Catland. The lone Blues and Jazz club in the city limits, housed in the skeleton of a tilted, narrow building with a peeled skin front that revealed the many different colors of paint it had been in years past, decorated solely with a red neon sign that flickered when the train ran nearby and crackle-popped in the rain. On thick-aired evenings, music would boil out the door and iron barred windows, simmering down the black streets and bubbling around in the alleys that flanked either side, hot sounds for cold nights.

Every Thursday, they played good, muddy, Mississippi blues. The sort of music Michael had grown up on. He had a skull of dim distant memories, of sitting on humid bar stoops in the middle of the night, of listening to old men play harmonica and guitar and sing about lost loves and heart break, of the smell of old spilled beer mixing freely with cheap tobacco. The all-to-early adulthood had been set to a C-blues soundtrack. Just as the Old Man River ran through the lands of the country, the Blues ran through the states of his life. The Malkavian from New Orleans even owned a few harmonicas and could play a tune or three when the mood struck him.

Which hadn't been often. Not until Jessica had walked into his life. Michael and gone into hiding ten and a handful of years ago, long enough for the time to get fuzzy and people to forget about the relentless stalker of the LeBeau family. Only a pale shadow of a whisper remained of his reputation. Just a man with a forgotten name. Faceless, again, amongst the many peoples of the streets. And in the dark and the shadows, he had quite lost the living compulsions: music, food, drink, sex. But Jessica.

Oh, how powerfully she brought it back.

The guts of the club were as much a muddled mixture as the peeling paint front, constructed in a sweeping pattern of river greens and ocean blues and sky purples. Furniture came from a dozen sources and in as many styles. The walls and floors were black to hide the stains and dirt. The small front door and hallway was short enough to make tall men stoop. A bar ran most of the length of the right wall, oak wood peppered by knots and brass faucets for the thirty customers. A thick skinned man with arms like tree trunks and a bloodied apron took drink orders with monosyllabic grunts. Rumor went around that he was a wizard or a dragon or worse; he never confirmed any of them, but he never denied, either. Above the bar was a balcony and office.

Where the bar ended, the room expanded into a dark and dim lit space busy with tables and chairs. The walls were couch lined and the floor marked in random intervals with tables and stools. The stage took up the left corner and was bright beneath buzzing spot lights. Red curtains draped across either side of it, like falls of bloody water, spilling out across the uneven wood. An exit sign over a door in the right corner marked the way out into the alley.

It was the right corner that was Michael's haunt. He towered over the table nearest the back, dressed in a weather beaten leather jacket and blue-on-grey flannel, with holes in his jeans and boots in need of cleaning. His newly shaven head had a lazy sideways tilt, heavy lidded eyes cast stage wards, and he shifted and leaned with the music. He probably shouldn't be here — signs said strange forces were closing in around him. More than once in the last few weeks, he had spent all night here, listening to men croon about love and loss. More than once was a pattern. A pattern was dangerous.

But music soothed the savage beast, and Michael was ever so savage.

Sabotage had spent the better part of her life becoming a songbird to such savages. The realm was a melting pot of the grotesque, a playground for the worst of natures, and so full of strange energies you couldn't spit without hitting a demigod, or without worrying that a scavenger might collect the saliva and weave some terrible magic into it. Different creatures necessitated different lullabies: the softest croon for the big egos straining against the sinewy hulks of the mythical beasts, sotto voce dirges for the demons swathed in the sleek lines of couture and, for the most bloodthirsty vampires, the piper's song of ripe blood and the tempting cadence of bared flesh. Sab's body was riddled with the aftermath of wrong notes and imprecise timing: perforations that had healed in parabolic flares; a topsoil of petal-pink skin thin and taut between deep, scorched-earth gouges. And over her back the deep, insidious crosshatchings of a hundred angry strikes. She'd been singing the wrong song altogether that time.

On this particular night, Sab whistled a harmony that trailed her passage through the alley flanking the outward spill of music and its accompanying baggage of all the sadhearts and savages inside. Her heart was not sad, not at the moment. It'd been broken'several times" but it was rarely something that couldn't be stitched back together with a string of lovers.

