Whence Black Waters Flow
14th of March 2007 A.D.
Dhaka, Bangladesh
It is not that Michael had never worked with a vampire, thanks to Harry he had and several times, but the White Court were for all their hunger, living breathing beings and Thomas at least was young enough that his experience was not so remote from Michael's own, he might not approve of how he lived his life he understood it, because of course he had a
life to live. Nergui on the other hand did not stop when street vectors offered him a key chain, a bottle of counterfeit perfume or a good luck charm to keep the dark spirits away,
the irony, he simply swept through like a dark omen letting the long shadow streaking ahead clear the path and even in those parts of the city where two armed men walking with a purpose did not pass unnoticed he simply demanded that the world give way. And when it would not do so simply at the glint of steel in his eyes he
commanded... attempted to at least, until Michael bid him stop.
Stop he had not not without complaint. 'Like having a Crane overhead,' he had said shortly before to methods less esoteric, but no less brutal in their directness. It was a cult he argued, the slip Michael managed to recover 'had the touch of Faith' as though Faith was a scent that his dead nostrils could assay. It reminded him of Harry in away, with his insistence that Faith was a kind of magic, or that magic was something one could have faith in, but Harry had never given him the impression that he might try to bottle holiness and put it on a shelf to trade for some favors with an oni given half the chance.
Either way the reasoning he had given for why they should plumb the depths of Dhaka's cramped and labyrinthine slums had been a good one, cults tend to recruit from among those who have very little that they can hold in their hands and so can be swayed to mortgage that which is infinitely valuable. The distance was not so great from being hired on to a company and invited to a 'spiritual retreat' on which that job would hang and from there to being pressured into the kind of rites that would... solidify loyalty.
It would always sicken him to his stomach to think of it and Michael thanked God for that small mercy as he listened to a woman elderly woman, all but hidden behind a veil speak of the actions of her middle son and her brother, how they had grown distant, secret then angry. How the last time she had spoken with her son she had been drinking heavily even though he never drank and had claimed in response to her tears that never seeing or hearing of her would be
safest for her.
She had given them a name at least, the Penitents of the Hollow Thorn and with that name to open the way Michael's contacts in the church had almost instantly pulled up an address, though that was for the Bashundhara City Shopping Mall.
"At the very least I won't be able to miss them for the pounding of so many heartbeats in my skull," the complaint had a less agrieved tone to it, which Michael was starting to grasp was about as cheerful as Nergui ever got. "Tell me Michael son of Carpenters how skilled are you in disguising your face and nature?"
The knight thought about the line of deathly shudders the vampire had drawn across the city. Probably better than you are.
***
How the cult had managed to get approval to crowd into the underground parking lot of the all Michael didn't know, but there was something about the waight of the air, the fliker of lights whose radiance seemed to fall short of where it should have been, the tight-lipped eager faces of people streeming in that put Michael's teeth on edge. More than once he was passed by a lanky boy maybe of an age with Mathew moving through asking for 'donations' and all he could think about was how easy he would be to turn that child into a hostage. Everyone here was basically a hostage.
"I dislike this," the voice was soft enough that he shouldn't have been able to hear it and yet he did.
Unsure if he could match the trick Michael just tipped his head.
"This is moving too quickly, not at all like the slow and steady recruiting practices of before, as stones who had been rolling slowly down an incline tumble over a cliff face."
All the lights went suddenly out... yet out in front on the makeshit stage a man walked wearing darkness neaten like steel, seen by all not because it was light, but because the blackness that enfolded him was so much deeper than any the mortal eye had been made to behold.
"And that," Michael said tonelessly. "Would be why."
OOC: For the record the reason why Nergui is so out of sorts compared to when he was accompanying Molly is that the presence of an infernal is a lot more pleasant to an Elder of the Wan Kuei than one of the Swords, Michael just chalked it down to 'miserable because he's undead'. Kind of true but with extra steps 
