Orchid peered through the window, her black-cloaked form invisible in the shadow of the house as she narrowed her eyes against the ruddy light from within. The room was occupied, and she kept her head well down to avoid being seen. It was a bitter November night, and the wind bit deep.

She closed her eyes, thinking. The hungry ghosts, the Chinese called them. They were the ghosts whose children did not honor their ancestors, keep the family shrine, set small bites of food before them to feed the rich and benevolent dead. The hungry ghosts howled at crossroads and under windows, snatching at the food and warmth. On cold nights under the shadow of the great mountains, families huddled together within their homes, safe in the glow of the fire while the hungry ghosts pressed to the window with their starved and empty mouths.

The shadows of the mountains were far from suburban Bry Mawr. Orchid shook the thought off and focused on her prey. The house was a typical one for the area, trim and opulent in a warm, familial way. Its cheery livery of white and green gave little hint of what lay inside -- a grieving family and the ruined husk of a young woman.

Brittany Linder was far from the usual inhabitant of such homes. Sullen, listless, and crushed, she shuffled through her fungoid life in the dim glow of the television screen. She rarely left her room, shunning human contact and dragging her food back to her den in the dark hours of the night. She consumed caffeine in all forms and vast quantities, forcing herself awake for marathon stretches before collapsing in exhaustion. When she did sleep, it was in odd nooks and corners -- hidden in the closet, pressed between the bed and the wall, huddled behind the door with her fat black cat on guard. Or huddled as much as her deformed joints allowed.

Orchid nodded with a grim satisfaction as she watched her eat, fumbling with hands skewed nauseatingly from the wrists. Her lurching, shambling gait bespoke a similar ruin of her ankle joints, and her facial features were blurred by a mask of puffy white scar tissue.

But it needed a final polish, Orchid thought. It needed more. She drew her cloak more tightly around her and crouched in the spiky ornamentals. Pity, loathing, horror, disgust -- feel what you will for her. I’m still the one out here. I’m the one at the window.

Her eyes narrowed as the wind gnawed her bones, and she shook her head with an angry curl of her lip. Not enough. It was never enough. She watched Brittany eat, propped against the headboard of the bed, and felt the hungry resentment seething up from within her. The girl was tiring. She’d been awake for nearly thirty-six hours and was due to crash any time now. A little help surely couldn’t hurt. She closed her eyes and drew in her breath as she felt the Power unfurl and ebb into her in a long, sensual tide. Brittany began to nod, then slowly slumped forward in exhaustion. She lay with her chin on her chest, grotesque hands stilled at her sides. Orchid drew deep, feeling Brittany’s strength flowing into her as the girl grew limp. When her victim was motionless and deep in the sleep of exhaustion, Orchid stepped silently though the wall, her mind swimming and ringing with drunken Power.

The parents were asleep -- as well they might be. It was past one in the morning. Brittany had no doubt been trying to make it through to the daylight before collapsing. Orchid shook her head and smiled wryly as she examined the sleeping girl. She looked fragile, broken.

Unbidden, an image surfaced in her mind: Permafrost, bent double on the stage of the fashion show, that sick look of disbelief in his eyes as his blood seeped through his hands. He’s the best of us. She shook her head with a scowl, forcing herself to focus on her one-time tormentor.

With her eyes closed and her head slumped limply down, Brittany Linder looked almost real. Almost like a human being and not a frame for spite, cruelty, and malice. The hard lines around her forehead and mouth, brackets formed by years of habitual disdain, were starting to fade. True, they were replaced by the taut pallor of terror and exhaustion, but it was a better look for her.

Orchid nodded approvingly, then looked down at the motion near her feet. The cat glared at her from under the bed, bristling at the strange intruder. As Orchid stooped and reached out, it hissed and backed further under, tail puffed and lashing. She smiled icily, grabbed its darting, furtive little mind, and marched it back out on struggling feet. She’d felt sorry for it for a moment, but clearly it was much like its owner. Her remorse vanished as she reached down with a leather-clad glove and lifted it by the scruff of its neck. Just another vicious little vermin. She raised it to eye level, stared into the baleful yellow orbs. With a sigh, she drew in again, feeling the strength of it flow into her as its body went limp.

Yes, I hear you, Daxrathas, she thought-snarled to herself. Because I want to knock it out. I don’t owe you an explanation. She scowled and reached down, snapped the unresisting neck with a slender hand. A moment later she slid her nails into the soft warmth of its body.

She tore it open, her blood rising at the warm, rending feel of it. The Hunger surfaced low in her gut, and she felt it quicken at the hot copper scent of the blood. Nausea swelled in her conscious mind but failed to dismiss the loathsome stirring of appetite. She shook her head and forced herself to concentrate as she laid the cat on Brittany’s stomach and wrenched its body into an attitude of taut agony. Digging her nails into the animal’s remains, she strewed its innards over Brittany’s lap, then took the girl’s limp hands and pushed them into the ruin of her pet. Raising her own gory hands, she smeared blood over Brittany’s lips and chin, rubbing it up her cheeks as if she had fed ravenously.

