Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It's not like waking up, not really. One moment I wasn't there, and the next I was was, completely conscious, without any transition or groggy stage.

The slob from last night was standing over me. "Rise!" he said. "In the names of Nergal and Namtaru, in the names of Ashtoreth and Lamashtu, rise!"

What could I do, faced with that? I rose, all right. I kicked out and bounded to my feet. I spotted some metal thing like a fireplace poker, and I whacked him upside the head with it. I didn't know what he'd done while I was out cold, but I wasn't letting him do any more of it. He hissed at me like a cat and bared a set of needle-sharp fangs. That, I hadn't planned for.

A word to the wise: cheerleaders are highly-trained athletes. Unless you are too, or you're really big, don't try fighting one. I didn't know for sure yet about vampire strength, but this guy didn’t have it, not enough to matter anyway. In about five minutes, I had the fat vampire slob on the ground with his knee bashed in and his arm twisted behind him.

That's when I realized I was parched. Dry as a bone and hungry too. A delicious scent like the best steak ever pulled me down to the arm I had twisted. Something shifted in my teeth, and I bit down. I don't even know how to describe the flavor. He was like steak and like chocolate and like a great coffee, but food doesn't really come close to how good it felt to drink him down. I'm at a loss for words even now.

I left him on the floor unconscious. No, I didn't know any better. A vampire doesn't have a pulse. I figured he was dead, and I was only sort of wrong, of course. Then I peeked around his grungy little apartment until I found the way out into the night which, lucky me, it was.

You don’t even know who I am, do you? My name's Beth MacAllister, and I graduated from Harding University about a month ago. I had plans for graduate school all lined up, but you may be realizing what I hadn't just yet: taking daytime classes is hard for a vampire.

I checked the time before hurrying back to my apartment. My car was still sitting out front, and devil-boy hadn't even bothered to take my keys. Searcy isn't a big town, and it wasn't too late to drive around looking for other people out late who might be like me. I didn't find any, which was good for you guys but not so much for me. I needed to know for sure what I was and what I could or couldn't do.

After eating the vampire who I suspected had changed me, I wasn't even hungry. Finally I just went back home.

Food wasn't remotely appetizing; the thought of it was like eating roadkill. I think I might have been able to keep down water, but I didn’t see the need. I did step into the shower, partly to get rid of any dirt that might be on me if I'd spent any time in a grave but mostly because I was wondering about the running water thing. Yeah, no, the shower was uneventful and I was pretty sure I had driven over a bridge over a little creek without thinking about it.

Getting dressed, I realized I hadn't been wearing any jewelry last time I left the house. Not that I ever thought there was anything supernatural about it--and here I was re-evaluating that, you understand--but I did have a small cross pendant I wore sometimes. I opened the jewelry box.

It felt like staring into the sun. That little dollar cross shone like a bonfire, the heat clawing into my face like sunburn creeping up on me. I had to avert my eyes. Flailing, I managed to slap the lid closed. An after-image was burned into my vision. If God had appeared and told me I was worthless I couldn't have been hurt much worse.

If I'd been wearing that I'd have been safe, wouldn't I?

I dropped to my knees beside the bed. "Oh, God," I begged, "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean...what did I do? Why are you punishing me? Oh, God, please, please have mercy." I half expected my tongue to catch fire, but nothing like that happened. Finally, I came to myself enough to add a rote, "In Jesus' name, amen." Still nothing.

I crawled into bed and wept bloody tears.

*****

I guess you could say I was lucky. I've worked enough night jobs that my bedroom was set up in the one room without windows. I woke with the same jolt as before, and peeked out of the bedroom to see that the sun had been down maybe half an hour and all trace of daylight was gone. I was hungry, but not the ravenous monster I'd feared being.

I remembered dreaming vividly, yet patches were missing. I stood on a plain surrounded by people, and Jesus turned to look at me. "Depart from me, accursed ones, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels." I shook with terror, half-aware I was dreaming but unable to wake up. There were scenes afterwards, though I couldn't place them except for the fight with the devil-worshipping vampire. Some were ordinary, like shopping, others so strange as to be nightmares.

I shook myself. I couldn't let it get to me. There was a way to fix things, somehow. With a broomhandle I levered open the jewelry box. As painful as the light from the cross was, it was a sign I'd never seen before, a sign that God was real. I averted my eyes and sang the first verse of "Father and Friend" before the fear of that light forced me to close the box.

"Father and friend, thy light, thy love
Beaming through all thy works we see.
Thy glory gilds the heav'ns above,
And all the earth is full of thee."

A little voice in my head told me that I was damned and being an idiot, but I couldn't have seen God as a mortal and lived, either, so who said this was any different?

On the other hand, I had to assume that eventually l was going to have to drink some blood or die. There had to be some way of handling that. The first thing I thought of was animal blood, but I was going to have to find it somewhere. I put my jacket on and went out into the night.

Arkansas summer nights are pretty warm, but I wasn't exactly producing body heat. I put the thermodynamics on hold--my degree was in history--and went for a drive. There were farms less than an hour away, full of horses and cattle, and before I started chowing on people I was at least going to see how megafauna blood treats me.

The first snag in my plan: animals run from predators. The second snag in my plan: sometimes big herbivores run toward predators. I narrowly evaded being trampled by angry cows, and confronted a third snag.

I wasn't the only vampire looking for dinner here. Three ragged-looking people with gleaming red eyes loped toward me, two men and (I was pretty sure) a woman with fur on her face. I realized at that point that I hadn't thought to check my reflection when I got out of the shower. I knew my face was smooth, but did my eyes shine that way?

"Stop scaring them off!" hissed one of the men.

"There's enough for us all," said the other, but the woman shook her head.

"Only just, and only if we can get our hands on them," she said. "Don't you know what you're doing, puta?"

"It's my second night," I said, sweating. "I don’t know anything."

"Then watch this," said the man who'd been marginally friendly. He let out a low moo, almost subsonic, and the cows came ambling up to him. He stroked the head of the nearest one, and it lay down, not resisting as he drank. The other two did the same.

I reached out to pat a fourth cow, but the nice guy signaled me to stop. When he was finished, he said patiently, "Let me. You don't know how and she'll hurt you." Whatever he did to the animal, it worked. The blood was filling but tasted terrible, like a coke gone flat.

When I was done, he glared at me and said, "Now we have four dead cows and the three of us have a job to do. You had better cover this up, and good. Burn them, tear them up, whatever."

"She could be the one," said the other man. "Just because she claims to be a fledgling doesn’t make it true."

"If she were the one, she'd be eating people, not farm animals," said the one who'd taken my side so far.

"Has she got a cross on her?" the woman asked, sounding unsatisfied. The unfriendly man began fumbling through his pockets.

"We can't stand out here all night," the friendly one said. "If it gets us what we came here for, we can tolerate one cow slaughter." He took me by the wrist. "You're coming with us. We have a camper."

I went along without resisting. Maybe that was a mistake, but I had to learn somewhere, and if the first other vampires I saw were this hostile, the rest might be no better.

"Vampires come in different lines," said my defender. He was swarthy, with dark wavy hair, but his pupils were shaped funny; with the red reflection in them I couldn't quite see how. "We're gangrel. Unlike most vampires, we do all right away from cities. We're looking for a Baali. There aren't very many of them, but they worship demons and have very dangerous powers. Nobody trusts them and nobody should. They're looking to end the world, and there's at least a chance they could."

"I don't worship demons," I said quickly. "I'm a Christian."

"Got a cross on you?"

"I left it at home," I said completely truthfully. The..."gangrels" looked at each other anyway. "How was I supposed to know?"

I spotted the camper through the trees. Their night sight was probably better than mine, but I could see ok. They had me almost to the spot where they wanted me. "I have found a friend in Jesus, he's everything to me," I sang out. "He's the fairest of ten thousand to my soul. The Lily of the Valley, in him alone I see all I need to cleanse and make me fully whole."

This time when they looked at each other, everyone shrugged. "Can a Baali sing hymns?" the woman asked.

"I don’t know," said my defender. "I don’t think one would, but a song's not a physical object like a cross." He looked at me again. "Most vampires can be repelled by strong faith, but a random cross doesn't bother us like it would in the movies. Baali, though...as long as it's real iconography and not just a couple of sticks, it'll hold them off, and faith burns them, hard."

Oh. Oh no. I tried to keep my face blank. "Because they're part demon or something. And the rest of us aren't?"

"Mostly not, no," the last guy said. "Hey, worst case scenario, she's the one. Best case scenario, she's some poor banished schmuck's childe, or a caitiff made by a gangrel, and she's got nothing to do with it. What's in between?"

The woman walked up to the camper and unlocked it. "She could be the Baali's childe. That makes her Baali, too, even if she's not the one. But they usually do a good job of indoctrination and kill the failures."

"She could be some other party's agent here to confuse things." I spun round to stare at the one I'd thought was on my side. "It's a stretch, but it's not impossible."

"I have a thought," said the hairy woman. "You're from around here, right?"

I nodded. "Not originally, but I just graduated."

"Two of us have trouble going out in public and the third could start having trouble any time." She must have seen my confusion. "We'll explain in a minute. You know this place and you look normal. Help us find the Baali and we'll let you go your own way when it's done."

"Even if I turned out to be one?" I pushed.

She took a long breath so she could use it to sigh. "If you're some unlucky Baali neonate who doesn't mean any harm, and you help us get your sire, we'll make it quick and painless. It's the best we can do. No one would ever trust a Baali in the long run. I promise it's better that way."

Chapter Text

The camper, a trailer model, was completely blacked out, and all its food preparation equipment except a mini-fridge had been removed to make space. Nobody needed food here. (The fridge held emergency blood bags.)

Lucas Espinoza, the friendliest of the three Gangrel, gave me a quick run-down on the clans and sects. "No, the Setites worship their founder as a dark god, not a demon."

"What's the difference?"

He snorted and spread his hands. "Not a lot that I can tell. It makes enough difference to the princes that they don’t call a blood hunt whenever a Setite comes to town. That's what this is, by the way, but since this Baali is doing whatever they're doing out in the sticks, we three are freelancing."

"Four," I said, as if that would make it so. These Gangrel ran in a pack, Lucas, Clem, and Rita. They didn't really want me along, not even Lucas.

In the light I could see that his pupils were slits, like a cat's. Rita could shave, but the skin beneath looked wrong, and the fur grew back every night. I had missed Clem's misshapen hands in the dark; he had doubled thumbs like a koala. Lucas wore dark glasses when he had to deal with humans. "You couldn't read the cows," he said, "and you haven't been able to manage night sight. You're not a misplaced Gangrel."

"You talked like you knew about Baali powers. Are you going to test me on those?"

"Hell, no!" Lucas waved the notion away. "The only ones I know about I'd rather you didn’t know. Can't have you throwing hellfire. But we can try some common disciplines, figure out what you do have. You're obviously not Nosferatu. You're not Lasombra, because you've got a reflection, or Tzimisce if you slept okay. They need their native soil and you said you were from off. I can't really imagine the Giovanni losing a fledgling, and the Tremere usually don't either. But that leaves a lot of ground to cover."

He took me outside into the dark again. "Most clans can make themselves stronger, or faster, or tougher, usually only one. Those are the easiest to learn, even if they don’t flow in your blood. We've established you're not Gangrel, but testing out the last will let me hit you. Are you game?"

"If I'm a vampire, I'm a hunter, not the game. How about you let me hit back and we'll test all three?"

"Ha ha, cute. Fine, we'll do that. You can burn blood in your system to make yourself stronger, but what I'm talking about is innate, ok? Let's not waste blood on practice if we don't have to."

I told you before: I'm pretty fast, and I'm stronger than I look, but I could tell right away that Lucas was just toying with me. He smashed a couple of trees with his fists, and a punch to the face didn’t even faze him. He didn’t seem especially quick, but I don't think I was in bullet time myself. Eventually he punched me in the gut and I doubled over.

He crouched down beside me. "So. Not a natural at any of the basic three. You're probably not Tremere or Tzimisce, so that leaves Setite, Malkavian, or a minor bloodline. Not looking good for you." He whipped out a halogen flashlight and shone it in my face. I was blinded for a moment, but then my eyes adjusted and I yanked it away from him despite his attempt to keep it. "Setites have trouble with bright light. You're not crazy, are you? I know, that's harder to tell."

"I thought the resilience thing was the Gangrel one, not super-strength."

"Absolutely. But the benefits are terrific, so most of us eventually pick it up somewhere. The super-speed's a little harder to find a teacher for."

"As far as I can tell, I still have all my marbles, unless being a vampire is all a hallucination and I'm in a straitjacket somewhere." I looked him up and down. "Didn't you say I could be clanless?"

"Right, yeah, that would suck, but at least you wouldn't be Baali. Sometimes, the blood runs thin, especially as you get further from the source, and you get generic vampires. It happens to all the clans, even the Sewer Rats. Hell, I figure it happens to bloodlines too. I guess the funniest thing would be if you're the Baali's get but not one yourself."

"That would be a relief." Behind him I saw Rita and Clem returning from disposing of the cattle corpses. Of course, I already had my answer, but I was afraid of asking too much and letting these three find out.

"Look, we'll try something else. Let your eyes go unfocused. Just relax and listen to your senses. Listen to the small noises. Inhale, but only through your nose, and focus on what you smell. Let it all flow through you."

So I did. Calm, quiet breathing--which is harder when you have to do it on purpose, but I managed. The woods and fields were quiet, but not silent. Frogs and crickets chirped, birds fluttered, breezes rustled the leaves.

But nothing much seemed to be happening. I didn't smell anything unusual but a trace of blood scent on the pack's clothes. I let my eyes start to focus again, seeing Lucas, and suddenly--

A little girl on white sheets, with tubes in her nose, needles in her veins, and pain and confusion in her eyes. The heart monitor's beeping turned constant as she flatlined. Her face, Lucas' face...

"Your sister," I said without thinking. "She died, and nearly took you with her."

"Meningitis," he murmured. "Her brain boiling in its juices. We were twins, we were connected. I felt like half of me died with her. How did you--?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "I guess I just intuited it."

"Auspex," he said. "The discipline of heightened senses. I think...I think you might be a Malkavian. Sorry about that, but the madness is quieter for some than others. I've heard stories of a Malkavian scientist studying vampirism. Total nutjob, but for him what that means is that he can't believe in magic even though he's a walking corpse. It'd be unscientific. He's learned a lot, though."

"That is crazy," I agreed. Only...I hadn't seen or heard or even smelled anything, except that vision. A sick feeling formed in the pit of my stomach. I hadn't meant to lie to Lucas...but it seemed I had him fooled. "Let me know if I do anything that seems off, especially in a dangerous way."

"Being Malkavian isn't fun," Lucas warned, "but it's not usually endless torment either. I have heard of Malks doing things like walking into the sun from confusion or refusing to feed, but they mostly don't or there wouldn't be a clan. You haven't been acting especially wacko. I'll help you with what I can."

