There are nights when I really wish I hadn't been turned into a vampire.

My name's Jay-Jay. It's short for "Jarvis Jones," the name I had when I was alive. By profession, I read foreign languages for the Linguistics faculty of Chicago State University. By nature, I drink the blood of living people and hang around with some of the nastiest assholes this side of Hell.

Oh, and yes, they all drink the blood of the living, too. Kindred, one and all. Pretentious name, pretentious people.

Tonight was not a good night to be around me. Well, it wasn't good for the seven or eight people whose blood I'd just fed from in the past hour. Right now, they were downstairs having food to bulk them up from their blood loss, while someone's droning voice told them they'd just participated in the University's blood drive, and here's thirty bucks apiece for the privilege, thank you very much.

And by the time the Svengalis with fangs downstairs were done, those poor saps were going to believe every word of it, too. Such is our awesome power to compel obedience from the herds - our charming term for the species I used to belong to.

So, then, you're asking, what the hell was I doing up here, on the roof of the faculty, looking out over the lights of the city shining in the darkness, all this wind blowing everywhere?

Watching and waiting, that's what I was doing up here. I'll tell you what I was waiting for in a moment, but as for the watching ... I was watching this big old city rolling along before me, same as I do to this very night.

With my acute senses, expanded beyond the human norm, I stared at the lights, heard the sounds. The ceaseless traffic rumble. Distant gunfire, Dopplering sirens, heading away. The sound of a train screeching as it rounded a bend in the rails three miles away.

I caught scents on the wind. Jasmine, cigarette smoke, fried chicken from the nearby fast food franchise, crack, gasoline, burning rubber, the cordite from old gunfire. Two pretty young female students passed by, wearing perfume: I could smell their passing on the breeze, mingled with night blooming magnolia. At times, I fancied I could even read their books from up here. I could definitely smell their sex: one of them had had some just before hooking up with the other one, not more than twenty minutes ago. His smell and her sweat and fluids were still all over her body like an aura.

Oh, and I caught the scent of their blood, and a lot of other people's besides. So much warm, pulsing blood moving through human veins and arteries. So many people. So much time.

That night, if I'd been in need of a feeding, I'd have been growling inside, the hunger a howl in the pit of my stomach. This night, with a full tank of juice, though, not even the Beast could complain or beg for more.

Well, not tonight anyways.

I heard a noise behind me. Kane, my study buddy. I turned to him, and thought "Surfer dude beach bum." I always think that: I can't help it. When he was turned, he really was a surfer dude, some guy who'd moved here in a hurry from LA to get away from what Kane intimated had been some sort of money or drug scandal his Dad had gotten embroiled in. Kane was all ripped and buff with perfectly coifed multi-tonal blond hair like someone who'd stepped right out of a magazine advert.

But that was a whole lot of Vitae ago, and now he was a language student, learning from me.

'The rest of the coterie's gathered,' Kane said. I ran my fingers through my own short, dark, perpetually scruffy hair and nodded acknowledgement.

"What do you feel when you come up here?' I asked Kane. Kane shook his perfect head of hair, told me.

Then it was time for me to go downstairs and meet the rest of the kids.

I called our group The Unseen. Okay, so call me pretentious. It beats "The Black Nightmasters" or "Raven something" any day. I know of a bunch of Goth vampire wannabes calling themselves "Black Storm" or some such working the Rack. They do the whole cliché: the rock metal stuff, the whole Anne Rice thing.

If ever there was a sign for vampire hunters screaming "TORCH THESE GUYS," they were it. Makes me glad I'm a scholar. Hunters think "Goth rock," "cheesy black capes." They don't think "text books and computers."

We're all vampire geeks. Yeah. Now you know why we're The Unseen.

There were five of us in our little coterie: myself, Kane Sorenson, Joe Kendrick, Tammy Bloch and the new face, whose name I didn't recall back then because I'd only known him for a few nights. A redhead with a crew cut and freckles, who looks barely twenty, even tonight.

