Karry sat picking her nails at a table outside a small restaurant near the museum, where she and Oasis had agreed to meet after the heist. She thought it had gone pretty well, all things considered. Certainly, she hadn’t expected The Big Leaf (blaze it!) to show up, but that rich bastard wasn’t much of a problem for her when she was in costume, let alone out of it. He’d just breezed past her on his search for the robbers and hadn’t given her a second glance, not realizing that the magic that had tripped the alarms was coming from her.
By the time she’d left the museum, TBL (blaze it!) had been standing in the parking lot with everyone else, talking at a deeply uncomfortable-looking Oasis. She was sure they’d find a way to get away eventually from the other superhero and all the cops that were beginning to swarm at the scene. They’d found a way to get away from time itself, apparently. A few crime scene investigators were nothing, compared to that.
She had to admit that as eager as she was to have her necklace back, some dark part of her thought that it would be deeply amusing if they got caught. With Oasis in jail, she could just go back to the museum, steal her necklace properly and using her own means, and skip town and this whole farce entirely. After all, Oasis had only asked her help because the Tyrant had used her necklace in the future and they didn’t want that to happen again. The fastest way to achieve that was to place both herself and her necklace outside of the man’s reach, after all. No matter what Myriam seemed to think, she wasn’t that interested in Oasis’ schemes.
She was flipping idly through the menu, trying to decide between a lemonade or a fresh beer, when the hero in question poured themselves on the chair opposite her with a deep, soul-shuddering sigh of relief.
“So how was Pot Man?” she asked mildly.
“You knew it was him! And you went ahead with the plan anyway?”
“Of course I did, he smells like a science experiment,” she said, gracefully side-stepping their actual question. “Did you run into any problems?”
“Any more problems you mean? He made me talk to every cop on the scene,” they complained, but then shoved their hands into their hoodie’s front pocket in a move that was anything but casual. “Told them all that he was the director of the CSL and that I was his intern. So much for the first rule of superheroes,” they added in a frustrated mutter. “But at least they were so annoyed with us that they forgot to search our pockets. Still had to give a statement though.”
They kept their hands in their pocket as they talked, absently playing with whatever was inside of it. Something hungry burst to life in her chest like a zombie rising from the grave. It was deeper than yearning, more savage than need. She shuddered. The greed was almost delicious in itself, a rising tide that made her feel more alive than she had in a thousand years. Finally, after so many years of imprisonment, her freedom was within her reach.
She held her hand out, palm up on the table. “Give me.”
Oasis’ eyes flickered to the other tables around them and to the pedestrians on the street. Far away, music could be heard, and the noise of the cars on adjacent streets were a constant symphony polluting the air. A young waitress had just come out of the front door of the restaurant and was making her way toward them, order pad at the ready.
“Here?” they asked, unnecessarily.
Karry growled, and sent out another powerful pulse of magic. After the day she had, she was waning, but it was for a good cause. She would just have to drink some blood later, even if she disliked having to do it. And besides, this was easy, unlike in the museum, where she’s had to strain to project her essence enough to overpower the alarms but not enough to overwhelm herself. This was her thrall, curling around humans and shaping them to her will, and it was so natural to her that she could do it in her sleep.
Everyone in a two block radius suddenly found something more important to be looking at than two suspicious individuals an at outdoor table. Cars turned into other streets; customers nearby became very interested in their meals; the waitress rushed back into the restaurant like her job depended on it.
Oasis blinked. “You’re an asshole. Why didn’t you just do that at the museum? Nobody would have stopped you from taking your necklace!”
There was a long silence, during which Karry crunched all the reasons why this wouldn’t have worked in her head because she didn’t want to admit that she hadn’t though of it. The minute Oasis had vetoed all of her more violent plans, she’d let them take the lead on planning the heist, not realizing that they wouldn’t be aware of all of her vampiric abilities.
The thrall was too subtle to work as a super villain gimmick, so she usually only used it as a civilian to attract or detract attention as she saw fit. Full-on mind control, and on a large group of people… Now, she hadn’t stretched that muscle for ages. It stood to reason that Oasis would have rarely, if ever, seen it.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do that and overload the cameras at once,” she finally said, realizing as it said it that it was true.
“What, really? Is it because you’re not as powerful as in the future?” Oasis asked while, she noticed, still not giving her the necklace.
She narrowed her eyes and wiggled the fingers of the hand still stretched on the table. “You tell me,” she answered testily. So they had known about her thrall. Had they also forgotten about it when planning the heist? Apparently she wasn’t the only idiot at this table, then.
But this particular idiot was keeping something very precious from her, and she felt her patience wearing thin. She wondered what would happen if she chose them as her source of blood for the night. Would some of their immunity to magic rub off on her? What did that mean, for someone made of magic to absorb that sort of power? Would she have to drain then entirely to derive any strength from them? It was an intriguing question, and finding out the answer seemed more and more alluring the longer Oasis kept their hands in their pocket.