As she stepped back she smelled, stronger than ever, the blood on her hands. It brought a sharp, vital response from within, a craving that shook her body despite her mind’s rebellion. She felt the Hunger rise from her gut like a serpent from its coils, and her features knotted as she fought the bone-deep urge crushing her down into a greedy crouch. Compulsion like a steel hand on her neck bent her head inexorably down until she licked greedily at her fingers, feasting with grunting, snarling obsession until the heaving of her stomach recalled her to reality. She staggered as the nausea rolled over her.

Finally she was able to force her head up, pushing her back straight, shoving her hands down to her sides to push the scent of the blood from her. She kept the power flowing, holding Brittany in her exhausted unconsciousness as she shuddered with fear and fresh-blown anger. Her eyes narrowed as she looked upon her enemy, sleeping peacefully as she crouched before her with the chains of the Hunger tight around her neck. Rage leapt up fresh and burning as she fixed her gaze on the sleeping girl.

You. You made me what I am.

Orchid’s eyes hardened as she dipped her finger once more in the cat’s blood with a jolt of hungry temptation. She snarled as she smeared the blood on the mirror in harsh, slapping strokes. WOOF WOOF. People get what they deserve. People get what they deserve.

She turned sharply on her heel and strode out through the wall as Brittany began to stir behind her. The blood was clammy in her mouth and her stomach twisted in a vicious knot. The sound of the screams beginning fell like soothing snow and she straightened, raising her head as she stalked into the night. A lone raven croaked from a nearby tree, then flew after her.

An hour later, Pantomime was no better solace. There was a sensation in the back of her mind, a feeling like scrabbling on gravel. It made her fingers twitch with the sensation of raking her nails over stone, and she struggled to put it from her mind. It meant nothing.
 

Pantomime was on his usual beat, depressing and meaningless. The night sky was cloudless, nothing between the earth and the endless depths of the space beyond. Mallarmé. Ah yes. Life is like a bird that flies in the window from a dark, cold night, through a brightly lit dance chamber, then out the other window forever. A blaze of light and a blur of crazed motion -- then nothing. A heap of broken images.
 

It was certainly true of Pantomime. Every night he pounded through the same dull beat, holding out the faint hope of serving some tiny purpose. He had no friends. He had no admirers, even. Who really goes to their friends and says, “Hey, I was saved by this amazing mime?” Even the people he helped were embarrassed by him, ashamed at the pathetic combination of his talent and his nature. More and more he ended his night shift here, in the dark back rooms of Revival. She could feel its pull. He never went near the dance floor either. He hung over the bar, drinking, letting the pulsing beat and the press of bodies lull him like the waves of a primal ocean. She felt something like envy as he emptied the last of his dark liquor. He found what he wanted. Simple oblivion was beyond her now.
 

She followed him out, noting the heavy sway of his step, not-thinking. She wanted nothing from him. She moved after him, a shadow, silent until he approached the alley leading to his home. Then, still pushing away her own intent, she slid forward through the shadows, stepped out before him and looked at him silently. He startled, head jerking up, body animated with the sudden presence. A strange look crossed his face -- puzzlement, a sort of confused recognition. She didn’t speak. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know why she was there. She watched him silently with a sense of falling, of a vast emptiness like the wind howling into space.
 

He hesitated but stood his ground. Slowly he began to move. His mouth opened -- then, still silent, he fell slowly into action. He took a step toward her, his features softening. Another step and he leaned forward, intent, drawn, starting to reach out to her.
 

And then that fucking crow. It flapped down heavily to the fire escape overhead and perched with a harsh caw and beating of wings. He jerked back. A moment later he was at the mouth of the alley and retreating. She stood motionless, let the feeling smash through her, like sheets of glass falling and breaking all around her. She felt dazed -- then shook herself, glared at the crow. She forced down the impulse to kill it. It was a crow like she was Jane Orcrest. She looked bitterly after Pantomime’s vanished form, then stepped back into the shadows.

It was six o’clock in the evening of a late November day. Now, here, it was sorcerous time of shadows -- the moment of dusk when darkness makes itself palpable, foreign, encroaching. It was that moment when man must admit the surrender of light, when the day teeters on the precipice of dusk and then plunges down into the depths of utter and profound darkness.

And, Orchid thought, it’s fucking freezing out here.

