Chapter 56: A Second Skin, A Million Minds

Wakanda wasn't a place known for hysterics and religious or cult-related fanaticism, but there was a distant tribe that had been collecting the skulls of Vampires for who knew how long. That would send any collective of people into a stir no matter what historical age you existed in.

So, everyone inside the Wakandan space station did preemptive damage control…..

By lying.

Let the Marube people think the skulls just belonged to the European men across the seas. Let the modern folks of Wakanda continue on thinking their only current worries were Namor and Romulus.

All the while they collected the skulls.

The ones they could of course. Many others were used….. for ritual purposes.

"Oh yea ya'll bugged out with this one…" Bronte remembered commenting as the masked tribe leader took him to a pot that smelled distinctly of burnt weed the closer he got.

They were smoking Vampiric kush strains….

No more of that though. Not after they returned to the space station headquarters, now looking over a table with at least forty skulls in varying conditions of deterioration and damage. If you ignored the blinking lights of Wakandan tech and embraced the see through walls of the night sky it almost looked like a field of corpses.

"Dios mio…" Laura commented as she stood over the skulls, too close for Bronte's comfort…. Or Gabbie's as she held his hand from behind him.

A couple of the Vampire skulls with flesh still present sluggishly gnawed and hissed at their undead brethren, attempting to pop their fangs that had long since withered away. Leaving them showing rotted gums with holes opening and closing like the nostrils of a hyperventilating man.

"Is it cool for y'all to be that close?" Bronte asked the members practically leaning over the skulls.

"They can't move. I've also killed my fair share, I'm not scared."

"You should be." Daken stated from the back of the room where he leaned against a window. He'd always find his window…

"What? What's wrong?" Laura asked.

"At least five…" Daken sniffed hard, "No… seven of those skulls aren't just skulls. They're still alive…. Just starved." Daken turned to look at Laura, "We know chopping the head is what does it for them…. Just like us. I don't know how you forgot."

Laura's eyes widened, "I thought they were just outliers… too low of a cut down the spine. Magic? Dammit."

"Alright. Let's get these skulls secured and conduct an investigation and an autopsy on each of these…. Vampires. We no longer refer to them as skulls in this room. I also need a stealth unit watching the seas edge at all times." T'Challa rattled off orders to the extra hands in the room.

"We don't need your people in our land destroying it anymore than the ocean does." Tosin pressed.

"Then send your people." T'Challa looked from Tosin to Gentle. "Bronte is right. We need to unify. And I don't mean forcing you into anything…. But our people must compromise. A battlefield forms around us."

Gentle nodded in understanding. Tosin smacked his lips.

"I'll call Kurt." Ororo said in addition.

"Kurt used to date that sorceress….." Laura remembered.

"She can come as a consult. Maybe she can trace what coven these Vampires belong to." Ororo added.

Slowly everyone shuffled off to their work posts to tackle the very recent and jarring Vampire dilemma. Leaving Bronte and Gabbie…..

The famous youngling duo was missing a member….

They caught it immediately as the slew of bodies in the area continued moving about like worker ants.

"Hey… hey, where's Raze?" Gabbie said beside Bronte.

He was already looking.

Faces, smells, colors. They blew past his vision in a blur as his eyes spun around inside his skull like pinballs.

Once the crowd slimmed out as a number of people hopped in the elevator at the center of the room, he found Raze.

Brontë walked over, finding his brother truly silent for the first time in a long time as he faced the see through container holding the Klyntar Symbiote.

It was still. Almost looked like oil or gasoline.

"Hey, bro…" Bronte said from behind him. Seeing Raze so still was unnerving in all the wrong ways.

"Hey, Raze we're off for the night so let's go find some candy." Gabbie said from behind Bronte.

"Was I like this when you found me..? Haha!…. Imagine." Raze whispered as he watched the glass. His attempt at his usual self was a failure. Which was terrifying… somehow. He raised a hand to it. The black goo moved just enough to surround the warmth of his hand.

Brontë swallowed, "Raze…. We didn't find you. You found us, remember?"

