Valentine’s Day
Valentine’s Day.
A day of love, giving and happiness.
Possibly the most dangerous day out of the entire year to be a man in Brandenburg, Virginia.
Because here, the women are not shy about what they want. Nor do they flirt around and act happy when the gift sucks. Oh no…here, the women are very, very straightforward.
In the depths of the vampire’s church haven, Thomas Walgrave Nordenheim is smiling pleasantly at a man bound and gagged. He is utterly terrified, tears wetting the blindfold, and thrashes about in futile attempts to escape. She pins a card to his jacket lapel and lifts him easily, walking down the hall to leave him in front of her husband’s study door. The man is a Camarilla Ventrue Infernalist, who molests children as a side hobby. Thomas knows what her husband likes to play with.
Kearna Tierney is waiting patiently for her husband to wake up. Creamed, perfumed, coiffed and primped to her finest, she has posed herself in a red silk nightgown. Long, flame-red hair is fluffed down her back, emerald eyes highlit by just the right touch of eyeliner. A breakfast large enough to feed a football team awaits, and the Bubasti is smiling like a…well…cat.
Honoria Wingate-Foster ni Varich looks over the invoice for her gift to Jonas Foster, and smiles just a little. Enough Dragonsbreath ammunition to take out Luther von Nordenheim and the guns to go with it. She looks at the daisy in her hand, with dirt still clinging to the roots, and slithers in the demon’s bedroom window to leave it on his pillow.
At the freehold, one upstairs bedroom is rocking as Bertram Jumoke and his three "wives" celebrate the beginning of the day of love. Downstairs, Aeneas Dougal is halfway through his second bottle of Glenlivit and bemoaning his lonely fate. Sitting alone in a corner, Amelia Nordenheim turns a small silk rose petal over and over in her sensitive fingertips. Her blind blue eyes gaze at nothing, and despite the despondancy of her pose, no tears glimmer in her eyes.
Claire Reynolds stirs her cup of tea at home, gazing at the framed photo of her mother with misty eyes. A single peach rose has been placed in a vase before the photograph, and a few tears have dried on the glass. She murmurs soft words to the picture as she swallows the bitter tea, smiling even as she winces at the hot liquid.
Briar Dallas laughs as she flings paint on a canvas. The ghosts surrounding her all whisper praise, loving thoughts and sorrowful tales to her, inspiring the mortal artist to greater lengths. As her lifelong companions, the ghosts try to keep her happy or sad as they please, but they never abandon her to loneliness. Even when her eyes well from the pain of their stories, she still clings to their presence, and they to hers.
Spider Pennworth walks silently around her bookstore, dusting shelves the old-fashioned way: with a feather duster. Magic laid aside for the day, she takes some small comfort in playing mortal bookseller, in playing the life she once knew. No valentines sit on the counter, no roses cluster in vases. She is alone, and for the moment, happy that way.
Joshua Ogniali, better known as Ax, sits motionless in his room. He gazes at the photo in his hands, and for a moment, feels a pang of guilt at having lied to his tyrant. One finger strokes over the picture delicately, tracing the soft curves of the long-dead fae’s face. He sniffles, quietly, and closes his eyes. His inability to let go is what pains him the most, and yet is the thing he understands the least.
Not always happy, but certainly interesting. Valentine’s Day, like any other holiday, brings up painful memories, joyous thoughts and..
.well…amorous intentions.