I heard a new putdown line that day. Professor Theodore Brigman said it to the new lad, Simon, when the new face asked the Prof in all honesty if we had to wear black capes and stuff, now we were all supposed to be 'creatures of the night.'

The Prof turned to the lad and said 'Don't be ridiculous, whelp. You don't know a thing. Your reflection's still sharp.'

I got to the foot of the stairs, and the group was upon me, all eager faces. None of them knew back then what was going to happen, only that it had been called "Chrysalis."

'How're you feeling?' Simon asked, and deep inside my Beast wanted to smack the little dork about, but I kept it civil.

'Fuzzy,' I replied. 'Warm and fuzzy.'

'Nah, that's just your face in the mirror,' Kane said, and nobody laughed because we'd heard it from him a thousand times before.

Simon didn't laugh because, fool that he was, he hadn't seen his face yet: or maybe he had, and he was still in denial as to what he is. Even tonight, he's still slightly squeamish about what he has to do, namely go out there and sink his fangs into human necks, or perhaps wrists or what have you, and partake of that lovely warm juiciness.

Part of me was tempted to let him stay this way, let him still pretend to be human, start to starve, then come up to him and offer him some of my blood. Two or three times. Just for kicks and jollies. See how many sips it took before he started kissing my boots wanting more. Yeah, I liked that thought. It'd been tempting.

I also thought that come to it, I might have to do it first, before one of my group decided to beat me to the punch and envinculate the little stain first. I mean, we could all have done with a little help with the homework.

"Envinculate." Nice word. I came up with it. It means to put the blood oath on another being, to lock them into a Vinculum. That's because our blood, our Vitae, has such a kick to it that after three drinks or so from the same donor, you're theirs, body and withered soul and all.

'You know what they call us?' Simon asked, his newly dead eyes wide.

'What?' asked Tammy, frowning in spite of herself. She was currently sporting a sort of diesel dyke look that night, her blonde hair close cropped, all leathers and boots and a tattoo on the side of her neck that wouldn't be there the following night. Everyone craned their necks forwards, wondering if the newcomer was going to surprise us.

'They call this kind of group a "Blood Coven,"' Simon replied. Everyone sighed, shook their heads.

I put on a smile. I didn't need to: I'd just felt like testing my facial muscles, see if they still worked. 'Welcome to the Ordo Dracul,' I said.

They say Dracula founded this covenant, or secret society, I belong to. I couldn't have cared if it had been founded by Yogi Bear. They were big on students and academia, and nearly every vampire here on campus was a Dragon, so it was pretty much a given I'd join them: which I did, a few months back, in the summer of '95.

I was Embraced, turned into a vampire, back in 1994, right on the cusp of New Year's. The Windy City had turned out in all its glory and majesty to celebrate the end of 1994, and the start of '95.

I remembered Professor Brigman's presence nearby as the beer and wine flowed, and everyone in the faculty room was getting roaring drunk. Stephen Rowlands was getting nasty drunk, as he usually did; in a minute he'd stop badmouthing the girls and start threatening some of the guys with his big ham fists.

Across the room, I watched Karl Landers, the slime, putting the moves on Penelope Grainger, a pretty blonde cheerleader who was Steve's girlfriend, except everybody knew they were on the verge of splitting up because of Steve's bad temper. I watched Karl offer Penny a glass of champagne ... and spotted the bastard slip a roofie into the bubbly. Turning to the Professor, I saw him nod.

'I saw it, too,' he said, thoughtfully. 'I will remonstrate with Karl shortly. Arrangements will be made to ensure that the girl gets home safely, and he'll not see his feet touch the floor, don't you worry.'

'Thanks, Professor,' I said. I turned away, and looked back a moment later. The Prof was still looking at me.

'What?'

'Jarvis,' Professor Brigman asked, 'why aren't you currently involved with any of the women here?'

'I thought everyone knew,' I replied. 'Me and June Redmond broke up last October. I mean, I've been looking for a date, but they've been thin on the ground. They all see me as this thin dorky geek type, all foreign languages and asthma and Star Trek wallpaper on my computer.'

