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That fight was worse than anything you saw in the service, but you walked away in one piece, leaving twisted heaps of dead blood slaves in a Phoenix parking garage. Olivecrona may have mastered an array of awesome mental powers, but you had developed a more pragmatic art: Clan Ventrue's near-immunity to small-arms fire and knives. Only you and your friend Radu walked away from that fight, but you walked away a free vampire, and Olivecrona disappeared, her power broken and her hundred-year plan ruined.

And after all that, ten years on these miserable desert highways, scraping by on the "charity" of your elders as you run their errands.

If you were still alive, you'd be middle-aged.

The elders of the Kindred are lies wrapped in flesh: undeath is no promise of immortality. You've seen a hundred Cainites born into the night, only to die a few months later at the hands of hunters or their own kind, or just because they didn't know what time it was.

Strange that you're going to die young.

The air ripples. It smells like burning metal. You never should have bought a hatchback.

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Your durability means that you'll take slightly longer to burn unless you can find somewhere to hide.

You tell yourself that you're not burning, not yet, that the smell is just the scent of your fear. It's someone else's blood simulating sweat on your forehead.

It's a familiar smell, actually. Metal, rust…blood. You smell blood.

You run toward the smell of blood.

The lightening sky reveals an old filling station, faded sign banging faintly in the slight wind with the creak of metal. Located just off an old frontage road, its windows have been boarded up for years. You don't see blood, and now you can't even smell it, but that doesn't matter. As the first ruby red light touches the hills, only shelter matters.

Maybe you have a chance.

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Though the station looks abandoned, you see footprints in the sand. A golden eagle sits on the stripped diesel dispenser, watching you with unsettling intensity.

You approach the main building, looking for a way in. The windows and doors are all boarded up, and though there's a garage door for a loading dock, it seems locked.

The eagle spreads its wings and screams. You don't have time for this. The sun will kill you, but first it will drive you mad—you can feel the Beast rising in you. The Beast: the untamed monster that lurks inside every vampire, that drives you to acts of depravity and violence. You're losing control. You need to act now—but that eagle seems almost to have been put here to guard this place. Its talons flex.

You don't need to say anything. You just stride forward with the Blood burning behind your eyes, and the dread fury of your gaze—perhaps mingled with the rising, bestial terror you feel as sunrise approaches—drives the eagle back. It flaps away with a frightened caw. Without the distraction of the eagle, you're able to move quickly around the abandoned station. You run to the north side, which will buy you a few more seconds before the light destroys you. And there you find a single open window. As smoke starts to escape from your clothes, you wiggle inside, then crawl-kick away from the hole.

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