Rhiannon Lee (rhiannon_lee) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2021-02-23 21:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | npc, rhiannon lee |
Good Talk
Who: Rhiannon, NPC Sean
What: Phone Call
When: Present, Night
Where: Rhiannon’s Car
Warnings: Language
Rhiannon parked her car in the field of the deserted Searchlight Drive-In and cut the ignition. The air frosted her face when she stepped out to do a lap around the perimeter of the lot, trying to dispel her queasiness and the vague notion that she might throw up. If she did, it was fine, just as long as it happened before she dialed the person still listed as a favorite in her cell phone contacts list.
The hunter took a second lap for good measure.
When she returned to her Dodge, the hood was still warm. She sat down and scooted herself up to the windshield. Her uncle wouldn’t return Rob’s calls, but she was counting on him to pick up hers, if only for curiosity’s sake. Rhiannon dialed. She cleared her throat and closed her eyes. Underneath her, the machinery ticked.
The line picked up. She heard ambient sound: a door closing, air stirring against the mouthpiece. “It’s me,” she said.
The man on the other end of the call took a deep breath. It sounded like someone enjoying the first morsel of a dinner he’d been waiting for ages to taste. He took a step off a concrete pad and walked into a dirty parking lot. Sean was looking for some privacy. Any conversation he had outside the row of motel windows would be picked up by someone. “What can I do for you, Rhiannon?”
It was a broad question, but she could work with it. Rhiannon gathered herself into a cross-legged position and breathed steadily. This was a voice she knew as well as Rob’s, one that she missed, but not in the same way. It was like catching a glimpse of your childhood home as you drove past it, aching to go back inside but knowing that it had changed, that doing so would only hurt you. “Be straight with me,” she said.
Sean nodded. “I’ll be straight with you, if you’ll do the same.” He had unknowingly copied what his niece had done: found his way to a vehicle. The older hunter shook out his keys and got into the driver’s seat. When he turned on the truck, he rolled down the window and got out a pack of smokes.
“Okay,” Rhiannon said. She could hear his truck running and knew from the sound that Sean hadn’t bought a new one, even when he could afford to. He was particular about certain things, that old Ford being one of them. She remembered riding in the middle between him and Rob, a palm braced on the roof when they hit a rut, demanding equal space for her legs.
“Alright.” Sean rolled down his window. Smoke began to drift. “Let’s talk.”
Rhiannon shifted her weight and took a weapon out to examine it. Her fingers ran gently over the knife, the smoothness of the bone in the handle, and the sharp edge of the blade. “Why did you come here?”
Sean leaned back in his seat. “I’m here because Clark County is a stronghold, and there’s money in it.”
“But there’s always money in it,” she said.
“Yeah. That is how we eat. That’s how you ate, before you were old enough to work. The more we get paid, the less part-time jobs we have to take to keep a roof over our heads and weapons in our hands,” Sean said.
“I know that, but your m.o. is different,” Rhiannon said. “You’re not coming at it the same way, so the same reasoning doesn’t hold.” Her finger balanced atop the end of the knife, just shy of cutting herself. She knew how much pressure to apply if she wanted to change that.
Sean asked, “Do you agree that you’re living in a stronghold on a pocket of energy?”
Rhiannon took a moment to think. “Yes.” Cian might not agree that the area was overrun, but he might be thinking in terms of violent creatures, not the kind who co-existed with ordinary humans. Sean didn’t differentiate between the two. To Sean and to her, from an objective standpoint, it was overpopulated. “I might have made a bigger dent in the numbers if you hadn’t cut me off at the knees.”
“There’s probably some truth to that,” Sean said. His phone buzzed with an incoming text. He pulled it back to look at the message preview and decided not to respond.
Rhiannon added, “You don’t usually cast such a wide net. The money gets too slim when it’s split so many ways. I also know you don’t like working with people you didn’t pick by hand. So why are there so many hunters here?”
“Well, it’s a big job.” Sean nestled the phone between his ear and his shoulder. He turned the heat on low. A blast of air fogged up the windshield. “I needed more hands.”