'Well, those two girls over there are single,' Professor Brigman said, pointing to two seemingly identical young brunettes in matching red dresses across the room, who were currently looking at Steve, who was starting to turn red in the face.

'The Johnson twins?' I said. 'Naturally they're single,' I replied. 'Nobody will hang with them because they are so freaky.'

'Why?'

'They like to mess with people, swap identities, pretend they're the other twin just to get inside everyone's heads.'

'What about her?' Professor Brigman asked. I looked. He was pointing to Janice Quayden.

'Her? Nah, she plays on her own side of the street,' I replied. The Prof frowned. 'She's gay,' I said, clarifying. 'A lesbian. She is sexually attracted only to other women.' A pause. 'Or so I've been told by people about the campus.'

Understanding dawned on the Prof's face, uncomfortably slowly, like a Brit finally figuring out how they keep score in baseball: you know the look, the one that says "I get it," but deep down they're saying "I don't get it, but I'll let them think I have, just to be polite." I saw the Prof nod, and I looked puzzled. This was the bit I never got, right up until he'd turned me. He hadn't a clue about how modern students think, or what they consider to be the important issues.

I remember them calling him "The Old Man" right back when I'd started in the Faculty. He only looked about 39, but yeah, it was beginning to dawn on me even back then that he behaved like an old man, even then. Like someone from the past, like the early 1900s or something, trapped inside a young man's body.

But right there, right then, all I could think of was that the Prof might actually have been trying to find out if I was gay.

Back to the night of the Big Test.

'Are you ready?' I heard the Prof say behind me. I turned, nodded.

Professor Brigman had started to apply some theatrical silvering to his temples, just to start looking as if he was ageing. Like the rest of us, he'll look the way he did at his Embrace until he dies a Final Death or the world grinds to a halt: but he'd been among people so long now that unless he'd started putting on the forties, people were bound to start asking awkward questions.

Heh. Like Simon, our newest recruit. The replacement for Lucius Drake, dust to dust.

'Then let's go,' the Prof said. 'Your chrysalis awaits you.'

'Good luck,' Simon chirped behind me, and for a moment I didn't feel like smashing his face in.

For a moment.

'What's "the Chrysalis?"' I asked the Prof, as he led me off. I dreaded to think. But this was something I had to undergo, if I was to get above floor level with the Ordo.

These guys are really big on this Masonic kind of thing, all secretive stuff, all robes and staffs and halls with pillars, stuff like that. I heard there were Kindred out there who were really into old school witchcraft, others who were into religious trappings.

The Order of the Dragon are the Kindred Masons, if you will. Well, they certainly behave like they are, anyway. Funny handshakes, knowing winks. You know the score. I'd half expected some sort of strange bozos in fezzes riding go-karts around and chanting or something like.

That night was my first taste of one of their deep, dark secrets. Their initiation into one of their great mysteries, that I had absolutely no idea about and nobody was telling me about either.

The Prof led me down some stairs, all marble steps and wrought iron railings and polished walnut banisters, right to the bottom of the stairwell, where it dead-ended. There was nothing to see here. No doors, no corridors, no other exit, apparently, except back up the way we came.

The Prof leaned forwards, tapped the centre of the wall three times. A moment later, the entire back wall just slid away to the left, and a cold, dark draft of air washed into the stairwell.

'Awesome,' I heard myself say, in spite of myself.

'Step inside,' the Prof said, and I did so. It was dark, but I hadn't needed much light to see since I turned. One of my little talents I picked up from being turned: senses like you would not believe.

I knew, from the Prof's surefootedness, the way he walked through the room, that he possessed the same talent, too. Not surprising: he and I are, well, like family. Something to do with our belonging to a Clan, going by this name, "Mekhet."

I knew that word: it's an Egyptian noun, means "amulet." I know a lot of Egyptian, like I know a lot of languages. That's the reason why the Prof had turned me, apparently: my languages.

