Chains of Retribution Prologue

[Tiko]

May 1st, 2024

Baron lay unconscious, an IV in one arm. The sedative that fed into his bloodstream blocked the hormone production that would be required to signal the body to start shifting.

---

[Something is wrong. You need to wake up!]

"Where the fuck is Bastien?" Baron demanded.

"I'm almost out," Vanessa said as she dropped down as well.

Julienne checked the clip in her gun with a grimace.

"Three more rounds for me," she said.

---

[Wake up!]

Blood seeped between Baron's fingers as he held his hand pressed to the side of his throat.

"Fuck me," cursed Jesse. "Did any of you know he was allergic to silver?"

---

[This isn't right. This already happened.]

Baron raised the butt of his shotgun to slam it forward into Rowan's face.

CRACK

The echo of a rifle as a silver-lined bullet tore through Baron's midsection.

---

[Wake up!]

"That bullet needs to come out, but I don't have the tools here," said Jesse.

"Jesse, this looks bad," interrupted Julienne.

"Her right lung has collapsed," replied Jesse. "We need to keep more air from getting into the chest cavity. How far out are we?"

"Ten minutes maybe," answered Bastien.

---

[Wake UP!]

Baron's head smashed into Rowan's face with a solid crunch.

CRACK

The echo of a rifle as a bullet shattered Baron's right knee into a mess of bone fragments and smoking flesh.

---

[Ragenard? Where had Ragenard come from...]

“Yo. Jesse. Do you think he’s going to make it,” Ragenard asked.

"I don't know," Jesse answered.

---

[Fuck!]

"Beginning to slow down, Baron..." taunted Rowan.

CRACK

The echo of a rifle as a bullet struck Baron in the left shoulder blade.

---

[I fucked up.]

"We have a rat," Baron growled out between blood coated lips. "Someone betrayed us."

“Don’t die on me, fucker, and stay the fuck calmed. Do you know who’s the rat,” Ragenard asked.

"Find out," Baron growled.

---

[Vanessa! No, I've seen this already. Again. I have to wake up.]

The bite of a knife bit into Baron's neck as he caught a glimpse of a red furred wolf slam into Rowan.

"Stupid bitch!" Rowan shouted.

---

[Wake up!]

"You've done one hell of a job to yourself this time, James," remarked Reinhard. "Dose the other," he said to someone. "Going to have to put you out too, James."

---

[Wake the fuck up!]

The sound of claws scraped against concrete as the red-furred wolf dragged herself away from Rowan with a low whine.

"Ragenard!" screamed Julienne.

Tires screeched nearby.

---

Baron's normally brown eyes burned an amber-yellow behind his eyelids and his heartrate had spiked. Nearby, Jesse could sense the invigorating rush that came before a transformation. He adjusted the dosing and Baron's heartrate slowed. He wouldn't be able to keep him out much longer. He could only hope that Baron's body had healed enough.

 

[Tiko]

Baron's eyes snapped open, and a snarl tore from his lips. His eyes were a swirl of amber-yellow, and the guttural sounds that tore from his throat were more animal than human. He could feel the bite of the bullets that struck him, smell Vanessa's blood, hear Julienne's scream. The stench of burning flesh filled his nostrils. His burning flesh.

"Someone betrayed us."

His words to his brother, Ragenard. It was the last clear memory he had.

The phantom smells faded as he became more aware of his surroundings. He didn't recognize the place, but the calmness in the air and the steady beeping of medical monitors told him that he was safe. There was another sound behind the noise of the equipment that caught his ear. It was the rapid thumping of a heartbeat.

"Baron?" a familiar voice spoke.

Jesse. Of course. Jesse was an intern at Saint Adelard Hospital before he contracted lycanthropy. While he wasn't much use in a scrap, the kid had guts. That Jesse was alive meant that their raid on the casino was a success. But at what cost?

He could hear the hesitance in Jesse's voice, and for good reason. Baron's fury writhed just beneath the surface, and the wolf raged to be unleashed.

"I'm not going to shift," he growled as he sat up.

"We've had to keep you sedated while you heal," Jesse explained.

"How long have I been under?" Baron demanded.

"Two weeks."

Two weeks. The time lapse hit him like a truck. There was no telling what could have transpired in two weeks.

"Who have we lost?"

"Renard, Marc, Carlisle, Christian, Ulrich, Camille..."

Baron's fury was an inferno that burned hotter with each name, and he could feel it coursing through him, almost as if it had a substance of its own.

"Where is Ragenard?" he asked.

"He uh... he took the pack with him. They're moving on Rowan," Jesse answered.

"Where," Baron growled.

He should be out there, with the pack.

