It's not natural: A Sunset Coven Omake - Episode 2 (Part II-a)

It’s (still) not natural!

Another Sunset Coven Omake: E2-P2b

Finally Trice had reached her destination: Rabat.

After Kane had manned up, she demanded him to show where the Nemean lion’s skin was found. It wasn’t that she couldn’t have gone there on her own, but there was something to Kane’s story. Something was going on here that was more than just the death of a cool pet. And while she didn’t want to meddle with the affairs of others, this mystery intrigued her a lot.

To be honest, now that she was following Kane into parts of the Saint Paul’s Catacombs that weren’t even open to the public, she thought it was handy to have him.

‘Aren’t we there yet?’ she asked. There was more comfortable than walking around, bent in two so to not knock your head against the low ceiling you couldn’t even discern in the dark.

‘Yeah, I think it was here,’ he said as shone the flashlight into the floor. ‘As soon word gotten out that his skin was found, some Italian dudes came claiming to research the place and took everything with them.’

‘Was there something else beside the skin?’ Trice asked as she squatted down.

‘His eyeballs.’

‘Eyeballs? They didn’t say that in the news report.’ She looked at the bloodless crime scene and overturned some stones. ‘Was there any blood when you found the skin?’

‘No.’

‘Skinning and eye-gauging spotlessly?’ she asked as she dropped a stone she’d been holding. ‘Damn those skills. By the way, is it normal for the lion to come here? Looks a bit too populated.’

‘Bob? No, he normally stayed Calypso’s place at Gozo. She was her pet and took good care of it, ya know.’

If her skin could turn into another colour, it would to become green of envy. To have a Nemean lion as a pet was so freakin’ cool. ‘Calypso never took it for a walk or something?’

‘Well, of course she did. I mean, Bob isn’t a poodle meant to keep indoors 24/7.’

‘The lion came here without being seen by anybody? Didn’t Calypso notice it when it went missing?’

Kane huffed. ‘Could you like address “Bob” by its name instead of referring it as a “lion” or “it”?’

She smirked as she gotten up. ‘Over my dead body. Now answer me.’

‘No one did and Calypso was out the night he went missing. She only noticed the next night.’

‘How on earth can you not notice that your lion is missing?’

‘She had a bad hangover.’ He paused and since there was no comeback he explained. ‘We went out in St Julians. At Dragonara Casino’s she lost all her money and it depressed her…’

‘Hah? Losing money depressed her?’

‘Fine, she used to be a bad drunkard. I heard that since Odysseus left it was all booze, booze, booze. Well, my pal said that it was worse before she had Bob. But even so, pretty bad.’

‘How did Calypso even get the lion?’

‘Bob? I don’t know, she had it before I came here.’

Trice sulked. This guy was useless when it came to get info about the Nemean lion. Looked like all he cared about was that drunk with a gambling addiction… I bet she had rage issues too. ‘When did Calypso die?’

‘That night she found out Bob was missing. She called me to ask if we could search together and I was going to meet up with her at Mdina…’

‘That’s not far from here, right?’ she asked and checked how much time she had left. ‘Take me there.’

‘Okay,’ he said and made a step towards the exit, then halted. ‘Wait, why should I do that? You’re my prisoner.’

He was so slow it wasn’t even funny. ‘And here I thought we bonded over alcohol,’ she lied.

‘You slashed my friends,’ he accused.

‘Well, did they die?’ she asked.

Kane tilted his head to the side like a dog. ‘ No?’

‘See, I meant no harm.’ She slapped his back. ‘Now let’s go.’

***

Her thoughts bottlenecked in her head. When Kane showed her Mdina yesterday and explained to her what had happened, her gut feeling told her she would soon unravel the mystery of the disappearance of a truckload of Maltese creatures.

But her gut feeling was seemingly wrong.

Frustrated Trice rested her head on the table on which a map of the island filled with her markings had been spread out.