Across the room, which was cold and dark and eerily silent, there was what looked like a bank vault door. It was open. There was a cold light coming from a striplight overhead.

I peered inside it. 'Files in folders,' I said. And there were plenty of them, lining every wall, shelf upon shelf of them, from plain manila folders to elaborate three ring binders with separated polypockets and multicoloured indexed dividers.

'An archive,' the Prof said. 'And a test.'

'A test of what?'

I had to ask. Before I knew what was happening, the Prof had seized me painfully by both shoulders, picked me up bodily and thrown me into the vault. I landed, sprawled across the cold steel floor, turned, began to rise. I was already too late. The door was closing on me, closing, shut.

I heard the locks clunk home. The vault was locked. The main light went out. I went up to the door, pushed. Nothing. The door was staying put, and apparently, so was I.

'This is your test,' said the Prof's voice, over the vault's intercom. 'The objective is to survive. This door will not be opened until you have either passed the test, or you signal to us that you want to quit.

'You will also be allowed to leave if you answer a simple question correctly. You will be asked that question once and once only per night. Get it wrong, and you spend another day locked into the vault, until you get it right.'

'And if I say I want to quit?'

'We cannot allow you to leave the Order in possession of its secrets,' the Prof said, and by the finality in his voice, it sounded as if it was up to him to perform the killing himself.

'What do I do?'

'Start reading,' the Prof said. 'Everything you need to pass the test is inside that vault. You'll find a light to help you read, if you feel you need it.

'Someone will be checking on you nightly from now on, but until you signal your failure, or you pass the test, you will receive no further feedings. The Vitae in your body is all the sustenance you have standing between you and torpor.'

'But -'

'Success, my Childe,' the Prof said, his voice surprisingly soft: and with that, the intercom snapped off.

Four nights into my incarceration, there was no sign of a way out of this box.

That first night, I spent cowering in a corner, staring at steel walls, steel floor, steel ceiling. The vault appeared to be airtight; a good job I didn't need to breathe, or I'd have been dead in an hour or so.

I wasted that first night. Instead of looking for a way out, I just curled up in a ball in the corner, whimpering, my Beast fully in control of me. In the end, I only stayed that way a short time before my body began to feel heavy right to the bone, and I knew that somewhere outside, the Sun was coming up and all the other little Kindred, boys and girls, were going to bed too.

And then, nothing more until sundown the following night, when I felt the pulse of some of my precious Vitae flowing through my necrotic flesh, stirring dead bone and tissue to a semblance of life.

That night, I no longer cowered. I was frantic, poring through all the documents I could get my hands on for hours, right until the heaviness came over me and I sank once more to the floor for the day. Someone activated the intercom some time during that night, as they did each night, only once a night - each time a different voice, nobody I knew.

Each time, the same question: 'Who is your mentor?' Each time, my reply: 'Professor Brigman.' Each time, the same response: the sigh that indicates disappointment, failure, followed by the click as the intercom got switched off for the night.

It was the same for the next two nights after that: the burning of some more of my Vitae, the rising, the same frenetic search for a clue as to how to get out of this room, to no avail. The same question, spoken over the intercom.

One night, I did something different. I didn't cower. I didn't jump about like a blue tailed fly. I sat down, and had a think.

After I thought about the problem, I wondered what the Prof had said about "everything I needed to know" being in the room with me. I thus began to reason what the answer, the key to releasing me from this box, lay somewhere among the documents in this room.

That night, I began to look hard at what the documents in the folders actually contained. And, for the first time, I began to feel perplexed.

Each of these documents had been handwritten in the native language of a student, a scholar of the Ordo Dracul who'd been thrust into this same situation as myself. Each document was a journal of some sort, describing their incarceration, their frustrations, their attempts to find a key to unlocking the cage that had surrounded them. Describing failure after failure.

