The expanse outside the city was a vast cobweb of lowlands and bayous fanning ever outward toward Louisiana’s interior plains. Chorused by the throaty croaks of amphibians or the shrill cries of herons, even on clear nights the landscape resembled nothing so much as a patchwork of shadows. Black ribbons of roadway, all but swallowed by the dense vegetation, snaked out from the city lights like spokes from the hub of a wheel. Twin beams of halogen carved their way through the darkness as the vehicle sped from Cascadia and out towards the hinterlands and its buried secrets.

—

He stood again on the shoreline facing an endless sweep of ocean. Overhead, the sun was little more than a smeared pinprick struggling through the haze. The clouds were the washed out color of static except near the horizon, where they darkened and grew dense. The black swell surged against the sands. The strip of beach itself was a ruddy band listing out either in direction, disappearing into the banks of fog. He glanced down at the volcanic basalt sifting through his toes and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. There was no sound. He watched the waves rise, crest and crash against the shore, the soapy foam sliding across the wet sand, thinning and receding all to abject silence.

Overhead, gulls wheeled in the sky. He watched them and felt oddly disquieted. This was not familiar, but somehow expected. The world stretched before his eyes, carrying with it a discomforting sense of recall. In his scattered memories, he could not place himself on this beach. And yet his instincts told him that he had stood here before watching this same swath of water. It left him with the impression of a length of cord fastened to a pipe and slowly rotated around the outside, forced to revisit the same contracting orbit again and again, until the length runs out and then…and then what?

A sliver of lightning materialized at the horizon’s edge and in time a growl of thunder came rumbling over the water. And he heard it. To his left, he could make out vague shapes hidden in the fog. Distant, ephemeral yet visible. He set off down the beach. In the distance, the swollen stormclouds were billowing up from the horizon. The air seemed to grow heavier in anticipation of rain. His step quickened.

“We’d better get back soon.” she remarked. “That storm will be here soon.”

Kay had seemingly appeared out of the ether. Despite this, he felt at ease. It was almost as though he had expected her to show up when she did. He stopped and looked her over. Auburn hair loose and dancing round her face and neck in the stiffening wind. She wore a satin nightgown he dimly recognized, the breeze pressing it flush against the familiar shape of her body. He resumed his walk and she kept pace at his side.

“Rain doesn’t worry me.” he replied.

He could see her regarding him from the corner of his eye. Her incisive stare undressing all his pretenses as it always had. At the horizon, the cloud had grown dark and thick enough so as to have been virtually indistinguishable from the sea.

“So what is worrying you then?” she asked. “Why do you continually put yourself through this? What’s keeping you from contentment after so much time has passed?”

He chewed the question over.

“Everything.” he confessed. “All of it. Everything that was.”

Hands clasped before her, she looked down towards the sand as they walked. At length she gave him a playful bump with her shoulder.

“Everything?” she repeated. A phantom of a smile and she dipped her head, searching for his downcast stare. “Is that all?”

He met her stare.

“You.”

Her expression didn’t change but her lips seemed to tighten. To thin.

“Time can’t change what we had. You know that.”

“Time changes everything.” he replied. “Takes everything.”

They walked in silence for a time.

“That’s the way of it for everyone though.” she said at last.

“I know it is.”

By the time the SUV quit the highway, turning onto a solitary stretch of unlit roadway, the city lights were little more than a faint halation of ochre light glowing in the rearview. The vehicle trundled down the access road, the curves and divots spilling the car’s headlights across the undergrowth. Cool, liquid eyes caught and refracted the light from their hiding places.

As the roadway distanced itself from the main highway, it coupled itself to the border of a coiling oxbox lake, winding its way along the syrupy black waters to a thicket of cyprus trees sprouting up on the bank’s edge. The vehicle grumbled to a stop and a trio of figures stepped into the moonlight.
“Whew! I can smell the Wyrm-shit from here.” one of the riders remarked.

“At least we know we’re in the right spot.” another replied, hoisting a bulging duffle bag from the vehicle’s interior and slinging it over one shoulder.

“Should’ve told Strauss to do his own dirty work.”