Not that it mattered with no internal body heat, but she could still feel it. A habit of the mind. She grimaced. Daxrathas would love the irony of a vampire shivering in a graveyard. Her eyes clouded as she focused inward, probing her mind like a painful abscess. He wasn’t there. He probably was. She couldn’t feel him but she wasn’t sure that he was ever really gone. As the clock tower began to chime the hour, she pushed herself up from her position leaning against the cold slab of a raised crypt. The broad-beamed wooden doors of the Gothic church swung open, revealing the candle-lit interior and the single figure facing her. She’d spent the remainder of the last night and all of this evening preparing for the moment, but she hardly felt ready.

Black Priest was standing in the doorway, composed and silent. He was tall and gaunt, his skin as pallid as a corpse’s and his lips a withered black line. She swallowed, feeling her lips writhing in disgust. This was the real thing, not some poseur suburbanites dressed up as goths for Revival. This was the real evil. A quick glance to either side revealed the two lackeys who’d opened the door. She recognized Macha -- a tall, pale-skinned woman with swords crossed behind her back. She had a fierce eye, red-brown hair, and skin that Yeats had called “stone-pale.” It suited her. Her features were sharp, fine, and unyielding. The other was lower, lither, a young woman clad in leather and smiling sardonically as she spun a knife on the ball of her finger. Misfit was her name, which suited her as well since she looked like trouble. And there, over Macha’s shoulder, was that damned crow. Orchid drew a deep breath and nodded, stepping into the church.

“I want to talk to you about that crow.” She pushed her voice, projecting as powerfully as she could to avoid sounding as thin and childish and scared as she felt. “This was a one-time job. I don’t want your spies following me around.”

Orchid paused, but he said nothing. She hated that about him. She could feel him paying out the rope for her to hang herself. She started to say more but bit it off. There was no point in threats. She didn’t know what the damned thing was and she wasn’t ready to start a war over a bird. For all she knew it was the Morrigu. She glanced sidelong, catching the warrior woman out of the corner of her eye. She was probably just a lunatic with powers and a Celtic fixation, but it didn’t pay to get high and mighty when you were standing in an abandoned Gothic church wearing the better part of a BDSM catalog.

She waited a moment longer for Black Priest to say something, then sighed and let her impatience rule her. “All right. Let’s get this over with. You’ve got the books?”

Black Priest nodded, gesturing for her to follow. She moved on into the depths of the church as Macha and Misfit closed ranks behind her. She shot sidelong glances at her surroundings, trying to scent a trap if there was one. All right, Daxrathas. Let’s see you prove yourself. Think you can see what he’s got coming? She felt the response, a surge of irritation tinged with scorn, and filed it away. He didn’t like her consorting with some other master of the dark arts. It was a point to remember. She didn’t want either of them in her life, and the less they liked each other, the better.

Permafrost was sitting in the vestry, staring vacantly at Jerry Springer. She watched him from the side, noting his slack, incurious expression and his pasty skin. He looked shrunken, hollow somehow. He was nothing like the cocky, humourous kid she’d seen on television and in the fight at the fashion show. He looked drained, drained in some way even more vital and fundamental than her own blood cattle when she left them for dead. She looked down, feeling what had to be a purely mental heat in her cheeks. He’d been kid-brother goofy-looking before, not handsome but pleasant. She’d destroyed him. He’d been like those little sparrows, beggar-birds Melvin had called them, that hopped around on the sidewalk chirping for crumbs and flipping their little wings cheekily. She’d crushed him, and she felt ashamed.

She forced her mind to other matters. All for the cause, she thought as she turned to Black Priest. “We’re glad you’re keeping him under wraps. What are your plans for him?”

Black Priest shook his head. “Not for you to worry, little daughter. None of your concern. He’ll be taken care of.” He took up a tied bundle of books from a cabinet, handed them to her with a hollow, depthless gaze that clawed at her mind. “I give what you seek.”

She bit back a sharp response. Every second this got worse. She’d hoped for some help. She’d thought that Black Priest might know something to get Daxrathas off of her back. Now it looked like she’d invited another problem into her life. She’d thought about partnering with him to make a hit on Halcyon, but she was getting an ugly vibe off of him. He didn’t want a partner. He wanted pawns, and she wanted pretty badly not to be one of them. And Permafrost He’s the best of us. Fucking Omega and his fucking press conferences. He was full of shit. As if he gave a damn about anyone but himself. But he was right about Permafrost. Of all of the jerks in tights, he was he was different.

She finished her business with Black Priest hastily, not thinking about anything. Certainly not thinking about what she was considering. Not even later that night. She just took the envelope and dropped it in the lobby mailbox of a hotel near the airport, thinking of absolutely nothing. Inside, two smooth pieces of plastic slid against each other -- a white knight and a black bishop. She threw the rest of the cheap chess set into a nearby trash can. Let the Canadian Shield work on that. She glanced around the lobby as she stepped away from the box.

No fucking crow anyway, she thought. I don’t know about this. Hack doesn’t know about this. And that damned crow isn’t going to know about it either.

Underneath, she felt the deep, sardonic chuckle from Daxrathas.
 

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