“And any hands will do?” Rhiannon thought that was odd. She frowned. Setting the knife aside, she slid down the angled hood of the Challenger and went for another walk. “So money isn’t an issue. It’s all about numbers. You don’t care how it gets done or who sees it, as long as you clean house. I find that really weird.”
Sean laughed. The noise was hoarse from too many years of smoking. “It’s not that weird. Don’t forget the energy.”
“I haven’t.” Rhiannon stopped pacing near a concession stand boarded up for the winter season. “Whoever’s paying you doesn’t want a supernatural population establishing itself around the energy, either because they’re afraid of that connection or they want for themselves. Which is it?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Sean watched the activity between rooms. One door opened, a woman took a long walk to an ice box, another face peered out to ask a question. It was a long block of rooms, all rented on the same credit card at a discounted rate.
“How could it not matter?” she asked, trying to keep her voice from crescendo-ing in the empty field. “How could you trust someone with that kind of power?”
“I don’t. We’ll deal with them after,” he said with finality.
“You mean after you get paid,” Rhiannon asked, “for all the heads and pelts you collect? You’re a piece of work.” She looked around for something to take out her frustration on. All she saw was the cinderblock wall of the concessions building and a bit of faded graffiti painted on the side of it. It was a daisy wheel, or hexafoil, an apotropaic mark that protected against evil. Rhiannon ran her fingers over the symbol.
“Trust me, kid. The world’s better without this one. It’s a developer with more money than they know what to do with and their fingers in everything from occult collectibles to renewable energy. There’s not an ounce of mystical talent in their blood, but they're a fanatic, so they figure they’ll buy their way into the club.” Sean took another drag of his cigarette and tossed it on the asphalt, still lit. "I don't mind wiping out the competition, but I don't have to leave them to inherit."
"Right, not when you can kill them. Wow." His niece touched her forehead. When had things gotten this far? She had sworn to Cian that Sean would never do that. Apparently she had one hell of a blind spot. Rhiannon thought back to the ancient artifact Sean asked her to procure last summer (the one that she and Katherine had accidentally broken, unleashing a demon on the town); this occult collector was probably one and the same. “Look, if you take them out, right after they pay you, there’s a good chance someone’s going to trace that back to you. Is that why Rob’s not with you?”
Sean sat forward and leaned his large frame over the steering wheel. “Are you going to tell me you don’t know how to kill someone and cover it up?” When she was silent, he kept going. “Or how to get someone else to do the dirty work for you?”
She swallowed and leaned against the building alongside the marking. “All you need is a hungry enough vampire, or an injured Were, or the wrong witch.” She took a breath to tamp down her emotions and looked up at the stars. She thought about how she stalled Noah from torturing the security staff at Dante’s. It had been easy enough that night because they were human; it took more to break most vampires and Weres, but if you applied the right pressure for long enough, they would eventually break and they'd chase the first pulse they heard.
The pair of them were quiet for a moment before she spoke again. “Why’d you tell Nina to come by?”
Sean waved the last of the smoke out of the cab and rolled up his window. “Because you lied to me.”
Rhiannon’s laugh was sharp. “Which time?” The rough cinder blocks bit into her skin through her hoodie.
“In Chicago,” he said. “When things went sour on a couple of jobs, I wondered if it was one of us. I suspected it was you because you kept arguing, getting up on your soapbox, and then the screw-ups stopped when you were on the road. So I tried to teach you a lesson.”
“You did the same thing to me,” Rhiannon said, “You tipped someone off. I remember because my hunting partner got shot--”
“And that pissed you off more,” Sean continued. “So you moved to Nevada. I thought letting things cool off was a good idea, but out of nowhere you quit for good. What could change in your life to make you give up your family? I was scratching my head, but I could only think of one thing. I did some digging and I found out you weren’t sleeping alone anymore. Searchlight is a small town. If you wanted to keep secrets, you should’ve picked somewhere else.” He smiled. “Man. Your neighbor rolled over so fast, you’d think I paid her. So I told everyone to cut you off. I can’t trust you if you keep things from me.”
