4

A wave of exhaustion hits you as the sun rises fully. The Kindred were not meant to remain awake during daylight hours, and you look around for anywhere safe you might rest.

There's an old metal-topped freezer beside a counter here, just big enough to hold you, and sealed against sunlight. Inching around the shafts of daylight that filter through the open window and the gaps in the boards, you wrench the old freezer open. It smells like expired milk, but you can't worry about that now.

You drop into the old freezer and pull the lid shut.

Then you mentally inventory all the things you do need to worry about: your ruined car, the ache of Hunger in your gums, the smell of fresh blood somewhere in this building, the strange eagle.

You may not survive another night. But you survived this one. You survived the desperate ambition of your sire, Elin Olivecrona. Then you survived out here in the desert for years, one night at a time. You permit yourself a tight little smile. You can still make it. You can still find a way out of this.

And then the blackness of the day-sleep swallows you.

Next Chapter

Chapter Two: Into the Sunset

Arizona, I-10 heading west.

Night of November 2.

Sunrise: 6:42 a.m.

If anyone had found you that day in the disused freezer, they would see only a disheveled corpse. And while the sun is in the sky, that's all you are.

The blood you got back in El Paso, before you hopped in your Honda, awakens the moment the sun sets. The return to consciousness is instantaneous and agonizing. You open your eyes in blackness. Your limbs are still heavy, as if crushed by the weight of the sun. As you wait, you think about the Camarilla, and you remember what the elders made you do after Elin Olivecrona disappeared.

Next

You were desperate then, and you knew you had to obey. They paired you with another desperate young Cainite, a charming young man named Julian Sim who talked too much. He was something that other Kindred called an Assamite, and back then you didn't know if that was another clan like the Ventrue or another sect like the Camarilla. No one ever bothered to tell you.

Julian had the eager energy of a congressional page and the glittering, patient eyes of a reptile. He was out for himself, and so were you, and that gave you something in common.

You remember Julian's lime green Geo Tracker crunching to a halt over gravel. You jumped out and felt the sand beneath your feet, still hot hours after sunset, though the night air felt cool. Julian was well dressed despite the rough work, but back then you always wore the same thing when out in the desert: coveralls with the name you used sewn on a patch.

Not your real name, of course. That person died in an alley outside a locked apartment.

You still call yourself—