“You don’t want that.” The figure slammed the door, approaching his compatriot and pressing the bag into the man’s gut. “You give ‘em an inch and they’ll take it all. Better to do it ourselves and let them rot in their cages. Let's just get this over and done.”

—

He looked past her, out past the sable coursing waters. Behind the screen of thunderheads, a vast miasma of scarlet spread throughout until the entire skyline burned a fiery red. Spidery webs of phosphorescent light backlit the stormfront. Fissures of crimson burning through the sky.

“Fixation on the past is hardly unique amongst our kind.” He turned to address the remark, already knowing who he’d see there. Set upon an outcropping of sandstone, the owner of the voice looked much as he had in unlife. Flaxen hair spilling loosely over broad shoulders, patrician features hovering somewhere between amusement and expectation. He sat turning a small stone over in his hands. “But I'll admit I hadn’t anticipated you’d turn out so mundane as to flit away your unlife bemoaning bygone nights.”

Kathy gave an audible tut.

“Not very charitable of you Sorenti.” she chided.

“Oh Kath, now who's being uncharitable?” Sorenti stood and approached the waterline, giving him a friendly clap on the shoulder as he passed. The echo of a smile played upon his lips. “Nothing is more corrosive to a Cainite than looking backwards. Pining after those faces and things lost to time? That are beyond your reach? Please. That’ll rot you from the inside out.”

He considered the stone in his hand and then flung it out of the churning ocean waters where it landed noiselessly. He turned back towards Gabriel.

“Consider it a final piece of advice. A final token of wisdom from your erstwhile mentor.” he grinned.

Gabriel peered out to the waters and the broiling sky beyond. Rim lightning flickered at the storm’s edge. He spoke over his soldier.

“There’s just so much I would’ve changed. So many mistakes. I should have held on tighter.” he said.

Sorenti’s comforting hand on his shoulder once more. The sands beneath him seemed to tremble slightly beneath Gabriel's feet and the cries of the gulls became audible.

“Mistakes are the currency of life. The money with which we buy experience. Come on, lets keep moving. There's still more to see."

Aaron stretched as he slid from the bed, the empty cans, empty bottles and the torn condom wrappers littered the floor, a forensic team’s wet dream of saliva, blood and worse. Anyone who brought a blacklight into the room would have thought it the fourth of July when the walls, floor and pretty every surface that wasn’t tacked down would have shone with the unspeakable spillages thereon. He pulled on his boots, tripping over the table and landing with a dizzy thud. The noise woke him a little more and in a way he thanked his own clumsiness for the wake up call. He pulled a shirt over his head, in that lazy way that men did and walked to the sink. A cursory glance in the mirror reminded him of the thing he hadn’t forgotten, no matter how hard he might try to. The long, deep but gratefully healed cuts in his face, that looked like he’d been hit by a garden fork, caught the light in their deep channels in his flesh. He washed rest from his face and turned to the bed.

She lay there, motionless. Dead in every way but the one that mattered, her heart was still beating, even if the rest of her body couldn’t agree. With a grunt he started wrapping her in the blankets like they were a shroud. Taking care to cut a hole for her mouth so she could breathe, he then taped her limbs and taking care to watch the highway outside, carried the long and curiously suspicious sleeping bundle to his truck. Once hidden there, he grabbed her things and threw them into a plastic bag, threw the bag into the passenger seat and pulled out of the motel lot. Slowly and as quietly as the truck’s engine would allow. He tapped the glowing little face of his satnav, more out of reassuring habit than necessity. This journey wasn’t new to him but hearing the satnav’s slightly seductive timbre made him feel less alone, especially once the truck was free of the city limits and was engulfed by the forest. He considered the radio, but the late night hosts always made him flinch with their crazy midnight conspiracies and insipid taste in music. He rubbed his eyes, massaging the migraine he always got on nights like this, and blew hard between his teeth as he wheeled the truck onto the old dirt track. A few miles off the highway, in the apparent middle of nowhere he stopped the truck, leaving the lights on and dragged her body from the truckbed.

