13

You had to learn on the road, though your sire had spoken truly: your time with Brian had been one big lesson. You knew how to hide from the sun, how to feed, how to avoid attention. Or at least you could figure it out.

You and Yarrk followed signs and rumors for a month, until you found the cabin at the Colorado-New Mexico border. It was a decaying ruin, the river choked with corpses in the yellow light of a gibbous moon. Your sire was dead—nothing remained but a crumbling skeleton, though you recognized the rings. They were all dead: a dozen of your clan, locked in bloody conflict, their bodies torn and mutilated. Animals—some of them former servants—pawed at the bodies. Something had compelled Clan Ravnos to destroy itself. Whatever Brian and his master had feared for so many years had come…and gone. It had not glanced your way.

So you were all that remained. You and Yarrk got out of there.

And after all that, ten years on these miserable desert highways, scraping by on the "charity" of your elders as you run their errands. You've lost your edge, the clarity of your focus, sacrificing specialization in order to learn trick after trick, in order to survive from night to night.

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

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

Strange that you're going to die young.

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

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