Wonderland
When dream and day unite

Christmas Eve, Denton.

The malls are open late and everyone is here, wandering to and fro in search of the last minute gift, spending bonus checks and digging themselves in debt. Santa Claus is receiving child visitors in a winter wonderland of foam, plastic and wood just down the long, open hall, and I can hear the bells on his elves' clothing jingle and occasionally the low "ho, ho, ho" of the Man Himself. Carols are crackling through the PA system; my favorite rendition of Jingle Bell Rock occasionally pulsing through the deafening crowd noise. And everywhere there are lights, tinsel and glittering jewels of every variety, the consumer miracles of the holiday season, lovely, gaudy, nostalgic.

I sure picked a great time to come home.

For the past hour I've been sitting in the food court, clutching onto the small paper cup in front of me, trying to ignore the fact that I'm starving. Everywhere around me there are mortals going about their business, talking and laughing, but in the steady roar of conversation I'm aware only of the scent of blood suffusing everything. Its stench covers me, drying up my parched lips and throat, stirring the thirst to rattle against its cage. The scent of the latte helps a little, granted, but only a little. I'm holding onto control by my considerably sharp fingernails, every bone and muscle aching, a grim frown on my ashen face.

I will not lose control. I will not.

I hate Christmas. Or, rather, I used to adore Christmas. Now it's like Chinese water torture, slowly wearing away my nerves. I've become one of those people for whom the holiday is a bleak reminder of the emptiness in my life, rousing bitterness and disappointment, and the despair I feel is like a heady drug to the Beast. Any flicker of holiday spirit is dashed whenever I glance down at the white flesh of my arms or turn my attention to the dry agony in my throat. I've taken the miser shtick one step further than anybody else. I'm dead. And though I never would've thought things could get any worse than that, life has proved me wrong yet again.

I'm alone.

Grief digs in against me; I let its talons come. Everywhere I look there are reflections of them. My beautiful, ruthless Michelle, whose humanity made her cruelty all the more tragic, and my soft-spoken, compassionate Daniel, now Kindred as well, now damned like the rest of us. I shudder to think of my former fiancé with the shining amber eyes of a killer, or of his weary acceptance of what my childe did to him. And whenever I long for Michelle's gentle kisses, her strength, her heartbreaking vulnerability which she hides so well...well, all I can hear is Laurent DeLouvois' laughter, light and urbane, making a mockery of my hopes and dreams.

Who says Toreador aren't dangerous?

There are familiar faces here. Jolie and Brooke breezed through a little while ago, one laden with bags and the other pensive, those dark eyes of Kelly's sweeping the crowd with a touch of sadness. They didn't see me, of course. I wouldn't allow it. But I watched from afar as they came into the food court, acquired drinks, and proceeded on their way. Perhaps Brooke sensed my presence - she glanced in my direction several times - but she was too distracted to pay much heed. For the nth time I wished Michelle were here to tell me what they were thinking. Why was she so sad? She had wealth, hope, love - and above all, life. Was it her father? Her family? Some other British goth-child angst which I couldn't understand?

Who cares.

I've been watching life here as if through a one-way mirror and the two female magi were no different. Out of mind, out of reach. Perhaps once I'd hoped of returning home to the welcoming embraces of friends, but the idea seemed monstrous now. I'd gone against everything they taught me, done everything they feared. I'd traded away my human soul for some peace of mind, only to lose it in the end, unsurprisingly enough. I'd given the Embrace and, worse yet, I'd lost my former mortal lover - the last piece of my old life - to the misguided machinations of my own childe.

Who was I to deserve compassion?

And, really, there was no absolution to be had from my friends. Not this time. Not after slamming the door in their faces and abandoning everything I'd worked for in their company. I certainly wasn't about to deny everything which had happened - I needed the memory of Michelle and our time together too much - and I wasn't going to hide from it. I imagined my friends and what I might say to them: C'mon, we always knew this was going to happen to me. I could see by the look in your eyes you were expecting this. I failed. What more can I tell you? What else can I do? You were right all along.

I could only hope they'd read my story and understand this spiritual exhaustion.

Sighing, I look at my reflection in a store window opposite me. I look like any number of weary shoppers waiting around me for their friends and family to finish. Dark aviator sunglasses. Long, curly auburn hair wound back into a ponytail. Stylish leather jacket which Michelle purchased for me with Laurent's money - the memory causing a pang of grief and loathing. Plum turtleneck to replace the old one I tossed when leaving White Rabbit. Black jeans, boots, supple leather gloves. My usual thing, like a shadow lurking in this brightly lit miasma of song and wealth. Vampware, Ashley used to call it.

Ashley.

I realize I'm walking suddenly - I didn't even notice that I stood up - and I'm cutting through the dense crowd like a scalpel. Everybody knows to get out of my way, even if they don't know why. What's to fear from a slender young woman at Christmas, after all? But they sense what I am. Blood drinker. I exude a very real aura of despair and everyone wants to get away from its cloying touch before they become infected. An off-duty police officer running security detail glances in my direction, frowns cautiously, but all it takes is a cold look to dissuade him. He's ghouled anyway, though no telling to whom. But I can see the blood's subtle effect on him.

Feels great to be home.

I close my eyes as I walk, drowning in the smell of warm blood, and I allow people to give way for me. I often wonder if this is how it is for ghosts, drifting through a sea of humanity, just a step out of touch with the solid world. Maybe I'll find out some day, judging from what Brooke said. Bad enough that we Kindred should suffer as much as we do, especially those of us who never had a choice in the matter. We have to endure the hell of separation even in Final Death. What kind of fucked up god made it this way and why?

No.

I stop dead in the middle of the hall, nearly causing two teenage girls to crash into me as they flounce by. As I do so the aroma of blood thickens around me, becomes a fog around my aching mind. My throat closes up as mortals glance at me, frightened and curious, and everywhere I look there is only blood, not human beings. Not people, just food. Food for the taking. I feel my fingers flexing into claws and force them down. I make myself start walking again, head bowed against the growing hunger, willing it to stay down. The claustrophobia of the place doesn't help. Surrounded by mortals, by noise, by soaring walls, I'm completely out of my natural element. A displaced lioness.

I'm growing smaller, pulling inward as I wrestle with the hunger. Humans start bumping into me left and right as I go against the grain. I feel like that woman from the Twilight Zone, trying to escape from the mall and turning slowly back into the store mannequin she really is. I stumble as someone's shoulder crashes into me, and I nearly lose it right there, flashing claws and fangs, but I catch myself with a supreme effort. The food court was safer. Stillness allowed me the power to restrain my thirst. Here I'm swimming through a tide of blood, struggling against the waves went send me crashing toward the maw of the Beast.

Suddenly I'm bursting out into the night air, the cold slamming me with the force of a sledgehammer, leaving me delirious for a moment. The sound has cut a thousand fold and I'm standing outside one of the smaller side exits, which I must've fought my way to in a haze. There are still mortals here, standing around and smoking, talking about a movie they just saw. I try to hide the fact that I'm so gaunt, so pale, out of habit. But they can tell from my stagger that there's something wrong with me. I'm ill or drunk. The thirst is ravenous, clawing up my throat in a surge of nausea, and I shudder as I smell the scent of countless human beings on my clothes.

I lean against the building and breathe deeply of the cold, trying to steady myself.

A girl lays her hand on my shoulder.

"Hey, are you okay?"

I look up at her. Pretty young girl, probably eighteen at the most. Thick black hair smashed by a knit cap, glasses riding low on her nose, sweatshirt and blue jeans bundling up the rest of her. I'm struck by her resemblance to Alice Chenoweth, as if my past were coming back to taunt me at every turn. For a moment, I feel the stake pierce my heart again, hear the roar which sounded nothing like Michelle - and then I'm back, staring at this young woman whose eyes are blank, innocent.

"I'm fine," I whisper. There are already designs drawing up in my head on how to kill her, how to feast on her succulent warmth. I'm ill, perhaps, and could use a hand getting to my car. But her friends are watching us, and the Masquerade is the Masquerade regardless of how hateful this all is. Or maybe I could just kill them all?

"I'm fine," I insist, my voice threatening to become a growl as I straighten up, "I just got dizzy. Being inside made me claustrophobic..."

Flash of concern in her eyes. "You going to be okay getting home?"

I don't smile, even though I bitterly want to. She's standing close enough that I can smell the sweet tang of her perfume, the faint scent of sweat in all the secret places of her body. Amazing how different men and women are to my senses. The cream of her skin is luxurious, the fine wisps of her hair seeming to appear from nowhere in the soft flesh. The aroma of her blood is delicious. I can see the throb of the artery against her throat, hear the gentle rhythm of her heartbeat. I feel like a husk inside, desperate for a drink. My fangs push out to full extension as I loll my head toward her, but then I'm forcing myself away, stumbling off into the night with a mumbled yes, thank you.

I crash into the front seat of the Mustang, shivering and hugging myself. My thirst is scalding, but I swallow it down, struggling through the warring impulses inside of me to reach the cool, darkened comfort of my surroundings. In desperation, I bring my own wrist to my lips and sink my fangs into it, sucking the blood from my own veins to momentarily sate my hunger. The blood is brackish against my tongue, used, awful flavor, but it shocks my system as it pours down my throat. It won't stop the hunger at all, I know, but it can slow it down. Just long enough to regain control, to keep from going back and killing that girl.

After a few minutes, the world straightens out a bit. Dizzy, I grip the steering wheel for support while everything swims back into solidity, glaring out at the swarm of headlights passing on the freeway ahead of me, like maddened fireflies. The bitter taste of my blood is on my tongue, bringing the hunger to greater heights, but while I feel like my insides might turn to dust I miraculously feel some stability coming on. My arms tremble as I start the car and pull out of the parking space, willing myself to concentrate on not running down some man and his children as they cross my path. I badly need to feed or I'm going to frenzy, that I understand. But I won't allow myself to. I can't. This hunger is the only penance I have.

I know I'm driving to the dojo, even if I don't admit it to myself.

A darkened street is where I stop and get out. Shoving my hands in my pockets, I start walking through the deserted neighborhood, allowing the cold to seep into me and cool some of the cravings I feel. It's largely ineffective, of course, but it's better than nothing. I have no other way to bottle up my hunger now, and a thousand ways to satisfy it. My eyes stray to the houses and other buildings lining the street, dreaming of the mortals within. Christmas lights sting my eyes from every sleeping home as I pass, wishing like hell the ache I feel would go away. My head is throbbing, my eyes are gummy, my throat is raw. Every step forward I take is an effort, threatening to pitch the world over onto its side.

In this manner, I reach the dojo.

Of course, Ashley isn't here. The lights are on but nobody's home. I knock, I pound, I nearly scream to try and get someone's attention. There isn't any answer. While I doubt she's celebrating Christmas, my mentor is probably with her husband tonight, or out on some Faerie revelry or other, lurking in the shadows of the celebration as always. Still, Ashley's the only friend in the world whom I wish to see right now and even she's out of reach. I sink down onto the steps, sobbing softly in my mewling voice, but no tears will come. My eyes burn and my head pounds but the blood tears won't fall. Even my moans are raspy, dry, like paper.

My skin feels as if it's been stretched taut over my bones, the muscle and ropy blue veins pushing out against it as I battle for control. The fangs which used to be my eyeteeth are still out full and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth as I drag in heavy gulps of cold air. Amazing that nobody noticed me at the mall. I must be getting to the worst stages of hunger, shuffling around with a dull gleam in my eyes, the Beast showing in every aspect of my appearance. I struggle for my feet and fail, falling hard to the concrete steps.

Something has to give, I argue with myself, You have to feed or go into the ground.

I huddle against the door, contemplating this. If I bury myself, how long will it be before I wake up again? Months? Years? It wouldn't take long before I entered torpor, and only the taste of blood would rouse me again. But if nobody knew where I lay then there wouldn't be any vitae to bring me around, not unless my friends came looking for me - fat chance - or someone happened upon me accidentally. Hell, I might sleep through Gehenna, or be destroyed by some hapless mortals digging to lay pipes or something. And after every aborted attempt at suicide, wouldn't that be the ultimate joke?

Suddenly, the scent of blood, as if to answer my delirium.

Just a whiff at first, but growing stronger. Familiar scent. Hard to pin down though, particularly with the bloodlust burning in my veins. What was one mortal compared to another when all I needed was to drink? Now footsteps. Light and quick rhythm, a female gait, but the sound was muffled. Soft-soled shoes, possibly boots. I can smell the scent of perfume underneath the blood, sweet and surprisingly subtle. Ashley? No. I've never been able to pick up the Sluagh from a distance. She was too clever for that; and besides, it was her nature to not be noticed. The footsteps scrape upon the pavement before coming to a stop.

"Hello?"

Familiar voice, too. Female.

Releasing a shaky breath, I look up at her, blinking my eyes to clear them. My eyes are so dry the lids keep sticking to them. Petite figure, dark-haired and dark-eyed, bundled up against the cold, with a splash of red here and there, perhaps a scarf. I can tell she's startled by my presence here just from the way she moves, the slight backwards jerk, hazy blur that she is, but she only retreats a step to reassess me. Ache throbs behind my eyes as I try to see past the haze of bloodlust and pain, wanting to cry but completely unable to. Has it been that long since I last fed? Nothing seems to be working right.

Finally, the image resolves into something recognizable.

* * *

Karma
Denton, Texas
8:37pm, February 16, 2006

It happened early one Thursday evening, nearly two months after my encounter with Ashley, while I was sitting in the coffee shop Karma near Fry Street and Hickory, which I'd taken to frequenting both to avoid the bitterly cold temperatures - without body heat, vampires freeze all too easily - and to dull my ever present hunger somewhat. A hot cup of coffee sat beside me, laden with cinnamon, its scent trying and failing to mask the aroma of human blood around me, and in the babble of mortal conversation I kept my gaze fixed on my stolen Apple laptop, scanning the lines of information which flashed by on the LCD screen.

I'm sure it seems bizarre, of course, taking refuge from my thirst in a place where the presence of human beings is all but unavoidable, but since leaving my Michelle and Daniel, I'd fallen hard upon coffee - just the scent of it, mind you - as a crutch, much like a smoker chews gum to endure constant nicotine cravings. Its aroma, combined with the all pervading smell of cigarette smoke, dulled the lioness' sense of smell, and the white noise of voices caused me to shrink from those around me and withdraw into my own inner world. The better to focus on the task at hand, so long as I fed lightly every other day or so. The better to blot out the painful memories and thoughts which had haunted me since leaving New York.

I was looking quite respectable for a change, at least amid the college crowd. For variety's sake, I'd cropped my hair back from its normal shoulder-length mane to a manageable bob, glassy auburn curls falling in front of my drawn white face, and I'd found an all night laundromat where I could get the few sets of clothes I owned clean. So for once my blue jeans and plum turtleneck didn't look as if I'd spent the night sleeping in the ground, which I had, though the boots and leather jacket Michelle gave me were just as dusty and travel worn as ever. And sunglasses, of course. Even in the dim, smoky confines of the coffee shop, shades were a necessity. Who knew what the computer's electric light might do if reflected in my eyes?

All in all, I was feeling shockingly human.

Oh, the blood drinker was lurking in the background, of course. She always was. The amount of warm, pliant bodies around me assured that. And with a diet of animal blood and the occasional mortal dalliance, I was in a perpetually hungry state, wholly unsatisfied by my meals yet grimly determined to persevere. But it was better than starving myself into a blood frenzy, which is all I'd accomplished before. Whatever guttering flame of humanity I was trying to nurture, I couldn't avoid making friends with the Beast. After all, just because I looked like any of the young mortal women around me didn't mean I wasn't a killer, a predator, and it sure as hell didn't change anything I'd done. Wasn't that what I originally left Denton to learn?

With the miracle of 24-hour telephone banking, I'd transferred all the money I had in the world - the "blood money" Michelle and I had lived on in New York, earned in service to Amanda Chase, Prince of New York - here to Denton, purchased a year's worth of dial-up Internet and cellular service, withdrawn the remainder into cash, and closed the account online. I had enough money left over for the irregular use of the laundromat, gasoline on the rare evenings I chose to drive instead of run or walk, an occasional motel room in which to relax and warm myself, and a seemingly endless supply of lattes and hot apple ciders I would never drink.

And it wasn't nearly enough to forget the agony of the past year.

I glanced up over the rim of my sunglasses as the three of them entered without a care in the world - Sung Lee, Naomi and Laura, the adopted daughters of Steph and Jolie. Sung Lee was in front, wearing a tired, burdened expression, a shock of electric blue hair swaying around her exotic Korean features. A laptop was slung over her shoulder alongside her backpack, which was festooned with anti-establishment slogans and buttons. Even her baggy black tee shirt proclaimed in large white letters: "I know the Truth".

I flirted with a bitter smile.

Naomi and Laura followed close after her. Naomi, a petite red-haired beauty, cutting a sensual, vibrant figure amid the drab colors of the café, dressed like a little girl in her pink baby doll and tight blue jeans. Laura, leanly muscled and standing a head taller than her sisters, the very model of Nordic loveliness, her long blonde hair pulled back in a simple ponytail, wearing a leather jacket and jeans. The three of them - serious, sensual, athletic - couldn't have been more different from each other, and all of them turned heads.

Of the three, I knew Laura best - we were fellow students of Ashley's, after all, and we'd fought together on a handful of occasions, including against Billy's pack. The other sisters I knew largely from my friendship with Stephen, or whatever was left of it, and his kindness in allowing me to stay in the family's pool house after I couldn't bear Andrew's presence anymore.

Sung Lee was my favorite, of course.

Without thinking, I turned my head slightly as they passed me, heading for the counter.

Suddenly, like a jolt of electricity, my senses snapped into focus. As the three young women ordered their drinks, my eyes were drawn to the window. Casually peering inside the café was a girl, the edges of her form hazily defined and shimmering faintly as I watched, and although she nearly pressed her face to the glass, the people in the booth there didn't seem to notice her at all.

Was she visible to anyone but me?

Long black locks of hair fell around a dusky skinned face, tattoos or strange make-up dotted her face and shoulders, and her clothes had an almost gypsy-like quality. She methodically scanned the faces of everyone in the café, her attention lingering on the three sisters before moving on. And then, finally, we locked gazes.

The girl started, realizing for the first time that I could see her, and with a panicky air she quickly turned and darted away from the window. I very nearly bolted out of my chair to pursue her, puzzled by this strange girl and her interest in the sisters, but I clenched my hand into a tight fist to subdue the feeling. Running out the door would attract Sung Lee if not Laura's attention - something I wasn't sure I wanted at this point. And besides, the ghost - or whatever she was - would probably just wait for the young women to leave.

The question was, should I even get involved?

* * *

For a long moment, I simply stared in shock.

I stared at the large gash at her forehead, from which a thick, dark red fluid was bleeding, which smelled of blood and oil, the same horrid scent emanating from the two dissected bodies in the mechanic's pit nearby, and at the scratched metal where the bony plate of her skull should've been. And before any realization as to what this woman, this Sybille, was came to mind, a shudder rippled through me, and my gaze fell down to my shaking hands. I hadn't meant to hit her - and certainly not so hard! I hadn't even realized I'd done it until I heard the crack of her head against the cement floor.

No! I didn't mean to -

A sudden coldness washed over me, as it so often does in these situations, and all of these doubts and questions were cut short. The lioness' instincts extended beyond just the battle fever, after all. I stared a moment longer, my jaw clenching to hold in a despairing growl, and then I was scanning the room, hunting for anything useful. Spying a small cot in the corner, I gently carried Sybille over there, hoping that it wouldn't do further harm to disturb her this way, and I laid her out flat. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bleeding was already starting to slow, but as the guilty party I wasn't about to take any chances.

She was still breathing, deeply and evenly. Her pulse was steady.

I swallowed down on my emotions. Thank god.

Moving silently, I scavenged the garage until I happened upon a first aid kit, set on a small workbench nearby as if recently used, and set about cleaning and dressing her wounds as best I could. I didn't think at all during this, even as I made out more of the metal plating beneath her skin, which was either molded to the bone or had replaced it entirely. And it quickly became apparent that this wasn't the only "modification" which had been made to the young woman. In amongst blood, bone and muscle, I felt an entire network of wires and subcutaneous armor plating, particularly over the soft organs in the abdomen and over the chest - a cyborg.

A Hit-Mark, probably, like the bodies in the tanks. Though I'd never actually seen one before, only heard about them from BTG.

I was a bit out of my element here, wasn't I?

Yet why did she act so vulnerable? So human? Why the prayers?

Sybille didn't awaken under my examination, nor even as I cleaned the wound with alcohol, though she didn't seem to be worsening either, merely unconscious.

When I finished, I rolled back onto my haunches, staring at the woman's limp form on the cot, horrified by what I'd done and at a loss for how to help her further. Part of me wanted to run, to get as far away from there as quickly as possible, like a spooked animal. But that was instinct speaking, trying to keep me alive at others' expense, not reason - and certainly not compassion. I couldn't bear to simply abandon her, not in this condition. The bleeding seemed to have stopped on its own, but I didn't know when or if she'd regain consciousness.

Of course, whomever she'd contacted earlier - whatever lay on the other side of the gate, amid the awful stench of death and decay - would come looking for Sybille sooner or later. Of that I had no doubt. But this hardly looked like a Technocracy stronghold, nor did the young woman seem like your standard, rank and file MIB, at least not any kind I'd ever met. Judging from the clutter of the garage, it seemed the girl had been scavenging, collecting spare parts here and there with which to build the gate - miraculous that it even worked! And judging from the decrepit bodies in the tanks, she'd been cannibalizing her fellow cyborgs for parts. Probably to repair herself, gruesome though the thought was.

Sitting in the dark, I glanced over the room again, thinking.

I looked down at the blood on my hands and rubbed it between my fingers, grimacing at the oily texture. I sniffed at it, even tasted it despite my better judgment, and shuddered in revulsion at the bitter flavor it evoked. Like blood, but not. Contaminated. Changed.

But still blood.

I stared at it on my hands for a long time. The scent of it was everywhere in the mechanic's shop, and most strongly around the bodies in the pit. The hunger pains were coming again already, rippling up through my ribs and belly. If anything, my thirst had only been growing over the past few years, the urge to hunt and feed coming earlier and earlier with time. No matter that I could actually last longer without feeding - that was irrelevant to the Beast. The more I could take, the more I wanted, as with every addiction. When was the last time I'd fed? A deer the night before, if I remembered correctly. A young woman - cream skin, sweet fragrance, urging me to take her fully - in a nightclub a few days before that.

Too long, frankly. My control was fraying, as Sybille's condition proved.

I wanted to laugh suddenly. This had never been a problem with Michelle. She'd always been insatiable, and we'd hunted together every few days at least. This had never been a problem until the guilt of human death overwhelmed me again. That's the tragedy of it, don't you see? It's our selfishness and our grasping for redemption which leads us to do the things we do. All in the name of virtue!

I knew I should hunt. But it was very early yet, barely even nine o'clock - thank god for early nightfall in Winter! I had plenty of time, and I could hope Sybille recovered before anything went awry. And besides, the grey area between satiation and starvation had become painfully familiar over the past few years.

My gaze drifted around the room, and I smiled sardonically at what little food Sybille kept here, utterly useless for my purposes, mostly Twinkies and other assorted junk food. High sugar, high fat, probably lethal in large quantities to any mortal but suitable, I supposed, for the digestive system of a cyborg. Perhaps simple foods were all she could digest, depending on how severely "modified" she was - something I didn't care to think on deeply. I was reminded of Wells' degenerate yet intellectually advanced Martians from War of the Worlds, for whom blood was the only sustenance their withered bodies could handle.

Pushing away from Sybille, I sat against the wall to watch and wait.

* * *

Sybille was far more forthcoming when she woke, for which I was very relieved.

Though she wasn't quite the young woman I knew:

"I am in need of contact with my Iteration to facilitate repairs, and I must deliver certain supplies through that device. I am willing to answer questions or facilitate what aid I can give you, if you are willing to accept those terms?"

I admit it. I blinked. I didn't know what to say to that.

Around midnight, she had stirred and propped herself into a slight sitting position, seeming completely unsurprised to find me still there. The damage was worse than I'd thought, however - a skim of the dark, oily blood swam over her left eye, and occasionally as she spoke it ran down her cheek, looking very much like my own blood tears.

In comparison to the panicky, almost childlike young woman I'd encountered earlier, this Sybille seemed thoroughly in control of the situation, her voice dry and flat, as she spoke through what imagined was a great deal of pain. I took this change as anger at first, but no - her bearing, tone and speech patterns had all changed dramatically, taking on the bluntness of a captured soldier. This was more what I expected from a Hit-Mark. But how deeply did her modifications go? Was her previous personality just a sham, a program running atop an underlying AI?

I wasn't sure whether to be relieved or disturbed by her sudden honesty.

"Alright," I sighed, "Please, continue."

"There has been a corruption to the purity of the Primary Iteration," the small woman informed me, "We - I am a product of the Iteration created from a breakdown in the Primary Iteration due to an unknown event. The Primary Iteration became three separate Iterations. The Imperfect Iteration has been expelled beyond the rim; the Patriarch controls what is known as Iteration X, and the Matriarch has been expelled to Earth. Iteration X has begun a program to eliminate the Matriarch’s children. We have been hunted and assaulted at almost every level because of our perceived imperfections - "

Sybille's voice strangled off, and she fell into a fit of coughing.

Rebel Hit-Marks?

I'd heard of civil war within the Technocracy, of course, before originally leaving Denton - if there was anyone who could be said to "run" the city, after all, at least on the supernatural side, it was the mages of BTG and their various allies, who had every reason to keep tabs on their enemies in the Union. But I'd never heard of anything like this before, let alone cyborgs referring to themselves as "children" and their creators as parents. But then again, it's not like I'd ever met a cyborg either.