In Mdina Kane explained that he had set a rendez-vous with Calypso on her night of disappearance. When he reached the gates of the city, where they would meet up, she wasn't there. So he waited a few hours before going into the city and ask some kind of well demon whether he had seen her. On which the demon replied that he hadn't. However a person dropped some fabric in his well which he gave to Kane. Kane immediately recognised that the scraps of clothing belonged to Calypso.

When Kane explained to her that the well demon was the only creature in Mdina, Trice's suspicion was that perhaps the murderer was in the vicinity of Mdina and Rabat. The Maltese creatures were religiously following the Treaty who said that they should leave the Noblemen alone so they avoided Mdina where the last two were currently living.

It made of Mdina the perfect city to kill.

But when she asked Kane to give her a map of the country and tell her where they had found indications of other disappearances, she had to conclude that her theory was wrong. The disappearances were not, as she hoped, grouped around the area of Mdina, but grouped in Fgura, Santa Lucija and Kordin.

It was rather odd how disparate the murder scene of Calypso and her pet were in comparison of the rest. It could be that the murderer was exploring larger horizons, but it didn't make any sense. If she were a bloody murderer thirsty for a killing spree she'd go to la Valette where there were a lot of humans and monsters. It wasn't as if it was a subtle killer anyway. Then again the way Calypso and the Lion were killed was so different from the humans and other creatures. From the latter two no traces were left at all, unlike the former ones.

She sighed and eyed the door where she saw a shadow shifting. It had been her third night she had been hanging around at Kane’s hide-out in Birgu. While she didn’t like depending on strangers, Trice did have to admit that it was easier to access to more information this way as Kane could speak some Maltese. However, she was on guard when it came to the old crone. Which was why she hadn’t spent the day here, but found somewhere else to sleep.

Trice lifted her head and connected Fgura, Santa Lucija and Kordin.

Kane walked in with a cooler in hand. ‘I brought food,’ he announced.

Without looking up she pointed at the triangle, ‘What’s there that’s interesting?’

‘Interesting?’ he repeated as he opened the box. ‘You wanna do some tourism? Then you should visit the Tarxien temples.’

‘Anything else?’

‘There’s a church,’ he fished 2 foil packets. ‘Well, there’s also the Hypogeum, but it’s closed. So, you prefer pigs heart or cow’s stomach?’

‘The Hypogeum?’

‘Yeah, some sort of Prehistorical underground. And as I said, it’s closed to the public during the winter so...’

‘So? We broke into that other catacombs in Rabat,’ she countered.

‘That’s different. I know most of St Paul’s catacombs as the back of my hand. But the Hypogeum… It’s kinda hard. I mean, like hard to do more than humans would explore. It’s rather vast and all… You know, there’s been stories of people who disappeared without a trace. I heard that in 1940 a school of 30 children gotten lost in there or something. Anyway, which one you want?’

A big underground where no one has access to? That’d be the perfect place to eat and hide corpses. Maybe she was finally getting closer to the carcass of the Nemean lion. ‘Interesting,’ she said and gotten up. ‘Let’s make a trip there tomorrow night.’

‘What? But I just said we can’t.’

‘Then you’ll have to figure out by tomorrow how we can.’ She picked up her bag and headed to the door.

‘And why should I listen to you? You’re not the boss of me!’

She paused a second at the door and forced herself to flash him a dazzling smile. The kind that worked to get all the girls buy all the alcohol in her bar. It was perhaps not how she should get a guy do things for her, but she ran out of ideas and this whole “we’re happy friends” thing was wearing her down. ‘Drinks will be on me tomorrow night, okay?’ Then disappeared.

Kane remained behind puzzled what all this was about and why his heart just skipped a beat.

***

Trice had gone back to Mdina. Even though it looked like that the Hypogeum was probably going to give an answer for great deal of what was happening on this island, she could not shake off the feeling that something was off with the Silent city.