He dragged her into the underbrush, sweat pooling in his lower back from the exertion and left her in the usual spot. He didn’t look back as he walked, he didn’t look back when the forest suddenly fell silent and he sure as hell didn’t look back when he heard the sound of tearing cloth, the sound of something wet happening to the girl or the sound of something hungrily gulping something unspeakable down. When he heard something rustling behind him he finally screamed and ran for the truck.

The ancestor, sated for a moment, stopped at the perimeter the headlights created and growled.

Aaron, emboldened by his proximity to his truck, called into the pitch.

“Remember! We had a deal! I bring you food, and you make me like you! I’ve kept my side! So far all you’ve given me is this!” He touched the scar on his face.

“It healed well enough, didn’t it? You grumble too much, cub.”

Aaron screamed again, the voice of the ancestor fluttered raspily across his right ear. He was about to scream again when the ancestor fell on him, something dry, stinking of the earth and of ancient rot held at bay. A leathery, no not leathery…papery. Made brittle by decades of thirst, crinkling and hoarse and hoary like the oldest leaves cast by the oldest of the forest’s trees. Fingers or roots or were they woody tendrils, grasped at him pulling him close to the ancestor’s face. A thirsty, loamy muck sound interrupted the rasping of the thing’s body.

“Ancestor? That what you think I am? Well I suppose I’ve been called worse by better men. A deal is a deal, cub.”

Aaron tried to scream again, but his mouth was filled with dirt and leafy debris, his nose smothered by a ragged tarpaulin of muck and meat and mange. Then as suddenly as it had all started, silence and emptiness returned to the forest. The truck would be recovered, it might even be connected to the killings, but the bodies had been claimed by the cradle of rot and ruin the woods represented. As for Aaron…

"Arise," came the word from the darkness. It was a musical whisper. The scent of lavender still filled the air from the dream she had in her slumber. She was back in Provence. In ages past. Now it was just dark. With painful effort she opened her eyes. All was completely black. With even greater effort she willed herself to sit up. When she did, lights kicked on. "Arise," came the whisper again. It was her Mistress. It was Eveshka, calling her to back to the world of the Awakened. Why? Theophanie looked down at her skeletal and atrophied body. The last she knew, Eveshka was still in deep torpor in France. How long had she been under this time? She swung her legs off of the bed and went to an armoire. She covered herself with a black cloak. Tiffany, as she was more generally known in the 20th century, made use of a keypad that was on the inside panel of the armoire. After punching the code a door slid open. Inside the door were several bags of what looked like plasma. Blood. She consumed several bags and started the regeneration process. Her strength and mental acuity were already returning. It'd be a few days until she would feel comfortable showing her face in public without people screaming in horror however.

Tiffany walked across the room and sat down at an ornate table with a computer console on it. and switched it on. It immediately hummed to life. 16th February, 2023. She'd been under for more than 22 years. "Mother... what do you want me to do," she murmured to herself. She logged into her encrypted account and found a bunch of old emails from ages ago, but nothing from Eve. Nothing from anyone who would have been relevant in any way. Nothing to shed light on why she was summoned... ostensibly by someone who was still slumbering.

Tiffany stayed at The Haven for several days doing research online catching up on current events and recuperating. It seemed she slept through a few wars, civil unrest, an ongoing pandemic, killer balloons, and all manners of other unpleasant things. It took a day for the first Toreador fledgling to come along to check on her. The Toreador Primogen of New Orleans had summoned Tiffany. The young Torries brought her the latest fashions to wear.

She walked out of The Haven and onto the grounds of the Tulane Medical Center around midnight and headed over to the Ariodante Gallery, the Toreador Primogen's haven. Tiffany was met at the door by several enforcer types. They merely nodded at her and opened the door for her. "Madame Delacroix awaits you inside," said one of the men. They were clearly ex-military. Everything about them screamed professional, right down to the ear pieces.

"Welcome, Theophanie," said Renee was an ingratiating smile. Tiffany smiled back. Renee introduced Tiffany to her Whip and to the Toerador elite of New Orleans. "This is Theophanie D'Estaing. Born 1769 in Provence. Reborn in 1789 in Paris. Childe of Eveshka the Comtesse de Touraine. She is one of the illustrious Daughters of Ishtar." Tiffany seemed a bit taken aback. The gathered Toreador court was impressed with her. The whispers and pointing made it obvious. Young Toreadors are such mutton heads, thought Tiffany.

