Vampires don't drink coffee, but I still can't understand how most of us make it through the night. What with all that has to be done, even after the oldest children are in bed, I'm always exhausted. Josie does a lot, that's true, but the two of us can only do so much, and I was seriously getting sick of the Kindred 'hangers-on'. Dylan was always coming over and needing to talk and vent and whatever. Maybe that's what a Brujah rant is all about; they just stand around and whine. That, and Bastian could have lent a hand with the children instead of being Mr. Vampiric DJ down in the basement.
The weeks were passing swiftly, and I busied myself going through junk and throwing out anything that was too old or that we didn't need. What I really wanted to clean out was the attic, but Josie started to freak out every time I mentioned going up there, and made me swear that I wouldn't. That's the thing with Josie; a lot, she expects you to listen and agree with her, just based on her own vague statements. Then, if you don't, she flies off the handle. Still, she was just trying to protect me, I guess, so I stayed out of the attic.
Then, I made an interesting and disturbing discovery. It was late at night, and Josie and Bastian were down in the basement doing God knows what, so I was alone upstairs. I'd found a box full of papers and whatnot labeled DESK DRAWER #2, so I decided to go through it, and hopefully get rid of a box of junk. Mostly, it was old school assignments of the children's and take-out menus, then I found a marble-bound copy book at the bottom.
The first twenty or so pages looked to be a ledger of the orphanage accounts and expenses by month. All of it was in my own tight, neat handwriting; I had kept this book long ago. Paging further, a worn, much-folded piece of paper slipped out and fluttered to the floor. Curious, I picked it up, opened it, and read what appeared to be a letter.
My Dearest Josie,
Of the first concern, do not worry yourself, for I am not finally dead, though I may hover close to it. Wake me from this timeless slumber if you feel that you must, if I am needed desperately by those who might contact you, or should great danger arise in our orphanage or city. Baring these occurrences let me lie, like the sleeping wolf I am.
Time is a strange creature, is it not, my child? I remember days when I danced and played among the bamboo reeds under a gentle and warming sun. The same sun is now anathema to me, for but one step of the same dance would end my unlife. Here, in the darkness, in this cursed place we call existence, all has grown gray and cold with time and decay; there is nothing to warm us, no solace to seek.
These years have also changed this city. Do you remember Prince Tyler? Then it was Lord Ian, Lord Brendan, the triumvirate, then Prince William, or have I forgotten and put them out of order? The Ventrue will not last much longer, I think; his luck has hopped away, and soon he will fall. What also, of Vincent? It has been so long since you spoke his name, and three nights ago, when you crept up to check on me, I realized why. Another has taken his place, a darker one, if possible.
My Sao-kan, will the years that make up eternity bring back those who have left us? In every room and house, the air is choked with the memories and impressions of them. No. Time will not find your Catherine, nor my Jack. What is the line from your music…empty chairs at empty tables? Yet, time moves on, taking with it more and more people every night until all who care, and all those who cared for them, eventually, are naught but dust. I should be an old woman, the matriarch of a large Chinese family, revered for my wisdom, and close to the rest of death until I may re-join the circle once more. Instead, I stagnate.
I was forced to leave after you slept, on a matter of the most urgent business, petitioned by my sire for aid. For that, I pray you have forgiven me. The city had become different by the time I returned, and you slept still. I retreated to the attic, what more could I do? There was once a time when my blood flowed strong through your veins, but when I regressed, I found that Bastian would let none to see you, and so the years seemed longer. I now know it was then his blood for which you lived.
Now, after awakening, you have grown up so much. I knew, you must understand, the night you awoke. Why did you wait so long to see me? That as well, I realized three nights ago. Do you need me any longer to protect you? No. You have a loyal guard. Does my sire have use for me? No. He and Dominic went on a mission a year ago and have since not been seen nor heard from.
Once, long ago, it was my life-force that gave you strength. I did that to protect you from those in the city who would have killed you for what you were, and for that, your noble knight threatened to kill me. Did you even know? Now, in this state brought on by fatigue and lack of sustenance, I am visited by strange visions, and they frighten me greatly. May Cain and my ancestors forgive me for delivering my only child into the vile coils of a serpent. Yet, what other choice do I have?
I take this road to rest, to forget that I am a thing unnatural and cursed. If only Wen Fu had killed me the night he killed you, Josie. With Nancy here, the orphanage runs well and safely. It was a good idea of yours to ghoul her, for the girl works hard in the interest of the children. Yet, I fear losing her to the same madness that claimed you, though what is done remains done. Live well, my darling child, and I shall see you when finally I wake.