She walked through the narrow streets until she stopped in front of a house. Above the door there was some kind of emblem with a fish and three pink flowers. The vamp overheard a guide whispering to a couple who were paying her for a late night tour, ‘there are only two nobles living in here. A man and a woman. The property is so huge that they can live there without seeing each other for weeks I guess.’

Trice sized up the house and shrugged. It didn’t look that big to her. After the couple and their guide was gone, she went straight up to the door and rang.

A few minutes later, a small old man in a black suit opened curiously the door. ‘Yes?’

‘Hello, would you sign a  petition for the re-opening of the Hypogeum?’

The man shook his head. Trice shrugged it off at first, then grabbed the handle and smacked the door against the man’s face. As he fell backwards, she slipped in unnoticed.

Before getting adventurous she checked the old man first. He was knocked out, had a heartbeat and didn’t have that eau de monster-smell on him. ‘Yup, human. Alive and kickin’’ she whispered to herself, ‘… Sorta.’

Once she was sure he would be out for a while, Trice let herself into the first room which looked was a living room of some sorts. It was pretty much like every house in Malta she had seen so far: high ceilings, light colours and carpets covering the till floors. ‘Booo-oring.’ She walked straight across the room, to the next one which seemed to have the same purpose, only with bookcases. Mildly interested, she picked randomly a title and flipped through the mouldy crumbly books. She swapped books a few times, but they were all in the same state and in Maltese.

Even more bored, she plucked a framed picture from late 1800’s amongst a dozen others and studied it. A man with short hair but a big waxy moustache standing next to a lady who sitting down in a chair and looked like she would drown into an uncomfortable dark dress.

Still carrying the frame, Trice looked around and sighed. Perhaps this house was bigger than she estimated and just maybe the tour guide was right. A week would pass before she would find these “nobles” at this rate. There was no the time neither patience for her to do so, hence she dropped the picture on an uncovered patch of the till floor. ‘Oops,’ she said flatly and waited for a few seconds.

Nothing.

Maybe it was simply that big that no one would hear a frame getting smashed. She moved to another room who seemed to look the same as the previous ones, only with a long eating table in the middle of the room.

She put her hand on the surface of the wooden table and narrowed her eyelids.

A hiss.

Trice kept her position but soundlessly moved her hand sideways to get a hold of a chair. As she observed how her shadow on the table grew larger, she grinned and swung the chair around to crush it against whatever was sneaking upon her.

The figure fell down. Since it was dark, Trice couldn’t make out after a first glance what she actually hit down.

As she approached it, the unknown clump squirmed, looking as if it were changing size or shape. As it rose up, Trice made a step back and made a quick scan again of the other objects she could use to whoop its ass.

‘Who…’

‘Huh?’ Trice uttered as the face of her opponent became clear.

‘Who are you?’

‘Noooo…’ Trice grabbed her cell phone and cast a light on the man. ‘Oooh. The guy from the picture. Well, I’d say upgrade since you’ve lost the moustache. Since guessing who you are is easy, how about you tell me what you are?’

‘Are you one of Kane’s mutts?’ he asked disdainfully. He dashed forward and grabbed Trice by the throat with one hand. ‘Then again, he isn’t much himself. More like birds of a feather flocking together…’ It looked as though he made up his mind about something and gave her a piercing look. ‘If you are with him, you wouldn’t break into this place so easily…’

‘Screw the Treaty.’ With one hand she grabbed his wrist and the other she twisted his elbow towards his body. ‘You signed it and it’s not as if you’ve been respecting it,’ she accused. From what she gathered with this single move was that he was a rather bendy lad. He didn’t even whimper and so she added a kick against his shin so that he’d finally back off.

‘What? How dare you!’ This time he lunged at her in an attempt to punch her.

She dodged him easily, pushed him flat on the ground and herself up on the table. He had practically no fighting skills, but he withstood the blows well. It was definitely not human, and his heavy aftershave smell wouldn’t change her mind about this. ‘Ah come on, we both know that you’ve been chomping sneakily here and there some humans.’