* * *

Well, there is someone here, Lanthinel thought.

Treading lightly upon the floor matting, the Sidhe scanned the darkness of the Dojo with eyes opened to true magick, which allowed him to see not only through the thin wooden walls but the very flow of Quintessence in the Patterns around him. He was certainly unusual in this regard - he knew of no other Changelings gifted with the Art as he was - and he took quiet pride in this, appreciative of the advantage it gave him, particularly at moments like this.

Walking a slow circle, the pump-action shotgun resting snugly in his hands from its leather shoulder strap, Lanthinel glanced all around him, trying to pick up the source of the movement he sensed. With life magick, he could sense the myriad little creatures which made Ashley's Dojo and the surrounding area their home, yet the presence troubled him because it was so starkly not alive. It was a void in the flow of life around him, a dark spot. That it was dead and animate could only mean one thing: a vampire, hiding using their blood arts.

Wonderful.

Neatly brushed, golden blond hair swayed around Lanthinel's face as he stepped carefully over a fallen support beam, which had been shattered by the impact with something very large and very heavy that left a deep gouge in the floor near it. Judging from the hypertech machinery he had already discovered and deactivated, the Sidhe was almost certain Ashley had been the target of a H.I.T. Mark attack - operatives of Iteration X, the Technocracy's masters of machines. The thought brought a small chuckle out of him - even Undone, her Fae self destroyed, Ashley still managed to attract the worst kind of trouble.

What else could he expect? Even before falling asleep, Ash was hardly a typical Sluagh.

But she had also been one of his closest friends and companions, as well as the greatest swordswoman he had ever known. Also a treasured confidante, for Lanthinel had turned to Ashley for her kind advice and support during the long years when he watched Katherine feebly struggle to awaken to her own Fae self, the nymph Ariel. Another old friend, his affection for her tangled up with the love of his mortal sister, whom he chose to let awaken on her own - a decision he came to bitterly regret when Katherine was murdered and changed into a vampire, shattering Ariel, perhaps forever.

And even then Ashley proved invaluable, for in those first few months of Katherine's vampire existence, when her survival - both physical and psychological - was deeply in doubt, the Sluagh had taken in the young Gangrel. She taught Katherine to wield a blade, something his bookish, fickle younger sister had never seriously even thought of doing before. More than that, Ashley taught her to care about holding on to her humanity, her very soul, and revealed the truth about Ariel to Katherine, which was something that Lanthinel, horrified and disgusted by what his sister became, simply could not bring himself to attempt.

The irony was not lost on him, of course. It was originally Ariel, whose gradual evolution from fey wood nymph to bard to knight of House Fiona he observed in fits and starts, who taught Ashley the art of dueling and swordplay early in the 15^th century. And remembering nothing of it, Katherine was forced to start over from scratch. Ashley was glad to take on the role of mentor, to watch over their old friend's slumbering spirit, for which Lanthinel was deeply grateful. As a Sluagh, Ash was far better equipped to handle Katherine's devolution into a brutal, martyred killer than he was. How many times had he considered simply killing her, after all, to free she and Ariel both?

And now Katherine was gone, having abandoned everything she built in Denton to wander aimlessly, and Ashley was Undone, having gone out in a blaze of glory. Lanthinel hated the sense of decay in everything around him. The feeling that everything they once fought for was beginning to crumble.

Lanthinel's coat swung behind him as he stopped suddenly, struck by a strange odor.

It smelled almost like cat fur...?

Grimacing, shotgun at the ready, the Sidhe turned, hunting for the hidden vampire again. His bright blue eyes swept over the ruined Dojo, the numerous racks of antique swords and practice weapons left bare for the first time he could remember - a sight which left him feeling somewhat sad. And as his gaze skimmed over the broken support beams and scorched walls, penetrating the thick gloom with his magick, Lanthinel's jaw clenched as he spotted her in the doorway to the kitchen.

Katherine.

Of course. Who else would it be?

His sister was crouched on all fours, her back arched, peering at him with feline eyes that glowed red in the darkness. The Gangrel's hair was shorter than Lanthinel remembered, cropped back to a shoulder-length bob, but it was still a wild tangle around her white, angular face, curls of it falling across her eyes and brushing her bluish mouth. The leather biker jacket she wore was dusty and her blue jeans were ripped - by claws, he noted - in numerous places. Yet despite her animal appearance, there was no ferocity in her expression. In fact, once Lanthinel looked past the catlike shimmer of her eyes, he found them to be remarkably human.

That was different.

Katherine smiled a little catlike smile, her voice soft: "Hi, Lanthinel."

He sighed.

It was going to be one of those nights.

* * *

When was the last time I lay on a real bed?

I couldn't remember. Weeks? Less than a month, I was sure of that. I remembered the last hotel room - cheap, clean, utterly basic amenities - and how luxurious simple sheets and pillows could be, how decadent the hot water of the shower felt on my perennially cold skin. Winter is the cruelest time for vampires, after all, and any shelter would do to avoid the all pervasive chill. When you've got no body heat, at least not without the benefit of magic, the long, cold nights were hell to endure.

I lay on my back in Sung Lee's bedroom, the small apartment she kept set aside for the occasional bout of privacy, and tried not to think about the whirlwind of events over the past few days, which had led me inexorably closer to the mortal world I thought I'd left behind here in Denton. The apartment was more or less neatly kept, but it seemed hardly lived in. Sung Lee's scent - subtly sweet and strangely like her adopted father's, different than I remembered - was faint everywhere except the bedroom and down the hall, where she kept a computer and some research material. It swam around me as I lay there, stroking the fur of Lucifer, the Siamese stray who'd taken to following me a few nights earlier, who lay on my belly.

Her heat, small though it was, felt wonderful.

Thoughts of Ashley, Sybille, Lanthinel and others danced around my head, but when I tried to close my eyes to banish them, there were merely other images there waiting for me - running through the night on all fours, the smell of blood in the air; the slight shock on Lanth's face when he saw me in the dojo, crouching like a cat with my eyes flashing red; memories of Sung Lee and her father from before I originally left Denton, the differences which she must have erased through magick; thoughts of my beautiful Michelle curled up beside me, draping her arm and leg across my body, and the immediate loneliness which the memory evoked.

Had I detected sadness in Lanthinel's eyes when he saw how I'd changed? I thought I saw pity in Sung Lee's. Here I was in her bedroom, after all, another stray taken in. It wasn't lost on me that I was becoming something other than human, or even Kindred - Gangrel occupied a category of their own. Yet I couldn't say I was devolving, becoming less human. On the contrary, the more I felt myself sliding into the Beast, into the sly patterns of the feline mind, the more comfortable I felt in my own skin. It was a transformation which had begun in the desert, of course, and which Michelle, by rekindling my humanity, had ironically accelerated.

Pride mentality, I supposed, like that of a mother cat. I'd certainly attracted a following of cats from the area, of whom Lucifer was most loyal. And certainly, when I looked myself in the eyes, I saw a startlingly human woman behind the white face and predator's features. Even transformed into the lioness, this was true. The contradiction there of the human animal was enough to leave me reeling if I examined it too long.

Lucifer's purring hummed through my belly, her warm little body soaking into me. I thought of my dream, from before I'd even met Michelle, of the cat woman.

Sighing, I opened my eyes again.

It felt surprisingly good to see Lanthinel again. Crouching in the darkness of Ashley's dojo, virtually invisible, it took a moment to recognize my brother - having been consumed so utterly with thoughts of my childe, of Daniel, and Ashley's disappearance, my memories of him were rusty, and the huntress merely regarded him as a potential threat. Yet like Sung Lee, he seemed to draw out the human woman in me. Standing there in his home, feeling hopelessly out of place in wealthy civilization, I felt a pang of heartsickness. The lush furniture and décor hardly seemed real, and I found myself sniffing at things, caressing them, to reassure myself of their reality. And then Sung Lee had offered her apartment as a place to crash, and for the first time since leaving Michelle, I felt...loved.

Maybe it was the sense of being drawn into a group again, of no longer being alone, but I wanted desperately to talk to someone, to justify everything I'd felt and done with Michelle, even now that she'd done the unthinkable. I couldn't blame her for Alice's death, though I'd done so anyway out of confusion and grief. But the death of Daniel's lover, accidental or otherwise, and then to give him the Embrace - ! It was monstrous. Yet in a strange way, I knew Michelle meant well, and in the chaos after Alice's death and my childe's first change, neither of us had been thinking especially clearly. And how could I stop loving her when she'd had this profound effect on me? We'd had a year of happiness together, more than any two monsters had a right to expect, and as much as it broke my heart, I cherished it.

I hadn't thought happiness was possible for me. Nor love. Nor desire. Nor joy.

It was transfiguring.

Growling softly, I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes, forcing back the bloody tears which stung my eyes. How often must a vampire cry after all? I must've set a record by now. So few other Kindred had the emotional capacity to feel this kind of grief. I recalled Andrew's initial disgust upon seeing me again, having hoped I'd never return, followed by my "gracious" reception, grinning like a jackal over his supposed princely power, and the jeers of the Harpies in the half-light of the chamber. I was indifferent to their taunting, even Andrew's condescending platitudes. I was fulfilling the Traditions and that was all, though I found myself missing the courtliness of New York's Kindred. What they thought of my life was irrelevant.

Or so I thought.

"We're monsters and incapable of love," said Andrew offhandedly, as if he were reading my thoughts, "We shouldn't feel such things..."

Outwardly, I thought I showed no great reaction. A little tightening of the jaw perhaps, the narrowing of the feline eyes. Inside I was seething. Of course, I don't think his remark was directed specifically at Michelle and I. In fact, I doubted he knew about my childe at all, despite our relationship being common knowledge in New York. I certainly hadn't mentioned it. So I swallowed down on my retort, my condemnation, and endured his little speech in silence. Why waste my breath on him anyway? Andrew was a fool. What could he possibly understand of love, let alone any genuine human emotion?

"Is there a blood hunt for you?" he asked, fully expecting me to be on the run.

"I left New York with the Prince's favor," I replied coolly.

"Oh, really?"

I offered him a thin smile. "Yes. I was her mercenary. Ms. Chase provided me with a suite at the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, as well as the usual amenities. I killed more Sabbat in her name than I can remember, and even stopped a plot to assassinate her. I worked in close association with the Sheriff, and spent a great deal of time with the Toreador Primogen. Even as a Gangrel, I was afforded a fair amount of respect for my services. But then, we always respect those with prowess at killing, don't we?"

Andrew smirked. "Yes, we do."

Of course, Andrew loathed that I'd circulated through the New York courts, the bastion of Camarilla power in the New World, however beleaguered it was. Loathed that I'd lived on Fifth Avenue, which might as well be a million miles away from the relative anonymity of Denton, Texas. Loathed that I'd wined and dined, so to speak, with the social elite of the great metropolis, while he fashioned his own little kingdom here. Loathed the implied threat in my explanation - I was a diabolist, he could easily tell that from studying my aura, a power I knew he possessed. My blood was more potent than ever, thanks to the Assamite Saqim, and any Kindred who regularly indulges in the cannibalism of diablerie poses a threat.

Thank god Angelo was there to end the taunts and speeches.

As I lay there in the dark, listening to the night world around me - the wind in the trees outside, the soft roar of the central heating, the myriad little noises which human beings couldn't hear, which had been nearly maddening at Lanthinel's house, surrounded by machines and electronics - I laughed to myself. Having spent the past year in almost the exclusive company of other Kindred, I suddenly found their presence unbearable. The familiar faces of the Denton court, their inhumanity undisguised in the company of fellow monsters, with only the good Dr. Geovanni standing out from the pack as being "human".

Michelle's face swam before me suddenly, her shimmering green eyes and delicate pink mouth, and I could've sworn I felt her weight upon me, the soft crush of her breasts into mine. So much so that I think I sighed.

Sitting up in bed, I cradled Lucifer's warm body against my chest, nuzzling her fur with my lips and cheek, silently thanking her for the companionship. If anything, her purring grew louder, and a small smile tugged at my mouth. I glanced down at myself, at my terribly thin and nude body - every article of clothing I owned was in the wash - and closed my eyes, preferring to listen to my Siamese friend instead. To the dreamy workings of the feline mind, which I felt in my blood as I once felt Michelle.

* * *

I stared at her in complete surprise.

"You're offering me your blood?"

"Yes?" Sung Lee flirted with a smile as she leaned back against the bedpost, strands of bright blue hair falling across her eyes. From her tone, you would've thought she suggested letting me borrow some of her clothes, which we'd already ruled out - I was a bit too tall. "I know you've been subsisting almost entirely on animal blood lately, which you can't do for very long, but you're reluctant to feed from humans against their will. If it will help, I'm offering to let you drink from me, at least a little."

I blinked and fell back against the wall, studying her through the veil of my own hair, still damp from the shower but drying quickly as usual. I think I unconsciously licked my lip before biting down on it, puzzled by the young woman's proposition yet quietly enamored of it. I hadn't fed on a mortal since that night in the Official, not long after Christmas, and then only to regain some precious control over myself. The prospect was tantalizing. I'd survived for over a month on a diet of cattle, dogs and other small animals - though never cats - but it was hardly satisfying. The edgy sickness had long since set in by now, the craving for the blood of my former species.

And here was Sung Lee, offering it to me.

I stood up - I always did my best thinking on my feet - and went to the window, glancing at the crescent moon through the trees outside, and ignored the chill damp of my hair against the back of my neck. The thick pile of the carpeting felt good under my bare feet, however, and I gave myself over to the sensation for a moment, allowing myself time to consider this and Sung Lee time to reconsider. But the young mage merely watched me from the bed, her arms folded upon her knees, smiling faintly at my reaction.

I thought of Michelle in Club Helios, the heat of her body under my fingertips, offering herself to me both at Mireia's command and to further her own designs, and how foolishly squeamish I'd been. Sitting so near at hand, I couldn't help but drink in the aroma of Sung Lee's blood, the scent strikingly similar to Stephen's - which, given my old feelings for him, I'd always found intoxicating. Only her fragrance was a little sweeter, a little richer, as women's blood often seemed to me, tangled up with some remnant of human lust. That my memories of and desire for Michelle were so strong in my mind only heightened the allure of feeding from her.

I took a deep breath and banished these dangerous thoughts.

"You realize I'm hungry now," I murmured, "Just having you here."

"Yeah, I expected as much."

Raking my fingers back through my hair, I pushed it behind me and out of my face, turning to look at her with an expression of concern. Fortunately, I wasn't starving - I wasn't stupid enough to let myself go that far - or I would've looked a perfect horror, breathing in the scent of her like this. Though I'm sure my iridescent eyes were a little paler than usual, a little more luminous, against the smooth whiteness of my face.

"You're sure about this?" I asked gently.

"Well, I'm not afraid of you, if that's what you mean," Sung Lee replied wryly, flicking blue hair out of her eyes, "We both know what we could do to each other if it came to that, and I doubt you'd want to risk bringing my father and his friends down on you. But c'mon - if I really thought you'd lose control or anything, I wouldn't have offered. You think I haven't been watching you? You're a hundred times more in control of yourself than I remember, and when I look at you I actually see a human being again. I'm willing to trust you if you trust yourself. I let you stay here, didn't I? Believe me, I know what it's like to be alone, and how much it means to have someone who cares in your life."

"You mean Steph - your father."

"And my mom. And a lot of other people, too," Sung Lee agreed, "They believed in me, and they gave me every opportunity to learn, to be somebody. Because of them, I don't just have a family but I've found a purpose in life as well. You alienated almost everyone when you were here last time, but if I can help you now that you've changed I'd be happy to do so."

"You're probably the only human friend I have anymore," I laughed softly.

She shook her head slightly. "My father cares about you. He was sad when you left, though he didn't talk about it much. He respected your wishes."

"I couldn't find what I needed here. I felt smothered. I had no idea how to deal with the world or what I'd become on my own, and being dependent on your father and others for help, I wasn't going to learn."

"I can understand that."

"And I couldn't pretend to be normal," I added quietly, hugging myself for warmth in the cool air, though it was a futile gesture since I lacked any heat of my own, "Not like I did at White Rabbit. The more time I spent there the more I wanted to run away. To run under the night sky and feel the wind on my face. It was in my blood. How could I refuse it...?"

"You don't have to justify yourself to me, Katherine. Not about that anyway."

"Are you cold?" she added.

I nodded. "Yes, a little. My hair's wet, and being hungry makes it worse."

I wanted to laugh suddenly. We sounded so normal discussing this, as if we were any two ordinary women. But all I had to do was look back at Sung Lee, at her pretty, exotic features and the delicate warmth of her body, and the humor drained out of me in an instant to be replaced by desire, longing, and hunger. I felt immediately ashamed of these feelings, as if I were contemplating rape - or adultery, really, given the depth of my longing for Michelle - and I kept them at arm's length, allowing my head to remain clear.

"Are you okay?" she asked calmly, watching all of this take place in my expression.

"Yes," I smiled, my voice soft, "But are you sure about this?"

"Why not?" Sung Lee replied gently, though not without a small smile, "If you'd have jumped on the idea I probably would've changed my mind. The fact you're worrying so much about it - about me - is a good sign. Like I said, if you trust yourself then I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, too."

I took a deep breath, full of her heady scent. "Now?"

"If you need it."

"Honestly, it's driving me crazy just having you here," I chuckled, flashing teeth and fangs in a brief smile, "But I don't need much. Just enough to sate the craving, or at least dull it somewhat. Less than I've been taking from my human victims." I paused, grimacing at my use of the word, and feeling too much like an addict pleading for a fix. "Have you ever been fed upon by one of us before?"

Sung Lee shook her head. "No."

"But," she smiled faintly, offering her wrist, "There's always a first time."

I admit it - my gaze went first thing to her wrist, to the fine network of veins pulsing just beneath the surface, and the hunger leapt into my throat at the sight. Swallowing it down, I dragged my gaze back to meet her eyes, frowning slightly. "You want me to bite you?"

"That is the usual method, I presume," she said dryly.

Seeing my reluctance, Sung Lee shrugged. "I'm not into self-mutilation and I don't carry syringes with me everywhere I go. I suppose I could circumvent it through magick, but this is just easier. Or I could just go if it makes you uncomfortable?"

I laughed, reminded of Michelle and Club Helios again, and of my timidity in feeding on her despite my aching desire to do so.

"I just don't want to hurt you," I told her.

The young mage chuckled. "I knew what I was offering when I offered it, Katherine."

Giving her a thoughtful look, I sat back down on the edge of the bed and gingerly clasped her wrist. The heat of her skin nearly stung me as I did so, like hot coals against my cool flesh. I could feel her warmth even from a distance. I was even more aware of her pulse, the fragile rhythm of the blood moving through her body.

"You're curious, aren't you?" I murmured, "About the Kiss."

"A little," she admitted calmly, "But that's not why I'm doing this."

I nodded. My grip tightened ever so slightly.

"Here?" I whispered.

"Does it make a difference where?"

I grimaced. "It's more painful from the wrist, at least at first."

You empathize greatly with your victims, don't you? Michelle whispered in my memory, from a hazily remembered night in Central Park, You hate seeing them in pain, at least the women. You want it to be romantic each and every time, like it was with me...

Sung Lee arched an eyebrow. "Then where?"

My voice was faint. "The throat...?"

"I don't know you that well," she smirked.

I couldn't help it - I laughed. "Then the wrist."

The young woman shrugged but watched me cautiously as I turned and brought her arm closer, breathing in the scent of her skin. Chemical fragrance overlaid there upon the creamier smell of her skin, light perfume she'd spritzed on this morning. But the blood scent was clear, and I closed my eyes with a slight wince as I felt my fangs push out of my skull with the usual dull ache I'd grown to associate with mortal lust. The thirst was in my throat again, choking me, lunging for Sung Lee. I toyed with it a few moments, allowing it to boil up inside of me, and then gently brought her wrist to my lips as if to kiss.

Sung Lee hissed as my mouth closed over the skin, my fangs piercing the thin flesh there in a single fluid motion, but she didn't squirm or try to pull away. By then I was insensible to her anyway. The blood welled up into my mouth in a slow, hot tide, and I shuddered as I lapped my tongue over the wound, moaning in the back of my throat at the flavor - smoky, thick and decadently rich, more like Stephen's blood than even her scent suggested, yet strangely golden. It was electrifying! Immediately, the crazy thought occurred to me that she might as well be Stephen and Michelle both - his scent and flavor, her human warmth and softness I knew only when I gave her the Embrace - and nothing less would satisfy me than to devour them completely through her, the only way I could have them.

My mouth closed on the wound, pulling for more, but after a moment I forced myself to draw back and licked the wound away, sealing it shut. It had been precious little, and my hands were trembling as I released Sung Lee. Without missing a beat, she gasped and clutched her wrist, clenching her teeth against a ripple of searing pain along her arm and a wash of dizziness from the sudden blood loss. But her expression was more startled than anything. And when Sung Lee opened her eyes to look at me, panting slightly from exertion, they registered surprised pleasure and perhaps a flicker of fear.

"Wow," she gasped, "That's not what I expected."

"I'm sorry," I whispered, licking a smear of her blood off of my lips, closing my eyes against the blissful shiver the taste of it produced, "I'm sorry. I didn't want to hurt you..."

"You haven't. Not much anyway." Sung Lee flexed her fingers, trying to work some feeling back into them. I stared fixedly on her wrist for a moment, at the bulging veins there, before ripping my gaze away. "It was painful at first, but then it felt...weird. But good at the same time. I didn't realize it felt that way."

I laughed under my breath, recalling something Michelle once said: "We're nothing if not pleasurable demons..."

"I'm fine," Sung Lee assured me, grimacing as the numbness subsided and gave way to the pins and needles lighting up along her arm.

Nodding, I climbed to my feet with surprising steadiness and went back to the window. Now the aroma of her blood was everywhere in the bedroom, the taste of it lingering on my lips and teeth, drumming at the hunger within me, sated but still as voracious as always, and I pressed my forehead to the cold glass to try and calm down. I felt feverish, dizzy, wanting more. But while the Beast was insatiable, this "little drink" satisfied my thirst for the moment, and I found myself reasserting control with surprising speed. Without quite realizing what I was doing, I thanked god for the animal blood which kept me from starving, which made all of this bearable, praying wordlessly and with silent fervor.

"Are you alright, Katherine?"

My voice sounded surprisingly normal: "Yeah. Just give me a minute."

Sung Lee nodded.

Closing my eyes, steadying my breathing, I heard Alice's voice speaking to me from memory, her lovely brown eyes fixed on me from a distant New York street corner -

Behind me, I heard Sung Lee working her magick, healing herself of the blood I'd taken. My eyes burned with tears when I opened them again, staring out into the darkness, the glass blazing cold against my brow.

"I have a childe," I said softly, my voice hoarse.

I saw Sung Lee's reflection glance up in the glass. "What?"

Turning, I leaned against the wall, dark auburn curls falling across my face. My eyes were rimmed in scarlet.

* * *

Café Étrange
New Orleans, Louisiana.
3:04am, February 26, 2006

"The one thing I hate about New Orleans is all the goddamn vampires."

"You've never even seen a vampire, Tess. And what are you doing?"

"Playing Doom 3."

"Isn't that so passé now?"

"Bite me. The classics never die."

"You're playing with sunglasses and the table?"

"It's called VR, dumbass. And you've never seen a vampire either."

"I've seen quite enough of them, personally."

"You live in Denton, Kelly, of course you would. The place is crawling with freaks."

Clucking in irritation, Kelly Brooke lay a manicured finger on Tessa Garland's palmtop computer. The machine whined petulantly, the lights on the side flickering wildly, and Kelly shared a smile with the others at the girl's squeal.

"Shit! You botched my game!" Tess cried, flipping back the mini-goggles to glare at her.

"You were being very rude," Roland reproached.

"Goddamn it," the girl pouted, peeling off the goggles and gloves, "Theresa's sitting over there with her Chinese balls tinkling away. Can't I play a harmless video game? It's fucking three o'clock in the morning for Christ's sake."

"And I'm at least involved in the conversation," Theresa smiled.

"You guys're just jealous because my paradigm's winning."

Roland grunted. "If by winning you mean you're dragging reality down to the level of banal arcade games and internet geeks hopped up on caffeine."

"It's called technomancy, you fossil," Tessa muttered, rattling her computer to assure it was still in one piece, "You better not have broken this thing, Kel. I built the Dynamic ROM stacks myself from scratch."

"It'll live," Kelly replied in her soft British accent, fishing out a cigarette and a box of matches, "I can't break machines, Tess. They just don't like me."

"So you say."

Chuckling under her breath, Kelly shook her head and lit up, glancing over the cool, vaguely Caribbean décor of the restaurant, Café Étrange, where they had retired to following another long, tedious bout of arguing at the fractious Conclave of the Rogue Council. The place was doing brisk business - the young woman recognized a handful of Fae in attendance, as well as a couple of other magi enjoying a quiet drink or twelve. No spirits, curiously enough, but the Prodigals who frequented the place kept it clean. No vampires either, thank god.

Locks of raven hair fell across Kelly's soft brown eyes as she leaned back in her seat, stowing the matches in one of the many secret pockets in her green velvet smoking jacket, her eyes skimming over her companions this time, friends she'd made here and outside of the Conclave, as diverse as any group of magi could be.

There was Tessa Simone Garland, a Palo Alto Virtual Adept, whose petite and skinny frame looked boyish in her white shirt, tie and suspenders. Beside her sat Roland White, the oldest of the group at forty-seven, a New England Hermetic with whom she shared a common friend in her mentor and former lover, John Dawson. On Kelly's side, there was Theresa Albcastle, Prioress of the Chantry of Saint Paul in London, a bastion of the Celestial Chorus, looking ethereal with her long blonde hair and gauzy white dress.