Jesse hesitated, but fortunate timing would save him from the uncomfortable situation. The sound of vehicles on gravel announced the return of the others.

Baron saw the audible relief in Jesse’s posture. He ripped an IV free from his hand and swung his feet down to stand up. He was intent on locating his brother sooner rather than later. His knee failed to bear his weight though and he snarled as it went out. In his head he heard the gunshot and felt the bones in his knee shatter all over again.

“Shit,” Jesse hissed and moved towards Baron as if to help. A piercing glare from Baron stopped him in his tracks though. “Your body is still healing,” he explained. “We weren’t going to wake you yet, but your body has been adapting to the sedatives too quickly.”

Baron, normally the calmer of the two brothers, could barely contain his seething rage. He would stand. Rowan would not see him brought low, kneeling on the floor like some wounded pup.

“Where are we?” he bit out through grit teeth as he forced himself to his feet.

The small room was devoid of much in the way of equipment or furniture, and the unremarkable grey stone that made up the walls didn’t leave much to identify their location with. It wasn’t the Den Basement, and it wasn’t the Med Center.

“Maybe you should sit-” Jesse suggested.

“Where are we?” Baron demanded.

“A warehouse of Ragenard’s, out by the old abandoned train station,” Jesse explained.

They could hear voices now, and distant footsteps.

 

[Dashmiel]

It was a balmy and uneventful Lutetian early evening. The clock hadn’t quite struck 19:00, and the day’s heat was finally starting to relinquish its hold as the last rays of sunlight began their final descent behind the horizon in the car’s rear view mirror.

A particularly forgotten bit of decaying civic infrastructure reared its head in the form of a pothole large enough to nearly swallow the sedan’s front axle as the vehicle shook and bounced hard enough for Ragenard’s head to thunk upon the roof.

Bastien raised a worried—less at the possibility of an outburst and more at the large man’s uncharacteristic post-battle silence, Ragenard suspected—eyebrow towards him. Ragenard merely grunted before continuing to look outside the car’s window.

He’d barely registered the car’s impact; his mind was still lost in the repetitive and nauseatingly squelching thud-thunk, thud-thunk, thud-thunk of his inhumanly shifted fist rendering a problem he’d been dealing with since the schoolyard days just… be no more.

There was also the itching. Leave it to that snake to not go out without trying some absurdly high-class James Bond shit. Ragenard aimed his remaining eye towards the silver-mist poisoned gash in his right forearm, watching the glint at the bloody edges slowly vanish. He’d asked Jesse once what he supposed was happening; the other posited that perhaps his body had, however slowly, figured out a way through its silver allergy.

Apparently, it could happen to normal people too, but Ragenard doubted their allergies involved their bodies collecting heavy metals for them to excrete later. I ought to start a fancy shit-store, Ragenard mused ruefully.

He recognized the pneumatic knife, of course—power tools were ever a favorite of his enemies to try to tackle with him—but Ragenard didn’t expect fucking silver flakes in the compressor chamber. It was clever, and Ragenard was actually afraid once he lost the eye but while it didn’t kick in for an abnormally long time, the once reassuring itch was back in his eye socket now. The itch let him know that his body was healing; his tissues mending at preternatural speed. It ought to have been reassuring.

It wasn’t. The allergic reaction was one of the few things he had left marking him as “normal”. One of the few things he could commiserate with Baron over.

There it was, the thought he’d been avoiding. Ragenard had cast a die tonight, and whether it was sevens or snake eyes wasn’t something anyone would know for sure tonight. Whether or not it had to be done was immaterial—Ragenard thought so or Rowan and his pack wouldn’t be a cautionary tale for the morning—what mattered now was the reality.

The long-contested second-largest Lutetian gang finally took out the long-contested largest gang at last, in a flash of savagery that wouldn’t be possible without his own presence as a force-multiplier.

Ragenard could be said to be a terrifying enemy to have, but he was one man, and he had announced to the world tonight by even attacking in the first place that he could be pushed to a purpose not his own. That was dangerous. He had to hope that the lesson the coroner would scrape off that warehouse in the morning would serve as a counter announcement of how bad of an idea that was for all others paying attention.

But that still left him with a Baron he was uncertain would understand and worse, one Ragenard did not think he could afford to leave with a misunderstanding. He would need to make Baron understand if he didn’t; it was a time of war, and of the two, one of them had the greater acumen for the necessary savagery. He just hoped—

“We’re here,” Bastien said simply. Ragenard nodded and signaled for the man to park. He left him with clear instructions to pass on to Desmond on the immediately-beginning new patrol rota, which he expected Desmond to personally handle that night. That it placed his second far away from what would at best become his… third was a happy coincidence.

