Roberto knocks discretely on the library's open door. "There's a man walking up the driveway."

In times of stress, Roberto reverts to Portuguese, which alarms me more than the news does. I look up from my books and the notes I've been typing, make one last entry. "What does he look like?"

"Big, aryan. Has a mark on his cheek in blood."

Norn. I am relieved for a moment and wonder which one has decided to grace us with his presence when I hear a booming voice so loud that I can hear it all the way in the library, although I can't precisely make out words. "What did this mark happen to look like?" I ask, even as I start walking towards the front door.

Roberto hurries beside me, holds up one finger vertically, and two more perpendicular to the first to make a line with a sideways triangle. I wrack my mind for a moment trying to remember which one that is. By the time I get to the front door, I remember.

Thurisaz. The giant. Also, danger to women. Charming. ( Oh, lovely. )

The moon is bright overhead where Christian and I lay. The lawn, by some miracle, is dry and even the cicadas are quiet.

"It's beautiful," I say, drawing closer to his body, my head on his shoulder and pressing against him, even though it is too warm.

He nods, tightening his arm around my shoulders.

"Do you ever miss them?" I ask. I walk my fingers up his chest and then draw a lazy spiral around his buttons.

He knows who I'm talking about, but he says nothing for a long moment. Then, he kisses my forehead. "No. Not ever."

Zacharie's scent has always been peculiar to him. Fresh earth and loam, dark rum and blood. It follows him and surrounds him in a comforting cloud untouched by Josephine's scent of champagne and strawberries, Donatien's musk, or my own juniper. Even here in San Francisco where salt from the ocean mixes with hydrocarbons and in some places is overlain with decaying garbage and human shit; far away from New Orleans and his cemeteries, his scent lingers still, as if any moment he will step back through a gateway and return once more to marble mausoleums and his own small cottage.

The letter from Zacharie tells me as much with what it doesn't say as by what it does. He writes that he is recently awakened but well. He writes that the world has changed a great deal. He asks after me and our family.

What he doesn't say is how terrifying the world is, or how fast it moves, or how little reverence there is for what our family does and has done. In each question there is a world of hurt and fear. I tell him to come to me, and here he will find home with his heart.

The difference between the very old and the very young is in the elders' inability to see possibility. The very young see nothing but possibility. The very old simply cannot.

Not all lose the trick, of course. Kincaid, canny creature that she is, sees possibility in every corner, in the soul and breath of every neonate that crosses her path. Behind her eyes is a question: If this, then what? Machinations beyond mortal ken thrive in a fertile mind, and with every raised eyebrow and smirk as she looks at me, I wonder at what ifs she has in store.

Okay, so some of you have asked, what's with the drabbles? And what is a drabble? I try not to post too much OOC stuff here, but sometimes it's necessary.

A drabble is a piece of short fiction that is exactly one hundred words long, no more, no less. And I personally love them. I like evoking emotion in a hundred words, telling a story, or alluding to something more. The best part? They're exactly one hundred words. I have time for one hundred words. I can write one hundred words in just a few minutes. I don't have time to write is never an excuse. I can do one hundred words.

A friend of mine started using drabble charts, which are HTML tables with prompts in each cell, usually a single word or a phrase. In this case, every time I've written a drabble from the prompt, I put a link in the table. It's a little more time consuming, but it's entirely worth the effort.

That being said, I've been soliciting prompt requests from people. I am firmly of the opinion that one of the most interesting parts of writing in the Cam is seeing your characters through another's eyes. This is an opportunity to do so in a low stress, easy way.

So, your job: go here and select an unused prompt (you can tell the unused ones because they aren't linked). Tell me what it is. I'll write one hundred words using that prompt about your character through MA's eyes. There's no stress. No need to buy in. No need to repeat the meme. No need to post this in your own journal. I want to make it through my last 49 prompts before the end of the year and start a new style of chart. Seriously, that's all it takes.

What I offer Vincent is a taste, the barest hint of the power he could have if he follows me down this path. Unlike Ian, he has a choice. Unlike Etienne, he knows what it is.

Unlike both of them, Vincent craves power like a starving man craves food or a drowning man craves air. And unlike those, he will continue on even if he never achieves it.

But he craves it unceasingly, and I offer it to him in drops and pieces, knowing that if I just lead him on long enough, he will follow it wherever it leads.

I know who it is before Roberto announces him. Ribedeaux’s presence slips and slides over one’s skin like the little fingers of the spirits we both purport to call. Regardless, I’m still pleased as ever to see him and from his grin, the feeling is entirely mutual.

“Henry,” I greet him. “It’s unlike you to come to me.”

“Perhaps. But tonight, I have something special in mind, if you’re clever enough to guess it.”

He has said the magic words and I am entirely interested in what new trick he will propose to teach me before the night is out.

Fall is different here than it is in other places. A gradual shift in climate from warm summer days to cold rains. In December, all the leaves fall, torn from their branches by tempestuous winds. Here, what fall really means is “harvest.”

Etienne watches it all with a smirk and a glass of wine in one hand. “Why don’t you throw parties like you used to?” he asks me.