And herself, of course, the so-called Goth Queen of Denton, Texas.

"Oh, waiter! More coffee, please!" Tessa called to the passing server.

"What'll that be," Roland remarked, "Your seventieth cup of the day?"

"It's a ritual of purification."

The Hermetic snorted. "I'm surprised you can sleep at night."

"I don't."

"Don't be too hard on her, Roland," Theresa smiled wryly, brushing a strand of hair out of her aquamarine eyes, "We practice much the same thing with tea, don't we, Kelly?"

"Not every hour of every day," Kelly replied, "We have teatime for a reason."

"'Oh, take me back to dear old Blightey'," Tessa sung in an awful cockney accent, "You know, there's a reason Morrissey moved to sunny Los Angeles. You people ran him off the island with sheer boredom."

"And he is still quintessentially English."

"No, he isn't! He turned into fucking James Dean for Christ's sake."

"Who the hell are you people talking about?" Roland sighed.

"An Eighties musician," Theresa explained mildly.

"Your coffee, sir," the waiter interjected, pouring Tessa a fresh cup.

Roland chuckled.

"That's miz, asshole!" Tess snapped at the young man's back, running a hand through her short brown hair, "Jeez. You cut your hair so you don't get in your face or tangled up in your VR gear all the time and people think you're a fucking guy."

"Maybe you should act and dress like a woman then," Roland taunted her, "Instead of like a teenage boy."

Tessa sneered. "Do you want me to hurt you?"

"Bring it on, kid. You'll be a smoldering cinder when I'm through with you."

"Oh, yeah, I forgot. You're Mr. Fireball with your D&D spell lists and shit."

"Maybe you should try our paradigm instead," Kelly added lightly.

"Fuck off, Miss Goth Lesbian USA."

Kelly smirked. "If you want your computer to keep working, I suggest you be nice."

"Where is your girlfriend anyway?" Tessa sulked, "I'm surprised you didn't bring her."

"Jesse's a Sleeper," Kelly replied, smoothing her skirt out as she crossed her legs under the table, "She hasn't got any idea that I'm a mage, let alone what I really do for a living. As far as she knows I'm just an antiquarian and archivist for Better Tomorrow. Besides, she had gigs to play in Dallas. We're planning on going to London this April, though, and she's working up the nerve to meet my family."

"It is hard to tell you're a mage sometimes," Tess remarked, "You're the only Hollow One to ever amount to anything important, after all."

"Well, I was taught by Hermetics."

"Yeah, that really elevates you in my eyes!"

Shrugging, Kelly dipped a finger in the ashtray and began drawing a series of Hermetic symbols on the case of Tessa's palmtop computer. The Virtual Adept blinked at in confusion for a moment before she realized what the young woman was doing, and she snatched the computer away, wiping off the ashen symbols with a napkin. Roland and Theresa both chuckled.

"Never mess with a master of Entropy," Kelly smiled.

"You know, we call it Probability Theory here in the educated world."

Kelly said nothing, just gave the girl a dark glower.

"Fine, fine," Tess muttered, "I get the point."

Shaking her head, Theresa chuckled, the meditation balls chiming softly in her palm.

"So where's Reese anyway?" Tessa pouted, "I thought you said she'd be here."

"The message she forwarded through BTG said she'd meet us here tonight," Kelly agreed, "But it didn't specify when or where. Since she doesn't have the luxury of traveling openly in public, I imagine she's taking her time and being cautious."

"Yeah, it ain't fun being on the Union's bad side."

"What?" Roland grunted, "You mean like the Difference Engineers and the Etherites, the Conventions who rebelled and came running to beg us for help?"

"We didn't beg," Tessa snapped.

"Like hell you didn't."

"Leave it alone, you two," Theresa murmured gently, laying a hand on Roland's shoulder, "I've had enough political bickering for today. Remember, we're all on the same side, and we're all a part of the One."

"E pluribus unum," Tessa agreed, "God bless the Traditions. Cheers."

Smiling wryly, Theresa lifted her teacup in salute. "May God give us the grace to resolve our differences. Before it's too late."

"It'll take a lot more than God to do that, I'm afraid," Roland muttered.

"Let's hope not," Kelly murmured, "Or we've all suffered this Conclave for nothing..."

Her voice trailed off as she spied a figure entering the restaurant from across the dimly lit chamber, and Kelly straightened in her seat as she recognized them - Janelle Reese. The petite black woman, dressed smartly in a black pantsuit and wraparound sunglasses, her hair gently smoothed back from a small, slightly scowling face, scanned the room, and as she spotted the group assembled at the table, she crossed over without breaking her stride even for a moment. Tessa brightened at the presence of another former Technocrat, nudging Roland to scoot over to make some room for Reese.

"I'm not staying here," Reese advised them as she reached the table, not bothering to take the seat offered to her, "We're going someplace else to talk."

"You should've just come to BTG," Kelly remarked.

"Are you kidding? Everyone and their dog is watching Denton these days."

"And they're not watching the Conclave?" Theresa asked, bemused.

"What is there to spy on?" Reese smirked, "You guys spend all your time squabbling over differences in worldview."

Roland grunted, giving the former New World Order agent a disdainful look.

"That's what I've been saying," Tessa smiled, thrusting out her hand, "It's an honor to meet you by the way."

Reese glanced at the girl's hand and then turned back to Kelly.

"Meet me here in an hour," she murmured, passing her a ReMax business card with an address written across the back in neat, precise handwriting.

"Where is it?" Tessa asked eagerly, surprisingly pleased at being snubbed, "A secret hideout or something?"

Reese sneered. "Who do you think I am, John Courage? It's just a safe room. I've made sure of it. Take your time following. They shouldn't pick up on you - I've been dodging surveillance for three weeks now, and as far as I know from their chatter, they still think I'm in Dublin. And keep a low profile. The information I want to share isn't important enough that I'm going to die for it, but I thought you should know."

"We'll be there," Kelly murmured.

"Good."

Turning, Reese moved off with the same purposeful stride, heading in the direction of the restrooms in back. She did not so much as glance back at the group before ducking through the doors and vanishing from sight.

"Wow," Tessa gushed, "She's like a legend. I heard she took out a Hit-Mark once with a pneumatic drill and a set of jumper cables."

"And you call that shit magick," Roland grumbled.

Kelly frowned. "Well, she was certainly more bearable than John Courage."

Tess' eyes virtually exploded. "You've met Courage, too?!"

"Yes," she sighed, "Unfortunately."

* * *

Hyatt-Regency Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana.
4:17am, February 26, 2006

"The Void Engineers have been increasingly worried about the instabilities in what they call the Lower Dimensions and what most of you here would consider the Dark Umbra since the failed operation in Stygia four years ago, which triggered everything from the Avatar Storm to the whiteout and reboot of the Digital Web to the Maelstrom which has destroyed most of the weaker 'ghostly' spirit realms. I'm sure most of you already know about conditions in the so-called Shadowlands, which the V-E's affectionately call 'Wasteland'."

"Yes," Kelly nodded, contemplatively stroking the gold and jade ring she wore, "Even in Sheol, the storms have grown stronger and more frequent in recent years, and nihils are becoming a common occurrence everywhere. Most wraiths have already gone into hiding or move very cautiously through the Shadowlands, and almost none of the ones I've spoken with will risk travel through the Tempest, even to reach the other Dark Kingdoms which are still intact after Stygia's destruction."

Reese nodded. "Before the civil war, the V-E's were pressing hard to do further research into the matter. They had strong evidence that the instability was spreading through the Gauntlet into the other Dimensions, and activity even in space has been highly erratic as of late. Most of the Technocracy didn't pay any attention, of course, being more concerned with their own problems here on Earth. Right now, most of them are watching the war which has broken out within Iteration X, which has already spilled over into other Conventions."

"A civil war subroutine," Tessa remarked.

"So it would seem. I admit I don't know much about it. It hasn't been my concern."

"Go on, please," Theresa murmured.

"Three years ago, a group of individuals, mostly New World Order and Void Engineers, including former colleagues of mine, put together a program to investigate the instability, operating outside of the White Tower's purview. They were very active last year, scouting among Sleepers and making recruitments. I'm not sure what for,. There's some suggestion they were building up some kind of military force. Though from what I've seen of their files leads me to believe they were sending teams into the Lower Dimensions, possibly even to Stygia itself, to investigate further."

"Last November, the program attracted the NWO's attention. There was evidence the group intended to either go rogue from the Technocracy, or worse, attempt to go public with the information they possessed. The NWO tried to shut them down, and a lot of people were killed, but most of their people and resources went underground. With the civil war the NWO didn't have the resources or the to hunt them all down. Intelligence on them has gone dark since then. But in their last communiqué, the program leaders argued the situation was dire and justified rebelling against the Union, or what's left of it."

"Any particular reason they're so worried?" Roland asked, "Aside from the obvious?"

"They were running enormous data analyses," Reese explained, "Using all the available information they could get their hands on. Late last year they finally got an answer. According to their projections, the instability is spreading at a geometrically progressing rate, and is not limited to the Lower Dimensions. The boundary lines between Earth and the Lower Dimensions, the Dark Umbra, are slowly breaking down and 'leakage' is beginning to occur on an increasingly frequent basis. Thus far, V-E teams have been successfully sterilizing the larger leaks - your nihils, Ms. Brooke - wherever they appear, but this group's projections indicate they will eventually grow beyond their ability to control."

"Nihils in the physical world?" Kelly asked, sitting up in alarm.

"So it would seem."

"You're talking about the spread of Oblivion."

"Chaos," Theresa mumbled.

Kelly glanced at her. "What?"

The blonde woman shook her head. "Ms. Reese is talking about the Apocalypse."

"If the program's calculations were correct," Reese sighed, leaning against the desk behind her, "We'll have a major dimensional breach in either 2009 or 2010. I've got no idea what the nature of this breach will be, of course, nor what this group - if they're still active - intends to do about it. Nothing I've seen of their work was clear on that point. The instability has been spreading in what at first appeared to be a random fashion, but they seemed to believe there was some correlation between particular locales and areas of the greatest instability. Among others, Denton was noted as a site of importance, which is why I contacted BTG, Ms. Brooke. They passed me on to you, suggesting you were a specialist in this regard."

"Unfortunately so," Kelly murmured, lost in thought.

Roland grunted. "This all sounds like apocalyptic propaganda to me. How many times has the world supposed to have ended already?"

"If you want more evidence, I'll give you the files in my possession," Reese frowned.

"Please," Kelly nodded, "That'd be most appreciated."

Theresa gave the former MIB a thoughtful look. "Do you believe them, Ms. Reese?"

"I know a lot of the people who were involved in the program early on, and they did solid work within the Union. I don't know if they're on to something for sure or not, or if it'll be as bad as they think or not. You may be right, Mr. White. I can't say. I'm only passing this information to you because I thought BTG and your so-called Rogue Council will make better use of it than the Technocracy will, or at least I hope so. The end of the world is a very unpopular idea in the Union, but given your present situations, I thought the Traditions would give it more credence."

The Chorister nodded. "So yes, you do."

Reese bristled but did not argue.

* * *

"Everything is information. There's no difference between the digital world and the Real World, except one is more open to patching and modification than the other. Like a massively multiplayer VR simulation, the world operates according to defined and binding rules and parameters unless, like us, you know how to hack the program, insert your own code or otherwise manipulate the plane of information. That's all magick really is, right? The cheat codes of reality, slid into the system with a bit of skill, experience and Enlightened will? And what is Enlightenment really, except rising above the program entirely, to understand it completely yet divest yourself of it, so that it no longer restricts your potential? To become a plane of information all to yourself. Your own universe."

"Spare us the Matrix crap, Tessa. What the hell are you doing?"

Sighing, Tessa's virtual self spun about in midair, floating in the stream of information pouring out of her Node in the Digital Web, a stream of pulsing light in amber hues, flickering motes and fragments of the One Code. The others could see and hear her through the LCD screens in her office, and they could speak to her here as well, their faces projected onto a handful of light panels, like unfortunate Kryptonians trapped in the Phantom Zone. Kelly, Roland, Theresa and Reese were all present, their two-dimensional mini-avatars hovering in a semicircle around the Node.

At least the comments about her self image, manifest through her digital avatar, had finally stopped, Theresa thought. Here in the Web she was rather different from her usual mundane self, the mousy, boyish girl with the short cropped hair and gangly limbs. Without the irritating impediments of the Real World, she could afford to let her inner nature shine. Granted, she wasn't a goddess or anything. Nothing so presumptuous. There was nothing 1337 about being a fucking wanker, after all. No, like a lot of Adepts in the Web, she was simply what she might've been if she'd been dealt a better hand in life, and if there hadn't been the constant business of studying, research and nocturnal existence which the computer world necessitated.

So yeah, she was a little prettier here. Her hair was a bit longer - nothing shocking, just a bob of dark brown hair brushed back from her face. She was a bit curvier, and yeah, she showed it off in a slinky black outfit. Nothing dazzling. Combat boots, black leather, body-hugging black top, black gloves, sunglasses, trench coat - the standard stuff. She was a woman, yeah, but she was also a gamer. She'd spent half her life on a computer, blasting digital monsters in artificial environments with blatantly unrealistic weapons. She'd written her own games and simulations. She'd done things those poor bastards in the Real World could barely even imagine, stuck as they were in a retro-fantasy mindset.

Was it any wonder Tessa preferred Reality 2.0 over the buggy original?

"You people are so goddamn medieval, you know that?" she muttered in a slightly fuller voice than her usual girlish squeak, calling up glowing translucent displays and controls around her with a wave of her hand, "You guys can't see anything past your Enochian-babbling, crystal-waving, grimoire-using bullshit. Why don't you people grow up already? Join the fucking modern age! The world has moved on."

"Time is meaningless and eternal," Theresa replied quietly, "God is still God, the Prime and One, and magick is still magick."

"And as you'd say," Kelly murmured, "It's all just different kinds of information."

"And there's no accounting for taste," said Roland, "Now what are you doing?"

"I'm running a Boggs-Hobson informational analysis, if you must know," Tessa frowned, her fingers dancing over the controls before her with the lightest touch. Lights flickered on the holographic panels, programming code - which she'd personally written and tested over long weeks of effort - flashed by in a rush as the code was uploaded. The Node opened wider, the amber streamers become a flood of light, washing over the young woman's virtual body, stirring her hair around her face and flapping her trench coat as if in a cool breeze. She sighed softly in pleasure as the flow passed through and beyond her into the digital ether.

"It amazes me how 'mystical' this so-called science of yours is," Roland grumbled.

"Magick is magick, like Theresa said," the Adept replied distantly, too caught up in the rush of information to react in anger, "And I'm a human being. There's no point in doing any of this if there isn't any pleasure involved. Any excitement."

"So what is a Boggs-Hobson analysis?" Kelly asked.

Surprisingly, it was Reese who answered: "It's a way of extrapolating data about the physical world by sending out pulses of information through the system and studying the return information which comes back, like pinging a cluster of Internet servers to see if they're operational. Or analyzing seismic data to gather a picture of the earth's interior. It was initially devised as a testing method by the Void Engineers and was adapted for use in the digital realm by the Virtual Adepts early in the 1980's."

Theresa said under her breath: "Trying to know the mind of God."

"You're studying the health of the Tellurian," Kelly reasoned, "Testing their findings,"

"Something like that," Tessa smiled, "From what Reese told us, it's a similar method to what her rogue group of technomancers did to study the spread of the instability. I'm essentially trying to detect where these instabilities might be and to what extent they've already effected the Tellurian. The Digital Web runs through what you'd call the Gauntlet and spans the globe, offering a multitude of public Nodes and access points from which to scan. Unfortunately, the resolution will be extremely low. The Tellurian is a massive place. But it'd take forever to render a more accurate scan with my present equipment. Decades, if not longer."

"And you think this'll work?" Roland grunted.

"More than any shit you'd try to throw at the problem."

"As it is," Tessa added, "This'll take a while. Probably a few hours, and I'll have to manage the program to make sure nothing crashes. There're a few bugs in the source code I don't think I've fully worked out yet. And I'm hijacking a lot a of access points on the Web right now. I don't want anybody retaliating while I'm in the middle of this."

"Figures," Roland muttered.

* * *

By the time the story ended, Sung Lee had forgotten the pain of the Kiss.

She sat silently in the living room of her apartment, listening while Katherine related in an animated, often emotional manner the events of her wanderings in the Mexican desert, her time with the Garou Saul, how she met and fell almost immediately in love with Michelle Avoyelles, ghoul to the Lasombra vampire Mireia, the bloody rescue and flight to New Mexico, where Katherine gave Michelle the Embrace out of love and fear of losing her.

The Gangrel was in tears when she related how she killed her mortal lover and gave her the blood, but it didn't stop her from pressing on, telling of their journey to New York City, where they lived for over a year in a state of anxious bliss, only to have their relationship disintegrate from the almost accidental encounter with the hunter, Alice Chenoweth, and the machinations of the Toreador Primogen, Laurent DeLouvois.

Of her mercenary work and battle with Assamite assassins sent by Mireia, Katherine spoke little, for which Sung Lee, captivated by the tale of the vampire lovers, was rather thankful. Instead, her thoughts turned toward the final nights with Michelle, explaining how her childe found her watching her former fiancé, Daniel Vera, and his new girlfriend in their upscale Greenwich apartment, and how Michelle persuaded the distraught Katherine to feed on him. From there, Michelle's decision to leave her seemed almost inevitable, but her Embrace of Daniel as a gift to Katherine, a replacement companion, left Sung Lee feeling vaguely ill.

There Katherine paused a moment, offering only a brief account of her return to Denton and her encounter with Ashley Dochev outside her dojo, which led her back into association with her brother, Lanthinel, and her old friends there.

After three hours, the two of them were exhausted and the sunrise wasn't far off. Sung Lee could already feel it as a palpable change in the air, and Katherine had to feel it far more strongly than that. Yet during all that time, the Gangrel's voice hadn't broken or given out on her, uninhibited by any such mortal frailties. But her cheeks were stained faintly red, as if by blush, and her eyes were rimmed in crimson against a drawn white face. Staring into those eyes as she had for so long, Sung Lee felt vaguely entranced, but the vampire finally turned away to recompose herself and check the time.

Sung Lee stared dazedly into the empty fireplace. There was simply too much raw emotion and information in Katherine's tale to absorb all at once. The humanity of her experience was perhaps the most startling thing, underlying all of the horror and uncertainty Katherine felt about what happened. She hadn't thought it was possible for vampires to feel such things, at least not to such a painfully sharp degree, especially when compared to the terrible nature of what Katherine admitted to doing - often gladly at the time. Murder, mutilation, breathtaking violence, and the reluctant but joyous damnation of a lover whom Katherine was still obviously obsessed with.

In retrospect, Sung Lee recognized that their love affair was doomed to failure. As vampires, both Katherine and Michelle were quintessentially self-absorbed creatures, predators concerned with survival and control. That Katherine still possessed a flame of humanity left her vulnerable to Michelle's seduction, her overt manipulation of the Gangrel into freeing her from Mireia and giving her the blood. Yet even Michelle was more of a fractured soul than a truly evil one. She still suffered with the loss of her humanity to the Sabbat, and like a moth to a flame, Katherine's compassion drew Michelle to her and made them lovers. From that point, Michelle's hatred of being controlled and imprisoned by Mireia would inevitably boil over into her relationship with Katherine.

Of course, Katherine recognized this painful truth as well. It was the doomed nature of their love which enchanted her in the first place, after all, and Sung Lee couldn't deny the tale had a certain tragic romance and an eroticism which surprised and captivated her. That she'd felt Katherine's fangs sink into her wrist just hours ago with the sweet agony of the Kiss, feeling her own lifeblood flow into the vampire, only served to lend a vividness to the memories Katherine struggled to relate.

Only now, Sung Lee didn't know what to do for her.

"Why did you tell me this?" she asked quietly, turning to look at Katherine.

The vampire had seated herself on the brick lip of the fireplace, her glossy auburn hair falling in curls around her face, and Sung Lee realized with a small start that Katherine was cleaning herself - wiping at her cheeks and eyes, which continued to weep blood, and licking her hands and fingers to wash them off. The regular, quick flicking of her red tongue, one for the few parts of Katherine's body which had any color whatsoever, and the eerily feline posture the vampire had fallen into seemed vaguely monstrous to the young mage's eyes, and she forced herself to look away again.

After a moment, she heard Katherine sigh.

"At first, I didn't intend to. I haven't told anyone - I've been too ashamed, and even to think about it is agony for me. But..." She groped for an explanation, bowing her head. "I wanted someone to understand what I've done and what I've been through. To confess my sins. And I needed that person to be a human being. Not Lanthinel or even Angelo, but..."

Her voice trailed off again.

"Someone like you used to be?" Sung Lee suggested in a soft voice.

"Yes," Katherine agreed, rising to her feet, "Something like that."

Sung Lee watched in silence as the Gangrel crossed the room and collected her sleek leather jacket, the very same one which Michelle had bought for her using Laurent DeLouvois' "coin of the realm", and tugged it on over the black sweater she wore. And from behind, with clean clothes and neatly brushed hair, Katherine looked remarkably normal. Thin, yes, though that was perfectly fashionable for young women. But when she turned around, hugging herself more for comfort than warmth this time, Katherine's unnaturally grey eyes were bloodshot and her face was that of a drowned woman.

Still human, Sung Lee thought distantly, But also an animal.

"I should leave," Katherine murmured, her expression softening as she saw the pity in the young woman's eyes, "It's nearly dawn and I need to find somewhere safe to sleep."

"Why not stay here? It's safe?"

Katherine shook her head slowly, flirting with a smile. "You don't have anywhere that's safe from the sun, and it'll take too long for me to protect an area with thaumaturgy. I can already feel sleep coming on. And besides, I think I'd rather sleep in the earth tonight. It's comforting, melting into the soil like that..."

Sung Lee frowned. "You're not going to run now that you've told me, are you?"

She was relieved by the vampire's laugh.

"You know, I might've at one time," Katherine replied, flashing a weary grin, "I admit it. But there's too much to do now. I owe it to Ashley to find her and help her if I can. Maybe when that's done I'll move on again. Or maybe I'll stay - who knows? Right now I just want to sleep, and to find a comfortable place to do so while I can."

The mage nodded thoughtfully. "Alright."

"Don't worry about me," Katherine smiled gently.

"Well, I'm sure you can take care of yourself, so yeah."

"Most of the time anyway."

Shrugging, Katherine headed for the door. "I'll collect my things tomorrow night, if you don't mind? I don't want the hassle of it right now."

"That's cool," Sung Lee nodded, "You can come here anytime you like, Katherine. And my earlier offer still stands when you need it."

The vampire glanced back at her in mild surprise. "You're sure?"

"Well, it's my blood to give away, isn't it?"

Katherine laughed once under her breath and nodded, sending a spill of hair across her face, and a smile slowly spread upon her pale mouth. Her voice was faint, but aching with relief: "Thank you, Sung Lee."

The young woman tentatively smiled back. "No problem."

* * *

"Well, here it is."

The group gathered around the holographic projection unit as it flickered and came to life, a shimmering, hazy image coalescing in the air above it. Wearing her controller glove, Tessa waved a hand and the image spun, revealing itself as a flat plane of frozen amber light. Shot throughout the plane was a faint stain, smoldering darker than the surrounding pattern, with patches of greater darkness appearing here and there.

"Mathematically, the Tellurian is far too complex to represent in any visual medium we could understand," Tessa explained, "Rather like trying to render a four-dimensional cube with a two- or three-dimensional projection - you're forced to operate within a framework that we as human beings can perceive. There's simply too much information to juggle on a large scale. So I've had to abstract it down to a two-dimensional plane, using a pretty standard data mapping technique, so we can have a look at the finished output."

"It's blurry," Roland observed.

"I already told you the resolution was gonna suck," Tessa snapped, sliding out of cultured techno-speak and into irritable geekdom with effortless grace, "So stop complaining. It's the best I can do at the moment. But assuming I was able to filter out all of the other random noise and instabilities running through the Tellurian, and there's a lot, that shadow should be what we're looking for. Your buddies were right, Agent Reese - "

"Just Reese."

" - it's pretty pervasive by now," she continued without missing a beat, zooming and spinning the plane at different angles to get a better vantage point, "And from the looks of things it's slowly soaking or eating through the fabric of reality. A virus or corruption of the code, causing random errors as it goes, shutting down any system it comes across. Sadly, this is too quick and primitive to compare it to any map of the world, so I can't localize any of this for you, and the resolution's too low to pick out any of the smaller regions of entropy. But there it is, ladies - the End of the World."

"It reminds me of radio views of deep space," Kelly murmured, "Like from the Hubble."

Everyone glanced at her in mild surprise.

"What?" she frowned, glaring at them, "I watch the news. I went to college. I'm not totally illiterate scientifically. I work with BTG for Christ's sake."

Smiling wryly, Theresa returned her attention to the hologram. "Well, I'm not surprised by the similarity. The same underlying patterns are present everywhere. It's just easier to see them when magnified on a huge scale."

"Exactly!" Tessa beamed, sending the image spinning out of control as she clapped her hands together in delight, "Like crystalline structures on the molecular level, or quantum mechanics, or mapping the structure of the observable universe. You see the same patterns over and over again - fractals! Infinite complexity on a quantum scale breeds infinite complexity when blown up on a massive scale, but we can only make out a very small part of it at a time. My god! One of you finally understands!"

"Yes, of course," Theresa smirked, "It's God's design."

Tessa's face fell. "Well. Maybe you understand."

"Can you confirm the source of the 'infection'?" Reese inquired.

