Deartuate - 1497

Mona learned that she had a father a few weeks before her fifth birthday. It was a strange revelation, for the child had sincerely believed that she, out of millions, had been the product of her mother and her mother alone. It was silly to believe such a thing, but neither her mother, Yael, nor her grandfather Nechimiah had thought to tell her otherwise. Both had seemed content to foster the little girl's strange whimsies.

Once.

The weeks leading up to the discovery had left no room for either adult to participate in little Ramona Oliveira's flights of fancy. Something had happened, something bad, and whatever it was had clipped the wings of the adults and mired them in reality. Yael and Nechimiah had grown secretive, their conversations hushed but rambling. Sometimes they didn't go to bed until the morning sun was up. Sometimes they didn't go to bed at all. Nechimiah was better at hiding his worry than his daughter, who regarded every odd noise, every unannounced knock at the door with fear, as if some monster was coming for her.

Mona asked often about the thing that had made them so fretful, or she tried, but Yael ignored her daughter's questions time and time again and always directed the conversation to the little girl's prodigal father. Just the mention of the man was enough to put Nechimiah in a sour mood.

"He is named Jo?o da Silva, Almonda," her mother would say in robotic tones, and without fail Nechimiah would snort his disdain. Though the little girl was the apple of his eye, he cared not for the gentile who had deflowered her mother and left her with child. But since That Silva Man wasn't there to collect his wrath, the old man lent it to Mona's accursed nickname instead.

"Feh! The girl is not a nut, Vavrum!"

Usually the conversation ended there, but there was something different about that hot, sticky night that lent an imagined chill to the air. It was during that time that her father became more human to her, and that left her miserable.

"He works the fields," Yael continued, nonplussed by her father's earlier interruption. Yael was not beautiful, but she was pretty, with almond shaped eyes so pale they resembled amber and sharp, high features. But now she looked old, far older than her twenty one years. "He..you have sisters." Her fingers traced the baby soft curls at the nape of her young daughter's neck. "He is a good man."

Across the room, Nechimiah looked up from the small chunk of wood he was working with his knife. His eyes were cold, his mouth hard and straight. "Do not lie to her. A good man. Feh!. He is a drunk and would bed a donkey if it winked an eye at him."

Mona, her head resting upon her mother's breast and her thumb in her mouth, just stared at her grandfather, but she could hear Yael's heart racing and could feel the girl tense up. She heard her mutter something, barely above a whisper; Please father. Not this. Not now.

There was no way that Nechimiah had heard her, but something changed. His wrinkled face softened and his wet eyes were apologetic; ashamed. Mona's chest rose and fell with the force of a sigh and Yael rubbed her back. Whatever her mother had meant to tell her, her resolve had weakened.

But the days that followed were suffocating. Nechimiah would return with more bad news, which lead to longer, louder conversations. At some point they had stopped trying to keep them from Mona. Monsters were after them, after all of them. Mona was terrified at first. She refused to go outside alone, checked the doors even after her mother and grandfather had deemed them barred, and more often than not she went to sleep with her head beneath the covers.

Nechimiah noticed before Yael, and tried to calm her fear with stories, but they were halfhearted affairs that left the little girl wanting. Then one night he pulled his granddaughter onto his knee, as he had done since Mona could remember remembering, and she looked into his face with her large eyes and placed two small hands against his cheeks.

"Kontar un maas??

Nechimiah smiled when she asked for a story and, as he had done a million times before, he removed Mona's hands gently from his face and nodded his head. "A story you shall have. Have I told you of your Nonna??"

Mona knew little of the woman, only that that Ramona had been loved and had died before she was born, and that she was named after her. So immediately the idea of hearing more about her drew the child's interest, and she shook her head. The old man nodded once, took a deep breath and began the tale.

"When your Nonna was a child of only four her family was taken by the Black Death. She wandered the streets of Beja barefooted, filthy and starving. A wandering doctor discovered her and took her into his home, but upon finding her burning with fever, he and his wife sought only to make her inevitable passing a comfortable one.

Still they prayed over her, morning to evenfall, and eventually she awoke to discover the doctor looming over her. Terrified of the stranger, and though still weak with sickness, she kicked him in the shin. For the rest of his days he bore the scar that her foot had gifted him. Yet he and his wife had grown to love her and over time, once her grief was not fresh, she saw in them not the family that had been taken from her, but the one that had chosen her.

The doctor and his wife fought over what to name the little girl, for in her sickness she had forgotten even that, and eventually they settled upon Ramona. Surprisingly Catholic for a pair of Sephardim, but they found it appropriate to name the girl after Raymond Nonnatus, the patron of children.

Ramona thrived and grew, but sickness hounded her. Some days she would not remember her new name, or would recall her old family with no recollection of the new. Sometimes she would be given to tempers that vexed her parents. She never doubted their love for for her, even after they married her off to a skinny, big eared boy from Evora."

Mona looked to his ears and went wide-eyed at the connection she had suddenly made. "You, Nonno?"

Nechimiah laughed. "I should hope so. Granted, I did not have much to offer. I was still an apprentice then, but my parents knew her adoptive ones, and the dowry helped a great deal. She was..." he paused and sighed, his eyes distant as if he were chasing a fond memory, one that lent the bittersweet tilt to his smile, "..she was something. A force of nature. We were ten and four when we were married, younger than your mother was when she birthed you, and within a year we were blessed with two boys, and," a frown then, "within a year they died. I was devastated, but your grandmother..I believe grief had grown fearful of her. 'Life is for the living, not the dead.' The next year came and went and Yael was born at the end of it. She was our last, but to have one child is a blessing, Mona.

At ten and six, your mother became pregnant with you, and I was none too happy. Ramona though, she balked at convention at every turn, and would not use our faith to chastise the girl. I know now that she was right, but at the time..well, we will leave that for when you are older. Anyone who dared say anything untoward, your grandmother was quick to correct them. Hurricane Ramona," and he was laughing again. It had been so long since he had laughed so much. But it was there and gone too quickly. "A few months before your birth, a fever took her away from us. We thought you would be joining her, you were so small and pitiful. Your mother was terrified to name you because we were so sure that you would die."

Little Mona sat up as prim as any lady might and pulled her hair around to cover her face, to remind her grandfather just how painfully young she was. "I lived though."

"You did. You were by no means a fussy babe, but very serious at times. It only seemed wise to name you Ramona."

"Will I die one day?"

The question startled Nechimiah, but the girl was nothing if not precocious, and after he had placed a kiss upon her forehead, an answer arose that seemed, at the time, suitable. "Everything dies, sweet girl. But you do not have to worry about that for a very, very long time."

Later that night, long after her grandfather had retreated to bed and her mother was asleep at her side, Mona lay awake. Yael whimpered in her sleep, tossed and turned and marked her cheeks with tears, and instead of hiding beneath her blanket as she had so often done, Mona wrapped her arms tightly around her mother and held on for dear life. She wasn't seeking comfort. She was trying to provide it; to battle the beasts that so plagued her Yael's dreams. Even after Yael had settled, Mona fought sleep for as long as she could, her little face twisted with resolve.

Grandmother Ramona wouldn't have been afraid of monsters, this Ramona knew, and she would have no doubt protected her family at all costs. That night and for nights afterward the spitfire's namesake stared into the darkness, silently daring the beasts in the shadows to try something.

Rustle-1497

In those hazy days when the faces of Yael and Nechimiah were still so fresh in Mona's head, her new family grew into something of a stabilizing force. That Silva Man and Genia hadn't completely mended the tears in her heart left behind by the ripping of her old world, but they managed to at least add a few strong stitches.

Genia regarded her with kindness more often than not, and disciplined her when she acted out. The twins, Jacinta and Francisca, seemed to think she was a doll placed there for their amusement; something to dress up and manhandle. They were, however, quickly dissuaded of this notion after a week of such nonsense, and while the fight had been short and quick, the twins decided to give their little sister a wide berth afterwards.

After the fight, Jo?o found his youngest daughter outside while the eight year old twins cried for justice in their shared room just yards away. He placed a gentle hand upon her shoulder and took a seat next to her on the soft wood of an old cork log. "I warned them to not be so rough."

Mona didn't speak- she rarely did- but she didn't flinch away from his touch as she had a week earlier, either.

Perplexed but by no means a quitter, Jo?o tried again. "You miss your mother?"

The dark little head next to him fell and rose with a nod.

"She will return for you," he whispered, his dark eyes looking off into the distance while Mona's stayed trained upon the moon above them, her thumb planted in her mouth. After much thought, she removed the digit and shook her head to the contrary.

It was an answer that surprised Jo?o and saddened him all at once. "...why do you say that?"

She peered at him with eyes that seemed to have seen centuries and spoke in a soft, sorrowful little voice. "Because the monsters ran them away."

Jo?o fidgeted where he sat and stared at the girl for a long time, even after her attention had returned to the stars. He swallowed hard and tried to relax, but he was too disturbed, and most importantly too worried about the little girl. "Mona, even if you do not think it so..hope for it. Your mother, she loves you."

And Mona turned her head at that, the look in her eyes so serious that Jo?o couldn't help but to smile. She removed her thumb from her mouth once again.

"Do you love me, Jo?o?"

The kid was cute, the kid was sad, but the kid was almost eerie. He wanted to remind her that it wasn't proper for children to refer to their parents by their first names, but he wasn't a proper man, and besides, his daughter wanted an answer.

Of course he loved her; he loved her like he did all of his known progeny, but it was not such an easy thing to voice when they were both still strangers. Eventually he nodded lest he trouble the girl, and gave her a gentle shove to send her teetering harmlessly towards the edge of the log. And there, right there, she smiled. A rare sight.

"I am more fond of you than I am of the pigs. Now, let us go into town."