Many of these documents did not have a conclusion at all: just a sad little tailing off after a week or so, perhaps because the writers had run out of Vitae, fallen into torpor and had failed their own tests. By "failed," I read "staked and left for the sun."

On this night, I was already feeling hungry myself. I looked at the files, felt my Beast begin to scream at me, wondered if there would be a way out of this box.

Beside the files, I discovered some drawers containing papers and a manila folder to put them in. There were also several pens: clearly, I was meant to write my own journal to record my failures, or success, in escaping this box.

I looked at the mass of paper in the room, and thought, and thought. There had to be dozens, hundreds, of folders. They couldn't all have been Ordo Dracul students, could they? A quick glance at a few files pulled at random suggested yes, they might well have been.

There was no way I could look through all of those folders in only a few days. This job would have to take more than a week.

I didn't have a week. I was getting hungry now.

There was only one thing for it: I realised that I would have to ration my Vitae, to rise each evening with only a fraction of the Vitae it normally took to get my body going.

And that meant consciously controlling my Vitae, my vampiric blood. Budgeting it. Monitoring it, like a doctor monitoring a patient's life signs, minute by minute. Only this was going to have to be a night by night affair.

I was reminded of something from my living days, when I'd been a student of the warm, breathing kind: having to keep a hold on my visits to the bathroom, having to pinch it, keep it in, show a little self control.

The following night, that is what I tried. On feeling the stirring of my body with the setting of that distant Sun way above my head, I pinched off the tiniest amount of Vitae that would allow my body to rise, sluggishly, from the ground.

Well, something worked my body, anyway: I could barely remember that night's work, because while I had put enough Vitae in my body, there was barely enough to keep my brain working, and it hovered that night on the edge between wakefulness and torpor.

Well, I could barely remember that night, and the few nights that followed: but I remembered the dreams well enough. Those nights were like a waking dream to me, because of the effect the lack of blood flow was having in my brain: and the days, while my body slept, were wracked with the same dreams, only even more vivid then while I was up and about on my wobbly feet at night.

Those dreams ...

Kindred don't dream like people do. People's dreams are full of Freudian symbols, houses and rooms and going to work naked and cars driving into tunnels and all of that stuff, the mind making up things. People dreams are full of originality, bright and funny, and maybe sometimes a little sad, like when they dream of people and they don't remember in the dream that the person's been dead for years.

Well, our dreams aren't like that. Kindred dreams are basically our memories, taken out of context, jumbled about. But we live them out, over and over, in our heads. No talking emus or dreams of flying. Just dreams of our living days, our undead nights, and lots of dead people. The longer we exist in an undead state, the more blood we consume from people ... the more slips we make, when we give in to the Beast and let loose and feed with mad abandon where we wanted to just take a wee nip ... the more dead people we see.

I only saw two dead people in my dream. One of them was Lucius Drake, dust to dust.

And the other was, may God forgive me, Toni Lockhart.

That time, that first night, the night I turned, became Kindred, Toni'd come into my life.

I'd known her since my first few days at University: bright, sexy, sassy, with perfect brunette hair done in a braided ponytail, her eyes green and flashing with life and fire, her laughter like ... like ...

I can't remember what her laughter sounded like. Sometimes being Damned really sucks.

In my waking dream, I remembered her coming over to greet me and the Prof as we stood there like wallflowers, watching life go by, waiting for time to run out on the old year. On my life, as it turned out.

Toni'd been drunk that night. Drunk, and definitely looking for some action, by the way she swayed her hips as she sashayed across the student-filled room towards me, blowing off freshmen as she went.

I knew she had to be drunk when she put her arms about my neck and planted a big, warm kiss on my lips. Well, at least I knew a good thing when I saw it and responded in kind, you know.

I remember her separating her lips from mine, leaning over and whispering into my ear 'Cloakroom. Ten minutes.'

I glanced at the Prof, who smiled.

'Someone wants to celebrate the start of 1995 in a big way,' he said, glancing down. My taut pants showed quite clearly that this was A Very Good Idea.

