Act II: Prologue.

The death and rebirth of Damian Cross.

"You make too much noise," she said. They had been walking in silence for almost ten minutes, the light rain slowly soaking them both.

"What?" Damian replied, as if her voice had woken him.

"I said you're noisy, cub. You walk too heavy."

The figure walking beside Damian was shorter than him, and her voice, though youthful, carried the weight of something ancient. He did not say anything back, but without realizing, he tried to be quieter.

They were making their way back to the Suburbia District. The young woman walking next to him, her hands stuffed into the pockets of a worn leather jacket and her face half-hidden beneath the hood of a faded sweatshirt, was Baroness Lisette Renaud.

She was a vampire. So was he.

He sighed out of instinct, trying to process what he remembered.

It had been one hell of a night. Damian had followed a tip to a park in Suburbia—a they had told him a group, possibly linked to the kidnappings that had plagued the city for two years, was meeting there. And when he arrived… a trap. His own captain. His partner. Others too. Their faces were covered, but he recognized their voices. "I'm sorry, Cross," his partner had said.

Then they opened fire.

Next thing he remembered after the lights and gunpowder, he was dying somewhere in the dirt. He knew he was dying, his fingers clutching the rosary in his pocket as he tried to pray for the first time in years. Muttering Hail Marys through choking blood, he kept thinking, begging: "Not yet. Not yet. There's a job to do." Damian didn’t know where he was. Probably the woods near the park. There was dirt in his mouth. He was going to die there.

And then—a figure.

A creature with no face, whose voice—neither fully male nor female—slithered through the darkness. It dragged him into its lap. "That’s not where your story ends, Detective." Then—cold, thick, liquid forced between his lips, down his throat, drowning him. It coated his mouth, his mind, and then—

Fragments. Hunger, terribly hunger. Blood. He...

"I killed someone", Damian’s voice was low, but Lisette heard him.

She nodded. "Your first, cub?"

He shook his head. "No, but..."

She nodded again. There was... compassion there. Or something close to it.

"Look," he said, suddenly stopping. "My head is spinning. What the hell just happened back at the Museum?"

She stopped and turned toward him. She was smiling, but her grin had too many teeth to make him comfortable—and they were all sharp. Lisette studied him for a moment, then jerked her head toward an alley. He followed.

They found a place among the shadows. Lisette took a moment to survey the area, then turned back to him. "I’ll keep it simple, cub. Try to keep up, all right?"

He nodded. Not once in his life had he thought he’d let a small girl talk to him like this. But something about Lisette made him very aware that she could snap his spine with one hand.

"You died. You died, and one of us—Kindred, Licks, vampires—fed you his blood just after lights out. Normally, the transformation happens when you kill someone and then feed them your blood, but it also works if you feed your blood to the recently dead. His blood healed you, but he didn’t stick around long enough to actually feed you—so you went crazy with hunger and tore the throat out of a granny in the middle of the street."

Damian felt his stomach sink as flashes of memory stabbed through his mind.

Lisette continued: "Feeding out in the open is a big no-no. It’s one of our most important rules. Lucky for you, the Captain is one of ours—Kerberos Lineage, like you and me—and happened to be wandering Suburbia after meeting me. He found you and dragged you to the Court, because no one in town knew you. They thought you were some crazy Agorean or Egregoros, and were planning to interrogate you."

Damian opened his mouth, but Lisette caught his gaze, and he shut it.

"The woman on the throne is the Queen. She rules Santa Maria, and she summoned the whole Court to watch your interrogation and execution. That’s why there were so many people there."

"But no one asked me anything!" he interrupted.

Lisette blinked one eye at him. "Asking questions is for mortals. One of the Barons, Evelyn March, read your mind. She saw that you had no alliances with our enemies and, more importantly, that you had no idea what had just happened to you."

Damian frowned, but kept listening.