"Not like this," the Adept sighed, shaking her head, "The scan isn't deep enough, and I don't have the resources to study the Lower Dimensions slash Dark Umbra. I'd need a bunch of Void Engineers to do that. No wonder it took your team so long to figure this out, Agent Reese."

Reese rolled her eyes.

"So what do we do about it?" Roland asked gruffly.

"Uh," Tessa laughed, scratching behind her ear, "There's not much we can do about it, actually. Scanning the informational plane is one thing but modifying it on a large scale is unheard of. Who knows how much of it you'd have to purge just to clear the infection, and that wouldn't even come close to solving the underlying problem, assuming they were right. You're talking about a complete rewrite of reality. You'd have to bring about global Ascension first. The program's locked down pretty tight these days, as I'm sure you know."

"It can't be completely hopeless," Theresa murmured, "There has to be a way."

"Well, if you can summon up god to work some miracles, that's fine."

"I serve God, not the other way around."

Chuckling under his breath, Roland shook his head. "How else do you undo the primal force of Entropy, though, without devastating the Tellurian? You're talking about changing the fundamental nature of the universe. No mage can do that. Not even a thousand of us."

"Oh, c'mon," Tessa grinned, "You're a Hermetic. Your ego alone could probably kill it."

He glowered at her.

"You'd either have to rewrite reality to unravel the nature of Oblivion," Kelly thought aloud, raking a hand back through her raven curls, "Or else overwhelm it with a near infinite amount of Quintessence. Engulf it into its opposite, the primal wellspring of existence. Though they might just cancel each other out."

Theresa gave her a strange look. "Allow God and Death to consume each other?!"

"It was just an idea," Kelly shrugged sheepishly, "And probably not a very good one. Though without the primal essence of the Wyld and the change supported by the Wyrm, effectively, there's no telling what would happen to reality."

"I suggested global Ascension for a reason," Tessa reminded her.

"You're thinking on too large a scale," Roland interjected, "What you're talking about is impossible. We'd stand a much better chance of containing it and limiting the infection before it unravels even more of the Tapestry."

"I agree," Reese murmured, folding her arms under her breasts, "You'd have to harden areas against it, which is effectively what the Union was doing prior to the civil war. Ironic, isn't it? If it weren't for the hardening of reality against magick, we might all be dead now. Of course, that would probably just slow it down. But it's a start."

"Hardening reality to that point would make it almost impossible to work magick," Roland argued, "It'd be a stagnant universe. And then we couldn't do anything against it."

"Not necessarily," Kelly said, "It depends how you go about it."

"Yeah, you'd have to rewrite the program to allow a certain amount of flexibility for the working of magick and Enlightened Science," Tessa agreed, "Make them part of the paradigm for a hardened reality while excluding other factors. Essentially you'd be putting up a firewall to keep out the infection and limit it from worsening inside the protected region. Then you could clean up the damage inside without doing massive damage to the Tellurian as a whole."

"That'd never work," Roland snapped, "As long as you've got Sleepers around, you'd never be able to effect reality on the scale you'd need. At best, you'd just end up shunting yourself and the area around you into an Umbral realm. And even then you'd need a massive amount of Quintessence."

"Well, it wouldn't be easy, that's for sure," Kelly smiled, giving him a sly look, "But we're mages, right? Nothing's impossible."

"Not with the grace of God, at least," Theresa murmured.

Kelly turned back to Tessa, and gestured at the hologram. "Can I get a copy of this? I'm sure BTG would love to see it, and maybe together we can pull a rabbit out of our collective hat. Also, if you can, I'd like you to keep running these scans on a regular basis and forward me the data so we can keep track of its progress. Maybe even get an idea of how fast it's spreading."

"Sure thing, boss," Tessa grinned, "I can try."

"Also, Reese," she glanced over at the former MIB in the corner, "Would it be possible for me to meet with some of your friends who were in the program?"

"They're all former Technocracy," Reese replied coolly, cocking her head to one side, "And they've gone deep underground. I don't know if they'd want to see you or not."

Kelly shrugged. "Well, they want help, don't they?"

Reese smiled ever so slightly.

"I can try," she offered, "Maybe Dr. Garland here can help me reach them."

"The two of you might as well share this information with your groups as well," Kelly told Theresa and Roland, smiling softly, "Perhaps even consult with the Oracles to see if they have any bright ideas. Assuming this is all true, and that's really what we think it is," she pointed to the hologram, "I think we're going to need all the help we can get."

"I love it when you take charge," Tessa quipped.

* * *

In the chill of the room's air conditioning, a necessity even in Winter given New Orleans' sultry climate, Kelly shivered as she came out of the bathroom, toweling listlessly at her hip-length black hair, which fell around her in a mass of dripping curls, dressed only in a pair of black lace panties and a slightly damp, black custom-made tee shirt Rook bought her last year for Christmas, with the slogan Oi, wankers! emblazoned in bold white lettering across the chest. Kelly always thought it was an excuse for Rook to check her out, of course, but having uttered the proverbial phrase on more than one occasion while fighting demons, bane spirits and vampires, the gift was appreciated all the same. Besides, Jesse loved the shirt.

And it had been a very long day.

Having endured hours of waiting at Tessa's office on the west coast, and having assured that the data was forwarded to Rook and Sung Lee in Denton, where her colleagues and the incomprehensible computers at BTG could pour over it at their leisure, the young woman had no qualms about crashing into bed early tonight - "early" being a relative term, of course, given her usual schedule. Granted, she didn't feel as young as she once did either, and the thought of her twenty-sixth birthday next month wasn't an especially pleasing thought, but for once in her life, even with the supposed apocalypse forecast on Tessa's computer, Kelly didn't feel as if she were constantly racing against the clock.

She had a lover, and Jesse was waiting for her return in Denton. She had an excellent job, and more money than she'd ever dreamed of. She had the gift of magick, the power to work wonders. She had friends who understood her, and who trusted her implicitly. After all these years, the pull of the Underworld felt blessedly remote, and her tumultuous adolescence seemed comfortably in the past, like no more than a bad dream. And even if Oblivion was seeping into the world, slowly devouring it from the inside out - well, that just proved everything she'd been saying for the past five years, now didn't it? And for once, Kelly felt strangely assured that between she and the others, they might actually save the world and hold back death.

As if on cue, the lamp on the nightstand flickered and went out.

Kelly sighed. "Oh, no. You're not getting off that easy."

Dabbing her finger in the ashtray, smiling at the irony of her tools, the young woman inscribed a few Hermetic symbols on the lamp's ceramic shell and applied her will. There was a dim fizzle of electricity hitting the broken circuit, the faint acrid smell of burning wires - which gave her a strange sense of satisfaction - and the light bulb reluctantly flickered back to life, shining as brightly as before. Kelly stared at it for a moment, assuring herself it was working properly again, before wiping away the ashes with the palm of her hand, leaving only a faint smear where the symbols had been.

Then, laughing under her breath, she turned it off and fell into bed.

In the darkness, Kelly rolled over, warring momentarily with her decadently long hair to pull it out of the way, and stared up at the ceiling in utter exhaustion. The lights from the street outside played faintly upon the ceiling overhead, but only faintly, and the street noises were almost completely inaudible. More so than most places in America, New Orleans understood the business of privacy. Pressing the balls of her hands to her eyes, Kelly forced her mind away from the events of the past few days, listening to the little noises as the twenty-year-old building settled around her. Listening out of habit for the whisper of spirits, though she didn't expect any. She'd carefully warded the room upon arrival, and the aroma of incense still lingered.

The one thing she hated about New Orleans, after all, was all the ghosts.

Grunting, Kelly rolled over onto her stomach and chest, trying to get comfortable, but the mattress was nowhere near as plush as her own, and her breasts felt squashed against the hard surface of the bed. She slid a pillow underneath her for cushioning, but even that did little to improve the situation. After a few minutes, she lay her head down and tried to will herself to sleep, but the chill air tickled her bare legs - just cold enough to cause slight discomfort but warm enough that the velvety blankets and comforter would only make it worse. So she rolled over again to stare at the ceiling, blowing a curl of black hair out of her face.

So much for sleeping early.

The young woman grumbled as she climbed out of bed, padding across the thick pile carpet to pull the old Zippo lighter Victoria gave her out of her jacket pocket, along with a pack of Morley cigarettes, only to find it empty. She must have smoked the last of them earlier in Tessa's office, she realized, halfway across the country in California. Sighing, Kelly crumpled up the little box and tossed it on the bed. If she had the Art to magically cross the 1,500 miles between Louisiana and Palo Alto the way Roland did, she'd have demanded another pack from Tessa, just for making them all wait so long.

Irritably, Kelly flopped onto the bed again.

"Well, I should probably fucking quit anyway," she sighed, rubbing her eyes.

Rolling over onto her side, wrapping the top comforter around her petite frame, Kelly made another futile attempt to sleep, but her mind was far too alert and active now. It didn't help that the comforter wasn't her own; its texture was coarser than what the young woman was accustomed to - what kind of business are they running here? - and every time she felt it glide against the smooth skin of her legs, it felt like sandpaper. After a while, even the tee shirt felt constricting in her cocoon, her breasts wedged awkwardly between the clinging fabric, the hard mattress and her splayed arm.

"Bloody hell," she growled, nearly hurling herself out of bed.

She stood in the middle of the room for a moment, panting, running her hands back through her tousled hair, debating whether to destroy the room in a fit of pique, check out and find a better hotel, or find something else to do since sleep so obviously wasn't happening. Finally, brushing back her hair and smoothing the shirt over her chest, Kelly forced herself to calm down, counting her breaths until they and her heartbeat slowed to a more peaceful rhythm. And then, feeling more rational, she considered the pros and cons of destroying the room like an intelligent, educated woman should.

Kelly laughed at herself.

Shaking her head, the young woman glanced around the room, and her eyes fell upon the dainty pile of her jewelry by the nightstand. The comforting gleam of her father's gold pocket watch, sitting atop the long, pooled chain. A pretty silver anklet Jesse had given to her a few months ago. And, of course, Typhane's ring of gold and jade, inscribed with a single black symbol - her own true name, as far as Kelly could discern - which had survived nearly two millennia, locked away in a sarcophagus in the Egyptian desert. She stared at these for a long moment before collecting them, slipping the ring on her finger and her father's watch around her neck, where it shone brightly against her black shirt.

It felt good to wear them. The reassuring weight of her father's presence and the sense of strength which Typhane's ring lent her.

Rummaging through her luggage, the young woman drug out her old afghan, her bowl of polished gold, her candles and incense, and arranged them on the floor as she did every night - or every night she felt able, at least. She filled the bowl with fresh water from the tap, spending only a minute's effort to assure herself of its purity, and set it down before her as she sank into a sitting position on the blanket, surrounded by a ring of candles. Falling into the lotus position, she carefully lit each candle in order from left to right with the dented Zippo lighter, then did the same with the sandalwood incense.

Before long, the hotel room was filled with the aroma of incense and the subtle, sweet fragrance of the candles. Quietly pleased with this little ritual as always, feeling calmer for performing it, she washed her fingers in the bowl, washed her face, and even moistened the hem of her shirt with it, smiling wryly as she did so, as if it were one of her ceremonial gowns back home instead of a cheap babydoll tee shirt. Still, it was the ritual that mattered, right? The focus it provided. And at this time of night, as tired as she was, Kelly could care less about appeasing the gods of style, at least this once.

Closing her eyes, Kelly breathed deeply of the perfumed air and sighed.

In a quiet voice, she offered prayers for the souls of the dead and the safety of the living. Prayers in Latin to the Christian God. Prayers in Arabic to Allah. Prayers in Egyptian to Osiris, Thoth, Isis and Ra. She promised herself to Jesse and her love to her father, her family, her friends in BTG, and many others besides. She asked in earnest for guidance in her endeavors, particularly where they could help others, and for protection against the nightmares which waited for her in sleep. From there, Kelly plunged headlong into za-zen, allowing the incense smoke and the silence to carry away her thoughts, until there was only her breathing, the soft sounds of New Orleans outside, and the blinding awareness of sunyata.

An hour later, she silently roused herself by some unconscious signal, dousing the candles and incense with a light touch, and replaced her treasures in their battered leather suitcase. And then, clutching her father's watch as she so often did, Kelly fell back into bed for a long, dreamless sleep.

* * *

The night was cold as I stood in the center of the fairy ring, little more than a patch of mushrooms in the middle of a wooded clearing to my eyes, warming myself as best I could with the blood Sung Lee had given me the night before, and wishing again that we could have a fire at least, something to take the bite out of the wind, but that was little more than a fanciful notion for a vampire to have.

Gazing up at the full moon, pale and bluish-white in barely seen stars, I tried to stand still while Lanthinel worked his ritual magic upon me. For the sake of accommodating my brother's sense of Faerie style, I wore the only real dress I owned, a thin slip of green which hugged my body in a tight wrap before exploding into a fan of the softly caressing skirt - something Michelle once bought for me, I thought sadly, to better appreciate my "beauty".

I ached as the wind cut through it, but at least we were in the woods, the natural world, where I felt most at home. As the breeze gathered my skirt in its fingers the way Michelle once did, crushing it against her lips to drink in the decadent fabric, Lanthinel crowned me with a laurel wreath, the scent of the aromatic leaves swimming around me. He wrapped a translucent shawl of handspun green cotton around my shoulders. Holly, acorns and mistletoe were heaped upon me as if I were a pagan princess.

And as he worked, Lanthinel chanted softly under his breath in a low, musical voice, words in a language I recognized yet didn't understand slipping over me like droplets of rain. The fragrance of the trees, their leaves sighing in the wind, and the moist earth underfoot washed over my senses. Between this and the cold, I was already in something of a dream world, my luminescent eyes fixed upon the moon, whose bathing light seemed both sweetly enigmatic and utterly desolate at once, the kiss of a dead world.

I stared unblinking at it for a long while, falling into a haze of melodic chanting, resisting the urge to scratch at where the laurels made my skin itch, finding it increasingly hard to breathe in the little green dress. The confining feel of the bodice drove the lioness mad, and standing still only made it worse. But I held my place, allowing Lanthinel to work his craft, seeing him out of the corner of my eye only as a sweep of blonde hair and flashing blue eyes, his cloak and robes trailing after him.

I knew I was falling into a fugue, allowing my mind to wander like this. But still the moon seemed to grow larger to my eyes, becoming hugely swollen, until it swallowed the sky before me, and I closed my eyes against it, reeling at a sudden sensation of vertigo. I clutched at the shawl, pulling it tighter around me, as if it would hold me upright if I stumbled and fell, and the thick mane of my hair fell forward in front of my face as I struggled for a shaky breath, drowning in a myriad of fragrances.

When I lifted my head and opened my eyes, I -

- smiled solemnly to myself, violet eyes gleaming like the twilight sky, and drew the shawl around my nude body, feeling like nothing so much as a lover waking in the morning, clutching the sheets to her bosom. Lanthinel was a flashing dark shape, nearly lost in the gloom of the primeval forest, and only his voice came clearly to me, singing the song of war I loathed yet knew so well by now, calling to my forest children, casting me of the earth I so loved. With light caresses he painted symbols on my brow, my arms, my breastbone with sweet-smelling sap. The wind of his movement stirred my raven curls, which fell forward into my eyes, and I exulted in the warm breeze upon my skin, the perfumed night.

I lifted my eyes and dreamed of touching the stars, as I always did, wordlessly longing for home and all that was beyond my reach, a place without the battle coming with morning, without the stench of murdered blood ­-

- felt lightheaded, staggered and nearly fell, and found Lanthinel standing between two gnarled trees before me, his arms folded across his chest and slips of silvery-blond hair falling around his fey, smiling face, his eyes shining in the moonlight. This was not the Lanthinel I commonly knew, of course; there was far too much Glamour washing through me by now to see the mundane façade of my human brother. For a long moment I could only stare at the Sidhe, shivering in the cold air, jarred by the sudden intrusion of memories.

The aroma of jasmine and roses clung to me, riding atop the scent of the forest, the smell of smoke from a nearby house, the dazzling array of sensation which I was capable of. And underlying these things, another scent jolted to my awareness - ancient. The smell of ancient blood, sweetly burning, and the touch of a thousand places upon us both, immortals in a world of flesh and blood and death. Trembling, I glanced down, expecting to find the black hair and dusky skin of the dream-memory, but there was only my usual self, the vampire.

I made a faint noise in the back of my throat. A moan. I sank down to my knees in the soft, dewy grass, overcome by exhaustion. Lanthinel laughed and knelt down beside me to help if necessary, but I was already rolling over onto my back, shivering, to stare up at the stars. My cat's eyes flashed red in the dark, rimmed in scarlet as the tears threatened to boil up.

"You still remember her," he whispered, smiling, "She's not gone after all!"

"Ariel," I sighed, clutching my head. The perfumes and ancient scents weren't fading in the slightest. If anything, they seemed to thicken, smothering me.

"Ashley thought she was gone."

"No," I breathed, "She's just buried deep down...I've heard her, so have others..."

Lanthinel laughed again, this time more gently. "Are you alright?"

"Yes...I just...I need a minute."

Was the world spinning, or was it just me?

"Alright," the Sidhe nodded, "We're almost done for tonight anyway."

Climbing to his feet, Lanthinel collected a cup of some sweet-smelling drink he had set in the grass hours earlier, and he took a thoughtful sip of it while I struggled to collect myself. The stars seemed clearer when I opened my eyes again, glittering through the fog of city lights, and they appeared to come nearer and then recede in a subtle rhythm, as if they sky itself were little more than a backdrop rippling in the wind.

Your soul is pure light, Katherine, burning brilliantly, Michelle whispered in my ear, I have to be close to it, even though I think it will burn me. I have to touch the fire inside you...Why do you think I love you? How can I help it?

I closed my eyes against an upwelling of loneliness.

You just don't give up, do you? Saul growled in my other ear, I could maul you a hundred times and you'd still try climbing up here every single time. There's nothing up here for you, so why do you keep fighting for it?

"Katherine?"

I turned my head slightly to see Lanthinel standing there, holding the chalice in one hand. Studying me. Not the same way he used to, however. The bitterness was gone from his eyes, the loathing for the fierce eyes and thirst which now defined his sister, replaced by tenderness. It reminded me of Sung Lee's expression as I said goodbye to her the night before. Or the tearful, angry look Ashley wore when she told me the truth about Ariel and all that I'd lost because of Billy. Or the aching vulnerability in Michelle's eyes as she pressed her brow to mine, our cold lips brushing softly against each other, and confessed the heartsickness she kept hidden from everyone but me.

Tears stung my eyes, a trail of scarlet running down my cheek.

"There's something else I want to show you," Lanthinel smiled softly, offering his hand, "Which I think you'll enjoy."

* * *

What is happening to me?

Chilling winds assault me as I hurtle upwards at an ever increasing speed, clawing to touch the glittering stars overhead, yet they seem forever out of reach no matter how high I go. Even as the world disappears into blurry darkness beneath me, I can't reach them. I want nothing more than to touch them! But how can this be possible? How can I be doing this impossible thing? How far can I go? The stars? Are the stars even real?

What is happening to me?!

I moan aloud at the power in my blood, the intoxication of it, the magic which bears me ever upwards, which might carry me forever into the night, my naked face turned upwards to the moon and stars, my arms thrown out to embrace the sky. My scream is blown back into my throat, a cry of exultation and terror both, and the blood tears are streaming down my face as I grasp vainly for the darkness that is either space or an illusion.

What am I becoming?

"Ariel!" I scream. I grasp for her. I can't find her. Only the briefest touch.

The pain is exquisite throughout my body, spreading a terrible numbness I haven't felt except when Billy stole my life from me, and when I gave my blood to bring new life to Michelle, the scarlet spattering on her lips. But I no longer feel like a vampire. Nor do I feel human. I feel as if I am an angel or goddess, streaking toward Heaven, begging for admittance. My hair whips back behind me, rippling like a ribbon in the wind.

But the stars are coming no closer. My transformation is incomplete!

"No!" I cry, pleading to her, "There's nothing I want more!"

My voice is rasping. My skin is aglow with agony.

But all of this is the most excruciating kind of pleasure. The fiery pulse in my veins, the magic of the blood suffusing every particle of my dead body. The magic with which I learned, through painful effort, to conjure flame now carries me to the stars - but nowhere near enough. They shimmer within my sight, blurring behind the red clouds of my tears, but they are always out of reach. I can't push myself anymore. For all my ecstasy, I'm quickly weakening. And I am so far from earth, from Lanthinel's grove, that I don't know if I'll ever get back.

I try to scream again, but it's frozen in my lungs.

My sight is dimming. Frosting over.

NO! More! I have to get higher! I have to touch them!

I feel a sudden pinprick of heat upon my skin, real heat this time instead of the cold fire, and with the greatest effort I force my head to turn, hearing the crackle and pop of ice breaking, and there in the east I see an impossible sight - the first crowning glory of sunrise, the colors melting even as I force myself to look, as it creeps above the curving shadow of the Earth, its landscape unrecognizable from this altitude, falling away behind me.

My strength gives out as I feel the sunlight glance over me.

My God?! How high am I?

Shuddering, I drag in a rasping breath, but it's terribly painful to do so, and I catch the merest glimpse of myself - the glaze of frost and ice covering my dead white skin and clothing, my hands grotesquely frozen into claws, the steam beginning to rise as the sun's caress falls more and more fully upon me.

I realize I'm falling suddenly, the heat of my burning body giving way to coldness again as I plummet through the atmosphere and lose sight of the sun. Even this is a sort of rapture. I haven't just gone from a mewling childe to a lioness, I have done the impossible! And as I spiral further out of control, the friction of the bombarding wind slowly melting my skim of frost, what else can I be but a fallen angel, just as Michelle always promised? Yet I must be going mad to think such things. This can't really be happening...can it?

The ground is rushing up to meet me at a terrific speed.

At first I allow myself to drop like a rock, the world and sky flashing by as I tumble end over end towards the earth, wondering if I'll survive the impact, wondering if perhaps it would be better if I didn't. Having touched the sky this way, having performed this little miracle of blood magic, what's left down there for me? Why can't I die happy while I can? But no - there is my debt to Ashley, my hopeless love of Michelle, a world of crimes for which I haven't yet properly paid the price. And now there's a precious idea that I might become more than the lioness. More than the blood drinker.

I will myself to slow down - and to my surprise I do. Gradually. Difficultly.

Within a few minutes, the ground begins to resolve into recognizable patterns and shapes, but to my surprise I find I haven't drifted far. Lanthinel's home rears out of the earth to greet me, and so does the small grove in which I'd been standing just minutes earlier. Gravity reaches out to reclaim me, dragging me down, and I allow it to happen at my own pace, gently wafting toward the surface like a falling leaf. I'm still half-frozen, of course, and every tiny movement is agony. But I'm insensible to it all.

Suddenly, I'm touching the ground, sinking into a crouch.

I might have dreamed it all.

But as I stare down at my frozen, clawed hands, hearing the grind of stiff joints as I flex my fingers, the reality of it sinks in. Only now, safely on the ground again, surrounded by familiar earthy smells, my mind picks at the experience, trying to unravel it into something coherent my rational mind can comprehend. I violently push it away, feeling the first ripple of laughter bubbling up inside me. Such things can't - shouldn't! - be captured in words, nor even in memories. They're dreams come to life!

I feel madness seizing me as I collapse, manic laughter forcing itself out.

Ariel, what's happening to me?

You're starting to remember, she laughs in the depths of my soul, What else?

It's a long time before I can stop laughing.

* * *

There's a point where even crystal clarity is distracting.

At least, that's how it felt the next night.

At Lanthinel's suggestion, I spent the day in his home, sequestered within a guest bedroom I'd proofed against sunlight with the thaumaturgical ritual Angelo once showed me, only to discover after a few sleepless hours that time passed differently in the Fae Freehold. The instinct or curse which caused me to sleep at sunrise couldn't recognize that dawn had already come. No stiffening of the limbs, no sluggish thoughts, no paralysis, no falling vertigo as I lost consciousness. I knew it was daytime by the sounds outside and the activity in the house, but I was wide awake - something that hadn't happened to me in five years.

After the night's miracles, all I'd wanted was to sleep. It was calming, and it maintained some order in an existence which was otherwise timeless. Unless I was grievously wounded, I only ever felt truly exhausted in mind and soul, never in body, and having Ariel's memories barge into my consciousness, and then to soar under my own power, left me well and truly drained. So I lay there for the longest time, fidgeting, waiting for sleep to come, overcome with nervous energy I couldn't contain. I turned on the television to watch the banal daytime news reports and soap operas I'd watched as a mortal.

By three in the afternoon, I was about to lose my mind.

It was miraculous, yeah. I felt startlingly human, sitting there in bed watching The Bold and the Beautiful, seeing the news photography of a bright and sunny day outside - the sight of which made me cringe, instinctively fearful of the light. I flipped through the handful of books lying about in the room, mostly poetry collections composed by Lanthinel's dreamers. I paced the room like a caged tiger, wrestling with the urge to go outside, as if my magic could protect me there as well, craving nothing more than to taste fresh air again instead of being trapped in the Twilight Zone.

Finally, with a great deal of effort, I willed myself to slumber.

It was over an hour after sunset when Nightshade woke me by knocking on the door, and despite the confusion of my instincts which caused me to oversleep, I felt remarkably refreshed, much more so than from my usual daytime sleep, and I burst out of the room with an eagerness that nearly frightened the changeling. And as Nightshade graciously led me into the main hall of Lanthinel's estate, I swore to myself that I'd never sleep in a Freehold again, at least not as long as I remained a vampire. The effects were simply too disconcerting.