~ Eternus Hyperion of Clan Gangrel
Pu-jin Yi of House Xian
What I read absolutely floored me. The name, 'Eternus' caused the stirring of recognition that I'd first had when I heard Josie's name, doubtless I knew her, and from the context of the letter, she seemed to be either Josie's sire or mother. It sounded a lot to me like she was on some kind of suicide kick, but she'd said that she wasn't dead. I also got the impression that she didn't like Bastian very much either. Whatever the matter, she'd written the letter and left soon after I'd been ghouled.
There was no date on the note, and Eternus didn't say where she'd intended on going, although, I had to then realize that the Chicago story might just be another one of Josie's lies of comfort. Madness, huh? Well, I guess that was true enough, I was getting to be madder than a hatter these days. Maybe she actually was in Chicago, I wondered how I would go about getting in touch with her. Who were the others mentioned; Vincent, Prince William, Lord Brendan, Jack? I'd heard Josie murmur the name 'Catherine' when she was upset, but who was she?
I suddenly felt guilty. Maybe I should just forget all this and that I found it. After all, it was in my best interests that Josie didn't tell me about my past, in a way, I was defying her by trying to find out. Hadn't it been only a month ago that I kneeled on the basement floor, overcome by pain and screaming to keep out music that caused me both agony and ecstasy in one instant? And hadn't I vowed to just forget and let it be? Doubtless, anything that happened was some kind of horrible tragic secret, and would only hurt me by knowing.
I flipped further through the book. What followed were pages of phone numbers, quickly jotted notes, so-and-so called about such-and-such, and little margin sketchings. Then I hit a run of blank pages, and was about to put it down, figuring the rest of the book was empty, when I ran into a page of script.
The greatest crime in this world must be love. Each thought of someone, no matter how innocent, is in itself a grave sin. How ultimately selfish and self-righteous it is to covet another in the sanctuary of one's own emotions, to seemingly keep them an unwilling prisoner of affection. That one would dare to consider the one they love as belonging to them, and owing to them equal love; such felons are monstrous aberrants, best to be ignored, reviled, or destroyed.
Shocked, I put down the book, staring straight ahead, lost in thought. Surely, I couldn't have written that, it was so, so…bitter and lonely. Were those really my thoughts? The language and feel of the words were formal, but almost lyrical, as if they rolled off the tongue with a proper sound. I had the urge to read them aloud in a soft British accent. Could I really have been like that? No, impossible, it was probably some prose that I thought of, and not what I believed. I continued to read.
Conversely, what hell it must be to live one's life in a state of self-imposed oblivion! To know only sleep and solitude, and even this solitude standing impure. Great poets and philosophers have said love deferred or indulged leads to madness, but I charge that love itself is that singular madness of which they speak. And I, no less a hypocrite, now the stricken, so that these words are not even my own, but the brilliance that he speaks through me. I, so low a servant, could never be so eloquent.
Who was 'he'? Could it be true that there once was a 'he', that there was someone that I loved and who loved me? At least it meant that those flowing and distant passages weren't my ideas, but it seemed to be saying that I was influenced by the mysterious shadow man. I was betting that this was what Josie was trying to keep from me, but this felt too small and insignificant. The secret was bigger than that, I knew it. At that moment, she and Bastian came upstairs, so I quickly stowed the book and letter under a pile of papers. They didn't even give a glance, and later that night I hid it behind a loose panel in the kitchen wall.
For a few nights I kept my distance from Josie; tried to make it seem like I was randomly doing something involved or interesting when she was around. I think she knew anyway but didn't say anything to let on. On the fifth night, I woke before her, and sat at the dining room table, pondering the book and what it had revealed. Thus far, I'd refused to take one of my options, and just show her everything and demand the ultimate truth.
My attention was turned by four of the older kids, Roger, Christine, Nicki, and Beth, who were watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TV. It was too loud, I thought, and was about to tell them to turn it down before they woke the little kids, when I shivered. A glass half-full of milk sitting on the table shattered, and I heard the kitchen windows burst.
"Aunt Nancy?!?" All four whirled around as I was standing. Best to keep them calm.
"Damn wind blew out the windows again, don't worry guys, I'll go get Bastian to clean up the glass. Turn down the TV a bit, Ok? I don't want the little ones to wake up."
"Sure, K."
Time to wake up Josie and Bastian, no matter what they were doing, something was wrong and I needed help. I started down the basement stairs, but then my head filled with a piercing shriek, it felt like my brain was going to explode. Tripping, I fell down the rest of the stairs and landed on the floor, screaming as the searing agony expanded and my eardrums ruptured, blood pouring down both sides of my head. Josie was standing there, looking at me, mouth open, and I realized through the haze of torture, that she was singing at such a high frequency that I couldn't even hear it. Her mouth shut, the pain stopped.
"Oh my gosh! Nancy, you're bleeding! Here, heal it," and she bit open her wrist, offering it.