"Do not be surprised, child, I make it my business to know everything that goes on here and in Louisiana as a whole. We knew you were torporing here, and watched over you. With such parentage, how could we not? What I would like to know, is why you are here and awake. Not that we mind guests, particularly ones of such famed lineage. But still, such illustrious guests often bring illustrious problems. We have had none since the Cappadocians were driven out of Cascadia decades ago. I may not be as old as your siress, but I am attuned enough to know that something has awakened in that god forsaken place again. Something is calling out, and I hope it is not calling out to you."

"I never lived in Cascadia," said Tiffany. "Nor did my Mistress. After the Gangrel wars, she resided in France when the rest of the Court came here. Tiffany was silent for a while. "I do not know why I was summoned from torpor. It was not my choice."

He awoke. The trees were in the sky, their branches reaching down. The sky was at his feet He was a column of red, surging into the peat above him. Impossible to tell where he began and the red column ended he screamed, his mouth sticky with dried saliva, mud and the leakage from the onset of death. The soil twitched under or above him, the detritus of countless millions of souls, atoms and minutiae moving together as one. The ancestor shifted just beneath the surface, rotten, desiccated and mummified, probing around the blood soaked earth. Primal rather than intelligent, it drained what it could from the meatlocker it’d hung from the tree by his feet. Aaron’s eyes opened as his heart stopped and he saw a pale, leash of muscle reach up from the mire and cut him down. As he landed, near death, the leash withdrew, the ancestor emerged coalescing from the twigs and the rot. Pooling together a body made from blood, brush and bracken. Then, with a wooden smile it cradled the dying Aaron’s head in his hands and bit into its own finally fleshy wrist.

“Drink. You’ll feel better.”

Silence bubbled in Aaron’s dead throat.

“Drink.”

The body jerked as droplets of the ancestor’s blood reached Aaron’s tongue. As more blood crept into his throat, Aaron’s mouth snapped at the ancestor’s wrist, sucking at first softly like a baby then insistent, demanding. The ancestor grunted as Aaron started to moan, then with a powerful swat of its free hand, it tossed Aaron aside like a mosquito. It stepped over to him, scooping his unconscious body and disappearing with him into the earth. The particles of dirt moving around them both like quicksand, closing above them, a protective act to shield them from the impending dawn.

Three months earlier

He threw up. He’d found this stretch of the woods by accident after his first kill. Had driven around with the body in the trunk for hours before he took a wrong turn off the highway and ended up on a trail that looked like something abandoned since the 1800s. The track was still a track, but nature or whatever passed for nature out here had reclaimed most of it. There’d been a plantation here once, he remembered reading about it. Now though the trail was more like something that an elephant might have crushed out on its way through the trees. A mile or so on the trail widened, he half imagined there’d been a house here but it was just imagination. There was no ruin, no foundation stones to denote the fossil of a residence, and hell, even back then god knew who’d want to live this far out. He had stopped the car and got out and that’s when he puked. The sudden, mouth soaking precursor to puke that made you moan in some instinctive horror. He’d spat out the last of it, wiping the dregs from his mouth on his sleeve and grimaced. Walked to the car, drank a soda, in part to wash his mouth out, and sat on the bonnet. It was late afternoon, the sun had already started to head towards setting behind the trees but he had a hole to dig. He retrieved the shovel from the passenger seat, picked a good spot by a tree stump and cut into the dirt. It moved easy enough, soon becoming a mound and a deep enough hollow to hide a body.





1 Year Earlier

She wore the green sweater. The one that clung to her like an emerald skin. I loved that sweater. I followed her from her place to the coffee shop on Third. She ordered a latte, as always, picked some french looking pastry and paid the dorky looking guy behind the counter in cash. As the door swung shut, I passed her. Her phone fell out of her purse and I picked it up, got her number from the contacts list under “Me” and then when enough time had passed, ran after her and called out, “Hey! Miss? You dropped your phone.”