"Normally, we would execute you. You have no known sire, were created without permission, and were caught breaking the First Law. However..." She shrugged. "Since last night, we are at war. Our enemies are stronger than we thought, and the Queen doesn’t want to waste a good Kerberos—we’re known for being fighters. Not only that, but she doesn’t want to waste a full-fledged Kindred investigating who created you. So, being the good politician she is, she killed two birds with one stone: she kept you alive—one more body for the Olympian Army—and forced you to sing an Elegy. That’s the paper you signed with your blood, promising to find out who made you."

She paused, watching Damian’s furrowed expression.

"And that’s where I come in. You needed someone to take responsibility for you. To train you. To keep you from embarrassing us. I volunteered."

"Why?" The word escaped before Damian could stop it.

Lisette smirked. "I have a soft spot for strays", then she shrugged. "And no one else would. You’d be dead otherwise."

"I am dead", he replied, joyless. She chuckled and slapped his arm with her hand. Hard. He stumbled. "You’re undead, cub. Not dead. Big difference. Try to keep up."

Damian sighed again. His lungs burned when he did it, but it was like a reflex. He looked at Lisette in the darkness, studying her angular features, her golden eyes, the stripes on the sides of her face, hidden beneath the hoodie. He remembered her mane-like hair, now tucked away, and looked at her elongated fingers, with an extra joint and long, black claws at the tip.

"Why...?" He gestured toward her hands. She lifted them, holding them up for him to see before leaning against the wall beside him.

"Okay, pay attention."

He turned toward her, trying to focus.

"You and me—we’re vampires. Most of the old folk don’t like the term. Try to use 'Kindred' around them, but we’re vampires. Not all vampires are the same, though. There are five main lineages, descended from what we assume were the first five vampires to ever walk the earth. Each lineage has its own upsides and downsides."

He nodded to show he was listening.

She continued. "You, the vampire who turned you, and I—we all share the same lineage. We are the blood of Kerberos. Some call us Ferals. You’ll learn soon enough what we can do, but this..." She gestured toward her face, moving her clawed fingers in front of Damian’s eyes again. "This is our curse."

He frowned.

She explained. "Do you remember how you lost control and attacked that grandma?"

His throat felt dry. He swallowed, then nodded.

"That’s called frenzy. Anger, fear, and hunger can make you lose control. Your instincts take over. You become a mindless beast. When a Kerberos loses control, when they come back to themselves, the Beast marks their body or their mind. Bestial traits. Sometimes you can see them, sometimes you can smell them, sometimes... well, I know a poor soul who has to fight real hard not to chase pigeons."

"Shit," Damian muttered. "So, if we don’t die of natural causes..."

She could see the wheels turning in his head and nodded: "Exactly. Every single one of us, sooner or later, ends up a chimeric monster."

Damian exhaled sharply, rubbing his hands over his face. And then it hit him.

"But I lost control."

"Yes, you did."

"So, I..."

She nodded before stepping away from the wall. She grabbed a broken shard of mirror from the trash and held it up in front of him.

He looked at his own reflection—and staring back at him were a pair of golden-green, vertically slit, crocodile-like eyes.

"Fuck." It was all he could muster.

Lisette tossed the mirror shard back onto the ground. "I advise sunglasses, just to keep the authorities off your back. Most kyne—that’s humans—will just think you have weird contacts, but our guys are paranoid about the Façade. But the changes have their upsides, too. Noticed how the night seems lighter? How the shadows don’t obscure your view?"

Damian blinked. Then he really looked around, paying attention. For the first time, he noticed—everything was clear. It was well after midnight, and they were far from any streetlamps, but he could see as though it were daylight.

It didn’t console him much, though. "Fuck, Lisette. That’s just... shit. I don’t know." He rubbed his face again.

Lisette chuckled. "Don’t worry, cub. The night is still young, and there’s a lot more to learn before sunrise. Now c’mon, let’s keep walking. We’ve still got a long way to go."