The Well (I-XI)

The Well (last updated: 11/15/2011)

I. First Line

After five years of serving blood and waiting on each and every one of them in perfect patience, David felt the talisman under his shirt ignite with a salvo of stinging heat. The pendant scorched against the skin of his chest as his business partner said it would, before they'd opened The Well, five tedious years ago.

The trigger scorched his skin once again as his guests were joined by another member of the community of the damned. She was a female, very young, but graceful and assertive in her approach to the far corner of the bar. David moved quickly to catch up on his work, but he also waited for the jewel to react again. He was nearly positive, but he needed one more trigger. He felt her stare lingering over him and he gathered the goblets he needed to serve his current guests.

Nothing had been a guarantee with the prospect of peddling blood to vampires in the name of good business.The rhythm of his blood quickened. There was no longer any agony in David's anticipation of fate. Maric had promised him a member of the first coven, and he was forced to satisfy the eager neophytes in front of him, desperate for a morbid thirst quencher.

David's pulse began to race, and a thousand bar shifts of research finally exploded in an immaculate rush of adrenaline to his thumping heart.The potential to gather information from immortals as a lowly human often fizzled out. His waiting guest held answers to questions that had kept him wide awake until sunrise four times a week.

David lost himself in a momentary trance of excitement before he snapped back in to reality. His precious trigger girl who'd initialized the blazing reaction from the necklace upon her arrival folded her legs over her bar stool and seemed quite content with the opportunity to observe him as he began his routine of service with the neophytes. The trigger was beckoning him, and yet he couldn't insult his current customers.

He felt a piercing disruption in the tracks of his mental railroad when the talisman heated further.

"Sir? You were saying?" The other young female vampire's sonorous voice flowed in his ears and returned his attention elsewhere. Any inexperienced mortal would have instantly served her for no tip. Her presence would have been enough.

David knew their charms and abilities, and he was a shrewd business man. He felt her poking around in his head with a sixth sense finger, and he'd conditioned himself to resist the dominance of the vampiric mind. Her lack of disrespect for his strength of will and intellect was insulting, but he had money to make, and she'd probably succeeded in playing games with every other human bartender since her turning.

He swallowed hard and tried to recover his clarity of thought. His own voice surprised him.

"If you want a first timer discount, you don't have to use hypnosis, you know." David said with fake sternness. The couple seemed unsettled when he called them out. He might have been the first human to do so. Ever.

When he'd first started serving one or two clients directly after The Well had opened, the hysteria in his brain had been difficult to block out. Seasoned veterans of the world of darkness had coached him over a glass of blood as his business continued to grow, and he was now an adept at feeling the foreign presence of manipulation in his mind.

He paid no direct notice to the newcomer and did so very deliberately so as not to blow his cover of observation. The heat from the talisman was barely tolerable now. His new guest stared at him at the end of the bar. He was anxious to get to her.

David was thankful that his ominous guest had been preceded by the embraced couple. For neophytes, almost any blood would satisfy them. He quickly placed the heated, platinum engraved chalices that his establishment was known for on the bartop. He swallowed hard and struggled to get his breathing under control.

They watched because they felt him.

They felt his blood moving faster, and they couldn't help but stare, for they were made to do so by the nature of their curse. Every undead childer locked a thirsty gaze on his body, and he felt his skin crawl under the eyes of a dozen perfect predators following the flow of blood in his chest. They were entranced by it, and a shiver raced up his back before he maintained his composure to serve the new couple their fix.

"Easy, my dextrous little bar boy. Don't let me get you all worked up." The female said, flattering herself.

David played it off and turned his back to the customer base. He removed the chain around his neck and unlocked the cash drawer, where he stowed the burning piece of jewelry for later retrieval. Without his flesh burning, he regained his candor quickly.

"Good evening, children of Cain, and welcome to The Well. I haven't seen you before." He said. Running the presentation that he'd run a thousand times, a routine that had undoubtedly made him the wealthiest entrepeneur in Los Angeles (off the grid, of course), he was regaining his bartending rhythm.

Before he'd met his first nosferatu on a fated night in Scottsdale, David had served vodka and bourbon and long island teas to the wealthy for twelve years. Moving up from mom and pop service to bar management at a five star restaurant, his experience meant nothing when it came to serving vampires. Everything changed overnight when he received a capital investment from a wealthy business partner who happened to be a member of the undead. The vampire had noticed his ability to adapt, to keep good numbers, and his penchant for good business practices.

Good service is universal. Bloodsuckers or alcoholics. It's all the same.

He grinned to himself.

"There are only three places like this in the country, and this is the only one we hadn't discovered yet." The male vampire spoke up for the first time. His voice was equally gushing.

"You've found the best. I carry over four hundred packages of different vitae. Some are straight up, some are blended, some are taken against the will of the specimen by your crafty kind, and some are donated to me by very successful elites around the city. They revere you for what you are, and they consider it a compliment that you would pay for their services. There's no other blood bar that operates like mine." David said.

"We're impressed! The word of mouth has been good to your place here, or we never would have found it." The female said.

"Your bouncer was very polite, considering the fact that we hadn't made reservations. What blood clan is he from?" The male asked.

"I'm not sure. You'll have to ask him on your way out later, I guess. May I make a recommendation for your first glass?" David asked inquisitively.

"Please do." The male said.

David deftly retrieved two air-sealed packages of plastic from the cooler behind him before he pierced them with a knife and drained them in to the decorated goblets. The metal was hot enough to burn human hands and bring the blood to a soft simmer.

Blood tasted better when it was still warm.

David described the product as he threw away the empty plastic packages.

"What you smell is from the veins of a twenty nine year old graduate from Stanford Law. Her name is Elaine, she's never had less than a four point zero GPA, and she was just hired at one of the more prestigious entertainment law firms in Hollywood. Her hair is fire engine red, her eyes are green, and her family descends from Ireland. She was drained of this blood three nights ago by one of your kind that I employ for the sake of quality product and she has no recollection of it. Until my vampiric associate seduced her, she was of the virgin flow."

They were captivated by his description, and vampires really perked up when he dropped the V-word. Purity was rare among natural feeding grounds, and might be compared to the age of wine or hop levels in a lager if there was any parallel between booze and blood.

"Do you have all of them memorized like this?" The male vampire asked.

"I own this place. Of course I do." David said with a smile.

The couple began to delve in the samples that he'd given them, and then ordered the rest of Elaine's supply after the first sip. In the motion of six seconds, he watched them devolve from gentle kine to almost ravenous. They consumed her offering deeply. He watched the vicious glint in their eyes as they swallowed, and they joined the other rabble of satisfied creatures that David was serving for the evening.

He started a new tab and pressed Elaine's button twice. The inventory program informed him that the supply of Elaine's blood in the cooler was exhausted, and the file disappeared to his permanent archive of service renderers. Their tab was starting out at a healthy thousand dollars each.

Vampires had eternity to make money, and despite the pop culture mythos, all of them were powerful and wealthy, in California especially.

At times, David felt like a drug dealer when he saw them partake. His product was primo.

When he'd refilled all the goblets, tabbed in his orders, and finally had a chance to make his way to the far corner of the bar, the look on his newest guest's face remained terse and authoritative. Without the trinket to alert him of it, David would never have placed her in the first blood line of Cain.

He had to be wary of her mind.

"What are you in the mood for this evening, dear eldress?" David asked. He'd discovered some of their demarcations of proper form in his experience at his profession.

Her red-ringed irises flashed at him like fire, and he saw the thin apexes of white piercing the ridge between her pouty lips. Her guise was flawless, and her voice cascaded through his head like a soft Spring rain.

"Hello, David. Why don't you surprise me? Something different if you don't mind, dearest."

He poured some blood in to the heated chalice. His hands shook and he knew she was aware of it.

"Why so nervous? I've heard great things about your work here. The neophytes and their zealous thirst don't put you off-balance, and then I walk in, and your heart is moving faster than the expressway." She smiled, and he felt her bouncing around in his head. She picked up information faster than he could defend against it.

He tried to keep his thoughts distant and murky behind a thinly veiled wall.

"If I wasn't used to it by now, I would tell you that it's very rude to run around in someone's thoughts before you order a drink." David said.

"I'm sorry, dear. It's not every day that I have full-fledged conversations with mortals. You're very talented to be able to do what you do. Most humans would have collapsed from that little instrusion." She grinned, and he knew she was very aware of his interest in her.

"I've been saving this for a long time. This is the blood of my favorite musician, but I guess you already know that now. Thanks for spoiling the surprise." David said.

"Oh? Do tell. Aren't I the lucky lady this evening?" She said.

"Before you drink, tell me who you would have guessed first." David smirked.

"Hm. I would say Ozzy Osbourne because this place has British architecture and you seem like a Sabbath follower, but that seems a little too in your face. Let's see here..."

"You're close. Sort of."

"Jimmy Paige."

"Ah. That was the other good guess I thought you might have gone for, but this will certainly have a little more mellow taste of creativity than the both of them put together." David said.

"No."

"Yep."

"David Gilmour isn't healthy enough to be drained. Are you trying to prematurely yank him away from us? I've always been a fan of his lovely leads." She laughed.

"He was tripping on acid during New Years and thought being bitten was a hallucination. They didn't drain more than two servings. His next performance of The Wall was quite powerful, of course." David said.

"Then cheers to the dark side of The Well!" She raised her glass, and he met her with a shot of scotch for himself. It was the only bottle of real alcohol under his roof. He saw the feet of the blood sticking to pearly incisors in her mouth, and then it was extinguished. The neophytes watched her like a small child would revere a comic book hero.

"For the health of the business and the preservation of the Shroud, might I ask how you came by my little dive here? I like to hear the stories of my guests, and you certainly win the most interesting guest award here tonight," David said, trying to cover the anxiety in his voice. He was talking to a First Line. This was it. The scotch burned when it hit his belly.

Stay cool. Remember your research.

She stared at him in silence for a moment. He tried to think of nothing.

"I come from the prime coven, but you already knew that. You've been looking for traces of one of us on the internet and in museums around the world for the last half decade. In fact, that is the very reason that I am sitting at this bar right now, drinking the blood of the front man of Pink Floyd. Don't try to hide things from me, human. You were denied of Elysium credentials just last month." She hissed, and for a brief moment, David's heart felt the grip of frosty fear.

He looked around at his clients, and all of them were still nursing second glasses. He lowered his voice and found it difficult to focus on the two red swirling seas burning right back at him.

"Tell me why you're waiting. I know what you want to be." She whispered.

"You know I want to be embraced, and I want it to be a first child of Cain who does it." David said with a cold efficiency. He'd heard this line in his dreams a thousand times, but he'd always pictured an ancient looking vampire with wrinkles instead of outstanding beauty.

"Are you aware of the laws that bind and govern our society? It's not just about the Shroud. It's not just about proliferating superstition and policing society to cover up traces of our existence. If I were to sire you, I would have certain personal expectations. Profit and gain will only be a fraction of your responsibilities. Being a successful mortal doesn't make you a successful childer. Everyone's resistance to the urge to feed is different. You could lose your mind for the first year as I ween you on two drops of blood a day."

This was the first and maybe the only time that he would meet a child of the first line. He couldn't show doubt or trepidation. In that moment, David would have done anything to convince her.

"I know the risks. You've been in my head. You know how determined I am." David said.

She slashed her wrist open as casually as a guest in a dining room might ask for a side of dressing, and the thickness of it lapped in to the goblet slowly. David found himself licking his lips. Some other vampires in the bar had concerned expressions on their faces, but none of them had the sway or authority to speak out against his newest patron.

Members of the first bloodline commanded respect, as any other vampire would be considered beneath their lineage. She could do as she wished. She waved the chalice in front of his face, and he found himself staring at her violet-painted nails as she teased him, dangling the most powerful reign of the dark gift a few inches from his nose and mouth.

"Bet you'd really like a taste of this, wouldn't you, David?" She cooed.

He gritted his teeth and started polishing goblets.

"So your answer is no, then. I'll simply give you the same excellent service that I deliver to the lessers of your kind." David said quietly.

"They may be dilluted, but they're still superior to what you are, little blood peddling human." She retorted.

"I don't want to upset someone of your status." David said. "The Well is very close to being recognized as a real world Elysium by the council of elders, and you have to admit that I've done more to protect the Shroud in the five years of running this bar than some of your neophytes have done in a hundred years. We're in the age of cell phone cameras on every corner. There are more and more violations and unauthorized turnings every day."

"I'm aware of the dynamics of modern day vampire society, human. Thank you. But I do commend your efforts. Although you've become very wealthy by linking human capitalism with our thirst, you also act on our behalf before the interests of any man or woman. For this..." She trailed off and stood to her feet. David watched her raven hair spill about her face in a moment of distorted time, and he found her olive, Mesopotamian complexion completely alluring.

"Fellow Bloodkin, I'd like to propose a toast to the only human whose blood I might feel guilty of partaking, considering everything he has done for our hidden community. David, refill their goblets on my tab." She said.

He appreciated the burst of business and the unexpected sum of five figures for his ledger, but David only stared at the goblet near her left hand that held the blood of Cain.

After she'd regained her seat again and the glow of her snowy skin left his mouth agape, a window of opportunity opened.

"I had to test your head, to feel your motivations. You understand this much." She said.