“I haven’t had someone to host them with.” It’s truth of a sort.

He smiles knowingly and pulls me in with a strong arm to lay a kiss on my lips.

Alexander, the clockmaker’s son, has come to fix the grandfather clock again. He’s been in the foyer all afternoon and the sun his heading towards the horizon line fast. I want to get him out of here before Josephine wakes and decides he looks like a nice snack, so I hover on the stairs, waiting impatiently for him to finish.

“C’mon,” I tell him once he’s nearly done. “I’ll walk you home.”

If I had told him that I would be giving him a puppy (or at that age, a nubile girl), he couldn’t possibly have looked any more pleased.

It feels like it’s always raining – possibly because it is. I am stuck in the house waiting for Donatien and Josephine to make their nightly appearance, but the night wears on, and rain pounds on the roof and against the shutters with no sign of them.

Finally, I can’t stand it anymore and I make my escape to the cemetery Zacharie tends. On a night like this one, even he doesn’t venture far outside and I find him in the caretaker’s cottage. He opens the door to my insistent knock and welcomes me in with a smile warmer than fire.

May leans on the shovel above me while I kneel in the hole we made together. My own spade rests to one side. Each body has a ghost, and each ghost will not be appeased until it has been laid to rest.

The weather is dry and the bodies fresh enough, that they have not yet begun to stink. For this, I am grateful.

Once each one has been prayed over, May offers me a hand out of the grave we’ve dug. I hesitate, then take her dark hand in my light one and together we fill in the grave.

Some Acolytes ask me in what ways the Lance are different from us. I point to Jacob and ask, “What do you see?”

The answer is different, of course, for everyone who views him. In this, we two are alike. Some see the powerful Sorcerer. Some see the staunch Priest. Some see the tweedy Academic.

“No,” I say. “What do you see?”.

And they look again. Another set of answers.

Only once am I ever asked what I see.

“A man,” I say, “flawed and imperfect, moving through life and trying to be untouched. He fails miserably in that goal.”

Per Leanne White: "At this time there is no intention to sanction the bloodlines and mechanics from Ancient Bloodlines for play in the chronicle."

Well, shit.

I feed on females rarely, but tonight I wanted something different.

I look down at the woman I took, feel her heart speed up underneath my hand. She is soft and curvaceous, warm and inviting. When I put my hand between her legs, her wide dark eyes hold no fear, but challenge. For a moment , I wonder at it, if this is a sign of the girl I’m meant to Embrace, the only one I’ll ever get.

Then, thunder crashes overhead and the moment is gone. I slip my fangs into her thigh and feed, all the while wondering.

“Mercy?” Henry calls. After a moment, he sticks his head into the library where I’ve been holed up all evening. “Have you seen Mercy?”

“Who?” I ask, pulling the headphones from my ears before I remember that it’s the name of his new driver, and not a request.

Henry rolls his eyes at me. “Have you seen her lately?”

I frown and shake my head. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen more than a glimpse of her, let alone can remember her name for more than thirty seconds. So much for being better at dealing with mortals than other vampires.

Okay, kids. Remember the drabble chart? I do. I haven't been doing nearly as much writing (for LJ) as I have at various points in the past, and I need to get back into the swing of fiction. So: Now's the time, kids. Go to the drabble chart. Pick a prompt. Tell me which one. I'll write a drabble for your Requiem character using that word. If you have more than one character, tell me which one or I'll pick one for you.

Go on, now. I'm waiting.

Marie considers the clock in the entry hall. At some point, it simply had stopped working and she's not certain when.

From nowhere, Christian appears, earlier than he normally rises. "Clock's broken."

She tamps down irritation. "I noticed that. I suppose I'll just have to send for the repairman again."

Leaning on the banister, he eyes her. "Why d'you suppose our great-grandfather collected all these clocks?"

"No use for it now. We either sell them or take care of them." She shrugs.

But the thought's a good one and she thinks it over even as she sends for the clockmaker.

Like a great many things I do in my life, it starts as a lark, an amusement to pass my nights, to keep me entertained when there is little to do but oversee the vines and wait, wait, wait for an ineffable something.

The first message is a diversion, an indulgence of idle curiosity. Jonathan Wells is not a name I know, but the story draws my interest and I'm struck by a desire to know more. Subsequent messages mean more, mean ever so much more. He writes of his concerns, his fears - of a city torn and his own confusion. The latent sense of maternal instinct I possess comes to the fore, so I do what I do best: I ask questions.

He answers them and I leave no part of his psyche unturned. I speak with Carson, the one who brought him to the attention of the Circle, to better understand the motivations. When Jonathan petitions to join our ranks and Carson speaks well of him, I ask to be present for the ritual, perhaps to participate. Never did I think that I would be the one to do it, to offer a very simple solution to a larger problem. Never did I think that Etienne's and my hands would be the one to wreak the magic that binds him to the Circle, but we do. ( Magic! )

June 1, 2009

In the way that Kindred measure time, it has not been so long since I put that piece of wood in Vincent's chest and buried him, but nine years is not an inconsiderable quantity of time when your life is yet still measured in decades. ( Digging up the past. )