'Yeah,' I remembered saying. 'Hey, look, Prof, you know it's good us hanging and all, but right now I really think that I should be going someplace, now, so you grab a drink and I'll -'

I remembered the Prof's smile broadening. 'What a good idea,' he'd said to me. 'Join me for that drink first, please.'

There'd been resistance. 'Look ... uh ... she's gonna be waiting for me and ...' Images of her waiting for me, ready for romance, in the Cloak Room, beneath the coats, had brought a flush to my face.

'She said ten minutes,' the Prof said, being very insistent. 'Join me. Please.'

Hey, I wasn't to know he'd been putting his whammy on me, one of those vampire Svengali look-into-my-eyes tricks. Until he got me alone in one of the rooms next to the cloak room, and I'd begun to think "Oh damn, he is gay," and he'd sunk his fangs into my neck and begun to drain all of my lifeblood from me, I'd no idea vampires had been real at all, so I can be forgiven, okay? I mean, it had to be the whammy come-hither, right? Not something inside of me wanting to be with him, all right?

Anyway. My first waking dream, I remembered Toni, as I last saw her.

The moment of my Embrace was, well, traumatic. What else can you say about the last moment of your life? I tried to fight, to struggle, but it was no use. I felt the cold seep in, my heart slowing, the sparks as the blood finally stopped flowing to my head and the brain cells began to die.

And I remembered that warm, hot, sexy glow pulsing from the point of contact where the fangs had sunk in, and thinking 'This is death, this is me dying, and oh God, it's good ...'

And then nothing, until the hot rush of something warm and sticky and soupy pouring down my throat, and the thirst, the huge, endless thirst. My first taste of Vitae. The moment my eyes opened as a fiend instead of a human.

And Toni, bursting into the room, looking at the Prof and me, his wrist fixed to my mouth, me sucking his blood.

And Toni, the next time, the last time, I saw her ... on the floor.

On the carpet.

Glassy eyed.

Dead.

And all her blood inside me.

And now it was the eighth night, and not long after the usual one question-one answer thing over the com, I turned around from poring over the latest document, and saw Toni again.

She was standing over in the far corner of the vault, just staring at me silently, dressed in the exact same party clothes she'd been wearing New Year's. 1994/95. I knew that stare. It had been the same sort of stare my sister had had when she'd been blamed in the wrong for my putting a baseball through a window back home.

An accusing stare.

'What?' I asked her. Nothing. Just the stares. I blinked, and she was gone, like she was never there.

'Vitae deprivation,' I said to myself, and then the sunrise took me again. That night had seemed to flash by.

On the ninth night, Lucius was there, waiting for me.

I wish I could remember the night I'd supposedly killed him. There'd been something about something he'd said, I'd no idea what about, and then ...

Well, I remember what Kane told me that he'd pieced together afterwards: that I'd frenzied, gone berserk, and pushed him off the roof of the building where we'd been standing talking.

There'd been this dumpster on the ground beneath Lucius. Someone had been throwing large planks of broken timbers into it from a demolition job next door. One of the pieces of wood had had a sharp point to it, because it had been broken.

Toast always falls buttered side down when you most want to eat it, or on the most expensive carpet in the house: the one you can't replace. Well, it seems that Kindred always seem to be falling on sharp bits of wood at just the right angle to impale them through the heart: and that's what happened to Lucius, dust to dust.

From what I recalled, I'd just run off to find a hole to slip into to see me through the day, safe from the burning sun. Staking didn't do for Lucius-it doesn't kill vampires, only paralyses us, sends us into torpor-but it had left him helpless for the sun to do the rest of the work.

My fault. Just like Toni'd been my fault.

From Night 9, they were there in the room, each night, just staring at me accusingly.

Night 15, and when the voice came to ask me who my Mentor was, I turned to the intercom and, sardonically, said 'The Good Humor Man.' The same sigh, click, silence. You'd think the Damned had no sense of humor. I looked at the two in the corner, said 'What?'

Blink. Gone. Same old. What the hell was going on with me?