"But it is dark," came Mona's soft reply. There are monsters out there. Monsters who beat the brave and chase mothers and grandfathers away.

"Sim, sim it is, but that is when this place really lives."

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1497-1498

During those nightly expeditions into Evora's seedier pockets, Mona bonded with her father. He found within Mona what he had lost nine years before; a son. Genia's lessons fed Mona's soul, while their father's fostered (at least as far as he was concerned) more 'practical' skills. So while Genia refined the child's Portuguese, their father taught her to scrap. For every dish Mona burned under her sister's tutelage, she bought food later that night with coin she had bamboozled from someone else.

By the time her sixth birthday rolled around, Mona was already an accomplished little grifter. To Genia's disdain, Mona returned that night with her hair chopped short, their father smiling proudly and three sheets to the wind behind her. She was more at home in breeches than the pretty frocks her sisters favored, and this delighted Jo?o just as much as it irritated Genia.

Tacking Maria onto her name had been pointless. Everyone who knew Jo?o had grown used to his little shadow, and they all knew her as Cachorrinha because she followed at the scoundrel's heels like a little puppy. Wherever her father went, Mona went.

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1498

"She thinks I hang the moon and stars, Chuchu!"

Genia, her stitching dangling from her long fingered hands in limbo, stared at her little sister's prone form, mortified. The child was sprawled out and stone cold drunk. It wasn't anger that she leveled upon her father's face, but disappointment, and though Jo?o should have been so very used to the latter, his head drooped low in shame.

"The moon and stars Pai!? Ela est? b?bado!" Realizing that she was shouting, and no doubt perking the identical sets of ears that should have been sleeping in the next room, Genia flushed a deep red and lowered her voice. "I love you, Pai, but you are not one to admire."

Jo?o's guilt bent beneath pride as he gazed at the snoring child. It did not help that he was as drunk as a skunk himself. "If it eases your heart, Chuchu, she drinks like a sailor.."

Genia frowned and quickly reminded her father of his faded guilt. She made the sign of the cross. "If m?e were only here to witness this. Taking a child and turning her into a misfit. Do you know what she would say?"

Genia waited for his answer with her hands on her hips, and watched as her father bolted up and swayed from foot to foot, his doggish grin returning full force.

"She would not speak, Chuchu, but I can almost feel the stinging in my cheek from the slap that she would deal me."

Dodging-1499

One day Mona would come to learn that Gabriela had been a creature to be pitied. Whatever fire had destroyed the good within her had left nothing behind but a rotting, hateful husk. But today would not be that day.

Mona would never learn that at the age of thirty three, her beastly half sister would be dead of a heart attack, still clutching the sleeve of the priest who refused to officially join she and Fylinto Abrunheiro as husband and wife in the eyes of God. But what Mona did know, not the vampire but the broken little girl with the bruises and busted lip, was that her own hatred was surely and justly growing. Like dark fruit it took seed within her, growing larger everyday. She did not like that feeling, or how good it felt to acknowledge it. It scared the child more than Gabriela ever could, but she was reluctant to say a word to anyone about how she felt. Fylinto was neither her enemy nor her friend, and Faustino was just a scared little boy.

So she kept it bottled inside until it filled her days with horrible thoughts and her nights with nightmares. Then the bottle broke.

Gabriela had returned from market with a basket of verdant greens to find her little sister and her son wrestling in the parlor. No one would ever know the reason, not even Gabriela herself, but the woman immediately flew into one of her wild, worrisome rages. The basket was sent sailing across the room, where it pelted poor Faustino in the face, and for a moment the entire room went quiet. Then Faustino began to cry. It wasn't her son that she was after, but Mona. For Gabriela Silva, Mona was the cause of all of her problems. It made no sense, but it didn't have to, not when blind anger came into the equation. She jerked the little girl up by the collar of her thin brown shift and shook her until her jaw rattled. "You awful little !" Gabriela shouted. "You mongrel! I give you a roof over your head and food to feed you and this is how I am repaid? You and that worthless boy rolling about like pigs in my home!? After I've told you not to!?" She punctuated each word with a shake, and soon all that Mona could see was stars. "If you want to act like a pig then you can live with them!"

While Faustino pleaded, sobbing, with his mother to stop, Gabriela's enmity only gained momentum. She carried the little girl towards the door, fully intent on making good of her threat. Mona was scared; those pigs weren't pigs so much as hogs, and they would eat anything. Just as Gabriela reached the door, however, it flew open. Fylinto had heard the commotion a few houses over and had come running, his face red and his breathing labored. He took one look at the tableau before him, at his raging wife, the tattered little girl and his sobbing son, and without thinking he reached out and wrenched Mona from Gabriela's grasp.

He held her so tightly that she could scarcely breath, the same way her mother had once held her, but she was too stunned and too breathless to contemplate escape. Gabriela opened her mouth to scream at her husband, but Fylinto beat her to it. "Gabriela, that is enough! She is a little girl and you are a woman grown! Look at what you are doing! To me, to her, to your son!"

She reached for Mona, but Fylinto quickly spun around and placed her in the doorway, where she swayed and gripped the wall. He turned to face his wife again, and when it appeared that she would barrel into him, he pushed her away. "If you do not stop, I will make you stop!"

That did not calm Gabriela, but it caused her to stumble back, and when her rear hit the floor and the breath was knocked out of her, she came to her senses just enough to regard her common-law husband with a shocked expression. He ignored her then and turned to comfort the children.

But Mona was gone and so was Faustino.

Beyond Recall- 1499

Mona never saw Faustino again.

True to her word, Lucretia had fed them and put them both to bed in her little guestroom, but the morning held no trace of Mona's nephew. She searched through the fog clearing from her mind- a parting gift from the drug Lucretia Enrathi had used to lace their dinner. She bumped into things, knocked over vases and bowls. Her stomach hurt and her head was throbbing. The chaos brought Lucretia through the door, and she discovered Mona staring vacantly at her surroundings with her face scrunched up as if she were trying to grasp too many things at once.

"What ails you, girl?" Her voice was pregnant with concern, but Lucretia's expression was both amused and bored. Mona turned slowly, her foot barely missing a shard of broken pottery, and she saw not one but two Lucretias fading in and out of one another.

"Where is Faustino?" The words came slow. They stuck to the sand dry roof of her mouth.

Lucretia's smile widened until it threatened to overwhelm her face. "Why, he left early this morning. He said that he was going to return home."

It sounded perfectly reasonable, but bile tickled the top of Mona's throat. The wrongness of the night before came rushing back to her, and she fought to keep her stomach at bay. It was a battle she barely won.

A vision. A nightmare born of heavy sleep. A boy and girl, drugged. The boy stolen in the night by a monster with a man's face and a shark's teeth. The boy sleeps as he is carried through the door. There is a sound like a teeth tearing into an apple.

Lucretia saw, in that instant, that Mona somehow knew, and her smile faded into a toothy snarl. "What is wrong?"

"Faustino did not go home," the child sadly whispered, her hand cradling one side of her head.

So what? another voice chided, and it was not her voice. Not at all. It belonged to Lucretia Enrathi, but the woman's mouth wasn't even moving. He was too old. My children, you have to pluck them at a certain age. Where will you go if you leave here? If I let you leave? Who would want you, Ramona da Oliveyra? You are far too wild and too broken.

Hurt breached the dull sheen in Mona's eyes, and Lucretia smirked, her head tipped back. She had dealt with willful children before- Mona was neither the first nor would she be the last- and the fun came in breaking them, she knew.

People do not want broken children. Your mother must have sensed it, no? Your grandfather? Your sisters?

Mona hung her head down, and it didn't matter if what Lucretia was telling her was lies. Right then and there everything that came from the horrid woman's mouth was convincing, and though Mona's mind fought to push the words away, it eventually lost the battle, leaving the child to sniffle and wipe her tears away on the sleeve of her dress. Lucretia was grinning- little pig, little pig, let me in- and she gazed idly at her long, sharp fingernails. There is a use for you though, for your viciousness and your pain. Do you understand?

Mona shook her head, and her tears pelted her dirty feet. Lucretia's voice resumed, but this time her mouth moved along with the words.

"You will, little one. You will."

Mahdokht- (1511)

Time dropped away at a snail's pace, and somehow Mona managed to make it to her nineteenth year. Four more and she would be Embraced by a member of the True Black Hand. Let the repulsive circle be unbroken.

There would be no celebration for her, no brightly colored pastries or lovingly chosen gifts. Women her age were often already married and had at least one child clinging to their hip, but those things were reserved for human beings. Though Mona's heart beat and her stomach growled and thirst quite often clawed at her throat, the world- both natural and supernatural- had been very quick to let her know that she did not belong with mankind. She was no longer the daughter of Yael, or Jo?o, or the granddaughter of Nechimiah bin Micah of the Tribe of Benjamin and his late wife, Ramona. She was what she was.

If someone had sat down with the girl, gained her trust and dove deep into her mind, they would have been startled to discover that she was glad of this. If asked why, Mona would simply direct her imaginary interviewer to the faded but still pungent aroma of burning flesh and hair; a persistent reminder of the horror of the auto de fe. She would mimic the sounds of cheering crowds and tortured screams.

She would say that that was what humans did.

So it was that barely eight hours into her nineteenth birthday, Lucretia found Mona sitting in a tub of grimy water, staring off into the distance. One might have mistaken her for a simpleton- many an unfortunate Chatterling certainly had- but Lucretia knew what she was doing; she was thinking, always thinking, and it took but a gentle clattering of her nails against the door frame to pull Mona back to reality. The girl turned her head and quickly shot Lucretia a dismissive stare before spying the lean face watching her from the Enrathi woman's side. A child no older than ten, worryingly pale with curly hair as black as a raven's wing, and sharp eyes stuck in the middle of black and brown. When the little girl smiled at her, Mona felt her skin crawl.