A thick gold slug of a watch rescued from a sedentary life squeezing a fat wrist dangled loosely on her arm. The second hand swept the pearl face smoothly. That uninterrupted passage of time was the real reason people shelled out wads of money for Rolexes"even if it was a subconscious notion. The seamless motion mimicked the best of time: yachting trips, expensive shoes, cocktails on verandas with rich, unhurried laughter studded like jewels against the twilight of a never-ending happy hour. Seconds counted by ticks usually meant a dire situation: countdown to detonation, the measure of a pulse. Who wanted to wear such a constant reminder on their arm' A Rolex was a lifestyle purchase with the highest aspirations of a beautiful life played out in pink sunrises and polite talk of the weather. That Sab's was stolen held no small sense of irony.

The watch rattled heavily between the bracketing of cheap metal bangles as Sab dropped a small package wrapped in foreign newsprint into the right corner of a dumpster flanking the club. Once, long ago, she had reached into this same dumpster and her fingertips had met the stiffening, lukewarm tips of another's. She reeled back aghast, initially, but soon enough she reached back in for the thing she felt before; the ring was cheap titanium and not worth the crack of knuckle required to clear its passage. She wore it around her neck as a reminder, instead; how important that space between the two tick marks of a watch face could be.

Sab twirled the ring around her thumb as she passed the entrance of the club, and maybe because the band dropped an octave lower, unearthing from all that delta mud a rhythm beat on the bones of New Orleans itself, she turned instead and entered. Nostalgia was an Achille's heel of hers.

She stopped at the bar for a sharp-eyed assessment of the highwire truce she and the bartender had strung up long ago. The slightest gust of the wrong rumor would likely mean its demise, but he passed her a glass of whiskey without comment, and he watched as her gaze drifted upwards towards the balcony to the thin hint of light beyond the door. He shook his head once to her before turning away. There was a couch in that room with velvet brocade congealed into tough lumps from the wear of time"and bodies"that would press its hard clots into the tender flesh behind the thighs and lower back and leave burns with friction. The salve of time had soothed both the flesh and memory and Sab turned away blithely, her gaze sifting and sorting the occupants. She had been a softer beauty once, but now compelled more aggressive adjectives of which savage was merely one. She had a predatorial mein, the kind most often comfortably viewed from behind wrist-thick glass. Even her gaze prowled: stage to bar, bar to tables, back and forth like the clipped switching of a feline tail.

A large puddle of a man nodded along in the corner. Slow and steady the accordian accompaniment of his three fleshy chins, his eyes closed like he might be drifting towards sleep, but his fingers were white-knuckled around his rocks glass as if this particular song was his. Such was the promiscuous nature of the blues. At a table on the fringes of the stage, a wayward siren with salt-brimmed eyes of the sea sat with a businessman in a suit. The siren's fingers crawled a forward and backward tide over the table top as the man's fingers scuttled along her thigh. Before the night was over, the siren's fingers would pick the man's pockets clean, and he would feel sea-sick and wobbly in the morning. A barely-discernible figure Sab judged to be an incubus watched the siren hungrily from a mantle of shadows. But it was the mad knight that held the greatest portion of her attention. Sly and sidelong she watched the savage a few moments before she sidled to a calculated closeness that positioned her poignantly at the edge of his personal space without the overture of threat. She remembered his face, though time had altered it. Not in age, but in the more enigmatic ways of nature and psyche that lived beneath the skin. Like she, he looked as if his life had been counted out by second hands that ticked rather than swept.

"Rumor has it that the drummer over there fell in love with a sorceress. Vile bitch with a mean streak the size of the Mississippi. She spelled his heart, bound it to hers so that it matches her pulse." Sab paused briefly, watching the jump of the sticks as the drummer picked up a new rhythm with the change in song. "Every now and then she'll stray. Her heart starts pumping furiously. It gets his pumping, throws him off his beat and pisses the hell out of him. Watch. Watch his jaw clench. You'll see it. Right?".there." And it could well have been a complete fabrication, that in fact she just happened to know the song right down to its meter, but there it was: a subtle clench of the drummer's jaw followed by a sudden syncopation in his beat that twisted his lips all askew and knit his brows darkly. Maybe for the effort, but maybe due to the credence of her story.

