Torn (Apart)

"The more I bless, the more I bleed for you..."

"W-w-what... The fuck... Shit!"

Clothing shredded, covered in burn marks and rips, skin struggling to heal no matter how much blood was devoted to doing so, Sara looked like a poor recruiting poster for the benefits of immortality. The attack had come out of nowhere. Her ghoul's ex-lover, a stalker by nature, had not taken the hint by Jamie's (faked) death. Revenge was a potent and not-entirely unreasonable motive, but it still caught Sara off guard.

Stumbling through an alleyway blocks from the bar, she looked for anyone to feed on. The Beast inside of her growled in hunger and frustration, needing to be satiated before she abandoned what little remained of her humanity entirely. The struggle was made the more difficult if she thought about what had happened. Losing a ghoul was never that much of a problem, since there would always be more that she could charm into her service. The upstairs haven, and the "watering hole" that was Philly's, however, was not so easily replaced.

Sara was a Carthian, a member of an anarchistic and revolutionary sect. Rabble-rousers and trouble makers, her group was a thorn in the side for local movers and shakers. That in no way endeared them to the Ordo Dracul, the scholarly order to which the city's Baron belonged, nor to the Invictus or Lancea Sanctum, the two most dominant groups in the city. And she had made enemies amongst all three factions over her decades of unlife. She survived by laying low and not drawing attention to herself, something the attack and subsequent fire would make impossible.

Food and shelter, those were the only drives the Beast would acknowledge. The moon had already slipped from view and dawn wasn't far off. The temptation to crawl into a hole and sleep was forefront in Sara's mind. The need to feed on unlife-sustaining blood was the only thing pushing that temptation down and keeping her senses focused.

It was that hyper-attuned focus that alerted her to the presence of another monster in the alley, the singular fight or flight response only provoked by her fellow Kindred. Half-feral, her fangs and claws painfully extended, she faced the interloper, knowing that she had no flight and only as much fight as she could coax from the Beast by giving it free reign over her body, when the figure spoke.

"Ah, my little one, ye've gone and fucked up now, haven't ye?"

Sara didn't need to see the speaker to recognize the soft voice tinged with the barest hint of a sing-song Irish accent. Leaning against the brick of a warehouse wall, wearing the simple black garment of a priest, Cardinal Caoihme Lynch stared at her, arms crossed and head tilted like a predator studying its prey.

Of an average 5'6" height, trim, with classic Gaelic features and hair pulled back into a functional braid, the Cardinal didn't possess traits that would conventionally be considered intimidating. If she were mortal. Nor would her garb and title be something so casually carried, if she were mortal. As the head of Union City's Lancea Sanctum, and a master of the esoteric Theban blood rituals, the Cardinal was most assuredly not.

"C-c-cardinal? Help me! Please??" Exhausted, Sara pleaded.

"Aye, I've tried. Good Lord above knows that I've tried to help ye, and the rest o'the Godless hordes in this city. But have ye ever come to confession? Have ye ever come to God when ye weren't in desperate need?"

The Cardinal locked eyes with Sara, muttering an incantation in a language long dead in the annals of mankind. Sara could feel her blood begin to boil as fresh wounds opened on her wrists.

"N-n-o, please!! I'll confess! I'll join the Lance!" The Beast, prepared for a fight, nevertheless whimpered and retreated, leaving her to her fate.

As the incantations grew in fervor and pitch, new wounds ripped themselves open on Sara's ankles, and a deep gash tore itself into her side, drawing out the little Vitae remaining in her body. She collapsed against the concrete, mewling like a sick kitten into the ground. The deep, nightmare-laden sleep of torpor tugged upon her awareness, struggle against it though she might.

"Don't ye worry, God'll hear those confessions for ye. And our fair city will be blessed for one less unbeliever in it." Curled into a ball, Sara was blissfully unaware of the consecrated dagger being pressed into her cervical vertebrae, cutting until her head was a separate entity from the rest of her body.

As the corpse transformed itself into ash, the Cardinal smiled, and whispered "trí ghrásta Dé..." before walking away, content with an evening's work.