There was something horrible about that child; more off-putting than rotten Lucretia Enrathi, and Mona pulled her lips into a silent tooth filled snarl. With her head held high, Lucretia placed a hand between the brat's shoulder blades and pushed her further into the room. She did not stumble, but gracefully moved until her knees bumped into the edge of the tub, prompting Mona to draw her own to her chest.

?You have been alone for far too long," lamented Lucretia to the birthday girl. "I do not believe in only children, and neither do our masters. You will keep this girl by your side until she is sent for training. Is that understood?"

Mona nodded slowly. Teach the new kid, prepare them for their trip to Enoch. If they died, well, people were always breeding. When Lucretia departed, she left the horrible little alone with Mona. The older girl inclined her head to one side, uncomfortable with the weight of the child's poorly veiled interest in her.

"Do you need help?" Though not hospitable and bordering on warning, Mona's question widened the little girl's smile. Her arms grew riddled with gooseflesh and a knot began forming in the pit of Mona's stomach; she needed to get rid of the small horror as quickly as possible.

Scratch her out before she could return the favor.

Mona, who had went by Treze (13) since she was the little girl's age, learned that the youngster was called Mahdohkt, that she was Persian and that she was surprisingly good at the things expected of a Chatterling even without training. A bit too good. She kept by Mona's side like a nightmarish little shadow. She seemed to take glee from the pain of others and bombarded Mona with question after question after question. Mona's silence never seemed to deter her, but their job was to take secrets from the undead, not pass them around to one another like gossiping schoolchildren.

"Do you hate me? Truly?" Mahdokht asked the night before she was to begin her training. Mona, bruised and bleeding from a narrow escape with a group of Brujah neonates grumbled her answer. "I hate many things."

Mahdokht smiled- for she was always smiling- and inched in closer to her mentor. "Do you think we resemble one another?"

Mona crept closer to the edge of the narrow straw bed in an attempt to put some distance between the terrorkin and herself. "We both have skin. That is the extent of it."

Silence then, sweet and blessed, but sorely short lived. Mahdokht's body blocked out the moonlight streaming into the tiny room as she leaned over Mona. Mona could feel the chill of her flesh, could smell the strange tin scent of her breath, and as unnerving as those things might have been, nothing had prepared her for what rolled off of Mahdokht's tongue. "May I call you mother?"

Mona bolted upright, clamped her teeth together and pushed the little girl away from her. "You may call me Treze if you wish to keep your teeth!"

Mahdokht, still smiling, crawled like a spider back to her side and tempted fate by laying her head just inches from Mona's. The questions continued to grow stranger and stranger and stranger, but when Lucretia poked her head into the cell, Mona did not complain and Mahdokht stayed silent.
To do either would mean no food for two days, though Mona was almost certain that Mahdokht wouldn't suffer from such a punishment.

As she fell into a restless sleep, Mona began to conjure up ways to get rid of the weird little girl, each possibility more creative and grislier than the last. Mahdokht was gone by morning, but so was Lucretia, and the absence of both meant that Mona could enjoy the quiet solitude of her room. She did not think to flee; this life, though dismal, had been her only slice of structure in a very long time.

She left her room only to scavenge for some food, and that night her sleep came sweeter. She dreamed of blue skies and what she believed the ocean looked like, for she had never been. A horse the color of Kindred skin watched her from where it stood in the sand. Someone touched her cheek, and when she pressed into it, she was startled to discover how cold the flesh was.

Mona awoke with a start to find Mahdokht standing over her in the darkness, her hand on her cheek and her stupid, evil smile unwavering. That smile alone was enough to inform her that Lucretia wouldn't be returning home. Lucretia wouldn't be returning anywhere.

"I think we would make a good family. You and I and Father. I think you will come with me."

Her body protested, but her mind coaxed it forward, and as Mahdokht's cold hand slipped into her own, Mona was screaming behind her eyes.

Quixotic- 1511

Perhaps God had a sense of humor. Maybe it had started out lighthearted and full of whimsy, but when it became time to craft Mahdokht from the common clay, His since of humor had already begun to mimic that of the doctors that He had created; inappropriate with the need to cope and far too dark. Though Mahdokht was old (how old neither Bakar nor Mona nor the other ghouls really knew), she still fancied herself a lost little lamb drowning in a sea of wolves..."And little lambs," scoffed Bakar as he slid his untouched bowl of gruel Mona's way, "have an apparent need for a mother and father."

The laughter that followed was dry, gruff and void of anything resembling real amusement. Mona looked up at him, her fingers curled in a death grip on the edge of the bowl and her lips parted in horror. A mother. Nevermind that the wretched little beast that was forcing them to play house was a monster. The very idea of being a mother to anyone seemed so otherwordly that Mona nearly lost her appetite.

But Bakar, charmed by his housemate of three whole weeks, fought back the grin forming suddenly in the face of her antipathy; a battle which he quickly lost. A defeat which he immediately regretted. Mona's mouth shifted into an incurious frown and Bakar's lips fell into a straight line bordered by beard. "It is funny, is it not?"

Mona shook her head and lowered the bowl to the table, her dark brows furrowed. "No." Then she sniffled. Being trapped with Bakar in a house that she couldn't leave, a castle ruled by a hellion, had somehow become worse for her than her previous existence as a Chatterling. She wiped the sleeve of her dress across her eyes, her shoulders shaking ever so slightly with a sigh.

Bakar reached over and placed his hand upon the wrist that bore a peculiar scar. "I joke because it is wretched being here, Mona. If I did not joke then I would not be able to continue on. Before you arrived, I felt as if I was going mad, talking to the walls and insects like a lunatic. For as much as I wish you were anywhere but here, I am glad to have such lovely company."

Mona examined the hand resting upon her wrist like a child admiring the coat of a beloved pet. She traced his thumb with the tip of her finger; marveled at how his skin felt. When she peered back at him, she found Bakar watching her, and she drew her hand back as if the mere touch of him had branded her flesh. She didn't trust him, not entirely, but Rome was not built in a day. ?I think I am too young to have a daughter of ten.?

Bakar smiled again; relieved. ?What man wouldn?t want a young wife??

That time Mona laughed at the joke.

Apostate-1512

It took a long while for Mona to muster up the gumption to announce her own escape. Faced with the news, Bakar could only watch as Mona squeezed through the hole in the wall. It was late, and the last thing he saw before the darkness devoured her was the arch of one pale foot. Half an hour passed by before he could bring himself to plug her escape route with a blanket, and when the rustle of fabric freed Mona's scents, he found himself filled with longing and dread. She was out there somewhere, and somehow that hurt him more than if she had actually died.

It was that thought that stabbed Bakar Barinaga with the poisoned blade of guilt. She had wanted him to go with her and he had snapped at her as if the very idea of escape was wrong, and that she was wrong for even entertaining the notion. That day had plagued his thoughts and soaked his dreams, but the hold that Mahdokht's blood had on him was a strong one, and worse than any prison with four solid walls. So as time throbbed by like an aching tooth, the Basque man stood vigil in his chair by the window; just biding his time until the grunt ghouls made their rounds and noticed that their little mistress was one person short of a happy family.

Bakar wasn't sure what would happen when Mahdokht found out. She had not taken the deaths of the two women-including his own wife- before Mona lightly. Her tantrums had been miniature hurricanes made flesh, born not from a genuine love for the departed, but the loss of a favored toy. He pondered that, poor Bakar, and scratched the side of his face, his eyes narrowed on the moon hanging just out of reach of his window. He hoped that Mona was okay.

Another hour followed on the heels of another, and as rain pelted the little manse, Bakar slept a mercifully dreamless sleep. Far off the sound of faint footsteps, the maddening drip drip drip of water, and the dull scrape of something being dragged across the floor worried him back to the waking world. Drowsy and forlorn, he wondered silently how much time had passed.

Then the figure stepped forward, and in the pitiful light of a dying candle he could barely make out the outline of his visitor. Before he could call out, Bakar heard another steady drip, followed by the sound of something smacking the floor. Gathering up his courage in a nice and neat little ball, he reached beneath the chair for the crude knife he kept hidden there, and as his fingers traced the dented blade, he bellowed out to the creature.

"Show yourself!"

The being slowly straightened up and began to move his way, dragging something large and rain sodden in its wake. When it reached the moonlight, Bakar released a small, startled sound that did not fit the middling thrum of his true voice. There were so many things stewing inside of the man; surprise and relief and something as close to love as he had felt in a very long time. Soaked to the bone and shivering, her dress so wet it was nearly transparent, Mona smiled at him. Words failed Bakar Barinaga, but nothing needed to be said. Before he could think to stop himself, he was on his feet and embracing the girl, clinging to her. If I let go then I am lost. She stiffened in his arms, her large, wild eyes glued to some point far beyond his shoulder for just a split second until her feral wiles fell to comfort and a sheepish, sleepish expression.

Mona pressed her face against his shoulder and breathed him in, relishing in the scents of sweat and old leather. Everything was amplified, from the way his large hands traveled the gentle slope of her waist to the feel of his breath upon her neck, teasing up the tiny, baby fine hairs there and turning her legs to jelly.

"Safe here," she muttered with a sigh, but if Bakar heard her then he did not make it known.

In the frenzy of their reunion they had forgotten the old cloth sack that lay at Mona's feet. Bakar stepped back to give his erstwhile cellmate some breathing room, his fingers gently roaming her sides as if he couldn't fathom completely breaking contact with her.

?You've returned.? His voice was awestricken, triumphant; a man presented with water after wandering years through the desert. His smile was so wide that Mona could nearly make out each and every one of his teeth. ?Why would you do such a thing, you silly girl??