Michael's mad, bright green eyes ticked into the woman's direction as soon as she started her way towards him. She was making no attempt to hide her approach and for that reason, and that reason alone, Michael wasn't already out the door and into the safety of all the escape routes he had worked out weeks in advance. Up the wall of either building, or down the alley, or into the sewer, or to wait and fight it out; the Malkavian had a thorough mind when it came to war, and lately it was rare that he didn't feel at war.

A lean hardness grew in him as she talked. Conversation pulled him quite out of the music. Maybe it was the topic, or maybe it was the person doing the talking. All those scars had stories. Michael took a subtle sniff; more chapters. Violence and trafficking, alley ways and dumpsters. It was a book he was familiar with. Another reason, perhaps, that he didn't just get up and leave. There was something else, too. Something beneath the asphalt smell of a criminal mind, mingling with sweat and smoke and sex of the bar and its many occupants. It reminded him of Jessica. It reminded him of family.

She was an animal, too.

Finally, when she finished, Michael moved, a stirring of a great and powerful beast. His posture straightened and his face slipped into a stonecold flatline. It wasn't her fault, but how would she know that' There was an imaginary noose around his thick neck and a cold voice coolly whispering in his head.

"He should see a wizard, then. Get that taken care of." He turned in his seat to look at her, face to face, scars to scars. Handsome, in a broken nose sort of way. Attractive like a lion, charismatic like a hawk. Long fingers rolled the beer bottle around on the table, spinning it on its edge. Michael hadn't aged a second since his Sire had given him the Kiss, but he'd acquired enough battle wounds before then to leave him a map of abuse etched into his body, from the lines of cuts on his cheeks and the crooked way his nose sat, to the thickness of his knuckles, and to the deeper things that lay hidden beneath his clothes.

Sabotage was a heady mixture of scents, but the base note from which every other assemblage of her fragrance rose was the ashy grit of perseverance. It wasn't pretty or tempting in the way something like vanilla or sandalwood was; it did not crawl subtly insinuative to the nostrils but assaulted and forced a flare like the metallic sting of perspiration. It lived in her eyes, as well, deep, lush green like pine needles shaken to a forest floor and made flinty and brittle as Michael's face became a fortress. She'd hit the wrong note, it seemed, and she looked to the nearby exit expectantly, as if she thought to simply catch a glimpse of his back as he escaped. When he didn't move, she took it for the brief reprieve it was, and though some would be hasty to fill the silence he'd left heavy with the curdle of his words, she let it linger as she took a slow sip from her whiskey glass.

The band finished their New Orleans reel and the drummer sat back, swiped his brow and took a long quaffing drink from his beer bottle. A man on fire, he found the same ways to douse it that many others did. Sab, too, had once nearly drowned in that particular solution. The guitarist twanged a few notes that ascended and quavered against a long slide down the guitar's neck.

"Maybe he likes the pain. Misery can be one of life's most potent flavors"like salt"when properly measured, it can inspire and motivate. Maybe his rhythm would be lost without it."

"Read, my darling, read," her mother had told her in the cotton-thick way she spoke at night. Even from the alcohol soaked sponge of her mouth, the words rang insistently, like a hand on the small of the back, urging forward. So Sab read and found she liked words very much. She learned all the synonyms for escape by the time she was eight, convinced that once she hit upon the right one a portal would appear and the urgent hand of her mother's best legacy of advice would have a place to push her towards. By the time she was sixteen, she knew them in four languages. Still she waited. At night in her bed, she whispered them into the darkness against the scattered shards of her mother's bitter laughter: abscond, "vasion, escapar, flucht. At nineteen she added another language. It involved no spoken words but its letters were written over her body and along her knuckles in adjectives of violence. The language brought a portal eventually, though it led down into darkness, not up to light, and was shaped like a madam with a leonine smile. Sab escaped.

Her love for the playground of words remained and she often indulged it until a wrist-slap of sharp admonishments pulled her back into the practical, as Michael's stony face did now.

