Silver, in a werecreature, burned like hell. It took time to recover from getting hit by it even when the stuff came out. The disruption of the spirit as well as the physical effect of it lingered after it was pulled out, enough so that one didn't necessarily want to do much. That was why Tony found himself in a van healed but still very much cursing and sore after that. He'd spent much of his existence not getting hit with silver after that first exposure. Contrary to popular perception, and Flint's accusations, he'd managed to live a pretty sedate and quiet life as a werecreature after the Vietnam War, finding ways to channel himself in directions that didn't put him in the way of gunfire.
So much for the quiet days of living out in dignity, now his hometown, Camden, was blowing up and he was getting shot by vampires. He'd spent something like fifty or so years avoiding that precise situation, keeping the beast chained except for field trips out into the wild to hunt and expatiate the roaring predator that shared space with his humanity in a never-ending war for his body. Between the change and the wound he'd sustained -- and damn, that thing still burned, annoyingly -- he looked like a complete mess, which was appropriate wear for this party.
"She's right" he gasped, barely getting his head straight enough to process all the information, "It's time to get the fuck out. This place is about to be crawling now that we've kicked the hornet's nest." The idea of grabbing someone in the know to interrogate them was now out, and it seemed almost pointless to grab the vampire they were about to snap up. Almost. Once he and Autumn were close to the van.
"We gotta bring the van closer to the guys grabbing the vamp and start clearing out before the reinforcements show up. Someone's bound to have called for help with all this," he gestured at the mess of the Rusty Steak Knife, "going on. Some smart vamp probably called help."
Tony groaned a bit as he forced his arm to work and got the door opened, blasting him with the accumulated smell of the air fresheners, incense and other scents Tony had used to avoid being detected as a werecreature -- useless now.
There was an AK in the back of the van that he'd brought along with a consolidated ammo supply, but he left it there untouched for the moment, though he kept his eyes peeled as he crouched in the back, rubbing his shoulder as he took in the devastation.
"Well, so much for a minimal exposure plan that involved quietly grabbing someone for information."
--
"My Lord," he intoned, with that smooth bluegrass, whiskey country accent.
He had the mannerisms of the 19th century southern gentleman and the pedigree as well. It was authentic; sometime during the colonization of North America, a pair of poor Scotch-Irish immigrants, the Gordons, were finally freed of indentured servitude but lacked the resources to establish themselves further east. Due to a lack of funds upon emancipation from servitude in a Virginia plantation near Richmond, they had to find the cheapest, most dangerous frontier and carve themselves a new life from the wilderness of the new world, a pair that loved each other deeply and had the same dream -- a life away from the old world they'd been condemned in by birth. They managed to establish a homestead in Tanasi that prospered over the next century and a half. Angus and Tess were fine, upright folk that had a sense of decency, though it didn't necessarily survive them. They learned to live in harmony as neighbors with the natives they found in the area, for they'd been of modest needs and took little from the land, but subsequent generations of Gordons, starting with their son Joshua, found cause to look down upon their neighbors and drive them out, to covet more land as their farming and horse breeding business flourished, and that streak of ruthlessness was inherited by in Charles Niall "Neal" Gordon. A historian might well say the potential was there in him and was refined during service under no less than William Tecumseh Sherman during the Civil War, because like a number of Tennesseans, he remained loyal to the Union, despite owning some slaves, and learned well the lessons of that bloody era of strife.
He remained in the Cavalry and served in the West after the war, where his uncompromising view of the situation matched that of the men who burned Georgia and the South down in that terrible, destructive march, and his methods were among those adapted by the white men who wished to tame the 'menace' of the people that inhabited the land well before they'd ever seen it -- to cut off their food supply, to dwindle the resources with which they could use to survive, to sap their will to continue the war by bringing them psychological distress. Sherman's lesson -- War is Hell. Sherman once asked Gordon, who'd been an aide of his at one point, what to do about the Indians. He told him, "Kill buffalo."
Sherman later was heard saying that to end the problem, send ten regiments and shoot bison. (He had, needless to say, watched the application of Sherman's methods by airpower, in the 1940's, with particular interest -- he was an avid admirer of Arthur "Bomber" Harris and Curtis LeMay.)
