Prologue: Holding Out

　Merely human hearing would have had difficulty picking up the scuff of a cheap plastic stereo being set down on the bare concrete of the unfinished high-rise, especially over the gusting wind, but Prince Alexis was a member of Clan Toreador and had spent three hundred years refining the bloody magic of his lineage. He heard it clearly, and raised a finger to silence his childer in the middle of their briefing about the recent disruptions to city operations.

　The three vampires turned and peered into the shadows atop the construction site: moonlight; deep shadows; the eerie motion of loose plastic sheeting flapping in the breeze. “I heard it too,” the youngest of the trio, Donald, said. “Is anyone else supposed to be up here?”

　The Prince forced down a hot wire of irritation. Three centuries, and still people would insist on asking questions about why they were being silenced after being commanded to stop making noise so a man could concentrate and listen. He shook his head. No, no one should have known the three were meeting up here; and even if the damned Nosferatu were spying from the shadows, it was difficult to imagine them sending so inept a spy as to give away his presence….

　The click of a button being depressed. The whirl of a CD spinning up. And then—

　Alexis jerked back, pushing away the supernatural acuteness of the Blood as music blasted across the construction site at full volume, momentarily deafening to his heightened senses. Karen already had a finger pressed to her earpiece, was calling up her security ghouls from the street below. Donald stood, dumbstruck. There was a rhythmic, 4/4 drumbeat, snare and bass alternating every four beats, hi-hat connecting them like a heartbeat. And then a woman’s voice:

　“Where have all the good men gone
　And where are all the gods?
　Where’s the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?”

　“What the fuck is that?” Karen snapped, fangs dropping. If she had time to ask stupid questions, it meant security was on its way. Good.

　Donald blinked, drawing a kerchief out of his pocket. He wasn’t sweating, but he still had the habit of patting his face when confused. “I think… I think it’s from Footloose?”

　A gunshot echoed across the unfinished room, impacting the pocket the kerchief had just come from. Donald Yance made a little “hff” sound. His fangs descended. His face twisted into a mask of immediate rage. No confusion now: just the red awakened edge of the Beast. Donald had been dead for twenty years; a bullet to the chest was little more than an insult.

　The Prince felt his own blood (well, his now; earlier in the night it had belonged to a young data analyst named… Melissa? Melinda? Something with an M)
quicken. The world slowed down.

　Figures emerged from the veils of plastic sheeting: A striking young woman, Hispanic, dressed from boots to neck in black leather and silver jewelry, face painted up like a Mexican candy skull, hair streaked with white, holding an enormous revolver; an even younger man, a teenager perhaps, a boy, shirtless in blue jeans and sneakers, carrying a baseball bat, with deep bags under his blue eyes. They didn’t move as the dead moved. They were breathing. They—

　Donald grunted, and then screamed. There were a series of cracking sounds: bones breaking. His chest caved in on itself. Karen stepped away, lively. The Prince quirked an eyebrow. His childe met his eyes. “Help,” Donald said, before his jaw was violently ripped off and sucked into the growing void blooming in the young vampire’s chest. Then Donald’s eyes were gone as well, along with his shoulders, and his hips, and then his arms and legs, all vanishing into a howling black hole. The plastic sheeting flapped and flailed in a sudden vortex-wind; debris swirled around the construction site; and then the void collapsed, and Donald was gone.

　The two remaining vampires eyed the pair of youths facing them down.

　“Isn’t there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
　Late at night I toss and I turn
　And I dream of what I need—”

　“This is bullshit,” Karen said. They were her last words before the baseball bat made contact with her midriff in a flash of golden light, sending two halves of her sailing forty feet out into the cold air of midtown St. Louis, fifteen stories above the ground. Both halves were dust and bone fragments tangled up in business formal by the time they hit the ground.

　Alexis moved like a bloody reaving wind then, his speed unlike anything a living body could ever produce. He flowed like a scream. He was graceful as only the dead can be graceful. Using arts bartered from degenerate Gangrel begging the rights to his hunting grounds, he forced his fingertips to extend into vicious talons. He crossed to the Hispanic woman between two beats of the hi-hat, swung to tear out her throat. But her eyes were already following the path of his arm before the motion began, and she threw herself back, scrabbling over the bare boards and concrete of the site. The revolver barked again. He felt the bullet whine past his ear. Then, somehow, the boy was on top of him, bat in hand. The Prince evaded an overhand swing, struck back with his claws. The boy should have been in five gobbets already (Alexis realized he was unconsciously timing his swings to the piano on their damnable stereo), but he ducked and twisted away from every blow, or deflected them with the splintered bat.