"I want to ask to sit with you, because I plan to stay for awhile and might like your company, but there's nothing inviting about the way you're looking at me right now, and I'm too wary to take your reply and the fact that you've made no move against me as an implicit invitation. You could harm me faster than the split second it would take me to determine which blade to pull." Blatant honesty always had the purest tone. "I recognize your face, though I never saw it this closely, only glimpsed it from safer distances and filled in the finer aspects of your features with the rumors I heard." Those rumors must have had elements of truth because they cut the same jagged edges against the quarry of his face in her mind that she saw now, up close. "I'm called Sabotage, but mostly Sab because it's less unwieldy." Called because there was a significant difference, in her mind, between the nickname given by her long-dead accomplices in memorandum to times past and the ill-fitting name given her by the woman who'd slurred her into existence.

Maybe he liked the pain, or maybe he didn't know how else to live. Pain could be a constant to which all things in life could be referenced. It could give meaning, bringing light to the shadows of the mind that were left undisturbed in happier times. It could be a truth, dispelling illusion on the hard edge of a blade. It could be a friend, or a lover.

Or it could just be pain. Michael was familiar with it in all its shapes and shades. Where Sab's world had grown through the worlds in books of words, Michael's had shriveled by way of fist and belt. Birthday gifts were broken bones and a veteran's face, split by knuckles and more than one empty bottle. If the drummer's heart was enchanted to follow the infidelities of a wandering lover, then Michael could feel some sympathy. Being on the wrong end of a cruel soul was the pain he knew most of all.

But if he agreed or disagreed with her notion, he didn't make it clear, simply grunting at the story. A wizard remained the best option in his mind. There were too many loose ends to be had with an arrangement like that. Loose ends were weak spots and weak spots could be exploited. Whatever truth there was to it should be taken care of, one way or another. This thoroughness of mind was one of the things that made him the Knight and had, once upon a time, put him in high demand.

It was not a thoroughness he had kept up in his long exile. The mode of thinking almost worried him. A frown, subtle and small, dirtied his straight face. Michael looked away from Sab to track the band as they settled into a break. She wanted to sit, to invade his space, a foreign army in his country. That strengthened the frown, setting it into stone and hardening his countenance into a statue. Long fingered hands flattened against the table, readied. In the old days, the war days, the smoke and fire days, Michael wouldn't have let someone so dangerous get so close as to talk to him. Words were weapons, too, after all.

These weren't the old days, though, even if someone wanted him dead. With a deliberate nod at the other side of the table, he said, "So sit. Sab." The name wasn't doing her any good. If only she could read minds, she would see the horrors he was working. Sabotage was a word he did know, just like she knew escape, evasion, and so on. "Sit and talk, since that's what you want to do." Oh well. What's that old saying"

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. It remained to be seen which one Sabotage was.

In the nebulous purgatory between friends and enemies, Sabotage made herself comfortable: hooked an ankle over the opposite knee and crooked her elbow on the table in a geometry of body that had few right angles. That she sat at all given Michael's impressive glower could have been nostalgia, too. The faces had changed drastically during her absence, the prevalence of certain species, too, and that made Michael"even as he added the ramparts of hands flattened along the tabletop to the increasing arsenal of his countenance"a strange comfort, if a poorly chosen one: like the lonely hermit that mistakes the wild wolf's visits to his cabin during a lean winter as camaraderie. Maybe, too, she liked to see the tension pass over him up close, liked how it played against the long-ago whispers that built his shadow in her mind; the hermit inching a hand towards a cave of teeth. Nostalgia often bites that way.

Sab let the silence between them enjoy its limelight a few moments longer as she flattened her back against the chair. She sipped her whiskey and let her gaze leap slowly from patron to patron like a great cat took the limbs of a tree.