I felt a change in myself I couldn't describe. It was far too mercurial for the analytical part of my mind to grasp, possessing the dreamlike quality of last night's experiences, and I was afraid to explore it yet with instinct and intuition. But as I strode through the winding halls of Lanthinel's mansion, grimacing at the hum of the central heating and the ever-present murmur of electricity in the walls, I felt reborn in a way only vampires can, as if a part of me had gone into the sun the night before. It was a strangely resonant, somber sensation, as if I had plunged through a smoky mirror into Wonderland. But I felt as alive as a Kindred could hope for.

It was Glamour, of course. I was still flush with it.

The scent of jasmine and ancient blood had faded by now, though, leaving me vaguely uncertain as to whether I'd only imagined it. I glanced at my reflection in a passing mirror, seeing the way my inhumanly pale grey eyes drank in the colors around me, tingeing them in shades of pink from Lanthinel's warm-colored décor. They were also bloodshot. No surprise there, I suppose. Probably strained from my daytime activity. A little laugh rippled out of me, catching Nightshade off guard, and I shook my head with a solemn smile as I pulled my aviator sunglasses out of my jacket pocket and slid them on.

Ashley was waiting for us in the central hall.

"Well," she said softly, gesturing at herself, "What do you think?"

(This was turning out to be a strange week.)

I slowed to a stop. "Lanthinel?"

Ashley laughed, which sounded strange in the spacious chamber. "Well, yeah."

My brow furrowed in bemusement. Outwardly, she - well, I should say he - looked almost perfectly like the Ashley I remembered. Petite and very thin, with the long, lean lines of a dancer, literally just a pale slip of a girl, with her long black hair braided neatly in a long cord behind her, dressed almost entirely in black clothing - gloves, sunglasses and all - save for the long, crimson silk scarf and the black and cherry red combat boots. Not obviously armed, though probably concealing something underneath the coat she wore. Even Lanthinel's natural swagger, masculine and somewhat aggressive, fit the image well. Except when acting, Ashley was never one to back down from anybody.

"Who knew you were so good at being a woman," I remarked, lightly teasing.

I sensed the roll of her eyes, even behind the shades.

"But do I look convincing?" she whispered.

"You don't smell right."

She frowned. "Why not?"

"Mostly because Ash didn't have a noticeable scent," I explained, sliding my hands into my jacket pockets, "At least not one that I was aware of. I was shocked when I met her at the dojo, after she'd been Undone, and realized I could smell her. Still, I guess it's a small detail. Hopefully no one else will notice."

Ashley gave me a small sulking look, which I found adorable knowing it actually came from Lanthinel, albeit translated through my friend's feminine features.

"It didn't come up last time," she argued.

I shrugged, resisting the urge to grin and bare my fangs. "Well, scent is the strongest of my senses, except maybe for my hearing. I'm sure it's nothing you can't fix."

The young woman grunted.

I smiled wryly. "It's definitely a more convincing disguise than the Shadow."

* * *

Stephen Truncali watched with a discrete smile as the young woman solemnly walked about the room, she was lighting scattered candles and incense with a single long-stemmed match, her skirt dancing around her legs as she moved from corner to corner, the beautiful black curls of her hair swinging against her slender back. He'd seen Kelly perform this little ritual more than a few times over the past five years-one of the few rituals she found pleasure in. She was doing nothing overtly magickal, just "rekindling the hearth fires" as she liked to put it, warming her Sanctum after a long absence. Her resonance was strong here.

Steph was smiling at her low, melodic humming, a tune he recognized but couldn't place, and the sweet scent of her perfume in the air around him, mingling with the first taste of the incense. There were already oil lamps burning, and between they and the soft glow of sunlight filtering in through the heavy curtains, Kelly's lightly tanned skin seemed to shine and her father's pocket watch gleamed gold at her breast. Amid the tinkling of other charms she wore, it was hard to believe the watch was anything but another talisman, something of ancient construction instead of recent Swiss manufacture.

He was thoroughly pleased to see her again.

Of course, Steph also liked being in the young woman's Sanctum, which felt more like the parlor of a devoted mystic then a company office, but then again his own private demesne across the hall had a similar feeling to it. There were no electronics inside the room, all of that was kept to Kelly's “public” office downstairs. In fact, aside from the low murmur of the central air vents (she liked to keep it cool in here, all year round) and the ponderous hum of the ceiling fan overhead, there were no machine noises whatsoever. Not that anything more complex than the fan would function inside here, of course, aside from the BTG cell phones, which were themselves a quasi-magickal construction. Kelly would have none of it, and in this place her will was law.

Stephen waited patiently while Kelly tended to the little shrine in her office, a little mahogany dresser, something of her grandmother's. Here there were photographs of her father, Douglas Brooke, and her family, flanked by white candles. This was something Steph found drew them together - one of their mutual passions - a reverence for the dead. Alongside these there was a profusion of idols and mementoes - Catholic rosaries, gifts from her mother; jade statuettes and chits engraved with hexagrams; a scattering of Navajo and Kainah paraphernalia; Egyptian statuary, particularly of Osiris, Anubis and Horus, and a small wicker dream catcher stitched in the patterns of the Uktena tribal marks to name a few. Also a simple bronze urn stood among the items, Stephen knew it contained the ashes of the sorceress Typhane, one of the earliest past lives Kelly was aware of.

Kelly lit the fragrant incense along the side of the shrine and ran her fingers over the pages of a book there. One of her own writing, Steph had found out, a collection of Gnostic scripture, fragments of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and rites for tending to ghosts and spirits, some of which had been taught to her as a child by wraiths, all written in the young woman's own flowing script. She murmured a soft prayer under her breath, and then came the pinprick at her finger, a droplet of blood in the golden bowl to feed the spirits, a ritual she had taught Stephen in the first year of their growing friendship. It was a rite of sacrifice - to appease the dead, no doubt a practice as old as the world.

Finally, Kelly turned back to him with her crisp English accent and an apologetic smile. "Sorry for taking so long."

"No worries, I understand," Steph smiled, her body was backlit by the window for a moment and she looked radiant. She moved towards the desk breaking the spell so with his thoughts returning to the present he asked. "How is Jesse by the way?"

"Mmmmm," she sighed, "It was wonderful seeing her again. We spent the whole weekend doing nothing but sleeping in, ordering out and dropping in clubs to say hi to people. It felt like I'd been away forever. She's good, though. Her gig in Dallas went well, and they're in talks again with Rough Trade for a record contract."

"That's very cool."

"Well, it'd only be the fifth time," Kelly chuckled, leaning against the desk, where her velvet jacket was thrown atop a pile of books and papers, "Everybody wants them to churn out more songs like 'Don Juan' instead of the punk they want to do."

"I think I’ve heard ‘Don Juan’- its very good- labels don’t want to have political or social commentary they want love stories and advertising, remember?" Stephen replied with sardonic humor, "And nobody gives punk the respect it deserves."

"Nobody wants to hear what they might want to say." She grinned at him, then her eyes flickering past him for a moment as if she was sliding into darker thoughts.

"Pretty much." He sighed, watching her smile fade.

"Anyway," Steph brightened, putting aside those cynical thoughts, "It's good to see you again, Kelly. I take it you didn't make much headway at the New Conclave? I'm surprised you even went, to tell the truth...?"

"Well, I had been invited, and it's not often the Hollow Ones get a voice in the halls of power, as it were. I know we're technically there in the trenches with everyone else, but the Traditions don't give us much credit most of the time. If it weren’t for Roland and the good name of BTG, I probably would've been ignored as well. Besides," she shrugged, "It was a chance to see some old friends of mine, people I haven't seen in years."

"True, Though I’m sure it was more Roland’s doing then BTGs- we are considered taboo by even the Rogue Council these days." Steph gazed up at the ceiling as he felt the faint rumble of a jet engine overhead.

"And it's good to see you, too," Kelly smiled, pushing away from the desk, drawing his attention back to her as she kissed her friend on both cheeks, though she had to stand on tiptoe given their difference in height. Stephen chuckled as she did so, knowing it was both a gesture of polite affection and a chance to flirt, something which the young woman could barely resist from habit, even now that she and Jesse were living together. Still, he smiled faintly at the scent of her hair as it tickled his cheeks, and the light fragrance of her body so close to him, marred only by the faint smell of cigarette smoke, and pulled her closer for a brief hug. For his part he found it hard not to flirt with her as well.

"And at least it was productive in some respects," she murmured as she drew back.

Steph nodded. "Sung Lee has been studying the data your friend collected, as well as what Agent Reese provided, though she hasn't had time to go through it all yet, since she's preparing for a tactical assault on Autocthonia."

Kelly blinked in disbelief. "The machine god? The Iteration X stronghold?"

"Yes," he smirked, "Apparently Ashley's being held there. She, Lanthinel and Katherine are going to attempt a rescue mission."

"Katherine's back in town?"

Stephen shrugged.

"That can't be good."

"Actually, Katherine seems relatively under control for a change," he murmured, smiling wryly at the young woman's soft British accent, "Though I've only spoken to her once since she returned. Apparently, she and Sung Lee have become friends, enough that she's allowed Katherine to feed on her, and even stay at her apartment occasionally."

Kelly arched an eyebrow. "And you're fine with that?"

"Sung Lee's an adult, Kelly," Steph smiled softly, "I can't tell her what to do. I've already spoken to her and warned her about Jhor. Beyond that, there's not much I can say or do. She trusts Katherine, more or less. She was protecting her for a while, when she first came back to Denton, keeping her presence a secret. Lanthinel seems to trust her, too. And Zilla, though his opinion doesn't really matter at this point."

“And your letting Sung Lee go?” Kelly asked as his with a look of concern, though it only produced a laugh out of him.

He paused and looked down, where they both knew Sung Lee was plying away in her office surrounded by the company’s primary computer network. “She isn’t the young girl who was taking lunch orders five years ago. She’s earned her position here and she’s earned my respect- it’s her decision.”

Kelly grunted noncommittally, sitting on the edge of her desk. She had never much cared for Katherine or any other vampire, really, viewing them as twisted servants of Oblivion, though she understood that neither the Gangrel nor Andrew had a say in their Embrace - only in how they dealt with the curse. Sung Lee however was another matter- the teen was like an adorable American little sister to Kelly. "Do you think they'll make it out of Authocthonia alive?"

Stephen nodded with confidence- a smile Kelly suspected to be pride on his lips. "From the information Sung Lee's shared with me, I think they've got a strong chance. And the three of them have worked surprisingly well together so far, even taking out six Hit-Marks at Ashley's dojo. And you never know what Lanthinel can do when pressed. He's apparently been running around Denton as the Shadow lately."

She laughed and conceded his point with a small nod.

Steph smiled. "Though I take it you'd like to personally follow up on the information you brought from New Orleans?"

"Yes, of course. I am the resident expect on Oblivion, after all."

"Since you've seen it," he replied with wince.

Kelly nodded, grimacing faintly at the reminder. How many times since childhood had she dreamed of Stygia's dizzying spires soaring upwards into darkness, or of the maddening whispers of nephwracks and spectres in the depths of the Labyrinth? That had been the hazily remembered existence of Evelyn Whitlock, murdered by her friends in the Order of Hermes, who wandered the Underworld of the 18th century and witnessed the loss of Charon in 1945 before finally achieving Lethe. Those two centuries of existence were burned into Kelly's soul, and she was still startled to discover how much her life was driven by Evelyn's fragmentary memories.

"Only a brief glimpse, fortunately," she murmured.

"You're also the most familiar with wraiths and the Dark Umbra," Stephen added, shrugging, "And these are your friends you've been working with, though of course you'll need Sung Lee to help you with whatever needs to be done on computer."

"Well, we'll be leaving for England in another couple of weeks," Kelly reminded him, brushing a spill of hair out of her eyes, "So Jesse can meet my family - cross your fingers, please - and so I can visit the Chantry of Saint Paul, among other things. I'll try to get as much as I can do beforehand, though, around my usual schedule. I think I may call up Rook to see if he can loan me some help. He and Tessa could probably kibitz better over certain things."

Steph smiled at the word kibitz, which she'd picked up from him, it clashed slightly with the rest of her accent he thought.

"Well, then I'll leave you to it."

"Actually," Kelly said, "Are you free to have lunch with me? I'd love to discuss this some more and bounce some ideas off of you."

"I wish I could," Stephen demurred, smiling gently at the crestfallen look which crossed her face, "But I've got a meeting with the FBI and I don't know how long I'll be there. Tomorrow possibly? I'll clear my schedule for sometime later in the week if you want? Though please share anything you find out before that? I'd like to look over it when I have time?"

She nodded. "Alright."

"I'm sorry to disappoint you?"

"It's fine, Stephen. I'll live," Kelly chuckled, "We're all busy, especially since Zilla up and walked out to wander the earth like Cain, as you put it. And I have some spirits I'd like to talk to anyway."

"Then I'll catch you later," Stephen smiled gently.

She surprised him with another kiss on the cheek. "Alright. Enjoy your luncheon."

"I doubt it," he joked.

* * *

"Well, this is it. It doesn't quite look like a pit to Hell, now does it?"

"No, my man, it sure doesn't."

Kelly smiled in bemusement as the two women approached the playground, extending her black umbrella as a fine misty rain began to fall. Tessa Garland glowered at the leaden sky and flipped out her own compact model, checkered black and white, which unfolded itself at the flick of a button. In the near distance, the San Bernardino mountains were fading into a dense grey fog as the storm swept eastward from the coast across the small residential suburb of Colton and the Mojave Desert to the north. If anything, Tessa thought, it seemed to cheer her slightly older companion, who relished in the refreshing cool damp of the March rain showers.

The landscape here was relatively dry as Kelly expected, and like its larger neighbor to the south, Colton lived and died primarily by importing vast quantities of water into what was otherwise an arid desert. Of course, Colton was a semi-exclusive suburb, a place for the wealthy and upper middle class to escape the frenetic pace of the city, exchanging it for the comforting banality of sterile neighborhoods, stark Californian architecture, identical houses, and bright, over-watered green grass. Compared to New Mexico, it was a plastic and sunshine wasteland. The playground was only the most recent in a long string of anachronisms, situated outside a small neighborhood on the outskirts of town.

"I think we should nuke the site from orbit," said Tessa, "It's the only way to be sure."

Kelly chuckled.

There were no children on the playground, of course; the inclement weather apparently drove away any prospective customers. But the equipment was brand-new, its plastic and metal shining proudly in the grey lighting like most everything did in California to Kelly's eyes, and there was a fresh, newly laid turf carpeting the area around it. The young woman paused and glanced around as they approached the site, her skirt swinging around her legs, and scanned the line of houses nearest to the playground. It was all walled off, of course, with neat privacy fencing and the like. But Kelly couldn't remember seeing any vehicles outside any of the nearest houses, or any other sign of habitation. In fact, most of them looked brand new.

"It's a new addition," a soccer mom informed them earlier, shrugging indifferently.

"You're sure this is the most recent site Reese's docs mentioned?" Kelly murmured.

"That's what her records say, yeah."

"All of this looks brand new."

Tessa shrugged. "I'll look it up and see."

Sliding on her VR shades and glove, the Adept toyed with her handheld computer for a moment before surfing through information on the Internet and Digital Web, gesturing vaguely in the air as if doing a pantomime.

Laughing under her breath, Kelly continued ahead, fishing out a silver charm pendant from her jacket pocket. The nearer she came to the turf, however, she felt a chill come over her, a sense of dread washing over her like a ripple of heat, and her pace slowed. It grew no stronger than a vaguely ominous feeling, however. Kneeling down at the edge of the playground, Kelly wound the black silk chord around her hand and allowed the pendant, inscribed with Enochian symbols, to dangle from her palm.

"The area belongs to the Desert Aerie Development Company," Tessa announced, approaching at a languid pace as she continued digging through reams of information, her black trench coat trailing out behind her, "The same developer who built the rest of the neighborhood in the late Nineties. There was apparently a lull in development until recently, and it shows the land was acquired from a private holder in April of 2004, which is months before Reese's records show the instability breaching through here."

Kelly nodded, murmuring a mantra under her breath.

"Looks like a pretty classic cleanup job to me," Tessa thought aloud, tapping controls in midair which only she could see, "You know, something fucked up happens, the Void Engineers get called in to fix it, and the New World Order or somebody covers it up by buying the place, building a playground over the site and pretending like nothing ever happened. They probably even backdated the deed records to make it look like this Desert Aerie biz had already bought up the place and were starting to build here..."

"It's a Caern," Kelly said in a distant voice, scanning the playground with new eyes, "Or at least it used to be. An ancient one..."

"How do you know?"

"I just do. Uktena whispering in my ear, perhaps."

"Okaaaaaay," Tessa frowned, "Whatever you say, Spooky."

"There used to be a cave entrance here," Kelly added, the silver pendant glittering as she gestured broadly at the playground, "It looks as if the entire thing was collapsed, plowed up and paved over. I can see the disturbances left behind, the collapse of old patterns underneath the new order. There's a strong whiff of Jhor about the place as well, and the touch of Oblivion remains strong in Sheol. If I had to guess, the playground and everything else is an attempt to normalize the area, because the Shroud has been strengthened here recently. It's all very rigid and static in the Etheric."

"Yeah, there's been a serious disruption of the informational plane, like dimensional fatigue or some shit," Tessa agreed, running analyses between her computer and a handheld scanner, "Almost like somebody plastered over a hole; the flow here is different from the surrounding area. Looks like an amateur job to me, though, the way they patched the code like this. There's still low level errors degrading the code here."

Kelly gave the young woman a quizzical look at her choice of words. "It's probably an Uktena Caern, like the one in Cement City. Probably it became corrupted and something breached the Shroud here."

"Whatever it is, it's gone now," Tessa shrugged, scanning data on her virtual HUD, "This whole place has been forcibly sterilized."

"There's still a ward here. They hardened the Gauntlet to hold out further breaches."

"Take no chances, right?"

"So it seems."

"So what next, Kemo Sabe?"

Straightening up with a glance at the drizzling sky, Kelly shrugged. "We ask the spirits what happened here."

Tessa grunted. "You're kidding, right?"

"I trust them more than I trust a lot of people," the Englishwoman replied, smiling softly at the sighing rain around them, "Though you might also flip through the local news to see if there's anything which hasn't been covered up yet. If the Technocracy are as harried as they seem, and if this was a sloppy job as you suggest, then perhaps they missed something useful. It's almost impossible to completely cover up something like this, after all. Entropy won't allow anything so perfect..."

* * *

The nightmare shattered and melted away into blinding light.

Glamour rushed in around the fragile essence of her soul, embracing and suffusing it in a wash of ecstatic new sensations and memories, momentarily overcoming her awareness of self, as a separate being from the dream fire, and Katherine felt herself hurtling upwards at terrific speed, away from the wintry streets of her imaginary New York, the nightmare of snow and exhausting battle. The young woman threw her arms out behind her, riding the whirlwind of blistering, unimaginably beautiful song, past throngs of whispering voices and pawing hands, and was borne ever upwards into sweet delirium.

Katherine was aware of being stripped down to her essence by the whirlwind, to the core of her being, as melancholy fragments of her old life and the agony of her vampire existence were both shorn away, gently, like being shed of garments by a lover's warm hands, yet with a merciless urgency which brooked no argument, not even as she began to lose sense of herself as herself, as the human woman and Gangrel she'd always known. There was precious little time to weep or mourn its passing before the mortal world fell away from her mind, and as she swept ever upwards, she felt a torrent of music welling up from deep inside herself - a chorus of singing, wailing voices which might have been her own.

Suddenly, she was soaring past a threshold, incandescent with blue-white flame, shooting upwards into the night sky and all its coldly glittering stars, away from the remorseless gloom of the Underworld and the demons within her soul. She reached out to touch the stars, the jeweled blackness which filled her vision, and she could not be denied! Katherine longing carried her the impossible distance, the starlight dazzling as she drew near, weeping. They rippled at the slightest touch and then parted for her, like a theatre curtain drawing back from the hidden recesses of the stage.

Ariel gave an exultant cry of triumph!

And then a moment of pure madness erupted, as if she were cracking open, baring her heart to the searing touch of the mortal realm. The cold of Banality washed over her again, clinging to her, threatening to drag her back downwards. But a new panoply of gossamer, dream-spun fabric was already drawing itself around her, shielding her from the harsh climate of the mortal world, and there was a moment of utter panic as it coiled around the delicate limbs of her body, pulling tight, constricting, gathering the pieces of her soul together and lovingly enfolding them in a soft, fragrant shroud. And as her chrysalis hardened, her vision was swallowed by darkness.

With a guttural, ragged gasp, Ariel convulsed on the slab.

Her eyes snapped open.

For a long minute, she could only stare wildly into darkness, breathing in the cool air, which burned in lungs that hadn't really tasted oxygen in over five years. Her eyes were swimming in tears, the pupils nearly erasing the jade green irises as she gaped. She felt as if she were being held by a dozen sets of hands simultaneously, pinning her neck, arms and legs, and she thrashed wildly for a moment before realizing she was wrapped in soft gauze. Then the sense of suffocation and confinement kicked in hard again, spurring the part of her mind driven by wildness to fight furiously for escape.

This time real hands gripped her arms and legs. Soothing voices spoke her name.

As she was gently pressed down against the slab, she closed her eyes with a fuzzy moan, panting desperately for breath, too disoriented to beg the hands to hurry as they began cutting the wrapping which pinned her. Having spent three days and nights as a bound spirit, locked within her own corpse, left to the madness in the darkest recesses of her soul, the young woman was insensible to the world. Simple sensations were startling. Sounds were overly loud, the aromatic scent of the bandages too strong, the sense of conferment too suffocating.

It barely even occurred to her that she was alive.

Gradually, as her senses calmed into something resembling order, allowing her thoughts to do the same, the young woman realized her legs were free and she could feel cool air upon the bare skin there. She could move them. And the soft tearing sound of cloth being cut was drawing nearer and nearer, until the chill air breathed across her naked stomach and chest, which were slick with sweat. She feebly moved her fingers, her toes, this time more to test the working of her own body than to relish the newfound freedom.

Finally, the wrappings came loose and fell away from her face.

She lay there on the ceremonial altar for a long while, half-delirious and half-dreaming in the languid stillness that followed. The fragrant wrappings, inscribed with ritual symbols and prayers, lay ruined about her nude body like a caul. The young woman lolled her head against the stone, feeling the first tickle of hair against her cheeks and throat, blinking groggily up at the ceiling, where a stone window allowed her to glimpse the stars. Her fingers and toes moved almost of their own accord. And ever so slowly, she became aware of a sound thudding in her head, a sound she hadn't heard since Billy stole and murdered her.

It was her heartbeat...!

The voice was speaking again, more softly this time, telling her to lie still. A soft, warm blanket was gingerly draped over her shivering body, and the woman moaned at the decadent heat of its touch. Soon came cool fingers and a cold metal instrument, which touched her chest, her throat, checking her pulse and breathing. And ever so slowly, while they examined her, the young woman realized that not only was her heart beating, but her skin was warm. The blanket was warming her with the heat of her own body...!

I'm alive?!

She must have spoken it aloud, because the voice answered: "Yes, of course you are."

Laughter. It was a faint sound, because her throat was parched.

"She's thirsty," said another voice.

The young woman felt herself being lifted up slightly, and a cup of cool water was brought to her lips, from which she drank deeply. It felt cold and clear, washing down her throat in a blissful tide, bringing renewed vigor to her weakened body. Her hands came up and clasped the cup - a chalice, she realized, blinking dazedly. It was gold and ornately worked, beautiful really, but the water was all she was interested in. Because with the water came strength. And very quickly clarity as well.

She drained the chalice dry.

Laying it in her lap, licking her lips to catch every precious drop of water, she looked up to see Angelo standing at the foot of the slab, smiling thoughtfully at her with his hands clasped behind his back. Even in the chamber's dim lighting, her eyes recognized him as something other than human - the highly reflective white skin, the vaguely luminous eyes, the stillness in his bearing. For as long as she'd known him, Angelo had always been simply another vampire, Kindred like herself, which made him rather ordinary in a way. But now...?

The chalice clattered against stone as it fell from her shaking hands.

Lanthinel was there as well, resplendent as always in his Sidhe mien, with his long blond hair neatly brushed back from his lovely, angular features, blue eyes shimmering with newfound color. And as recognition struck her, the young woman felt memories and associations surge to the fore - Lanthinel, her friend and companion, whom she had known since a time of desert sands and great burning monuments of stone...! Dizzily, the young woman sat up, clutching the blanket to her breast.

"I'm alive," Ariel whispered.

"More than that," Angelo bowed, "Welcome to the ranks of the true immortals."

She stared at him for a moment, stunned.

And then the nymph began to laugh. Long, low, delirious laughter.

* * *

At first, that was all Ariel heard. Everything else Lanthinel said, his face drawn with concern, was lost on her after that. She was stricken, her earlier gaiety forgotten, and it was some time before either he or Angelo could rouse her again. The world was simply blotted out by an upwelling of rage and alarm. But not despair. The nymph had gone through more lifetimes than she could remember, all with passionate abandon, and mere death couldn't frighten her. But this...! This threatened to not only end her life, a life she fought for so fiercely, but to annihilate her soul as well.

She was understandably horrified. And pissed off.

And when Lanthinel shook her gently by the shoulders, Ariel couldn't help her violent reaction, which sent her spinning angrily away from her brother and crashing into the stone wall behind her, her catlike eyes gone wild. Irresistible though her passions were, however, the young woman quickly forced her rage to smolder down to ashes, though that merely brought the sting of tears to her eyes instead. Oh, yes, she could've argued, could have raged against what they were telling her, but that was senseless - it was the truth.

Your Pattern is degrading...

Besides, that fury was the Beast's doing, exacerbated by the nymph's own emotional intensity. The raw Glamour which rushed in to embrace Ariel upon awakening, not to mention the ecstasy of these first hours of life, had initially blinded her to the demon's familiar whispering presence in the back of her mind. But Ariel was all too aware now. It twisted, thrashing madly against the cage of her Changeling soul, rebelling against the new life which flooded her body from the Spell of Life. And the young woman couldn't help but feel Awyrny's curse devouring her from within like a cancer.