"I appreciate it. What else can Malkavians do?"

"Well, they know how to disguise themselves. The first bit of that is hiding in shadows. They also have some kind of power to drive other people crazy, but I can't help you there."

I turned to focus on Rita. The impressions from her weren't as strong. I saw her face covered in blood rather than fur, tearing people apart in a fit of rage. She felt older than the others somehow, more cynical but also wiser in some ways. Clem...that was strange. I saw him dressed like his name sounded, in bib overalls and a straw hat, his eyes a little vacant, and children making fun of him. He didn’t seem especially stupid when he talked, only angry, but maybe people had treated him as if he were.

I said nothing about what I saw. I couldn't expect them to take it well, and it might give away that I wasn't seeing what they thought I was. I was seeing their weaknesses. If I didn't know already, that sure sounded like a Baali power to me.

"I'd think being around someone bonkers would drive people crazy without a power," I said after a long moment. "I don’t guess you know anything about hiding."

"If I knew much, I could make a false face like a Nosferatu and go on into town. You'll have to work it out on your own." He checked the clock. "You should get back to your house. Get yourself squared away. We'll meet you outside of town tomorrow night."

I took my leave, grateful that I'd managed to fool him without even trying, yet a little afraid of myself because I had.

Chapter Text

If anything, I popped awake even earlier the next evening, with the sunset still red and gold outside my window. I was still pretty full, and strictly speaking I hadn't even drunk any human blood yet. It would've been easy to conclude that being a vampire was pretty awesome, if opening my jewelry box didn’t subject me to soul-searing terror.

By way of experiment, I picked up my Bible without more than a little discomfort, but when I tried to read it, the words howled inside my head like a damned soul. Not good. I discovered soon after, though, that a paraphrase translation like the Message was readable, with some difficulty. Did that mean it was all in my head somehow? Or was the Message somehow less holy? My parents would have said the latter, I suspected.

I took my car back out to the edge of town, near where I had met the Gangrel. Their camper was gone, as I expected; they probably moved it every night. Before I could get back in the car, though, Lucas burst from the soil right next to me. "You came back. Good enough." He put on his dark glasses. "Take me into town."

My car isn't very big, but his posture was a permanent slouch. I had to pester him to put his seatbelt on. Even if he couldn't be hurt at all, the police could still stop us. "OCD much?" he muttered, and nodded to himself. Apparently a lot of the less crazy Malkavians had something like OCD, and that was where stories of vampires counting grains spilled on the doorstep came from, or so Lucas said.

"Most of Searcy is pretty quiet," I explained as we drove. "The campus has a curfew, so there's no real college nightlife. There are churches all over town, but most of them are Churches of Christ, because that's who runs the university."

"So?" he said with a frown.

"Not many crosses or other iconography. A nice Church of Christ meeting house is pretty in an austere way. A badly-built one looks like a warehouse. Maybe one in five has a steeple. One in ten might have stained glass, almost never with pictures. I know you don’t care about the architecture as such, but for the Baali it could mean--"

"A chance to invade a church without worrying about crosses and shit. What's the matter with these people?"

I waved one hand around. "They don't believe in vampires? Or in visible miracles in the modern day. And there's a tradition of spending most of the money on helping people instead of on religious art. There'll be Bibles inside. I don't know if the baptistry counts as holy water."

"Probably not, unless it's blessed. You don't consecrate your churches?" Lucas looked flabbergasted. I tried not to laugh.

"The people are the church, not the building. We consecrate ourselves. 'Wherever two or three are gathered--'"

"'--there I am in the midst of them.' I have heard of that. My parents were Catholic, so it's all alien to me, the way you do things."

On a Thursday night, most of the church buildings were empty. None of them had any sort of terrifying glow, except where a cross was on the sign. I gripped the steering wheel tightly when I saw those, but they weren't close enough to panic me.

"The Baali like to corrupt the faithful and the innocent," Lucas explained. "It's possible they see this town as a bonanza. Your churches are weakly defended against them, but not for lack of piety, just of spiritual force. Most vampires live in cities so they can maintain a herd. Even Little Rock is a podunk town to them, let alone a place like this. But suddenly I'm imagining small Baali cults all over the country and wondering if they're really as rare as the Camarilla thinks. Four or five vampires wouldn't be that much of a strain on a college town."

The campus would be nearly deserted, of course, with the reduced number of summer students all in the dorms by now. Some people might have said it was repressive, and maybe it was, but a curfew also kept vampires from munching on the students. Mostly.

"Stop," Lucas said suddenly, taking off his seatbelt and opening the car door without waiting for me. He leapt out and dashed into the park as if chasing something...no, someone. I parked on the side of the road and ran after him. He loped along almost as if he were on all fours, but he wasn't just blindingly fast. I caught up with him next to a baseball field, where he had a young man by the throat. "Animals aren't going to keep you going forever," he growled. "You need to learn to eat real food."

"No!" I grabbed Lucas by the arm and yanked, but all I did was drag him a couple of steps. "Stop it right now! Let him go! Leave him alone, you freak!"

I wasn't expecting the stunned look on his face at all. The stranger looked stunned, too, and he was staring at me instead of the guy who had a hand around his neck. Lucas recoiled and let him go, and I shouted, "Run, you idiot!" because from his shocked expression I thought he was just going to stand there. The stranger ran.

"What happened to the Masquerade?" I hissed.

"No fangs," Lucas said. "Eyes hidden, no mention of vampires or blood. It's not forbidden to scare people. Three days from now he'll be telling people about the crazed vegan who screamed at him to stop eating animals in the park. Trust me."

"But--"

"Look, Beth, you will eat a human. It's going to happen. And before that, you're going to drink from someone you can trust, or think you can. But honestly I'm glad you didn't just agree with me. You didn't react the way I'd expect of a Baali, even a clueless one." He smiled and started walking back to the car. "Also, it looks like you're probably not a Malkavian. I don't know why you can't do Celerity--that's the fancy name for super-speed--but you just put an emotional whammy on us both without even realizing it. You've got to be a Toreador."

"Great. I'm a bullfighter." I knew what he meant; I was just in a sarcastic mood after that.

"I saw the way you looked at the fancy sign for the...Apostolic Church? I was afraid you were freaking out over the cross on it, but you just have a weird aesthetic sense. I told you about Toreador and how they freeze up." Lucas shook his head. "Weird fundie whackos and their total lack of taste."

I didn't complain. Actually I agreed with him about the lack of taste, but if he thought I wasn't fascinated by the sign he'd start asking himself what my reaction really meant, and he already had the right answer at hand. "So heightened senses and 'emotional whammy' add up to Toreador?"

Rapid-fire nodding as we got back to my car. "Not sure why you can't move fast, but maybe it's just a fluke. Maybe you'll pick it up in a bit. The fancy names are Auspex, Presence, and Celerity."

"And Malkavians have Auspex, hiding, and crazy power?" Bad Latin gibberish. Just my luck.

"Auspex, Obfuscate, and Dementation. I'm still confused. You don’t seem like an exact fit. You could still be a Caitiff." The wheels were still turning in his head, and I didn’t like that, but what was I going to do?

"I wouldn't know. What do you do all night?" I cranked the engine.

"Hunt, when I can. Read, play computer games, that sort of thing, when I can't. No night life out in the sticks."

"I'm guessing the Gangrel don't have a reputation for literacy, then. I see why most of us live in the city." I understood what he'd said about the real reason. If humans were our "proper" prey, we'd need a lot of them.

"You'd be surprised how many Cainites spend the night clubbing. Mostly the young ones, but I've seen elders breakdance before, when they don’t have to look dignified. Some adjust better than others, with culture as much as with technology."

"What's a Cainite? A vampire?" I began to circle back around through the industrial part of town.

"The stories say--not that I believe it--that the first vampire was Caine, that God cursed him for killing his brother. There are other stories in different parts of the world, and some people say it's an infection or something else entirely." He narrowed his eyes and watched a man out walking, but he didn't jump out of the car again. Maybe it really had been about the lesson.

"So it's like people saying God turned Cain black? Ugh."

"Well, we do have the Book of Nod. I don't think it's Caine's diary or anything but it is an authentically old document. The question is, how old? It's got more versions than the Bible. Officially, the Camarilla denies Caine is real, and the Sabbat says it serves him, but I don't put much stock in either party line."

I nodded slowly while I thought that over. It was one thing to believe in a literal Cain and Abel, another to think Cain was the first vampire. "So not Dracula, or Akasha, or any of those stories. Cain."

"Set's pretty close to Akasha, but he's just an antediluvian, a clan founder. He might be dead. The Camarilla claimed not to believe in the antediluvians either, till Ravnos woke up almost a quarter century ago now and got himself killed. There was a cover-up, but I've heard somebody nuked him. If the others are awake, they have the sense to lie low."

"Nuked!?"

"And it almost wasn't enough," Lucas said seriously. "That's why I think the antediluvians are dead, or most of them. They're powerful enough to rule the world or destroy it, so where are they?"

"Don't look at me," I said. "I'm the ignorant neonate here. We learn anything else about the Baali?"

Lucas nodded. "Tomorrow night, we go to church."

Chapter Text

I don't have to tell you how anxious I was about breaking into church buildings after hours, but I guess I shouldn't have worried. We arrived at the Forest Grove building at ten-thirty to find a van and a car already there and the doors open. "Wonder who's visiting?" I said.

Rita growled. "I thought you said your churches are locked outside of services." She'd been scandalized by the idea.

"Maybe there's an event going on, or someone's cleaning late, or who knows what," I argued. "It's just about keeping out thieves and vandals. Getting permission isn't hard." I hopped out of the car. "Come on!"

"This don't smell right," Clem said, but I was already almost to the door.

The first thing I saw was a box that said "Mercury Logistics". The second thing I saw was a group of people carrying another one just like it down the stairwell. "Hey," I called out as Clem came in behind me, "how goes?"

I had expected them to stop and smile or nod in lieu of waving. I didn't recognize any of them, but they just looked like laborers, maybe a little tired and unhappy about working so late. Instead they dropped the box on the stairs and hustled down out of sight. "We have intruders, probably HEs," one of them said. "Should we go shockwave?"

That sounded bad, but the answer must have been "no," because I heard more clattering but no one appeared with guns or claws. Then the same voice called up to me, "We're authorized to be here. You startled us. Who are you?"

"I go to church here," I told him. "I'm showing some friends around."

"Come on down," he called. Lucas mouthed a "no". "We're just adding some decorations."

I didn't believe that after the "shockwave" comment, but I had absolutely no idea who these people were and I had three other vampires to back me up. I went into the stairwell. Halfway down the stairs were five pale people with dark hair and thin features, and they looked alike. Not like quintuplets, but like a group of siblings, maybe.

One of them popped the lid off the box and pulled out a cross.

Instantly I was confronted with a light like pure white flame. I stumbled backward up the stairs and fell. I couldn't make myself stop trying to crawl further up, but I couldn't seem to get to my feet either. The one with the phone shouted, "H-skin with the HEs! Now can we go shockwave?" It sounded like gibberish. It sounded like they were going to kill us, or try to.

Rita cursed and leapt over me, snarling, and Clem followed her, while Lucas pulled me to my feet and out of the stairwell, closing the door. "You had me believing you," he growled at me. "I didn’t think you were one of them after all."

"I didn't know!" It came out in a squawk as my panic began to fade. "Nobody told me anything!"

He ground his teeth as if ready to bite into me, but before he could, Rita slammed one of the strangers through the stairwell door. "They're ghouls," she snarled. "Maybe revenants."

"That doesn't make sense," Lucas said.

Rita's eyes blazed at me. "Take the key and put her in the car. We made a deal with her and I mean to keep it. Clem! We've got a hostage! They called for backup!"

Clem came racing out of the stairwell on all fours and rose to his feet. "We're leaving?"

"Yeah, dumbass. Help me stuff this guy in the trunk."

Lucas shoved me into the back seat and got in next to me, then handed the keys to Clem, of all people, as he got into the driver's seat. Muffled pounding came thumping from my tiny trunk. Clem fired up the car, grumbled about my automatic transmission, then shot away as Rita slid into her seat.

"I wanted to trust you," Lucas said, "but there's only one way to do that now, even temporarily." Sharp curved claws sprouted from his fingertips, messily displacing his human nails. "You're lucky we still need you." And he sliced open his own left wrist, then jammed it against my mouth.

The taste was intoxicating, even better than the Satanist frat boy had been. I wanted to stop, knew this must be some way of leashing me...but I desperately wanted not to stop. Not ever. I just had no room in me to drink.

When I had drunk the little I could, he pulled away. "Two more of those, and you'll be bound to me. You'll love me, hopefully like a brother because I sure as hell don't love you. Then we'll be able to trust you enough not to cut your head off. I know you didn't mean anything by it. I know you didn't know. But I don't care. Sin's in the seed."

"Which is better," I asked him, "to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?" He looked at me as if I'd grown an extra head or something. Idiot! I was making pop culture references to someone who might be a hundred years old or more. I hauled out Ezekiel instead. "The son shall not die for the sins of the father, nor the father for the sins of the son. Everyone suffers for their own sins." This time he scoffed at me, while Rita turned to glare back from the front seat.

"Maybe for humans," Lucas grunted.

"Not for humans," Rita insisted. "I'm not sure where that's from but if it's Biblical it's a misinterpretation. It denies Original Sin."

"It sure does, it's from Ezekiel chapter 18, and it's not a misinterpretation. There's no Original Sin. Sin doesn't transfer. Sin is an action."

"She's spouting Cainite Heresy crap," Rita said. "Don't listen to her. No wonder her churches are vulnerable to the Baali. She probably thinks being a vampire is a blessing from God, too."

Rita, who sometimes seemed more animal than woman, was the theologian of the group? Worst of all, I had no idea what she meant by a "Cainite Heresy" beyond what she'd said. It could be anything from a sensible attempt to say no one was beyond redemption to a crazed idea that vampires were manifestations of God. It might be both, and everything in between.

How old was Rita, anyway? She usually deferred to Lucas, but maybe that was because he was younger and knew the modern world better. Every once in a while, things seemed to flip-flop and she took control.

"Being a vampire is definitely not a blessing. And I have no idea what the Cainite Heresy is."

"Of course you don't," she said. "That's the point of it." Okay, it might be a secret, if it was meant to exalt vampires, but that left me with no way to refute her. "Now shut up, Baali. Lucas, if the intruders were revenants, only one family makes sense in this context. The Baali have a revenant family working for them."

"Why would people working for the Baali be bringing in crosses?" I asked. Rita reached back to slap me for my trouble.

"No, she's right," Lucas said. "I don't know what revenants would be opposing the Baali, but it makes no sense to put in crosses and keep them out if you're working for them."