"Yes, I do. Tell me what I have to do. Five more years? Twenty? What am I looking at?" He sighed.

"It's not a question of your commitment to us or the Shroud. Adding a member to the first coven of Cain isn't something that happens based on the judgment of one member. I'll have to consult my brothers and sisters. I know exactly what they'll say already, actually."

"No?"

"Not necessarily. Are you aware of a businessman named William Mercer?" She asked.

"The guy who started Ableman Industries? I've heard of him. He's a modern day robber baron of the medical industry." David said.

"You don't know the half of it. He knows we exist." She said.

"Are you positive?" David asked. Other vampires were listening now and stirring uncomfortably on their barstools.

"The story of William Mercer and why he is dangerous to the Shroud isn't one that we can discuss here, and it will take time to fill you in. Regardless of your intentions, I came here tonight to enlist your assistance, and if you perform admirably, then perhaps there is potential to grant you what you've desired since the night you met your first bloodkin." Her face was tense, and the mind tricks were over. She was communicating as honestly as the Beast within would allow her.

David never thought he would see fear in the eyes of predatory perfection.

He clicked his bar microphone and felt his voice crack painfully as he announced the end of tonight's tasting session.

"Last call, my friends. I hope you enjoyed yourselves this evening." David announced shakily.

As David's undead door fledgling came down the spiraling stairs and escorted his fellow creatures of the night in to the pale yellow lamp light of 2nd street, she handed him a folded black envelope.

"This contains the credentials for a new account on the Elysium server. Log in at three a.m., and I'll send you the information you need to complete our task. If you succeed, you will see me again, David the life peddler. Oh, and there's one last thing."

"Great."

"You will not be drained and turned until you prove yourself, but the blood in this goblet is for you. You'll need every advantage you can get to thwart Mercer. Enjoy a hint of what it's like to be one of your customers." She smirked.

"I won't let you down. By the way, what's your name?" David asked.

"Lillith."

He watched her curving, graceful form glide up the stairs and out of sight, and then it was only him, the humming ceiling fans, and the pull of temporary immortal power on the bartop.

He said goodnight to his bouncer and locked the door. When he sat down in front of the goblet, he found himself reaching for it, but his hands were shaking too violently. He gripped the warm metal, tried to steady his breathing, and spent what felt like eternity running the events of the last hour through his mind.

He raised the cup to his lips.

The hot, sickly smell of copper swam in his nose and mouth, but he didn't feel sickened. He knew what the mixture represented, and it represented the dark gift of the best brand of eternal life he could get.

He felt a wave of indescribable gratitude to the ancient, beautiful woman who had made this possible as he saw details in things that he'd been looking at for five years. Wood grains in the chairs and blended marble in the polished bar granite. The clarity was overwhelming.

He felt the hotness of her essence moving through him, he heard every split-second impact of the ceiling fan's blades against the air, and the world in front of him seemed to slow down ten-fold.

He had time to take in and observe everything. His senses became omnipotent with a few swallows and a few breaths.

David checked his cell phone, and it was only one in the morning. He had two hours to kill, and going home right away would be impossible. He grabbed the pendant, bounded up the steps in two strides, and found himself on the sidewalk faster than he'd expected.

He entered the welcoming night with vicarious intentions.

II. Field Tests

The sharp whites and yellows of street lamps captured him at first. He saw each individual, deceased insect carcass on their surfaces, as well as inbetween the cracks of the asphalt of the sidewalk. The street in front of the hidden entrance to The Well was empty, but he heard a car engine that needed an oil change nearly a mile away on the overpass as it puttered in to the city.

Held captive in a standstill of admiration for his heightened senses, David decided that he was going to enjoy them at their full capacity in the company of other humans, namely the handful of friends from Little Tuscany who were forbidden from visiting him at his suspicious new profitable venture for obvious reasons.

His arms and legs carried him in an unsettling, graceful stride that felt foreign to his brain when he started walking. He found himself at the fence that separated the locked cellar door from the other deserted junkyards and factory lots at the water's edge. He'd chosen this unscrupulous industrial plot at the advice of his vastly older and more experienced undead business partner, Maric.

He squatted on his calves, taking a brief moment to take in the newly detailed surface of the moon overhead. His legs felt ready to spring upward with enough energy to send him to the stars. David took in a deep breath as he stared at the layer of barbed razor wire running the length of the barrier. Each sharp tip seemed ready to strike at him like a metal animal under the silver moonlight. This was not a logical decision for his logical human mind, and yet his boundaries had been changed by a half ounce of cursed blood.

He leapt. There was a ripping sound as he lifted his legs to his chest.

His body cleared the wires, but he felt no pain. When he rolled like a cat and found his hands in the dirt, keeping his center of gravity intact, he rose to his feet. The corner of his pinstripe jacket dangled freely in the midnight breeze, tangled among sharp points that had intimidated him moments before.

"Thank you, Lillith." David said. He took in a new breath of fresh air and laughed softly at himself.

He started running in his Italian loafers and his tailored pants. He wasn't sweating, and his eyes seemed to show him where all the right jumps were coming up. The top of a broken down Bobcat. A flagpole rising over the auto parts surplus building.

After what felt like fifteen minutes, David checked his phone from a catwalk under the overpass he'd been staring at from his bar. It was 1:04am.

"No fucking way." He muttered to himself. His human heritage suddenly felt so boring, so cheated out of natural power.

He did some mental calculations and filed them away for his research documents. One half ounce of first line vampire blood was capable of allowing human beings to sprint and jump a mile in less than five minutes. Vision and auditory thresholds were exponentially augmented at least three hundred percent, if not more.

He started running again, and it was still 1:04. He stuck to the shadows and cleared the bridge in twenty seconds, climbed the fire escape for a dentist's office, and bounded the rooftops until he was looking down at second street. There were a few pedestrians in the business district hustling past to reach the last bus.

He took the drainage gutter down in to the alley and silently padded with incredible agility to a solitary lamp post with a designated cab marker. He saw headlights a half mile down the street, and an older man in a business suit power walking with futility to catch up. Everyone else had passed.

David sent a text message to Nance and Lexi and waited in clear view under the pale light. The older gentleman eventually reached the marker sign, panting and out of breath. David hailed the cab and opened the door for him as he hunched over, leaning against the post.

"Thank you, young man. There's not much in the way of public transportation at this time of night in the city." The old man said. As he stood up straight, his crystal blue eyes seemed to twinkle with a phenomenal clarity for a human. David would have noticed even if his senses weren't enlightened by the undiluted blood of Cain.

"You're welcome." David said smoothly.

"Care to share this one? How far do you have to go?" The old man asked.

"Oh, I'm having an excellent walk so far. I think I'll remain on foot this evening. I'm meeting with some friends a few blocks down." David said.

"Well, then, it was a pleasure. Be wary of the shadows, my friend. This city is getting safer every day, but there's still work to do." He said.

He closed the door and flashed David a smile. The cab pulled away and finally left him standing there in solitude.

"Still work to do, huh?" David chuckled to himself. "You have no idea, suit."

When he was the only soul with two feet on his current portion of the grid and the cab was out of sight, David started running again. His destination was the Lava Lounge, a late night gathering place with a diverse urban culture and an excellent sound system. It was a favorite for his old friends from Little Tuscany, as well.

He removed his ripped jacket and threw it in a dumpster when he found himself a block away from the electric red sign. Nance, Nicole, and Lexi were already standing outside waiting for him. He checked his phone, and it was 1:21am. He hadn't expected his ex to show up, and it had been more than three months since he'd seen Nicole. She was capable of being a buzzkill even when he was on the world's greatest drugs, but there was no way she could interfere with Lillith's blessing. Tonight was David's night for fun and enjoyment. Just once.

He heard wobble bass pounding through the walls of the building as he approached them. Nance stared at him with an arched brow, and all three of their mouths were agape.

"Where's the Mercedes? Holy shit, David. Did you walk this whole way?" Nance asked.

"I hailed a cab and walked part of the way." David said. It wasn't entirely untrue, and he wasn't prone to making things up in front of his best friends.

"You seem energetic. Did you have a good night? Lots of rich pricks throwing their secret parties and such?" Nicole's tone was less than cordial.

"There was a high roller tonight. Someone I've been wanting to serve a drink to for a long time." David smirked.

"Ooh. Was this high roller a woman, by chance?" Lexi asked.

"As a matter of fact, she was." David said.

"If it was such a good night," Nance said, "Then you shouldn't have any trouble letting us party on your tab."

"Well of course. I'm feeling better than I have in a long time. Things are changing in the air. Can you feel it?" David asked.

"I think I'd prefer to feel some candy flipping." Lexi said.

The Lava Lounge cover for the night was twenty apiece. David put a hundred dollar bill in the breast pocket of the massive bouncer at the front of the club as they walked in, and then they played the "excuse me" game until they found a green and pink illuminated booth in the back corner.

David gave Nance his wallet and reclined in the booth, resting his head against his hands behind him. The blood was only increasing in potency, and he watched the cascading lights in the dome of the lounge pulsating with the beat of the DJ's dubstep remix.

"Get me a bottle of Amarone, whatever you guys want to drink, and something else to get us feeling good. I'm celebrating a fortunate turn of events tonight." David said.

Nicole scowled at him and pulled down the edge of her skirt, twirling her flowing red hair around her index finger anxiously.

"You're always the responsible one. You're a one beer and go home guy. What's up with this chick? Or is that information off limits to me, just like The Well?" she asked with acid etched in her voice.

"I think I'll be getting us some alcohol, folks," Nance said, taking Lexi by the wrist and leading her through the maze of glowsticks. They were evading the inevitable clash. Now that he held no obligations to her, Nicole accomplished very little other than lighting up his temper and shitting on his good time.

"Just let me say that if I fulfill her expectations, the benefits will be enormous. You also know we can talk anytime, despite the baggage. I still care about you, and you still care about me. Right?" David asked.

"That's the problem. You know I care about you, and you pretend that you're not angry about the way everything went down. I never wanted to hurt you. You just stopped coming around, and then you go open this mysterious bar in crackhead-ville and no one hears from you for months. I sat around and just cried sometimes, David."

"Was that before you started fucking my best friend?" He retorted coldly. His mind was racing with a thousand things that he wanted to say, but there was no respect or friendship in any of them. Only jealousy and short statements that would yield him argument points.

"It's something new. He was there for me when you stopped coming around, and he was there to care about you first. You walked out on everyone, David."

"I'm done talking about this. I'm going to have fun with Nance and Lexi, and if you get any ideas about inviting him around, don't. Tonight, I think I might kick his ass." David said.

He rose to his feet and left her to sit alone texting on her iPhone. He wandered around the lounge until he found Nance. Each perfume from the women in cocktail dresses cultivated around his head, but he was able to distinguish each one from another. Nance was placing his Amarone in a bucket and attempting to carry two wine glasses with his mouth.

"Score. Look, you can get Nicole a drink and I'm cool with her being here, but next time, I would appreciate a heads-up before you invite my ex-girlfriend out when I'm paying for everything." David said.

"She invited herself and I didn't have the balls to say no. Lexi is too nice, too. You know how it is sometimes when you close down with people." Nance said.

"True. Well, I'm going to drink this wine and indulge a bit. Did Lexi find the goods?" David asked.

"She's getting them split up in the bathroom so each of us can take an equal dose." Nance said. "Shit, man. This is going to be a good night. Thanks for hollering at me."

"No problem. I can only hang around until a quarter 'til three, but that should be enough time to do some damage." David said.

When Lexi returned, she gave each of them a half-inch strip of paper and a plastic capsule of pale yellow powder. She was giggling like a school girl and unfastened the top button of her halter top.

"Where's yours?" Nance asked.

"Already going." She laughed hysterically afterwards, and they both believed her.

David dissolved the acid on his tongue, broke the seam on the capsule before he swallowed it, and poured a healthy serving of Amarone. He waited for Nance to catch up and proposed a toast.

"To temporary mindless self-indulgence and debauchery." Nance said.

"Indeed." David said as he tasted his blended red.

They made their way back to the corner booth again, and the Molly was already starting to milk his muscles. In thirty minutes, his trip would take him to a convoluted place of scattered thoughts and reflections. When he began to see tracers of glowing moonbeams leading from the center of his chest to the flashing and sweeping lights on the dance floor, David lost himself to a new perspective.

He stayed on the opposite side of Nance and Lexi away from Nicole and sipped his wine. The prospect of having his ex around for the next hour seemed much more tolerable now that his body was spiked with the greatest augmented buzz of all time. He watched crawling waves of tiny creatures meandering through her blonde streaked, strawberry hair. Her makeup was still the most chiseled and artfully applied among most of the women there, and her legs were still long and slightly thick at just the right places in her thighs that her dress allowed her to lord over his gender. Her skin was an electric pale color, kissed by the sun but affected just barely enough to carry a glow in the low light of the lounge. Her breasts weren't sizeable, but the dress she was wearing made them look better, of course. Soon, the hallucinogenic evaluation of his last girlfriend started to bore him, and he focused on listening to the music instead.

He smiled to himself, aloof in his mind as the music ransacked his senses. He snapped his gaze away from the lights and caught Nicole staring at him this time. Over the wobble bass pounding through a speaker right behind him, he felt like he could hear hints of the thoughts racing through her head. He wouldn't be surprised if his next partaking from Lillith granted him some form of mental domination.