I know she didn’t really see my face under the cap, but I saw the relief and the smile that followed, hitting me like the second wave on a beach that hits as the first one is still retreating. I nodded, smiled my goofy warm smile, then left. As she rounded the corner onto Emerson I stopped. Took off my cap and added her number into my cell.

I sent her a text. Nothing sordid, it's not about that. But you can’t hunt pheasant without beating the heather. The text just said, “Hello. I love the sweater.”

I wait three days before I follow her again, to the park. She was meeting friends. That was good, good that she had somewhere safe to run to. Good that by doing so, she showed me she’s a creature of habit. I tail her for a few more days, weeks..was it a month? Anyway, soon enough I knew her movements like my own. I could predict hers as easily as I could find my face in the dark. I sent her another text, “Run”, and wait. Right on cue, an hour after she got it she was in her car and driving into the city. If I didn’t already know her reaction, she might have been able to disappear in the crowd but that wasn’t her game. She’d called the police, definitely but she was heading to her sister’s. Lucky for me, her sister wasn’t home when she arrived. She didn’t stand a chance. I’m not a monster, I made it quick. I put her in the trunk. Plastic wrapped, obviously. Then drive out of the city. I take the I and with some luck and some heavy feet I hit the woods before nightfall. I needed somewhere to dump the body. Like I said before, this was nothing sexual. It was hunting. Nothing more. But it wasn’t like I could take a trophy for my wall. I drove a long, slow lazy circle around the perimeter then the inner circle of the woods, heading for the peak. I was about 9 miles in when the tyre blew.

I pulled off the road onto a dirt track. It was wide enough, just, to drive down. But narrow enough that I would have missed it if I’d been moving too fast. I rolled just long enough to disappear from view but not enough that the flat damaged the wheel, stopped, popped the trunk and hopped out casually like I’d pulled into a drive-in. I wasn’t afraid out here, no need to be really. Biggest thing out here was a black bear or some kinda badger and both would have been scared off by the car’s engine. The dark didn’t scare me either, no such thing as monsters in the dark, right?

Wrong.

It started as a quiet hiss, barely perceptible, barely anything, but dragging her body from the car made it louder. Maybe it was blood whizzing around my skull, like being quiet was putting too much strain on me. I let go of her when I reached the tree. The hissing stopped.

The tree stood motionless. Yeah I know, trees aren’t known to dance a jig. But this one didn’t move. There was a breeze that night, but this bastard didn’t care or wasn’t interested, either way it didn’t move. The branches stayed stock still, the leaves didn’t rustle. Nothing. Its trunk was wide, shark-skin rough and grey - bloodless. I don’t know why I chose that particular word but I found out. It loomed, lurked, hunched in a clearing, monolithic, more corpse than copse. Again with the weird comparisons, but…well you’ll see what I mean. I shook my head and walked back to the trunk to get the shovel. As I turned back to face the tree, shovel in hand, something stood in the void between the body and the tree. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. The figure, or shadow disappeared but the noise in my ears started again. This time it was a whisper. I strained to listen, were those words? Was I losing my mind, I mean sure. I’d killed someone to satisfy an urge, a compulsion but hearing things?

The whispering got louder, the closer I got to her and that damn tree.

Bring me something living

What? The hell was that?

She’s cold, Aaron. I need something warm.

I thought I was going crazy, talking to myself. I pushed her body into the brush instead of burying her and ran for the car. I forgot about the tyre and drove out of there like the tree had uprooted itself and came thundering after me.

I drove back three days later. In daylight, I guess somewhere in my head I thought that sunlight was my protector in the woods. But these old woods get pretty dark. The tree was still there, still standing, stagnant, torpid maybe. The branches still otiose, languid and still ignoring any of the movement the autumn air insisted on. But I felt a definite relief with the sun at my back, my shadow seemingly daring the tree to do something. I pulled my bag from the car, took the rabbit out; its legs tied so it couldn’t escape, and placed it at the tree’s base.

Thankyou, Aaron. Something to warm me. But….something bigger next time?

Next time?

Don’t pretend you won’t be back, and don’t insult me by thinking you don’t want to kill again. Bring them to me alive and your conscience will be clear. I need food, I need their warmth, Aaron.

What do I get in return?

