

For the recently sired the clinic is to be exploited, which is at least in keeping with the spirit of the place. The lobby is crammed with the sick and the dying, the doctors unable to meet demand–a potent symbol of the republic’s decline and its manifest failure to protect its citizens. The Hunger strikes fearing a public descent into savagery, she walks with heavy footsteps toward the clinic, knowing what it is she seeks and what she must do to acquire it. She’s drawn into the street by a sad duo of palm trees and the flicker of a red light that signals the presence of a clinic. Later, she stumbles out of her new apartment into a dark alley splashed by lazy rainfall. It was made pretty clear such an event was to be avoided at all costs, which sounded reasonable. If it was not then they risked allowing the Beast that now dwelled within to emerge and take control. It was a miraculous quirk of fate that had seen her spared, and if she wished to survive then that hunger would need to be satiated. The woman had been sired by a vampire, which had broken the rules of the “Masquerade”-the code vampires follow to keep their existence secret from humanity-and resulted in his execution. Outside a raggedy man introduced himself as “Jack”, and explained what the well-dressed man did not, not in so many words. So she was spared and sent out into the night, wracked with questions and a desire to satiate an overwhelming hunger the likes of which she had never known. But someone in the stalls spoke up, calling out the pale, well-dressed man presiding over the charade for his hypocrisy, whatever that may have been. The man from the evening was decapitated by something other than human, and she too was set to share his fate. There’d been a moment, maybe two, to draw a sharp intake of breath as the room was stormed, but that breath never came.Ī grotesque trial by a cast of strange, ominous figures quickly followed, the rules of which were lost to her.

The man she’d spent the evening with sat opposite, and he too was staked.

The stake was plunged into her chest before she was able to ask how, why, who. Broken condom wrappers lay scattered across the hovel like stale confetti-a miserable, unknowing final hoorah on a life questionably spent. The last instance of mortal life was a memory before she knew it had even happened.įlashes of a hotel room peeling wallpaper, a mottled carpet, handcuffs clipped to a rusting bed frame. “It seems the stream of time has begun to erode the moorings of my chosen course of study…”
