14

Cláudio Fernandes mentions, "The Children of Haqim revere diablerie as a sacred pledge." He hesitates, "I've been a letdown to my guild. But I propose a new escapade—risky yet rewarding. Who can predict its destination?"

The recollection of the elder Blood's flavor makes your lips tingle. Contemplating the stolen power coursing within, you ponder what more could offer.

"It's almost dawn," Cláudio Fernandes remarks, glancing at his device. "I'm late for meditation." Extracting a card from his Glitch jacket, he adds, "With my Usurper contact gone, my former Denver company, 2100X, is...on pause. But I'm envisioning the future. The twenty-second century. Consider that, Darius Blackthorn—it's an enigma in our thoughts. We discussed the twenty-first century in our youth. We can still, to some extent, envision the distant future. But what lies ahead? What will it be like in eighty or a hundred years? Because I intend to be there. And I seek your assistance."

A sense emerges that the Camarilla desires you. Perhaps Prince Lettow simply seeks you as a scapegoat if the Second Inquisition strikes, but he hasn't mistreated you so far. And you're aware that Kindred of the Camarilla don't serve dual masters.

August 2005.

"The rest of the Family doesn't really understand our affliction," Violetta says, dabbing at her red lips with a napkin as she looks around the bookstore. "The Camarilla vampires don't understand either. Are we the damned? The dead? Are we gods?" She shakes her head so her tangled hair falls down around her shoulders. "We are creatures without a center. We are empty things. The Beast is not a thing. It's not Freud's id, or a whispering demon. It's what we call the emptiness inside us, that sends us careening from one…Look, we need to get rid of the corpse."

You look down at the dead grad student. Her blood has already soaked into the Persian rug. She's dressed in a black gown and wearing some kind of Tibetan skull cap.

"What were you doing here?" you ask as you push books off the rug so you can roll it up.

"Too many things at once," Violetta says, digging around in the bookstore's closet until she turns up some nitrile gloves. "Dealing with a too-curious mortal. Toying with the Masquerade by convincing someone I was a necromancer—which I am—without revealing anything more. Experimenting with ideas of ritual purity and taboo. Well, Darius Blackthorn, I've never presented myself to you as some paragon of wisdom, and now you fucking know why."

You check the corpse. It's been exsanguinated, obviously, and Violetta's ragged tooth marks are still visible. Your sire taught you what to do in a situation like this, so you unfold your knife and cut the corpse's throat to hide the two big Hammer Horror vampire bite marks. When you glance up, Violetta nods, impressed that you remember.

"We must return to the Cross Plains Dairy Queen and employ its unspeakable necromancy," Violetta says. "But tonight isn't just going to be a lesson in corpse disposal. We need to talk about what lets the Beast slip free. This—" she gestures around the bookstore, at the ritual paraphernalia, the corpse, "—was perfect. Too perfect. We are denied perfection by the nature of what we are, Darius Blackthorn. You'll learn that, in time. Skim by, skate by, do just enough to stay hidden and get the blood you need, and you'll thrive. Get cocky—wield your powers to crush and overwhelm, to demonstrate your glory—and the universe reminds you that you have no glory. You're a corpse full of stolen blood with appetites that can never be satisfied. And it unleashes your Beast to cause things like this. Stay humble, Darius Blackthorn."

Violetta is silent for a moment, as if meditating on the depth of her own arrogance and failure, then she says, "I can still make this work. Get her head. That's all I need."

Next

Before you can control yourself, you grab him by the cuff of his shirt. He calmly twists out of your grip and slams you against the wall, moving faster than you can track. Your head bounces off the wall, but the Banu Haqim doesn't strike again.

"You've changed," he says.

"It's been ten years of this!" you scream, still trying to control yourself. But that rage reaches out to Julian like poison gas, and he presses himself against the metal door. He's older and stronger than you, and he could probably bounce you off the walls until sunrise, but he seems to watch you now with greater care and respect.

"No hard sell, then," he says. "My offer stands. When things go bad with Prince Lettow and the Camarilla—and you have to know they will—get in touch with me. It's been ten years for me, too. Everything is different now."

He hands you a card with information about how to reach him—the motel where he's staying, and the location of a drop box. There's a little glyph like a knife doodled on the card.

"A karambit," he says. "I'm not exactly a regular member of Clan Banu Haqim, so that's what I'm using instead of the old 2100 logo to mark my holdings. No name yet, just the mark. Look for it, Darius Blackthorn."

Then he opens the door to your little office-room, scans the shadows, and disappears down the garage, in no evident hurry despite the proximity of sunrise. The metal door swings shut.

Next

You let the shock of Julian Sim's return fade, then check your knockoff Panerai as you take it off. It's 6:20 a.m. You secure the door, drop the dead bolt, and strip out of your leather jacket. You don't even have time for a shower, so you just unroll the sleeping bag and make sure your phone is charging.

You dream of flying high over the Alps at night, the roar of a single-seater engine in your ears, a silk scarf wrapped around your throat to keep off the cold, though you are already colder than anything else in these skies. Your dream shifts to a huge moon over a city you know so well that no name comes to mind, all turquoise domes and tall towers, black against the midnight sky. And then the same city, except it is only a village: low mud huts, donkeys, children laughing. It's morning, and the sun feels hot against your back and your bare limbs.

Not dreams. Memories. And one last memory, one that you know isn't yours: you remember forcing your eyes open after years of darkness and looking up at two eager fledglings—one from your own clan, one Clan Hecata. You remember watching, frozen, as the Hecata's fangs slide out.

You open your eyes for real and check your phone. It is 5:49 p.m. Sunset. Aila is asleep again. Your fangs are protruding; you shake your head until they go away, though you keep remembering the coating of dust on the elder's throat as you sank your teeth into her.

You shower, scraping the last of the filth out from under your fingernails. Then you decide where you're going. You don't want to keep Prince Lettow waiting as you make a decision.

Your first stop will be—