Ahhhhhhhh! There’s the crux of it, cub, yes? In return, well I will give you a gift. A gift that keeps on giving, though not in living.

What?

Nothing to worry about, boy. Now, food.

I was figuratively and literally talking to myself in front of a tree that inexplicably scared the shit out of me and standing over a rabbit that apart from being tired and ultimately doomed didn’t seem to be fazed by any of it. Or maybe just ignorant. Ignorance is bliss, they say. But then, so is the hunt.

I had started watching him the day after I first met the tree, the Ancestor’s the name I’ve been using, I don’t know why.

I was watching him, he wasn’t the usual prey but maybe I needed the challenge. It got dirty fast and I was sloppy. Still, it ended the same way. He was gagged, which was lucky because the things the thing inside or under the tree, did to him would have made even the dead scream. I sat in the car, the radio on and my eyes shut tight trying to drown out the noises the thing made and those he made. It was almost enough but I was still terrified and I wouldn’t have left the car if the Ancestor hadn’t commanded me to. The body was drained, no not drained, eviscerated of its soul. Not just lifeless, dried, desiccated, sun dried minus the sun.

So. What is your gift?

Ahhhhh, always to the point. Good. I loathe drawn out conversations. Who has the time? Oh yes, immortals like me. You keep feeding me and once I’m something of myself again, well you’ll join the club.

I.

Yes.

I left the Ancestor laughing inside my head.

2013

He woke, coughing up dirt, his body cold like the damp, toffee earth that had bore him for how long he couldn’t tell. He pulled himself up from the hollow he’d been left in and felt a hunger like he’d never felt before. A longing, an appetency no no that wasn’t it, it was more than a yearning it was a need, a stupid cupidity that made his gums ache to bite down, a pressure of maw, mind and mesial. An ache that made his bowel palsy and writhe and twist, pulling him to his knees and releasing a wail.

Shut up. You sound like a newborn. You wanted this remember, you wanted to be the killer, the predator. Well there you are. No in fact wait, here eat this.

A fawn stepped groggily into the clearing. Its eyes glazed, was it drugged? No, it was a puppet on invisible strings being given to him by the Ancestor.

Stop calling me that.

He looked around, climbing off his knees again before clumsily lunging at the fawn. It didn’t or couldn’t even scream or struggle, the Ancestor saw to that.

Stop it. That’s now who I am.

He fed, obsessively, childishly, spreading gore across his face as he puked then glugged the fawn’s blood down. He wanted to thank the Ancestor. He suddenly stopped feeding as suddenly as he’d started, flew through the night as the thing swatted him. Smashed his face against the tree and blacked out. Who, what was the thing?

The ground heaved. As though being pushed up by some 60’s horror movie monster was pushing its way to the surface.

How does this go again. It’s been so long. Two arms, yes that’s it. Two legs, not four. A head. No not like that. That’s better.

The ground heaved again and the figure stepped up. Naked but so covered in mud, blood and vegetable tissue as to be indeterminate. It shook its great shaggy head and bayed. Then looked down at the unconscious Aaron whose mind was asleep but aware.

Sleep, cub. You’ll need it. Tomorrow begins your trials. And stop calling me ancestor. I’m your Sire now, your creator. But I had a name once, what was it again…Marneus? Martin? No no that wasn’t it.


Porter.

He ran. He ran for longer than his lungs would once have allowed him, not that that meant much. In life he’d never been athletic, but now? Now he had been sprinting for more than twenty minutes, his new body driven by something more vital to him now than oxygen had ever been. He was running without any real direction, lost instead in the staccato of his feet hitting the sidewalk. Lost in the swirl of scents and sounds the city offered to him on plates of concrete and asphalt, a heady mix of smoke, fumes - per and noxious, and the variable aromas of life in all its exotic and familiar forms. And every time he stopped, not to gain breath but to change direction suddenly or get his bearings, the birds followed. Every time! They would alight on the streetlamps, the street signs and the rooves of cars, hundreds of them.