Or maybe he had it now.

He stepped away from the booth after pouring himself a new glass and left them there. Nicole was mashing furiously on her iPhone again while Lexi and Nance stared empty-eyed at the colored liquor bottles behind the bar, discussing which were the most decorative instead of rating them on taste.

David carried one thought in his head for a long time and repeated it to himself, slow and smooth.
If he was going to be trying to dig up information about a pharmaceutical company, the mind game might be an easy way to please the first coven. Best to test it here. Best to fail with someone who didn't matter anymore.

You're a beautiful bitch.

He liked the alliteration of it. David stared at his ex in the booth from the speaker and tried to imagine that his thought was projecting in to her, penetrating her head. Fucking her shit up, as Nance would have said.

He took a deep quaff of Amarone and felt another sugary jolt of Molly in his arms and legs. He saw a tear cascading down her cheek as she texted more and more quickly. He pulled out his phone, added her number and the number of her new boyfriend who happened to be a childhood friend of his, and chuckled to himself as he sent a simple observation to them both.

Sorry I made your sloppy seconds cry, my little shadow. - D

She left, but not before he heard "message received" over the wobble bass and the normal laughing people on her phone as she passed him in the crowd. So his number wasn't blocked any longer. Undoubtedly, that would change as the result of his little stunt.

Domination was a possibility with one half ounce of Cain's blood.

After his heartbreak, David had discounted the opposite sex as a factor in the future of his human and possible vampiric existence. Nicole had crippled his ability to trust any human being ever again. The eccentric and intense waves of circular logic from the LSD attacked his mind, and the time distortion felt immense. He knew he was thinking at a thousand miles an hour, and the world around him was ticking by at thirty five. He heard Nicole's voice behind, felt her hand on his shoulder, and he kept walking. He trashed the possibility of good terms and respectful bygones and lost himself in the drugs, as he had to a ridiculous extent when they'd been together.

Lillith's blood took hold over him and he entered a trance. He saw a glimmer of tunnel vision as he watched the back of Nicole in her high-heel sprint out of the Lounge. Some part of him said that perhaps she'd wanted to deliver an apology, but he stamped out that voice and held on to his bitterness. He thought of her new lover, who had been his human comrade for most of his pathetic and meaningless human life, and the thought of draining them both dry or selling their confines as wares to his new matron.

Humans and their drama were somewhat dead now that he had taken the first finger of Cain. The whole handshake had to be earned. He was wasting his time here unless he was learning how to exist as a vampire. Not a human.

He had a little over half an hour to get back to his study at his apartment. Faces were starting to droop and swirl and elongate, and he saw vibrating particles of energy in the red EXIT sign that were invisible to everyone else.

One last experiment for his research. To be productive. He turned off his phone and entered the opposite room to evade Nance and Lexi. Nicole was now a beautiful and lost relic of his past.

Only the future mattered. Pleasing Lillith. Nothing else.

David rolled up his sleeves and approached the reserved round table in the corner where a dozen beautiful and successful people roosted with their martinis and sangria pitchers. He'd always programmed his brain to locate the most attractive people in his vicintiy, regardless of gender, ever since his resolution to find a first line vampire.

With the vampire blood in his system, he was one hundred percent certain that all of them were human. He leaned against the end of the booth couch and ran his fingers through the dyed red locks of the most gorgeous female in the group. She jumped in her seat before her head snapped around to glare at him.

When he focused his stare on her, there was a translucent, cognitive barrier between her mind and his own that he could almost see. He tried to imagine that his own impulses were firing off from the folds of his gray matter to her own, filling her head with a voice that she had no natural ability to resist.

"I'm sorry," David said smoothly as he leaned downward to speak in her ear. "I was only trying to get your attention. I've been watching you for awhile."

Her green eyes went wide, and the menacing glare faded quickly.

"You ... you have?" She asked.

"You seem way too classy for this place." David said with a smirk. He blew a small gust of cool air from his lips across her ear lobe. She looked straight ahead and he felt her breathing pick up when he wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

"I like it here, but I don't go for guys I meet in bars." She said matter-of-factly.

David knew he was hearing twenty plus years of cemented values and beliefs reinforced by her prudish attitude. She was the perfect choice, because although she was stalwart in her convictions, she wasn't very bright. She didn't spend time thinking about big-picture things or complicated lifestyle choices. She was a very average human being in the brain with a flawless physical appearance, and the first line dose had shown this to him in a span of twenty seconds.

She was the perfect choice for his first time.

He felt his cheeks tighten up as he tried to commit to exhuding a wave of influence over her. His eyes quivered, and it was difficult to keep the foundation of the thought intact before he sent it across the invisibile film. He had to use his voice as a crutch, for now. True mental manipulation was beyond him for the time being.

"So the hottest girl in the bar is also the hardest to get. That's what you're telling me." He said in her ear.

"Your chances aren't looking bad, but I'm not leaving here with you tonight, smooth operator." She said. "You can call me tomorrow and we can eat lunch in the sunlight when we're both sober, and then I'll see how interesting you really are."

He chuckled softly, placed his fingertips on her chin, and guided her head to face him eye to eye.

"You've been a classy prude your whole life and I could probably count the number of people you've given it up for on one hand, but that's about to change. I want you to take your friend sitting next to you, and I want you to show everyone how raunchy you can be. Your body is a gift. You should share it with everyone instead of one new douchebag every year."

He saw her eyes glaze over, and his voice seemed to be a tangible weapon that he could harness to break down the barrier. He'd discussed the finer points of domination with many vampires at The Well, but he'd never understood some of the odd ways in which they'd described doing it.

Now, he somewhat understood.

The fake redhead with a perfect body took her slutty friend by the hand. They removed their high heels and got on top of the table. The three males with them were astonished on the other side of the booth. She looked at David as she got on her back, pulled her red and pink polka-dot panties down her thigh, and proceeded to finger herself.

"Not so selfish. Please, other people first." He said.

David checked his phone, and he had twenty minutes to reach his apartment. He turned his back on the racy booth and thoroughly enjoyed his stroll through the crowd. When he finally left the lounge and his feet were on the street once more, he felt less restricted. He was capable of physical feats that he'd never been capable of for a limited time, and he intended to enjoy them instead of locking himself down in the dynamics of social nightlife. The drugs were being overwritten by the potency of what Lillith had given him, but he still saw hints of his trip.

He started walking until he hit the first line of heavy shadows on the street, and then he ascended the drainage gutter and leapt the rooftops for what seemed like forever. He was lost in the flow of the city and the grid, and he was closer to the moon than he'd ever been on foot when he finally took a break on the roof of his favorite deli, directly across from the loft of his apartment.

After a cigarette and a lost moment of staring at the stars, David leapt to the awning. The fire escape door was open, and he descended the stairs a flight at a time until he was on his floor. Despite the incredible night he'd had so far, the real information and the real research was behind the door of room 104B.

He placed his key in the lock and found that it was already disengaged. His acid trip went south on him almost instantaneously, and visions of cloaked killers and monsters with teeth rampaging through his home ransacked his thoughts.

He heard the sound of a keyboard behind his apartment door.

III. Threshold (physical influences: sober) (musical influences: silence)

On any other night, David would have phoned the police and spent hours going through his personal effects after the intruder was neutralized, but he felt ready for anything.

He kicked the door in as effortlessly as he might have snapped a toothpick between two fingers. Within a split second, he felt a crushing grip around his throat and an otherwordly hiss. A hot dot of pain formulated at the center of his vision and began to supernova outward as the flow of oxygen to his brain dwindled in the hands of the monster.

Another second, and there was air.

David regained his vision, coughing madly, until the chiseled face of his business partner and his sad smile were apparent. He collapsed in to his loveseat with an exhalation of relief.

"What are you doing here, Maric? You usually call me three nights ahead of time when you visit. You scared the shit out of me." David said.

"Bar man," Maric said as he joined him on the couch. "My lifespan is over five centuries for a reason. Anyone who makes an entrance like you did will be met with the same reaction. You shouldn't be unnerved, really. I was only trying to protect your research."

Maric was what David referred to in his notes as a "conservative modernist" vampire. Most generations that were displaced only a few bloodlines from the first were turned between 1500 and 1900 A.D., although Maric had been turned without the consent of the elders. He was fortunate to be sitting in front of David considering his long history of backlashes with the Shroud.

"It's been what, a year?" David asked.

"Barely over, yes. I can smell it in you, David. You've finally found it, and I presume they said yes, or you wouldn't have the blood in you right now." Maric assumed.

"Better than we could have hoped for, my friend. How did you find out so quickly?" David asked.

The dark-haired vampire proceeded to lift an identical engraved talisman from beneath his shirt, and it glowed softly in the palm of his pale hand.

"I had my own alarm. No offense. I know you would have told me when you got here, but you're on human time. You have no true concept of urgency yet." Maric grinned.

"Guess what." David said.

"Hm?"

"There's an Elysium login and password in my back pocket." David said. "I'm sitting on it. Something you haven't been able to get for three hundred years."

"Is that what you meant by better than we could have hoped for?" Maric asked.

"Basically. And you know what else? They're scared of a human, and the terms of my turning revolve around digging up dirt about Ableman Industries." David said.

"More specifically, a drug that is in the testing stages in the laboratories of that company." Maric said.

"See? You're more informed than everyone else and you're not even in their circle. How do you know all this? You've always known everything."

"The Elysium is the official record, but we have ways of gathering information that even you don't know about. Yet." Maric said.

"Look, Maric, I'm glad you helped me start the bar, and I've learned a lot from you. I wouldn't feel this power in me right now if it weren't for you lifting the veil from my eyes. But you have to realize that I've sacrificed a lot of very human things to learn the truth. You told me when I met a first line vampire that you'd tell me everything you know." David said.

"Correction. I said when you were turned by a first line vampire. You've only had a drink." Maric said matter-of-factly.

"Well, it's 2:57, and I'm logging in for the first time in three minutes. I'll be up all night gathering information for my records on the boards. Tomorrow, they want me to go to Ableman and witness the drug presentation." David said.

"You need to be careful. These aren't ordinary humans. The building itself has safeguards against my kind." Maric said.

"When I've succeeded, I want answers from you, Maric. I've done everything you've asked." David said.

"Very well. Don't do anything to get yourself noticed. We're very close." Maric said as he closed the door behind him.

When David turned his computer monitor on, a familiar pair of twinkling clear eyes burned backed at him from the Ableman Industries greeting page.

Although he was minutes from accessing information about the children of the night that no other human had ever held access to, the cold stare bred some hesitation in his keyboard fingers.

"Hello, William Mercer. That was an awful late cab ride for an old man." David said to himself as he closed the browser window.

IV. Final Death Blues (physical influences: 10mg xanax, Rockstars, 30mg Watson blue tabs)

Aloofness of the mind and circular logic were not normally conducive to his collaborations about the hidden world within a world, but this had been the only instance where drugs hadn't impeded his research. The candy flip from the Lava Lounge finally receded as the sun's rays began to pierce his loft windows. David's eyes were wide and bloodshot, but his fingers moved like lightning, and he was halfway through the modernist era of vampire history after only five hours.

He double-copied the files to an external drive as he put on a pot of coffee and hid the power cables to his computer in the ventilation shaft above his toilet. There was a good month's worth of research and analysis ahead of him, but the demands of personal hygiene and good health were necessary to make an impression with the movers and shakers at Ableman.

He showered, shaved, and ate a bowl of granola cereal to kick any last hints of the drugs out of his system, but he still felt the augmentation from Lillith's blood flowing, lukewarm instead of deliciously hot.

He was on his way down from the blood, but she must have known the span of its effects. Maybe she'd anticipated its potency and didn't want him doing anything too extreme in the nine to five hours of a major corporation's headquarters.

The blood still had David going strong. He tied his tie in less than a second and located the keys to his secondary vehicle on top of the refridgerator. The Lexus had heated seats, but otherwise, the cars were a diversion for his money. A visage of success to persuade other wealthy humans, which were a secondary minority on his social agenda now.

Humans were easy. With Lillith, he would have to be genuine.

He pulled out of his carport at seven thirty, and he thought of Maric and Lillith and the couple who had exhausted his supply of Elaine the Stanford student. He lowered the sun visor as he turned east on Forrester, and his luxury sedan already felt boring and crowded. He couldn't leap the rooftops in broad daylight, and the sun already felt as though it limited him. He was doing something now that none of them had been capable of for hundreds of years. He was driving his car in broad daylight.

Morning city traffic frustrated him further in the half hour it took him to travel five miles. He punched his stamp for the visitor's parking garage across the street from Ableman and found himself outpacing the other pedestrians until he reached the doors for William Mercer's drug breeding ground.

The lobby was spacious and contained within a massive glass dome with rows of elevators at its rear. As David walked in, he found his eyes burning with the effect of the dome's amplification effect on the morning sun at certain angles. The worst glares were emanating from the glass over the elevators.

The building itself has safeguards.

In addition to the Elysium access logins, David had also found a magnetic card enclosed within Lillith's envelope. He pulled it from his back pocket and approached the receptionist with his most endearing of smiles. She placed her caller on hold and impatiently addressed him with as much professional urgency as possible.

"Good morning, sir. Welcome to Ableman. Do you have an appointment?" She asked.

