Of Those Chosen: The Twins - 03
Chapter Three got a re-write, which turned out to be over nine pages long, and that's long. So I broke it up into two chapters for ease of reading. I'm posting these with the current date (actually, chapter four will come out later) because they're technically new, now.
I think the new write is a whole lot better than the previous. I was always uncomfortable with how it came out; it just didn't flow quite like I wanted it to, but I couldn't figure out how. So, instead of editing it, I just jotted down some notes on what I wanted to happen and then rewrote the entire thing. I think the bad guys come off as more dangerous and menacing, and I think the conflict between Faith and Katharine is articulated better. The dialogue between Faith, Kennedy, and Xander is also much better in this draft -- but don't you X/F shippers go getting to worked up. The name change in a certain part should give a hint as to the real relationship here.
Anyway. I'm not sure exactly why I'm writing so much here -- currently, I think I have two people who have friended me, and one is me. =P Still. No reason not to make it all as good as I can, right?
Previous chapters can, as always, be found aqui.
Chapter Three
A Matchbook With Numbers
Cole stood back in the shadows of the club -- well, the deeper shadows, “the shadows of the shadows,” he would say were he in a poetic mood -- and watched the Slayer dance. She moved with the music, not to the music like everyone else in the club. She flowed with the song as he had seen only once before, back in the early eighties before he became a vampire. Her movements took her between people, couples or groups or singles, she cared only for the music which swirled her hair and her hips. She danced with everyone on the floor, or with no one; it could be either.
“Is that her?” Donner, his friend and sire, asked softly.
Cole shook his head slowly. “She’s close, but...” he trailed off. It was hard to explain what he looked for. Luckily, his friend trusted him completely, so there was no need to explain. Donner knew that when Cole found what he looked for, the reward would be significant.
Cole turned and looked to the bar. An itch between his shoulders lead him there again and again, a feeling of power he continually failed to pinpoint. His shaggy, nose-length hair fell into his eyes as he tilted his head and squinted through the smoke. What he saw caused his lanky body to stiffen slightly.
Cole nudged Donner, who still watched the Slayer dance. “Look at the bar,” Cole said. He indicated a group of four -- a small redheaded woman, an athletic-looking brunette woman, a small blond man, and a shaggy-haired brunette man -- who stood against the bar and chatted together. “You see the redhead?”
“Yeah,” Donner said. He squinted for a moment. “I, uh, I think she’s with the other girl.”
Cole looked at his friend askance for a moment. “Yes, she’s kinda gay, Donner, but I was going for something a little deeper than sexual preference.”
Donner looked again, then shrugged. “Whatever it is, I’m missing it.”
Cole shook his head. When he first became a vampire almost twenty years ago, he was astonished that he could sense different vibrations of power and energy that his older brethren -- including Donner, thirty-five years older than him and his sire -- missed completely. Now, though, he took it as a matter of course. And kept it from everyone he didn’t trust.
“I don’t know what it is, but she absolutely radiates power,” Cole said.
Donner smiled. In his fifty-three years as a vampire, he had raised more vampires than he could count, but he knew that even were he to live another two hundred years, he would never match Cole. As a human, he had been a brilliant mathematician whose anti-social tendencies were legendary -- in fact, some circles in his former vocation still believed he was alive. As a vampire, the intelligence remained and was coupled with an insight that rendered his strength and cunning unparalleled. Within a year of being raised, Cole no longer followed Donner -- Donner followed Cole. There was no friction between the two, no conflict of ambition.
He looked more closely at the redhead, relaxed his senses the way Cole tried to teach him. “I feel a little something, but nothing like what you say,” he said after a moment.
“How many mooks can you round up in the next half hour?” Cole asked.
“Not many,” Donner said. “Three or four, tops.”
“That’s good,” Cole said. “Meet me on the rooftop in an hour.”
:#:
Katharine danced the entire dance floor. The energy within burned her up, kept her awake at nights unless she wore herself completely down to the point of abject exhaustion. She barely heard the music, only the beat to move to registered with her mind, but the lyrics fit her currently:
I see you work at night and are you sexually amused? What’s it like to have a room of guys encircling you? How she moves and how she walks, they all patiently await while the heat from in their pockets could burn marks into their legs*...