"We'll ask the one in the trunk when we get them to the camper and properly tied," Rita said, "and then maybe dispose of this lying piece of shit."

"We may still have a use for her once she's bound," Lucas said, "if the ghouls are working for someone else." Rita just growled and then, reluctantly, nodded.

My situation had changed. I wasn't just working to help people who didn't fully trust me but with whom I might have something in common. I was being kidnapped, brainwashed , and probably killed. Even if we did have a common enemy in these other Baali, I wasn't going to be allowed to help effectively until I was too tied up to escape with my life.

Barring an apocalypse, my first duty now was to escape.

Chapter Text

They started by handcuffing my hands behind my back and followed up by tying me to a metal chair. Only when they had me secure did they let the ghoul--or was it a revenant? I had no idea what either was--out of my trunk and give him the same treatment, with his cuffs threaded around mine. He grumbled sullenly as they tied him down.

"Now," Rita said, "you are going to tell us your relation to the Baali."

I could hear the sneer in his voice. "I am of the ancient breed, the D'Habi. Millennia ago the Baali desecrated and enslaved my family. Over the years, some few of us have squirmed free. I have come here to hunt and kill our tormentors."

"We heard you calling for backup," Lucas said. "It sounded to me like they turned you down."

"We received our equipment from Mercury Logistics. We know little about them, but it hardly matters. They are a front for something powerful. Something that hunts monsters. We offered them our services. The world will be a better place when the spawn of hell are gone from it."

"You realize they probably include your kind in that category." Lucas' tone was acid.

"And if they do? We are cursed. I would hope for a cure, for redemption, but if they kill us after the other monsters are gone, at least we will sleep easy in death."

"So you're okay if my so-called allies kill you instead?" That was maybe a little too sarcastic. Believe it or not, I had a plan. "Whoever it is you're chasing, we want to get them too."

"Hardly. Your accursed blood is theirs."

"Exactly. Look, I was turned all of three nights ago. I'm not on their side. I'm their victim, same as you. Any Baali who's not in the same boat I'm in probably ought to die. We're actually all on the same side here." I wanted that power I had used on the guy in the park to help me here. I wasn't sure if I was doing it right, but I poured it on.

"We don't trust Baali," Clem said.

"Nor we...nor do we trust anyone who works with Baali, whatever they may claim," said the...D'Habi? Was that pronounced right in my head?

"Well, we don't trust Dobby ghouls either," Clem reiterated. "So there."

"What even is a ghoul?" I asked. "No one has bothered telling me yet."

"Humans who drink vampire blood live longer and get some of our powers," Lucas said impatiently. "They also get addicted. Revenants are families that have developed the ability to concentrate their own blood into vampire blood without needing to drink it. Personally, I think it was a dumb experiment, because it means revenants don't need us."

"You sure do act like the D'Habi need the Baali," I said, "but they don't seem to think so."

"Most of the family are indeed subservient," the guy tied behind my back said. "They bred us for it. Even we few have found a different cause to serve--a better cause."

Bred to be subservient, huh. I felt a little bad, because here I was trying to exploit him. But not all that bad, because I was doing it as much for him as for me. That reminded me that I was neglecting something. I couldn't see him, but I could hear him and feel his body heat. I tried to focus on the sound of his voice without closing my eyes.

beaten eaten whipped pierced raped pain Pain PAIN hate them hate them all pay them back for what they did to us to me make them hurt make them suffer

That was enough to turn my stomach and I didn't even have mortal glands any more. Maybe trying it was a mistake. No, if I said the right things the right way I could use it. "These guys are never going to let us go. You know that, right? I wanted to make my sire pay for turning me. I guess it's not going to happen, though."

"Cooperate with us," Rita said, "and he'll still pay. I don't blame you for being disappointed but it's better than nothing."

For a long time she and Lucas worked the D'Habi over, trying to get any more information about his backers. Mercury Logistics didn't sound like a likely name for an anti-monster CIA, but he was right, it was an obvious front group, probably offering real services for hunters but mostly there to hide something bigger. He wouldn't crack, and I started to think maybe he really didn't know any more. Finally sunrise approached, and they left us tied together while everybody but the D'Habi passed out. My last thought was that I hadn't even learned his name.

I woke in pitch darkness. The guy tied behind my back stank; he must have wet himself during the day. I could hear no movement but his breathing.

"You are awake," he said. "They are not."

"Any luck with the knots?"

"Some," he said, "and I have broken the ropes in other places. The handcuffs remain a problem. I do not know what my family would say, but you are not the vampires who tortured my ancestors. I promise nothing if we meet again, but I accept a truce until we are away from here."

"Your secret is safe with me," I said, "but we have to hurry." Bracing our backs against each other, we stood and shuffled away from the chair, dropping cords as we moved. "This is going to hurt." I focused the blood into my arm muscles and strained, pulling my handcuffs against his. I felt his muscles tense as he did the same, until, with a clatter of falling links, the flimsy chains broke and left our hands almost free. "Let's leave them with a problem," I said, and swung my chair at the window, shattering it.

Purple dusk shone into the camper, and I felt the faintest of tingling on my skin. Clem bolted upright. "Wuzzat? Whozzat? Wake up!"

I gathered my legs and sprang through the broken window. The D'Habi leapt out after me. "They'll have to spend the night trying to replace it," I said. "Run for the car!"

Behind me I heard the Gangrels struggling awake. I wasn't sure why I consistently woke earlier than they did, but it sure came in handy. They had trusted too much to tying us up; the keys were in the center console. The moment the D'Habi was inside, I floored the gas and sped away.

"Surely you have a name," I said.

"We will not see each other again," he insisted, "or if we do, you will not care to know it."

"I'm Bethany," I told him, "so if you try to kill me you'll have a name to match with my face."

Reluctantly, he said, "I am Lino. Try to forget. If you want to survive another meeting with me, you will have to kill me."

He asked me to let him out at the laundromat, which sounded reasonable enough. I assumed he was staying somewhere, but who knew if they'd let him in as he was. My car seats weren't too happy with his condition as matters stood. I wondered if a human would still smell anything with him gone. I wondered if he meant to steal clothes or stand around half-naked in the empty laundromat while his clothes washed and dried. I wondered if his backers had any way to find him.

Then I put aside wondering and went home.

I hadn't given my address to the Gangrel, but I parked in a nearby lot rather than in front of my duplex, just in case they could track the car by smell or something. I also hadn't told them anything about the Baali's house, which was also in this neighborhood. I thought I had killed him, and if so maybe they could report the threat was ended and leave, but I would have to somehow inform them and also make them believe I was gone. Anyway, I didn't know for sure if he was the only one in his little cult, and going back to investigate would be risky if he wasn't.

I realized I was going to do it anyway. Maybe not right this moment because I needed to prepare, but I shouldn't be risking other people's lives by delaying indefinitely either, not when I was a vampire myself. I was, I concluded, the most pathetic excuse for an evil undead monster imaginable.

I updated my Facebook and Tumblr. Lucas had emphasized the "masquerade" and that I shouldn't so much as give hints about vampires, but none of my friends and family would believe I was one unless I drank blood in front of them. My brother still might not. I checked my bank account--I still had leftover money from my scholarships, but I would have to get more soon, somehow--and paid the electric bill.

Then I walked around the house. The pantries, useless. The refrigerator, useless. The toilet, useless. I probably should donate any unopened food, if I could figure out how, and trash the rest before it rotted. At least my expenses would be low. I tried drinking a little water, but it tasted terrible. The teeny sips didn’t come back up--maybe they diluted into my blood--but I could tell that so much as a mouthful would. The shower wasn't totally useless, but I assumed I wasn't going to sweat any more.

It wasn't even midnight yet. I played a few rounds of video games with my mind half on the screen and half on my situation. By midnight or thereabouts I realized that I hadn't tried practicing any more vampire powers in two nights or so, except for trying to persuade the D'Habi. Like it or not, I was going to need them.

My church didn't share the perspective of most fundie churches that magic was real, demonic, and dangerous. As long as I'd been alive it had taught that the rules against magic in the Bible forbade a mixed bag of idol worship and con artistry. But then, it didn't teach me anything about vampires, so I had to assume that its doctrine that we were in a no-supernatural-stuff gap between the apostles and the Second Coming had missed some things. That said, the powers I had used hadn't involved any spellcasting; I had concentrated on them and they had happened. Until some hard evidence proved otherwise, I was going to have to treat them like superpowers with no hidden moral cost and hope for the best.

I went out the back door. I knew where my neighbors' bedrooms were, so it couldn't hurt to test whether I could probe their minds without seeing them. A faint light still shone from Dave's window in the other half of my duplex, so I crept closer, crouching beneath his window, and reached out with my senses. At once, I wished I hadn't; at this very moment he was watching some rather squicky porn and feeling guilty about it, but not enough to stop. I had my answer, at least. Now I needed some brain bleach.

I started to rise and stumbled over a buried brick which had once bordered a tiny flower garden. Dave made a muffled sound from inside the house, and then I heard his footsteps coming closer. With nowhere in sight to go, I flattened myself against the wall and prepared to answer some uncomfortable questions with half-truths.

The window opened and I felt a shift in the air as he stuck his head out and looked around. "Huh," he said. "Must have been a dog." A dog did bark in the distance, and, satisfied, Dave pulled his head back in and closed the window.

I waited a few minutes until I was sure Dave was back at the television, attempted to stop holding my breath before realizing there was nothing to hold, started to leave, and then realized that someone else in the block was looking right at me out their back window. Mrs. Thompson muttered, "Dang cats," scratched her head, and closed the curtains.

That must be the mysterious third power for Baali, because there was no natural way they could both have overlooked me. I could be noticed, I could be unnoticed, and I could see people's shameful weaknesses. Lucas had called the first two Presence and Obfuscate, and I shared them with vampires in the clans. The last must be a Baali secret. Moving very carefully, I got out from under the window and sheepishly went back inside.

Lucas had said the Baali powers were terrible, and I could see awful ways to use what I had. I could also see very good ways to use it, but I supposed horrible demon-worshippers weren't interested in persuading people to repent their sins. Still, I was beginning to think there were worse things in the world.

On that count, I was completely right.

Chapter Text

I spent the next few nights practicing and gathering some improvised weapons, just in case there were more Baali waiting at devil-boy's house. I wasn't sure I could drive a stake through somebody's heart; it wasn't like on Buffy where you could poke vampires with a pencil and watch them turn to dust. But I wasn't going to be using my kitchen knives for food any more, and I did have one stake sharpened for potential use.

I didn’t hunt. There was a risk of running into my Gangrel "buddies" if I went for animals, and I couldn't stand the thought of eating people. I hadn't been burning that much blood anyway.

Yeah. Four nights without blood. I woke up the fifth night starting to feel hungry. I took my stake and my knives and headed down the road toward my captor's home. No one seemed to have noticed his absence, which should have been my first clue something was wrong. The door I had come out of remained unlocked, and I headed for the room where I had left him lying, bloodless, on the floor.

He was gone. Had he turned to dust? I searched the room with his little stone altar, which seemed to be made from a worn headstone, but found only a variety of Satanic symbols and a badly-written diary titled "Book of Shadows". He'd tried using blood for ink at first, it seemed, but blood doesn't write well.

Much of the house was empty. The kitchen held nothing but a forgotten can of soup in the pantry. A living room contained a single sofa, a television, and some shelves of cheap occult paperbacks. In the back of the house I found a door to the basement stairs. No light switch at the top.

I was halfway down in the darkness, trying not to stumble, when my vision suddenly popped into clarity. Everything was sharp black and white except for the red stains on the walls. I knew at once that this was the darkvision mode Lucas had tried to show me, but how? If I'd been able to before, he'd have concluded I was a Gangrel. Maybe it was because I drank his blood? For people and animals, "blood relations" was a metaphor for genetics, but maybe for vampires it was different.

The door at the bottom was slightly stuck, and I had just forced it open when someone began screaming for help. I raced into the room to find a much more elaborate ritual space with a fancier altar lit with candles, a dozen inverted crucifixes, a girl tied up badly and thrashing, and my kidnapper, very much awake, with a bloody knife in his hand.

"You," he snarled, and lunged at me with it.

I yanked out my big meat knife. He was definitely better prepared this time, pumped up with clearly unnatural strength, but he still had lousy moves. He leapt over my attempt to trip him and banged his head on a support beam. Still, that altered his trajectory and he fell right on top of me as I tried to dodge out of his path. His knife sank deep into my chest. Mine gashed his arm. I gasped in pain, and the heavy scent of blood grew thicker. My vision went from grey to red. I felt my own blood boil in my veins and my muscles fill with violent power. One knife in each hand, I stabbed at him over and over again, right on the ragged edge of self-control, until his own strikes grew weak and his blood was leaking uselessly onto the floor.

This time he wasn't getting up again. I was going to make sure of it. I sank one blade into each eye and then forced the makeshift stake into his chest between the ribs. Hopefully into his heart, but how did you tell? Surely I had him this time. A little of the haze cleared from my vision--surely he was dead now--but I was ravenous and all his blood had spilled onto the concrete.

"Oh, God, thank you!" the girl tied to the altar screamed. "Help me get untied! I've been down here for days." I staggered to my feet and stumbled toward the altar. The candles weren't even real: they were little electric Christmas lights. They weren't even as bright as the hot blood pumping through her veins and leaking from the gash on her throat. I could hear her heart pounding. I could smell her, so juicy, like a bite of rare steak already in my mouth. My fangs descended. No, no, no, said a tiny voice in the back of my head, my voice, or so I thought, until a much louder roar drowned it out with Yes! And I realized that one had been mine.

My hands tried to reach for her bonds, but even as they made contact my mouth closed on her throat. I'd been wrong. It was better than any food I'd ever eaten. I felt warmth burst inside me, and my body shook all over.

When the red faded from my vision, she was gone. Her cooling body lay on the table beneath me where I had crawled on top of her.

She'd begged for my help, and I had killed her.

I sagged down off the altar. I had ended the killings this time, sure, but I had ended them with one of my own. I'd gone into the fight prepared in every way except that I had gone in hungry, and I suddenly realized that was the dumbest thing I could have done. Only, how would I have gone in full, except by eating someone else?

How was I supposed to get through this without killing people?

Now I was the murderer the cops weren't prepared to handle. If they did catch me, I'd probably end up in a cell in broad daylight and burn to death. If not, I'd be the object of a manhunt, and that would pull down way too much attention on everyone.

Maybe it was better if I died.

Sooner or later, someone would trace the murders back to this guy, who was now dead on the floor with my kitchen knives in his eyes. Even if I took them out, there was obviously still a second killer (me!) for the police to search for. I removed the knives and slid them back into my jacket pockets. After thinking a moment I decided the stake would probably hold fingerprints and pulled it out too. Devil-boy didn't move or even twitch. Surely he was dead for good.