"I'm here for the presentation." David said, handing forward Lillith's card. "Here are my credentials."

"Ah. Thank you for coming in prepared, sir. I believe you're one of the last observers to check in. Please give me a moment to verify." She said. She swiped his badge through a feeder next to her keyboard and his heart bounced in his chest for a brief moment until the green light flashed with a quick beep.

He exhaled. One step closer to immortality.

"The presentation will be held on floor forty three, and please be mindful of the confidential nondisclosure agreement you signed upon receipt of Mr. Mercer's invitation." She handed the badge back to him and her touch lingered on his hand for a moment. "You'll need this for access to the lab area. Thank you for your visit, David."

"No, thank you. Facebook me." He said as he walked through the security gate.

The elevator ride was a surreal ascension through an engineered tower of more glass. He listened to the sound of his own breathing and the cool waves of ambient music drifting quietly from the corner speakers. When floor forty three arrived, he opened his eyes, ready to take advantage of the opportunities granted for him. Lillith's blood was no longer something to indulge in or enjoy, but a tool to build the foundation of his success in his second life.

The elevator beeped. The doors retracted to reveal a honeycombed floor of pressurized glass laboratory compartments with a center aisle leading to a stage. He saw a large digital display monitor at the end of the hallway and the backs of old man heads.

David's footsteps were light as he passed the compartments on either side. He heard the same voice that he'd heard last night when Lillith's blood had begun to take hold.

Be wary of the shadows, my friend.

Mercer's back was turned when David took his seat at the conference table. He was discussing something about the presentation with two young people in white lab coats, and his eyes were wide with excitement. David tried to use his amplified hearing to gather bits and pieces of their conversation, but none of it made any sense.

David took a piece of gum from his pocket and sat calmly with his hands folded on the table. There were two more arrivals as five minutes turned in to fifteen. The lab technicians disappeared behind the backdrop on the stage, and Mercer finally took the podium when every seat was full.

David pressed the record button on his pocket receiver. If he was discovered with it on the Ableman premises, he would be charged with corporate espionage, a felony in all fifty states. He maintained the pace of his breathing and locked his eyes on Mercer when the old man began to speak.

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to our presentation today," Mercer started. "I apologize for the level of scrutiny required to arrange this meeting. Now that we're all here, there are a few things you should be aware of before we begin."

Mercer pressed a switch on his podium, and the rear wall behind him retracted to reveal a young man inside a glass cube. There was a steel barrier separating the man from a transparent plastic trough with nothing in it. It looked like a twisted, clean, farm animal stable.

"First of all, you'll notice that this sealed chamber is devoid of any natural sunlight. Floor forty three was designed with this intention in mind. The person in the glass prison before you is not a person at all, but someone who died in 170 A.D." Mercer paused and pressed another switch.

The cube moved forward on its mounted tracks until it was only a few feet behind Mercer. When the hydraulics locked the apparatus in place, there was a soft beep, and a light on a small black device in the rear corner of the man's container came to blue life.

"All of you are here because you've been debriefed with some very sensitive and dangerous information. I won't coat anything with diversionary tactics or dance around any questions you might have. We know vampires exist. We know people disappear every day, and you're here because one of those people was someone close to you."

People around the room shifted in their seats and some reached for napkins and water pitchers. He was hitting their emotions before any scientific jargon was presented. He was winning them over. Mercer was a genuine and thorough communicator with the business skills of the country's elite.

David felt fake. Whoever Lillith's resource for obtaining the card in his pocket was, they were crafty. For the remainder of what happened in this room and inside this building, he had to put on the mask of loss.

He forced himself to think of the day his ex-girlfriend found him passed out on opiates, and semi-tears formed in the corner of his eyes. The mask of loss was complete. Fake, but complete.

"The killer behind me is the property of this corporation, and is legally defined as a cadaver by the California legislature. For all intents and purposes, the dead body moving inside the cube behind me could just as easily be used for stem cell research, organ donation, or the next medical lesson for USC's third year students." Mercer cleared his throat, and a layer of black plastic serpentined the board room, further placing David and the others in artificial darkness.

"This will be a graphic presentation. This is your last chance to stand outside until the investors meeting afterward. I understand that some of you are interested in the economic benefits of my new drug and are not necessarily committed to this part of the presentation for personal reasons like the rest of us..." Mercer trailed off.

Then, he looked directly at David, his blue eyes twinkling as always.

David tried to gather what he could about what the man was thinking, but he was too far away and too engaging to the others around the room. Lillith's gift was in its waning stages, and he was a captive audience member at this point. He only hunkered down and continued to observe from his seat.

"But I have a feeling that most of you will stay right where you are, because you've been waiting for this day." Mercer finished.

Three of the nine observers rose to their feet and left quietly through the back of the room. When Mercer was certain that everyone else was committed to their seats, he pressed switch number three and sealed the door behind them.

Mercer leaned in to the microphone and spoke clearly.

"Hello, J.R. How are you today?" Mercer asked.

The young man in the tank walked calmly to the corner of his cell with the camera and microphone and responded almost immediately.

"I'm well. Is this my audience, Mr. Mercer? They look like very distinguished humans." J.R. said.

"I would have to agree. Did you know I received over fifty applications, and barely a dozen of them contained the sentimental qualities that breed determination? The attributes I was looking for, to set their aching hearts at ease? You understand that the time has come for you to fulfill your purpose as an employee of this company, correct?"

David watched, fascinated. He finally noticed the teeth, the tinged irises, and the twitching fingers.

J.R. was on the cusp of blood emaciation. David had heard of "the twitch," but all of The Well's customers had indulged in his blood as a pleasure instead of a necessity.

"I understand, Mr. Mercer. I appreciate your hospitality in the last twenty years. Thank all of you for coming to witness the salvation of my disease. I'm honored to be the first to set that empty hole of loss inside you with a ray of hope. I never chose what I've become, but if you help William Mercer, the world will be a safer place. Ahem."

"Enjoy the show." J.R. said.

"Thank you, J.R. I'll take it from here." Mercer said, disconnecting the cube's microphone.

"When the lovely neck of my fiance was torn out almost eighty years ago, I found out that vampires exist." Mercer began. He pressed yet another switch.

The trough on the other side of the tank filled almost instantaneously with a glowing liquid. At first, David thought it was irradiated, but something seemed different. The fluid was tinged with a glow so potent it created an azure sheen of illumination around the circumference of the room.

"The liquid in the trough behind me is a new drug in the final testing phases at Ableman Industries. Until now, I've spent my entire life helping the Food and Drug Administration thoroughly test all the medical products that our labs have engineered. Liquid Blue, however, is an exception." Mercer said.

J.R. hands and feet began to twitch more rapidly. He crouched on all fours like a feral cat, his eyes locked on the steel frame between him and the trough. David barely heard a deep hiss through the glass that none of his other human colleagues picked up, thanks to Lillith.

"Imagine walking freely in the streets at night. You've purchased a Liquid Blue vaccine from Ableman, and a child of Cain hypnotizes you. She convinces you to follow her in to an alley. When you regain consciousness, she is tearing open your neck with her teeth, trying desperately to gain nourishment from your jugular." Mercer said.

He pressed another switch, and the back wall of the trough section retracted open. Mercer began talking again as he walked in and locked himself inside with a black remote in his left hand. The microphones were on.

"Ladies and gentleman, science has finally become the ultimate ally, over faith, over skill, and most of all, over superstition. The blue liquid next to me is a hemophotaic compound that smells, tastes, and flows in your veins as freely as O-Negative from a human being. Soon, we will have a universal compound that can be injected effortlessly, in less time than an American Red Cross appointment. The vaccine will last for three years, but we're currently working on prolonging the drug's effects to indefinite." Mercer's eyes were wide now, and his speech was picking up rhythm.

"I've worked with my scientists on this compound for over fifty years. I've sustained this company selling good, valuable products to the medical industry, but the culmination of that hard work is glowing before you. This is our final weapon against the curse of vampirism. Liquid Blue is what makes us greater than immortal." Mercer said.

David's mouth began to gape as the old man pressed another switch. A robotic arm descended in to a hatch on the cube's top surface and gathered a small sample of the blue liquid and then rose upward to descend through a twin hatch in to J.R's tank.

"J.R., if you would, please. Demonstrate the intricacies of our genius." Mercer said.

"Of course, Mr. Mercer." J.R. said.

The vampire pressed a button on the arm, and a centrifuge immediately sent the liquid flying in all directions. The pale, thin cheekbones and narrow brown eyes were marred with sticky beads of sapphire goo. J.R. looked humiliated, and yet he continued to smile with the tangles of fluid in his hair.

"As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, when touched or ingested by childer, the drug is as harmless as water or hand sanitizer." Mercer said.

Mercer took a syringe from his lab coat pocket and filled it with some of the remaining Liquid Blue in the plastic basin. The room was deathly quiet as he applied a tourniquet and injected himself with it as casually as a man might light a cigarette or empty the change in his pockets.

"Do not be alarmed at the color of my skin or the reaction in my pupils. I feel perfectly fine. I have just placed perfect synthetic blood in the veins of my body."

J.R.'s twitching elevated to convulsions and rabid screeches of frenzied bloodlust.

"Before I switch off the microphone, I'd like to thank J.R. for his contributions to our research, and I wish him peace in his final death." Mercer said, much more quietly than his other bold statements.

The other lab technicians outside the cube gave the vampire a nod, but he hardly noticed as he bashed his hands and face against the steel barrier.

"Liquid Blue becomes irresistible to vampires when it synthesizes with human blood. Observe." Mercer said coldly.

He pressed a lone button at the bottom of the receiver, and the steel barrier withdrew in to the floor.

J.R. fired off his haunches at the old man with predatory fury, his mouth agape and gnashing at Mercer's throat. Both suits sitting on either side of David screamed, and he heard the sound of someone else vomiting on the far end of the room.

Mercer stood motionless and allowed the monster to sink his mouth in to his vaccinated bloodline.

J.R. drank for almost a full second before his head twitched upright as if stricken. Blue droplets fell from the tips of his incisors down his chin and chest. His mouth began to corrode and melt from the inside out, and for the first time in an eternity, a group of humans began to witness the final death of something they hated. In the moment when the young vampire fell to the floor, the blue liquid coursing in an acid river through his body, David finally understood.

He knew why Lillith and the others had been afraid. This was the end of their world, right in front of him.

J.R.'s eyesockets flayed off in flakes of wet ash and his body began to rip apart in waves until there was nothing left of him but a pile, a set of lab scrubs, and glowing droplets of Liquid Blue scattered randomly amongst the remnants of the guinea pig.

Mercer casually wiped his neck with a handkerchief, disinfected the bite wound, and used the nearby first aid kit to dress his laceration. When he exited the cube, his head was draped, and in an odd way, David suspected that the man felt a wave of loss.

He was certain that his capacity for revenge was much, much deeper.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is Liquid Blue. I apologize for the graphic display you have just seen, but it was necessary. I'm sure many of you have disconcerting feelings from long ago that can finally be put to rest. Soon, the shadows will be safe. Thank you for coming, and I hope to see you at the investor meeting in an hour."

David turned off his recorder and got on his feet.

V. Collateral Damage

They filed out of the board room and walked slowly down the aisle between the cells of glass. They waited for the elevator in a daze, and the one who vomited was still sickly and pale. They'd seen the curse of vampirism when it wrecked their realities the first time. Liquid Blue reminded them of it, but with the tables turned. There was sudden comfort in the thought that they could walk the streets at night without a hint of paranoia. Mercer's drug would protect them.

David remained behind, leaning on the back wall with his cell phone out. It was dead and he was mashing dead buttons, but he looked busy, and that was the important thing. Mercer was working with the technicians to glide the stage backward from the apparatus of undead death.

When they'd finished, the chamber sealed with a perimeter of steel, Mercer pressed his final switch.

Flame jets disintegrated what was left of J.R. and everything else that was no longer useful. The spigots rotated and sprayed cool water a few moments later. There were some details to attend to, but there was no evidence that someone had met their permanent end in the tank, much less a child of Cain.

Mercer finally shook hands with his lab techs and bade them a farewell. He removed his lab coat, straightened his tie, and finally smile as he approached David.

"Ah. The local business owner representative of my distinguished audience today. Had I known you would be attending the presentation, I would have walked with you last night instead of taking a cab after all! Goodness, what are the odds? Do you mind if I ask you a few personal questions?" Mercer asked, his crystal blue eyes gleaming with intrigue.

David took a deep breath and pressed the recorder button in his pocket. His heart started to pound again, and he was glad Mercer wasn't a vampire, for he surely would have felt his nervousness. With humans, there was always some semblance of a mask that he could create on the whim to fool them.

"Sir, if I had known you were who you were, I much rather would have sat on a bench to pick your brain for two hours instead of consuming alcohol and behaving irresponsibly downtown. Your presentation was lividly fascinating to me, and not only because I know about vampires. Your ingenuity and the science behind it is really incredible." David said.

"Why thank you, David. I hope you feel some hope where once, there was fear and loathing for the moonlight. I won't ask you about the details of the night you found out about them. I never ask anyone to relive that moment." Mercer said, turning his back to stare at the empty paneled room. David was starting to lean away as if pressed for time, but he was also recording a private one-on-one conversation with the very man Lillith had tied his turning to. He stopped and let the wisened old scientist continue.