The song ended and she left the dance floor, sweaty and flushed. Quite a few guys watched her as she walked away -- girls watched, too, but very few in the same manner as the guys. She headed over to the bar, where the guys she came with (she certainly would never refer to them as friends; they were older and knew the door man so could get her in) leaned and drank and checked out all the other girls in the club.
Rick saw her coming and tilted his head at two girls, a redhead and a brunette, a few feet away. The girls held hands, and the redhead stole furtive glances at her companion every few seconds. A tall black man and short blond man talked with them.
“Check it out, Katie,” Rick said. Katharine bristled; she hated the nickname Katie. Her name was Katharine -- so named after Katharine Hepburn -- and she had no desire to go by anything else. “You into that lesbian stuff like that?”
Katharine raised an eyebrow. She nodded at the bartender, who quickly grabbed her a Michelob Ultra Lite. One thing that was good about having rich parents who just wanted you out of the house -- bartenders worried less about legal ID when you tipped the hell out of them. Plus, the service went up.
“I don’t know,” she answered Rick. “Never tried it.”
Rick looked over at his two friends, Danny and Brad. The three were off-and-on students at one of the local community colleges; not the brightest of guys, and fairly stereotypically misogynists. The things a girl does to get into a club.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Brad said. “I love that whole bisexual girl thing.”
“Yeah, that’s the way a girl is,” Rick said. “Bisexual girls, they’re hot. Lesbians are for nothin’, though. It’s just some stupid political junk.”
Katharine noticed the two girls were listening to the guys now. She cringed; the next comment would certainly be from Danny, the most offensive of the three.
Sure enough, Danny said, “Man, a lesbian is just a girl who ain’t met the right guy yet.”
The brunette pulled away from her girlfriend at that, and took a step closer to Katharine’s gang. “No, idiot, a lesbian is a girl who’s learned no guy is the right guy.”
“Kennedy, don’t!” the redhead said.
“Whatever,” Danny said. “Five minutes with me, dyke, you’d be begging for more.”
Katharine tried to defuse the situation. “Yeah, five minutes with you, she would be begging for more -- because you’d have finished four minutes earlier.”
Neither person heard her. Or, if they did, they ignored her.
“Five minutes with you is six more minutes than I’d ever want, you asshole,” the brunette -- Kennedy -- hissed.
Kennedy took another step forward, and Katharine slid between her and Danny. “Look, they’re drunk boys, they’re stupid. It’s axiomatic. Just let it go,” she said.
“It’s what?” Kennedy said. Katharine winced; drinking always made her use big words other drunk people rarely recognized. “Who the hell are you? Get the hell outta my way!” Kennedy said.
“Kennedy!” the black man hissed from behind her. “Do you really think this is wise? Let it go!”
“Your friend’s right,” Katharine said.
“Well, I’m sick of taking this crap all time!” Kennedy said.
She glared at Katharine, a glare Katharine recognized. This Kennedy was angry and ready for a fight; nothing Katharine did would deter her. She might as well get in a few words before she had to knock the girl out.
“Yeah? Well, unfortunately, that’s not my problem,” Katharine said. “So just buy a drink, get a pink triangle tattooed on your ass, and go home and put that stupid tongue ring to good use, okay?”
Kennedy’s eyes widened -- as did her redheaded girlfriend’s -- and she moved forward. Before anything happened, though, a hand grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back.
“What the hell are you doing, Munch?” the new girl said. She looked back at Katharine, did a quick once-over. “Who the hell’s Lite Beer here?”
Katharine stared at the woman in front of her. They had a lot in common, physically: similar height, similar clothing, the same hair (although Katharine’s was dyed, while this girl’s was a natural deep brown, almost black color). Aside from the face, she looked more like she could be Katharine’s twin than Audrey did. They both even had the same outfit on: black spaghetti-strap tank with blood-red leather pants and flat boots.