Ariel wasn't afraid of the Beast, not in the slightest. Actually, she took grim pleasure in its frustrated rage, sneered at its struggles. She could feel nothing but loathing for something so alien to her nature. Besides, while she was bound by her Oath to Awyrny, the nymph was free of the Curse of Cain, and in its drastically weakened state the Beast was largely impotent against the ancient strength of her Fae soul. That might change as she weakened, of course, but Ariel had struggled with the Beast for five years already. She could do so again, if necessary. And when - not if - she fulfilled her Oath, the demon would be extinguished forever.

Shaking herself out of reverie, Ariel glanced up to see the sun's golden fire just cresting the horizon, like a firewyrm rearing up in the forest. The Beast recoiled at the sight, of course, struggling vainly to escape its bane, but the nymph smiled softly and closed her eyes, basking in the blessed warmth. It was her first sunrise in five years, and the first Ariel could clearly recall in this lifetime. Even those Katherine witnessed during the nymph's long sleep had grown hazily unreal after so many harrowing, bloody nights.

There would be many more sunrises, Ariel quietly vowed.

The east was blazing when she opened her eyes again, her firewyrm unfolding its wings to claim the sky, and overhead there was only a deep, dreamy blue. The last stars had already faded, and even the moon was an eerie phantom of its earlier silver glory now that the dawn had come. Birds were greeting the light, singing the old melodies Ariel knew so well. And as her firewyrm took to the air, the beating of its wings stirring warm breezes, which played with her dark red hair, and the fragrance of the woods reached her finally. The scent of the earth, the trees, the living world of which she was inextricably part.

Ariel drank it in with an aching heart.

Autumn childe, the wind whispered, Welcome home.

Opening her eyes with a faint, solemn smile, carefully balancing herself on the balcony railing where she sat, her legs dancing over the side amid the folds of her skirt, Ariel indulged in a long, luxurious stretch before meeting the firewyrm's gaze again. It was climbing for the heavens, shedding the angry luster of flame for pure white brilliance. The nymph forced herself not to flinch at the dazzling light, which terrified the part of her mind that remembered what it meant to be a vampire. Everywhere around her, the world was coming alive, answering the call of the light, and Ariel blinked away tears as the sky blossomed into its true azure.

"I've forgotten myself and my Oath for too long, Awyrny," she whispered, "I will save you, for both our sakes."

The wind sighed around her.

Ariel closed her eyes and turned her thoughts toward war.

* * *

"Good morning, Zilla."

Karl drew up short as he strode into the foyer, seeing her there and hearing the strange timbre of her voice. A shock of familiarity went through him. He knew of the ritual, of course, by which Katherine sought to regain her humanity. Word of it swept quickly through his closest friends, since everyone from Lanthinel to Cassandra were asked to play some role. And after a moment, as his surprise faded, he felt a smile on his lips.

Perhaps this was inevitable, after all.

All the colors of autumn were drawn to her - the delicate paleness of her skin; the dark brown shirt worn tight across her breasts and against her lithe body, one shoulder sliding down to bare milky skin and a black spaghetti strap; the explosion of auburn that was her hip-hugging skirt, like a train of gold and russet leaves. For as long as he'd known her, Karl had only ever seen the young woman dress in somber hues - blacks and violets - so the profusion of burnished color caught him momentarily off guard.

Also, as a dead woman, a vampire, her latent beauty never really struck him. She was dead, after all. And Katherine gave her tarnished charms and strangely feline eroticism little notice - what did aesthetics matter, after all, to someone accustomed to sleeping in the earth and running on all fours under moonlight? Even to wear fresh clothing that wasn't ripped or stained in some fashion was a remarkable change for her.

But now this apparition, standing between shafts of dusty sunlight streaming in through the tall windows, was a vision of fey beauty. A moment of exquisite feminine grace and longing captured in the flesh. The mane of curly dark red hair, which fell to her hips, framed a narrow, gently angled face, the features hinting at wildness, with skin like snow. Tall and willowy, seemingly fragile, she stood with her hands casually clasped behind her back, smiling.

It was the eyes, however, which were most striking. They were the deepest violet, betraying a spirit of mischief - wickedness, really - and they shone with the light of an ancient soul. Yet there was something undeniably human in the nymph's gaze.

As she approached, cocking her head slightly to one side with a coy smile, the faerie moved with the languid grace of a dancer, virtually silent even on the hard wood floor, and with more than a hint of the feline movement Zilla remembered from Katherine. In ancient times, such beauty may have blinded or killed a careless man obsessed with capturing the forest nymph - and possibly this was still true! Her smile was bewitching.

But, of course, Zilla was no lovesick fool. Far from it.

As she drew nearer, the fragrance of jasmine and honeysuckle swept over him like an embrace, riding an underlying heady aroma of roses. It reminded him of the sprawling gardens outside, and of wildflowers blooming.

"The Lady Kildare, I presume," he smiled.

"Indeed," she curtsied, "Lady Ariel Kildare of House Fiona, at your service, sir."

For a moment, Karl nearly chuckled, amused yet deeply relieved by all of this, which he politely suppressed for the sake of the show. Instead, he shared a small, wry smile with her and took the delicate white hand she offered him, planting a courtly kiss atop it. The smooth skin was sweetly fragrant, bearing nuances he hadn't detected from a distance. The scent of moist earth after a rainstorm, of spring willows and deep forest glades, and of cold, clear waters babbling in lonely streams.

"It's good to finally meet you again, Lady Kildare."

Ariel laughed. The sound of it was as lovely as everything else about her - soft and melodic, like a crystal chime. "Alright, enough of this," she grinned, sweeping Zilla into a friendly embrace, "I'm a forest nymph, not a Sidhe. We can skip the courtly pleasantries! You're an old friend, and friends shouldn't require formal ceremonies to say hello to one another, even after such a long absence as mine. Though it is very good to see you again."

"And you as well, my lady," Zilla replied, tongue in cheek.

But something was wrong.

It was subtle, and at first hardly noticeable. But Karl prided himself on his powers of observation, and he was not limited strictly to the mundane senses. As Ariel swept him into a loose, friendly embrace, there was no denying the coolness of her skin and the coldness which lingered after her touch, just as it was with Katherine. As he turned his attention toward this curiosity, Zilla sensed the wrongness ran much deeper.

As they drew apart, she saw the change in his expression and smiled softly. "It's alright, Zilla. I know you can sense it. I've come to ask you for a great favor."

Karl half-bowed, half-nodded. "Ask away."

Ariel flashed a small grin, and while her voice grew solemn again as she spoke, her tone was light, deliberately eschewing any great melodrama. "I'm sure you can guess what happened, how I've come back to life. We made no great secret of it, after all. But it looks like I've jumped the gun a bit. I've overcome the Curse of Cain, but I'm still bound to Awyrny - the Huntress - because of her curse, which was placed on her by Visbali, and because of an Oath I made to save her at Lago de Como. And unless I can fulfill that Oath, my body and soul will continue breaking down, until eventually I'll lose myself and become Kindred again. Or what's left of me will be dragged down into Oblivion."

"You're dying," Karl said wryly, "And you're asking me to join a suicide mission?"

"Something like that, yeah."

The Mokole nodded, mulling over this.

"At the very least," Ariel continued, "I have to kill the Huntress to free Awyrny and I, as well as all the souls I'm carrying inside of me - those of her other childer and our victims. Obviously, that won't be easy, but she's not interested in killing me, per se. We're both equally bound by Visbali's curse, and she knows that as her descendent by blood, I'm the one who's meant to complete it. If she captures me, she'll no doubt have me Embraced again, to start the cycle over again. I don't know what'll happen if I die before then, or before I can fulfill my Oath. I only know that I'm weakening day by day, and so there isn't much time. This has to be done now if it ever will be."

"How long do you have?" Zilla inquired, concerned by the urgency in her voice.

The nymph took a deep breath. "Five days. After that, I'll seriously start degenerating, and I don't know how long I'll last after that. If necessary, Rook or Jolie can buy me some more time by placing me in stasis, but that's hardly a solution. I've forgotten my Oath for far too long, and I will do everything in my power to fulfill it. And obviously, the last thing I want is to suffer the Forgetting and become a vampire again - or something even worse."

Nodding thoughtfully, Karl admired the young faerie, who was almost Sidhe in her grim determination. In fact, it reminded him of Lanthinel's stubborn sense of honor. No surprise there, of course, since they were siblings, and Fiona had long ago recognized Ariel's nobility, for which they conferred upon her a knightly rank within their House. Granted, Fiona was often easy to please, but it spoke volumes for the Incarnae to earn such prestige. It brought the smile back to his lips, for it was something he very rarely saw reflected in Katherine. Ariel, for her fickle nature, was far more comprehensible.

"Alright," he agreed, "When do we attack?"

Ariel gave a small bow. "In three days. We're amassing a force against the Black Spirals and Balor troops who're with Awyrny, and all of us need time to prepare. Stephen - " Slight, affectionate smile. " - has been working on a way to buy more time, though I don't know how successful he'll be. He hasn't spoken much about it, I'm afraid..."

* * *

Grunting with effort, the young woman hauled the body out of the Cadillac and dragged him across the rocky soil into the trees. In the distance, the Blue Ridge Mountains reared some three thousand feet up from the humid earth, forming a jagged silhouette against the slightly lighter blackness of the sky. In the sparsely populated eastern half of Tennessee, the stars were bright and easily seen to the naked eye, the Big Dipper standing out most prominently, but the sky still seemed blank compared to the jeweled heavens she once knew.

She bitterly missed her vampire eyes. Her preternatural strength.

The black man - a drug dealer, always her favorite victim - was very nearly twice her size and weighed perhaps two-hundred pounds despite his leanly muscular frame. Not so long ago, this would have been a simple task. She would've hefted him over her shoulder with casual ease and gone dancing into the forest to bury him, carefully disposing of the victim as her sire lovingly taught her. And instead of stumbling in the forbidding darkness, the night world would have been as bright as noonday to her eyes.

Well, it wasn't like that now. The magic of the night was gone.

Michelle was crying in frustration by the time she dragged the corpse into a concealing ditch, and as she lurched to a halt, the young woman toppled over onto her side, landing beside the man's body, panting heavily with the exertion. Her arms and back screamed in pain as she rolled over onto her back, pine needles catching in her blonde hair and on her clothes, feeling feverish and disgusted with her own weakness. Even before Katherine's Embrace, this would've been a difficult task - she was a small woman, after all, and rather willowy. But at least she would've been healthy then.

No such luck now. The headache which had been building for the past several hours now exploded with a roar, pounding dully behind her eyes, making every little movement an exercise in nausea, and it literally hurt to breathe. There wasn't a part of her body which wasn't either aching or exhausted. When the Change first came upon her, Michelle couldn't help but obsess over her mortal weaknesses, but she'd still been as strong as before the Embrace. The timeless beauty she'd known for over a century was still the same.

But every passing day wore on her like they were years. Michelle couldn't escape the sense of being slowly unraveled. It felt like she was in that cabin again, dying in her sire and lover's arms. Is this what it would have been like, she wondered, if Katherine had allowed her to go without the blood? Maybe she wouldn't have simply withered to dust as Mireia always warned her, decades flashing by in the blink of an eye. That would have been merciful, in a way. It would've been preferable to this slow decay which sapped her strength and left her mewling in the dark, heartsick and desperate.

Michelle refused to imagine how she might feel in another week.

Instead, she pulled herself up and set about burying the man as best she could, ignoring the trembling in her arms and legs. She dug a shallow grave in the soft black soil and covered it loosely with fallen tree branches, leaves, anything she could get her hands on, working to make it appear somewhat natural. Granted, when it rained the grave and its camouflage would probably be washed away, but Michelle could hope she'd be long gone by then. Besides, the effort helped to clear her head, and by the time she was finished, Michelle even felt somewhat stronger.

Growling a sigh, Michelle angrily smeared away fresh tears.

The night of the Change, there had been a violent argument between sire and childe - which wasn't unusual for them. For all his grim resignation and their strange camaraderie, Daniel's hatred for her was blistering. It wore on her nerves until they were both ready to explode at any provocation. She'd felt it coming on that night, seen it in those hard amber eyes of his, which Katherine once rambled on about so dreamily. And sure enough, it came soon after hunting, while they were standing on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Given her fledgling's insatiable thirst, Michelle had let Daniel feed first, such that when she tore him away to drink herself, there was precious little blood to be had. The man's heart fluttered wildly and stopped long before she could be satisfied. Granted, it was enough to sustain her for a night or two, long enough that she could find her own victim in the next town, but she couldn't help the sinking despair she felt as she watched the man - a dockworker whom Michelle caught beating a prostitute - vanish beneath the dark, listless waves.

Worse than the hunger was the meaninglessness of it all. Michelle, who once boasted to Katherine that they were fallen angels, passionate and untouchable by sorrow, found herself overcome with loneliness. Forget their beginnings - hadn't she loved Katherine in the end, with the same longing her sire felt for her? Michelle cared little for the trappings of humanity, aside from what pleasures they offered, but she still craved emotion. The ability to feel something - some hate, purpose, love or anything - which was almost impossible for the Kindred. But she 'd had it with Katherine, miraculously enough.

"Don't tell me you feel sorry for him," Daniel said.

Michelle had glared up at her childe, her eyes flashing red in the gloom. He perched on a nearby tree branch, gazing down at her with a sardonic smile. He looked like an escapee from the Eighties - trench coat, grey shirt and blue jeans, black felt hat to hide the crow feathers in his hair. Handsome in a melancholy way, dark eyes shining from his dusky face, a shade or two darker than her own snowy complexion.

"No," Michelle replied, "But I took no pleasure in killing him."

"Oh, no? Not like with Veronica and I?"

"You were to be a gift," she growled, "You meant nothing more to me than that."

Daniel sneered. "Shit load of good it did you, though, huh? Katherine couldn't stand the sight of me. Or you for that matter, knowing what you did to us. Knowing that you murdered us out of some sick desire to please her. Did you really think Katherine could accept that, or that she'd have anything to do with us after that? Didn't you see the fucking disgust in her eyes? You killed Veronica and I for nothing."

Her anger snapped.

In a flash of motion, Michelle grabbed her childe's leg and wrenched him out of the tree, hurling him to the ground, striking his head with a sharp crack. Of course, Daniel snarled and lunged back at her immediately, ramming her into the tree, using every ounce of preternatural strength to crush the life out of her body. But for all his physical size and strength, Michelle's blood was more potent, and she was far more experienced with their blood gifts. In the end, neither of them could seriously hurt the other, and they squared off from opposite ends of the beach, glowering at each other.

Sprawling on the ground, Daniel ran a hand back through his dark brown hair, grimacing as he felt the glossy black feathers growing out of his scalp - the product of his first and only blood frenzy weeks earlier. The reminder killed whatever fury he possessed, leaving him cold and sick at heart, and he sullenly pulled the hat back on.

"Would you prefer to join her?" she hissed.

"Sometimes," he muttered, "I would."

Then he added: "But you're stuck with me, aren't you?"

Grimacing, Michelle shook her head in disgust. But she couldn't argue with him. Daniel was the only companion she had, and in a strange way, even their mutual loathing was better than feeling nothing at all.

"I'll see you back at the hotel," she said coldly, "Don't do anything stupid."

Daniel just laughed.

Turning her back on him, Michelle stalked away, and she spent the last hour of her vampire existence wandering the piers of Rochester, brooding over everything which happened between she and Katherine, over the loneliness which made her cling to Daniel. Her childe didn't need her, of course. He stayed with her purely because of the blood bond, and because there seemed little point in doing anything else. What else was there, after all? Between she and Katherine, they had systematically destroyed him.

She had no idea where Daniel was when it happened.

It struck like a thunderbolt, but not without warning. Drifting across the beach, Michelle felt an inner twinge that stopped her in her tracks, glancing up at the moon's reflection on the lake, scanning the night around her for the cause of it. But she had only a moment to question the sensation before weakness and vertigo gripped her, forcing her to her knees. As Michelle crouched there by the waterline, shuddering, nausea surged in her throat. And suddenly, the man's stolen blood was coming up in a torrent, splashing crimson as she vomited it onto the rocky sand.

Michelle's eyes were wide with shock as the last of the blood dribbled down her chin, her skin bristling with pins and needles.

The answer came swiftly - Michelle gasped as she felt her heart spasm. It beat once, weakly. Then again. And again, fitfully, lurching into an aborted rhythm, like a stake being driven through her chest. Finally, after several false starts, her heart began pumping again at a fearful pace. And suddenly everything was agony, fire spreading through her veins and muscles as the blood was forced through them. Michelle nearly choked as her body demanded oxygen for the first time in over a year. The blood, no longer stagnant, roared in her ears as it flowed again, bringing warmth to her cold limbs.

Michelle moaned to see color draining back into her skin. Salty tears stung her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.

She collapsed.

Hours must have passed, because when Michelle awoke, the horizon was pink with dawn. The sight of it sent her scrambling backwards, crying out in alarm. But almost immediately, as she struggled to stand, the young woman realized what had happened. She felt terribly weak -weaker than she'd been even as Mireia's ghoul. The chill breeze sweeping Lake Ontario, which she'd been indifferent to earlier, was now biting through her thin clothing. And as she climbed awkwardly to her feet, trembling violently, the gathering sunlight didn't burn her. In fact, its warmth felt soothing upon her exhausted body.

She was human!

The suddenness and impossibility of it sent Michelle reeling.

Having taken their preternatural speed for granted, the hotel was halfway across Rochester, and it was hours of walking before the young woman arrived there. The daylight world frightened and horrified Michelle at every turn, and she shunned the mortals - the other mortals - around her. Michelle shivered at the puzzled stares her starved appearance earned her, and she was all too aware of her weakness, her fragility, in the company of creatures she once preyed upon with impunity.

Finally, staggering into their hotel room, she discovered Daniel with his wrists slit and a bitter, almost laughing expression frozen on his dead face. And then the world fell out from underneath Michelle's feet.

* * *

Michelle hoped her sire would have answers.

Even if she didn't, Katherine was all she had left.

Exhausted, the young woman trudged uphill to where she left the Cadillac, lazily checking the drug dealer's weapons - an old, snub-nosed revolver, what people called a Saturday night special these days, and a couple of 9mm automatics, both Barettas. As much as she disdained guns, they offered some small comfort. There was no denying the vulnerability in being a petite, sickly woman traveling on her own, after all, especially when she knew what kind of monsters were out there, hunting for mortal prey.

Oh, yes. She knew that exceedingly well.

Dirty blonde hair fell across Michelle's eyes, green and bloodshot, and with hunger - real hunger, not the blood thirst - and the craving for sleep preying on her mind, she grudgingly turned her thoughts towards toward the road ahead. Huntsville was probably her best bet, she decided, though it was almost a two hour drive. It was the only real city for miles, however, and there would be everything she needed there. 24-hour fast food restaurants offering a menu of sickening garbage to eat, and cheap hotels where she could crash for a few hours -

Michelle stopped suddenly, sensing a presence.

For the nth time, she was relieved her psychic gift hadn't abandoned her since becoming mortal again. It was fleeting, but Michelle knew she had touched upon another mind - possibly two? - lurking in the nearby forest. Her hand dropped to the pistol in her waistband, and she sank into a crouch, scanning the trees with her eyes and mind both. Everything was still, and the noise of insects drowned out all other sounds. Michelle silently cursed the blinding darkness and the loss of her vampire senses.

Who could it be, she wondered, this far from civilization? Not Kindred. At least, not hopefully. The werewolves Katherine once warned her of? Or just mortals?

"Just" mortals, she thought bitterly, As if they aren't dangerous enough now.

There. They were elusive, but she sensed them again.

They were at the car now.

Pulling the Baretta and casting a wary glance behind her, Michelle moved off to the right as quietly as she could manage with tired legs and feeble human reflexes. The Cadillac was parked near the crest of the hill, but the trees crowded in on either side of the road, offering some cover. The ground also dropped steeply a short distance away, and Michelle hugged the side of the hill, her head down, as she circled the vehicle. The presence remained stationary as she did so, lingering near the Cadillac. Before long, she was approaching the car through the dense trees on the other side of the roadway, keeping the pistol ready in one hand.

At first, Michelle only caught a glimpse of a tall female figure leaning against the car, arms folded across her chest - waiting patiently - dressed in blue jeans, boots and a leather jacket. Long, curly hair falling to her hips. Impossible to make out the color by starlight. No lights or signs of another vehicle either, which was troubling. Focusing her concentration, Michelle lightly touched upon the woman's mind, but it was no more than a caress before she lost telepathic contact. The woman's psyche was strangely elusive, dancing out of her grasp. But was it some defense or just exhaustion sapping her concentration?

Either way, the woman didn't seem to notice.

Michelle tried again, eschewing subtlety for force this time.

Immediately, she was inundated by a flood of emotion, as if the sun had burst through in the darkest part of night, dazzling her. Lovers' whispers, disjointed questions and low, wracking sobs flashed across her mind simultaneously, threatening to overwhelm her. But Michelle forced herself to plunge through the tempest, seeking out her thoughts. She'd experienced something like this before, when touching the minds of elder vampires like Laurent. But this woman's soul was like a newborn star, with depths of time and memory the likes of which Michelle had only glimpsed once before.

Shocked, Michelle jerked back, releasing her grip on the woman's psyche.

She clamped down on her thoughts, grimly silencing the question.

Let's get some answers then, shall we?

The young woman at the Cadillac half-turned as Michelle stepped out onto the pavement and leveled the Baretta at her chest.

Michelle's jaw tightened at the sight of her.

Yes, it was Katherine.

Not the vampire she knew. No, of course not. And having never seen Katherine while living, and certainly not as the fey young creature before her, the differences were perhaps more startling than Michelle's own transformation. For while all of the familiar features were present, they were sharpened, refined to the most delicate pinnacle of feminine beauty, which clashed sharply with memories of the wild-eyed lioness who sired her. In fact, if it weren't for her almost-familiar presence, which teased the edges of Michelle's telepathic awareness, she might have believed it was someone else entirely.

But what changes!

Where there was once a shoulder-length sweep of auburn waves, there was a hip-length mane of dark curls, so deeply red as to be nearly crimson. The vaguely feline features were both softened, lush with a girl's sweetness, and made angular, emphasizing the elfin quality Katherine always possessed. The natural loveliness Michelle remembered had been refined, such that there was hardly a blemish or mark upon her precious pale skin. If anything, the woman's long limbs were even more slender and fragile-seeming than her sire's had been.

Most starting, however, was the change in demeanor. This woman had none of Katherine's preternatural stillness or huntress' bearing, and while there were hints of her sire's former languor, she carried herself with an imperturbable grace, the natural elegance of a female creature. She wore the blue jeans and scoop-neck green shirt tight upon her body, the leather jacket pushed back to show off the narrow slip of her waist. She seemed ripe with color as Katherine never had been, jewelry gleaming in the moonlight, and to Michelle's aching eyes, she appeared almost unbearably alive.

Beautiful as well. She stole Michelle's breath away.

She must be Ariel.

There was no flicker of fear or alarm at the pistol Michelle brandished, not even surprise, though her lips parted slightly in shock at the blonde's appearance. Michelle grimaced, knowing how she must look. Dirty, bedraggled, pine needles in her hair and on her clothes, terribly thin, eyes bloodshot. Perhaps older as well, for Michelle sensed time catching up with her, robbing her of the youthful vitality she so long enjoyed.

She felt Ariel's concern, heard her questioning thoughts.

"Show me your hands," Michelle demanded, thrusting the Baretta forwards.

The woman eased off of the Cadillac and gamely complied. Unarmed from what the blonde saw. Not that she could conceal much in the jacket, except perhaps a small pistol.

"Do you think I'd hurt you, Michelle?" Ariel said gently, "I've only come to talk."

Even her voice was lovely, clear and bright.

"Then talk," Michelle snapped.

"I'm Lady Ariel Kildare of House Fiona," she nodded, "The faerie or changeling whom Katherine would have been if she weren't Embraced. Obviously, I've Awakened within her, and so now she and I are one. Do you recognize me?"

"You resemble Katherine," Michelle frowned, "Though you've changed."

"My true nature has come to the surface."

"I already knew it was you. I've felt your presence before."

Ariel's expression softened. "When I gave you the Embrace. I was still Sleeping within Katherine at the time. You must have...touched upon some part of me through the blood."

Michelle grunted. "Do you have any idea how strange it is - how painful - to look at you and not see her?"

"Katherine's part of me," Ariel demurred, "Just as I've always been part of her."

"Oh, I know. I've seen your ancient soul in her eyes before." She smiled bitterly, dirty blonde hair falling forwards across her face. "You were hardly gentle before, Ariel. I was terrified of dying, for which Katherine felt nothing but agony. Yet you taunted me for my fears and my longing for immortality. For freedom itself! And it was you who prevented Katherine from accepting what she was. You wouldn't even allow her to accept my love, my gratitude, for the gift she gave me."

The young woman shook her head. "Katherine and I are the same, Michelle. What she felt, I felt as well. And I still love you, despite everything that's happened between us."

Michelle laughed softly, sadly.

"How I'd like to believe you, Ariel," she sighed, letting the pistol drop, "I even wish I could say the same! But you aren't Katherine. You aren't the person I fell in love with. Still - " She visibly swallowed down on her emotions. " - I'm glad Katherine finally found what she wanted through you. But how did you get here? How did you know where I was?"

"Magic."

Michelle arched an eyebrow.

"The Fae are creatures of dreams," Ariel smiled, peeling off the sunglasses to reveal her bright green eyes, "Magic is our lifeblood. It wasn't a simple matter, granted, but knowing what must have happened to you and Daniel, I desperately needed to find you."