His birds, he knew. The birds of his creator, his sire, his new dark father. Always present, following, chaperoning, snooping. He could run all night, he knew, and his Sire would hsve them follow. A murmuration of starling, pigeon, nightjar and more. Their presence made him think of the way birds would follow an apex predator, seeking the scraps the object of their attentions might drop. Crows following bears and wolves, gulls following sharks and trawlers but their behaviour here was utterly selfless, utterly mindless in that their minds were currently under the command of a predator far greater than any nature might have created.

He reached the outer wall of the city park, was up and over in the time it took most to hop up the kerb and landed with a surprising grace in the ground beyond. His body was still, soundless. No thunderous heartbeat, no deafening scream of muscles and nerves pushed beyond breaking, just the sounds of the trees rustling in the wind and the cacophony climbing and stumbling over the wall from the cityscape outside. He instinctively but pointlessly patted himself down as though expecting his clothes to have already collected a mantilla of dry leaves and dusty soil, then walked into the artificial sunlight the park lighting provided. The paths here were gravel rather than concrete, an effort to further expand on the deliberate chaos the park’s original designer had foretold. A place of nature the designer had explained, where the cityfolk can retreat from the sprawling metropolis without and instead embrace the wilderness within. Except it was far from it. Still, it was better than nothing and he often slept here.

“When you’re finished running away, can we talk? Cub?”

God he hated that voice.

“Stop following me!” Aaron said finally.

“No.” Was his Sire’s reply. “We have things to discuss.”

Swagger had been following the evidence,the way most detectives did, but his reasoning and his suspicions lay in a direction most would deem laughable but his eyes were keener. Where the majority, the ignorant, cattle-kine would see fantasy and make believe, he would see clues. Tracks to follow and spoor to capture the senses of hounds and detectives alike. So he followed, he watched and he watched and listened. The killings had seemingly paused, a period of dormancy the psychologist had said. Many killers go dormant after a spate, but inevitably they return, oftentimes with alterations/evolutions in their MO. Still, Swagger was a patient if not diminutive man. Standing at 6’4”, he towered over most and proved intimidating even to some of his own kind, a fact that he used often to gain confessions and leads when simple evidence was insufficient.

When his prey resurfaced, he was ready.

The trail led him out of town, up the old road. Once upon a long ago this road was dust, crushed grass and hope. As pilgrims crossed the land like well intentioned locusts, scouring, taking all in the name of some greater but less interested higher power. His car swayed off the road into the woods it circled, making a juddering-creaking sound as though the vehicle itself felt a fear its driver was oblivious to. He drove on until the trail became a path, then followed it on foot, flashlight and shovel in hand his pistol holstered, until it became a clearing. He found the vast, primordial tree and started to dig. A few centimetres here, a few inches there. Following some instinctual map, searching for his prey’s first.

“Why are you after the boy?”

He spun. Pistol drawn, shovel left earthbound. His light caught something glinting, eyes?

“Who?”

“I asked first, Detective.”

“The boy? You know him then? You know what he is?”

“I should.”

“He’s a killer. He’s a risk to…” He stopped then, he had no idea who or what he spoke to.

“Who are you?” He asked.

“His…sponsor so to speak. Ah to hell with it, Sire is as good a name as any.”

Sire? So this thing was Kindred, but who and to which allegiance.

“You know, I never liked being called Kindred. You and I are not brothers, Swagger. As for allegiance, I hold none.”

None? Then. “He’s a potential risk to the Masquerade. I’m taking him down.”

“No. No. You’re not.”

He fired his pistol. Clean shot into the silhouette of black against blacker, its head snapped back as though hit. It chuckled.

What?

“You’re out of your depth here, Detective. And sadly, for you, out of time. I can’t let you have the boy, you see. He’s mine. And I protect what’s mine above all else.”

Swagger stammered suddenly, had his bowels still lived he would have shit himself. His Beast was terrified, run it screamed. Negotiate at least! Survive!

“Look you can have the boy! Whatever! But he can’t keep this up. You know that! Just let me…”

“Thankyou, Detective. He’s a pup, still finding his feet. Teething problems shall we say. And no.”

“No?”

“You can’t leave.”

“But.”

He had enough time to fire another shot, it went wild into the trees. He had a little less time to see the great, monstrous, formless thing of fur and tooth and claw. And less time even to hear himself wailing.