Mona chewed on his words, her pale cheeks splotched with rosy color. She narrowed her eyes, furrowed her brows and stared off into the distance, leading Bakar to believe that perhaps he had spoken ungraciously. Then she spoke. ?You did not leave with me, so I left for the both of us.?

Spiral- 1512

On the fifth night of every week that followed, when Mona was sure that Mahdokht was attending to her own devices and that she and Bakar would be left relatively undisturbed, Mona ventured out into the world. It took Bakar quite some time to shake off the sense of foreboding that followed, but he always sealed the hole in the wall once she had left his sight. She always returned, and the old sack she carried was more often than not filled with food not laced with Mahdokht's blood. Both were aware of the chance that Mona took every time she left, and in the back of their minds they knew that sooner or later her luck would run out.

The little town of Cordoba was Catholic infested, surely, they all were, but her strange schedule kept her from witnessing all but the scorched earth remains of one atrocious auto-de-fe or another. Regardless, Mona always took the time to stop and grieve and silently mutter vaguely remembered bits of the Kaddish. Those moments in time were for the dead and the dead alone, and it struck her as far too intimate a thing to share with anyone, even centuries later.

Mona did, at least, make the acquaintance of one living person; an elderly baker known to her only as Se?or Compostela. For weeks he had turned a blind eye to the small pale hands swiping the day old loaves of bread from outside of his shop, if only because the girl always left a few reales in the bottoms of the baskets before dashing off into the darkness. He was a kind man, but a curious man, and when that curiosity began to gnaw at him like a cancer, the genial old baker devised a plan to meet his last patron of the night.

It took all of a week for Se?or Compostela to gather his courage, and the moment he saw her reach for the bread, he rushed through the door of his shop and quickly reached for her arm. She turned swiftly, too swiftly, and the old man found himself gripping her long hair instead. Fear turned the blood in his veins to ice, and Se?or Compostela thought she might scream. She twisted her head around, her pale brown eyes meeting his darker hues, and for a moment they were both as still as statues; each seemingly unsure of what to do. Then the girl growled at him, a sound so hellish that he immediately let go of her. Mona stumbled back, snarling like a wild animal, and the loaves of bread tumbled from her hands to the muddy ground.

But she didn't run. She just watched him, perplexed, her head tipped to one side. With a warm smile, Se?or Compostela took a step forward, prompting Mona to move a few steps back. Her eyes were so wide that he feared they might pop from their sockets.

She is scared, you old fool. Maybe you are mad, striking fear in the hearts of the ni?os de la calle. "Do not flee. I mean you no harm, se?orita."

Mona, who had learned the hard way that trust was not a blessing to be easily earned, still regarded the baker as an animal might; a frightened, cornered animal. When he bent down to retrieve the bread, his joints cracking, she spared a glance to the darkness surrounding the town.

A gruff but gentle voice brought her back. The old man was holding the bread loaves out to her. "These belong to you."

Puzzled now, it was all that Mona could do to take the bread from Se?or Compostela's wrinkled, twisted hands. Her face drained of any hint of color, she hurriedly stuffed the loaves into the cloth sack tied around her waist.

Se?or Compostela received no voiced words of thanks from the girl, and she ran faster than anyone he had ever seen, almost as fleet-footed as a deer. When he turned to retreat back into his shop, he spied her standing there in the distance, watching him watching her, and she nodded once before dashing off into the darkness.

Some things were universal.

Provocation- 1513

Mona Oliveyra would always be a dreamer. Sleep's chaotic landscapre, the nightmares and the sunny skies alike, removed her however briefly from the pain of the waking world. The memories of her childhood were interconnected by dry, dusty trails where four beings moved ahead of her, each one bathed in hazy sun. No matter how fast she ran, the figures remained just out of her reach. Mona knew without knowing who three of them were; her father and her mother and her grandfather, and she saw them as a child would see them, larger than life beings that had once formed the moon and stars of a world long gone. But the little boy that followed at Yael's heels, and again she just knew that the child was a little boy- remained a mystery. It was frustrating but not saddening. They were unattainable, but they were nearby, and the dream had become so recurrent that Mona knew automatically what would happen when they turned to face her.

A large hand on her shoulder, a gentle shake, and then..

?Mona, wake up. Please wake up.?

Bakar?s voice, ragged but ever gentle, repeated those three words over and over again like prayer, coaxing her sweetly into harsh reality. He looked concerned and haggard, his eyes shrouded in shadow. He had not trimmed his beard or his hair in almost a year, and they grew unruly. They were both in rough shape. Mona had grown scrawny, and her skin was yellow with sickness, but her eyes were terribly bright. They often looked far away, glancing off into some world that Bakar could not see.

She would cry out for her family, or talk of them as if they were there in the room, but nothing unnerved Bakar so much as when she spoke to them. Always her grandfather and father, and sometimes, Bakar knew, they answered her back. If there were things like vampires in the world then there were certainly ghosts, and Bakar had no doubt in his mind that Mona was speaking to the dead.

As strange as those times were, what Bakar feared the most was that one day, sooner or later, Mona would call Death to her.

Almost a year had passed since Mahdokht had punished her for her little sojourns, and what a punishment it had been. If Bakar had ever harbored doubts about what the sinister child was capable of, he had but to look at Mona's sickly form to remember.

Her goons had rushed in without warning, and Bakar had nearly killed one of them before the other three could subdue him. It had taken two to restrain Mona, and even she had managed to liberate one of his right ear before they could still her long enough to carry her from the room. She had been all gnashing teeth and angry snarls; animal fear and rage and strength. With his head pressed painfully to the floor, his right arm broken and wrenched behind his back, all that Bakar could see as they carried her off was their feet, and he cried out in a haze of anguish and vitriol, "If you are men then let her go! You are craven! If she is but a girl then let her fight!"

Her screams broke his heart and set him to foaming at the mouth, and for a moment he nearly bested the ghouls pinning him down. The silence that followed ate at the marrow of his bones, but it was brief and the screams that rattled through the halls and his skull would stay with Bakar until he died. They were high and full of pain, and though Mona had never so much as shed a tear in his presence, he could hear her sobbing in between howls of agony. Even the ghouls that held him looked bothered by whatever was happening, and he struggled to free himself, to help her, but his broken arm and the blows that rained down upon him left Bakar helpless.

At some point shock set in and left him spiraling through blissful darkness. At some point they had left him alone, placed more locks upon the doors and left Mona broken and bruised and bleeding upon the bed; crumpled there as if she were nothing but garbage.

That had been nearly a year ago and it was a wretched memory, but one that kept the fire within Bakar lit and blazing.

?I have news,? Bakar crooned, his voice barely above a whisper. Mona managed to pull herself up so that her back was flush to the wall. The Basque smiled weakly and worked a few strands of hair out of her eyes. ?Something or someone destroyed most of Our Horrible Mistress? servants last night.?

Mona?s eyes grew wide with disbelief. ?Who??

Bakar shook his head, his own eyes darting from side to side. ?I don?t know, but I overheard the door guards talking about it. They said that Mahdokht was in dire straits; that she was losing her senses over it.?

It took a long while for Mona?s brain to process what he was saying, and she could not shake the image of the vampires that she had seen during her night time excursions into town- the very same who had seemed so keen on ignoring them when Mahdokht was playing house.

?I have a plan,? Bakar continued, bringing Mona?s small hand to his lips to grace her knuckles with a kiss. ?She will need help, will she not? If someone is trying to rid the world of her. Aside from the guards, we are the only ones she has left.?

?But we are humans,? replied Mona weakly, but he knew he had her interest. She was tangled up in his words like a fly in a spider?s web.

For the first time in a while, Bakar smile became bright. ?That we are, but perhaps there is a way around that.?

Daybreak-1513

Mona did not remember dreaming, and that would have frightened her if she hadn't awoken to full blown frenzy. She wouldn't remember that fledgling hunger, would recall only snippets of the farm boy that had reluctantly provided her first meal. Someone had bathed her- hopefully Bakar- and her new nightgown was soaked in blood. As awareness slowly sunk in, she lifted the edge of the garment to her mouth, sucked the vitae from it and looked to Bakar sitting in his chair.

The door to the room was hanging wide open, and two of Mahdokht's guard ghouls milled about restlessly outside. One poked his head in, nodded once to the newly minted Toreadors, and then went to join his comrade by the window at the end of the hallway.

They were watching the same thing that had Bakar's attention. He did not even look at her, did not offer a smile, but when he spoke his voice was the same as it had always been, albeit just a bit colder. "You are awake. Good."

She wiped her mouth, smearing the blood across her cheeks. "I am so very hungry."

Only Bakar?s eyes moved, and they watched her from the corners of their sockets. "Of course you are. We will find you food soon, but first come here.?

Mona slid out of bed and placed her hand flat against the wall to keep herself upright. She was still not used to moving about on one leg, and though her hops were awkward, there was no pain. Taking her place at Bakar's side, she narrowed her eyes upon the small form lying just yards away from the window; a broken doll with a gnarled piece of wood jutting from its chest. It took a few moments to realize that the body belonged to Mahdokht. ?But how??

He raised a finger to his lips and then pointed to the treeline. From out of the shadows crept two forms, a male and a female. Kindred, both of them, and if they noticed that they were being watched, they did not make it known. Perhaps they did not care, what with their actual prey gift wrapped for them. The blond woman said something to her male counterpart, and with a nod he crouched down at Mahdokht's head.

Grabbing fistfuls of Mahdokht?s dress, he hefted her up and tossed her over his shoulder as if she were little more than a bag of potatoes. A red tear dripped down her cheek, staining the back of the man's shirt. Then as quickly as they had arrived, the duo disappeared with their quarry.