Michelle's expression hardened. "And what has happened to us? What have you done?"

"That will take some explaining."

"Then explain."

The nymph sighed. "In the Fourteenth Century, I was in the company of another faerie, a noblewoman named Awyrny, with whom I'd been in love, off and on, for many years. While we were traveling through France, we were captured by sorcerous enemies, who cursed Awyrny and made her into a vampire. The reasons aren't important now, but Awyrny became a demonic creature called the Huntress."

"Katherine mentioned her before," Michelle remarked.

Ariel nodded. "I managed to escape, though I later 'died' in battle, but I swore an Oath to free Awyrny from the curse. In the centuries since, the Huntress sired her own bloodline. To serve the curse, each childe devoured his or her sire, so that the last of the bloodline carried all of his predecessors' souls within him. In 2002, the latest of the Huntress' get, Billy, gave me the Embrace just as I was beginning to Awaken within Katherine. Of course, Katherine knew nothing about any of this, only that the Huntress was her grandsire, and she continued to fulfill the curse by diablerizing Billy in revenge."

Dubious, the blonde quirked an eyebrow.

"When I left you and Daniel in New York, I returned to Denton, Texas. My old mentor, Angelo Giovanni, had been working on a ritual which could free a vampire from the Curse of Cain. He needed a guinea pig, obviously, and having nothing to lose, I volunteered. The ritual only partially succeeded, however, as I was restored to only a kind of half-life. However, it also brought me fully to consciousness, allowing me to Awaken in Katherine - "

Michelle frowned. "Get to the point, please."

"Very well," Ariel laughed under her breath, "I was free of the Curse of Cain, but still bound to the Huntress. I was dying. About a week ago, however, my friends and I confronted the Huntress and I killed her, thereby freeing Awyrny and fulfilling my Oath - "

"You did more than that," the blonde snapped, "I'm human again!"

The nymph shook her head slightly, saddened by Michelle's resentment. "It didn't occur to me at first that as part of the Huntress' bloodline, you were also freed from the curse when she died. Or if I did realize it, I ignored it, believing it was for the best. I was a fool, Michelle. I should've warned you at least. Please, forgive me."

"Forgive you?" Michelle laughed darkly. "I wasn't just mortal, Ariel. I was penniless and helpless. Do you know what my first day as a human being was? I discovered Daniel in our hotel room with his wrists slashed and blood all over the bed. That was my first sweet taste of mortality! He killed himself for what you and I did to him."

There was a flicker of grief in her eyes, and she glanced away.

"You actually cared for him, didn't you?" Ariel said gently.

"In a strange way, yes," Michelle whispered, "I think we can't help but love those whom we Embrace, if only in a twisted way. The bond of blood won't permit it. Don't you agree?"

"I fell in love with you because of your humanity - "

"Please. Don't go any further with that. I've heard it too many times already."

The wind rustled with a low sigh, the trees hissing around them, as Ariel bristled. Katherine had always refused to accept that Michelle couldn't be human - the Kindred were all she'd ever known. But Michelle was startled to feel the same pain and anger washing over her from Ariel. The emotion filled the air with a dark glow, like electricity in the air before a lightning strike, and the trees answered her call, becoming a living extension of Ariel's passions.

Michelle softened her tone when she spoke again.

"If I could give you what remains of my human self, I would, Ariel," she sighed, "If you're anything like Katherine, you know how much pain it's caused me."

"I understand, Michelle," said Ariel, "But there's always a chance of redemption, if you allow yourself to see it. I know how Mireia tortured you. I know what she stole from you, and how painful that is. But you could never have escaped that pain by becoming Kindred. It would only have completed what Mireia began. Daniel is proof enough of that. But you have a chance to become something else now. You can have a life and make of it anything you wish."

Michelle said nothing, warily studying the young woman.

"Also, I know Daniel is buried as a John Doe in New York somewhere," Ariel murmured, "If you know where his grave is, please tell me. He was your childe and my fiancé. He shouldn't just be left there to be forgotten. We both owe him too much, more than we can repay, and the least we can do is bring him home for a proper burial. His family must be terrified, not knowing what's happened to him."

Michelle sighed.

"We were in Rochester when it happened," she replied, "Most likely he's still there. I don't know for sure. After I found him, I took everything of mine and left. But with your magic, I'm sure you can track him down easily enough."

She shook her head. "His blood is still on our hands. Does our being 'human' exonerate us, Ariel? Believe me, I mourned for Daniel. He had nothing to go back to, and neither do I. But he was weak - we saw to that from the start. And I refuse to let myself be so vulnerable. Or to succumb to that kind of despair after everything I've endured."

"Then come with me," Ariel whispered, holding out her hand.

Michelle laughed hollowly. "And do what? Pretend to be human?"

"We can help you." A pained smile crossed the nymph's features. "I can see you're dying just by looking at you..."

A bitter laugh. "Yes. I know. Your precious mortality is killing me."

"You're over a hundred years old, Michelle, despite your youthful appearance, and almost all of that time was spent under the influence of the blood, whether as Kindred or ghoul. That paradox is slowly killing you. You've become what mages call a 'thaumavore'. But I'm almost certain that my friends and I can save you. At the very least, we can give you back your health so you can live a natural human lifetime."

"Ironic, isn't it?" Michelle said bitterly, "Nothing has changed since we met in El Paso. I'm still dependent on you. I still need your miracles just to survive."

"And I still love you," Ariel smiled, offering her hand again, "Please. Let me help you."

"I don't have much choice, do I?"

"You always have a choice."

Sneering, Michelle glanced at the Baretta in her hand and, flicking the safety back on, she tucked it into the waistband of her blue jeans. She stood there sullenly for a moment, gold hair falling across her face, mulling over her options - few though they were. Ariel's love was as genuine as Katherine's, of course. Between the intensity of the faerie's emotions and her own psychic gift, it was impossible not to feel it between them. So it was difficult to muster much anger against Ariel. Not after everything she'd done. And Michelle was far too exhausted, too sick and weary, to argue. What other choice could she make, after all? Death?

Even though the night air was warm, the breeze sent a shiver through Michelle's feverish body, and she hugged herself in vain for warmth.

"Daniel should never have been one of us," she sighed, "I was furious with you. You blamed me for killing that girl, when all I wanted was to save you. And you shut me out. I loved you! I'd only just come to realize how much I wanted and needed you. And suddenly...it was gone. We could barely stand to be in the same room together. Can you imagine how that hurt me? And I wanted so much to hurt you back, but I couldn't bring myself to. So I tried to punish you through Daniel and his lover, when all I wanted was for things to go back the way they were before that girl. Even before New York. When it was just you and I on our own..."

Sorrow etched her features as she glanced up.

Ariel's voice was soft. "I know."

A tear trickled down Michelle's cheek, which she angrily wiped away.

"I wish I could forgive you," the nymph murmured, "But how can I? You stole Daniel and Veronica's lives, not mine. Only they can forgive you for that. And like you said, their blood is on my hands as well. But I'm sorry that I hurt you and pushed you away. When I saw what you did to them and what happened afterwards, when the Gangrel curse changed you...I was horrified. I felt I'd destroyed the very thing I loved."

Ariel sighed. "I also thought I'd found something precious in Alice, something I'd never seen before. The compassion she showed me was electrifying. Her faith called to me. I didn't know what it meant - perhaps I still don't. I only knew it died with her, forever."

Michelle smiled thinly. "Finally, I hear Katherine speaking."

The faerie laughed.

"You gave me a life once," the blonde added, "You owe me that much."

"I'll ask my friends to do everything they can."

Michelle nodded. "Then I'll come with you."

Ariel smiled softly.

"Then to Denton we go, Miss Avoyelles!" laughed a mocking, sepulchral voice behind Michelle, and everything suddenly went black.

* * *

In the sweep of a black cape, the three figures vanished.

Silence reigned.

And then a figure melted out of the darkened trees. It was hazy at first, a living shadow, which glided over to the abandoned Cadillac. As it neared, the faint, strangely hollow sound of footsteps became audible, though there was no one to hear them, and the shroud of darkness gradually fell away to reveal a young man.

He was tall and dusky skinned, hands shoved in the pockets of his trench coat, and a tattered, long grey scarf trailed in his wake. A black felt hat cast deep shadows upon his face, but fierce amber eyes shone as they swept the empty street. Slowing to a stop by the driver's side door, he slid off the hat and ran a hand back through his tousled black and brown hair, smoothing out the crow feathers which stuck out at crazy angles from his scalp.

He listened. Silent still.

He reached absently for the door handle, but his hand passed straight through it.

The spectre smiled thinly: Oh, yes. Of course.

Shrugging, he replaced his hat, adjusting it carefully to conceal the feathers, and with a harsh ripping sound, he slashed the air with his hand. For a moment, nothing much seemed to happen, and then a black, oily mist began boiling out of a gash in thin air. He pushed against it, tearing the nihil wider, until a gaping hole stood in the street, from which the howling sound of hurricane winds emanated.

His smile widened slightly, and he stepped through into the Tempest.

The nihil slammed shut behind him.

Silence again.

* * *

For the longest time, he stood there, watching her sleep.

Because for the longest time, he couldn't muster the energy for much else.

Kelly lay cradled on the bed, her presence there leaving not so much as a crease in the thin, layered sheets of satin and cotton. Seen dimly through the translucent, seemingly organic membrane of the caul, she lay like a fetus in the womb, her legs tucked against her body and her arms folded loosely across her chest, completely naked.

Yet there was a vagueness to her features, an incompleteness, as if she were merely a hurried sketch of the woman he knew. The fine details of her body were blurred, suggested instead of shown, pieces of her missing. And on the rare occasion Kelly stirred, usually to draw herself more tightly in a ball, shunning the cold light of the outside world for the sanctity of her spiritual shell, her hair swirled as though she were immersed - but more truthfully because motion was something of her imagination now, not a physical act.

Who knew how long she might sleep? Death had driven her deep underground, scars lashing her psyche as much as they marred her body, and there was no telling when or if Kelly would struggle back to the surface. Probably soon. But it could be weeks. It could be years. If he wanted to, he could probably bring her out of the caul more quickly, but no - the shock of dying was too great, and there was vital healing to be done. And who was he to intrude upon her? After all Kelly suffered in life, who could blame her for retreating from the world?

This was a kind of rebirth, and she would do it on her terms.

Stephen made a bitter noise, unable to look away from his friend's shell-shocked ghost.

He felt Kelly through their connection to Uktena, of course, and through the magicks he spun to guard and watch over her while she slept. He caught vague impressions of dreams, drowning nightmares, the remembered haze of a narcotic drug she took as a teenager, all swirling lazily around her mind seeking to connect with something solid beyond herself. Occasionally, Kelly would shudder and struggle weakly as if realizing where she was, only to fall still again. During these times, the panic and confusion were at their worst, and Steph was more than a little fearful she wouldn't hold herself together.

But Kelly survived each time, still dreaming. Overcoming the horror of death which kept her there, inside the caul, by forgetting it completely. Great chunks of herself and her memories broke away like icebergs, melting away into nothingness, sparing her the grief and agony which might've robbed his friend of any will to live again. The survival instinct of the human soul, which he knew very well by now. But still - what was left of her, really, except for her memories? They were the fragile stuff of which Kelly was now made.

The cruelty of all this lay in its symmetry, Stephen thought. On the one hand there was Katherine, whom he'd begun to despair of ever regaining her humanity, and who now blazed with her own dream fire, incandescently beautiful, Ariel's ancient spirit made flesh, rising from the ashes of her old self. And on the other lay Kelly, perhaps the only friend who understood his ways - and cared to understand them - with whom he'd been intimate in deeper ways than mere love, with whom he'd shared nearly everything. Murdered. Her body and spirit broken. Cast down as the very thing she'd always feared becoming.

Stephen's jaw clenched, hatred boiling up within him, which he forced away.

There was little else to be done for her now. Kelly was well protected; he and the spirits would see to that. She was safe if her enemies came looking for her again, or if they tried to harm her from a distance by magic. Already, the house was very nearly restored from the bomb which shattered it and left Kelly's lover, the young woman Jesse Sylva, bleeding and crippled in the wreckage. Even Jesse was recovering well, "miraculously", though the painful burden of explaining Kelly's death still remained, which Steph took upon himself. The weight of his own anger and sorrow was crushing enough, but there would be precious little anyone could do to ease the grief he would bring to Jesse. And then to Kelly's family...

After all this time, Steph felt bathed in ashes. Always the bearer of bad news, wasn't he?

Well, of lies anyway.

A dark, self-loathing laugh rose in his throat, which he swallowed down upon. But no, there was little to be done for Kelly now, aside from tending to those she left behind - and working to gain revenge against those who murdered her, of course. That was always the easy part, wasn't it? Killing Billy or the Huntress or any of their other enemies was just a matter of careful violence and strategy, which they were very skilled at by now. It was far simpler than mending he and his friends' shattered lives and scarred souls.

Shaking his head slowly, Stephen assured himself that everything was in place before turning to go. As much as he loathed leaving Kelly, there was too much to be done.

"Dream well," he whispered, and quietly departed.

* * *

Normally, May in Texas was a warm month, the last gasp of Winter having long since passed in March, leaving only balmy weather and the beginning of the storm season, which - combined with the deadly summer heat - was more than enough to convince most northerners who'd migrated south to go back home. But normally he was also asleep and dead to the world at this time of day, recuperating from yet another long night of prowling back alleys, nightclubs and the redneck wasteland which surrounded Denton proper.

Well, this was hardly a normal day.

Lee Dubois shuffled down the street, slapping his sunglasses on against the glary morning light, seeking a coffee shop - Karma? - which he'd taken to frequenting, since it was the last place where he'd predictably located his quarry. It was a bright, blustery day, the sort of thing you expected in January or February. In the sunshine, it was too warm to complain about the cold, but the air was definitely chill, the aftereffect of a violent but short-lived storm system the day before. His hands were in the pockets of his grey trench coat and he kept his head down as he ploughed through the winds, which whistled gaily between the buildings.

Finally, as he neared his destination, Lee glanced up.

And then he saw her.

It was Katherine! There was no mistaking the young woman - they'd been too close in high school for that - yet Lee couldn't help but doubt himself for a moment. But no, it was her, wasn't it? Tall, fair-skinned and slender as always, walking swiftly in the general direction of the university with her eyes closed and her face turned up to bask in the sun's heat. Luxurious dark red hair bounced in her wake, blown back by the wind, and the autumn colors of her long-sleeved top and flashing skirt glowed warmly in the light.

Ripping off his shades, Lee squinted upwards, assuring himself that, yes, it was daytime.

Cursing under his breath, Lee shoved the sunglasses back on and started jogging after her, struggling to keep up with the young woman's urgent pace. Katherine almost seemed to be gliding as she crossed the street, her feet barely touching the ground, like an apparition. There was only the barest hint of the languid, feline gait Lee remembered from their last encounter, weeks ago, when he'd emptied an AK-47 into the vampire to little effect. Instead, she moved like a dancer, effortlessly graceful, and those she passed readily stepped aside. More than a few turned their heads, momentarily enchanted by her.

When he realized her destination, Lee gaped in astonishment.

She was walking to Karma, too!

Lee caught up to her inside, warily slowing his pace as he entered the coffee shop, and he fumbled to remove his shades in the gloom. It was very dark inside Karma, with only a diffuse, brown-tinged sunlight filtering in through the front windows. The usual crowd of college students, misfits and layabouts were present, and as his eyes adjusted to the light, he spied Katherine standing at the counter with her hands clasped behind her back, gazing up at the menu. The young man serving her waited with baited breath for her order, with a look of ill-concealed, dumbstruck lust Lee easily recognized.

Grimacing in puzzlement, Lee flopped down into a dark, empty booth and picked up the discarded newspaper there, pretending to read it - and feeling like an idiot for doing so. Surveillance and tracking were best handled from afar, not in some half-assed cloak and dagger manner. But then again, Katherine shouldn't have been there! For four weeks he'd lost track of her, and now there she was, standing in broad daylight as if nothing ever happened. Where was the creature who threatened him in his home, with his own gun? Where was the monster who'd snarled and fled into the darkness, drenched in blood from a hail of bullets?

She was supposed to be dead!

Well, she looked very much alive now.

Under the babble of conversation, Lee heard Katherine laugh, flirting with the cashier in a clear, light voice. As she turned to leave, he got his first clear glimpse of the young woman - and before he could stop himself, he gasped.

No wonder she turned heads. She was captivating.

Katherine had always possessed a certain elfin quality to her features, at least in high school. But now she looked positively fey, ethereal, her features finer and more delicate, bringing her natural beauty to exquisite perfection. And although her overall appearance was largely unchanged, merely refined, Lee still found himself doubting her identity. She didn't dress like Katherine, neither the shy girl he befriended nor the monster she became. The brown sweater was tight upon her body, the stretchy fabric clinging to every curve, and the skirt was slit high up her thigh. Emeralds and amethysts twinkled at her hands and ears. Gold shone from a scarab pendant and a heavy medallion.

She didn't seem quite real.

Even more strangely, however, there was no red laser light - the familiar sign from God, revealing her as a supernatural menace. On every other occasion, it had blazed in the middle of her forehead, visible only to himself, but now it was wholly absent.

What did that mean?

Frowning in confusion, Lee slid the newspaper back in front of him and waited for Katherine to leave, mulling over this strange turn of events.

The fragrance of jasmine, honeysuckle and evergreen trees swept over Lee, and he jerked his head up from where it was buried in the paper as the young woman slid gracefully into the seat across from him, clasping the coffee in both hands. A small, quixotic smile played on her lips, to which Lee scowled, disgusted with himself for getting caught but trying to play it off as disdain for her casual approach.

"I couldn't help but notice you staring," she said playfully, her green eyes shining as she peeled off the shades, "You're not going to shoot me again, are you Lee?"

It didn't even sound like Katherine. The timbre and cadence belonged to someone else. Her voice was almost musical, like a bell.

"I might," Lee growled, angrily slapping the paper onto the table, "It didn't seem to fucking bother you last time."

"That was different. I was different. I'm not the woman you knew, Lee."

He scoffed. "Then who are you?"

She offered a slight bow, sending a spill of dark red hair tumbling across her face, which she didn't bother to brush away. "My name is Ariel. Katherine was...or is a part of me, but in many ways we're very different people."

"What? Like Jekyll and Hyde?"

Katherine flashed a grin. "Hardly."

With a dubious grunt, he shifted on the bench, planting his back firmly against the wall where he could keep an eye on her - and so he could slip his hand beneath the tabletop, reaching for the pistol he kept hidden in his coat. Whether she noticed or not, he couldn't say. She showed no outward reaction.

"May I explain?" she asked.

"What? Like you explained last time? You shoved a fucking gun in my face!"

"Technically, you shoved it in mine first," Katherine smiled sheepishly, cocking her head to one side with a weary expression, "But I'm sorry, Lee. I only wanted to warn you away, and I did it in the most asinine manner possible. But like I said, I was different then. I'm not the same person you knew - and obviously, I'm no longer a vampire."

He grunted. "Who says you aren't?"

"I'm breathing, my heart is beating, I'm out in the daytime - "

"Yeah, and I've seen vampires move around in the daytime before."

She laughed. "In direct sunlight?"

Seeing Lee's obvious suspicion, Katherine offered him her arm, moving carefully so as not to startle him, and bared the slender wrist for his examination. "There. Feel my pulse, Lee. I'm alive. My skin is warm. Look at my teeth. Do you see fangs? I won't deny that I was once a vampire and that I threatened you that night. It was me - or a version of me, at least - whom you shot up the night I was leaving for Europe. But I'm not a vampire anymore, and I don't wish to bring harm to anyone."

"Even if you aren't, that doesn't change anything you've done," Lee growled, "You fed on human beings. You drank their blood for God's sake!"

A girl at the next table glanced over at them, puzzled.

"It's okay," Katherine smiled innocently, "We're just LARPing."

The girl shrugged and went back to working on her homework.

Katherine chuckled under her breath. "Look, we should discuss this elsewhere. We're being watched, and I'm sure everyone would appreciate a little discretion on our part. I have certain obligations, which I'm honor-bound to uphold, just as I'm sure you do."

Lee sneered at the word honor, though his voice dropped. "Who's watching us?"

"Others of my folk."

"Not vampires," she added, rolling her eyes, before he could comment.

"Then who?" Lee demanded.

Katherine seemed curious. "Can you not see them?"

He furtively glanced around, scanning the faces in the room. Everywhere he looked there were only the familiar, drowsy faces of college students and slackers. Most were engaged in pleasant conversation. A few, like the girl in the next booth, were doing schoolwork - scratching out notes, working on papers, reading books. A handful met his passing gaze, their expressions neutral, but if they were watching the two of them there was no sign, and the laser light failed to appear on any of them.

"I don't see anything."

"All the better then," she grinned, rising from the table, "Now come along."

Lee sputtered. "No! Fuck you! We do what I say."

Clucking impatiently, Katherine leaned forward and whispered: "What? Are you going to pull your gun in a crowded café? Don't be absurd. If you insist upon calling the shots, that's fine. I'll follow your lead. All I ask is that you let me explain myself peacefully, and please, don't do anything we'll both regret. Believe me, I could've eluded you at any time, but I chose not to. I've been seeking you out. I let you find me today."

He glowered up at her.

"Now come," she smiled, "Pretend we're still friends and walk out with me."

Which is exactly what they did.

* * *

King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band were playing on the phonograph when Laurent DeLouvois entered the room, announced by short, staccato cornet solo by Louis Armstrong, and the Toreador immediately felt as though he'd traveled back in time.

The room was elegantly appointed and somberly lit by ornate brass lamps dotting here and there, with a long, luxurious settee of finely carved walnut piled high with pillows and a cluster of comfortable chairs forming a semicircle before it, all done in rococo style. There were tapestries and paintings on the walls in various art styles he remembered despising, loving and growing nostalgic for in the long span of years. A handful of sculptures and statuettes provided further ornamentation, all of them impeccably tasteful - classical female nudes, mostly; always a favorite subject among artists.

In the absence of electric appliances, and with the heavy curtains drawn tight against the modern nights, Laurent could pretend that both he and the world were younger at heart, in a time when there was still style to be found in mortal civilization, and there were still mysteries of the ancient world which hadn't been raped by scientists.

Pity that he clashed so sharply with the scene!

Laughing under his breath, flashing teeth, Laurent glanced down at himself, at the immaculately tailored violet suit and grey tie he wore - Brooks Brothers, of course - with neat Gucci shoes and only the finest jewelry, from the amethyst at his right hand to the silver ring in his ear to the silver clasp which fixed his hair back in a streamlined ponytail gone brushy for the thickness of it. Suddenly, he was feeling surprisingly lighthearted - this was far from what he expected! As he felt a smile creeping up on him, Laurent slid his hands into his pockets and strolled easily around the corner of the settee.

Here was Michelle, of course.

She lounged amid the cushions, her arms draped casually over the back of the settee, wearing in a thin black dress, showing off her little waist, whose tapered skirt hugged her slender, pale legs. A constellation of tiny diamonds glittered at her breast, a gift from Angelo, Laurent supposed. Otherwise she went largely unadorned. But then, she didn't need to be. The gold of her hair was luxury enough, sweeping down around her delicate features, perhaps a little too girlish to enjoy a woman's full beauty, and the green eyes which opened to see him were like polished gemstones.

Lushly human she was, too, and the sight of her gave him pause.

He'd seen her before, of course, during volleys of negotiation. But still, it was strange seeing Michelle this way. The precious female skin flush pink with warmth, the swell of her breasts rising and falling with her breathing - and he immediately desired her. Oh, not in the crude, sexual way, of course. Even as a mortal, feminine charms were lost on him. But Michelle was a beautiful creature in her own right, and the enigma of her humanity deeply fascinated him. Particularly now the good Dr. Geovanni had explained his "experiment".

Well, it wouldn't last, would it?

Her scent was strong here - light perfume, female sweetness, blood.

Yes, her blood. It gave him a shiver.

"Hello, Laurent," she said quietly, cutting across his swimming thoughts.

He smiled broadly. "You're a creature after my own heart, my dear. It's a shame you wouldn't stay with me in New York. You were like a daughter to me, and such things we could have done together! Perhaps we'll have our chance again someday, do you think? Perhaps we may even forgive one another? If these 'experiments' prove successful."

She quirked an eyebrow and said nothing.

"Are these your rooms?" Laurent inquired breezily, strolling a circle around the settee to absorb the timeworn grandeur of his surroundings - and drinking in the scent of her. Teasing himself. Building up the ravenous hunger he would need for the night's business. He drifted over to the phonograph, a veritable antique, and momentarily fascinated himself by watching the disc spin lazily under the needle. "They're magnificent."

"No. They're just rooms. Angelo thought we should be comfortable."

Laurent chuckled. "Of course. Ever the gentleman, your Dr. Geovanni."

He glanced over his shoulder. "You know why I'm doing this, of course?"

A sardonic smile played on her lips. "Yes. You're as tired as your vampire existence as I am of this 'human' one. You want a new adventure, something to reinvigorate yourself. What more have you ever wanted? But you're not willing to risk yourself on a blind gambit either. So I'm your guinea pig as much as Angelo's for this ritual. Which is fine. Barring my death or insanity, I'll have what I desire either way, when this is all over."

"Well said, cherié," Laurent agreed, "Ironic then - isn't it? - that I should make you one of us again, when all I crave is an escape from it."

"The rite must be proven on vampires."

"True."

"And better you than some others. At least we understand each other."

Laurent chuckled. "That we do. That we do, indeed."

"Would you like the music to stay?" he added, lightly touching the phonograph stylus.

