Part Four: End - j

“This is…,” Bendis sputtered. “Enraging.”

Her eyes were filled with dark rage that boiled over onto her face. Drake sat on the couch in the hotel room he was occupying. His own eyes were closed and the only sounds he heard were those of the war that drifted up from the bottom floors. About twenty minutes ago, those sounds had been much closer as some of the knights, mages, and wolves went through the floor they were on trying to flush out any of his vampires they could find. Bendis, however, had done something goddess-y and made it to where the attackers just went by without so much as a knock on their door. Hiding instead of simply murdering everyone outright had been his idea. He could tell she would much rather rip all of them to shreds or simply stop their primary organs from operating like she did at the Bishop Media attack but he managed to convince her that would be a mistake. Drake had to tell her numerous times when the assault began to be patient. He had a plan.

Her patience, however, was a very thin and tenuous thing.

“The vampires I cultivated for you are being slaughtered.” She whirled on Drake, the hollows of her eyes smoky and filled with black veins crawling almost to the middle of her cheeks. There was an aura of power coming off her that Drake could feel brushing up against his skin like gossamer webs. He had to fight his urge to shudder at the sensation.

“Why are you just sitting here!?” she screamed.

“What would you have me do?” he drawled lazily.

“Do something. Anything,” she screamed loudly. “You’re my weapon after all.”

“I can always head out that door and let the Order kill me too.” His face was stony and almost bored. “If you would prefer that.”

She turned away from him in disgust and went to stand by the window. Something was not right. Everything was unraveling. She could feel it. It was like a thread being pulled from the bottom of a tapestry. The anger continued to surge around inside her but she closed her eyes and focused. The mortal realm dropped away from her awareness and she found herself floating among the vastness of the void where the threads of Fate existed. Her gaze swept over all the threads and finally focused on a bright cluster where many threads all converged together. Her vampires and the Order of the Defaeco Knights. A distressingly large number of the threads representing her vampires were going dark while on the opposite side of things, the members of the Bane Pack and Defaeco Order were largely bright and vibrant.

In short, she was losing.

And she hated losing.

She was not accustomed to it and she absolutely did not want it becoming a habit. For millennia, she was the one on top. She was a goddess! Those below bowed down and worshiped her but ever since Alrich, things changed. He spurned her. Rejected her. Because of that, her pride had demanded retribution. She thought her revenge had been an adequate punishment for him. In fact, it had been a truly beautiful masterpiece. But now everything was coming apart. The tapestry that had been her beautiful masterpiece of retribution was a frayed and worn thing. More and more of the threads making up its beauty were unraveling. She could feel it. It was like invisible fingers had gripped it and were tearing it apart.

But the fingers, she realized a half second later, were not invisible. They belonged to someone. They belonged to Kendra Henner.

A Bane.

Someone to be tortured like her father before her and his father before him. And yet despite everything, she was not succumbing. In fact, she was fighting back and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Even Merle, with all his grit and strength, had eventually fallen to her. Then there was Merrick. He had been laughably easy to drive nearly to the brink of insanity. Even now, he was a mere shadow of his former self.

Kendra, however, was proving more difficult to destroy. Despite all the pain, anguish, despair, depression, and whatever else she could throw at the annoying mortal, she always ended up bouncing back. She would overcome it but it was more than that. She would be even stronger for it. There was something about her that wasn’t...right.

“Is your idea to stand there and say nothing?” Drake asked.

The voice interrupted her concentration and the reality of the threads abruptly vanished. She turned around again, her thoughts still stormy and raging nearly out of control, but she forced a small smile to spread across her face. It was meant to be something reassuring but it was a dreadful, twisted thing.

“I can see your indecision written all over your face, my pet,” she purred. She stalked over to Drake, who was still lounging on the couch. She reached down and grabbed his chin with her index finger and thumb. Then she raised it to where she could look directly into his eyes. “I promised you the chance to get revenge yet here you sit, seemingly disinterested in protecting the army I have given you. Why?”

“They’re vampires,” Drake shrugged, irritatingly nonchalant. “They can handle themselves. They don’t need daddy to come down there and hold their hands.”

“They are being slaughtered!” Bendis yelled back. The calm, cool voice she had been using was erased by fury. “We are losing.”

“I told you before, I have a plan and throwing myself into the fight at this point does not serve anything but to get me killed and then where will you be?” Drake replied. He kept his gaze carefully on her own, not backing down. It was a risky gesture but he had spent enough time with the goddess to know backing down was not wise. It would only convince her that he was weak and he knew that could get him killed just as quickly as the Order outside.

“And what about my creatures?” Bendis growled. “Your children? How do their deaths serve your plan? I find myself suddenly questioning the decisions you’ve been making in recent months. The attacks you’ve made as of late have been feeling lackluster. And what about the attacks from Merrick Bane’s new pack? Or that attack from Kendra’s rejects? You could’ve killed them all with little effort and yet only one was wounded. Just wounded! Even then, you did not deliver a fatal blow. You left him alive.”

“Obviously so the pain would torture him more,” Drake replied, grinding his teeth angrily. “I let the others go as a message to Kendra. That I had all the power. I decide who lives and dies. I don’t want to merely kill her either. I want to destroy everything about her. I want to rip apart her mind like tissue paper.”

“And letting your children die? How does that factor into your tactical plans?” The inky black veins radiated out from her eyes again, this time spreading even faster and farther.