Questions swam through Mona?s head like schools of frightened baby fish, but they never made it to Bakar?s ears. Elsewhere she heard the sounds of locks being undone, and like soldiers leaving war, they watched as Mahdokht's remaining ghouls slowly spilled out into the night. Bakar didn't say a word, and Mona pressed her forehead to his in gratitude. She could not fathom the bravery it took to do what he had done, nor could she understand the pain that staking Mahdokht had caused him.

?We are free, aren?t we? You and I, we are free.?

Bakar placed his hands against her hips and smiled sadly. They were no longer what they had been, but in a way they were no different than the surviving ghouls. A solider could walk away from the battlegrounds, but war was never finished with them. They would carry what had happened with them, not matter how far they ran.

Clatter-1544-1546

A heartbroken Mona left Paris behind without a single farewell spared for her little group of friends. Somewhere along the way back home, Mona began to tear open old wounds, and she became obsessed with the whereabouts of Yael and Nechimiah. She found her way back to Portugal to discover that so little and so much had changed in her absence.

The graveyard where her father was planted remained just as it had been, but the one that harbored the bones of her grandmother Ramona had been turned into grazing land for cattle. She had questioned the farmer living there about it, but the culprits had died a long time ago, and he had no recollection of there ever being a Jewish cemetery there. She thanked him, made good use of the hospitality that he offered and left without so much as a word the following night.

With the exception of that understanding fellow, it would not have paid to ask most of the questions that impregnated her mind. The climate had changed, but not so much that people would take kindly to her asking about the Sephardim. So Mona turned to the place where all of the true heretics gathered; the churches.

Most of the priests were surprisingly kind, and it did not go unnoticed that this usually coincided with how ragged their vestments were. Mona was no threat to them. She was charming enough, and a cripple to boot, and thus they believed her harmless. She repaid kindness with indifference, and even if they could not help her in her journey, they were often more than glad to offer her shelter. For the most part these beings turned a blind eye when she roamed the church for what she sought. Some even went so far as to help her, if only out of disbelief or awe that Mona could read in the first place.

But there were others who were more like the monsters that she remembered from her childhood. They looked upon her with disgust or lust or a mixture of both, tried to turn her away from their doors and the dusty, moldy old tomes that she sought. No matter how well she pretended at being pious, they fought her tooth and nail. For those holy men, her indifference shifted to avarice, and Mona made sure to leave at least one of them a corpse before continuing on her way.

But no matter where she went, she always took the time to look at the lovely, colorful windows and the candle scorched statues of various saints. She held real reverence for only one; that of Raymond Nonnatus, the saint whose name she carried despite being born into a primarily Jewish home.

Once in a blue moon Mona thought she had found what was looking for in the moldering old books, each one penned by one dead clergyman or another. Some languages were familiar, others decipherable only by virtue of her Cainite gifts, but all were left behind.

With a trail of dead and terrified clergy in her wake, Mona eventually gave up. She had traveled from one end of the Alentejo to the other with no luck, and despite the horrors that she had committed, she shed no small amount of sticky red tears. There would be no closure for her, and perhaps that was how it was supposed to be. The murders stopped abruptly, the clergy let loose a collective sigh of relief, but the damage had been done.

News of her chicanery had spread like wildfire through Portugal's undead population. The kine had long since labeled her a monster, but her own kind hoisted upon her the title of a Cadela de Portugal. The Beast took it as a compliment. The Human's heart crumbled. Her reputation had preceded her and bent the ear of a Sabbat Cardinal.

It took two nights into her return to Evora for the man to have her staked and dropped at his feet. When he removed the sharpened bit of rowan wood from her heart, he did so with his knee pressed against her solar plexus. Mona met his dark eyed stared with practiced emptiness and genuine petulance, but the darkness she saw there threatened to devour her whole.

Minist?rio da Ilumina??o- 1546

Aamir and Isidoro were the other two vampires in direct service to Dom Cosimiro. Aamir was a large beast of a man, at least one hand taller than his master, and his skin was the color of a starless night; so black- as it was with most older members of his clan- that the scars that marred him stuck out like bolts of starched lightening. He did not speak, though not for lack of anything say. His tongue had been removed sometime before his Embrace.

Isidoro, on the other hand, was a beast out of a child's nightmares. He was a scrawny, hunched creature with a wrinkled, scabby head crowned by a Caesar ring of greasy black hair. His ears were folded like a dog's, his eyes were small and rheumy, and his flesh always appeared as it were sticky. To add to his loveliness, the Nosferatu carried with him a stench not unlike rancid chicken fat.

Aamir regarded the newest addition to the haven with little love and enough indifference to fill a small crater. Isidoro, on the other hand, was foul mouthed and went to great lengths to make Mona feel as uncomfortable as possible. To her credit, she took his hazing in such stride that even Bakar would have been proud of her.

Dom Cosimiro had placed her in the room that the both of them shared. Isidoro had pushed past her and leaped onto her bed, his yellow toothed grin lascivious. Though he had offered to share the bed with her, provided they both be naked, Mona declined and instead took up in one corner of the room away from his raunchy taunting and Aamir's hateful glares.

The next night, when three ghouls came to fetch her by order of The Cardinal, Mona nearly lost her balance in her haste to leave the room. Isidoro howled with laughter, placed his gnarled fingers between his lips and let loose a wolf whistle while Aamir simply rolled his eyes.

Still wearing rags, still covered in dirt and blood, Mona was lead in front of her new master by the three nameless ghouls. Dom Cosimiro said nothing to her, but he whispered something to the glassy eyed ghoul at her side, and before she knew it she was being lead away. She felt like a feather being whipped around by the wind. The ghouls that accompanied her were neither rude nor overly nice, but they were scared and eager to please, and the two hollowed eyed women that flanked her gripped her arms as if at any moment she might flee.

A male ghoul followed close behind, his eyes fixed upon the back of Mona's head. They offered no words to her, and so she kept quiet. Silence was an important lesson; keeping your head down and your nose to the ground a close second. As they approached a large, ornately carved door, the women released their grip upon her and scurried off with the man in tow.

Her mind was spinning. She was hungry and tired; scared and forlorn. Despite the unease filling her belly, Mona did not want to run. To run would mean death, and though she had never really lived, Mona had always survived. She fixed her pale eyes upon the hellish stone cherub perched above the door, raised her hand slowly and knocked. Minutes slipped by without an answer, and all that she could hear were the hushed sounds of people talking down the hall and the distressed wailing of some unknown man. When the door finally opened, Mona nearly jumped from her skin.

A face peered out at her, and she stared back with a blank expression. It was a man's face, sunken and yellow, with dark almond eyes framed by deep, scarred claw marks. His hazelnut colored hair was thin and sparse, and his smile revealed the absence of most of his teeth. He smiled at her, and it was only then that she realized that she was still holding her fist in the air.

Snap-1546

In her childhood there had been a man who survived by catching rats. He made his rounds through all of the villages, and those he did not outright kill were stuffed into small wooden cages to be used in the barbaric sport of rat-baiting. Yet when he came to Evora, he was always followed by a gaggle of curious children, and Mona had more often than not been among them. One day as they gathered around him, he removed a timid, thin rat from his pocket and stuffed it into a cage holding a rat so large that its belly was nearly bald. While the children watched silently, the rodents sniffed one another, but with no room to move, the larger one pounced upon his smaller cousin and began to rip him to pieces. The rat catcher, content to enjoy his lunch, paid them no heed, and though some of the children seemed thrilled by what they were seeing, others screamed and cried, and in the end all but Mona had left the man to his own devices.

With tears streaming down her cheeks, she stared down at what remained of the rat with such a stricken look that even the rat catcher felt a pang of sympathy. He smiled faintly, looked around for the child's parents, and not seeing them he quickly tossed a filthy rag over the cage. When Mona looked up at him, he had shrugged his shoulders and said "If they are related, they get along, but when outsiders come in.." And the man had tipped his head to the cage and went back to his eating his meal.

Mona thought she knew exactly how that scrawny rat had felt. With Aamir on one side of the room and Isidoro eyeing her from her bed, she moved until her back was pressed against the door. The relief she had felt during her time with the seamstress was melting quickly, and it was completely gone by the time Isidoro made it to his feet.

While Aamir peppered his disapproving glares with derisive snorts, the Nosferatu hobbled ever closer, and Mona could feel her lips beginning to peel back to place her teeth on display. She would not go out like the rat had; she would not allow herself to be eaten so easily. The stench of him was almost overpowering, but the feigned breath that brushed across her neck was not unlike a charnel house. If he had moved an inch closer then she would have tried to put her fist through Isidoro's face. Therefore it was fortunate for the both of them that he had stopped when he did. He tipped his head to the side, his doggish ears slapping the sides of his skull, and she could feel his eyes upon her neck.

"Do you know what they say about man?"

His voice was as greasy as his appearance, but now it was soaked with unease. She clung to that desperately and shrugged one pale shoulder. Isidoro, his cloudy eyes suddenly alight with good humor, clapped his gnarled hands together. "They say he is ever as ready to copulate as a donkey, and would were it not for his purse strings!"

Isidoro's laughter was worse than the joke, high pitched and as ragged as a wild dog's. She did not see Aamir roll his eyes, but she can almost feel his disdain. A smile slowly crept across her lips, and Isidoro guffawed for a moment longer before pointing at her with a crooked finger.

"See? Smiling is what life is about," he grinned and his teeth were as crooked as broken piano keys. "Remember that Old Isidoro has told you this." Mona didn't so much as flinch when he placed a long cracked black nail beneath her chin and tipped her head back. "You learn to smile even when you are miserable and you will get through anything."

Another snort issued forth from Aamir, and the Nosferatu stepped back and shook his head. "Do not mind Aamir so much. He does not care for the change. You are here because The Cardinal, he wants you here. The last paladino, eh, he was not so..."