"However, I was going over your background check, and I saw that you were a self-employed entrepeneur. Let me ask you something. What services does "The Well" provide? I couldn't discern what type of business it was from the paperwork." Mercer asked.

David's breathing froze. Mercer was probing in dangerous territory.

"Oh, it's a food and hospitality company with a few employees. I do banquets, private functions, stuff like that. I really enjoy landing the high level clients and being able to bartend with an open bar. The room for creativity is endless." David said.

"I see. And your business partner, Mr. Maric Gareti, he is from Italy I understand?" Mercer asked.

Lie.

"Wh-who, did you ask?" David stammered.

"Maric Gareti. The European that you split half your profits with. Is he from Italy, or is he not?" Mercer repeated, turning to face him with his burning blue gaze.

"I've never asked him, but I respect the accuracy of any conclusion you might come to, Mr. Mercer. You're a very intelligent man and you've ---"

"Shut up, David. I want you to stop bullshitting me and listen to what I have to say for a moment." Mercer said.

"O-Okay."

"I know the person who gave you the five million dollars you needed to start your enterprise is a vampire. Do you want to know why I know this?" Mercer asked.

"Not really, but I'm sure you're going to tell me." David said.

"Maric Gareti is the vampire who bit my fiance. He is the reason I spent twenty billion dollars researching Liquid Blue, and he's the reason I've spent another ten billion on keeping myself alive. Don't doubt for a second that he doesn't already know everything about what's going on in this building, or any of the other facilities I have around the world. If he's the one who sent you here, then I have a proposal for you to consider." Mercer said.

David paused in silence for a moment.

"Alright. He did send me here, and I knew he was a vampire, but can you blame me for going in to business with someone like him? I was bartending at Little Tuscany and barely clearing a thousand a week, and then I became one of the wealthiest small business owners in this zip code." David said.

"I don't blame you. What I'm trying to say is that maybe your trust in Maric is not as entirely founded as you think. You'll distance yourself from him and eventually become a sole proprietorship, if you know what's good for you. I've seen him embrace the beast in a reckless frenzy, draining the girl I loved until she was nothing but a dry husk of skin and bone. I will kill him, one day, and I hope you're not around when I come for him, or there may be,,," Mercer paused and cleared his throat.

"Collateral damage. Thank you for coming today, David. I hope you learned something. Please say hello to your partner for me. I haven't seen him in over thirty years. Let him know this is his last century, and that his end is coming. Not just for him, but for all of them." Mercer said.

David got in to elevator before the old man was finished speaking and left the building much faster than he came in. Lillith's blessing was fading quickly.

He felt violated, betrayed, threatened, and very, very human.

He felt awful.

VI. Frozen In The Sun (Physical influences: insomnia and a hangover) (musical influences: silence)

The standard of normal had once been David's baseline for judging his scope of well-being. Normal was fine. Normal was great for feeding vampires blood cocktails like they were drug childs, and making lots of money from it.

For David, that standard had permanently changed, due to his involvement with his latest client.

"Human" was no longer a valid classification for the brown-haired man with hazel eyes, who now passed the other normal people on the street. Whether it was their subconscious or random paranoia, they were giving him a full step's breadth as he made his way to his parking spot. He looked at himself in the driver's side window, and he looked the same as he did on any other rare occasion that he might find himself out and about during the day.

Even without the prospect of becoming a vampire, David had always been a night owl. His best hours of rest came when the sun was at its peak and he was sleeping in a cool, dark room until the late afternoon, or even dusk.

David straightened his tie and tried not to think about William Mercer's sabotage job on him in their brief one-on-one session. He ran a red light without thinking about it because he wanted more of Lillith. That was impossible, considering the time of day.

Sleep was the only alternative, but it also seemed impossible at this point. David was second-guessing Maric for the first time in the history of their friendship, and Mercer had been fully aware of David's ties to him.

When he finally reached his apartment and the secure comfort of the futon in his bedroom, he collapsed and allowed his mind to race. When his thoughts were keeping him from sleep or he was finding himself distracted in his vampire research, he often found himself in this very spot, lying on his back, staring blankly at a blank spot near the ceiling fan as his brain sorted itself out.

David knew there were parts of his mind that he would never fully be aware of. If he was going to be harnessing its influence over others, then he had to respect it. This meditation phase, or "defragmenting," was his only way of retaining his sanity in his new lifestyle.

Sleep finally arrived with the aid of a melatonin capsule and a readjustment of his window blinds almost two hours later.

His hazel eyes buzzed behind his eyelids when the dreams arrived.

There were images of his new blood matron, of an old man with blue eyes and a needle, and the face of Maric, smiling in an expanse of nothingness.

VII. A Lonely Elysium (Physical influences: 1/8 Cali indica, 3.5g of ponic red capped fungus)

David awoke to fading orange embers of sunlight, trying in vain to keep their hold over the edge of his comforter. Twilight had arrived with the trainwreck of complete sobriety. He opened his eyes and thought of nothing but the sickly, copper ooze of Lillith's blessing running down his gullet. His body did not crave the sustenance of power as it might if he were addicted to some drug, but it was aware that it had taken a leap towards perfection. It was angry at him for being human.

His muscles and bones ached with the weakness of mortality.

In twenty four hours, David's list of priorities had decayed. He thought of his former obsession with success, with business sales and projection charts. With the culture of something ancient that many of its own brood had no initiative to comprehend. His research was important to him, moreso than a spouse or a nice pad or boundless financial windfalls.

Right now, the list of priorities was short. The list consisted of one word.

Blood. Her blood.

David remembered the recorder, and he tapped his foot impatiently after uploading it to his hard drive. Wherever Lillith and her companions resided, they would be stirring soon. Sleep was not a necessity for their kind to exist as they existed. They slept to evade weakness. To be sealed away and guarded and protected until it was their time to rise and manage their world.

He was about to become a part of it with his revealing scoop on Mercer.

David logged in to the Elysium server and waited some more. The sun had fully descended, but the tip of its thinning cascade had yet to surrender to the moon. He thought of Lillith, rising from her dark hovel to check on the completion of the task she had set before him.

The thought of not knowing where she was plagued him. He wanted to know that his second drink was lined up. Waiting in an empty private lobby with a blinking cursor on his monitor, David's thoughts began to drift to Maric and his whereabouts as well. He had halfway hoped that the vampire would be waiting for him when he awoke, but something was more important to him than David's sudden usefulness. What was it?

A second username entered the foray and disrupted his digital lonesomeness. The screenname was a jarbled mess of characters that David didn't recognize. Some scrit that was ancient and beyond him. His first instinct was to take the initiative. His yearning for the blood of Cain's top shelf drove him to type the first words.

His fingers shook as he began to formulate his message with his keyboard.

I have served the expecations of the Shroud.

David waited for five minutes with no response from the second user. He took deep breaths and tried his best to keep the paranoia from overtaking logic. Elysium channel logins weren't even granted to vampires of multiple centuries like Maric. They were earned. If the strange screenname responded to his query, it would be in an effort to advance the cultivation of his knowledge about the inner workings of the Elysium server. If the user turned out to be Lillith, then he was certainly ready to send her the recording from his encounter with Mercer. He wasn't specifically worried about anything in particular, but the Liquid Blue presentation video would horrify Satan himself.

David blocked J.R.'s pile of ashes from his mind and went in to the kitchen for cereal.

The milk encouraged his recovery in to a normal and unspectacularly human state of mind. David wrote his best research transcripts in "logic mode." His business was a semi-front before, but it might soon became a real-world Elysium with all the risks and rewards.

He ate his corn flakes at the kitchen table and forgot about the issues of the day. He thought of the hidden paradise beneath the trashy fenced lot. Soon, if he fulfilled his responsibilites to Lillith and her council, The Well would become the property of his blood family. He chuckled as he thought of Mercer's comment about making it a sole proprietorship. It was about to become something much greater than a business.

David realized in that moment that the evolution of his bar was as important to him as the notion of being turned. To have it recognized by immortals when humans no longer mattered.

Nevertheless, a new haven was necessary for him. One that no one was aware but David himself. He drained another glass of milk and returned to his keyboard. There was a message. His momentary clarity vanished with the disruption.

Should you fill the shadows with peril, then you become the enemy of all.

The user had logged out in the middle of his bowl of frosted flakes, and there was a flash of hot anger that he'd missed his opportunity to reply with something. Anything. David threw his mouse across the room and had to fetch it again. He amplified his frustration by being harder on himself as always. He paced around the room, assuming worst case scenarios in his mind. Had he compromised security? Did the intruder know who he was? Had he given anything away in pledging his loyalty to the Shroud, or possibly created an even bigger threat?

Fifteen minutes later, he paced by the keyboard and held his breath. Another user had entered the channel with a recognizable handle. E.

His heart began to pound. He typed.

Eldress?

In a split second of fantasy, he thought of hacking the connection and finding Lillith's personal haven with a tracer program. He instantly decided against it and focused on the confirmation of her presence in cyberspace. The response came quickly this time, and he said a silent prayer.

Indeed. Life Peddler?

His fingers attacked the keys with guerilla reflex.

Indeed. Got what you wanted.

Suddenly, she knew that his first task had been fulfilled. He felt a tremendous load of angst fall off his mind's shoulders and exhaled deeply.

He wanted to tell her that it wasn't safe to communicate here, but her loyalty to the flawlessness that her and her peers had created might blind her to reality. David decided to keep the information about the previous user to himself for now. To truly unwind the situation, he felt that he needed more of Lillith.

With the temporary enhancements of the vampiric mind, everything would be clear.

He decided on a less than ambiguous response to gain her loyalty as quickly as possible. No words. Only paydirt. He uploaded the Mercer file and encrypted it with the program she'd contained in the black envelope. The upload finished after a tense forty seconds, and her response made his heart flutter.

Knock knock.

The rap on his door almost made his heart explode.

VIII. The Good Fight

It was hard for David to imagine a worse degree of panic that the one induced by the sound at his front door.

An empty peephole was much, much worse. He would have preferred a tentacle beast with a million teeth than a barren hallway with the door of apartment 105 right across from him.

Fuck it.

He flung the door open as quickly as possible to surprise something that wasn't there. He felt his breathing and the softness of his humanity. David was actively participating in a community that was thousands of years old at the age of twenty five. Something had made that sound. Possibly something that could snap his neck with a flick of two fingers.

Maybe Lillith had enemies. He was making waves. If there was an unknown member of the community after him, he would be dead before he had a chance to know death was coming.

"I'm on your couch."

The voice was his own, but not his own. The sound punched him in the back and he went stiff, too horrified to move. He tried to make excuses, to think that this was a side effect from the Lava Lounge trip over twenty hours ago, but the voice had sounded real.

David closed his door, secured the chain very slowly, and locked the deadbolt under it.

He still didn't turn around. The thought of seeing nothing was the most dire, but the thought of seeing himself would push him over the edge of mental equilibrium just as well. It was all wrong. This was supposed to be Lillith. Had someone been impersonating her in the Elysium channel? Was she safe?

True terror basked in the company of dread when he thought of falling this close to a first line embrace.

"I know what you're thinking," the voice said, and David was sure of it. "You played fetch for your vampire belle and the reward is still being dangled over your nose. I can see your body and your mind drooling for it."

David remained still, but he responded softly. Simple questions. Nothing else. He thought this was the beginning of human insanity. He cleared the desert of his throat.

"You're right. Who are you?" He asked.

"I'm you." His voice answered from behind.

"Are you real?" David asked.

"To you? I sure am." The voice responded. "Look, instead of playing twenty questions, let me make things a lot easier for you. First of all, calm the fuck down. I'm not going to hurt you. I won't say that everything I have to say in this room will be easy for you, but you can sit down and talk to me. Wherever your immortal goddess bitch is, she's not here. Over becoming a vampire and all your other shitty problems, you need to turn around, face yourself, and come to terms with a few things."

David had experienced visual and auditory hallucinations during the best and worst of psychedelic drug use, as well as the feelings of being chased or attacked during intense narcotic withdrawals. This wasn't a flashback or a retort from his body gone bad. This was really happening. He blinked, took a deep breath, and turned around to face himself.

The person sitting on the sofa was telling the truth, both in presence and intent. He was David, but perhaps a few years younger and without the wear of the twists and turns on the road of fate. Everything looked as he remembered himself in the mirror at the age of twenty in his college years, or perhaps his last year of high school. Something was different in a way that was hard for one side of his brain to explain to the other.

He stared at himself for a long time. His thoughts raced in the most vicious and precious circles, sometimes both at once. He lost his concept of time in the torent of thought cycles that he thought he had sealed away from himself for his own betterment. This was one moment in a group of less than five in his life when reflection was not only necessary, but demanded of him. A choice. A decision.

The young version of him on the sofa did nothing and kept a calm face. David was thankful for that, and his copy offered a nod. Both of them needed the silence.

"I need to sit down." David said.

"I know what you're thinking, because I'm you." Other David said.

"You told me that. You're thinking about Maric, too? Cinco de Mayo?" David asked. collapsing in to the loveseat across from the clone of his exhausted self.

"Before the five million and The Well, Maric told you he was different. He chose you for a lot of reasons, I suspect. But you remember why you turned your life upside down in a month when you were on the verge of getting married after a two year relationship and a cushy routine." Other David said.

