Chapter 49

Ok, so when I said that I was prepared to wait as long as necessary for Viktor, that might have been a bit of a stretch. After about five minutes of sitting like a 'lady' on the couch, I got bored. I gave myself another ten minutes of playing on my cell phone before I was ready to toss it out the window and start climbing the walls.

I understood that I had the patience of a goldfish, but even I thought that 15 minutes was a little bit short for me to start wanting to climb the walls. Maybe it was because I was ready to get going and get things done. You would think, though, that after all these years of not wanting to do it, that I would be able to wait more than 15 minutes to start.

However, I knew that Jenny was going to be a problem, and I needed to deal with her first. Her family has had all the power allocated to the monsters, without being a monster themselves. And that type of power, no one in their right mind would want to give up.

The world as we all knew it, was a complicated place. There was layer upon layers of different societies and expectations, rules, and benefits. Cultural anthropologists called them subcultures, a group of people that are part of an overall culture but are also part of a smaller culture with its own set of rules and norms.

Think of it this way, North America was its own umbrella, with everything that makes it… it being the outer canopy. Now, the two countries that made up North America also have their own ways of doing things that are separate from the big picture, so those two cultures would be under the umbrella of North America, but still separate. And so on and so forth until you got down to families and individual people.

And as much as I am sure that you don't care about cultural anthropology and subcultures, it is important for everyone to realize that if each continent was considered its own umbrella, it was the monsters that held them all up.

We are in every country and in every city in the world, we are what keeps the world turning and allows all the different subcultures to run around, thinking that they controlled everything. And the monsters only had the laws of the six families to keep them in check. Being part of one of the six families meant having enough power and influence to decide who got to keep the umbrella over their head and who would no longer be protected from the elements.

Humans, with their short lifespans and limited understanding of the world, were not supposed to have that type of power. It is like giving a toddler the right to drink, drive and vote. You know instinctively that it is a horrid idea, but you don't have the ability to speak out and stop it. I do. I have the ability to stop the baby from making life-altering decisions, but if I was not expecting a fight on my hands, I would be the naive one.

Jenny lost her mind when she found out that I was a Tesalor, I don't imagine that she was going to be much more impressed when I told her that she and her kin were no longer holding up a part of the umbrella.

Deciding that it would be better to just rip off the band-aid and get it over and done with, I turned my attention to Sasha. "I'm going to be a little shit disturber, you might want to give the Van Helsing a heads-up," I smiled as I walked out of the office. I remembered where the House of Gypsies was located and I caught a cab to take me there.

This was going to be a fun day.

I was back at the creepy house, whose exterior did not look any better during the day than it did at night. I walked up the creaking steps and, before I could lift my hand to knock on the door, it opened, once again revealing the guy in the t-shirt and jeans. I guess he was what counted as the butler of this House.

"I'm here to talk to Jenny," I said, looking at the man in front of me. What caused me to flinch, however, was seeing a long pinkish-brown string coming out of him and connecting to the house. I had never seen strings coming out of people before, maybe it was a new thing with my monster? So why didn't I see them earlier today when I was in Knights Security?

Things to all figure out in the future.

"Jenny is not available right now, you can leave," the butler announced, looking down at me.

It was a habit that I was really starting to get annoyed with. "You can tell Jenny to meet me here and now, or you can let her know that she could have had a chance to save her House, but chose not to."

Apparently, he was not impressed with my statement as he slammed the door in my face without another word. That was fine… what would come next would be on them then.

I looked up at the top of the house, and what I had always considered to be dusty spiderwebs to add to the creepy factor turned out to be pinkish-brown threads, weaved together into a tight web that looked almost like a ball. The longer I stared at the threads, the more I felt. I could feel the brown rot trying to crawl over me… like it wanted to infect me with the same tint that it had.

That was what was wrong with the house… it was completely tainted by those brown threads. In a daze, I started to reach out for the brown thread, the closer I got to it, the more decayed it became. As if realizing that I could see it, the brown thread tried to scramble away in an attempt to save itself. But I would not give it the chance to taint others. I flung my hand out and grabbed the thread firmly, feeling it writhe and squirm like a snake.

I didn't have the same shears that I did in my dream, but something told me that I wouldn't need them.

Holding the thread in my left hand, I stuck out two fingers of my right in the universal sign of scissors and cut the thread. Like the one in my dream, this one too vanished into thin air.

However, I was not prepared for what came next.

It was as if I had set off a giant spider when I cut that thread of the web. The whole ball shook and more brown threads streaked out from it, aiming for me.

Not knowing what was going on… and between you and me, freaking out more than a little… I used my scissors fingers to cut any of the brown, rotten threads that tried to attack me. I couldn't slow down; the rot had taken over more than half of the pink web and it seemed desperate to protect itself. I could understand its feelings, but I knew that no matter what I felt, those rotten threads had to be eliminated.

The battle seemed to take hours, but it could not have been more than a few minutes. When I came back to my senses, I noticed that I was still standing perfectly still, looking at the roof of the Victorian mansion that was the House of Gypsies.

That was when I started to hear the screams.