　“He’s fast!” the boy whooped. He was enjoying himself.

　“Give me a clear shot,” the woman said, climbing back to her feet and settling into a Weaver firing stance. Her voice was cold, empty in a way that reminded Alexis of his sire.

　The lift rattled its way up. Four ghouls were no match for this, the Prince realized. Another realization followed: he didn’t know if he could survive getting shot by that gun, but he most assuredly could heal his broken legs and walk away from a fifteen-story fall.

　Alexis snagged a plastic sheet with his talons, threw it at the boy. In the momentary confusion, the Prince of St. Louis threw himself off the edge of the unfinished high-rise, laughing as he dropped. He didn’t know what was going on, and his eternity was in danger from an unknown threat, but there was a certain visceral thrill he hadn’t known in, oh, fifty or sixty years. Above, the music receded, as the sounds of a firefight with the ghouls began:

　“Through the wind, and the chill, and the rain
　And the storm, and the flood
　I can feel his approach like a fire in my blood—”

　Absurd. Utterly absurd. Children with power (stolen from where?), playing the games of immortals.

　Alexis landed on the curved drum of a cement mixer. He felt the bones of both feet shatter. One shoe came off. The shock ran up his legs, snapping bones, shattering his hip on the left side, which took most of the impact. He pitched off sideways, landed on his chest and face in the dirt. Gunfire was still erupting high above, along with a few screams. His supernaturally acute hearing picked up the boy’s voice (“Yeet!”) just before one of the ghouls went sailing off the building. The ghoul smashed into a pile of cut boards, and did not get up again.

　Alexis forced the blood to burn its way through his shattered bones, drawing them together, fusing them in the brutal heat of Caine’s forge.

　“I knew you was going to land there, but I didn’t tell them.” A woman’s voice. The Prince’s head whipped around. There she was, sitting on a pallet. Middle-aged, heavyset, hair a frizzy cloud above broad dark features. Smoking. “They thought I was staying down here to keep the getaway path open. Let them have their fun, yeah? Let them think they’d get you. But I knew they wouldn’t. Did you know one of your lot killed the boy’s sister?”

　Tibia and fibula fused together with red-hot clicks. Femurs would come next: both were fractured in more than one place. “Did they?” Alexis asked, buying time.

　“Yeah,” the woman said, “not that you care.” She leaned forward, took a drag on her cigarette. The momentary orange glow revealed her eyes: a deep violet, the pupils speckled with tiny bits of purple, like a field of star.

　Alexis grunted. That was one femur repaired. One more surge of blood, maybe. The hip was being stubborn. He was raised up on his hands now, but his legs wouldn’t quite cooperate enough to get his knees under him. Once they did, he could spring. The ground under him was sticky and wet.

　“But that’s what I do, you see, I know things. Like how I knew you’d be here tonight. And how I knew you’d jump off, and land… there.”

　Wait. Wet? He wasn’t bleeding. He didn’t bleed unless he willed it so. The vampire’s nostrils flared.

　“And I got ready for you.”

　Gasoline. He was laying in a pool of gasoline, trying to repair his legs.

　Maxine Wallace, Chosen of Endings, flicked her cigarette toward the fallen Prince of St. Louis, whom the infallible machinery of the cosmos told her would repair his body well enough to jump her and tear her throat out in another three and a half seconds. Or rather, he would have done, were he not now preoccupied with the larger problem of being on fire.

　She sighed, dusted off the seat of her dress as she stood up, and went to retrieve Billy and the Skull Girl. Their mission in the Gateway City was nearly at its end, and that meant it would be time to fulfill their promise to look for the Skull Girl’s brother in the land of the dead. She reckoned that was going to be pretty awful from beginning to end, but probably for all that, it couldn’t be worse than the sun-marked boy’s obsession with Bonnie Tyler. “You put up with what you’ve got to,” she mused, as a three hundred year old monster collapsed into embers and ashes behind her.