“Maybe you just haven’t scared enough people yet,” they mused.
Oasis, she noticed, had shifted during the conversation, no longer slouching in their seat. Confidence had entered their posture and Karry leaned back, suspicious. She resisted the urge to bare her teeth, lest they figured out the murder she was planning in their increasingly imminent future. She didn’t want to have this conversation, but Oasis had their necklace, and all of the power over her that it represented. She decided to play along, for now. Just until she saw an opening.
“What do you know about how my powers work?”
“The more people who worship you the more powerful you are, right?”
There was no hesitation in their answer, which was suspicious in and of itself. No one should have known these things about Katarina. The knowledge was lost. Or so she had thought, until Oasis had showed up at her door with implausible stories of time travel and future Tyrants.
“And who told you that?”
Oasis didn’t move, and there was something very deliberate about the way that they held still. They held her gaze without backing down, their breath even, their heartbeat erratic. She could feel it through the table, taste it on the air.
“You did.”
There was a beat, a space in the conversation for her to pick up that thread, to enquire further. She didn’t, because she thought it would throw them off balance, and also because she didn’t really want to know.
“It’s not exactly about worship,” she said instead. “Worship implies intent. Worship brought me to life, but it’s not necessary to sustain me. All I need is for people to believe in my existence and my powers. Or, in your case, Know about my existence and power. After all, knowledge is the strongest type of faith.”
“You mean I’m feeding your powers? Just by knowing what you are?”
She smirked, pleased at the annoyed expression that the thought had created on their face.
“Oh yes, and your faith is delicious.”
“Yikes,” they replied, face scrunching up into a grimace that broke the dark and threatening mood that had fallen over their conversation. “You actually do sound like a vampire when you say stuff like that.”
“Thanks, I try”, she said dryly before holding out her hand once more. “Now. The necklace, if you please.”
To their credit, Oasis proceeded to hand it over without further discussion. They pulled the necklace out of their pocket, it’s golden chain gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight, and lowered it into her outstretched hand. The ruby pendant in its bed of runes came to rest on her palm, and Karry was immediately overwhelmed by it’s intense power.
There is a statue in Rome sculpted by a man named Bernini. It is one of Katarina’s favourite work of art, and it features a nun swooning in front of an angel holding a golden spear. The expression on her face is rapturous, almost in a carnal sense, and if Karry was to guess, she would say that she was probably making the same expression right about then. She just couldn’t help it. After a thousand year, it felt like holding a shard of her own soul, and Karry didn’t even have a soul (that she knew of). It burned so hard it ripped a whimper out of her, and yet the pain was sweet like the early morning sun.
Then the intensity lifted, freeing her brain to think clearly once more, and she opened her eyes with a gasp to find Oasis holding the necklace a few inches over her hand. They were red up to the root of their hair.
“Sorry,” they said. “Let me just, um…”
They wrapped the necklace in a paper napkin and slid it over to her side of the table, almost bashfully. Karry placed her hand over the bundle, the burn almost tolerable through the thin napkin. She swallowed. Pulled one corner delicately back to gaze once more upon the gleaming ruby. She’d never seen it from so close. She’d never even touched it before. And now, it was hers. In possession of her master’s tool at last, she could finally take control of her destiny. The urge to run away, to let Oasis take care of whatever dreadful future they’d come from, came back to the forefront of her mind, alluring and insistent.
“Any idea how to destroy it?” came the hero’s voice, crashing through her daydreams like a hammer upon her thoughts.
She whipped her heard up to stare at them. “What?”
“What?” they repeated. “We want to prevent the Tyrant from using the necklace to control you, right? Isn’t the best way to do that, you know, destroying the necklace?”
Karry looked back down at the napkin and it’s precious content. Centuries of questing after it, and Oasis wouldn’t even let her enjoy having it for five seconds before suggesting its destruction. Not that it was a bad idea, but still. She removed her hand from the napkin and grabbed the menu instead.
“Let a girl breathe, why don’t you? We have time.”
Oasis eyed her warily, but eventually grabbed their own menu. “If you’re going to call the waitress back, how about you don’t leave that on the table? Do you have like, pockets or anything?”, they eyed her sheer dress skeptically.
Karry smirked at them, then grabbed the bundle on the table and slipped it in her cleavage. She tucked it securely near her arm, where the strap of her bra met the fabric of the cup. She was immediately filled with painful bliss once again, the magic of the necklace so close to her skin quickly becoming addictive, even without direct contact. No wonder the Katarina of Oasis’ future had worn it all the time, even though she must have been high as heck all the while.
She caught Oasis’ eyes and purred, just to see them go red again, and dragged her fingers slowly along the skin of her neck on the way out of her bra. They swallowed audibly, and Karry was filled with intense satisfaction. What a rush, to enthral one who cannot be thralled.
“Let’s have a drink to celebrate a crime well done, shall we?” she said, clicking her fingers to summon the waitress as she let her hold on the people around them dissipate. “Your treat.”
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