"You know, my brain is completely fucked right now and you've confessed that no one else would know you exist, so for all intents and purposes, I'm talking to myself and I'm crazy. Why don't you remind me?" David asked.

"You left Nicole and Nance and Lexi and your family and everything else because Maric told you one thing." The other said. He folded his hands and leaned forward from his relaxed position to stare at David straight in the face.

"The good fight." David said.

"You've let the curse control you so far. That's the bad fight. That's the sellout." The other said.

"I'm not going to betray Maric, if that's what you're going to say. The first line is the only way we can turn. We need the power. You don't show up to a fight unprepared, and I'm pretty sure you hate William Mercer as much as I do after today." David said pointedly.

"Oh, no, I do. Maric deserves what we've promised him, but don't start to lose your shit and kiss Lillith's ass any more than you have to. She has the blood you need for a higher purpose. You can't lie to yourself. You were lost as a slave to it for a stretch. That's expectable. It's time to get straight-edge, even when you're on vampire blood. Remember the good fight." Other David said.

"Do I shake your hand and you walk out, or what? How does this work?" David asked himself.

"I'm about to drop an avil on your brain." Other David said.

"I can handle it. I handled a Gareti blood sacrifice and became best friends with the guy. Just say it." David said.

"Alright, captain badass. Just listen. You know Cain slayed Able and became cursed by god to roam the earth feeding on the blood of his human children. You've ingested some of that curse. In addition to that, let me put it this way. There's a science behind genetics and the certain random component of the passage of traits between two people when they have sex and pop out a kid, right?" The other said.

"Of course." David said.

"The dillution of vampiric bloodlines are the same way. You've read all this, or I wouldn't be able to recite it. I'm telling you what you already know. To put it very simply, Lillith is a first line, but she is not one hundred percent Cain. No vampire is. She might be ninety percent Cain, and when she embraces you, we could end up at eighty five or seventy. Whatever."

"Okay. Go on."

"You drank Lillith's blood and experienced all the awesomeness and power of Cain, plus a little of Lillith, and then you thought you were done. You slept and withdrew because being human instead of being a vampire really sucks."

"Right."

"I am a byproduct of the fact that your body has been exposed to the curse. Maybe I am the curse. The person you're looking at and having a conversation right now exists because a curse allows him to. The curse also allows you to think about and come to conclusions about things in ways other than human thought."

"So my world exists on my mind's perception of what the world is, and because I can hypnotize and bend people with the curse in my mind that makes it powerful, I can also have a full-fledged conversation with myself in order to discover information in my brain faster. This is crazy shit. Am I sort of on point here?" David asked.

"You're exactly on point. I don't know what it will be like when you're a vampire, or if I'll even last. I don't technically exist and I am a byproduct of your imagination, but if a simple sip of Lillith's blood gives you the ability to talk to me, then I have a feeling I'll be a permanent personality within the heating thriller that has become your life in the past forty eight hours." David said.

"It's not so hard to let go and talk to myself, really, but since you look slightly different than me, we should come up with a name for you." David said.

"This is your brain. This is your brain on blood. Did you know only five seconds have passed since you heard the knock on the door? This is real power. As for my nickname, It should have a catchy acronoym origin. I'll have it the next time we run in to each other. By the way, before I disappear and you get up to let Lillith inside, do you want to know why I look different than you? It's a quite interesting little insight in to our head." The other said.

"Sure." David said.

"I thought about it when I was born during that gulp of Lillith's juice. I'm you, but I've never strayed from the good fight. I'm you, but without regret."

IX. Blood Mother (physical influences: 1.5 grams of MDMA, an ounce of California indoor, two half gallons of Early Times, and somewhere between 25 and 30 Rockstar Energy Drinks) (musical influences for this segment: Bassnectar, Shpongle, Willie 3rd Street, Citizen Cope, The Mars Volta, Tool, Sublime)

Still reeling from the surreal fireside chat, David felt there was no other course of action than to repeat the logical steps that had preceded his visitor's sofa time. He got to his feet and checked the peephole with an anxious squint. He prayed for her face, and there it was, just as the Other David had said it would be. She gave him a smile and was perfectly aware that he was watching her behind a dead bolt that she could crush with her pinky if she so desired.

He was constantly reminded of the difference in perception between the two worlds. His first taste had awakened his senses to reality as they knew it, and now that he was sober, he would never take their capabilities for granted again. Even the most trivial things like locked apartment doors gave peace of mind and security to one reality, while completely betraying the other. She was only waiting for him to answer the door out of politeness and respect for his most personal space of all.

He unlocked the door and managed to fail miserably as a host when he would have succeeded with any other visitor. His mouth was frozen in a dopey half-smirk and he wasn't aware that his bottom jaw had begun to descend lower and lower as he took her in. There was no use in trying to keep his heart rate in check. David didn't expect any mental intrusions that he wouldn't be able to predict from Lillith's end, but he felt as if he would never be ready for a dirt-digging sweep through his thoughts from a first line vampire. He felt as though his mind could handle a frontal domination assault from Cain himself after what had just happened in his living room and his conversation with his own mind, but he remembered feeling that way before she'd ordered a drink from him. She'd turned the tables in less than a second and could have easily melted his brain in to gray matter mash up. The element of surprise meant everything, even on the esoteric battlefield between mind and mind.

He wouldn't underestimate her again. Not ever.

"I'm glad you're here. You look stunning. Please, come in." David said.

Lillith stood perfectly tall and graceful with her hands folded behind her back. Her posture might be taken as a gesture of subservience or an air of yielding among humans, but David knew the body language of the council culture. He bowed to her and tried to mimic one of the smoother forms of respect that he'd witnessed bloodclan fellows adhere to in his bar: hands at his sides, neck completely down and open to any form of attack. She finally spoke.

"Speak your mind, barboy. There's no need for all that if there aren't others present. Are you going to invite me in or keep staring at my heels?" Lillith asked.

David rose and thanked the gods with gratitude when she glided past him and settled in to his sofa. She was wearing what appeared to be some tight European variant of a kimono that hugged her lines in all the strategic places, dyed with deep violets and reds over the base black material. For an ignorant human man, this visage was capable of creating a chovanist buffet of blood. He thought it seemed very much like Lillith, to sabotage the lusting whims of men with a seductive subterfuge. The council pin on her lapel was more than visible.

The episode before her entrance was starting to recede in to the back corners of his mind after seeing the red jewel on her collar and the tastefully curled ends of her dark locks, tied by thin, ornate hair pins that were in their own realm of class. Her skin was a lighter shade of olive, and when questioning her mortal origin, David wanted to assume she was Persian or Mesopotamian. Her earrings were engraved with some sort of glyph that dangled on a bangle chain beneath the raven sheened curls overlapping her ears.

Never one to bask in the presence of beauty so selfishly as to distract himself, David found himself forcing his eyes to return to the pin. He had to try three times, forcing his thoughts to the task of earning his embrace. He repeated business thoughts in his mind again and again until the heat of her presence relented on him somewhat. The lapel emblem made his service to her official, and he was excited. He left her on the sofa and perched himself behind his kitchen bar.

"Something to drink? I have some private stores in the cooler for my more esteemed house guests. " David said.

"I'm impressed with your preparation in hospitality, but no thank you. Let me be direct for a moment. The recording you sent me was very disturbing, but also very useful and revealing." Lillith said, folding one thigh over the other as she traced a fingertip on the back cropping of his sofa.

David poured himself three ounces of Maker's Mark and chased it with the unfizzed dregs of a doomed RC two liter at the bottom of the fridge. The legs of the dark oaky liquor tap danced on the sides of his mouth, and his eyes went wide when he swallowed again to catch his breath. He was expecting a long, heavy conversation. Anything to remove the edge was an advantage at this point.

"It wasn't easy. I don't even want to ask you how you came up with that access card." David said, going for Maker's round two.

"You probably shouldn't."

David poured himself a glass of water and doused the flames in his belly before he sat down in the loveseat across from her. He was overwhelmed with the events of the past two days and hesitated to say anything more for the time being. In his mind, he had passed with flying colors, and things appeared to be on an even keel, or at least as even as they could be with the images of Mercer's experiment running through his mind.

David chose an easier route and fixated his gaze on the slit in her kimono dress where one perfectly smooth bare leg was folded over the other. She waved her foot rhythmically, cascading the low light across the waving surface of the leather. Her eyes were locked in thoughtful and hidden observance of his Salvador Dali painting over his fireplace mantel, depicting the melting of elephants in to the bodies of swans. The sheen of Lillith's creamy skin under the soft light of his parlor lamps in the silence stirred a small spark within the kindling of his laughable dry spell. His love life had devolved in to a dormant pile of expended ashes, having served its only purpose of brutal and glorious sacrifice.

David wasn't a vampire yet, and already he and J.R. were not so different.

Lillith's irises flashed and he twitched in his seat. He felt her, very suddenly, crawling through the details of his memories that his human mind couldn't recall well enough to block out. He felt her see him in a way that he would never be able to explain to another human being. His mind had experienced temporary, watered down augmentations of Cain's curse, but her technique had been mastered over thousands of years.

She knew everything. Almost everything. His alliance with Maric remained within buried lockdown. Her voice smoothed through his ears when she chose him over the painting.

"David, in your service to me, I am already fulfilling the role of your blood mother. It's necessary that you learn not only to tolerate my efforts to gather information, but to support them. To look forward to them, even, as an opportunity for you to learn something yourself. I have to confess that you have the most formidable human mind that I have ever attempted to crack, and I didn't collect what I needed right away. Do you want to know why I was able to break through a moment ago?" Lillith asked, resting a curved index finger against her cheek as she watched him squirm through her odd mentoring methods.

"I'm sorry. I'm sure when I'm turned, it will feel like an extension of me instead of this wave of "otherness" that sweeps across my thoughts, like a blanket that's so thick and heavy that it makes you sweat instead of keeping you comfortably warm. You're different than all the vampires at The Well. What was the deciding factor that allowed you in? I certainly want to know more about it." David said.

"Your mind is branded with the horrible signifiance of this morning's events within that building, and I must admit that mine is as well. Our headspaces were aligned, if you will. I listened to your recording and also watched a hacked camera stream that was copied and transmitted to the council's chambers by one of our stationed operatives. I've seen what you saw on that test floor. Since that presentation, both of us hold an obsession, brooding in circles over Liquid Blue and its deathly efficiency. When you see images in your head that are close to what I have in mine, your thoughts become as transparent as a glass window. Our society calls it a muse handshake." Lillith said.

"Although you saw the camera feed and have sound to go with it, does my mind's personal view of the experiment pan out differently? Like a separate lens or feed?" David felt that he was proving himself to her with his words. His curiosity was one of his greatest strengths. Bringing up the topic of new ways to make himself useful to her held great relevance at this point. He only hoped, listened, and coveted the glow of her skin under the parlor lights.

"The scene unfolding in your mind is biased with sympathy for the vampire Mercer called J.R.You saw his death as a sad and misguided act of martyrdom, when in fact his only motive for participation was revenge. The suits in that room didn't care who got hit with it first. They wanted to see that science had finally prevailed against the curse, and Mercer wanted to set their minds at ease to rake in capital investments. He's going to line his pockets with production money for a private market rollout." Lillith said.

"Why would a vampire commit instant suicide in the name of revenge? How does that stick it to anyone he held a grudge against within the community if he just lets a scientific vampire slayer explode him in to gooey blue bits?" David asked.

"As I said before, even though I don't blame you for your derived conclusions given the information I had provided you, your view was ignorantly biased. You are under the impression that J.R. spent his entire immortal existence in Mercer's captivity, horrified at the twisted fate of what he had become, when in fact, he only fled to the front doors of Ableman Industries because he was exiled and sentenced to death by no one other than yours truly. He became obsessed with a simple human girl. He told her everything about us without permission, which is an unforgivable offense. I had no choice but to follow the precedents that keep us all accountable, or surrender my council seat. You can pick apart the rest, I'm sure." Lillith finished quietly.

"He was in love with a human girl? Enough to threaten his standing with you and the other council members? Is that considered a taboo among you all?"' David asked, fascinated.

"There was only one word in the declaration. I remember writing it myself. Josef Rotessin only needed to do one thing in order to secure eternity with his lover, and he didn't even attempt it. He ignored us, took her to the middle of nowhere, and trusted the sanctity of their love to preserve her and sculpt her permanently upon being bestowed with the dark gift. Unfortunately, our form of wretched immortality is horrifying to those who can't cope with the loss of humanity. He thought he could show her the beast within, lacking any assistance or tutelage from me or my other peers on how to go about conditioning her spirit to adapt and relinquish itself to the curse. Two thousand years of conceit in his perfect service to us led to him to cut corners. Until the six months of secrets when he surrendered his ultimate loyalty to a kindergarten teacher, Josef was once among the most valiant of night warriors. He rose dusk after dusk in the name of the Shroud, and nothing else. His goals were my own: our freedom to exist easily, in low and distinguished numbers, deceiving the collective societal agreement until it openly dismissed those who actually did know about us as insane and in need of professional help." Lillith wasn't looking at him any longer, but tracing a perfectly coated fingernail up and down the glossy surface of her Italian boot.