What the last paladin had been, Mona never knew. Aamir cut the Nosferatu off simply by standing up, and he bumped into Isidoro's shoulder so hard on his way out of the room that he nearly knocked him over. When he was gone, Isidoro pushed himself away from Mona's side and flopped back down onto her bed.

Mona fingered the golden silk sash at her waist and took a step closer to him. "He does not talk much."

The Nosferatu opened one eye and watched her, his fingers steepled above his stomach. "You noticed?" Clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, his eyes moved to the blackened ceiling. Mona's eyes followed. Blackened like the statues of Raymond Nonnatus, forever frozen with a lock upon his lips. "He has no tongue," quipped Isidoro. "I see it as a good thing. There are a lot of thoughts inside of him and none of them need a voice."

Mona nodded her head in understanding and smoothed down the sides of her new gown. "Why does he not have a tongue?"

"I have never asked, and you should not either. It would be like asking you how you lost your leg."

While Mona surveyed the sparse contents of their room, Isidoro eyed her expectantly. Though he did not voice the question, it hung in the air like fruit from a tree. He expected her to tell him, and that made her nervous. "A shark took it," she muttered softly.

The Nosferatu cocked one ear up and blinked. "How did a shark eat your leg?"

She shook her head and looked him in the eye. "I did not say that a shark ate it, Senhor. I said that a shark took it."

And Isidoro wasn't sure that he wanted to know the difference.

Perspicacity-1599

The villa was lovely in pink and peach and yellow; warm colors to offset its peculiar lack of windows. The inside painted a different picture altogether; one of mayhem, victory and defeat. The furniture was broken, the legs of more unfortunate chairs lying broken in putrid puddles of decay. Bodies lay scattered about; revenant men and women and children. There were skeletons draped over chairs, their mouths either frozen in agony or their bottom jaws hanging against their chests as if they were mocking the other corpses still in the throes of decomposition. The smell was terrible, a miasma that did not go unnoticed by the two perpetrators standing in the middle of the room.

Mona looked up from the prone, panic eyed body of the staked vampire she was dragging to the door. ?Do you think I will die like they did??

The question broke the thick and seemingly endless strand of silence that had bloomed between the two of them. Dom Cosimiro forced an inhale through the flimsy shield of his handkerchief, but the feigned breath stopped there. The smell of rot was burning his throat. ?What??

He moved his eyes sideways to glimpse the girl as she struggled with her burden. Mona would forever be small and she wore the gore of their crime as elegantly as he his silks and satins. Her eyes shifted, rolled just enough to lock onto his. ?Do you think I will die like they did??

Dom Cosimiro peered out over the wreckage, his mouth twisted into a scowl behind the handkerchief. It was not within him to worry about the fate of another (at least one who had not tried to kill him). People died, undead or hearts beating, and that was the one thing that they all had in common.

He stepped over the corpses and held the door open for her with a grim expression upon his lips. ?Do I think you will die like they did??

She nodded once, twice and as she dragged the paralyzed vampire out into the darkness, her mestre followed behind. ?No, Mona. I do not think you will die like this, and because I know you, because I know that you will ask why like a child, let me explain.?

Mona tipped her head slightly to one side to better hear her superior. Her arms were aching, her hunger roaring, and once they had put some ground between themselves and the villa turned tomb, she released the staked vampire from her grasp, his head hitting the ground.

Dom Cosimiro snorted and with his defenses still up, his ears still fixed on their surroundings in anticipation of hoof beats, he lowered the handkerchief from his face and began. ?You will not die like this because these are the deaths of wild animals, the kind who mindlessly revel in eating their own young. These creatures, for I will not dignify any of them with the title of Cainite, lived only to usurp with no thought as to what they would have done had they succeeded,? he paused long enough to spit into the prone vampire's eye. "The revenants were pawns. Regardless, no one will mourn any of them. No one will paint them with the brush of the martyr. Their game has ended and they have lost and no one will be worse off for it. You have a purpose. You understand that if this state of being is a game, it is one to be played for eternity. You cannot win nor can you lose. You simply play. Your purpose today was to declare this match in our favor, and you have done this. You understand your place, Mona, as well as you understand my own. If they had destroyed me then what would have happened? Everyone knows that there are worse demons than me running around.?

Mona thought his answer a nice one but still it left her wanting. Surrounded by death while yet it still courted her, Mona nodded once more to signal that she understood. That he had even deigned to humor her was enough to leave her satisfied.

None of their kind would find these bodies, and the younger vampires and the revenants would have remained entombed in the sunshiney walls of the lovely little villa had a passing farmer not complained four days later of the smell permeating through the walls. The staked vampire, however, had to wait for daylight to meet his Final Death.

Mona had developed a penchant for disposing of other Cainites by way of sunlight, and for that she became something other than The of Portugal. That day she had become Dom Cosimiro's Sun Cat, for he had yet to meet any creature so like a cat as Mona Oliveira.

When the hoof beats never came, as if it was the Universes? way of punctuating the point of The Cardinal?s story, Dom Cosimiro and Mona abandoned the house and its macabre collection to join up with Isidoro and Aamir.

If existence was a game, Mona could only choose to keep playing. What other choice did she have?

Solymar

Mona truly blossomed in Tavira. Evora would never fade from her heart, but it slowly began to fade from her mind. The sights and the sounds, the benediction of the crisp salt air seemed to calm the wild horror of her soul. When she was not following orders from Dom Cosimiro, one could almost always find her sitting in the sand and looking out over the churning waters of the Atlantic with an expression both pensive and content. There was a whole wide world beyond those waters, she knew; places where she had never been, as unknown to her as the deepest parts of the sea.

But Mona was not the only one enraptured by the ocean's spell. Every once in a blue moon, she would be joined by Aamir, and they would sit yards away from one another, often in complete silence. That he even deigned to move into her orbit surprised and delighted Mona.

Then one day she stumbled upon him sparring with some imaginary assailant, the blade of the sword he brandished razor sharp and as strong and pliable as bamboo. She could hear it whistle as it sliced through the air, and she watched the way the Assamite moved in awe. Mona had fought alongside Aamir in the past, but she had rarely ever seen him because of how fast he moved and how easily he blended into the shadows.

He was graceful and nimble, as surefooted as a mountain goat, and neither sand nor rock seemed to deter him. It almost seemed, to Mona at least, that he was dancing. When he brought the blade up and down in a diagonal swipe, effectively ending his pretend attacker, Mona stood up from where she sat and clapped. Aamir turned his bald head slowly and the way that he looked at Mona had her dropping her hands to her sides. "That was amazing, Aamir."

The Assamite rubbed his shoulder and looked off to the side, his eyes fixed upon the scuttling form of small, pale crab. Mona was used to quiet between them, it was, in a way, how they communicated, but suddenly she was too aware that his stare had found its way back to her, and it was ever a heavy thing regardless of the emotion it carried; like a branch doomed with too much snow.

You lack discipline. His voice wasn't really a voice at all, but the words filled her head loud and clear like cannon fire. She had heard one sided conversations between Aamir and Isidoro before, but it was only then that she realized that Aamir had been speaking too in the only way he knew how. Her face an expressionless mask, but her inner workings straining against the shock- Over two hundred years and those were the first words that Aamir ever 'spoke' to her- Mona stared up at the dark man against the dark sky in wonder.

"I am not," she agreed, nodding once. "Not so disciplined as that."

You fight like an animal.

There she nodded again, but that his eyes had traveled to her ivory leg filled her with unease. The Assamite approached her slowly and he tossed her a twisted length of driftwood plucked from the sand. That may pass as fighting for Our Cardinal, but it will get you killed sooner or later.

She caught the piece of wood, felt the countless bits of sand scrape across her skin, and her hesitation gave way to indignation. But she knew he was right, and there was no shortage of people that would like to see her fake leg hanging over their fireplaces. The moment she began to ease up, Aamir pushed her down with his own piece of driftwood, and he centered the ragged, pointed end against her solar plexus. We are not playing. You forget what you are.

Mona didn't understand what he meant. She had never once forgotten what she was or what she had been, and be it out of stubborn pride or true ignorance, Aamir bested her at every turn. In the end he left her sprawled out in the sand, her ivory leg tucked beneath his arm.

For weeks on end, when time permitted, the Assamite would educate Mona, and every time he would admonish her for forgetting what she was. No matter how angry she became, or how frustrated, his lesson remained too obtuse for her, and his disappointment at her defeat hurt more than the wounds he left her.

She thought he would give up on her, but Aamir never did, and her little victories- the ability to move through sand, to parry an attack and return blow for blow- were met with little celebration. You forget what you are. The words became an obsession, and when she asked Isidoro what it meant, she was met with a shrug. Aamir would certainly not tell her, and even Dom Cosimiro was left without an answer to give her. She was so many things, after all, so what was she forgetting?

She remembered the night that Aamir announced his intention to end her without a lick of malice. Mona became terrified, and that only intensified when he traded his hunk of driftwood for his sword. She could not dodge every blow, but she knew which ones to avoid. She discarded her own stick out of fear, shifted her weight from her fake leg to her flesh and blood one with an ease that left nary a footprint in the sand. He pinned her to the ground, but she managed to roll free in time to see his blade stir up sand, or hear it strike rock, and when his sword swung so close to her ear that she could hear its cry, Mona suddenly remembered.

She was a Toreador, a child of the Clan of the Rose. A darker shade of her Camarilla cousins to be true, but Arikel's blood coursed through her just the same. With her teeth gritted and red foam dotting her lips, Mona began to match Aamir move for move as if she knew what he would do before he did. For lack of an actual weapon, she drove her elbows into his guts, pushed her weight into the backs of his knees and managed to remove her ivory leg to strike him with such a quickness that her body had no time to realize that it was gone.