Sometime in the 1870's, after the whole thing was essentially settled, though Custer had gone and gotten himself killed, Major Charles Gordon found himself under the fangs of a simply enchanting woman who found him equally intriguing -- the whiff of blood, the dangerous but debonair mannerisms of the man, the far-seeing, hard eyes that caught and held what they gazed upon. He was already a predator of men, a killer, and that was much to her taste; dashing in the ballroom and uncompromising as a warrior. There was always a use for dangerous minds in the world of vampires, and he'd been useful in subjugating wild supernaturals as he'd been in subjugating wild humans until the work ran out and North America was finally domesticated, mere policework of the sort that others did for the courts, running after wayward individuals, seemed tedious -- he loved more than merely a little action, he relished a war, a contest of wills, the breaking of the opponent. There simply wasn't enough of that to go around and decades went by with very few unruly supernatural populations to suppress, and so much of it was handled through delicate negotiation that made his particular services unwanted. As a servant of the Court, he found little satisfaction in the diplomacy forced upon him -- as the Court started to recognize the autonomy of native populations at the behest of their local supernaturals, who formed Courts and stabilized the post-colonial situation, he resigned from active service in the 1950's.
He still wore a gentleman's mustache and a Vandyke beard, because he'd never quite been able to bring himself to go clean-shaven even in the eras that demanded it, and it seemed that of late the fashion was respectable, though he'd let his hair be trimmed in tune with the human fashions of the day, and he'd given up a gentleman's frock coat for a properly tailored suit done on Savile Row; dark gray, with a window-paned shirt beneath it and a sufficiently floral tie and a complementing pocket square. He looked dapper and little like the blood soaked killer of the Plains Indian Wars that he truly was; likewise, there was a Colt Single Action Army holstered beneath the jacket, because he never quite managed to shed the liking of the gun he'd killed so many braves, their wives and their children with. It wasn't one of the originals, because those took black powder and modern metallurgy and manufacturing was so much better -- trained as an Engineer at West Point, he'd prided himself on maintaining a surprising interest in science that exceeded that of most of his vampire kin. Of course, as he'd point out, most vampires were little more than someone's fucktoy made immortal. He held himself aloof from their sordid little games of running bordellos and gambling houses and nightclubs; he did a respectable business in stocks and bonds, though he considered playing the markets to be little more than a fun gentleman's game that also sustained his quiet penthouse lifestyle that he'd adopted from the Gilded Age, onward, converting the family farm into capital.
The petty little squabbles of the supernatural world bore him, so he stayed out, though in his time he'd made his necessary respects to the court of de Lacy and actually made himself useful as a sort of emissary -- he had a proud and aristocratic bearing that de Lacy had favored, even while dismissing any advice he had to give. Nemsemet, however, had learned of Major Gordon's unique history and seemed genuinely interested in his thoughts; this was not the first time he'd been called to the Elder One's presence and asked for his opinion on a matter.
"I find myself displeased with Billy Rikker. He did not manage to destroy the few enemies I had and he has also taken too much time uniting his own kind." Nemsemet intoned, with a dusty rasp of a voice.
The truth was, it disturbed Charles to even look at Nemsemet, and that was with the old mummy clothed in a voluminous robe that concealed much, and even with a forged metal mask over the face -- nothing in the city had ever seen Nemsemet's face, except for perhaps that fool de Lacy when Nemsemet first rose from the grave dust and destroyed so many of the Court in that first furious assault. No one even knew what happened because, quite frankly, there were no survivors. The old mummy didn't move much; no breathing, no twitches, just unnatural stillness. But the presence filled the room, oppressively so. de Lacy's old receiving chamber had been redecorated in a 'less is more' motif with the banners and historical artifacts removed. The throne remained, but the room was bare stone and lamplight now, for Nemsemet sufficed as impressive in his own right, a figure of dread awe, even simply seated there, deeply within his? its? robes; a simple white linen affair lined with blue, but dark and shadowy nonetheless. It was jarring to note that Nemsemet sat with a leg crossed over another, with a hand disappearing into the cowl of the robe, perhaps propping up his chin. One just didn't associate such incongruously casual body language to such a terrifying thing.