She looked like Katharine, but an older Katharine. More experienced. Sexier. What Katharine would look like in her early, mid-twenties. She made Katharine feel juvenile, immature, inadequate.
She hated this girl.
“Aww, look, mommy’s here,” Katharine said. “Guess you can’t come out and play. No beat-down for you tonight.”
“Don’t be so sure yet, Lite Beer. You want to tell me what the hell is going on? I’m out to get a girl drunk for Boy Toy there,” -- she jerked a thumb back at a handsome, shaggy-haired young man who blushed a bit at her words -- “but you got way too much of that underage, blew-the-bouncer-to-get-in jailbait look to you.”
“Just piss off, skank,” Katharine said. She turned back to the guys and was shoved forward by the new girl. Hard. She slammed into Danny and managed to keep her balance. Danny pushed her out of the way as he and Rick and Brad moved toward the other group. Kennedy and the new girl advanced toward the guys, as did the black man and Boy Toy.
Two huge bouncers stepped between the two groups before any punches were thrown. “Not happening,” the bigger one said. He stood about six-seven, and his arms were about as thick as Katharine’s waist. Everyone backed down.
Rick, Danny, and Brad walked away, and the bouncers backed off once the guys were gone. They kept an eye on the girls, but seemed much less worried about a fight breaking out.
“Lucky you, huh, Lite Beer?” the new girl said. “No beat-down tonight.”
Katharine sneered. She hated this girl. “What, you think you’re tough? You got no idea. Follow me, I’ll show you what tough is.”
“Five-by-five, Lite Beer,” she said. The girl laughed. “Let’s see just what you got.”
Katharine nodded her head toward a side door. “See that door? Go out, go left, then around a corner there’s a back alley. Five minutes.”
“Faith, you can’t take out a bunch of guns,” the black man said into her ear. He spoke softly, but Katharine could still read his lips. “Don’t be reckless.”
Katharine laughed. “I’m not gonna kill her, man,” she said. “I’m just gonna slap her around some.”
She spun around on her heel and walked off before the new girl -- Faith -- could get a last word in.
-:-
easy chapter navigation
<<< [ 03 ] >>>
* “Worked Up So Sexual” by The Faint, ©2001 Saddle Creek.
I think the new write is a whole lot better than the previous. I was always uncomfortable with how it came out; it just didn't flow quite like I wanted it to, but I couldn't figure out how. So, instead of editing it, I just jotted down some notes on what I wanted to happen and then rewrote the entire thing. I think the bad guys come off as more dangerous and menacing, and I think the conflict between Faith and Katharine is articulated better. The dialogue between Faith, Kennedy, and Xander is also much better in this draft -- but don't you X/F shippers go getting to worked up. The name change in a certain part should give a hint as to the real relationship here.
Anyway. I'm not sure exactly why I'm writing so much here -- currently, I think I have two people who have friended me, and one is me. =P Still. No reason not to make it all as good as I can, right?
Previous chapters can, as always, be found aqui.
Chapter Three
A Matchbook With Numbers
Cole stood back in the shadows of the club -- well, the deeper shadows, “the shadows of the shadows,” he would say were he in a poetic mood -- and watched the Slayer dance. She moved with the music, not to the music like everyone else in the club. She flowed with the song as he had seen only once before, back in the early eighties before he became a vampire. Her movements took her between people, couples or groups or singles, she cared only for the music which swirled her hair and her hips. She danced with everyone on the floor, or with no one; it could be either.
“Is that her?” Donner, his friend and sire, asked softly.
Cole shook his head slowly. “She’s close, but...” he trailed off. It was hard to explain what he looked for. Luckily, his friend trusted him completely, so there was no need to explain. Donner knew that when Cole found what he looked for, the reward would be significant.
Cole turned and looked to the bar. An itch between his shoulders lead him there again and again, a feeling of power he continually failed to pinpoint. His shaggy, nose-length hair fell into his eyes as he tilted his head and squinted through the smoke. What he saw caused his lanky body to stiffen slightly.