Feeling gorged, feeling miserable but somehow full of life, I made my way home and washed the knives clean. Tomorrow I would burn the stake, and maybe my jacket too. And then I would decide whether maybe I should join them.

I was an even more pathetic excuse for a vampire than I had thought.

Chapter Text

I woke up the next evening feeling horrible and afraid. I had killed someone, and I couldn't even turn myself in without dying right away. Maybe that was what I deserved, but on the other hand, wasn't I still a person? Didn’t I deserve a trial? Only the world wasn't set up to give me one. I was guilty, and I wasn't going to deny that, but society worked because even serial killers got due process. It was only fair.

Was that making excuses? I was a murderer now, and I didn’t see how I was going to be able to stop. Maybe with careful planning and help I could feed without killing, but that felt like a pipe dream. Was I allowed to kill myself, say by lying out on the porch and waiting for the sun, or was that bad too?

Wasn't I supposed to stop feeling these things? No, we'd established we weren't playing by Buffy the Vampire Slayer rules when a stake didn't turn him to dust.

That caught me up short. How did I know he was dead? He'd seemed dead when I drained him the first time, but he had come back to life. How?

She was dead. She wasn't coming back, Lucas had explained that much. I still wasn't sure I could face her.

I drove out to his house and parked nearby. The car was starting to run low on gas. I was about to get out and go investigate when I saw shadowed figures creeping closer to the house. Night vision time.

It wasn't the Gangrel pack or the D'Habi ghouls, but a pair of strangers. I know I should have confronted them. I know. It's obvious that they were working with him, that they were more Baali. And I couldn't claim to have any moral grounds for staying safe. But I couldn't make myself face them, not when I saw that one of them had ram's horns. My gut told me I wasn't seeing a vampire at all, but the Devil himself. I don’t know that. I don’t even know for certain it wasn't a costume of some sort. But I felt it.

They entered the house. And I drove away.

I wasn't sure where I was going until I found myself parked back at the duplex. Another car had parked in my spot, and it looked familiar. In the darkness, I almost didn't see the man sitting on the steps, but as soon as I did, I froze. It was my preacher and economics professor, Dean Statham.

Of course. I'd missed church, and I used to be one of his favorite students. He was at my place to see what was the matter. I should be grateful, but now I was going to have to lie to him. That, or try telling him about vampires, and that seemed unwise on multiple levels. I got out of the car and headed over; he spotted me and waved. "Can we go inside?" he asked.

"Of course." I unlocked the door and we sat down at the kitchen table.

He folded his hands and gave me a concerned look. "Beth, what happened with you at Forest Grove?" I blinked and began to stammer. "Security cameras got an image of you. Some things aren't very clear, but the contractors say they were interfered with by some sort of gang."

"Yes," I said cautiously. "It was a gang, and they kidnapped me. They claimed the...contractors...were some sort of gang themselves and wanted me to tell them about the church building. So the church hired Mercury Logistics? Or was it the university?"

"I suppose you could say the university," he said smoothly. "I hired them."

That brought a confused frown to my face. "There's a lot of strange things going on in my life right now, but I don't see what the College of Business and Economics has to do with any of it." Dr. Statham's biggest claim to fame that I knew of was writing a book titled Economic Alchemy: the Theory and Practice of Unlimited Wealth. Personally I thought it sounded like some hokey New Age thing, but Harding University had promoted it so they must find it compatible with the church's teaching.

"A great deal," Dr. Statham said, "but I'm under a strict nondisclosure agreement, you understand? So did you go to the police? I assume you escaped in the confusion at Forest Grove."

"I didn't," I admitted. He would be able to check on that and find out if I lied. "I've contracted some sort of blood disease. I'm worried that the police would get in the way of getting treatment."

And then Dr. Statham did exactly the worst thing I could have contemplated: his eyes widened for a moment as if he understood exactly what I meant, followed by a look of genuine pity, and he said, "Yes, yes I suppose they would, wouldn't they? Well, keep your nose clean, as they say, and by all means don't contribute to the spread." He reached out and took my hand for a moment, and his face said it was a genuine gesture of comfort, but his grip said he had noticed exactly how low my body temperature was.

"I wouldn't think of it," I said truthfully.

"I wonder if I could interest you in a position with Mercury Logistics," he said. "I'm sure we could avoid placing you in contact with the contractors you had trouble with. There won't be much opportunity for advancement, I'm afraid, but it could help you avoid future problems."

"I...I need to think it over," I said. Was my preacher and professor offering me a genuine business opportunity out of kindness, or was a man involved in some deep dark conspiracy trying to keep tabs on me, or...could it be both? I tried opening up my senses to focus on him; surely this business concern of his was the shadiest thing about him. But all that I saw was some sanitized, rosy image of a kid fibbing to his mom about snitching some apple pie. It was fake as fake could be, but realism wasn't the point. It concealed what he wanted to conceal, all while it told intruders like me that Dean Statham knew what we were trying to do, sorry.

"By all means," was all he said. I didn't even know if he had blocked me on purpose or if that was just a general barrier. "As your preacher, I want to assure you that I don't believe anyone is beyond salvation or God's love. I hope you'll be able to make services occasionally, and that you'll be able to keep your condition under control. As your former professor and your friend...consider this an enticement."

He pulled out a credit card with "MIDAS" and the hologram of a flying eagle on the front. "Keep it low budget," he said. "That shouldn't be a problem for you, I don't expect. Technically I should be reserving these for contractors, but I believe I can justify my confidence in you in terms of the bottom line. In the meantime, maybe it will help you stay out of trouble."

"Thank you, sir," I said. I wasn't going to be buying any food, but if I was traveling by car I'd need gas and maintenance, and the apartment meant paying rent. "I'm a little surprised you work for this 'Mercury Logistics' outfit on top of your other jobs."

"Oh, nonsense," he said, chuckling. "Mercury Logistics works for me."

*****

I sat there for an hour after he left. He knew I wasn't stupid. He must have at least suspected what had happened to me before he even came my way, or he wouldn't have come to see me at nearly midnight. And by giving me this card he was keeping tabs on me and tying me to his organization, whatever it was. Probably what he had described really was official policy, and just as likely there was an unofficial policy that said he should do exactly as he had to reel me in.

Wait. Apparently I was also an "H-skin", whatever that was, and given that the D'Habi had attacked after saying that, Dr. Statham probably wasn't actually supposed to be hiring me. Since he knew about me being a vampire, H-skin had to mean Baali, or some larger group that included Baali, but what kind of name it was for anything I had no idea. It meant I was dangerous.

He might get in trouble for dealing with me. But even more important, I could no more afford to keep his card than I could afford to throw it away.

I was in way over my head. At least I didn't have to breathe.

Chapter Text

It's hard to maintain guilt over the long run. I didn't feel good about myself when I woke up the next evening, but it took me a moment to remember why. Killing the girl didn't even feel completely real any more. I opened my jewelry box and made myself look at the cross for a while. The light surely wasn't physical; I wondered if staring too long would leave me blind. I wanted to believe this was something I could get used to, but other than a tiny reduction in my level of absolute terror, that wasn't happening.

Still, it got me into the right mood. Having my professor over had reminded me that a few of my classmates were probably still here. Like any college, Harding attracted some locals. I got out my phone, checked that it was only about ten o'clock, and called Eddie Phillips.

"Huh? Oh, hey, Beth. It's been a while." Eddie hadn't shared any classes with me since we finished up gen-ed. He was a biochemistry student heading for his Master's and maybe beyond.

"Hey. I know it's late, but I've got a biomedical mystery for you, and that's not some kind of come-on. There's something weird here you'd probably like to see." I didn't expect him to come up with any answers, though I wouldn't complain if he did; I just hoped I could persuade him to let me feed on him on some sort of regular basis. It was better than killing people.

"You definitely know how to get my interest," he said. "Mom? I'm heading out. A friend of mine wants to talk." Just a friend, of course. I couldn't offer him much else, especially now, but there had been a time when he was interested and it hurt a little that we were over.

I put on the tv and watched cartoons, the only thing that wasn't depressing right now. It took about a half hour and a couple episodes of Spongebob before he arrived, looking confused and nerdy as always. Mostly it was just a matter of refusing to update his glasses. "Where's the fire?" he asked.

"Take my pulse."

He complied with an annoyed grunt. He tried my wrist for several minutes, and then, with a hilariously predatory expression, made an attempt at my neck. "What kind of a joke is this?" he asked, finally.

"No joke," I told him. "You have my permission to try anywhere else you need to."

"I'd have brought a stethoscope," he said haltingly before putting an ear to my chest. He hadn't been listening for a minute when he added, "Stop holding your breath."

"I'm not."

"That's impossible. I just heard you inhale to talk, but..." He hesitated. "Nobody's body is this quiet. I should hear your heartbeat, your breathing, maybe your guts. Nothing in there is making any sound. And you feel cold."

"Put two and two together," I said. "What does it mean?"

"You've got me listening to a fake chest," he said sarcastically, and started feeling my sides for some kind of border. "Where's...? What kind of a prank are you pulling on me?"

I inhaled again, very deliberately. "No prank, Eddie. I promise."

"Right," he muttered. "You're a zombie."

"Vampire." I lowered my fangs into position and smiled. Immediately he leaned down to study them.

"Implants?" he asked, shaking his head in disbelief. I retracted them out of easy view. "That's an extremely neat trick. I--"

All right, this was getting frustrating. I turned on the mojo and took him by the collar. "Listen to me! This is real! I am a vampire! And I'm not supposed to tell people, but I need someone I can drink from and not kill, okay?"

I let go of him and he stumbled backwards with wide eyes. "You're serious," he said, and I could tell it wasn't really a question, he believed me. "I promise I'm not denying it but scientifically the whole idea of being 'undead' doesn't make a lot of sense. You do get why I was skeptical, right?"

"Sort of," I said, now that my frustration was fading. "I guess my biochemistry is all weird somehow but I don't know the details."

He nodded with great enthusiasm. "See, what we call life is in large part a chain of chemical reactions conveying energy through your body so that you can move and think and do things in general. Without those reactions your ability to do anything is kind of inexplicable, but with them, you're 'un-dead' in the very straightforward sense that you are alive."

"So maybe I have a very different set of reactions carrying the energy," I suggested.

"That's my working theory. I'm not sure I have the necessary tools to verify it, but there it is. How different is the question. Vampire bats and mosquitos are hemovores and they're very much conventionally alive. They both have working hearts, though. Until proven otherwise I'm going to assume that you somehow extract chemical energy from blood, but, well...."

"It's not guaranteed under the circumstances," I suggested.

"Right. It's the scientific question of the millennium and I'm guessing from what you said that I'm not really supposed to be studying it."

"Some vampires are, apparently, but they don't want you to know that vampires exist at all." I gave him a little shrug. "Anyway, I'm happy to let you do anything short of vivisecting me, but I brought you into this because I have to feed. May I?"

"You promise you're not going to kill me?"

"I promise to do my best. I promise I don't want to. And I think I have enough blood in my system that I can't drain you dry anyway."

He made a face, but he tugged down his shirt to bare his neck. I wish I could say for certain he did it entirely by his own choice, but I don't know for sure. When I sank my fangs in, he moaned as if he were dying and his eyes rolled back in his head. I felt like doing the same, but I was too full to keep drinking long.

It was the first time I'd drunk from a hunan and not killed them. When I pulled away, Eddie said shakily, "I expected it to hurt. That definitely did not hurt."

I got him a cold drink out of the fridge, which I hadn't gotten around to emptying yet. "It felt good to have your blood sucked out?"

"Uh-huh. Some sort of euphoriant effect, I guess. Was it good for you too?" He turned the can up and guzzled it.

"You make it sound like sex."

"Felt a lot like it, which is weird. I mean, obviously not in some ways. Got anything to eat? Fluids are good but I'll have to keep my iron up if you want me to go on donating."

I went to check. A good bit of the meat had gone bad already. I threw it out. "Hamburgers?"

"Good enough."

I wasn't a great cook, but after living on my own for a little while I was good enough. Shame I wasn't going to be using it much. I seasoned up some meat. "How's your girlfriend?"

"Waiting on me to move. Melanie's eager to get married as soon as I have a house for us."

The grill pan sizzled as I flopped two patties onto it. The meat stank, but I couldn't put my finger on any objective difference. It just wasn't food for me any longer. "I hope everything works out great for you. You want kids?"

"Not yet. We're going to try and settle in first." He opened his mouth to ask the obvious question, then changed it to, "I guess you're out of luck, aren't you? I'm sorry about that."

"I guess I am," I said, killing the conversation for a while. I hadn't been lucky enough to find any lasting relationship in college, and now that was even more unlikely. While I wasn't sure I had wanted kids, all chance of them was now up in smoke.

"Good food," he said, when he finally got one of the burgers into his mouth. "You must be pretty angry at whoever did this to you. I can't even imagine."

"I've tried to kill him twice," I said through gritted teeth. "I think he survived both times, but not for lack of trying. I hate him. He's a Satan-worshipping monster."

Eddie frowned. "I guess I couldn't forgive him either, and he does sound like a menace."

"Not really. He's not even competent." Something nibbled at the back of my mind. "About the only thing he's done 'right' was drug me at the bowling alley. Maybe you're right that the Christian thing to do would be to forgive him. He must have been in the same position as me once. But I really don't think I can."

"I can't blame you," Eddie said around a mouthful of burger. "At least it's not like some movie where you're tied to your sire. Though maybe then if you killed him--"

"Wait," I said. "I should be tied to him, at least a little. I drank his blood. Another vampire told me about that and...even though he kidnapped me, I think I would trust him, a little. I shouldn't, should I?"

"Not a hair," Eddie agreed.

"But when I think of the one who actually turned me, all I feel is anger. Maybe it doesn't count when they sire you," I said. "I haven't had a chance to ask. But...." Something else flashed into my mind. "The crucifixes. He had them all over his basement dungeon. Even if just being upside down was enough to make them not work, how'd he put them there?"

"So vampires can't be around crosses?" Eddie asked. "That's even worse."

"Only the kind I am," I said, and all at once I understood. "I don't believe it. It's all been some kind of trick."

"What?"

"He's not actually my sire."

Chapter Text

"Okay," I said, "I know you're new to all this, so I'm going to lay it out for you and see if there's something wrong with my reasoning. Vampires are divided into clans and bloodlines that have different abilities and weaknesses. I'm a Baali, and religious symbols hate my guts, as does every other kind of vampire, because the vast majority of Baali are demon-worshippers."

"But you're not," Eddie asked quickly, "right?"

"No, that's still voluntary, thank God. But the basement-dweller who I thought turned me somehow managed to get a dozen inverted crucifixes up onto his wall. They're legitimately desecrated now, because they didn't bother me, but he had to get them up there somehow."

"Maybe he put them up when he was still human," Eddie suggested.

