The accent was thick, like the muddy waters of the Mississippi from which it'd grown, feminine, and struck through with concern. "How is he?"

"Alive," came the terse, monotone reply. "He killed almost a dozen of my ghouls, despite the daytime."

"How is that even possible?"

"It's Michael," a new, girlish voice said, madly, before breaking into a giggle. "He sleeps with a chainsaw under his pillow."

"How do you know?" asked the first voice.

More giggling.

The flat line male talked again. "It will be extremely difficult to do what you want, especially if what you say of his activities are true."

"I wouldn't lie. Two elders that we know of, a Lasombra and a Ravnos. Who knows what else." Something about the accent reminded Michael of home, but it was so hard to think clearly, and his chest hurt so much.

"What will you do to 'em, and can I watch?" She just kept giggling, quietly to herself.

"In cases like this, there is only one thing we can do, Miss Jezebel. We will be giving him the tools he needs to fight his Beast, whether he wants them or not. It will be.."

Michael fell into a sleep deeper than death.

When Michael was at The Farm, he could sometimes hear Doctor Netchurch in his head. At times, the Doctor talked at length about him:

"Subject Michael Kilcannon shows signs of prior conditioning, unseen in any material in my library, and truly unique, both in scope, execution, and for the unpredictable way it has interacted with his 'vampiric psyche'. It is almost as if there was a preexisting secondary ego active within him before the introduction of the vampire state, and instead of this ego being subsumed or destroyed as it has been in all other known cases, it instead managed the unthinkable:

It consumed the Beast, and bent it to its will.

Further study will be necessary."

Memories -- Michael had so many memories, so many that in the quiet hours, when there was nothing to distract him, they would come up from his depths like bodies left to rot in still water, floating weightlessly, buoyed against invisible currents. Old faces, long ago places, things he'd lost; the brutal days of his childhood and their hard lessons, the glory of victories over enemies gone, dead friends...

Sometimes, very rarely, something would come that was not his by way of origin, but his by way of acquisition. Alien thoughts left behind by the consumption of vampires centuries old would come to him, dark artifacts of worlds unfamiliar to him.

It is not the shadows nor the darkness that moves, but what lies on the other side. The Bishop knows this; the children do not. They scream and claw at the stone wall. Some cry. Some break.

There are Things that sleep in the Abyss, Things of Death and Power. Things that can be woken. Things that can be used.

A labyrinth of arms reach out through the dark and Feed, stripping psyches bare. It Feeds and Feeds and Feeds, blind to the ritual marks on the floor that will soon bind it to the Bishop's will, blind to the task it will be bent to...