18

Gerard has never been held back by anything as pedestrian as a moral compass. Before entering your employ, he worked as an enforcer for a local crime syndicate. Calm, cool, and professional. When the syndicate chose to attack one of Prince Arundel's companies, he'd ordered the organization wiped out, but saved their most useful men and women for his own use, granting you one of your choosing. Gerard had been the obvious pick, and he reacted well to the gift of agelessness, exchanging loyalty to money for loyalty to the Blood.

You discard your clothes and Gerard collects them gingerly, his nose wrinkling at the state of their disrepair. "These won't be of much use to you anymore," he says. "I'll see about replacing them."

"That would be good, Gerard. Thank you."

"If I may be so bold, ma'am," Gerard asks with an unusual degree of trepidation in his voice. "Has Prince Arundel resurfaced yet? I've heard rumors among the servants…they believe he's left the city."

That was unexpectedly candid of you, ma'am," Gerard says. "I appreciate it; the greater my knowledge, the better I will be able to serve." He inclines his head with respect. "Will that be all for today?"

"Just about," you say, weariness enveloping you as the outside world grows closer to dawn. "I'll be needed at Corliss's offices tomorrow and I may be gone for most of the night. I have a job for you in the meantime

"Of course, ma'am. I'll get on it right away and hopefully have something helpful by the time you're done with your sire tomorrow night."

Gerard finally leaves you in peace and you make your way to your bed chamber, eager to put the disastrous night behind you. It surprises you how easily you fell back into the pattern of violence from your fledgling days, but now that you have the time to reflect, your entire body shudders and you feel weak in the knees. Un-life in the upper crust of Ottawa's Camarilla society is rarely dull and is filled with very real dangers, but those are attacks of a political nature, and to fall in a battle of wits rarely leads to a violent and bloody end—although it's certainly known to happen. Tonight, you faced final death on more than one occasion, and the resulting flood of memories from your mortal life brought back a heavy weight of long-repressed guilt.

Fear of dying is a persistent instinct in both mortals and vampires alike—even decades after your first death, you're surprised to still feel the faux spike of adrenaline and the gnawing fear of the grave. Agelessness, as you'd quickly learned upon your Embrace, can be stripped violently away, much the same as it is granted. Left to their own devices, a vampire's un-life could extend indefinitely, but the undead eventually desire purpose. True to the spirit of your damned nature, this desire manifests in the form of deadly politics, activism, or violence. For years now, the latter of these has been the furthest thing from your thoughts, but thanks to Corliss's prompting and Robert Ward's strangely personal attack, you're once again reminded that you are an inherently violent creature, and the thought both repulses and intrigues you, although not in equal measures.