"Possible," I said. "I'll flag that thought. But I should still feel some affection or at least trust for him if I drank his blood, and I don't. I loathe him completely and totally. I've tried to kill him twice without any qualms and...oh! The first time it was by drinking him dry. So I should really like him, if he's my sire. But I don't. No urge to make excuses for him, no inappropriate idea that he's hot, nothing."

"But you did drink his blood once."

"Huh. Yeah. Maybe the sheer rage is overpowering that. I don't know. But, and here's point the third: the Baali like to corrupt the innocent and the faithful. The guy who kidnapped me told me that, at a time when he had no reason to lie."

Eddie pulled another drink from the fridge. "You told me you trusted him too much. Are you sure he was honest about that?"

I gave the Coke a longing look. They used to be so good. "He was trying to work out if I was one of the Baali at that point and he hadn't kidnapped me yet. Also, it makes sense as a mode of operation. Faith has power, and they want that conviction turned away from God and toward their demons. Which leads into point four: he's a total scrub. I kicked his butt twice. If he's my sire, shouldn't he have some edge over me?"

"You'd think so." He sipped his drink and thought. "So what's your scenario?"

"The Baali find this guy. He's another bloodline, or a caitiff--that's a generic vampire. Maybe he's even a caitiff who should've been a Baali. They prep me to turn, and they hand me over to him to pretend he's my sire. Maybe they have something on him, or they could just be paying him off. When I rise, I beat him down, just as planned."

Eddie added some ketchup to the second burger. "What's their goal in all this?"

"I have all the problems of being a vampire and no one to turn to. I come into contact with other vampires who hate the Baali, because they all do. I find out that faith burns me. They want me to believe that I'm hopelessly damned so that I'll come to them of my own free will. Like Satan says in Paradise Lost: 'Farewell, remorse. All good to me is lost. Evil, be thou my good.'"

"And now that you've figured them out, you're safe?"

I made a circular gesture with my pointy finger as I mulled that over. "...no. Because I still have to deal with needing to drink blood and with having killed someone and all kinds of other bad things. Seeing ahead of time that I could lose hope, that they want me to lose hope, helps a little, but it doesn't prevent it from happening."

"It hangs together," he said, "but there are weak spots. There are ways he could have gotten the crucifixes up. If you can be angry enough to override one drink, maybe you can be angry enough for two drinks. And he could still just be a loser with the potential for power that he just hasn't developed. But it does kind of fit."

"There's one way to find out," I said, "because I'm pretty sure they're keeping him alive."

*****

"Third time's the charm," I said. "Now remember, you are here to be lookout. You are not to come inside because if you meet vampires other than me you will die. Got it?"

Eddie sighed. "Fine. Show me the eye thing again?"

I groaned and turned my eyes yellow for him. I was about to sneak in under cover of darkness anyway. "If you see anyone coming in, call my phone. It's on vibrate. I should notice and no one else will."

Rapid-fire nods. "I've got to find a way to study your tapetum lucidum. Don't worry, I've got your back."

"You'd better."

I didn't waste any time searching the house this time. I was looking for my fake sire, but nothing else, so I went through each room like a cop on tv. Nobody on the ground floor. Nobody in the upstairs bedroom. That meant the basement or nowhere.

I crept down the stairs. It would have been nice to be invisible while moving, but that just would not work for me. The ritual room was empty, but--

"What is it this time?" A dagger pressed into my ribs. "You have to to stop coming here and almost killing me, bitch!"

"I'm not here for that," I said, raising my hands. "I just want to know why you made me a vampire. I'm obviously no use to you."

"You know what? I'm done suffering for those asswipes. I didn't turn you. They paid me good money to pretend I did, but it wasn't me. My blood might as well be water. The only guy I ever tried to turn just died."

"They used you," I said, "and now they won't even let you die in peace, will they?"

"Hell no! I'm blind in my left eye and my hands shake! Who knows when I'll have enough blood to finish healing? They keep coming back and feeding me just enough to wake me back up."

"I'm Beth," I said. "You can tell me your name, if you want."

"Moloch," he growled.

"Oh, like the old supervillain in Watchmen? The one who got cancer?"

He let out a defeated sigh. "Fine. I'm Jerry. I thought Moloch sounded scary."

"If you want to get back at them, you need to put the knife away, all right?"

"You won't beat me up again?"

"Not unless you're torturing somebody else. Are you?"

"No," he grunted, "and, hell, you're the one who killed that girl."

"I did. I didn't mean to, but I did. Now are you going to put the knife away, Jerry?"

I was never more surprised than when he slipped the blade back into his pocket. "You really think we can get these guys to leave me alone?" he asked.

"All things are possible," I said. "You know, I really expected to enjoy killing you. I don't think I would, though. Weird, isn't it?"

"Not really. I've killed a few and watching them beg is pretty funny, actually."

"Yeah, Jerry, I think you've said enough about that." I got out my phone. "Can you behave yourself?"

Chapter Text

"They promised me I'd be favored by the dark powers if I pretended to be your sire," Jerry said over my dinner table. "I did my best, but I can't do shit, and they keep giving me just enough blood to stay alive after you beat me down."

"Because of course, demon-worshipping cultists are trustworthy," Eddie said.

"Shush," I said, elbowing him. "Let vampires deal with their own." I looked Jerry in the eye. "Because of course, demon-worshipping cultists are trustworthy. Okay, why me? Who did they say I was?"

"Didn't tell me nothin', man. They brought you to me dead, told me you'd rise and I should guard you and act like you were mine. I don't think I was ever any more than their patsy. I don't even have any powers."

"If you make me believe I won't regret it," I told him, "maybe I'll teach you some. If I can. I need allies. I'm not turning Eddie, and nobody trusts a Baali."

"So those...Gangrel are out," Eddie said.

"I wish they weren't," I grumbled. "They knew their way around. But they tied me up and started planning to kill me as soon as they knew what I was. They might still give me a quick death, but that's the biggest favor I can expect. No, I'm on my own for now, except for you two."

"I wasn't worth the effort," Jerry mumbled. "I was on their side already, and I still wasn't worth the effort." He stood and began to wander around the room aimlessly.

"Are you sure it's a bad idea to call Mercury Logistics?" Eddie asked.

I held up both hands and shifted them up and down to indicate how completely unsure I was. "I think Dean Statham means well," I said. "I think he believes he can still help me, maybe even that I can still go to heaven when I die. But I remember that the people he hired called me an 'H-skin' like it was some sort of slur and tried to kill me, repeatedly. Yeah, faced with certain death one of them cooperated with me and we escaped together. He also told me he'd kill me if we met again. People have good reason to hate and fear vampires, and maybe they're completely right to. I killed a girl without even meaning to. But I think the organization the dean belongs to, whatever it is, is willing to use me up for some greater-good goal. Maybe they're right about vampires, but the kind of people willing to do that sort of thing aren't usually very good them--"

I'd gotten completely distracted from the actual guy in the room who had tried to kill me. I guess I didn't deserve any warning when suddenly my awareness was swallowed by fire and light and judgement that slammed me down onto my knees. Jerry had opened my jewelry box, found my little cross, and taken it out. He certainly wasn't Baali in any way that mattered; his eyes bugged out at seeing me cowering on the floor.

The irony would've been palpable if I could feel anything but terror. Jerry would hold me immobilized while he killed my friend and then me, and then go back to ineptly terrorizing Searcy. But I was the one paralyzed by the cross. God help me.

Who was I kidding? I didn't deserve any help. I was a murderer. Maybe he was more dangerous than I was, but that wasn't saying much. God, let me die bringing him down. That's enough. I'll go willingly to hell if I can stop him.

"The love of God is greater far/
than tongue or pen can ever tell."

That was what came to me in that moment of paralysis, that song. I pushed myself off the floor and rose to stand, facing him. Blood flowed from my searing eyes like water in the light that radiated from the cross. I didn't matter. Stopping him did.

"It goes beyond the highest star/
and reaches to the lowest hell./
The guilty pair, bowed down with care/
God gave his son to win./
His erring child he reconciled/
and pardoned from his sin."

If Jerry had been shocked to see the cross work on me, he was astonished to see it fail. He waved it at me, backing up, as I took a step toward him, and then another.

"When hoary time shall pass away/
when earthly thrones and kingdons fall/
when men who here refuse to pray/
on rocks and hills and mountains call--"

The cross seared into my flesh as I took it into my hand and pulled it from his grasp. Now it was Jerry who fell to his knees. He was jabbering to himself in fright. Was he seeing what I saw? This blazing lamp of condemnation?

"God's love so sure shall still endure/
all measureless and strong/
Redeeming grace to Adam's race--/
The saints' and angels' song."

I thrust the cross back into the jewelry box and closed the lid. Immediately the cascade of terrible light ceased. I glanced at my hand, expecting to see horrid burn marks, but it was unharmed.

Jerry's was not. He clutched at a hand seared crimson and black. Tears rolled down his face, great red drops of blood.

Eddie just stared at us, uncomprehending. To him, I realized, we were just freaking out over a little jewelry cross. That was what vampires did, in the movies, anyway. Sometimes they even overcame it. I'd never thought about what it was like from their side, and clearly he hadn't either. I put the box on top of the fridge.

"You...you can't do that!" Jerry whined. "You're the real thing, a Baali! You're...you can't...and I shouldn't...."

"I think you might have just seen a miracle, Jerry. Still wanting to call yourself 'Moloch'?"

Chapter Text

I was joking about miracles, and then again I wasn't.

Growing up in the Church of Christ means you absolutely believe in miracles...in the past. But a long time ago we figured out that miracles right now were a fly in the ointment. We live in a world where churches, in general, are pretty corrupt. But what does "corrupt" mean? If God really spoke to you and told you to do something, shouldn't you do it? How do you know you're not crazy? How do you know if your preacher is? If the church is really following a leader who talks to God daily, maybe it's exactly how God wants it. Yes, theoretically, even the choir boys.

So the nineteenth century saw a rash of people claiming to speak for God and work miracles, and every one that we ran into was an obvious liar. Needless to say, that made us skeptical. Some people would say we should have questioned all of church history, too. We questioned a lot of it, but not the first century or so. For what it's worth, all this was happening at a time when "secular scientist who'd be an atheist if he wasn't convinced creationism had to be real" was still a thing. Several of them were the President.

All this is just to say I had some hangups about teaching Jerry how to use vampire powers I didn't think were real a couple of weeks ago. "I think you're what the Gangrel called a caitiff," I told him. "The copier was low on ink when the vampires turned you. That makes you weak, but it also means you can learn powers they didn't have." I flashed my night vision eyes at him. "I had to drink Gangrel blood to learn that, but I bet you don't." If "seeing in the dark" was enough to get me killed, I probably deserved it.

Jerry's response was to make a lot of weird squinty expressions at me. Fair, I guess, but whatever he was trying, it wasn't working. His hand was all bandaged up from where he'd burned it last night. Presumably it would heal up eventually.

Someone knocked on the door. I glanced at Eddie, but it wasn't that late yet. Someone legitimate could be here to see me at 9:30. I couldn't see anyone through the window.

"I'm going to risk it," I said to no one in particular, and opened the door. I don't know what I was prepared for, but it wasn't a very short black woman with hair so tightly-curled she seemed bald at first glance and a third eye in the center of her forehead. My mouth opened, but nothing came out.

"My name is Muriel," the woman said. "Have you accepted the mercy of our sire and savior Saulot?"

"I...what?" It was obviously some sort of riff on door-to-door evangelism, but who was Saulot? A vampire, from her use of the term "sire" and the fangs her smile revealed.

"Forgive me if I'm making a false assumption, but it looks to me as if you could use some help," Muriel said. "May I please come inside?"

"You're not wrong, but I hope you're not hungry. I'm a little limited when it comes to hospitality right now."

*****

A few minutes later her feet were dangling over the edge of the couch. She was tiny. "I know it's not the most pressing issue," I said, "but I've never heard an accent like yours."

"I'm from Botswana," she said, still smiling, "and yes, !Kung can be turned like any other people, if you were thinking otherwise. Only our small numbers and distance from cities make it unlikely." I started frantically trying to apologize--I had just thought she was African and short--but she waved it off. "My sire was far worse than you. He wondered if perhaps we weren't technically children of Seth and couldn't be Embraced. He admitted his mistake after the damage was done."

"You lived," Jerry began. Muriel rolled her three eyes as if he'd said the dumbest thing imaginable.

"In any case, the Salubri are not the Great White Hope of Caine's childer," she said, "as you can see. We try to make the world a better place, but that doesn't cure ignorance."

"The Gangrel who told me about the clans didn't mention you," I explained, "so I don't know anything about Salubri or Saulot at all."

"I can't say I'm surprised. We keep our numbers small, especially after the Tremere stole our place among the clans. There are those who falsely accuse us of devouring souls. From what I hear of you, you can relate."

"I'm pretty sure the stories about the Baali are true." I looked around and then remembered I didn't have a cup or a plate; I really needed something to occupy my hands. "Am I wrong?"

"In general, no. But are they true of you?" She folded her own hands. "Part of a good life is judging people by their own deeds, wouldn't you say? We are none of us innocent, of course. But if you come with me, perhaps I can help you avoid digging yourself deeper. And you also, Jerry-called-Moloch, if you truly desire it."

"Where are we going?" I asked as we buckled ourselves into her car. I was a little surprised she could reach everything, since there were no adaptors built in, and from the back seat I couldn't really tell how she reached the pedals.

She put the car into gear and glanced back at me. "To the nest," she said in a completely different voice with a completely different face with only the ordinary two eyes. "I'm really quite amazed at how gullible you are."

Chapter Text

I wish I could tell you I ripped my way through the seat belts and jumped out of the car, but they were reinforced, and anyway that would've left Eddie behind. Not a good look if you're trying to be a token heroic Baali. Once I realized we were stuck, I calmed myself down and started stoically looking for a way to escape.

Once, when "Muriel" said, "The Lords of Darkness do not love you, or us, or anyone, but they will appreciate your help in freeing them," I showed her my fangs and hissed. I have...opinions...when it comes to demons and their supposed appreciation. It was strange how natural it felt, no different from raising my voice. Jerry glared at me, but Eddie shied away even though he was in the front seat and out of my reach.

As we pulled up to an abandoned factory, I gave serious thought to trying my limited invisibility out, but she would know where I was and just grab me blindly. Again, too, I'd be leaving the others behind. I didn't have any quick escape options with my powers, and she might have easy counters. In any case, the car was quickly surrounded with people, most of whom were probably vampires. So much for the conventional wisdom that the Baali were dying out. I let them lead me inside.

The factory had a big assembly area, either for the workers who had been here once or maybe made by the vampires clearing some space. They'd hung it with desecrated holy symbols--mostly but not only crosses--and pictures of demons. I tried to look confident and unafraid, but whether demons were here or not, there were at least ten vampires besides me and Jerry. "Muriel" shoved me into a seat near the front and had a quiet discussion with the man with the horns, who mounted a platform in front of the salvaged pews.