David had a suspicion that Josef Rotessin meant more to his blood mother than she would ever let on, and he saw a thin line of breaking remorse on her face. It ripped open his heart. Her matter-of-fact narrative had quickly become something more than informative or enlightening as she listened to her own words. To say it out loud and have it heard by another was to make something permanently real.

Burning visions of J.R.'s recent fate at the mercy of Liquid Blue rampaged through their heads. The white teeth in his mouth corroding away in to the current of chemically dissolved flesh and gore goop until he was nothing but a pile that could be scattered in a thousand different directions with one breath. Lillith could hear David's thoughts. There was no peace, or closure, or even any acknowledgement at all that J.R. would be missed. She shared her own visions with him, not intricate or lifelike to his feeble human mind, but discernable enough. He quickly decided that it was monstous for the old David to be satisfied with Mercer's pet and his final death, and with the emergence of his own doppelganger. It wasn't hard to associate the traitor with the single greatest threat they had or would ever face in William Mercer and his biochemical crusade.

In this moment, David admired the vulnerable hints of what was left of her humanity. Her lip quivered just slightly as her thoughts drifted to the likeness of Josef before he became a miserly pile of ash and glowing undead acid. Perhaps once an impressive and formidable champion that she'd encouraged others to aspire to, he devolved in to a fugitive, and then nothing but a one-time spectacle of engineered destruction. Lillith was five thousand years old, but in learning the dark father's ways of seeking out blood and becoming a perfect hunter, she had developed millenia-old friendships that held more loyalty and meaning within them than anything David had ever known in a single, insignificant break within the split second of the Earth's lifespan that was his twenty five year old legacy. This matter of flipping perspective was perhaps one of many qualities that Lillith and her brethren measured within men and the success rate of a potential embrace attempt.

Lillith was pushing her nail in to the flesh at the top of her knee, perhaps without realizing it, enticing a rail of blood that began to congeal in to a trickled red oasis as it descended down and crashed in singular drops, blending in to be forever overpowered by the brightness of the silky dress material. David licked the insides of his mouth with his tongue and felt his jaw clenching tightly to prevent another gaping maw of involuntary embarrassment. When she continued speaking, the weakness in his brain made him consciously aware that he wanted nothing more than to capture the tip of the incomplete river on her leg and follow it, lapping up the trail until her flawlessly ancient body closed the wound and the only traces of her blood left were small feet of copper ichor clinging in futile desperation to escape ingestion on the eager walls of his mouth.

He was fortunate that she hadn't committed her vision in any particular place other than the Dali painting, and he stared at her legs mercilessly, fixated. His morbid sense of humor triggered a mind giggle when he realized that his dick was getting hard, but not because of an overactive fantasy or a desire to make love to her body. He had zero intentions in fanning the flames of lust that she had awakened, and yet the heat was increasing autonomously with every passing minute that he spent in her presence.

No, not just that part of him, but all of David the Shroud-Spreading Mortal Bartender felt the urge to remind her that he was still a living, breathing thing, stirred by passion when fused with the correct mix of ingredients. For a moment, he lost himself in the fantasy, watching himself crawl on his knees from the loveseat, across the sofa, kissing her feet and begging to be blessed once again with the voice in his head. Every inch and pore and limb of his body sizzled with the heavy voltage of raw desire; goosebumps raked his skin when he thought of licking his second gift off of her pristinely pale, ivory imbued flesh instead of from the encumbering, overly decorated bottom half of a metal fish bowl.

He didn't feel her in his thoughts, but he said a silent prayer to the fates that Lillith's mind's eye would continue to reflect and tell the whole story of Josef Rotessin, the child who betrayed his loyalty to the dark father and his coven for the company of one human girl.

She finally stopped picking at her broken skin and seemed to regain herself before she continued her story of Liquid Blue's first victim. David saw wishful flashes in his head when she finally turned the whirlpools of twinkling crimson on the boring hazel pupils of her newest servile fledgling for more than just a few seconds. David wasn't normally a vain person and took enough care of himself to make good first impressions, but he felt unsettled in the face of ultimate experience. The magnet of David's persona consisted of a memorable presence, of his ability to read people and work a room of strangers until all of them were on a first name basis. Captivating both mortals and immortals had been easy when his role had been to provide them with the best, top-shelf versions of their poisons of choice, and maybe to lend an ear or opinion from time to time.

Things were different now. This was the first line member that Maric's talisman had marked. His obligations to her as a fledgling rocketed beyond blood fixes and insightful conversation. Soon, he would owe the very power of his second-to-second existence to her. Every breath that he wouldn't actually need.

With no chance to cultivate his personal appearance, David felt very inadequate with the tent he was pitching and trying in vain to conceal by leaning back in to the couch. He knew that subterfuge was her greatest weapon against the predictable notions of mortal men. When she felt the need to earn her keep of blood by going old school, it had to be easy. She had the resources to nourish herself with high dollar samples from The Well forever, while still making profits on the interest. He couldn't stop another wave of hardening in his maleness with the thin stream of freshly spilled, sticky wet blood coiling around her legs like a hematic serpent.

David lied to himself and told his mind that Maric's good fight was still the first priority above everything. If any aspect of his relationship with Lillith as her next fledgling began to affect the ideals that Maric had laid out for him the night he'd discovered the world of immortal predators, then he was off-target to hit the ultimate goal. Maric himself had spoken with David for over a year before revealing himself in the progression of their friendship, hiding in plain view, camouflaged in a coat of sheep's wool and waiting for the moment to feed until the other sheep herd found itself too involved in the chewing of the cud to notice.

Instead of lying twice, he opened his mouth and disrupted her memories of Mercer's incinerated drug puppet. He had to be honest now, or never. The first discrepancy or attempt at deception could jeopardize years worth of patience at The Well, or jerk Lillith away from him faster than she appeared to make his dreams come true.

Maric needed a first line vampire that didn't consider him an outcast mutt because of his heritage as a Gareti, and David was quite possibly the only human with the capability of opening up a first child of Cain past bar conversation and a glass of gourmet blood taken from the veins of the mayor of San Francisco or Lady GaGa or Kobe Bryant.

Maric needed David, and David knew he could help his friend more in one night after an embrace from Lillith than all the research and information he'd collected thus far,

His mind pushed the imposing but bland image of Maric's sullen face in to the abyss, and he replaced it with the erotic virulence of the still-moist blood river marring the exquisite pearly plain of her leg.

In that moment, David refused to identify his desire for all things Lillith as unrequited love, but rather as an illogical and self-defeating leash of unquestionable devotion. Through the second partaking of her blessing, through the embrace, and finally to a connection between them that transcended even the unique and dangerously immersive world that Maric Gareti had exposed to him, David felt that he could get everyone out ahead. It was possible.

His mind accelerated from fragmented images with fogs of lust in to a furious gale funnel of arousal. He felt tugs that he promised himself he would never feel again for the sake of his heart and his sanity. She'd had him since her first step in to The Well. She was worth the crippling hindrance of commitment. Attachment. No secrets. Unquestionable faith, compassion, and loyalty.

He felt her come around the outskirts of his thoughts again, and he was not ashamed of giving in to the absolute inevitability of shock and awe. She'd felt that he wanted her. He'd cradled the birth of this realization carefully until it had demanded to manifest, to break through his fake human barriers and drug habits that he utilized for the sake of numbing a sickly, wilted heart crippled by the decrescendo and ultimate burnout of love.

They met at another muse crossroads between them, and David felt that he'd never said so much without words when she gave him a glimpse at her preoccupations. They realized their fear of Liquid Blue, and they realized the strength in their togetherness. Lillith saw them embraced in a coccoon on the couch in David's mind, hands outstretched on the other's shoulders to remind them of the indestructible bond between Blood Mother and Half-Sired Fledgling.

He indulged the creativity of his mind and turned off his logic switch. He undressed Lillith with his eyes, and very suddenly, the crossroads pierced them with the sting of desire from the other.

"I shouldn't be seeing this. The situation with Mercer is serious. Please, try to control your...." She trailed off, shocked at the vividness of the scene that she discovered in his mind in mid-sentence.

He was thinking of his blood mother in ways not even mentionable among humans until Sigmund Freud. David's fantasy developed further with the clarity of detail required to justify his longing for her; she was straddling him with her kimono pulled up past her hips, slowly inching a long, soft index finger through his lips until he could suck the traces of her essence down his throat by lapping his tongue against the delicious even wedge of her violet painted nail, preserving its uniform appearance alongside the others of her manicure.

He was seeing the perfect ideal of the beginning of his second drink, much further beyond the heated dynamics between them at his bar.

"David the barboy, what you feel for me is the byproduct of drinking my blood. Your obsession and love for me is not unique or poetic or tragic. It is nothing but the same blind veil of compassion that became Josef's ultimate doom. When he finally embraced her in secret, he had the most grandiose plans for them after bringing her in to his world. If he had asked us, we would have told him that failure was inevitable. His curse destroyed her from the inside out during her embrace. None of us are one hundred percent certain why the curse is lethal to some, and an unfathomable boon to others, like you. Some humans reject the curse before it ever takes hold altogether, and my personal suspicions were confirmed in this case." Lillith said.

"I'm sorry I have thoughts about you being such a generous sire. You're beautiful to me and I never thought my first line choice would turn out to be someone so magnetic. I would never be like the human Josef lost everything for. I'm here to make your world better, and mine, if you choose to bring with in to it. Do you think I have a chance of going haywire the way Josef's human did?" David asked.

"The body never rejects an embrace. Quite the contrary, actually. The body is aware of the dark gift and its physical advantages over the state it had existed in before. Physical flesh, muscles, and bones of the body merge with the curse quickly after each pass of a childer's blood through them. Augmentation of the mind occurs in a similar fashion. However, there is a third component to the change. The reaction of vampirism with a spirit that is unwilling to submit results in a catastrophic reaction that's powerful enough to pull the body and the mind along with it." Lillith said.

"Did you try to get J.R. before he locked himself in Mercer's laboratory?" David asked.

"We initiated a blood hunt and offered Elysium observation priveleges to our best hunters. None of them succeeded because he had symphathizers helping him along until he could break away and buddy up with Mercer. We considered involving the Gareti clan in council affairs for the first time in four hundred years because we were afraid he was going to become a whistleblower or cause something else disastrous by making as many waves as possible. We needed their blood magic, but the council is very fearful of the form of the curse that makes the Gareti unique. They don't understand it. They allowed Liquid Blue to be developed and tested on the very biological thing it was designed to eradicate because they were superstitious. I don't agree with the Gareti code or their constant attempts to remind us that they are exceptions to the rule, but soon, unity between all vampires will be necessary, or we will simply cease to exist. The food chain will become a bit shorter." Lillith said.

"Unity? You mean between every clan and coven around the world? That hasn't already happened after all this time?" David asked.

"Clashes between sects of covens have been limited in the past hundred years as the world population reached over six billion. Cell phone cameras and mass communication are against us in a bad way. Today, at a world population of over seven billion, the only way of maintaining our records of every childer in the world is to authorize every embrace and lend our collective experience and wisdom to every potential sire. This is particularly true for those who are attempting to sire their first companion or apprentice." Lillith said.

David felt a preemptive failure in his missed opportunity for preparation before this encounter. Lillith was beginning to open up to him about the way it all worked, and he was still human. He felt a vicious tick as if he should be held responsible for collecting notes as she educated him on topics that he had wondered about for five years. Some answers came with the company of his vampiric clientele, but Lillith had a part in creating the laws that even the most educated and active kine within the community found enigmatic. Barely a fraction of the insight that she commanded over neophytes was more useful to him than a decade's worth of Well customers.

He remembered one of his more perplexing late night questions that kept him from sleep until the sun had risen. The first night he opened the cellar doors with an open invitation to sample his limited wares of average plasma and hemoglobin, he received only three customers. He remembered the fear, which slowly morphed in to a reckless awe of fascination. Maric had been behind the bar with him for the first month to soothe his paranoia and forge him in to an alluring human being who could handle the heat. He was a pre-planned rat and Maric's ultimate trump card. The immortal politicians and their nearly pure and closely guarded bloodlines came months later when he began serving nothing but the highest quality servings of human sustenance, but his first three customers that night were Maric's personal coven brothers from the hidden Gareti estate.

He swallowed hard and exhaled. There were so many more questions to ask, but this one took demanding precedence.

"Lillith, I need to ask you something. You know I'm ready for the next steps, and not because your conditonal agreement to sire me is a perfect nightmare come true. You're unselfish and you don't seem as stubborn and unyielding as your other first line brethren. Truthfully, do you think the Gareti have the same ideal vision of vampire paradise as the council? What's the difference between their ultimate objective and yours? I've only met four Gareti members and spoken less than fifty words with all but one of them, and he wouldn't answer my questions about them even after five years of friendship, which is an eye blink for you, but a pretty good stretch for me. What makes them a special exception?" David asked.

