You were a mob bookie, like in the old movies. Except your mob was an undead Gehenna cult and your ledgers tracked not just money, but blood and lives.
One thing Millicent taught you about vampires is that there are never enough of them who are worth a Goddamn. Most Sabbat were packs of giggling murderers running wild through the desert, and most of the rest were insane mystics bound to alien Paths of Enlightenment, having forsworn their humanity long ago. Some nights it seemed like you and Millicent were the only ticks who could work a job.
But you worked well together. Millicent taught you how to hide revenue and arrange for secure transport of vessels, how to kidnap and transport live vessels, how to navigate a city's criminal underworld and crooked cops to pay off the right people and buy protection. And when that wasn't enough, you learned how to unleash your powers to bend mortals to your will. Amid the grimy offices you frequented, moving slaves and stolen blood, paying off Border Patrol and shaking down junkies for information, that power alone made you feel more than human, not less. The power made you feel like a god.
And Millicent promised you even more: enlightenment, transcendence, the chance to shed the scraps of your humanity in favor of something stronger and purer.
But then the Sabbat got sloppy. Too many massacres, too many mass Embraces. People learned too much, and mortal hunters—once mere nuisances—organized. Funded by shadow agencies in the US government, they swept across the desert. The Second Inquisition dragged vampires into the sunlight, put them to the torch, froze their assets.
Millicent was strong, and unlike you, she wasn't proud. She vanished. So did those vampires you knew who hadn't been destroyed. For a week or more, you walked among the old fortresses and temples of the Sabbat like a shade among the ruins of a forgotten civilization. The Sabbat were gone—and not just the creatures themselves, but, it seemed, the very ideas that sustained them. The war against the Antediluvians? The Sword of Caine? The dark Paths of Enlightenment that Millicent had promised to reveal to you? All gone, all dust. You had always been a grubby little bureaucrat in a terrible machine, but now the machine was gone and you were alone.
But even as your criminal network disintegrated without the support of the Sabbat, you grabbed what you could. Relying on your brains and your powers of mind control, you passed yourself off as an unwelcome childe of a Camarilla clan—the Camarilla being the ancient rivals of the Sabbat, every inch as ruthless but a bit less sloppy. You forced yourself to conform to their ways, to abandon the fantasy of dark metamorphosis and instead to masquerade as a human being. You survived on the fringes, one night at a time.
It's easier now: the remains of your clan have reached out to the Princes of the Camarilla, and proposed an alliance. You no longer need to pass yourself off as something you are not. You could almost walk openly again. But you prefer to remain in the shadows.
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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