Night 16, instead of focusing on my body, I focused on my brain, let my body half starve. Getting up off the ground was a chore, but at least my brain was free and clear of hallucinations that night, and no damn ghosts.

But that day, during my sleep, the dream came, and it was a nightmare that if I'd been human, it'd have sent me straight to the funny farm.

I dreamt I was lying on a table, my body cold, immobile, but yet still strapped to the steel bench. In my dream, everyone I'd ever known, starting with Toni and Lucius, came into the room, one by one, and stabbed me with a knife and fork, tearing off a chunk of me, eating it and leaving the room, not a word spoke.

I was alive. Being eaten alive. And I felt each cut and slice, as the sheerest agony.

That night, my response to the one question had been 'GET ME OUT OF HERE, YOU SONS OF BITCHES!'

Can you blame me?

I lasted those nights, twenty one of them, locked into that vault. Each night, the same question. Each night, to the last, a different answer. The Prince of Chicago. The Pope. Batman. Neil Armstrong.

On Night 21, I thought I'd try something serious for a change. I'd gone through every single one of those folders. Nothing. There was nothing in any of them to give me a clue as to how to get out of this box. There was no notation on how to turn into mist, or a spider and slip through a crack in the wall, or to Svengali someone into opening the door for me. And even if there had been, there was no way I'd have been able to work out how to shapeshift in a matter of a few days: learning how to shift takes years of effort, or so the few Gangrel I've mixed with have told me.

I'd not ghouled anybody yet, so there'd been nobody around to drop by and open the door or sneak in to offer me a pint of their blood or whatever. There was nothing in this archive, nor in any of the records I ever perused, about vampires phasing through solid steel like some comic book guy in Spandex. I was stuck, and I had barely enough Vitae to keep going another night.

So that night, when the voice came over the com, I said the only thing I could think of that I hadn't tried. 'My Beast.'

A chuckle. 'Man, if you only knew how far off that answer is ...' followed by the click and silence.

That was it. I was finished. Even my Beast accepted it: I was doomed. That night, I put away the folders, wrote out my last journal entry, put that away in a folder, turned out the lights and just waited for the dawn, and the final sleep.

And then, the following night, the voice over the intercom. The Prof.

'Jay-Jay, are you still there?'

I opened leaden eyelids, slowly rose to my hands and knees. It felt like a century passed, and my body could barely move. All I had in me was what felt like a thimble full of Vitae. If I slept now, that would be torpor, and most likely failure.

So I spent it all.

Dry as a bone, I got up on shaky legs, my head clear. I looked around, saw Toni and Lucius standing there, staring at me.

'Get lost, the two of you,' I told them. 'I don't want your pity, and if you can't help, I don't want to know, so just go to Hell, a'ite?'

And then I turned my back on the two of them. I no longer cared that they would still be there if I turned back. I didn't feel I had enough Vitae left to turn my head any more. Inside, I felt like dry dust, broken glass. A corpse inside for real already. I felt as if I was already starting to curl up around the edges, like a dead spider on a hot window sill.

But I still had the strength to push the intercom.

'Bring me out,' I said to the Prof. 'I'm beat. There's no way out of this damned box, and there was nothing esoteric in any of the folders to help me. I'm sorry. I failed.'

'I will do that,' the Prof said. 'Have you the strength to tell me one thing, though?'

'I'll try.'

'What would you have said if I was to come to you tonight with that one question, "who is your Mentor?"'

'Why would you want to ask me that now?'

'Humor me.'

'Well, since I haven't got anything to lose, I would have said,' I said, and then I stopped. What would I have said?

I thought of all those folders on the shelves, including my own. A whole lot of failures. Some successes, but many more Kindred asking to quit, or admitting to failure. Failure, in a dozen different languages. Some Kindred spent less than a week before their Vitae had run out and they'd either slipped into torpor, or they'd worn themselves out beating against the walls.

But some thick folders ...

Some of those folders were ...