Rhiannon’s stomach lurched. He spied on her. He knew about Cian, and rather than confront her with it head-on, he came at her sideways, just like before. She dropped into a crouch in the dirt. “Get real. You lie by omission all the time,” she said. “You choose how much to tell and who hears it, and you expect the rest of us to swallow that. I bet you’re doing it to Rob now. And you know there’s no way I could’ve told you about who I was seeing.”
“I’m not going to police who you let into your bed,” Sean said. “You wouldn’t be the first hunter to screw around with a Were and you won’t be the last. But there are rules. You don’t get bitten and you don’t give up your place in the family line.”
“Right,” Rhiannon hedged, “Because you’ve always been so open to us socializing with shapeshifters and the undead. Even if I did believe you -- huge if -- it’s not that simple,” she said. “I didn’t realize it at first, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen him. Years ago, you sent me and Rob to take out a pack that a contact told you was causing problems, but when we got into the house, it was a group of bitten Weres. They were new, they were figuring out how to survive, and we ambushed them. He’s the only one who got out alive. Once I pieced together who he was, I knew there was no reconciling it. How was he supposed to trust me when I was still taking your calls?”
Sean pulled out his key. He opened the door of his truck and got out. “If I’m reading between the lines, you’re telling me that you let a Were walk out of that house, even though he could’ve come looking for your family with an axe to grind. The first time you let your guard down in Nevada, he could’ve ripped your throat out.”
She shook her head. “Shocking no one, you can’t imagine anything better than what you’d have done in the same circumstances. I’m not afraid of him,” Rhiannon said. “I’ve known he was safe from the moment I saw him, because I actually looked instead of pulling a trigger.”
“I don’t care what story you spin.” Sean slammed the door. “You’re still a hunter. You’re the only legacy my sister got to leave. Even if you find a way to carry on the bloodline, as long as you’re around him, or someone like him, there will be things you can’t do without stepping on that Were’s toes, and no Were is going to stand by and watch you teach a kid how to hunt their own kind. But that’s what we do, whether you do it your way or mine. So sleep with a shapeshifter. Have a drink with a vampire. I don’t care, as long as you handle your business on a hunt. You don’t stop to ask questions. You don't second-guess. You take the fucking shot every time. Then you cash your check, buy more bullets, and reload.”
“See, that’s our problem.” Rhiannon said, getting to her feet. She started walking back to her car. “Right there. If you weren’t in such a hurry to cash in and reload, you’d bother to do some goddamn recon on your targets before you sent your hunters in to tear them apart. Or you’d hire someone to do it for you. But you don’t, because no matter what rational argument you’re laying down for me right now, I know you. You’ve lost the plot. You don’t do it to live to hunt another day, you do it because you like to destroy things.”
Rhiannon's words were angry clouds in the cold air. “Just like you want to destroy whoever hired you, but only after you make your money. Good or bad, dangerous or not, you don't care, like you don't care how many people get hurt in the pursuit of that money. I can’t change what you’re doing back home, but I’m not going to let you do this here.”
“Oh, you’re not?” He shouldered hard into his sticky motel room door. “Look who’s throwing her weight around now.” Sean dropped his keys on the table. “You really are a Corrigan. You can’t resist an opportunity to throw a punch.”
“This isn’t some sparring match where we knock each other around and then grin and limp off into the sunset. This is real. Either you agree to cancel the hunt and tell everyone the deal’s off, or I will personally get in your way.” Rhiannon stopped beside her front tire. She was too keyed up to be still.
“Rhiannon,” Sean opened his arms wide in the center of his motel room. “I welcome the intrusion.”
“Fine. Have it your way.” Quietly fuming, Rhiannon grabbed her mother’s knife from the car hood. She began to turn things over in her mind: send word to Rob, round up a few fighters, ask James to do a location spell.
“Hey.” Sean smiled.
“What?”
“It was good to hear your voice.”
Rhiannon pressed ‘end’ on the call. “Stupid son of a bitch.” She tossed her phone in the passenger seat and collapsed sideways into hers. The engine started easily but she waited to close the door and get back on the road. There was such a thing as too pissed to drive. After a minute, she reached for the phone again and pulled up her last text conversation with Rob. Her thumbs hovered and then she began to type.
‘I have a lot to tell you. This is going to take a few texts…’