Drake slowly got up from the couch he’d been sitting on and got right in her face, their noses nearly touching. If he’d had a heart that still beat, it might have been slamming into his ribcage but instead, it remained still and unmoving.

“These children of mine are nothing but mindless beasts. Their deaths are meaningless. Besides, I can always make more, right?”

Bendis didn’t like Drake’s attitude. There was a detached sort of carelessness to his features that hadn’t been there before. His humanity was what attracted her in the first place. It was that piece of him that she needed in order for her vampires to remain under some sort of control as opposed to the mindless horde that had nearly overran the world centuries ago. In that moment, however, that humanity inside him was gone. That alone might not have caused her concern but there was a flicker in his eyes. Something lurked in their deepest, darkest depths. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting to see there, but it wasn’t the…

Disgust?

Hatred?

Loathing?

Maybe all of it.

Then she finally realized the truth. Her creation wanted her dead.

“No,” she breathed. “Why?”

Drake looked at her, briefly taken aback.

“What are you talking about?”

But Bendis didn’t answer. She knew everything at that moment. Everything that was meant to be and everything that had led up to it. Once again, her mind opened onto the great expanse of threads that wove in and around themselves. She felt again their pull as fate and destiny was made known to her. She focused on one thread in particular.

Drake’s.

She drifted closer to it and reached out with a finger. She felt the familiar rush as images of the man’s life flooded all of her awareness. At first, nothing was amiss. He was now and always would be exactly what she intended.

Hers.

Her monster.

Her weapon.

But then she came across an event she had missed. An event so completely beneath her notice that she had overlooked it. Three threads had intertwined but not in a time or place she knew of or, more importantly, approved of.

One belonged to Drake.

One to the girl, Casey Dewar.

And the last...

Her rage and anger suddenly exploded inside of her.

The other thread was Kendra’s.

She watched as the meeting between Drake and one of her greatest enemies took place. The setting was a dingy diner but the where was unimportant. What was important were the words coming out of Drake’s mouth.

“And I am doing this because I don’t hurt children.”

Disobedience.

He deliberately defied her.

Instead of hurting Kendra further, she now had a piece of Conor back. She had his daughter. That rage boiled inside Bendis, churning and spitting. She screamed out a long, frustrated yell but the three present did not notice her. This event was in the past and as such, she held no power there. The two of them talked as the girl, Casey, looked on with eyes devoid of any depth. In fact, everyone else inside that place was as still as statues and she realized that Drake must have enthralled the lot of them.

The images dispersed into the miasmic expanse of glittering threads. The thread belonging to Drake and the one belonging to Kendra did not entwine again at points she wasn’t already aware of but there was something there nonetheless. Something faint but the more she focused, the more of it she saw. It wove in and around the threads of Kendra and Drake. That was not the first time that peculiar thread appeared. She looked back through them, tracing its origin, and found it had started with a single mortal. Bendis touched the thread and as images and memories flooded her, she knew the truth. The origin of the new thread was…

Her eyes snapped open and she was back in the hotel room, facing Drake. He stood in front of her, rigid and stiff. His muscles looked tense. His jaw clenched and unclenched but that was the only thing he could move. Bendis had done something to him. Had immobilized him.

“Helen Henner,” she gasped.

It all came back to her. The mother. That curious new thread started with her. It was then inherited by her daughter.

Kendra.

Bendis closed her eyes once more and found herself amongst the threads again but this time, she knew what she was looking for. Now that she could see it, she found that thread everywhere. It drifted in and out of other threads. She saw it drift out of Helen’s thread and touch the lives of others. She saw the same thing happening with Kendra’s. In fact, the thread drifting from hers touched the lives of many others. She saw now that the diner was not the first time that thread touched Drake’s. She scanned them again, looking forward along their lengths and saw that the thread touched Drake’s at least a dozen or more times.

Including earlier that day.

That was not even the worst of it. As she looked, she spotted more and more of those gossamer threads. The new ones. There were hundreds of thousands of them, maybe even millions. She touched one of these new threads at random and saw that it branched off a human named Justice Monroe. He was a homicide detective in a mortal city not far from the one she was currently in. This man’s gossamer threads touched other mortals but after the points where their threads had already gone dark with death. She touched another one and found herself engulfed in the lunacy of a man that could create fire with his mind. As images of his twisted, sick world overcame her, she instinctively jerked her hand back. She touched another one, this one a woman that could feel the emotions of others as if they were her own. Another mortal’s gossamer threads didn’t just wrap around other threads, but actually pierced them. When she touched his thread she found that he could strip away all a human’s lies and see their complete and total truths. Unfiltered. It didn’t stop there either.

She took several steps back, not really afraid but definitely disquieted by what she’d seen and what it would mean for the future of humanity.

“No,” she whispered.

Drake still stood there, completely frozen but his eyes gained a look of curiosity to them.

That shock and...disquietness...remained in Bendis’ eyes for a few seconds more. Then she seemed to take control of herself again. Her eyes grew shrewd and enraged. If Drake could feel fear in that moment, then he was sure something inside him would have ruptured with the intensity of it.

Bendis got swept up in her emotions. The anger. The rage.

The…

She stopped her thoughts, not even wanting to admit to herself what she was really feeling. What those gossamer, barely-there threads awakened inside her.