"Since we're both here, I should probably ask..." Around the rim of her glass, her words were collecting, drawing strength from the music, the atmosphere, the alcohol, the crawl of so many fingers over so many surfaces. What followed instead was an "oh?" pulled from the change in atmosphere when the alley exit door creaked slowly open, almost sentient with the intent of the dark figure that curled a long-fingered hand around the edges and beamed a toothy, horrible smile into the yawn of light. The "oh" was a sour b note that flattened further when she turned her head slowly in the direction of the front door. Eyes darkened by the sudden arrival ticked a countdown to the front door. Two men entered, also in dark suits, though these were cheaper than the one that silhouetted the trim man in the alleyway. Vampires had tell-tale movements, a way of motion that always suggested restraint. The taller of the two that came in first was supremely refined. By Sab's estimation he probably had at least a couple of centuries under his belt. The one behind him was rangy, gaunt and twitchy; she pegged him as a foundling for the way he barely kept his restraint' both in bodily motion and in eyes that darted around too ravenously.

There are many things that can happen in a moment; it's true that time slows down for a human during moments of peril, that in the span of seconds an entire replay of one's life might occur. This happened for Sab, but a recap of her life wasn't on the reel. Rather, it was the entirety of contents that made up the club and the memory of the alleyway beyond. Every empty glass, every crumpled napkin atop the bar, the siren as she leaned in towards the businessman, the slow open-mouthed tangle of their tongues, the number of chairs between the two suits sliding towards her, the tabletops. And Michael himself, the statue that wanted only to remain unperturbed in his gallery of solitude. If he was looking, he would have caught with his keen eyes the smaller-than-a-nanosecond splintering of her own flint-struck gaze. It was a chip of remorse, small as a grain of sand and big as the life of a child she'd never acknowledged. It might be the only secret ever shared between them.

Her gun was in an idling SUV three blocks away. There was a smaller one, a little stopgap for those of the human persuasion, tucked into a holster beneath her bra, but it wasn't worth the effort to retrieve. The recognition of how much her uncalculated slip-slide into nostalgia was going to cost her twitched her lips into an ironic smirk. Sab tipped her glass towards Michael and downed the rest of her whiskey.

"To better times, mad knight."

From all the things that had been broken in her life or sabotaged by her own machinations, she'd assembled her own code, and this dictated that she never impressed the messes she created upon others. Sab stood before the approaching men could say anything and walked before them, towards the man at the back exit already holding the door wide. She jerked the hemline of her blazer down and made a show of neatening herself"for how else should one walk into a deathtrap" Fingertips curled under to pull at the edge of her sleeves in an awkward motion that was arrested with a flinch-quick snap upright. There were her blades, old friends that greeted with a the hiss of the spring-coil behind them. They'd taken many dives, and this night the one in her right hand plunged forward into her approximation of the door holder's femoral artery as she stopped short before him while the left blade swept a long arc that missed the throat of the old vamp behind her and trailed its serrated bite across his chest instead. Sab was surely outnumbered in ways that transcended the physical, but utterly unwilling to go without putting up a dirty fight.

The vampire's suit exhaled tawdry threads and revealed the deep fissure of flesh left in the knife's wake. The sweep of motion spun her in his direction and as he lunged forward, she tipped herself backwards into the man who held the door. She'd lost her right blade to his leg and found herself in a most unappetizing sandwich as the trio tumbled through the door and into the alleyway with the foundling fairly prancing into the fray from behind.

Whether this too was part of her code or simple politesse for the truce between herself, the bartender, and the owner, Sab had the best intentions not to die on the floor of Catland.

(With thanks to Mad Knight for this collaboration.)

Even from the depths of her own cynicism about the situation at hand, there was room for a child-like awe at the way Michael's hand plunged fearlessly"and with visibly messy results" into the creature's maw. It was unwarranted self sacrifice that Sab could appreciate even as she puzzled over it. The unexpected landing of her knives pulled a begrudgingly delighted smile across tension-strained lips, though she didn't have time to pause and marvel at the way the blades sunk cleanly into the creature's flesh before she turned to the side, eyes raking the alleyway. She didn't reply to Michael's comment about questioning the man stirring on the ground; Michael was not privy to the inner workings of Sab. She was always calculating: each moment a boggling turning of the cogs of her mind with a clockmaker's finesse, sifting, sorting, and at moving the pieces into proper positioning, tossing out loose ends, reconfiguring.