"I understand my Lord, and while it is perhaps a touch untactful to say so, I also felt at the time that it was insufficient merely to 'send a warning' in the form of destroying one house and then backing off. Our friend Billy waited a bit for more to gather there after Augustus' little raid instead of being in a lather to impress you with precipitous action, he might well have been able to actually set up a much better trap and actually kill them rather than let most of them leave through the back door. That would have rooted it out from the outset, but he was impatient."
Rooting it out was what Charles liked to do best. "And if I might be so bold as to state, I do not think Billy is prepared to actually wage a war. I understand the negotiations go slowly to get more vampires in the field primarily because he is trying organize it under his control, rather than merely delivering your terms. I do not, of course, blame him for trying to profit from the situation, but I am afraid that his interests are at a detriment to your own at this moment. Billy Rikker did well within the scope of his experience as a gangster," that was delivered with faint scorn, "But warfare takes more than merely on the spot cunning and an eye for personal opportunity, particularly if pursuit of that opportunity endangers the long term goal." That was delivered with the fine diction that was drilled into him in the 19th century boarding school he'd been forced to attend. He could have had it in Latin if Nemsemet preferred, or even Crow, Cree and Lakota were Nemsemet himself able to speak in those languages, for he was a well-educated man and proud of that in this profoundly anti-intellectual era and a natural linguist in an era where rednecks shouted, "Speak Amurikin, galldurnit!"
But what he was really saying was that Billy Rikker was a gutter punk that had no idea what he was doing, because Charles Gordon was not necessarily a subtle man by nature, but he certainly knew how to get a point across without being so crass as to spell it out.
He always thought Rikker was an upstart and it galled him to watch the little guttersnipe rise the way he did, putting on airs. He did well when de Lacy was ruling, but the times had changed and, to Charles' delight, Billy turned out to be unable to adapt to the current situation. By contrast, the new situation excited Charles.
Charles Gordon was a vampire supremacist, unabashed; a twisted interpretation of Darwin's survival of the fittest had always fueled his unsentimental approach to burning hapless civilians out of their cities and hapless natives out of the lands of their ancestors, and he was similarly unbothered with the plight of the average human. A lifetime and then a death spent making prey of others while not particularly worrying about mundane and ungentlemanly things like turning a profit had put him at disadvantage in the world he'd gambled and fought his way through. De Lacy found little use for a man of his talents, and other vampires viewed him as a crazed misanthrope, not one taken seriously in the scheme of the petty politics of the city's vampire. Nemsemet...well, that was different. The old mummy gave him something no one had given Charles Gordon in a long time; a war.
He'd cheered Cecil Rhodes' mercenaries as they subdued spear-wielding natives with Maxim guns in the name of civilization, watched Foch and Haig drive their mass armies of conscripts into the teeth of the German trenches, laughed at Mussolini's invasions of Libya, Ethiopia and Greece, thought that Hitler needed to leave the actual fighting in the hands of a capable staff of bred-for-war Prussian gentlemen, applauded Patton's drive through France with a sense of relish, banged his hand on a desk, breaking it, when he heard news of MacArthur's relief in Korea (and agreed with the sentiment that nuking the Red Chinese was something to hurry up and do now, before they were nuclear capable themselves) and tut-tutted the deplorable mess of the Vietnam War and all the other post-colonial conflicts where the men fighting the savages in the name of civilization missed the point -- and while the feckless press seemed inclined to help put the Amins, the Mugabes and the Ayatollahs in power, people that retarded the march of progress. In Gordon's world, the best way to make a better system was to put aside any lingering sentimentality and, like the engineer he was, create an efficient system that didn't burden itself with petty tribal, or humane for that matter, concerns.
So too with how vampires interacted with society.
"How would you do it, Major?"
"You mean how would I pick up the pieces, my Lord?"
"Yes. Billy Rikker has proven to be a liability."
Major Charles Niall Gordon told Nemsemet.