"T-that's ok, I'll heal it myself, I've fed already for the night." Something didn't feel right, something about the tone of her voice and the cast of her eyes; something was very, very wrong.
"I was singing too loud again, wasn't I? I hurt you with my voice. I'm sorry." Josie turned to her dresser and tied on an ornate black choker which I'd never, since my memory began, seen her wear.
"Where's Bastian?"
"Who?"
"You know, Bastian, your boyfriend, goth music guy who kind of lives here at the orphanage? Where is here? You bro- I mean, the wind blew out the kitchen windows."
She just looked at me, vacant and lost. "What are you talking about?"
I was about to answer her, but she wandered off upstairs, singing softly to herself, as if I wasn't even there. This was weird. Taking a moment, I looked around, and noticed a single smear of blood across the keys of Bastian's synthesizer, but he was nowhere in the basement. Had they fought and he left?
After that, Josie went silent, she would only walk absently around the house at night, singing. I couldn't get a single word out of her, it was like she was in her own little world or something, and most times I couldn't even get her to meet my eyes or acknowledge my presence. Once I grabbed her by the shoulders and tried to force her to look at me, but she only looked away, singing some aria, as tears ran down her face. The children noticed it, and most of the older ones acted like it was routine, but the younger ones kept asking me why Aunt Josie was sad, if she was sick, or was she ignoring them because they had been bad and she was angry with them.
Bastian didn't come back the next night, nor the next, in fact, he'd been gone nearly two weeks and Josie's bizarre behavior had continued. I was seriously at the end of my rope and on my last nerve. One night, all she did was go from window to window, staring out into the darkness.
It was getting to be midnight, and all the children were asleep. Like a ghost, she drifted through the house, and it got so that it was uncomfortable to be in the same room, and when she wandered in, I would leave. I was coming into the front room, in fact, when I head the slow footfalls on the stairs, and got ready for what ever minor night crisis the child was coming to tell me about.
A short Asian woman was standing mid-way down the stairs. She was dressed smartly, and her short cropped, jet-black hair barely hid the Eastern lettering on her forehead. The woman just stood there, staring at me.
"Who are you, and how did you get in here?" How could I have not noticed an intruder?
"Nancy, don't you know me?"
I rubbed my eyes. "I've been hearing that a lot lately. I'm sorry, perhaps I once knew you, but I lost my entire life's memory three months ago, so I don't remember you."
"I see." She walked down the rest of the stairs, and slowed approached me. "My born name was Pu-jin Yi of House Xian, a fact that you and Josie once guarded at great risk to yourselves, but I have been known for the last sixty years as Eternus Hyperion."
"Eternus? The one who wrote the letter? Then you must be Josie's mother, but she told me that you were in Chicago."
She nodded. "Yes, there was a letter that I entrusted to you to give to Josie, but that was long ago. Since then, I have slumbered in the attic. How much do you remember?"
I sat down on the couch, and Eternus sat opposite in the rocking chair. "Here's what I know; more or less, three months ago is where my consciousness begins. I awoke on the front stairs, and Josie told me that she had embraced me, but someone had kidnapped me. Later, I finally forced the truth out of her that I had some kind of illness that wiped my memory."
"So you remember nothing of your past?"
"No. I have a question, are you Josie's sire?"
"My dear, we are of different clans. I am Gangrel and she is a Daughter of Cacophony, there is no way I could be her sire. Why do you ask, has Josie been talking about her sire recently?"
I shook my head. "No, but she said that you were her mother, and since she adopted me and also embraced me, I was figuring that was the way it was between you two as well. Actually, something's really wrong with Josie right now, maybe you can help her."
Concern sparked in Eternus's eyes. "What?"
"Well, Bastian left or something two weeks ago, and I found her screaming so hard and high that it shattered glass and blew out my ear drums. After that she seemed almost like a little kid or something, and didn't remember who he was or anything. That was the last she spoke too, ever since she's just walked around singing, won't even look at the children or me."
"So, these are the facts; you are Josie's childer, your memory was wiped three months ago leaving you no memory of your past and you haven't been told much, Bastian's disappeared, and that has thrown Josie into some kind of regressive insanity?"
"Yes." There was something about Eternus that instantly put me at ease, and I felt close to her, probably a resurgence of the barest trace of memory left in me. It was a feeling like, 'It's all ok now, the boss is here and knows what to do and is going to take care of everything and everything's going to be all right.'
"Josie? Are you here?"
I was about to open my mouth to tell her that Josie probably wouldn't respond even if she heard her, when the grieving girl crept into the room, headed towards one of the front windows. Eternus stepped in front of her, slowly and deliberately, and took her hands before Josie could turn away.
"Josie, listen to me." Remarkably, she looked up. "He's going to be all right, do you understand? He's somewhere, but he's safe and he will come back to you."