‘What do you know?’ he hissed back. ‘We’ve been forced by that bastard to sign the Treaty that forbade us to even touch a human. Even after his death we had to respect that fucking piece of paper cause of that fucking Calypso bitch!’

‘Calypso?’ Trice’s eyelids rounded at the mention. The person he referred to as “that bastard” obviously had to be Valette, however she couldn’t wrap her mind around how Calypso fit in the picture. Why would she even care about the affairs of humans? Didn’t she hate them ever since Odysseus dumped her to get back with his wife? Then again supposedly she was holed up in her cave in Gozo, crying a river over Odysseus… While it appeared she was a drunkard who knew how to party. ‘So that’s why you killed her?’

His body seemed to be changing again, but Trice was too caught up with her thoughts to pay attention to it.

What she had been assuming was wrong. If he was so angry at Calypso, why would they have killed her only now? Why wait for so long? They didn’t have to fear the Order anymore. Already early 19^th century its power had weakened, so it had to be either because they didn’t know how to kill her and found out about it now…

Either because the Order wasn’t the problem.

She snapped out of her thoughts as once again, he rose, this time not as a human… ‘Holy shi…’ but as a 10 ft long snake. ‘It’s a joke, right?’

Swiftly, she gotten off the table as the snake let its body fall down and caused the table to snap in two. ‘Damn…’ It wasn’t the first time she had seen a snake, but the first time she saw a snake with such proportions. It had a rather heavy body for its length. What was that all about? Shapeshifting gone wrong? Then again, maybe he wasn’t a proper shapeshifter, but just some jackass who gotten some shots just like in the film “Sssssss”?

The snake continued its pursuit and followed Trice who ran back along the libraries, which she tipped over one by one in the hope it’d just squash that little bastard flat.

However in spite of its thick body, it found its way fine to escape the rain of books and cases.

That was when Trice knew she had to become a little more creative. As she ran from room to room, the Vamp skimmed her memory to find ways to kill a shapeshifter or just a big-ass snake. She was cut short on her train of thought when she arrived in a hall with a staircase granting access to higher stories. It looked like the evident choice to make, but what if there was nothing useful in their rooms that would help the ass-whooping a bit? Moreover, what if the second one was upstairs? One was already a handful…

Since she hesitated for too long, the serpent caught up and slithered around her.  Quickly, she bent down and slide her hunter knife out of her right boot. The snake saw its chance and pounced on her. He disregarded Trice’s left arm that she had lift up to block his attack and simply went directly to bite her on neck and shoulder, taking the arm with him. Automatically she clenched her muscles so that he wouldn’t be able to bite through, but it didn’t matter to him as this wasn’t how he planned to finish her off. He focused on keeping his prey still, while the rest of his thick body circled around her…

Before he could tighten properly his grip, Trice rose her free right arm, stabbed the serpent in its eye with the hunter knife and twisted it. Immediately, she was freed from his toothy grip as it backed away in pain. Finally something that actually worked. With a shoulder blow, she moved his ugly snake-face out of her way and decided to take an escape route: the window.

She leaped through it, inevitably breaking the glass.

After a hard landing on the terrace, she attempted to asses her body’s condition in the dark. Her bruised left arm was strained, her body was covered in cuts and she didn’t want to even guess how the area around her neck and collar bone looked like right now. If she had to take a guess, the last one was fractured since she couldn’t lift her left arm. ‘That son of a…’ She chuffed.

From what she gathered it was a non-venomous snake… Then what was it? An anaconda? A boa? Then again, these don’t look as disproportionate as he does. Unless it fed on something not that long ago.

Whatever. She better found a way to stop it before she turned into breakfast.

On the terrace, no garden house could be found. There went her plan to find a chainsaw. She looked back to the building, hearing some movement. It was then that she noticed an outside staircase leading down to the basement. It didn’t take long for her to decide to go there.

***

This was bad. Whatever that woman who intruded into his house was, it was tough. However that wouldn’t stop him to get her. She had seen the picture, she had seen him, his true form. If he allowed her to stay longer in this place, it wouldn’t take her long to connect the dots. And then, he, he would be finished. And his sister, Perfidia would meet the same end as him.