Sab had plans already falling into place that would take care of expensive suit, provided they could hold off the Tzimisce. A wooden palette was the easy interpretation of Michael's directive. Two swift and stunningly accurate kicks splintered a portion of it, and Sab scooped up a few longer shards, which she eyed between glances at Michael and the creature dubiously until she spied a for rent sign stapled to a wooden yard stake peeping out of the dumpster. She loved dumpsters. Lands of opportunity. However, Michael was blocking her.

"You're in the way!" Both an explanation and accusation that grew in volume with exertion when Sab throttled forward and launched herself onto Michael's back as the creature lunged for Michael's face. Her left fist held the yard stake aloft above the elbow she planted along the saturated mess of Michael's shoulder, closest to his neck, right hand continued forward momentum to stab frenetically at the the Tzimisce's opposing shoulder and tendons along its neck with the serrated knife she'd retrieved from expensive suit's leg. It was a controlled flailing that, with any luck, would upset the creature's balance or force it loosen its grip on Michael. The easier thing"arguably the wiser thing"would have been to turn and run while the creature was distracted with Michael. The thought had occurred, and it resurfaced somewhere around stab two, when Sab got a better look at the wide stretch of horrific jaws from the back of an equally discomfiting beast. Why she found herself instead clinging by knee and elbow to share in the sour mash of blood-tinged breath and reeking sweat was a mystery with more ramifications of stupidity and loyalty than she dared to consider at the moment. But there was something else too: a long-suppressed livid joy with each thrust and recoil of her knife.

Behind the Tzimisce an engine roared down the alleyway.

She would never have gotten away if she'd run. Oh, she might have lived through the night. Maybe even the week. But somewhere, sometime, somehow, Michael would be back. His existence was a constant threat to every and all things that did him wrong. The monster would, when she least expected it, step forth from the shadows, and end her. If she was lucky, very, truly lucky, she would die with dignity, and she would put Michael down for a long, long time.

If she wasn't, it would be a brutal end to a brutal life. That was just the way of things.

The Tzimisce's mouth snapped at Michael again and again as, somehow, he managed to keep himself together. Each time the Elder lunged, Michael shifted his weight back and forth, pressing his knees into the hard carapace. When Sab attacked, Michael had almost worked one arm free. With a gurgling growl and as thick, black blood boiled out of the wound in its throat, its attention shifted from vampire to human, from Michael to Sabotage, and in that moment the Knight was able to finally wrench an arm free. It spun on the shoulder awkwardly and bent in the middle, but Michael still managed to flex the fingers hard enough to snatch at the improvised stake and roar.

"I hate the rude!" Even with one arm still caught between a massive, bone crunching pincer, he managed to generate enough force to shatter the protective shell across the elder's chest with a stake-holding fist, and before anyone could react, reach back, real back, and then drive the slip of wood through the vampire's heart. It fell back instantly, lifeless and frozen. Michael grunted and ripped his other arm free just quick enough to look up and see what new trouble awaited them.

"That is called upcycling, I believe." Sab nudged the yard stake with a gore-soaked boot. The attempt at levity was still leaded with tension as she loosed her grip on Michael and dropped to the asphalt below with a grunt. "You're filthy," she added in pointless, acerbic observation. Grit and grime were smeared heedlessly against her pants as she stood and stalked towards the man in the suit who was still doing time in stunned amnesia. "Are your arms toast or still functioning?" If he was following her train of thought, there was a lower level query layered beneath the semblance of concern for his well-being: help me"

Rubber peeled against the pavement and the high-pitched squeal echoed down the alleyway as an SUV careened around the corner and barrelled towards them, shooting a blinding arc of headlights over everything before the driver cut them and came to a stop within inches of the Tzimisce's carcass. "That's my driver," Sab offered as she hooked her arms beneath the suit's shoulders and began to inch him across the ground. Slow going. "If I judged his speed right, he was going to test how well we travelled through the air. Stopgap, of course, in case you couldn't hit the target. Would have been far more painful for me than you, so I'm glad your aim is exemplary"or at least that your arm stayed attached. Plus, I get airsick." She motored through words greased by the rush of endorphins. "Suit's coming with me. Are you?"

