Liliath Satin Morte.'s Story

She may have thought herself silent and unnoticeable, but few people ever were to him. He understood better than such young things how to move with the world around him, to make himself nothing more than another feature of the environment. He was already so suited to blending with shadows, from his coloration down to his customary silence—it hardly seemed like a talent to waste.

“Lilia,” he said without turning around, still upkeeping his pace about the town. “It is not conventional behavior to follow someone without speaking to them, especially not if they know you’re there.” There was a note of gruff chiding in his tone—he did not want the more odd of his coven’s mannerisms to stir up suspicion before they had the good reputation to protect themselves from it, and had she been stalking anyone but him, this would definitely have gotten her some weird looks, and probably more than a little suspicion as well. This, they could not afford.

Stopping for a moment, he turned to look over his shoulder at her. Her attempts to gain height on him or look over his shoulder were vain—he was an exceedingly tall man, and his posture did not slouch unnecessarily. The look he gave her through the corner of his golden eye was eminently neutral. Ephraim was hard to read on the best of days, but he did not seem overly displeased. At least, not yet. “There is little point in following me—you would be better served trying to get to know the town, and ingratiating yourself with the people here.” That was something the other members of his coven would always be better at than he was—Ephraim intimidated people even when he did not intend to.

With that, he checked to make sure that there were no humans in the vicinity, then looked up, gauging his jump, and leapt, landing silently on the rooftop and crossing it in a low crouch to avoid silhouetting himself against the sparse moonlight of the silver crescent in the sky.

In this way, Ephraim stalked the streets a bit less conventionally than he had in Virgil’s company—admittedly, part of the goal of it was to slowly acclimatize the humans here to their new neighbors, to allow themselves to be seen out and about in conventional, perfectly ordinary settings, thus dispelling any suspicion about their newfound presence. It would get around eventually that this large family had bought the mansion just outside of town, a building which was once overgrown with weeds and vines and falling apart at the seams. With a week or so of hard nighttime work and some input from each of the new occupants, it looked very different now. Virgil had done the gardens, he’d had Morgan and Arya arrange the interiors for the most part, and to Lilia, he’d given the task of selecting the home’s new color—as long as it wasn’t something outrageous. They all had at least three rooms to themselves: a bedroom, a living space, and a bathroom, and in addition, Ephraim had claimed an office and a library on the top floor.

It was important that they feel at home here, which was why he never brought in outside contractors to do the work—unless it was something none of them had skills in. Thankfully, the plumbing and electricity had been intact here. Ephraim did not seem like the kind of man to think about details of such a nature, much less the psychological comfort of his coven members, but leadership changed people, and on a practical level, it only made sense to want them to be at home. Their lives were not always easy, and he knew that. He did what he could to make them happy, though he would ever deny any such inclinations under a near-impenetrable layer of gruff distance.

As of now, he traveled via rooftop, silent and nearly inscrutable even as a silhouette, the dark colors he wore and the attendant darkness of his hair making him difficult to pick out against the moonlit rooftops. Golden eyes were faintly aglow, gifting him with the night-vision of his kind and making it possible to pick out colors and details clearly even in the murky shadows next to buildings and the like. He was leaping between a pair of rooftops when he caught sight of the man bleeding out in the alley. Normally, he might have left something like that be—he could not afford to cast suspicion on himself or any of his coven members by being near the scene of what had been a violent crime. But there was a smell on the air, one he recognized only dimly, and that was enough to draw his attention.

Landing soundlessly in a crouch, Ephraim straightened to his full height and approached the man, who was now groaning softly in his pain. He would not survive the night—the blood he’d lost already was pooling around him on the dirty cement of the alleyway, and though Liliath might have been able to save him were she right here, she was too far away to make a difference. Through clouded eyes of indistinct brown, the man looked up at him, and blinked slowly a few times, as though to clear his vision.

“Never thought… Reapers were real,” he admitted with a half-dazed smile. “I was… sort of expecting a—ungh—a white light.” Ephraim parsed that statement for a moment, and shook his head.

“You might get one,” he said dispassionately. “You’re not dead yet. But if you want me to be Death, I could be.” The offer was clear: the man was in a lot of pain, and the vampire was offering him mercy, a swifter end than the one he currently experienced. He stood still beside the dying man, unwilling or perhaps unable to move until he knew what he would be doing with the motion.

The man coughed, sending a spray of blood onto the hand he tried to cover his mouth with. It might have been a fine, pink mist once, but he was too far gone for such subtlety now—his end would not be much longer in the coming, and he was faced instead with liquid gouts of the stuff. Ephraim’s control was great enough that he didn’t feel much temptation to indulge. “Please,” he said, nearly choking on the word, and Ephraim nodded, casting his eye about for something to use. Simply plunging his fist into the man’s chest wasn’t exactly going to seem inconspicuous, and the same went for strangling him when he was clearly bleeding out already. The idea was that the death should at once be merciful and also not look too different from what had already happened.

Exhaling softly through his nose, the vampire picked up an empty bottle from the ground and shattered it over his knee, raining the jagged pieces down over the dying man. He was left with a large, sharpened point, which would achieve his purpose just fine. “If you have last words, I will hear them.” But the man shook his head, indicating that he did not, and so Ephraim lowered himself into a crouch, careful to avoid any of the puddles of blood, and placed the ragged shard of bottle gently against the homeless man’s chest. With a sharp motion, he pushed, and the exhale that followed was a death rattle as the glass pierced his heart. Taking the fellow by one shoulder, Ephraim turned him over, so that he was laying on the shards of glass and the bottle both, and for once he was glad he tended to wear gloves. Standing again, he left the man there and removed the leather coverings from his long-fingered hands, dropping them in a public waste disposal quite far from the scene.

Shaking his head to himself, he ventured into the nearest building. This one happened to be a family-owned general store, and he supposed the man running it now was used to the late-evening shift, because he looked up from the counter and smiled at the new customer entering. Ephraim didn’t need to be here, but it was better if he pretended if he did, and had some excuse to be out and about after such an event as the murder that had just taken place. Nodding to the old man, he performed the customary exchange of names and small talk, though his answers were gruff and abbreviated, something which didn’t seem to bother the senior citizen much. Bailey’s General the store was called, and he could only presume that the old man was Mr. Bailey. Whatever the case, Ephraim occupied himself browsing for a while, trying to find something plausible to buy that wouldn’t be entirely useless. He did hate waste.