When they had finished, and she knew they had finished from the way that Aamir slumped over across the hilt of his sword, panting like a dog in the Summer heat, Mona stumbled back to the spot in the sand where she had set so many times before and focused her wild gaze upon the waves. The man joined her in short order, but not yards away. He sat down not a foot away from her, and when she looked at him from the corners of her eyes, Aamir was smiling.

Tegan- 1982

America held no sway for Mona at first. Everything was loud and cold. Pavement stretched as far as the eye could see, and she grew so homesick that she was loath to take into account where she was or who she was with until she ran afoul of some Camarilla Prince. She grew sloppy there and it nearly killed her.

Mona had not heard from Dom Cosimiro since she had left, though she was certain her conversations with Isidoro made it back to him. By the time she reached London, she looked worse for the wear and days without feeding had left her starving and her humanity wavering.

London was no better. She didn't understand the language, just as she hadn't understood it in America. The city was as crowded as Lisbon, as loud as Chicago had been, and each noise brought wicked memories to the forefront of her mind. Every horrible thing she had ever done, every horrible thing that had ever been done to her visited her in flashes of recollection that left her still and shaken.

She had managed to hole herself away in the moldy basement of library, and even that fell more and more upon the Beast's shoulders, for it had no designs on falling prey to the sun's fatal beams. She fed from rats and junkies, but for the most part their blood went towards fueling her need for sleep, for the inescapable torpor that she knew would come any day. She began to wonder if Dom Cosimiro had left her with the title of paladino as a lark.

But she wasn't alone in that damp chamber. The being stayed to the shadows at first, just beneath the scope of Mona's awareness, and at first she believed the place to be haunted. That was far less disconcerting than reality. The being was tall, taller than even Aamir, and as slender as a reed. Its skin was so pale that it was almost blue, its eyes a sea of black that reflected no light and its ears long and delicately pointed. It dripped black lace that swished and whispered as it moved, and Mona wondered, vaguely, if perhaps it was an alien. It looked too other to be Kindred.

It didn't bother her and so she remained content for awhile to simply watch it from her nest of mildewed books. It seemed far more interested in the paper and ink contents of the library than her. It was the being's presence that kept Mona from torpor, everything about it a walking curiosity, and she began to look forward to its visits, even if she wasn't sure that it was centered in the same reality as she was.

Eventually that curiosity grew too strong, and while it pondered over some ancient tome written in Latin and reeking of rot, Mona cleared her throat and steeled herself. "Ol??"

The creature turned, every movement as deliberate as the flapping of a butterflies wings, and it occurred to Mona that the being was female. She looked into its dark eyes, her core growing ice cold with anticipation and fear, and when it smiled she smiled. "Oh, goodness me! You do live here, don't you? I forget. You are so dreadfully quiet."

Her voice was raspy, harsh, and while it was not too friendly it was by no mean inhospitable. Mona had no idea what she had said, and she must have looked it, because a moment later the creature was moving closer to her. "You look a fright! Was that Portuguese? Do you..." But she stopped talking and peered down to where the point of Mona's cane pressed into the hollow of her throat. Her blue pale mouth formed around a perfect 'o'.

Mona, her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed tightly together, slowly found her feet and motioned with her head to the book that the creature had been reading. The alien woman blinked her almond shaped eyes and followed the trail of Mona's gaze without moving too much, lest the cane puncture her flesh. "Oh yes. I am..I am a bit of a bookworm, I must admit."

"O que voc? ??"

"What am I? Well, I am what you are."

Mona's brow furrowed, drawing out the slight wrinkle between them, and while she did not lower her cane, she kept it where it was. The creature made no move to fight her, but there was an intelligence in her eyes, a deep and dark cunning that bespoke of abilities that were best left alone. Around them the shadows grew dense. "How good are you with that cane, dear?" But her words reached Mona's ears in perfect Portuguese.

The cane seemed as if it hadn't move at all, but the lace at the waist of the creature's dress, now severed, floated to the ground between them. "Qual ? o seu nome?"

"Tegan Milburn, now, if you would please..." but when she went to place a finger upon the cane, to distance its tip from her throat, Mona pressed harder and showed her every one of her teeth. Tegan nodded her head. "Alright then. How about we come to an agreement."

Mona's eyes darted from side to side before returning to her, and she nodded. "Estou ouvindo."

"Excellent. If you should teach me to wield my umbrella the way you do that cane, I could prove very helpful in teaching you English. Your gifts and my gifts, in that department, can only reach so far."

The paladino considered and slowly lowered the cane. The toes of her remaining leg curled in her tattered shoes. "Bem."

"Good. Now watch my mouth and do try to keep up."

(Tegan used with the permission of her player.)

Push-2010

With so much room to play, Mona eventually found her calling.

As dangerous as it was, there were worst jobs than that of Fixer.

To be fair the job of a Fixer was a pretty sweet one. All one needed was a good head about them and a group of like-minded, loyal (or loyal and stupid) individuals. On paper it seemed simple;

*Get a drop on those small businesses having trouble with hooligans strong-arming them for ?protection? money.
*Quote a price to the owners, gather your pay and go about persuading those hoodlums away from the establishment by any means at your disposable.
*Word gets around, business booms, and The Big Guys start offering jobs, pulse-having or not.

Mona didn't bother with views anymore, not after a bullet with her name on it had shattered a hotel window that she happened to be standing in front of back in Queens. It had startled her more than she would have let on, and it had taken too many hours with a screwdriver to dig the bullet from her shoulder.

In their defense, whoever they were, they were pretty indiscriminate about which one of her troops they took out. Mona had learned that after having her little team trimmed from twelve to six a few months back, and her numbers had never really recouped. Not that she tried to recruit.

She had her core group, and that was what mattered, but ghouls were no better than junkies, and they knew where their mistress slept. So it was important to make sure they understood not to bite the hand that fed them. Dom Cosimiro would have been proud.

But Detroit was suffocating Mona. She had never in her long life seen such a gray corpse of a city. Houses lay empty on unkempt lots like mouthfuls of rotten teeth in decaying sockets. Abandoned business buildings loomed as dangerous reminders to people and their cars alike of what the city had once been. It was that depression and her increasing paranoia that had Mona pacing in between jobs. Once in a blue moon someone would knock at her door, and that someone was usually Bart Fitzroy asking if she needed a ride somewhere, but that particular night she was left with her thoughts.

She was becoming something she had always hated; a trapped animal.

?It is a habit that I have developed,? she said to no one, the only other pair of ears around belonging to the image of a long dead Hendrix on a ratty old poster, and even he seemed too interested in his guitar to pay the nude little weirdo any mind. ?They keep shooting?but if I keep moving then they will have a harder time hitting me.?

Just saying it put her slightly at ease, but she couldn't shake the feeling of dread blooming like a blight devoured rose in her stomach. Tonight was a simple enough job; breakup the reunion between a local, newly returned protection racket and the owners of Pop Sammy?s Pizza. Easy peasey. Child?s play. It didn?t occur to her that Whomever Might Reside Above was, at that very moment, perusing their gun rack, or that this being enjoyed a good chase.

Someone knocked at the door and she froze. Mona had never been able to completely shake away the idea that such an act, as commonplace as breathing, meant that the person on the other side had come to do her in.

"Mona? It's almost eight, we gotta jet," rolled out Bart's voice, and Mona's shoulders slumped in relief as she buttoned up her blouse. Slipping into a worn leather coat along the way and checking herself in the mirror one last time, she stepped out into the hallway to stand beside of Bart. Leaving the door unlocked had become a sort of ritual. They wouldn't be coming back anyway.

"It's nice outside. Not too cold yet," mumbled the ghoul, his voice so painfully Mid-western. When he offered his arm to her, she took it, and scooted a bit closer to him to steal some of his warmth.

Most of the group were already waiting in the car, while the one called Tony waited at Sammy's. They were all eager for their next feeding save for Teo, a Toreador whose balls Mona kept in her purse, and history had taught him that being bound to the Iberian was about as safe as swimming in a pool of crocodiles.

While Bart took his usual spot behind the wheel, his mind already calculating just how fast he could send the little 'Stang over the limit before the boys in blue took notice, Mona squeezed in next to a stone faced Teo. Her other boys, Alphonso and Chuckles, greeted her with an almost identical pair of nods.

"Do we have everything?" She asked over the delicious purr of the Mustang's engine, and Chuckles twisted around in the passenger seat, his dull blue eyes lighting first upon her legs and then her face.

"Got all we need, Mona," he raised a brow, "s'gonna be a big piece a' cake."

She smiled her slow smile at him, and when the car pulled out of its spot to the tune of squealing tires, Mona tried to relax. The ghouls, excluding Bart, yammered on about this and that, unaware of how very spooked their boss was.

As one street corner bled into another and Mona had almost convinced herself that there was nothing to worry about, Teo clamped a cold hand onto one of her shoulders.

"You feel it too, don't you?"

Though his lips didn't move, she heard him loud and clear. She nodded once, shrugged his hand away and turned her attention back to the world passing by just beyond the window.

She felt it, alright. Whatever was waiting for them had been waiting for a very long time.

Hobble-2010

Mona awoke to cramped darkness. Her efforts to move were met with resistance from all sides, and while the world still rolled on around her, the sounds that reached her ears were muffled, save for a near constant scratching.

Rats. A grave. Someone had buried her alive and what she heard was rats trying to get to her. She wouldn't be granted the mercy of suffocation. She would just continue on and on and on until?

?Hey hey hey,? came a familiar voice, and Mona?s eyes widened in the dark. ?Gimme a second, Boss Lady. Let me get off the street first.?

And the scratching commenced for a few more minutes, but that was all the time that Mona?s mind needed to calm down. Bart had her. Now when she concentrated, she could hear him breathing and grunting.