"You see," he said in a deep and resonating voice, "in the end there is no future for you save to come home to us. Your blood is ours. Your blood is the blood of the Baals, the blood of the Children who fell to Earth. We are the Chosen of Asshur. Do you not see?"

He fell silent and held out an open hand to me. "I see that you've chosen the losing side," I said. "I don't know how it is that you don't get that."

He gave me a disappointed look. "Do you not see the world around you? How full it is of oppression and despair? Justice and mercy alike are crumbling. The planet burns. If your God is real, he has abandoned this place, and certainly has abandoned you. The Children have not abandoned us."

To my surprise, Jerry held up his wounded hand and ripped off the bandages. "Actually, I think maybe her God was with her," he said. "With me, not so much, but I was trying real hard to kill her."

"Hmm." The horned man stepped down to study the burns. "One might almost think you true Baali, and not a wretched, thin-blooded castoff." He looked back at me. "Tell me about your God. Does he not prepare to end the world any day now? How long until your Rapture, and then seven more years until he burns the planet up himself?"

"Uh...we don't know," I said mockingly. I was probably dead at the end of this no matter what, so there was no point in holding back. "The Rapture is a lie. Were you not even around in 1848? William Miller? It's always a lie, every time it pops up, because even Jesus doesn't know when the world is ending, or didn't when he was on Earth anyway. Yeah, one day God will wrap things up, but that could be a million years from now."

Horn-guy pinched the bridge of his nose in a very human gesture. "I...do you not even know your own religion?"

"I know it just fine," I said. "You're talking useless modern heresy. You didn't even do the research before setting up in this town. I would be embarrassed to join up with your little cult. How old are you? Thirty?"

His hands slammed down on my shoulders. "Mock me all you wish. This fact remains: no one will ever accept you again save us. We are the only family left to you. We are your only home. We are blood and life to you."

I have to admit, that hit home. Even the other vampires I'd met hated and feared me. Eddie and I got along, up to a point, but I could only rely on him so far. Jerry might be inclined to stick up for the sincerity of my faith, but I couldn't really trust him. And Dean Statham and his organization sounded like they just wanted to use me, even if Dean still liked me personally.

But at the end of the day, the world mattered more than my happiness.

I looked the horned vampire in the eye. "I'm sorry, Norbert," I said. "I really am. But your feelings of personal inadequacy aren't worth mass murder." That was his name. Seriously. It wasn't just having a silly name, of course; that was just a symbol of a whole complex of fears and failings. But it could all be wrapped up in that package. Norbert.. No kidding.

For just a moment, his eyes went literally blood-red with rage. Then it passed. No matter how screwed up he was on the inside, Norbert hadn't gotten to his exalted position as leader of a demonic cult by acting on impulse all the time. He reached out and traced a bloody inverted pentagram on my forehead. Then he shrugged. "Let her go. She will return to us when the time is right. When she has lost everything."

"Baal-Seraph," the one who'd called herself Muriel began. Norbert folded his arms, and she relented and shut her mouth.

I stood up. All of them turned their backs on us. There was a sort of ritualistic flavor to that, but if Norbert had done anything to me, it wasn't obvious. In fact, the anticlimax left me feeling a little hollow inside. "They're letting us go," I told Eddie and Jerry, wiping off the blood mark on my face. "I say we take the offer while it's good."

No one followed us out the door, but it was a long, quiet walk home.

Chapter Text

We split up on the way back, Jerry to his dank little crypt and Eddie to his parents' house. I woke up the next evening with a strange uncomfortable feeling that left me wishing Eddie had come with me, but it took several minutes of confusion before I was able to identify the sensation for what it was: arousal.

Yes, I went to a Christian college and I was a good girl the whole time I was there. I wasn't a sexless being and I did have plans to leave school, as the joke went, with my Mrs. degree, which didn't work out as I hoped. Then I was turned into a vampire and I really hadn't thought much about sex since then. It wasn't repulsive or anything, it still seemed like it should feel good, but there wasn't any biological drive behind it, I guess, and since I didn't have any strong memories of good feelings about it it just faded into the background.

Not any more. I couldn't stop thinking about it, and the more I thought about it the more I wished Eddie had stayed over so I could wake up beside him and promptly jump his bones. Which he would likely not have gone for, so what then? I still felt an internal pang of conscience at the thought of demanding more against his will, but there was a fantasy there about doing more anyway. I could just get myself off, but that didn't seem like enough.

I checked the clock. I was awake a good fifteen minutes later than usual. What did that mean? I wasn't punctual, exactly, but I'd woken up solidly ahead of the Gangrel whenever I'd been around them.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if that pentagram on my forehead had done something to me. It hadn't felt like anything at the time, but why should I expect it to? That was a basic fallacy people held to about morality and supernatural things, that your feelings should just inherently keep you informed.

I called Eddie on my phone, but he didn't pick up. He wanted to help me, but his life didn't revolve around me, which wasn't fair. Wait. Of course it was fair. He had his own life. Something was wrong with me. I wasn't thinking clearly. I ran through a few math tables in my head to check. Specifically, I wasn't thinking clearly about morality; the numbers were fine.

If you believe C. S. Lewis, good people understand both good and evil, while bad people don't understand either one. I was still clear-headed enough to realize something was wrong with me, and I wasn't particularly hungry yet. I spent the rest of the night in bed, trying to get the feeling I had when I was alive. I think I got close, but it wasn't quite the same.

The next night, I woke up even later, hungry, grumpy, and with the sheets bloody. In place of most fluids, my body used blood--maybe diluted in some circumstances, like getting watery eyes, but if I cried enough to have actual teardrops I cried blood. I had forgotten about that, and I was going to need pads if I had more days like this.

I didn't realize just yet that "like this" did not begin to describe what was happening to me.

I drove down to the corner store with the intent of picking up some pads. The cashier said I wasn't looking so good. Surely she was trying to be sympathetic, but the fury just bubbled up in me at the comment and the next thing I knew I was over the counter choking her out, slamming her head against the racks. The moment I realized what I was doing, I recoiled, but by then she was already unconscious. I grabbed the box of pads, dropped some money on the counter, and then realized that even if she lost her memory I was on the security camera.

Killing her won't help. I repeated it to myself like a mantra while I found her keys and stole the security recorder tapes--old model, or maybe they were just concerned about the footage being digitally modified. I really didn't want to kill her, but I absolutely did want to be left alone and it was hard to see how to make that happen. My stomach was snarling at me by the time I left, but I was determined not to kill her, no matter what was wrong with me. I was so shaken up, I spent the rest of the night hunting down large dogs to feed on.

I had to know it wasn't going to last. Something was seriously wrong with me. But I was determined to hold on as long as I could.

Chapter Text

I'm trying to record my thoughts and feelings as accurately as possible, even if it causes me some discomfort. So...sorry in advance.

The next time I woke it was even later, but at least i wasn't surprised. I was...horny, hungry, and angry all at once. Harngry? I haven't seen a portmanteau for all three yet. The only sliver of a bright spot was that the pads had worked and my underwear wasn't all bloody from being so turned on.

The cashier from last night was alive and even conscious, according to the news. I knew I should have been relieved, but all I felt was anxious until they reported that she had no memory of her attacker and the recordings were gone. They'd never find me. And I felt only the faintest echo of guilt, really just the memory that I would have just a couple of days ago.

That reminded me of what had set me off. I checked my reflection in the bathroom. She'd been completely right; I looked like hell. I wasn't so corpselike that makeup didn't help, but I didn't look at all healthy until I had gotten my face on, as they say. By then my stomach was tight with hunger.

I was at least still afraid of killing again. In hopes of relieving one problem out of three, I put down an old towel on the bed and tried fingering myself, but I couldn't even get close. All I did was make that problem worse, and meanwhile I was still ravenous.

In a foul mood, I got dressed again and drove to the bowling alley. There wasn't zero night life in Searcy, but there wasn't a lot, either. Still, it was the weekend, so the room was filled with people having fun. I could feel the body heat radiating off them and smell their blood right through their skin. Worse yet, I could cold-read them with terrifying precision. That girl in the corner? She was jonesing for some meth. The guy who had just rolled a strike? He beat his girlfriend every few days. I was considering putting him in the hospital--he deserved it--when a couple came in. They were both a little buzzed, and they weren't really here to bowl. They were looking for a third. Yes, here in a bowling alley in a Christian college town. You can imagine why it was rolling off them in waves; they were sure it could send them to hell but had convinced themselves they didn't care, they'd just repent later.

No. I was going to feed on the asshole who wanted to beat up women. I was going to drain him till he needed an ambulance. And then call the ambulance, sure, but....

"Y'all look like you're having fun tonight," I said without thinking. "Need something to take the edge off?" I reached for my purse; I wasn't buying food any more, and I wasn't afraid to carry cash.

He had a rugged look, his beard trimmed just enough to not be a mess and his muscles obvious beneath his shirt. She was small in the chest, but her butt filled out her skirt nicely. Nicely? I'd never even imagined thinking of a woman that way. I was only half thinking of her that way now. She was a piece of meat...just like he was. I struggled not to drool.

She glanced at him; he glanced at her. They plainly hadn't expected to find someone so soon. I had done a good enough job on my makeup that I was just a bit pale, not creepy or sickly. "Sit down," she said. "Let's talk. You want beer?"

I couldn't resist. "I never drink...beer," I said. "But I'll buy." They didn't catch on, so I ordered for both of them. "You needed a little liquid courage, didn’t you?"

I knew better. Damn, I knew better than to proposition a pair of strangers, even if they might have propositioned me, and especially with the goal of sucking their blood. They were irresistible, though.

"It's still early," she said, half-looking at her husband. "But I like this one. She knows exactly what we're looking for." I did, and a small part of me was trying very hard to warn them off. I couldn't make myself do it.

"If she's the one, honey, I'm not going to complain," he said under his breath. "Damn," he said in a louder voice. "Where's my card? Did I leave it at home?"

They walked out together, pretending to quarrel, and after counting to fifteen I followed them, not to a car but to a house in the nearby neighborhood. I was really going to do this, wasn't I?

They let me in without any real question. I guess he figured that if I tried anything he could just clobber me. If I were human, I'm sure he could. She tried offering me some food; I'm sure I looked hungry. "I know what I want to eat," I said, "and it's not that."

I don't think any of us knew what we were doing. They had wedding rings on but were too young to have been married long. Thry dimmed the lights, and we clumsily undressed each other. Mostly they undressed me; they had some experience on each other, at least. I just let them do it. "Are you ok with me being on my period?" I asked belatedly. I should have asked much sooner.

He looked a little unnerved by that, but she laughed and said, "He needs his red wings anyway. It's fine."

She went down on me first, and looking back it's embarrassing how quickly I came. Once he'd seen it wasn't so bad, he was next. I wondered if they were getting enough of my blood to be affected by it at all when he came up for air and I saw the smears. For a moment I was surprised that he was better at it, but then realized that if this was her fantasy, I was probably her first girl.

"Your turn," I said to him, and took him into my mouth. She didn't seem too upset, and when I bit down on him all she noticed was gasping and moaning, which she'd clearly expected.

The first sign she had of trouble was when he didn't get up. I'd left him weak from blood loss, probably not enough to die, but I wasn't sure. Before she could say anything that made sense, I grabbed her arms and showed her my night-vision eyes. "This is punishment," I told her. "Speak of me to anyone, and I'll be back to kill you both. Do you understand?"

She nodded, shaking violently, and I bit her on the boob. Maybe they could persuade the hospital it was some kind of fantasy gone horribly wrong. It wouldn't even be a lie.

I came again as I drank from her, better by far than from the sex. Then I got dressed, handed her the cell phone, told her to call an ambulance, and walked out full as a tick.

I knew I had done something terrible. I didn't think I could have stopped myself; I'd been cursed, after all. But if I didn't do something, I'd be the monster everyone thought I was in just a few more days.

When I got home, I picked up the phone and called Dean Statham. It was an awful idea, but it was the only one I had. Even if they killed me, at least I wouldn't hurt anyone else. "Professor," I was going to say, "you obviously know what I am and you have some kind of connections. I need your help."

The phone rang until it went to voice mail. I left the message anyway, then collapsed into bed and started sobbing.

What was I going to wake up as tomorrow?

Chapter Text

I woke up to a bloody pillow and struggled to remember what I had been crying about. I had fucked...had sex with...fucked a couple who had taken me to their house for a three-way. I had drunk from both of them but left them alive with a stern warning. This evening it didn't seem worth crying over, but the stained pillow said I had thought so last night. If I couldn't break the curse soon, I realized, I was going to stop caring that I was cursed, and then....

The Gangrel had told me that eventually, vampires degenerated into mindless predators. Once that happened, there was no helping them. Maybe the curse could still break, but if I reached that point before it did, even if I changed back, who knew how many people I might have killed?

What was I going to find myself doing against my will tonight?

I took a shower to help clean off the ruined makeup and start over. I wasn't remotely hungry. Maybe I could get away without feeding again tonight. Much stranger was that my tits and cunt were just so much meat. I could get a little stimulation from playing with them, but it barely mattered. I wanted the taste of blood in my mouth, full or not.

Same with saying "cunt". I'm looking at that on the screen in surprise. I don't talk that way. Shit. Cunt. Fuck. "Damn" still gets me antsy. So does "Jesus". I think I'm still a little afraid of those things. I'm fading fast, though. I didn't see that coming.

I don't know what I'm going to do.

*****

And then the Dean called me back.

"I know this will sound crazy," I said, "but I've been cursed."

"Curses are largely in the minds of the cursed," he said. Fuck! He wasn't going to even try! "That doesn't make them ineffective. What we believe about ourselves can become real. Let me get some things together and I'll be right over."

"Professor, be careful. I'm dangerous right now."

"Yes," he said. "So am I. Aren't we all?" And he hung up, leaving me to wonder if he understood me at all or not.

I paced around, getting antsier by the minute. What would he do if I wasn't here when he arrived? Perversely, the urge bubbled up that I should leave. I wasn't meant to be caged. I shouldn't cage myself. I was a predator.

I'll kill him, I suggested to myself. I'll eat him when he shows up. Instantly the urge to leave vanished, but what had I set myself up for?

*****

He pulled up outside somewhere around ten thirty, carrying a tablet and headphones, wearing a chain necklace that conspicuously vanished beneath his shirt. "I didn't know exactly what might be going on," he acknowledged, "but I knew from your msssage you were having problems. Unfortunately, I didn't get it till morning. You say you've been cursed."

"I met the sort of people your employees used to work for," I explained obliquely. I knew what he was hiding that was on his litte chain. "They did some sort of blood magic thing on me and I don't feel like myself. I'm hurting people and it's getting worse. Now maybe you think it's all in my head--"

"Of course it's all in your head," the Dean said. "That's where you do your thinking. And I'm going to see if I can't help you get it out of your head. Put these on your ears, close your eyes, and repeat what you hear."