To my astonishment, Josie seemed to nod, and still singing softly, listed over to a chair by the window, keeping some kind of tragic vigil. Eternus motioned me into the kitchen.
"That was amazing! I tried everything, but I couldn't get her to listen. How did you do that?"
"By doing what I'd once been warned I'd be killed for doing. The blood of our kind, Nancy, remembers and hears what the mind can often forget. It was only the distant memory of my vitae and the power it held that made her listen, but it was something I had to do."
"Will she be all right?"
Eternus closed her eyes, rubbing the bridge of her nose. So, that's where Josie got that motion from! I'd seen her do it several times when she was upset or stressed out, and had unconsciously picked it up from her.
"Everything has come full circle, right back to the way it was at the beginning. You don't know it, but the three of us and this orphanage have all been through this before. We survived last time, and we will survive again, it's now up to the waiting."
She stood and walked back into the front room, towards the door.
"Wait, where are you going?"
My 'grandmother' stopped are looked back. "To see an old friend of mine, a co-worker, you might say. I need to know what's been going on in the world and this city while I slept."
"Please, will you tell me what's going on, tell me all about the past?"
She smiled. "In time," and walked out the door.
A few nights later, Eternus told me that she was concerned for the city. Apparently, after Prince William, whoever he was, she seemed to have known him personally, left with his wife, a mysterious man took over the position. Later, he was revealed to be merely a puppet of the ghost of Dante Giovanni, the legendary first prince of the city, who'd been betrayed by his Ventrue lover and Tremere friend. He ascended, leaving all to fight over the position.
A Toreador rose to power, but she fled the city under suspicion. Two FBI agents made a detailed investigation of the Kindred of Swarthmore, but they were later killed by the Sabbat in Philadelphia. Speaking of the Sabbat, they tried to re-take the city shortly after the mysterious prince left, but were put down after bearing a message of warning to the Camerilla.
In the ensuing chaos that resulted, a new chapter of DX arose, only to fall apart, not being true to the original's ideals, and therefore not able to survive through family. Zane returned from Italy, where he'd gone to save Eve Giovanni, whom he loved, from slavery to her family. Shortly later, a Brujah who Eternus assured me I used to be good friends with, returned to Swarthmore as well.
It was during this time that strangely powerful elders came to the city and claimed it as their own, going so far beat down the local neonates and anchillae with their incestuous ways. Raven, the Brujah, was suffering from some kind of vampiric blood disease, though until her assassination by an Assimite, she firmly insisted that she was being prayed on by a Tremere. Her killer was murdered by Zane by means of a spectacular breach of the Masquerade in someone's backyard.
The new prince, a Tremere, had a local Giovanni killed, then foolishly declared war on the Independent clans, of which the Gangrel were now a part. Next, the Toreador sheriff was found crucified, leading to some kind of attempted kidnapping of Zane and Eve by forces unknown, but suspected Sabbat. Allegedly, two Brujah, Dylan and Reese, crusaded into Philly and wiped out the entirety of the Sabbat, which Eternus found highly unlikely, and she suspected the seemingly staged assassination of the Keeper of Elysium, purported to be not only antitribu but the Archbishop of Philadelphia, was nothing more than a ruse of the elders'.
Reese declared himself Prince of Swarthmore and Philadelphia, appointing Dylan as his sheriff. I guess they found the power over everyone that they were always lusting after. What concerned her was the strange way everyone was acting, all flocking to the Brujah boys' banner when they attacked an innocent Tremere who suspected them of foul play, and putting stock in the Gehenna ravings of a high-generation Caitiff, who was nearly killed by a member of an extremely rare Sabbat bloodline.
Not only that, but when Dylan thought Eternus was moving against him, he threatened to kill me as well if he were to be taken down. She revealed to me that he wasn't really Brujah as he claimed, but a member of a strange and reviled clan, the name of which she refused to tell me, saying that it was for my own safety that I be kept in the dark. That bastard tried to blackmail my grandmother into silence, and she well over a hundred years old! Then, as sheriff and prince, he and Reese had her Tremere friend staked, and she feared the power-mad duo would kill and diablorize him.
Something was rotten in the state of Swarthmore, she told me. But she also said that as Josie's childer, I had no reason to fear, because Dylan didn't know that Josie had a valiant protector, whom she suspected wasn't ever far from Swarthmore. Should I be killed, or he try to mess with Josie, Dylan might end up with a lot more to worry about than Josie's anger.
Eternus was right, though, it was now all up but for the waiting. We had to wait for Bastian to return, wait for Dylan to make his move, wait for time to pass, and time would reveal all. Since nothing could be done for Josie, I resolved to take the first action. I told Eternus that I was going to attend the next little 'gathering' and confront Dylan directly. If he killed me, well, then that would have to be that. The tempo was getting faster, and I certainly had no intention of falling behind.