It took a while for the Knight to come down from the height of combat, least of all because the Tzimisce was only momentarily laid out. While Sab talked, he stalked around in long, brutal strides, grunting and snuffling and shaking his limbs out. Blood seeped from his many wounds until, even as she watched, the skin started to grow over fresh. Where arms grew straight where they had been broken. The fingers were the most unnatural, unwinding and setting themselves like snakes. Michael cast a vicious, hateful look at the downed Elder...and licked his lips. A perverse hunger ran up his spine, so powerful that he twisted away on the spot and looked at the SUV moving towards them. The Voice in his head rattled and rattled and rattled, and something in what it said must have persuaded him not to move to attack the vehicle, too. "It's not dead. The Tzimisce." The word was shaped by a disgusted mouth. "Only put him down for just a bit. If you have real business with him, you need to finish it. Now. Or.." as if answering her question about going with her or not, "..ask me to do it." Eyes fixed on her, inexplicably bright in the darkness. The very nature of his being seethed, threatening to boil over. Only an iron will kept him from being subsumed by a Beast as ancient as Babylon itself. Michael stepped backwards, withdrawing from the beams of light stretched out across the alley, and the shadows seemed to coil around him, as though he were breaking the surface of a lake.

It was in that moment, as Sab watched the serpentine winding of his fingers healing before her eyes and the shadows that looped around and clung to his body, that respect cast her gaze briefly downward and a faint shudder that had much more to do with a surfacing memory than with the hulking knight before her trembled around her shoulders, muted and soft. The rot of the Tzimisce was given another long look of disdain; she couldn't figure the immediate purpose of the trio's visit, which now proved more of a threat than the creature itself. Lips pursed, opening to speak further before they clamped shut again in an aggressive line. The unnatural brightness of Michael's eyes met the drab olive pall of her own, and there was nothing between them but dead air as she gauged, measured and weighed until, finally, her words came clipped and sharp. "I've never known Tzimisce to negotiate. He's useless to me. Best option is the Suit. I like to take my time. So yes, take care of him. If you would." Manners prevailed a moment later, "Please." The driver hopped out and beelined for the backdoor, opening it as Sab released her hold on Suit with a curt nod so he could be shoved inside. Over her shoulder, she said, "Check him for a small package while you're at it. It's about the size of a jewelry box. It's not on either of the other two."

Endorphins had done the best of their work, and as Sab straightened from loosening her grip on Suit, she listed to the side when a crackling bolt of pain seared through her right side. She caught a palm against the hood of the SUV, but quickly righted herself again; there was no time to rest. In the event that the Tzimisce was not in possession of the package, they'd have to check the dumpster around the side where she originally dropped it off.

Clockwork and spring-loaded, the machine that was the Knight sprung into action instantaneously, motions as jerky and unreal as a wind-up toy soldier, as though he were just a showing of himself as filmed by a hand-cranked camera and not the real thing, truly there and present. A tremor ran through his limbs, transcribing the excited tension resting in his taut spine, and if Sab were to look, truly look, she might catch a hitch in his lips, a vague expression of a hungry smile, growing outward in the pattern of cracked glass with each booted step closer to the downed Tzimisce. Michael grunted at Sabotage's orders and got to work.

Whatever Michael did, it was over in an eye blink, damaged hands a blur of motion and accompanied by a distinct sound of wood shattering and flesh ripping. For a fraction of a fraction of a second, the elder's eyes opened and his chest rose, and it appeared as though Michael's very arm was inside the Tzimisce. Then; ash, nothing but clothes and ash. Michael threw a lump of over a shoulder, which dissolved in midair before landing as nothing. He went through the pockets with a similar efficiency and speed, grunting again when finished. "Nothing like you described. Some ritualistic items, might explain how they found you. The elder was a blood mage. Things like that don't work for money." Michael's use of the word "thing" was not an accident. He stood, leaving whatever trinkets he had found behind.

With a look between Sabotage and the SUV, he raised a brow without asking directly if he was invited further into her nightmare of a night. He also didn't move for the dumpster. The next move was hers.