Ragenard sighed as he smacked the roof of the sedan, signaling for Bastien to go on and get the cars hidden from view in their designated garage in the rail yard. He was left alone under the glint of a lonely light pole by the entrance to the rail yard office they were using as a makeshift infirmary.

He took a deep breath, scenting café au lait, oil, blood, and sweat in the air. Not even the ones wafting from him, that was just what Lutetia smelled like in the summer, whenever it hadn’t rained recently (and thus gotten the damn river and the grave smells all stirred up). He pulled out a cigarette from a slightly tattered pack he’d pulled from Rowan’s own desk. Aenyptian, fancy imported shit.

An enormously large crow squealed angrily as it landed upon the light pole. Ragenard hadn’t even gotten his first breath in. “I fucking know, okay!?” he said seemingly to the night as he took a deep drag. The crow watched him intently throughout the whole slow exhale.

A fear the dearly departed Rowan would have died all over again in order to be able to engender in Ragenard began to blossom in his chest. “Sorry. I will take care of it. Just, can we please talk tomorrow?” he added with an exhausted sigh. The crow squawked in what he thought might have been parseable as ‘indignant but magnanimous acquiescence’ before flying off.

“Right, that’s the scariest part of the night done then,” he said with a relieved grin. Part of him expected to find out then there if he could die after all, but his luck still held. That usually meant the misery was yet to follow, but Ragenard would take it. He made his way through the office’s unlocked front entrance, nodding to the younger wolf on watch that evening.

It didn’t take him more than a breath to scent that Baron had moved. Was moving. With an uncomfortable Jesse in tow. Ragenard wanted to go to his brother. But he didn’t.

He wasn’t just Ragenard Guiscard then; he was Ragenard the Bloodstone Alpha. It wouldn’t be seemingly for him to rush to Baron’s side, so instead he loudly declared to the young wolf on watch that he was taking the conference room as his room for the night and to let anyone asking know so.

 

[Tiko]

(as written by Tiko & Dashmiel)

By the time Baron located his brother, word was already spreading throughout the pack that he was awake. No one had moved to approach him though. No one quite knew what this would mean. Was Baron Pack Leader again now? The circumstances around Ragenard’s claim to the position had been unusual at best.

⁜​

Baron stood in the doorway of the conference room, amber-yellow eyes locking onto Ragenard’s. There was only one question of importance. One question that could make all of this right.

“Is he dead?”

“He is,” Ragenard confirmed in a deadpan tone before grimly continuing. “You won’t hear about it in the obituaries until the DNA results come back, but the streets already know on account of every other Scion at that party being a collection of body parts.”

The rawness of Baron’s burning rage began to slowly subside at Ragenard’s answer.

“I should have been there,” Baron growled through gritted teeth. “Should have strangled the fuck with my own bare hands. The traitor?”

Ragenard did not acknowledge Baron’s should’s, one way or another. “Dead before the rest, a week ago. Surprise, it was fucking Jacques.”

The sound of gunshot, a flash of red fur, the smell of blood. Vanessa. She had put herself between him and Rowan, bought Ragenard the time needed to reach them. He was having trouble keeping himself grounded to the present. What had been two weeks to the rest had felt like minutes to him.

"Did Vanessa make it?"

“Put her and Sophia up with Des’ aunt Mauribelle in Huglin,'' Ragenard reassured, referring to Desmond’s ancestral house up in the Iverian highlands. Unconnected to their mess.

"What now?" Baron asked finally.

Ragenard took a long drag of the fancy smoke belonging to a dead man before he replied. “We find out if you fit and look cute in the Sgt-at-arms-Cut” he replied.

"Heh," Baron replied. "Give me one of those would you?"

Ragenard tossed the fancy cancer stick wrapper over.

Baron took a drag of the cigarette before speaking again. “How long do you suppose we have before the blowback?”

Their dynamic had forever changed, and yet some things it would seem would forever remain the same between the brothers.

Ragenard’s brow furrowed as he calculated. “Probably three or four days before the first punkass try. That’ll set the tone…” he let his voice trail off, taking a drag of the smoke. “But I need to go…pay respects tomorrow night,” he added cryptically.

He didn’t bother explaining, Baron would know it simply had to do with ‘that Iverian wild peat bog shit’.

“I had to use something I wasn’t supposed to earlier today. Something that may require I put my attention away from things these pups definitely can not fuck around with while the more common sort of shit knocks on our doors…I need a sergeant at arms that’s gonna be about the business and keep the pack toughened up.” Ragenard led the worry in his voice out some; letting it flavor the air with the understanding that more than one kind of monster was going to be after them now.