Tucked away from prying eyes by virtue of another alleyway, Bart lowered the battered old steamer trunk to the ground. Looking over his shoulder, first to the left and then the right, his thumbs caught the tops of twin locks and popped them open. Then he stepped back to give the jostled vampire some breathing room. "You might notice that something?s missing,? he said apologetically, his eyes following Mona?s to the empty left leg of her jeans. ?That leg was ruined. The stump is probably tender because there's still some bits of it in there."

Mona?s mouth fell beneath the weight of a slow motion frown, and after a moment of thought, she gripped her tattered trouser leg and began to roll it up. A little sore was an understatement, and the flesh was as shiny and slick as the skin of an apple. A few bits of twisted metal and charred wood fell from the cuff, pushed free by a day?s worth of healing. ?You dragged me around in this box?? Mona asked, her voice soaked in surprise and her face lifted, her eyes trying to catch his. ?All day??

Bart cleared his throat, turned his head to one side and spat out something that made an audible splat against the concrete, but his eyes didn't leave her?s. ?Well, yeah. You usually find dead girls in hotel rooms. You don?t bring them with you. It?s like bad etiquette or something.?

Mona smiled and nodded her head. "Say no more." It was a distinct possibility that every vampire in the city was looking for them, not to mention their more day friendly ghouls, and Mona silently praised her companion's cleverness.

Sometimes Mona forgot that she was missing a leg, but she was reminded the moment she tried to push herself to her feet. Bart flinched. It was a painful thing to watch. Though he never asked if Mona needed help, and though Mona rarely asked for his aid, he slipped his forearms beneath her arms and carefully helped her up from the box, his feet parting just enough to support her weight when she leaned into him. ?No explosions yet,? he joked, one arm braced against her back. He shuddered as her own pale limb draped itself across his shoulders, the chill of her flesh startling the fever heat of his own.

?No,? she replied, her hops falling in line with his footfalls. ?Not yet.?

As their movements began to sync up, Bart looked around the desolate stretch of city, chewed up and spit out and bleached by the sun, and he laughed. Soon Mona joined in with him. Both of them were exhausted, and Bart's body was beginning to ache from helping Mona hobble about; pukishly sweet pain like a rotten tooth throbbing somewhere in his lower back. They eventually happened upon a group of hoodlums taking turns pushing one another around a parking lot in a stolen grocery cart. Bart and Mona shared a conspiratorial look, and Bart cupped his hand around his mouth and shouted at the children, his voice booming, and his tone reeking of misplaced authority.

"Hey! Hey! You little ! Get the out of here before I call the cops!"

Their faces terrified but still belligerent in the dingy glow of a streetlight, the three teenagers ran off as fast as their sneakers could carry them, screaming obscenities and waving their middle fingers in the air along the way.

"Nice work," said Mona with a tired smile as Bart helped her into the abandoned cart.

"Yeah," came Bart's reply, but his mind was elsewhere.

Hungry and worn out, the ghoul was not, however, stupid, and the sudden silence that pierced the parking lot struck him as fundamentally wrong. Mona sensed it too, and suddenly Bart was pushing her along the asphalt, his backpain temporarily forgotten. Something darted in and out of their peripheral vision; something big and angry that, when looked at head on, revealed itself to be nothing more than a malnourished cur. As the asphalt gave way to rain sodden, weed eaten Earth, the cart almost bogged down in the mud, leading Bart to shake it from side to side while Mona's pale little fingers gripped the edges to keep from tumbling out.

" this ," growled Bart, both he and his boss aware of footfalls approaching them, slurching through the mud.
The pain now a distant memory, Bart wasted no time removing Mona from the cart. She clambered around him, climbed him like a pet monkey, and wrapped her leg around his waist, her arms draping over his shoulders.

"Where are you going?" called a man's voice as smooth as butter, and Bart froze where he stood despite Mona's heel digging into his side.

The world melted into an acid trip around them, the harmless streetlamp twisting into the gnarled, bump riddled hand of some ancient horror god; the asphalt a churning river of hot tar. It was Mona's turn to fall prey to the Dementation, her arms and leg tightening around the ghoul, her stump desperately trying to do the same while her eyes squeezed shut. Bart steeled himself against the barrage, muttered comforting words to his shaking boss while still trying to keep his head about him. Even for Kindred, Malkavians were dangerous, their madness a weapon, and the man approaching them was nothing if not bad news.

As if sensing that Bart was thinking of running, the man held one hand up and suddenly the world went black.

Extract- 2010

?There is always people trying to take control,? Mona explained, the crutch salvaged from a pile of junk in the basement a true blessing for both her mobility and Bart?s poor back. ?I was busy with Teo in Rome, so I do not know what happened to Carmine, but whatever it was must have been really bad."

Bart listened in between grateful breaths of air- still Detroit smog, but better than the dusty miasma of the basement. They weren't sure where they were going, and each one held tight to the acrid hope that they would stumble upon Carmine before he stumbled upon them. Mona stared off as she often did when speaking at great lengths, the look of one who could fit themselves so perfectly into the puzzle of their past no matter how many years had gone by.

?I know he came to Portugal with his coterie. He started in the north, but The Cardinal there put a kabash on whatever he had planned the moment she laid eyes on him. She culled his group, I know that much, but he was never looking for her to begin with. He wanted meu mestre."

Master. That seemed to unnerve Bart, but the way she said the word hinted at a master/apprentice relationship and nothing darker than that. They rounded a corner and came across a defunct, ivy devoured bridge, and while Bart sat down to rest his aching body, Mona loomed over him like a grim little shadow.

"Meu mestre, he always kept a lot of ki?? she caught herself when Bart looked up at her, ?ghouls because he was so paranoid. He was already very old, and this thing, it happens, because you do not make Cardinal without stepping upon people. I didn't know that he had anything to do with what had happened to Carmine in Italia, but it isn't like some big surprise.?

She drew her tongue across her lips and continued only with the blessing of a nod from Bart. ?We went to visit the north to get information on him, and while we were gone he tried to burn down our haven. It was not the first time it had happened, but the ghouls there..they fought him off. No one was really harmed and so much time passed that eventually we thought he had forgotten, but Cosimiro does not forget things, and eventually he gathered us up, there were three of us, his cavaleiros, and he took us straight to where Carmine?s group lived.?

Bart listened carefully, for Mona so rarely spoke at such lengths, and never about her past. ?So then what happened??

?We killed his servants," and she shrugged casually.

Bart?s eyes had moved beyond Mona to study a car sitting at a gas station across the street. Its owner had just abandoned it to fetch a few items, unaware of the ne'er-do-well eyeing it from beneath the nearby bridge.

?He wasn?t among them, you know? Obviously. We did not even know what he looked like.?

?Then how do you know that it?s the same guy??

He turned to find Mona looking at the car too, her look too thoughtful to be good. ?Some things you just know.?

Bart seemed to know how to steal a car, that much was certain. Painters, writers, sculptors, and composers could happily count Bart Fitzroy among their number, his mastery of all things automobile nothing less than a work of art. Even though the stolen rolling piece of junk grunted and groaned in protest, Bart managed to fluidly navigate Detroit?s streets without so much as bumping his curious little passenger. Mona and her Presence helped too, and cops and regular commuters alike gave them the sort of wide berth reserved for local celebrities and politicians.

The radio blared an angry preacher?s message at them; grainy, old wire whining threats of heaven and hell rattling from the speakers.

And God shall smite those he finds *vvvfftt* unworthy..

?This station, it is so gloomy,? muttered Mona, her dark hair whipping wildly in the warm summer wind.

?Knob's broke, so good luck changing it,? lamented Bart.

Heed my words, glorious members of His Flock. Our day will come when we will rise above those that *zrrrttiiipp* -press us.

Mona pulled the spattered corpse of a gnat from her teeth and eyed it curiously. ?I never really understood how the majority of anything can be repressed, you know??

Bart chuckled and was about to say something when the static disappeared, giving way to a smoother voice, its undercurrent as cracked as the sigil of the speaker?s clan.

A stupid question from a stupid girl. Are you not too old to be asking such childish things?

Though alarmed, Bart managed to coast the car to a complete stop. Both he and Mona looked at one another, each wearing almost identical masks of tired, pissed off confusion.

You escaped, eh? Good. Hunting is wasted if you do not have fun with your prey first.

Mona jerked her head sharply towards the back of the car, and heeding the silent command, Bart eased out of the door and headed for the trunk.

?This is hunting to you, Carmine? Angering people more powerful than you are??

Leave it to Sabbat trash to think themselves better than the world.

Her eyeroll was wasted. She flicked the gnat's corpse out of the window. ?But Senhor, I do not mean me. Your explosion, it killed more than you think. Sammy was a ghoul. A plant, you know? The Prince of New York, she put him where he was so that he could spy. So if I am wanted by you, you have a Prince ready to rip your throat out."

Chiudi il becco!

Bart lifted his head up. ?You not talking about it doesn?t make you any less wrong, dude!?

Beneath an old, mud streaked tarp, Bart found the sort of random junk that one would suspect in a car better off scrapped. But amidst the jumper cables, mildewed clothing and assorted small tools, the mage hit pay dirt. A red gasoline can, and a shake revealed it half full. A fitting tool in the crazy coincidence that favored Bart Fitzroy. Half listening to the conversation going on inside of the car, he missed Mona?s reply, but Carmine?s was practically screamed.

Run wherever you want, you awful little dog, I?ll find you! I?ll always find you!

If there was anything else to be said from the lunatic, it was devoured by dead air when Bart ripped the radio from its harness and sent it flying into a trash laden ditch. Then he passed the can to Mona and slipped behind the wheel to start the car. ?Man, they?ll put anyone on the radio these days.?