Sab didn't miss the thread of hunger that pushed his smile well into the dark territory of mania. Had she made different choices, she might have worn its feminine compliment. Instead, her expression vanished altogether, a slackening of tension that didn't erase the years from her face, but downgraded them to faint reminders as she watched Michael get his hands dirty dispatching the Tzimisce. For however studied her observations were, the way her attention fixated on the blur of motion, she couldn't decipher the individual movements and was left with only the impression of raw aggression and an afterimage of gore and bone she'd parse through before bed until the cadence of the scene lulled her to sleep"if it came"like a nursery rhyme for the Devil.

"Another purpose then. Hm. We'll see," She rapped a lacquered nail to the paint of the car, three ticks as her mind ran down a network of theories and got stuck in too many blind alleys of possibilities. The toss of dark curls was almost garish for the girlish lilt it had when she turned to look down the alleyway that held the drop point.

"Do you?" It was a question with an onion skin's worth of layers and meaning. The peel of her eyes away from the alley and back to him revealed any number of them with a shifting of light that highlighted pupils blown wide in the darkness. The driver bounced foot to foot with an atomic restlessness borne of frenzy of energy still burning itself out around them, and finally got back into the truck, giving Sab a pointed look as he went. It was time to go, yes. Sab swung the passenger door open with a groan of hinges and made a querying gesture to the interior. Some might find it misguided to willingly invite another monster into an unfolding nightmare and, further, to do so with such a solicitous curve of her lips; Sab felt she was evening odds stacked against her. Michael was a risk, but a calculated one. One that might be worth the payoff. "Come with us?"

Michael had, in his fistful of decades kicking around the darker corners of the various worlds he'd spent time on, been called many things, sometimes to his amusement, often to his distaste. His hands were soaked in blood, his head cracked, his deeds dirty"mothers and fathers and wives and husbands cursed his name. Children grew up to fear him. Whole races of creature talked of him like a boogey man, an in-between man, a frightening, mad man. A few, a very small few, even called him a friend. Most, at best, called him a good man to call in bad times.

Usually they just called him 'scary".

But no one had ever called him a "calculated risk". If Michael could peel back the onion that was Sabotage, scratch the skin away and cut through the sulfurous tissue, to see what she thought of him, he would laugh and call her mad. Mad like him. Mad like Jessica. Mad like so many people in wild city all around them. Mad ...and brave. She, too, tipped her lance at windmills.

A slow smile spread into the corners of his face and Michael nodded once, slow and deliberate. "I do." Michael moved to the SUV with the same spine taunt energy he'd been inflicted by in finishing off the elder. "We'll discuss terms on the way." When he dropped onto the provided seat, the vehicle rocked beneath his weight.

Michael was free to call Sab whatever he liked. She'd been called many things throughout her life; when one refused to give a proper name they were subjected to anyone else's definition of her, though she put a great deal of effort into avoiding easy categorization as a part of her code for survival. Mostly she called herself "alive," and that would ever be the most important characterization. With Michael's literal deadweight occupying the passenger side, Sab circled to the opposing side and crawled into the backseat with Suit, who was either playing nice and lying still, or still out cold. Sab didn't care either way, and if he so much as whistled through his broken nose while trying to draw a breath, she'd usher him swiftly back into the darkness with the sole of her boot. She scuttled up against the door frame, resting her back against a cracked and peeling armrest and angled her knees wide before reaching her palm out to the driver and wiggling her fingers impatiently. "Glock, please," clinical as a surgeon before a tray of the implements. Several damn fine specimens of firearms were secreted in the SUV, but the glock was the equivalent of a little black dress: comfortable and appropriate for almost any occasion. When the driver set the gun into her open palm, Sab smiled fondly at the familiar weight of it, checked the magazine and sighed contentedly. Michael was his own weapon, but Sab had to rely on the good old creativity of hunters and psychotics in combination with her own resourcefulness. She favored timelessness and stopping power over fanciful gimmickry when she had to use a gun.

"On the way?" she questioned from the backseat as they bounced off a curb and pulled up next to the dumpster so the driver could jump out and check for the package. "Where is it you think we're going?" It was dawning on her now that his destination and hers might not coincide quite so neatly as she had anticipated.

Michael looked out the SUV and smirked, catching Sab in the side mirror. "Somewhere to eat. I'm hungry."