Cole nudged Donner, who still watched the Slayer dance. “Look at the bar,” Cole said. He indicated a group of four -- a small redheaded woman, an athletic-looking brunette woman, a small blond man, and a shaggy-haired brunette man -- who stood against the bar and chatted together. “You see the redhead?”
“Yeah,” Donner said. He squinted for a moment. “I, uh, I think she’s with the other girl.”
Cole looked at his friend askance for a moment. “Yes, she’s kinda gay, Donner, but I was going for something a little deeper than sexual preference.”
Donner looked again, then shrugged. “Whatever it is, I’m missing it.”
Cole shook his head. When he first became a vampire almost twenty years ago, he was astonished that he could sense different vibrations of power and energy that his older brethren -- including Donner, thirty-five years older than him and his sire -- missed completely. Now, though, he took it as a matter of course. And kept it from everyone he didn’t trust.
“I don’t know what it is, but she absolutely radiates power,” Cole said.
Donner smiled. In his fifty-three years as a vampire, he had raised more vampires than he could count, but he knew that even were he to live another two hundred years, he would never match Cole. As a human, he had been a brilliant mathematician whose anti-social tendencies were legendary -- in fact, some circles in his former vocation still believed he was alive. As a vampire, the intelligence remained and was coupled with an insight that rendered his strength and cunning unparalleled. Within a year of being raised, Cole no longer followed Donner -- Donner followed Cole. There was no friction between the two, no conflict of ambition.
He looked more closely at the redhead, relaxed his senses the way Cole tried to teach him. “I feel a little something, but nothing like what you say,” he said after a moment.
“How many mooks can you round up in the next half hour?” Cole asked.
“Not many,” Donner said. “Three or four, tops.”
“That’s good,” Cole said. “Meet me on the rooftop in an hour.”
:#:
Katharine danced the entire dance floor. The energy within burned her up, kept her awake at nights unless she wore herself completely down to the point of abject exhaustion. She barely heard the music, only the beat to move to registered with her mind, but the lyrics fit her currently:
I see you work at night and are you sexually amused? What’s it like to have a room of guys encircling you? How she moves and how she walks, they all patiently await while the heat from in their pockets could burn marks into their legs*...
The song ended and she left the dance floor, sweaty and flushed. Quite a few guys watched her as she walked away -- girls watched, too, but very few in the same manner as the guys. She headed over to the bar, where the guys she came with (she certainly would never refer to them as friends; they were older and knew the door man so could get her in) leaned and drank and checked out all the other girls in the club.
Rick saw her coming and tilted his head at two girls, a redhead and a brunette, a few feet away. The girls held hands, and the redhead stole furtive glances at her companion every few seconds. A tall black man and short blond man talked with them.
“Check it out, Katie,” Rick said. Katharine bristled; she hated the nickname Katie. Her name was Katharine -- so named after Katharine Hepburn -- and she had no desire to go by anything else. “You into that lesbian stuff like that?”
Katharine raised an eyebrow. She nodded at the bartender, who quickly grabbed her a Michelob Ultra Lite. One thing that was good about having rich parents who just wanted you out of the house -- bartenders worried less about legal ID when you tipped the hell out of them. Plus, the service went up.
“I don’t know,” she answered Rick. “Never tried it.”
Rick looked over at his two friends, Danny and Brad. The three were off-and-on students at one of the local community colleges; not the brightest of guys, and fairly stereotypically misogynists. The things a girl does to get into a club.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Brad said. “I love that whole bisexual girl thing.”
“Yeah, that’s the way a girl is,” Rick said. “Bisexual girls, they’re hot. Lesbians are for nothin’, though. It’s just some stupid political junk.”
Katharine noticed the two girls were listening to the guys now. She cringed; the next comment would certainly be from Danny, the most offensive of the three.
Sure enough, Danny said, “Man, a lesbian is just a girl who ain’t met the right guy yet.”
The brunette pulled away from her girlfriend at that, and took a step closer to Katharine’s gang. “No, idiot, a lesbian is a girl who’s learned no guy is the right guy.”
“Kennedy, don’t!” the redhead said.
“Whatever,” Danny said. “Five minutes with me, dyke, you’d be begging for more.”
