plaza, a former open air drug market the likes of which only Brideshead could produce, one of those plots of utter hopelessness where a mother would once ignore the cries of a hungry babe to earn her ten dollars any way she could.
Where grown men would buy vials from their own seed, which they abandoned for the same chemical happiness.
But that was the past, and there was no sense in dwelling on it, not when the future had just started showing promise.
The drugs had been chased off, and those who peddled them had to either follow the needle out or clean their whole act up. Jobs were being opened everyday, people going from clinics to rehabs to formations to gainful employment.
So when people saw a rather familiar five men crew setting up shop right there next to the low rise buildings, the stash barely concealed by the bushes, it didn't take long for people to realize what was happening and pick up their phones.
Not to call the police, this was still Gotham.
But they had their own barely educated boys with guns, sticks and anger management issues, though they were actually held accountable for their actions, so the comparison didn't work all that well.
As luck would have it though, they didn't come before an unpaid concerned citizen showed up on the scene, saw the ugly mugs of people he knew since kindergarten, and got understandably emotional.
The main emotion involved being rage.
The rage of someone who lost a child to a stray bullet.
The rage of someone who had to live knowing the police barely tried to look for the culprit, the flashing cars and boys in blue leaving as soon as the cameras did, never to be seen again.
The rage of someone who finally found some solace in knowing that things were being done to prevent such tragedy in his home, a man who was dead set on doing his part, be it by working in the soup kitchen or scaring some kids straight.
The rage of someone who was very likely to crash and try to fight five men alone.
Key word being try.
Rage did not make the common man all that strong. Not nearly enough to subdue five thugs, or to keep them from beating him to an inch of his life when he inevitably failed.
Broken bones, torn ligaments, internal bleeding and a concussion. His wrist had been shattered and needed urgent surgery, his liver had been terribly abused even for the thirty years old Irishman that he was, and the odds of him recovering fully were very slim.
Add in the fractured skull, and you got a recipe to make an American cry.
That was the state of James Wood when John visited him on his hospital bed.
He was but the first of many victims who experienced the second wave of crime that hit Brideshead, when the runts of the litter had been sent packing by nothing more than a few locals with boomsticks, it didn't take long for a higher class of criminals to show up.
Gangbangers that were kicked out when Brideshead was cleansed, back with vengeance. Soon after came the outsiders. Armenian mob splinters with slick suits and Eastern European accents, watching from cars with tinted windows, running around trying to collect protection money as if it was still the eighties. Small sects of the 88s, fresh from Chinatown, moving quietly in the corners. A crew of Dominican hitters from Washington Heights got caught on security footage moving into a long-abandoned barbershop.
Some were just stupid kids, eager to carve out a name, but others had real backing.
Because someone wasn't just poking around anymore. They were coming back for the whole thing.
Corners that had been cleaned up and free for nearly a year lit back up like old wounds. Surveillance footage showed known pushers with fresh gear. Street deals. Quiet turf fights that didn't make the news. More fires, more stabbings. Not chaos yet, but the kind of disorder that grows.
People started to slip. Some of the addicts who'd been clean relapsed. One of the watch guys took a shotgun blast to the arm in a shootout near Maple and 6th after trying to grab a stash.
Kids stopped showing up to the evening tutoring program. Someone firebombed a food bank. It made no sense, it was just bad business.
Harker's phones rang nonstop. He was calm in public, always. But in private, he was pacing. Reading dossiers. Watching footage over and over. Copperhead was deployed twice in two nights, and her new assignment in Europe meant the workload would go from bad to worse.
At least, Reginald kept close, always listening, taking notes, filtering the hundreds of voices calling for help, guidance, vengeance.
John already knew. He knew this wasn't some random fluctuation of the streets. Someone was sending these people. Someone was investing in the destruction of Brideshead.
It all fit.
Someone was ready to light a fire if it meant smoking him out.
The possibilities churned in his mind. Black Mask had the money. Penguin had the distribution lines. The remains of Hungry's cartel had motive. Falcone's old guard could be reaching in. Even the Cosa Nostra might be making a play. It could be anyone.
Or worse—everyone.
So John made the call.
He visited the hospitals. Looked each wounded watchman in the eye. Promised them everything he could, slipped a few drops of blood where it was needed. He spread the word any way he could, that the fight wasn't over.
That what they built still mattered.
Which was technically true.
Comfort was needed to control the chaos, and so he stood in front of James Wood, unconscious on a hospital bed. Battered and bruised, the perfect representation of Brideshead as his new foe would see it.
And he offered him a vampire's right to patronage, a few drops of blood slipping into his lips, manipulated to enter his system and rouse strength that he had not, numbing the pain and stopping the bleeding and slowly mending the bones in the way only a ghoul could.
It was only the first level of blood bond, and the power won't last as long as Bubbles or Larissa's, whose continuous reinforcement would make it last for weeks if not months even if he stopped feeding them.
A small mercy on his part, hardly more consequent than paying his hospital bills and making sure his rent and bills were taken care of while he recovered, but to the man…to the community, such gestures meant everything.
It was worth a few minutes of his life.
He left the clinic as a man, flirted with nurses and joked with the janitors, waved them goodbye before the pretance was done and the disguise abandoned to show the monster within.
A monster that moved at impossible speeds, scaled walls with remarkable ease, and abused this formidable prowess because he did not have a driving licence and Reginald was too busy doing both of their jobs to play cab.
Their Thing wasn't as much of a well oiled machine as the people on the ground thought, it was only the superior capabilities of vampire and ghouls that made it manageable, the use and abuse of his powers to fix mistakes or sway people's opinion…that, and a whole lot of blackmail.
At least, he managed to keep the economy stable and growing though.
Maybe because he didn't impose tariffs on everyone.
That night alone John had to personally raid five crews whose activities ranged from heroin retail to trying to set up a prostitution ring, five completely unrelated crews whose members had nothing interesting to say about who sent them or why.
Bottom feeders, the lot of them, though of a higher quality and greater diversity than usual.
He disposed of the drugs, guns and money in the nearest safehouse and prepared for the impending sunrise, but not before making a final phone call to make Bubbles' life that much harder.
"It's time," he said to Reginald, his voice low and final. "Enact Project Hermes."
"F*ck you, you—" Was the ghoul's answer before John hung up on him, the very creative stream of expletives he let out lost on him.
John chuckled as he slipped into a pitch black sleeping back that covered his entire body within the reinforced panic room, just in case someone leveled the whole building during the day, which was an actual worry in Gotham.
He could almost imagine the ghoul waving two middle fingers at the phone, saying very correct things about John's mother and the way she raised him, as well as many incorrect things about the nature of his existence, whether bloodsucking was gay, in addition to some things that would just get him cancelled by everything from radical feminists to the Chinese Communist Party and Diddy himself.
But eventually he would settle down and do the job.
In the coming hours, lines that shouldn't have existed were crossed. Bribes moved through back channels. False documents crafted by experts who didn't know they were being watched. Photos edited, Lives fabricated, Copperhead's tasks in the old continent would be used to the fullest.
Some people would be selected to receive the unpleasant experience of being dominated with various commands and flooded with so much presence their minds would become most malleable, vulnerable enough for him to implement a few minor suggestions about the distant past.
It was a thorough act of mostly unnecessary deceit, a money sink worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, involving multiple levels of blackmail and contingencies the human mind could not conjure in this relatively simple era, before the capes and cowls truly changed the world.
Some would say it's too much, but John knew it was the bare minimum.
Because it was the only way one could fool the world's greatest detective.
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Hope you had a nice day! Join the discord to threaten me if I don't upload soon, lova ya!