"Realistically, the council can't keep the entire vampire population on earth in check should they decide to hold out in the fight against Mercer. Every child knows this. A chaotically embraced vampire, deserted and knowing no sire, a slave to the frenzy of the beast, tearing apart animals in the wilds, or a distinguished member of the Silfi whose very sustenance is the fascination they forge in the weak minded circus of human society ---- the necessity of a unified front is undeniable. We won't survive without it. What every child doesn't know, however, is that we have never been able to enforce our punishments against the Gareti clan. Any vampire who has less than a millenium of intimacy with the beast within won't be able to resist Mercer's drug. The first line blood will help your resolve and keep you from losing yourself to its urges, but no vampire is immune to the pull of the frenzy. Mercer has something powerful enough to induce a frenzy on demand, and he will get better. The first line isn't as safe as the rest of them might think. Shutting out the beast entirely is impossible. We're up against the pull of something that's manufactured to smell and taste better than the best human blood you've ever served at The Well. In short, Liquid Blue is an amplified and euphoric kamikaze feeding in the few seconds before it destroys you. The ultimate taste with the price of a nearly instantaneous jihad suicide in the name of satisfying the beast who doesn't know better. A blaze of frenzied glory as you are held a prisoner in your own body, forced to the chopping block by nothing more than the simple instincts and demands of the monster behind your eyes." Lillith said.

They both fell in to silence, disturbed by the portrait of death she'd painted in both of their heads. He had a thousand more questions for her, and he'd never had conversations with Well guests at this level. They had all underestimated his ability to comprehend the problems that they brought down the cellar door staircase with them. There was a reason they needed a fix of blood that couldn't be forcefully taken out on the street.

Lillith had not underestimated him. The answers would come, and David realized that things would become easier as the dark gift beckoned to him, closer and closer. A winding road that his sanity had already been threatened upon. The first hidden speed bump of William Mercer and his tragic lab puppet.

He watched the melting swans on the painting and tried to keep his thoughts in check. She brought him back to the very real and suddenly stimulating world of his loveseat when she joined him, arching her lithe figure over the steep leather armrests. She curled his hair around her fingertip above his earlobe, bending her knees until her feet were in his lap.

"I know what you want, barboy." Lillith said. "I can feel the buzz of your body, the whisper of your mind's second voice, screaming for it. You want more of me. More than just a sip."

There were no secrets from this one. His heart and self-esteem had been picked apart by the beaks of the loathsome crows of the female gender before this, but this one was not a lover, and she'd been playing the game forever. There was no reason to protect himself anymore. It was time to let go.

"Addiction isn't the right word for it. There's no herb, pill, or line that's ever made me feel the way it feels to be like you. How do I try to go back now? I don't. What do you want for drink number two?" David asked.

"Tie up anything that connects you to the human world with a nice pretty ribbon. I'm going to blow your mind, David. You've earned your keep and the respect of not only your blood mother, but my council brothers as well. Use this temporary taste of the dark gift to bid farewell to those who don't matter anymore. Enjoy your time with them. Say your goodbyes. Very, very soon, you will be pulled in to a war. Do you understand?." Lillith chuckled.

"I'm not really connected with anyone. A few friends. Nothing that requires the sun, at any rate. Thank you for your generosity. I've been thinking about this nonstop since you came down those stairs." David said.

"There's one more thing. A tradition, actually." She leaned forward and brushed her metal-cold lips against the lobe of his ear. Her voice wafted through his head like an enthralling mist. "A foot massage as you drink, if you don't mind, which you don't. It's another bonus for you, really, and it excites me to feel the change in your hands as the curse takes hold." Lillith whispered.

David couldn't jump to the opportunity to move his hands across her creamy pale flesh, and he wasn't shy about sliding his palms around her calves below her knees. He felt her breathing quicken noticeably, and he felt like an angel bringing physical comfort to a god. Electricity sizzled on his fingertips as he worked the smooth skin of her immaculate pedicured feet, and he lost track of time as he engrossed himself in the surreal opportunity to bring pleasure to his generous eldress.

She cooed and moaned in his ear when the goosebumps arrived for both of them, and she sliced her wrist with the same nail she'd used for her knee before lapping the first drops of her second blessing in to his open mouth, The first rogue droplet of it fell off target and splattered his forehead, and he felt his member flash in to limestone. She allowed him to drink deeply in amounts that were tenfold over his small tasting in the goblet on his fated night of their first encounter. The fingers of his left hand clenched in to her thigh and his back arched like a feral cat after the first swallow. His left hand was unaware of what his right was doing, and he felt the stretching of time, the increase of awareness after each greedy gulp.

"Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Something like rigor mortis, because you are a few breaths away from undeath." Lillith whispered, squeezing the cut and lowering her wrist to his lips. "Take as much as you think you can handle."

She giggled, and then the fountain of his dreams was inches from his mouth. He leaned forward and drank deeply. With every push of the blood down his tongue, his body and mind thanked him.

He heard a familiar voice that wasn't coming from his own mouth, because he was drinking. His mouth was the gateway, but his mind had begun to run free with its own flavor of the curse's amplifications. It came from the sofa across from them, and David forced himself to close his eyes and maintain his focus on the flow and taste of the copper river.

"You know she can't hear me. I told you I'd be back. I am your humanity, reminding you that you are not an immortal and all-powerful lackey of the undead yet. Lay off it before you overdose and grow bat wings or something. That's enough." Other David said.

David ignored himself and worked his newly blessed and deft fingers up and down her legs. It was easy to touch her and feel her breath in his ear with the current of her essence transforming his being. His mind had birthed his imaginary visitor under the influence of Lillith's blood, but with this dosage and the electric feel of her body in his lap as he swallowed and then swallowed some more, he could seal out everything. In this moment, he was immune to any and all intrusions, even those of his own psyche.

When his eyes glazed over like crystallized hazel glass, she knew he'd had enough. Just as a computer upgraded with new parts required a hard reset to operate at its new potential, this was more than just a sip. David would slip in to unconsciousness for at least an hour as the curse realigned him, and when he awoke, she would be gone.

Lillith gave him a few last words before what she called the "red dream" overtook him.

"Tomorrow will be the last time you feel the sun if you dispose of your humanity and earn the embrace, David. Try to enjoy it."

X. The Other Edge

His eyelids snapped open to a room in which he'd spent hours of his life, lumbering in complete solitude at his computer. This apartment with all its diminished charms, with everything that was real and familiar to him, suddenly seemed like a different planet. Tables and floormats seemed off-angle when they had remained in the same spot for seven years. The position of his coffee pot bothered him because his sense of perception had been augmented light years beyond any other ten second span of his arrival to consciousness from sleep.

How much time had passed? Lillith had left him alone. A voice disrupted his moment of clarity and made the apartment recognizable again.

"She left you because she doesn't want to know anything about today. Today is the day you drop an atomic bomb on your human life. If you're smart, by the time the sun sets, your parents will think you're dead, your ex-girlfriend will feel good about fucking your best buddy because she thinks you're six feet under, and your Little Tuscany pals will hate you enough that they'll never try to contact you again. Do you feel up to the task, 'little barboy'? Lillith is apalled by the human aspect of your existence. It's time to get rid of it." Pip said.

"I really wish this little tick of mine was voluntary. I don't need you to tell me the way it is all the time. I'm smart enough to figure out things for myself." David said, peeling himself off the carpet and rising to his feet to face himself.

"On the contrary, you're too smart for your own good. I'll always be here to jerk you back from any ledges before you leap over them. The real danger is the remainder of your human brain. Even now. I much prefer you as a stalker of the night rather than a creature who is vulnerable to impulses and whims of emotion. That's the real weakness in being human, after all. You simply feel too much when you're only capable of processing half of what you take in." The other said.

"Don't speak as if you're not still human as well. Both of us are. We haven't taken the final step yet." David said.

"True, but I feel more real now than I ever have. If the half ounce in the goblet at The Well was my birth, then this is the prime of my existence until your embrace. You'll never be rid of me, not that you want me to go anywhere other than at your side, ready to feed you all the little gems of information that your mind misses in its intoxication with Lillith's curse." The other said.

"Let's put you to good use, then. Lillith told me I had one day to sever the ties. How do we go about doing that? Do family and friends even play a significant enough role on the grand stage of things? What's the true priority right now?" David asked, challenging his doppelganged persona.

"I know what you're thinking. Research? More questions? You want to use your temporary augmentations to answer more questions. I can't say I blame you, but think of the sun. Daylight is a limited resource at this point. Information is not. You can acquire information later. To satisfy your curiosity at this juncture is an illogical sacrifice when you can erase the traces of David away from the grid. Do you want your mother to call a detective and file a missing persons report? Will Nicole visit this place one day if she finds herself single again, only to find you with the blood of your newest human meal dripping from the mouth you once used to kiss her out of unbridled love and passion? Think, David. Today is unavoidable. You need to stop hiding and deal with it." The other said.

"I guess you're right. You know, I've thought of a name for you." David said.

"Yeah?"

"What about 'Pip?' It's an acronym for "projected intellectual personality." A scientific term for this brand of the curse, if you will." David said.

"Pip? At least it's one syllable. Simple enough. I'll take it." Pip said.

"Well, Pip, let me dip in to your glorious insight on another topic. How do you figure we go about disappearing from the man-grid without causing too much damage to the people who matter?" David asked.

"There's a special permanence that comes with death and a closed casket. Convince the world that you're dead, and even the sketchy ends tie up very nicely. They're forced to. Do you realize how much of her stuff is inside you right now? Even I can't predict the way things are going to pan out in the next twenty four hours. However, there is something that you're already aware of. I simply need to show you." Pip said.

"Show me what?" David asked.

"You've ingested enough blood to use their abilities. You need to ask Lillith what the actual title of your lineage is. Every blood clan has a name. I can't tell you what will happen when you trigger the signal in your brain that tells the curse to devour every last drop of humanity flowing through your veins. The Gareti can "burn" blood they've consumed from humans to fuel their sorcery. The Silfi can enhance their minds to hypnotize humans for weeks or months at a time. Think about your research. You've always been curious about them. What bloodline titles are there?" Pip asked.

"Gareti, Silfi, Jormand, Nastoch. I'm missing a few. There are only names. I know nothing about them. Even Maric's clan." David said.

"But Lillith knows everything about them, and she shared her mind with you. You have her blood in your veins. Burn it. You know what you have to do. It's instinct. You are closer to a vampire than human right now." Pip said.

"The fact that you exist is a byproduct of thinking on a different level. I've heard vampires at The Well talk about a 'blood trigger.' They can feed or order something from me and go for three or four days, but if they activate the trigger for whatever reason, they have to feed in the next four hours or risk the Beast within. If humans could extinguish the water and food supplies inside their bodies to temporarily enhance their physical capabilities, it would be the same thing, right?" David said.

"I can't tell you what will happen when you release it for a lot of reasons. You're not a full vampire yet. Lillith's brand is very unique, and the information about her bloodline could be concealed. It's definitely not on the Elysium server. We need you to do a test run. Be ready for anything." Pip said.

"I feel the parts of the river that are weak inside me. Human sections of the blood flow. There's this tick in my head that wants to eliminate them and have nothing but Lillith. It would be the closest thing to the embrace without her draining me, right?" David asked.

"This is something you'll discover for yourself when you walk out the front door of this apartment. Neither of us can predict what will happen when Lillith's juice starts to peak on you about forty minutes from now. Remember Maric. Don't upset anybody, especially the humans we're close to." Pip said.

David blinked, and he was gone. There was nothing but the elephants and swans looking down on him as his muscles and senses fused with the blessing. His feet felt quickened, and suddenly, there was that urge to move, to get things done, like he was wasting time standing still by himself.

"Thanks, Pip." David said. "Gareti, Silfi, Jormand, Nastoch, Kurani...."

He made his way to his parlor room windows, and before he could think about using his hands to unlock the latch and open them, they were already open. The night air of the city picked up and issued a friendly hello to the steel trap of his face. He leapt from the window and hit the pavement with his heels. It was a fall that would have killed him a week ago, and possibly resulted in broken bones the night he tasted Lillith's blessing at The Well.

Now, the asphalt was a trampoline of pillows, offering him more leverage with every step.

He stopped in the middle of an empty intersection, his eyes stretched and wild, his nose twitching with the scents of combusted exhaust, smog, and the gas pumps of a convenience store three blocks down.

He knew whath he was. What he would inherit from his blood mother. He felt another invasive urge from that tick Pip had made him aware of, and he gave in to it. His mind told it to go on a relentless assault against the inferior David-blood, to eliminate it and replace it with the power of Cain's curse.

"Cainite. That's what I am." David said.

The trigger he saw in his mind was not a literal one, or even an image that he could describe to someone else in words. It was something instinctual that had evolved from his greedy swallows, felt rather than seen. Much as he would never lay eyes on his own heart although it provided every full beating breath, he would never see this new catalyst. But Pip had. Pip, the companion born of the union between Cain's fate with his mind. With his every thought and every step.

As a thinning creek in a forest might finally yield to the dust with the company of a wildfire, the inherited blood in David's body that he received from his mother and father dissipated, exiled and consumed in one instantaneous heat flash as the curse learned his body, mind, and spirit.

This was the threshold. He wasn't yet a cub becoming a lion. He wasn't even the same breed of predator, but he was assessing the hunt in new ways than before.

His vision transmorgrified in to a tunnel. He felt pedestrians walking miles away and saw through the solid concrete of parking garages and the granite of the high rises around him as if they were glass. He saw the entire world before him as a new version of itself. A new grid with him at its center.

"Cain's clarity." David said to himself, although really, he heard Pip, saying it in his mind. Letting him enjoy the physical moment alone, but still there to give him a name for whatever this was. To take credit for his own unique usefulness.

With four hours left before sunrise, he started running.


XI. Selling Death