The ruckus this fight caused hadn’t woken up her yet, however he had to finish the job quick if he wanted to bury this quietly.

The problem was this damn knife she had pierced into his eye and left there. Now that he was injured and he had already morphed twice, doing it again would be too exhausting, so he was practically obligated to leave it there until he finished the job.

He slinked towards the window and peeped his head out, to catch her going to the basement. This was excellent, she actually made it easier for him by going there.

As he crossed through the mansion to find the door that would lead to the basement, he wondered by himself when was the last time he ate a human. Obviously she wasn’t one, but from the bite he was able to take she wasn’t far from being one.

Maybe his tongue had gotten dull after gobbling nothing but animals the last 500 years or.

In the beginning he didn’t fear the Order of Saint John as hunters. His cover as a nobleman was perfect anyway and so he was able to lead this silent war against the Order. But then one day Valette found out. How? As of today he still didn’t know. How could that bastard suddenly show up at his doorstep and threaten him with Perfidia? Just how had he known about their identity and her condition?

And why did Calypso ever take his side after his death?

The two key people were gone without leaving him any answers and the more he thought about it, the more it frustrated him. The only thing that could comfort him was that he had taken revenge on Calypso in some ways and that soon he would take over this puny country and undo the Treaty. But, first he had to take care of that Kane fellow. Then the matter of his minions would be taken care of automatically. There was no way these dumb Maltese creatures would stick together after he was gone.

At last he arrived at the door leading to the basement. It was oddly quiet downstairs. For a split second he wondered whether she was plotting something, only there was nothing in there aside whatever their butler used to keep the terrace tidy. She had to be hiding, rather cowering in fear cause he’d find her anyway.

He bust through the door and skittered down the stairs. As he moved along the darkness, he tried  to sense her body heat, but it was just when he tried, that it occurred to him that he was never able to do so. So far he had gone by scent or sight.

‘… where?’

Just then, she appeared as if she were falling from the ceiling or something and landed with one foot on his snout, clenching it onto the ground. ‘Eat this,’ she grunted and bore a shovel into his body, just under his head.

Trice watched his body twitch in an expanding pool of blood till it finally stopped and so confirmed its death. ‘Finally.’

Doing this dissatisfied her intensely though she had exacted her revenge. With this she didn’t do what she intended to: find out who killed the Nemean lion and so on. Instead of finding answers, she was stumbling on more questions and mysteries. If she didn’t find someone or something to answer them soon, she’d be stuck in Malta for a long time, something she couldn’t afford. ‘I miss Cookie-chan.’ The vamp pouted.

Trice grabbed her phone and checked time (Cookie-chan being her background), she still had enough time to find the other nobleman and clean up whatever mess she left behind. She also couldn’t forget the butler at the front door.

Maybe she had overestimated herself though. Her injuries not recovering quickly enough was one thing, but this being a big ass house was another. Searching for clues could take hours.

After checking the butler was still knocked out, she decided on skimming the top floor, pitchfork in hand.

***

The last room she entered, was an odd one. At each corner of the walls there were bookcases stuffed with porcelain dolls, in the middle a princess bed surrounded with pink frilly veils.

‘Come,’ a voice hissed.

‘Since you’re asking so nicely.’ Trice marched forward and pushed the veils aside. She raised the pitchfork above the bed, but put it back down the moment she saw that frail gaunt woman tucked in bed.

‘What?’ she asked breathing heavily. ‘I’m not even worth a kill?’

Trice smirked. ‘Something liked that.’ She seized up the room once more and went on, ‘So are you the other noble one?’

‘What about Franco? What about my brother?’

‘Oh, your brother…’ How to break the news that you killed someone’s brother? ‘Uhm, napping?’ Never mind, perhaps it was better not touch upon that subject and ask her questions. ‘Say…’

‘Could you kill me too?’ the woman asked.