Katharine tried to defuse the situation. “Yeah, five minutes with you, she would be begging for more -- because you’d have finished four minutes earlier.”
Neither person heard her. Or, if they did, they ignored her.
“Five minutes with you is six more minutes than I’d ever want, you asshole,” the brunette -- Kennedy -- hissed.
Kennedy took another step forward, and Katharine slid between her and Danny. “Look, they’re drunk boys, they’re stupid. It’s axiomatic. Just let it go,” she said.
“It’s what?” Kennedy said. Katharine winced; drinking always made her use big words other drunk people rarely recognized. “Who the hell are you? Get the hell outta my way!” Kennedy said.
“Kennedy!” the black man hissed from behind her. “Do you really think this is wise? Let it go!”
“Your friend’s right,” Katharine said.
“Well, I’m sick of taking this crap all time!” Kennedy said.
She glared at Katharine, a glare Katharine recognized. This Kennedy was angry and ready for a fight; nothing Katharine did would deter her. She might as well get in a few words before she had to knock the girl out.
“Yeah? Well, unfortunately, that’s not my problem,” Katharine said. “So just buy a drink, get a pink triangle tattooed on your ass, and go home and put that stupid tongue ring to good use, okay?”
Kennedy’s eyes widened -- as did her redheaded girlfriend’s -- and she moved forward. Before anything happened, though, a hand grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back.
“What the hell are you doing, Munch?” the new girl said. She looked back at Katharine, did a quick once-over. “Who the hell’s Lite Beer here?”
Katharine stared at the woman in front of her. They had a lot in common, physically: similar height, similar clothing, the same hair (although Katharine’s was dyed, while this girl’s was a natural deep brown, almost black color). Aside from the face, she looked more like she could be Katharine’s twin than Audrey did. They both even had the same outfit on: black spaghetti-strap tank with blood-red leather pants and flat boots.
She looked like Katharine, but an older Katharine. More experienced. Sexier. What Katharine would look like in her early, mid-twenties. She made Katharine feel juvenile, immature, inadequate.
She hated this girl.
“Aww, look, mommy’s here,” Katharine said. “Guess you can’t come out and play. No beat-down for you tonight.”
“Don’t be so sure yet, Lite Beer. You want to tell me what the hell is going on? I’m out to get a girl drunk for Boy Toy there,” -- she jerked a thumb back at a handsome, shaggy-haired young man who blushed a bit at her words -- “but you got way too much of that underage, blew-the-bouncer-to-get-in jailbait look to you.”
“Just piss off, skank,” Katharine said. She turned back to the guys and was shoved forward by the new girl. Hard. She slammed into Danny and managed to keep her balance. Danny pushed her out of the way as he and Rick and Brad moved toward the other group. Kennedy and the new girl advanced toward the guys, as did the black man and Boy Toy.
Two huge bouncers stepped between the two groups before any punches were thrown. “Not happening,” the bigger one said. He stood about six-seven, and his arms were about as thick as Katharine’s waist. Everyone backed down.
Rick, Danny, and Brad walked away, and the bouncers backed off once the guys were gone. They kept an eye on the girls, but seemed much less worried about a fight breaking out.
“Lucky you, huh, Lite Beer?” the new girl said. “No beat-down tonight.”
Katharine sneered. She hated this girl. “What, you think you’re tough? You got no idea. Follow me, I’ll show you what tough is.”
“Five-by-five, Lite Beer,” she said. The girl laughed. “Let’s see just what you got.”
Katharine nodded her head toward a side door. “See that door? Go out, go left, then around a corner there’s a back alley. Five minutes.”
“Faith, you can’t take out a bunch of guns,” the black man said into her ear. He spoke softly, but Katharine could still read his lips. “Don’t be reckless.”
Katharine laughed. “I’m not gonna kill her, man,” she said. “I’m just gonna slap her around some.”
She spun around on her heel and walked off before the new girl -- Faith -- could get a last word in.
-:-
easy chapter navigation
<<< [ 03 ] >>>
* “Worked Up So Sexual” by The Faint, ©2001 Saddle Creek.