I donned the headphones and listened, hoping for some profound insights or weird mystical tones. What I got was...not that.

Your brain is your own space. What you think is what you do. What you affirm becomes your reality. Repeat after me: I am a child of God. I have been made a good person. God loves me and helps me in my trials....

"What's with the platitudes?" This was so useless I wanted to cry.

Dean frowned at me. "Remember the story of Naaman."

I knew that story by heart, of course. Naaman was an Assyrian general who had leprosy. It wasn't an exaggeration to call leprosy a kind of living death. It only attacked your nerves, but once it had killed your pain receptors it was so easy to miss injuries that in ancient times, gangrene and other infections were inevitable. People literally rotted alive. We had better treatments now, but it was still bad news.

Naaman had gone to the prophet Elijah for a cure, but when Elijah told him to go wash himself in the Jordan River, he stormed off in a rage because that wasn't special enough. Fortunately for him, his servant talked him into understanding that if he was willing to fight giants and climb glass mountains for a cure, he should be willing to accept a bargain when it was offered. "You really think this will help me?"

"Look, your mind is a complicated system of memetic structures," he explained. "However the curse got there, it has to exist in a semiotic form, the way a retrovirus converts itself to DNA. I'm deconstructing and untangling its message from your thoughts. It's going to look simple because in some ways it is, but we're going to need to confront it directly and root it out. I don't make the rules."

"Semiotic structures?" That didn't sound especially miraculous. Surely I needed miraculous.

"Let me quote Brents at you. This is from The Gospel Plan of Salvation. 'The words in which a truth or thought is expressed are not the thought itself; nor is the thought or truth suggested by a person or thing the person or thing which suggested it. Hence, the words in which a spiritual idea is suggested are not the idea; nor is the idea suggested by the Spirit the Spirit itself. Nevertheless the thought was in the words, and the Spirit was in the thought.' Think of the Holy Spirit as inhabiting the Scripture in the way that our spirits inhabit a body. He's a memetic entity."

That sounded unorthodox but possibly not wrong. "Ok. I'm reciting your platitudes. I hope they help." I clicked the headphones back on. This part, at least, was from the Bible. I repeated the words with some discomfort. "Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? When we were baptized into his death, we were placed into the tomb with him. As Christ was brought back from death to life by the glorious power of the Father, so we, too, should live a new kind of life. If we’ve become united with him in a death like his, certainly we will also be united with him when we come back to life as he did. We know that the person we used to be was crucified with him to put an end to sin in our bodies. Because of this we are no longer slaves to sin."

I went on like that for maybe an hour, maybe a bit longer, alternating between self-help talk and Bible verses. It sounded hokey. You would think it would fail, like some faithless priest trying to do an exorcism on tv.

Sometime around midnight I looked at the Dean and realized that I no longer hoped to kill him. I saw a human being who was helping me, a person, rather than a useful but delicious piece of meat. And then, immediately, I felt awful. I'd beaten someone nearly to death over a well-intended comment. I'd entrapped strangers for sex and food. And I had completely forgotten Eddie and Jerry after the first night.

"Sh--" I began, and stopped myself. "Sorry," I said. "You did it." I wished, briefly, that he hadn't. In a few days, I wouldn't have cared about any of those things. But that was bad.

"You did it," Dean said encouragingly. "I gave you a little help, that's all."

"I'm not sure that's true," I told him, "but either way, I'm better now."

He nodded. "Now we need to talk about what you can do to make the world better."

Chapter Text

"I want to know who it is you're working for," I asked the Dean. We were still at my house, after I pointed out that I needed to be prepared to sleep when the sun rose. "I want to believe you're one of the good guys, but I haven't actually met any yet."

"I can't tell you everything," he said with a deep sigh, "but I'll tell you what I can. There are organizations in the world older than anything besides churches and the oldest governments. Some people would ask what our claim to legitimacy is, but there's no answer to that. What's anyone's claim to legitimacy? The oldest governments still in existence are founded on conquest. I'm small fry in a kind of business venture that invests in humanity. Sometimes it calls itself a syndicate.

"Most people in my organization, and in the even bigger organization it's part of, are atheists, and so I don't have their complete trust and they don't have mine. But I believe that God created humanity to carry on His work, the work of Creation. Miracles didn't end because God was satisfied with the world as it was. They were like a father carrying a child. One day the child needs to learn to walk."

I nodded. "I've heard that from the pulpit before, I think. But the things I can do...I'm not exactly human any more."

Dean sighed. "And that's a problem for my organization, which sees what you are as a disease. Here's what I think: you do have a condition, but it's one that normal people created by accident. We made a mistake of some sort and we inflicted it on you. The things you can do aren't alien to humanity, just skewed."

"This is a thing that can happen?" That wasn't encouraging.

"I would tend to think so. It makes more sense than babble about the curse of Cain, and offers more hope of fixing the problem one day. But it means that there's a catch. My syndicate won't deal with you unless it gives us a substantial advantage, because they see you as a potential danger to humanity, not a human in your own right."

"Well," I said reluctantly, "there are things I can do, like see the things people feel ashamed or guilty about."

"That's one I hadn't heard of," Dean admitted. "Sounds like a positive sign to me, honestly. Jesus could do that, you know."

I released a pained laugh. "You haven't heard of it because it's a Baali power, and not an obvious one."

"Again, all the things that vampires can do are distortions of gifts that humanity was meant to have. Jesus is the Last Adam. You see? I've heard of hostiles who can summon hellfire...but you know what hellfire is, right?"

"The wrath of God," I said as if by rote. "You believe that, for real? Even seeing how they use it?"

"But that's exactly it. They misuse it, turning it back against God and his creation. Which is not to say you should attack them with it where my supervisors can see, you understand."

"Luckily, I don't know how. But I think I might be starting to see a plan forming. To begin with, I need some people found...."

*****

Finding Eddie was easier than I had feared. He was alive and at home. Dean told me he acted as if his memory had been wiped, but that he might have been faking. Jerry was harder. He wasn't in his dank little home, and Dean said he would take time to hunt down.

Without Jerry, my first impulse was to leave Eddie out of it for now, while Dean investigated whether he needed more help. I had a different idea. I bought a phone from Wal-Mart using my MIDAS card. Then I drove out into the farmland where I'd been before, then left my car behind some distance away.

Lucas' camper was still parked in the same place, its shattered window replaced with a tarp and lots of tape. There was always the chance they were hanging about, but they had work to do, the same work I had: tracking down the Baali and disposing of them.

If there was anyone on watch, they'd gone to sleep. I wrote a message in marker on the door. "Found him!" followed by my temporary number. If they didn't call, I'd find some other way to handle things, but this was supposed to be their job. I thought they would at least test me out.

Some time around 4:30, I was proven right. I expected Lucas on the line; what I got was Rita cursing me out in Spanish. When her tirade ran down, I asked, "So do you want to catch Norbert or not?"

I have to admit I was expecting some incredulous reaction to the name, but I guess Rita was old enough that Norbert was just a name to her. Probably there were vampires still about who wouldn't have batted an eye if I'd said Aethelred. "How do you expect us to believe you, Baali?"

"I expect you to believe your eyes. No more, no less. There's an abandoned factory. They tricked me into the car, so they didn't get the chance to hide where we were going." I gave her the address. "Take your time. Scope it out. Be aware they've got a pretty solid little cult going. I saw ten. There could be more. Norbert's got ram's horns, if that means anything to you."

"He is an elder," she said reluctantly. "In generation even if not in age. We may be overmatched."

"Then before you make any moves," I told her, "maybe you come hear me out. I may possibly be able to find you some help."

She cursed me out again for a full five minutes; I timed her. She finished up by calling me a bitch and a bloody whore. I didn't take it personally. "Where do we meet?" she asked at last.

"On holy ground."

Chapter Text

"This is holy ground/
We're standing on holy ground/
For the Lord is present/
And where He is, is holy...."

Outside the big auditorium at Harding is a brick plaza with a fountain holding a baptistry. Most nights, it was empty, especially during the summer, but tonight, the Dean had put word out about a prayer vigil. Not that long ago, a former campus worship leader had been shot in his own apartment by a particularly incompetent police officer, and everyone still on campus turned out for any vigil in honor of him.

The main problem, for me, was that the introductory song was being proven true. The words echoed in my ears like screams, and the plaza reeled about as if about to pitch me into hell. Worse luck, I had been counting on it. The idea was that Dean Statham could demonstrate that I was no threat here, but that meant there was no leaving.

The end of the first song did nothing to make me feel better, but Dean excused himself and left the vigil to the summer students. I sat down on the outer wall--I couldn't approach the baptistry right now, even if the students had made a path--and waited. Soon enough, I was rewarded with cries of recognition and anger. None were directed at me yet; the Gangrel had just encountered the D'habi working for Mercury Logistics.

"Now let's all play nice," Dean said. "We're in public here." It helped that Lucas, Rita, and Clem were experiencing a bit of the same horror and disorientation that I was getting full force. There was evidently enough real sincerity and faith in the hundred or so people gathered around the fountain that any vampire could feel the effects. "We're all pursuing the same target, do you understand?"

"Where's the cheerleader?" Lucas asked. "She was supposed to--" I lifted my head weakly, and he closed his mouth.

"I don't appreciate being tied to a chair all night," Lino said, "especially when I am not only doing my job but could have helped you."

"We don't take help from Dobby ghouls," Clem said, not very forcefully. I could all but see his skin crawling. He was trying not to look at the fountain. He was also wearing ill-fitting gloves that covered his double-thumbed hands. Rita had shaved the fur from her face, leaving what looked like red, pockmarked burns.

"Perhaps you should," the Dean said calmly. "But I'm not going to ask you to work in close quarters after this one meeting. Our mutual friend here has helped me devise a plan that should put paid to our...what kind of problem did you call it, again?"

"Baali," Rita and Lino spat at the same time, then glared balefully at each other.

"Baali," Dean repeated. "I'll be sure to get that put in the database." For some reason, that also drew glares from the Gangrel. Oh, right. The masquerade. It was clearly an open secret to Dean's "syndicate," but no one was happy about that. Somehow I didn't think he was going to end up in a shallow grave over it, though. "Anyway," he continued, "surely everyone here wants to see Norbert and his little cult put down for good, right? So let's talk shop. I have certain preparations to make, after which I think we can make him wish he'd been ridden out of town on a rail. Will you hear me out?"

Lucas folded his arms. "This had better be good."

"Oh, it will be," Dean said, folding his arms right back, "and you'd best believe it."

Chapter Text

The plan was going to take several days to work out. I could only hope Norbert assumed I was helplessly in the grip of his curse, slipping toward a life of uncaring murder for my own hunger and convenience. I wasn't, but I did still need to feed. Less viscerally, I needed to work out where the Baali were feeding.

In theory, there were more than enough people here to feed several vampires. Not a whole big society of them, but as many as we had. In practice, it was hard not to get caught. Either you were killing people, or you were leaving witnesses alive, and neither was helpful for staying hidden. I had tried and fumbled with getting regular voluntary "donations" because the Baali coven objected. The Gangrel were feeding on cattle, but that was low-quality blood that even they supplemented with the occasional human. The Baali surely weren't doing the same.

There were blood bags at the hospital, but that didn't seem like their style, and Lucas had implied that bagged blood was low-quality too, at least for us. They might be able to feed on hospital patients, though. I gave that some thought. If hospital patients died, especially the elderly and the very ill, who'd bat an eye? But the numbers would rise, and the blood still probably wouldn't be very good--I thought--and even that didn't seem like the Baali's style. They wanted to spread fear, yet they had to do it without the authorities, or more than a few regular people, figuring out what was happening.

That's when it hit me like a Mack truck.

*****

"What are we even looking for?" Rita growled. Her fur had grown back in already, and the skin beneath still looked angry red. She was not in a good mood.

"Lucas should get it," I said. "Ask him."

"How about you tell me, and I don't feed you to the Baali when they appear?"

I gestured at the road spread out before us. "Highway 57. Main artery between here and Little Rock, and a lot of other places besides. Do you have any idea how many people die in car accidents here?" Even in the middle of the night, the steady stream of headlights only thinned a bit. "They won't want to go too far, I don't think, and the other side's not a direct route to anywhere big. Eyes on the road."

"Hey," Clem began, but even as he spoke the rest of us saw what was beginning. The lead car in a cluster went into a panicked swerve. Nothing was in front of the driver but empty road, yet he was terrified enough to flip his car. In a few seconds of thunder, half the highway was blocked by a pileup. Injuries guaranteed, fatalities likely.

Only then did three Baali drop from the trees and start across the road at a run. I think I had assumed that you needed to see your target, but I had already proved with Lino that some powers didn't require that. You just had to know exactly where they were. "Behind the steering wheel of the car I can see clearly" was good enough, it seemed.

"Let's get 'em!" Lucas shouted. I grabbed out my couple of stakes, but I had only taken about two steps when something freaky shot by me. It looked sort of like a dog, but not any breed I knew. Its snout was way too long, it ran in weird leaps, and its back was striped like a tiger's. A mountain lion followed it, and then a wolf, which was what made me realize what I was seeing. Gangrel could turn into animals! But what was that thing? A Tasmanian tiger?

Well, suppose it was. My job here was the same: kill or be killed.

I don't know if it was bad luck that I picked the one I did. I didn't really even see what happened with the others, except that the mountain lion went after one and both the wolf and the thylacine the last one. The small man had his eyes on my stakes, so I put a high kick upside his head. I thought I had dazed him, but when I tried to whack him with one stake and stab him with the other--not in the heart yet, just to wound--he spun around and slammed both of them out of my hands. He pointed at me, and his fingers started to spray some sort of black sparks like the beginnings of a fire. My heart proved it could still move by leaping into my throat. I lashed out at him with one hand, not really thinking, like a karate chop maybe.

He went stumbling backwards, arterial blood leaking from his throat. If he were human, it would have been gushing instead; still, it was a nasty wound, and I had no idea how I'd inflicted it. There was no time to find out; I closed the distance between us in an instant and was on him like a leech, drinking the sweet nectar of life. Well...unlife. He flailed and struggled, but I swiped at him with my hands and finally he was still, lying collapsed in the road like a rag doll.

My fingernails were red, and not just with blood. They'd grown to an inch long, pointed and sharp. They didn't look like animal claws, but they had sliced into him like blades. That was another thing I'd already known the Gangrel could do, another thing I'd picked up from them I guess.

"Finish him," said Clem, still adjusting his face as he changed back from being the thylacine. "He's got to die." The other Baali were dead already, that quickly.

I'd never really wanted to kill anyone. Not even that poor girl; I'd just been desperately hungry. As for Jerry, that was self-defense. I wish I could say I was as hesitant as the Gangrel seemed to think I was being. But when I heard sirens in the distance, I bent down and tore out his throat completely with my fangs. I couldn't see anything change, but the others nodded, then became bats--or maybe birds; they were quick about it--and flew away.