And then the Prof's words came to me, and I knew what I'd been put in the vault to learn.

'Prof,' I said, 'I would have said ... "myself."'

And then I heard the door clunk as it unlocked, and cold air sweep into the room. I'd been there twenty two nights, and the air inside the vault was neither warm nor stale. I hadn't needed it.

Of course.

The secret had been in not escaping the vault. The secret teaching, the thing the Ordo Dracul keeps secret, hadn't been any sort of Discipline or trick to change into mist, shift through the walls, any of that.

The trick had been surviving, and by "surviving," they meant "learning how to ration the Blood inside."

It was only after I'd slowly been fed bagged human blood for a week that I'd been brought out into the open night sky once again, to be told by a gleeful Professor Brigman that I'd successfully undergone my first Chrysalis, and learned the first of what he called "Coils of the Dragon."

This was the Great Secret the Founder had originally developed, when he'd founded this Order of his, way back in the 1400s. Something about "transcending the Kindred condition," or whatever that was.

But whatever it was, I'd apparently learned it. I'd learned that I could be selective about what parts of my body I needed to keep moving with Vitae.

If I needed to do a lot of sitting and typing one night, I'd only need to funnel Vitae into my arms, shoulders and head. If I'd needed to do a lot of socialising and mingling, I could go all out and pour my Vitae throughout my entire system, because the way I was spending it other times, I never had to go hungry again.

I worked out that the amount of Vitae, bare minimum, I could spend and keep functioning on a nightly basis could be cut down to about a quarter of what it had once been, roughly. It would feel rough, for a time, like functioning with only one kidney or one lung had I still been alive, but I'd soon learn to adjust to the new regime.

'What's the record?' I asked the Prof, standing out there on the roof. He smiled, the gesture unnecessary but welcome.

'Actually,' he said, 'you hold the record now.'

'Me?' I felt almost shocked, but didn't show it. I had no interest in spending the Vitae to change my expression. 'By how much?'

'Four nights,' the Prof said. 'And that one came out a basket case.'

'Damn,' was my only reply. From the corner of my eye, I could see a glimpse of what might have been Toni and Lucius, no longer staring accusingly at me but doing something else.

Waving goodbye, perhaps.

'Fun's over,' the Prof then said, taking me under his arm. 'While you were being tested, you missed Christmas and New Year's. It's now January, 1996.'

'What?'

'As a matter of fact,' the Prof said, 'the rest of the Blood Coven's got something special lined up for you. Three young women, very fit, and they're actually eager to share.'

'Blood Dolls.'

'Is that what they call them this day and age?' the Prof said. 'We had another term for them back in the day.'

'Yeah, right.'

'And afterwards, you and The Unseen have got some work to do. The Prince has called me. Seems that a Sanctified delegation from Rome is arriving tonight, and they want Italian speakers to greet them. I've told Maxwell that you're the best there is outside of the Italian Quarter, and they need Kindred to translate what they have to say: this crowd have no time for ghouls.' He paused, fished for something in his suit pocket. A cellphone. 'I got a message on this cellphone,' he said. 'A text message. New thing. I can't understand it.'

'Let me look at it,' I said, glancing at the little screen.

'What does "L 8 R mean, anyway?' the Prof asked. I told him. Again with the Brit nod. He'll get it, some night, or die trying.

'Do I get to see the Prince?' I asked, as we made for the stairwell.

'If you're lucky, you might even meet the Prince and make it to the dawn intact, as well,' the Prof said.

'Charming,' I replied.

'Some interpretation work will take the edge off, Scholar,' the Prof said. 'Your new title. Beats "Slave" any day.'

'When will the others join me?' I asked the Prof.

'Soon. The new face, Simon. He's next to be tested,' the Prof replied. 'He's going in to the vault tonight.' And now a grin showing fangs. 'And you can break the news to him that he's next.'

Based on the World of Darkness and Vampire: the Requiem settings, intellectual properties, registered trade marks and Copyright © of White Wolf.

Home