Raze didn't reply. The hairs on Bronte's arms stood on end…

Ororo walked by with T'Challa and that scientist from before. N'Thaniel. Brontë watched him from his peripherals.

They were so deep in talks they didn't notice Ra—

"WOAHP—" N'Thaniel tripped and smacked the perfectly smooth metallic floor along with his two trays of Vampire skull fragments causing a earsplitting shattering and clanging to take place beside them.

The previously still pool of black fluid ruptured and spiraled with an angered shriek that exploded from a razor toothed series of mouthes opening along the black skinned surface.

The shrieks grew louder in a fraction of a second until Bronte noticed it was Raze who began screaming along with it. They sounded the exact s—

Raze swung himself into the container with his super-alien strength and cracked the container in a thousand places.

Before he could do it again, Bronte lunged forward and grabbed him.

"Raze, chill!" Bronte yanked and threw him out of the way.

Silence fell.

Raze shook on the floor. He was seizing. Foam poured from his fanged mouth, his muscles tensed and changed size and shape a million times a second, and his eyes were glowing…. Red.

The veins that bulged out of Raze's face slowly twisted and slithered beneath his skin like slugs. They gathered and joined into a glowing red spiral on his forehead.

Then he went still.

"Raze!" Gabbie rushed over to him.

Brontë went to join them when he finally realized he couldn't move. Something was holding him by the shoulder.

"CONTAINMENT BREACH!" Somebody yelled and pointed at Bronte.

Brontë looked back at the container and realized the black goo had slithered out from the cracks in the container and attached to him.

It spread like wildfire.

"No wait-" Bronte pulled at it only causing the spread to reach his other arm. It was like fighting syrup and he was too stunned to improvise any better for the next four seconds he had before he was consumed…..

And then, silence no more.

***

Screaming.

That's all he could describe what he heard as. It was like a million crying voices from so far away it fell on his ears as a thunderous wailing hum. It made his thoughts uneven. His senses flayed and rerouted in new weird ways.

"Bronte!"

Someone called him from above… from the sky.

"What the hell is going on?…. Whe—. Where is my brother. Where is, Raze..?" Bronte mumbled. For some reason his voice was wrong. It sounded like he was speaking from under water. His thoughts were wrong.

"He's here…. He's still…. He's still somewhere else, mentally."

"Who is that?" Why were they speaking from the sky?

"Bronte it's me, Gabbie…. Is… is that you?"

Brontë looked up, wondering how his sister was in the sky….

And that's when he realized she wasn't.

He was just standing on the ceiling.

Everyone in the room looked up at him in fear as he watched them.

"Why…. Why ya'll look so shook?" Bronte slurred as he went to itch his scalp.

That's when he noticed. The skin. It wasn't his.

It was soft. Smooth like a shell yet hard as steel if he pressed. He could feel muscles that weren't his own laid over him like a second skin.

The goo.

"Hold on…"

Brontë looked down at himself. A black suit reminiscent of space stretched across his frame, emboldening and building over his large muscles. A symbol etched into his chest glowed a whitish blue. It looked like…. A dragon?

He could faintly see his reflection on the shattered glass and metal surfaces below him. The same galaxy blackness covered the contours of his face. Around his mouth the outlines of massive fangs gave him a cruel visage that wasn't helped by the sharp white eyes he gazed through. His sharpened ears at the side of his head twitched.

It was then that he noticed the glow of his tied down hair beneath the skin of the suit. Like glowing corn rows that led to the brilliant steady explosion of blue flame at the back of his head, connected with the electrical outline of his spine running down his back like a magical sigil.

"Nah this is wicked…."

The mask shifted and twisted with his words.

"Bronte…. Are you ok?" Laura asked.

Brontë looked down at himself once more.

He flexed and the veins in the suit bulged and glowed, coursing with lightning and the power of the storm.

"I'm solid…"

[No….. you are soft. Soft as your planets ozone layer.] a hideously ominous voice spoke into his mind. [And that's good. Because like that ozone layer, I will breach the walls of your mind until you are…. KNULL]

"AHHHCK!" Bronte's mind lit ablaze and the previously blue accents of his suit went red. Then he lost consciousness.