I ran to the underbrush beside the road, crouched down, and did my best to hide.

Chapter Text

Neither the police nor the paramedics even came close to spotting me. I might not have refined that power, but it was plenty effective as it stood. The idea that I was developing Gangrel powers faster than my own bloodline's was funny to me, though there were good reasons for that.

Crouching there wasn't entirely comfortable, but the only thing that could have really required me to leave was sunrise, and that was hours away. I had fed well without any humans being hurt by my actions. I only wished there was something I could have done to prevent the accident, but I hadn't known where the Baali were till they caused it. Within an hour, the victims and first responders were gone, and I didn't even feel stiff as I got up and walked away.

I texted the Gangrel, but no one responded. They still didn't like me, and probably never would.

Maybe they were watching the accident on the local news. Apparently the dead Baali had crumbled to dust as we were departing the scene, and I had missed it. A few of the victims had mentioned them, but they weren't in the police reports.

What did you do with the rest of your night after killing somebody? I was going to have to get used to that, even if I killed vampires more often than humans--and really, that didn't seem too likely.

One option I had was to relax and recuperate, but wasn't I going to be doing that all day? There wasn't a lot in my house to study, even if I somehow thought I could still go to grad school. Or I could practice using my powers. Making those claws had burned blood, even though I hadn't really been aware of it at the time. I was going to have to reserve it for actual fights, or I'd be hungry again too soon. There were other things I knew how to do, though.

The desktop beckoned. I got online and began searching for some of the terms Lucas had mentioned those first two nights when we'd been on good terms. Clan names. The Book of Nod. Caine with the extra "e". At first I found nothing except a few joke websites. Then a pop-up ad appeared for something called Bloodspot 5.5. The ad was designed to look like a joke, too, but a couple of words, like "kindred" and "vital", with the "l" in a font that made it look like an "e", stood out. I downloaded it, then installed it using a few odd Latin phrases included in the support file.

Suddenly about a dozen pages that had given me 404 errors turned into real, readable sites. Somehow, they'd been hidden from the mundane internet. At least one was still a joke, but it was an inside joke: a blog called the Book of Don. The rest looked legitimate, at least to my inexperienced eye. Now I was getting somewhere.

By the end of the night I had some additional basic information on the clans and their powers--no guarantee it was accurate, but it was consistent with the little I knew. I had confirmed some suspicions about the elder vampires--namely, that the really hidebound sort were few in number by now, their domains taken over by younger vampires or more flexible elders. That didn't create any new elders, of course, but there had probably been advantages to at least keeping up with fashion since the Bronze Age. Did I believe that "KatiePelly" on Dreamwidth was really Katherine of Montpelier who had been sleeping since the late 1400s and only woken up in 1999? Well, maybe, maybe not, but her story sounded plausible. And I had burned a basic username on a joke post to the effect that the Ravnos clan founder, master of illusions, had faked his death and gone to ground, probably even had a pack of fourth-generation youngsters doing his bidding by now. It would have been the sensible thing to do, if you were a super-intelligent vampire with incredible powers but no knowledge of the modern day. So why not?

*****

It took me several minutes after waking to work out that admins in New Delhi had "banhammered" me (their term) for "inciting a panic," because I couldn't access the site at all on my desktop. How was I to know that they'd take my Ravnos joke that seriously? And what did the Lasombra and Tzimisce have to do with anything? All the other sites were still accessible, though, and I could get to that one with my phone or a fake ISP. I had expected to at least be told off, though, so it wasn't that big a deal.

I downloaded a pdf of the "really authentic Book of Nod" with a hundred complaints about how this or that was inaccurate. None of them had good ratings, though, so it was the best I could do. The very first comment was that it was a "translation of a translation of a translation, not suitable for any self-respecting scholar". It appeared to be a photocopy of a transcript on notebook paper. I almost just deleted the thing and went looking for alternatives, but the next few comments said things like "at least they got the gist right". I wasn't writing my thesis on it; this would serve for an introduction.

It wasn't as long as I expected, maybe because it only contained the best-attested parts. One of the first things I noticed was that none of the (supposed) scholars had observed a callback in the last section. Caine repeatedly referred to Abel as "the first part of all my joy", but when the Antediluvians are supposed to "break their fast on the first part of us", everyone assumed it meant elders or something like that. It struck me at once that it would be a nasty punishment to be cursed to devour whoever had made you happiest, even if it let some elders off the hook for being eaten. Maybe nobody wanted to think about it, or maybe I was thinking too hard myself.

I was still pretty full, but the night was very young. I took the car and wandered around town, finally encountering a nightclub far away from the university and the bowling alley where I had picked up that couple. I say "nightclub"; I suppose really it wasn't much more than a bar, but there was dancing. I'd never been here as a student, and the university would probably prefer it not to exist at all, but tomorrow night--maybe the next if there were problems--I stood a good chance of dying.

The dance floor was full of warm bodies moving to the beat. As a human, I think I'd have found it heady, but I never had much sense of rhythm. Vampire-me was no dancer either, but there was a hot thrum to the air imparted by the blood of the dancers. Despite being mostly full, an urge still rose up in me to feed on the life that washed through this place. I was able to fight it back down without too much trouble, though I wondered if I should try to be ready for the confrontation tomorrow by filling up.

Instead I opened myself up to the secret shames of the crowd, letting them wash over me like the music. The dancers and drinkers mostly showed me little more than a lack of self-control; they weren't the awful people I might have thought they were as a teenager. Here and there I found shades of something darker: the proprietor and his greed, a man on the prowl for drunken women, a wife out to cheat on her husband. No intentional malice, just lack of concern for others.

I strolled over toward the man looking for women who'd had too much. He didn't think of himself as a rapist, I gathered; he had no intention of using force, only taking advantage, but it occurred to me that I might scare him off that path and set him straight.

I put my hand on his shoulder and gave him a little shove to spin him around on his stool. He leered at me drunkenly; how many had he had himself? I needed a bad pickup line, and I'd never tried anything like that before. "Looking to give a girl a good time tonight?" I asked directly. I wasn't really surprised when his eyes widened and he nodded; again, his goal was just to get laid as easily as possible, and I was making it easier. I took his hand and pulled him up, guiding him out of the bar and over to my car. He seemed a little unsteady, not to mention unprepared for the strength I was showing.

I let him get into the car, warned him to buckle up, and then locked the doors with the driver-side override so he couldn't get out if he tried. I peeled out of the parking lot faster than was really safe. "My place or yours?" he asked, sounding more excited than scared.

That would change. "Neither," I told him. Speeding was a bad idea in this town, but I hugged the limit, heading for one of the parks. This one had a community center that was supposed to be locked but rumor said never was. Sure enough, when I got there the door hadn't been pulled all the way to, rendering the lock meaningless. He was no longer so enthused, probably wondering if I was cheating on someone mean, but I pulled him along easily enough and shoved him down onto the tattered couch.

Then I gave him a big, fanged smile. "You had to know," I said, "one day it'd come back to bite you."

I was prepared for screaming and a struggle. I wasn't prepared for him to pass out from sheer terror. His eyes bulged, he let out one awful shriek, and then he just collapsed back onto the couch. Maybe I'd pushed too far? But surely this would teach him a lesson he'd never forget. I started to leave, thought once more, and then unfastened his pants and tugged them down a little. Then I left him there to draw his own conclusions, ignoring the nagging urge to feed, and went on home.

Chapter Text

I woke up to the signal I had waited for yet dreaded: a text from the Dean. Only one word: "Tonight."

I didn't bother getting made up. I put on shorts and a comfortable shirt. If I was dying tonight, I was going to die feeling like myself. I reached the factory just ahead of the Gangrel trio, who got out of their car and started going through the motions of limbering up. I copied them; maybe it wouldn't make a difference to my undead muscles, but it might do something for my mind.

Then we walked inside with me taking point. The surviving Baali stood up as they caught sight of me. "Baal-Seraph," the one who'd called herself Muriel began, but Norbert waved her off.

"I have seen the light in the darkness," I said. "I choose to accept who I am. This is my destiny."

"It's about time," someone muttered, but again Norbert waved him to silence.

"It seems rather sudden," he said, "that you come to this conclusion only when three of us are dead."

"If there can be this many of us in a sleepy town in Arkansas," I explained, "then what can possibly stop us? I am Baali. I can't change that."

"In that case," he said calmly, "the lesser for the greater is acceptable sacrifice. Do you know who I am?"

"An elder," I said. "My sire. I worked that much out. All this was meant to bring me here, freely and of my own will, to serve the...Children, I think you called them? And here I am. You got me."

"And your...friends accept this?" he asked further.

"No," I said, "they're looking for an opening. They thought I brought them here to fight you., but they're not nearly enough."

A voice in my ear, very soft, said, "There may be a thermal overpressure shockwave. It is not a fireball and it will not hurt you." Then the same voice came in loudly over the building's speaker system. "I don't know for certain if the Lord God condemns vampires, but I know the city council has condemned this building. The heavy equipment isn't here yet, but I had the explosives delivered ahead of schedule." Over the wire again, Dean added, "Keep your eyes low and try not to look at the fire. Follow the path I showed you and you should be fine."

Norbert's eyes went wide and he leapt from his podium, but as he did so innocuous crates scattered through the room burst open with a monstrous roar, terrifying as a horde of demons. I could barely hear the screams of the Baali as flames engulfed them and reduced them to ash in moments. The world went red around me, and I clung to sanity the way you'd cling even to a knife blade rather than fall from a cliff.

More explosions went off around me in every direction but that of the crooked path I'd been given to follow. I zigged and zagged, hoping the Gangrel were staying behind me, and then....

I fetched up against "Muriel". I'd never found out her real name. Her eyes were lowered, like mine to avoid looking directly at the fire, but she wasn't fleeing, blindly or otherwise. She took two steps back and lifted her hands; a torrent of black nightmare sparks erupted from them. "This conflagration is nothing," she hissed, "compared to the fires of hell."

A blast of heat struck us, not from ahead but from behind--thermal overpressure shockwave--and the black fire washed back over her rather than over us. She let out a terrifying shriek as it incinerated her. I forced myself to dodge around her and follow the path, but I no longer remembered clearly where I was going. "Left!" Lucas yelled. "No, your other left!" I was losing myself in the red, descending into a blind panic.

Rita grabbed me by the hand, and I spun to lash out at her, but before I could get even halfway into position I felt a desperate soothing touch on my mind, like someone trying to calm down a frightened dog with petting before it bit them. She herself was frantic with fear, close to what I was going through, and yet for some reason she made the effort to help me. The red didn't vanish, but it receded back into the depths of my mind. "This way," I said firmly, and went right. We were almost at the emergency doors.

We dodged a toppling pile of crates and staggered out into the night, covered in soot. Before I could say "So much for Norbert, the mighty Baali elder," he appeared, striding through the flames behind us, their light reflecting from his skin like brass. He wasn't even singed.

Norbert threw back his horned head and laughed. "The weak fall away," he said, "but I tire of you standing against me. So hear me, unbeliever, mocker of the fallen into flames: when you leave here, my curse shall fall upon you, the curse of white men from town." And he walked away, still laughing.

The Gangrel stared at me as I fell to my knees. "What the hell is he on about?" Rita asked. She didn't know. The only silver lining was what Norbert had just given away about himself.

Chapter Text

So here I was, back in the Gangrels' camper. I don't know what possessed me to return there, but my car was parked outside. I had come voluntarily. They were not, inexplicably, tying me up or trying to kill me. In fact, Rita had given me one of the plastic blood bags. It tasted flat and unpleasant, but it was filling, at least.

"I don't understand," she said, "What does he mean, 'curse of white men from town', and why did you go limp like a fainting goat?"

I took a deep breath to prepare. "It's from a Stephen King novel, Thinner. It's a deconstruction of a...sorry, a 'gypsy curse'. The protagonist kills an old woman in a car accident and her father puts a curse on him. He chases down the old guy and when he refuses to take the curse off, he tells the old man, 'When I go, my curse will fall on you. The curse of white men from town. You think men like me don't know how to curse? We're good at cursing once we get started.' And he hires a hit man to kill the rest of the old man's family."

"I don't get it," Clem muttered. "How's it deconstructin' anything?"

I sighed. "The idea is that cursing isn't some special power the Roma have. Anybody can put a 'curse' on people, if that's what they want, and rich white people are actually pretty good at it."

"That does make sense," Lucas admitted, "but everybody who knows the Baali knows they can put curses on people, whether they're white or not. Hell, most vampires turn pretty damn white after a while. So what's our guy on about?"

"I don't know, but I've already tried to call my family. I sent emails instead because no one woke up, but it's two in the morning. They're probably just asleep...I hope."

"Something still feels wrong about that," Lucas said. "Not that I think you're lying, but something's missing."

My phone rang. "Dean Statham here. We've got an issue. My Mercury contractors have gone rogue. Lino says he refuses to leave a Baali alive, including you. He and his relatives are very dangerous people and they won't hesitate to hurt your friends and family to draw you out."

For a moment I couldn't speak. "Just like that? I mean--"

"Personally I don't understand it. I was given to believe we have plenty of leverage over the D'Habi, but they're not listening to me."

"Okay. Keep me posted on any new developments. Something strange is going on." I hung up on him and explained.

"You trust this guy?" Lucas asked. "How does he know you're a vampire?"

"I do, but I'm not clear on that. He just knew. He's my preacher and my old economics professor. He came out to check on me when I didn't come to church, and he took one look at me and knew what was up. Later he helped me break a curse, but that was mostly a willpower and positive thinking thing."

The Gangrel all shared significant looks. "I've been around a long time, girl," Rita said. "If that's all he's told you, he knows more than he's letting on."

"He claimed he worked for some kind of bigger organization he called a syndicate. Not the mob," I added hurriedly. "Can you really see him and think he works for the Mafia?"

"Yeah," Clem said bluntly.

"And he broke your curse," Rita said. "Anyone who can break curses can lay them, and I've heard some bizarre stories in my time. Are you certain he's not playing some kind of double-blind game with this Baal-Seraph?"

"I can't see how," I insisted. "There's no way Dean Statham knows how to curse anyone. It was some kind of psychotherapy mumbo-jumbo."

"You said yourself," Lucas pointed out, "old white guys are better at cursing than they let on. Sure, he killed off all the Baali but you and Norbert. Norbert didn't seem all that pissed about it, though. You said it yourself. Something strange is going on, and you better find out what before it brings down more trouble on us."

"Us?" I asked faintly.

"We made you a deal," Rita said, "and then tried to break it because you surprised us. But you came through for us anyway. We were in the wrong. We keep you around until Norbert is dust on the wind. After that...well, we'll see if there's an after."

That wasn't as comforting as I'd have liked, but it was something.