Releasing a held breath, Michelle closed her eyes and nodded. Though she tried her best to conceal it, anxiety was writ large upon her features. Perhaps even a shiver of fear. After all, she knew exactly what his question meant - should they dance while Rome burned, or solemnly watch the fires rage in silence? If it weren't for the eerie calm descending upon him, borne on deliberately sharpened hunger, Laurent might have laughed. For someone accustomed to bringing death to others, Michelle was so very frightened of it herself. But then, what vain immortal wasn't? For all its dark allure, the thought made even Laurent shudder.

And end to his existence? And end to everything? Horrific!

"I heard Armstrong play with the Hot Sevens in 1927," Laurent murmured, turning back to her with his hands in his pockets again, "At the time, I hardly understood what the fuss was about. Here was this stocky negro blowing his trumpet with wild abandon, without any real sense of the music, and everyone adored him! It wasn't music. At least not anything I'd come to know as music. Creole jazz, that I understood, but this was mania. Not even the barest hint of that lovely old flavor survived."

Michelle said nothing.

"Of course, I was made a believer in time. I believed in him like I believed in Mozart and Botticelli. Like I could never believe in the sad, slack-jawed Jesus and his petty army of miscreant saints. I felt the same adoration that a monk feels for his god. The same jealousy as well. For here was this simple, uneducated negro who touched the world with his voice, with his songs. And before I knew it, he was everywhere, as were his disciples. It grew unbearable to listen. For they were of the world, seen and touched by mortals, while I kept to my poorly lit chambers full of moldering relics."

Michelle opened her eyes, surprised by the venom in Laurent's voice.

Laurent's smile was faintly cruel. "And you want my blood."

"I want the true immortality," the young woman replied, finding it hard to raise her voice above a whisper, "This is a means to an end for both of us. But if I can only be Kindred then I accept that. I find no pain in being outside the mortal world. I'd sooner glide unseen through the herd, taking what I want from them, when I want it, than lose everything. At least you've had a life of your own, Laurent. That is something I have never had."

"Ah, how I love the impetuous spirit of youth!"

"It's more precious to me than you can imagine."

"I think not," he chuckled, slowly walking towards her, "But I know what you're still too young to understand, my darling: there is no freedom in our curse. Beauty, yes. All the world unfolds for you by night, welcoming you into its embrace. Every age, every treasure, every lovely victim is yours for the taking. But the price - ! You grow tired of the endless night, cherié. Exhausted by its monotony in the deepest pit of your soul. Only those with stamina and imagination can bear this kind of immortality."

"Then for both our sakes," Michelle smirked, "I hope I don't suffer it long."

Laurent smiled. "I will be waiting with baited breath."

The smile faded but didn't completely die as the Toreador stood before the settee, gazing down at the young woman with inscrutable blue-violet eyes. Long fingers reached out, the fingernails gleaming like crystal in the soft light, and Michelle visibly restrained a shiver as they brushed over her hair, smoothing it back from her face, and then gently caressed her cheek. Laurent made a thoughtful, even startled, noise in the back of his throat. The heat of her skin stung him, and he could feel the low pulsing of the blood in her body, the tremulous rhythm of her breathing. The fragile warmth of a living woman.

"Are you comfortable?" he asked.

"What difference does it make?"

"This should be pleasurable," Laurent smiled, "Otherwise, there's no point, is there?"

"Pleasurable for whom?"

"Why, for both of us, my dear."

Michelle shook her head slightly. "Get on with it, Laurent."

"Tsk. Tsk. Very well then - 'assume the position'."

Green eyes flashed up at him, questioning.

But only for a moment - Laurent roughly pushed her head to the side, baring the soft flesh of her throat. Cool, hard fingers clamped down on her jaw, ordering her to hold still.

Michelle jerked a nod, grimacing in pain, and he released his grip.

Surveying the young woman's awkward position, Laurent felt no small flutter of smug desire - and irony. Hard to resist a guiltless murder, wasn't it? Especially when this beautiful creature spurned his gifts and his home, only to come back, as they always did eventually, to beg his aid. Forget her venal talk of freedom - Michelle craved power, nothing more. Ah, what it must be like to still feel such youthful passions!

And so here they were, each using the others. What a splendid game!

Michelle glared up at him.

Was she hearing his thoughts, perhaps?

Chuckling under his breath, Laurent allowed his fingers to trickle over her throat, lightly stroking the throbbing artery there, whose sweetness called to him, and over the narrow shoulder, feeling the fine bones and soft skin in which she was (presently) housed. So delicate! If they succeeded, would she be this way again as an immortal? Would he? Strangely enticing thought, that. It seemed so long ago that he'd been 'merely' Laurent DeLouvois, the dashing mortal man and darling of the court. But no, he would never be that charming creature again. Not ever. But there were other, equally dazzling futures to be had in the daylight world.

And the price of admission? Merely her death.

Oh, yes, and her resurrection, too. Of course.

Either way, he could only win in this bargain of theirs. And he would take great pleasure in depriving Michelle of her life. She was inviting him to, after all. Irresistible. She would be his daughter by blood now, as it should have been before, when she scorned him. A pity if it were all for naught, of course, if she died. Better that Michelle risk Oblivion, however, than himself. And if this miracle was genuine - !

Laurent let her wait a few moments more, taunting her.

Then, banishing all these giddy distractions, the Toreador slid onto the settee beside her, laying her back against the downy pillows with a gentle touch. She was trembling, eyes wide open, waiting for him to begin. Frightened? Well, she deserved that much. And she had every reason to be fearful, didn't she? There was no telling how Cain's Curse might turn upon her when she so brazenly sought to exploit it.

Michelle shuddered as he leaned into her.

"Are you sure you want this?" Laurent whispered in her ear, his breath cool and tasteless upon her skin, "This is your last chance. Past this there is only death, damnation or eternal life, and no guarantee of which you'll receive."

"Yes," she breathed.

The vampire laughed softly. "Then accept my thanks, from the bottom of this old heart, for your gracious and most noble sacrifice."

Michelle said nothing. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth.

Waiting.

Cupping her chin, Laurent tilted her head back slightly further, and Michelle shuddered as she felt his lips brush against her throat. He drank in her fragrance for a moment, eyes closed, rubbing his lower lip against her soft skin. Slight aroma of lavender there, overlying the blood. Or was that her own scent? Women had such strange flavors, he knew, even without the daily bath of chemicals they called perfume. Perhaps it was hormonal? They seemed inundated by it. Though until the twentieth century, he hadn't even known what a hormone was.

He wanted to laugh suddenly.

And then with unconscious desire, aching in his skull, he felt the fangs push out to full extension. The old sensation, which presaged the bliss of feeding. He must have made some noise - a soft inhalation, perhaps - because Michelle's hand shot up and caught a handful of his shirt in her little fist. This made the urge to laugh was almost overwhelming, hysterical, because it was simply the funniest thing any victim or prospective vampire had ever done at this point in the game. And it was such a futile gesture, too.

"I'll be gentle," he whispered, his tongue flicking over her skin.

"Do it already," she hissed.

Chuckling, Laurent closed his mouth over the artery, and his fangs pierced her throat with the familiar wet crunch of tearing flesh. Michelle gasped at the pain between clenched teeth. Her grip tightened sharply, nearly ripping the thin material of his shirt, and then she went virtually limp. By then, Laurent didn't care anymore. The blood was welling up into his mouth, and for the longest moment he simply allowed her to bleed, delighting in the slow pulsing of the wound and letting the heat of it wash over his tongue.

Strange elixir, this blood. Like honey.

But delicious nonetheless.

* * *

Rat-tat-tat.

Laurent sat against the wall, half-panting, half-laughing, clutching his wrist. The lamp was a shattered ruin beside him, but the bulb still shone, slashing light at a crazy angle along the walls and floor.

Michelle lay beside the overturned settee, breathing in ragged gulps, with her hair a golden halo around her head, her face turned up to gasp at the ceiling. The blood on her lips trickled down her cheek and chin.

Stray blood dripped off the side of the couch, beating out a gradually slowing rhythm as it hit the hardwood floor, sounding like a metronome. Except for their breathing, it was the only sound in the room, and it was deafening.

At least she'd finally stopped screaming. Now there was only the syrupy unraveling of her thoughts, slowly drumming against his skull as Michelle projected them into his mind with her telepathic gift.

How did Katherine Ducote manage this? After the first taste of hot blood against his tongue, it was like clutching onto a live wire. First the blistering intoxication of the Kiss was reflected back upon him, magnifying the pleasure of feeding to unbearable proportions. And then her terrified shrieks, like a needle driven into his skull, as Michelle felt the life draining out of her body and lashed out against him the only way she could.

Laurent had never felt anything like it.

Strangely, though, he found the experience quite pleasurable.

Michelle's death throes were worse, of course. A few drops of his old, potent blood were more than enough to revive her, and in her desperation for more they very nearly destroyed the lovely room which Angelo provided. She was easily deflected, of course - his strength was far superior, and he was prepared for her violence. But that didn't stop the screaming and the crying as her body shut down around her, the Embrace taking hold for the second time.

Once was more than enough for himself, thank you very much.

* * *

Well, it was hardly a mountain stream in a forest glade, but the bath felt luxurious all the same.

Ariel slunk out of the bathroom, steam trailing behind her in ghostly tendrils, and she wrapped one of the luxurious terry cloth towels around her middle. Beads of water ran down her shoulders, chest and legs as she padded into a bedroom fragrant with sandalwood incense and scented candles of jasmine and lavender. Her hip-length hair swung against her shoulders, nearly black with moisture. It was longer than Katherine preferred, but Ariel was accustomed to its length, and magic proved remarkably useful for indulging in her vanities.

The candle flames brightened welcomingly at her entrance, and scanning over the four-poster bed where Satan lay, dozing lightly, Ariel saw the handmaiden had already come and prepared everything for her. The kimono of dark green silk came first, clinging to her damp body as the nymph pulled it on and tied off the blue obi, smiling in pleasure at the luxuriant material. A profusion of makeup, perfumes and other articles littered the dresser, along with a broad wood-handled brush and a pearl and ivory comb, neatly arranged for her use.

Ariel chuckled.

Also on the bed, there was clothing for the evening gala, which she purchased herself the day before: the dress, with its dark brown bodice adorned in rose scrollwork, much like her armor, a sash to show off her little waist, and the explosion of autumn color that was the skirt; the strapless black lace bra and matching panties; the cream-colored hose, and a pair of French heeled shoes. The sort of thing Katherine loathed to wear even as a mortal. And of course there was her soft, voluminous green cloak, which Ariel had been wearing for millennia.

Accompanying these were three silver boxes, tied with white ribbons - gifts from Lanthinel - and the nymph enjoyed a slow, delicious smile as she opened them, careful not to tear the ribbons or damage the boxes. In one there was a jeweled scarab in the Egyptian style, a broach for her cloak, which gleamed with gold, silver and rubies. In the second there were the rings and earrings Ariel had asked for, one emerald and one amethyst each for Spring and Winter. The contents of the third brought a musical laugh out of her - it was a collar of red velvet for Satan, fitted with a single diamond.

Lanthinel's sense of humor, a refreshing change from his previous lifetimes, as well as his happiness to lavish presents on her, pleased Ariel to no end. And aside from the cloak and the collar, it was all very real luxury, not chimerical. With her Fae mien so tightly bound to her immortal body, such that there was little real difference between them now, why not indulge in the wealth and beauty which mortal shops could provide? It was fitting. Ariel preferred the fashions of the mortal world, albeit with the usual flair for the elegant and old-fashioned.

Of course, she felt a twinge of guilt that Lanthinel paid for this extravagance. Ariel was as accustomed to the wandering life as Katherine, the freedom of the wilderness she so loved, but that did nothing to dim her affection for the exotic and the beautiful. Also, Lanthinel had been waiting for her to Awaken for some time, and with the long desolation of Katherine's vampire existence, Ariel could appreciate her brother's joy at this sudden change in fortune. And he could afford it, after all.

As Ariel began to get dressed, the handmaiden, Ophelia, returned and offered to help her, for which the nymph was also tremendously grateful, particularly with the corset. Of course, "helping" quickly turned into indulgence, and once dressed, Ariel found herself sitting before the vanity mirror while Ophelia brushed out her curly hair, which had regained its dark red luster, and painted her face and fingernails. Before long, the air was lush with numerous fragrances blurring together into a heady atmosphere of decadence, and Ophelia departed with a curtsy and a bright smile at her handiwork.

Even Ariel's breath was taken away.

Though depression and the pressures of the mundane world blinded her to it, Katherine had always been a beautiful woman of fresh features, bright eyes and luxuriant red hair, and between the elegant attire and Ariel's Fae soul bleeding over into her features, she was even more so now. Ariel felt slightly strange, however, gazing in pleasure at her reflection, seeing Katherine's autumn splendor and not the familiar raven haired nymph she had always known. Only the eyes were the same, at least in the Dreaming: deepest violet, brimming with color. Still, it was a fitting change. Standing between the eternal Spring of immortality and the memories of desolate, bloodthirsty Winter, the golden glory of Autumn was exactly where Ariel felt she belonged now.

Satan was watching her with amused golden eyes, pawing thoughtfully at his velvet collar, when she rose from the chair. Almost out of habit, her eyes strayed in search of Never, the magical blade whose history stretched back into her earliest memories and beyond, for it was already ancient in the fragments she possessed of those times. A treasure from the birth of the world, and a friend as old as Satan. As a Fionan knight, it was a familiar companion - but sadly, it was still lost. In the six hundred years since the Shattering, Ariel hadn't caught more than fleeting rumors of the blade.

Besides, tonight was a festival, not a gathering for war.

That would come soon enough.

For a jarring moment, her mind slipped gears into memory, and she was standing in the shattered courtyard again, where the blade was lost - her hair whipping behind her in the storm's fierce winds; the horde piling over fallen stones and trampling the defender's corpses; the hoarse sound of her own scream as the spear pierced her breast; the searing cold snow against her back as she bled to death, and the moment of dying consciousness as Nicolas knelt beside her with tears burning his eyes.

Truehearts.

She learned later, of course, that her lover took Never with him, Nicolas' hands smeared with her blood, only to be robbed of it during the siege's end. From there the sword passed into the hands of the enemy, and through them into the labyrinth of history, following a path too convoluted for Ariel to unravel even over the course of multiple lifetimes. Not that she hadn't tried, of course, and her last life, Gabrielle Averoff, had come so close before losing it again. But given the influence of Dán in this lifetime, perhaps now was the time to seek out and reclaim her lost blade?

Ariel thought of the emerald pendant which Daniel gave her so long ago, and the slim gold and diamond engagement ring which came not long before Billy murdered her, both of which Katherine carried everywhere in a small jewelry box, and which Ariel placed in Daniel's coffin during the funeral. For a moment, the nymph felt a heartbreaking desire to see them again, to see Daniel again as he was before the Embrace, but she gently set this aside. He was gone, and they belonged with him. At least, Ariel thought with a soft smile, she'd been able to stand in the sun to attend his funeral - to say goodbye.

Ariel sighed to recall Michelle's visit the night after the funeral, approaching the nymph in the gloom of the Aardvark, the club where Katherine and Daniel first met, where she had gone to remember and grieve. The white skin and shimmering green eyes which marked Michelle as a vampire, a haunting testament to the twisted, broken nature of Michelle's soul. She had conspired with Angelo Giovanni and Laurent DeLouvois, the deceitful Toreador Primogen of New York, to become Kindred again. Ostensibly so Angelo could test the Spell of Life on a "normal" vampire, which she planned to undergo in a few short weeks.

This horrified Ariel, of course, watching Michelle deny her human soul for immortality's sake. But like Katherine, she couldn't help but love her former childe despite everything. She couldn't help desiring her in the old dreamy way, longing for Michelle's living warmth. Couldn't help the maddening frustration which was their "relationship". Of course, Michelle would prefer the true immortality of an Amenti - though Ariel doubted whether she would survive the ritual intact - but she would more than happily settle for the Curse of Cain. Immortality was power, after all, and like any abused child, power was all Michelle craved.

There was a knock at the door.

Ariel glanced up from where she sat on the bed. "Please, come in."

The bedroom door popped open and Lanthinel strode inside, the sweep of his dark-colored cloak trailing after him. She caught the surprised expression which flashed across his expression at the sight of her, his blue eyes brightening as he smiled. Despite her more or less human appearance, Glamour suffused her being, and it wasn't difficult to see Ariel in his mortal sister's lovely, delicate features. This immortal young woman had all the elegance and beauty he remembered. Her familiar violet eyes burned with the fires of an ancient soul, tempered by Katherine's natural tenderness.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

"Yes."

"About time," Satan muttered.

Ariel chuckled and rose smoothly to her feet, pulling on the green cloak, which she clasped at her breast with the jeweled scarab. And then, with the cloak drawn around her willowy frame, the resemblance to the old Ariel, the seductive nymph with the puckish smile, was undeniable. A swell of admiration rose in Lanthinel, along with no small feeling of déjà vu. For a moment, they were in ancient times again, the resplendent noble and the fey, wild-spirited nymph, standing in the primeval forest she called home, underneath the arching canopy which marked the dark, winding path to the Spring Court.

Lanthinel shivered.

"Come on," she smiled slyly, "Let's not keep them waiting."

* * *

Ariel saw her first while performing onstage, playing second guitar with members of Dragon's Ire, spying a bright, scarlet-clad woman on the far side of the ballroom, dancing with her old friend Eben: the Queen of Hearts.

She smirked.

Still, the music enraptured her, and the nymph soon allowed herself to dissolve back into it, adding a shimmer of steel strings or the lilting romanticism of the lute, the treasured old instrument Katherine rescued from Egypt, to the motley band's eclectic set of madrigals, rhapsodies, waltzes, jazz, old time rock 'n roll, and modern dance music. For this festival, which served both Fae tradition and the memory of Ashley, nothing was sacred musically. How else to celebrate a soul whose lives encompassed so many different eras, places and styles?

Eventually, of course, Ariel was placed at the forefront to lift her clear, crystalline voice into song, to perform with wild, manic intensity a chaotic medley of old and new music Ashley would have loved, followed by an a cappella rendition of the Ballad of Autumn, which the nymph had written some six hundred years ago while falling in love with Nicolas. For a brief moment, the entire ballroom went still to hear the bittersweet song, Ariel's voice shimmering over the speakers and filling the room.

Zilla stood between the double doors of the ballroom, head bowed with grief etched faintly on his features, hands in his pockets. Lanthinel, brooding in the far corner, looked up through a spill of blond hair with a melancholy smile. Eben's eyes grew wide at the enchanting sound of his former pupil's voice, different though it was from what he remembered, and almost seemed to forget the Queen of Hearts, whose little waist he had his arm around. This was alright, of course, since even the Queen was mesmerized, her eyes brightening with tears behind the elaborate crimson mask she wore.

For an instant, the young woman was somewhere else - standing atop the castle wall, silhouetted against the full and bright Winter moon, gazing out upon the beleaguered Fae and others defending against the besieging army, and singing the same song in a clarion voice. And then she was back again, in the warm spaciousness of Karl's ballroom, with many of the same faces staring up at her in rapt attention. Closing her eyes and cradling the microphone in her palms, Ariel nearly whispered the final line of the ballad, which seemed to hang in the air.

The Fae present - and there were quite a large number of them - were particularly stricken, as they were before:

Stillness. Rapturous stillness.

Then the applause came like a roar, washing over the nymph as she curtsied to the Fae, assorted Prodigals and mortal friends, and Ariel found herself trembling as she opened her eyes again to see them smiling, cheering and crying all at once, a sea of bright-eyed faces gazing up at her. More so than even her presentation at Court, this was the moment Ariel would remember as her welcoming back into the fold, the embrace of Autumn's Daughter after being lost for so long. What was said after that, by herself and by others who greeted her as she exited the stage, slipped quickly from her memory. There was only longing, and the pleasure of being with them once again, risen phoenix-like from the ashes.

It was nearly half an hour before Ariel suitably recovered from the delirium of exultation and sorrow, sipping champagne and laying her head in the downy lap of a gracious young Satyr to whom she rambled about these things, and who in turn praised, in poetic fashion, the power of her ballad. By then another band had taken the reins. This one was larger, almost an orchestra, and they alternated between lilting courtly dances - which appealed, of course, to the old-fashioned Fae - and looser, frenetic swing music - which did more to inflame the passions of the mortals and others in attendance.

Ariel opened her eyes as the Satyr stopped dead in the middle of his speech, his attention straying out into the crowd of dancers.

"There, my love," he nodded, "Do you see that woman?"

The nymph chuckled at his ready affection - it was why she adored the company of Satyrs, after all - and lifted her head slightly to follow his gaze. And there, like a mirage, was the Queen of Hearts, her body crushed up against Eben - producing a ripple of irritation and jealousy from Ariel - as they revolved slowly in a languid, vaguely erotic dance. Yet it wasn't the seductive nature of their intertwined bodies which had captured the Satyr's attention - though, no doubt, he'd been watching them play for some time. Rather, it was the luminescent glow to the Queen's skin and hair, and the white flames beginning to evince themselves.

Not Glamour, Ariel thought. At least, not quite.

"Who is she?"

"I can't say I know, my lady love," the Satyr replied thoughtfully, caressing the nymph's dark red hair as it fell across her face in a distracted fashion, "I don't recognize her, and she's certainly not one of us, though there's something about her...She's a Prodigal, of one sort or another. Of that I'm quite sure."

"I saw the two of them dancing earlier."

"Yes, they've been going at it like this for some time," he smiled, smoothing the wave of hair back from Ariel's face, "And I think young Eben has nearly intoxicated her with Glamour and drink both! She's certainly glowing, isn't she? Though it looks like he's just realized the effect of his ministrations..."

This was indeed the case. For glancing up over the Queen of Hearts' shoulder, Eben noticed the attention the two of them were attracting, particularly from those surprised mortals and curious Fae on the periphery - that is, those who were talking, gaming or drinking instead of dancing. Eben met Ariel's gaze from across the room, smiling wryly if not somewhat apologetically. He gently whispered something into his partner's ear and tugged her away from the crowd of dancers. And then out of the ballroom entirely, despite her disoriented protests.

"Curiouser and curiouser," Ariel murmured.

"Indeed."

"If you'll excuse me..."

She blinked, realizing she didn't know his name.

"Silenus."

"Silenus," Ariel smiled, "If you don't mind...?"

"Of course, my love!" the Satyr chuckled, "I wouldn't dream of stopping you. Not when there are mysteries to solve and female jealousies to appease! And I was taught to never get in the way of a nymph on important business."

The nymph laughed and shook her head, but didn't argue.

Kissing the Satyr on the cheek, Ariel slid out of Silenus' tender grasp to follow Eben and the Queen of Hearts, skirting the edge of the dancers with impeccable grace and ease. Walking out of the ballroom was like plunging into cool water - with only a handful of people milling about in conversation, the heat and noise was greatly lessened. She flashed smiles of greeting to those she knew in passing, the green silk of her skirt flashing around her legs, and before long she was striding lightly out onto the back veranda, which overlooked the hilly woods that dominated Zilla's sprawling property. Not far in the distance, shrouded by a copse of trees, Ariel made out the Queen's silvery radiance, and she started in that direction.

The nymph whirled as someone caught her gently by the arm.

It was Zilla and Lanthinel. They were standing in the shadows near the door, watching the activity in the trees with bemused expressions.

"Good evening, my lady," the Mokole smiled, "I'm 'surprised' to see you here."

Ariel laughed under her breath as he released her.

"I take it you've been watching them, too?" she asked, joining them in the gloom.

"For most of the evening, actually," Karl agreed, "Though she only picked up Liam when the ballroom was opened. I met her at the bar earlier."

"Oh?"

"Yes. She called herself 'Rociel', but her real name is Alison Drake."

"Rociel?" Ariel echoed, "That name sounds familiar."

Zilla shrugged. "I asked Sung Lee to run it through the computers at BTG, just in case. I recognized her from a CD release party in New York a few years back, though she didn't go by Rociel then, and I don't remember her being quite as aggressive or flirtatious..."

Ariel arched an eyebrow.

"She kissed the top of his hand," Lanthinel smirked.

"Well, I can respect her style at least," Ariel chuckled, hugging herself for warmth in the cool air. With the low neckline and thin silk of the dress, it wasn't much shelter against the October night. Seeing her discomfort, however, Zilla wordlessly peeled off his tuxedo jacket and passed it to her, which she pulled on with a grateful smile.

"Though she's not Fae," the nymph observed.

"No, she's not."

"Then what is she?"

Lanthinel frowned. "Under spirit sight, she almost looks like a Changeling of some kind. The connection between her spirit and the body is similar, but the only Glamour on her is what your friend Eben enchanted her with. I'm tempted to say she's a possessing entity of some kind, but that doesn't seem right either."

Ariel grunted. "Then perhaps we should ask her?"

"Mmmm. No, she seems harmless at the moment," Zilla murmured, his jaw working side to side as he debated the matter, "And she hasn't caused any problems so far, aside from confusing a few of the guests, so there's no reason to confront her just yet. I think it's best just to watch and see what happens for now."

"Can you see what they're doing?"

"It looks like they're arguing," Lanthinel replied, squinting slightly, "And Eben is trying to calm her down. But they're moving deeper into the trees where it's harder to see."

"There are security cameras everywhere," Karl assured her.

"And the tree spirits."

"And the tree spirits," the Mokole agreed, smiling wryly. Even knowing it was Ariel, he was still unaccustomed to hearing "Katherine" remark on such things, particularly with the affectionate, almost familial tone she used.

"We'll keep an eye on Eben for you," he added, "If you want to return to the party."

Ariel nodded, curls of hair falling across her face. "I'd appreciate that, since I left Silenus in the lurch. And let me know what you learn about our Rociel, too."

"Of course."