Black

        “Where did you get your name?”
	I didn’t answer right away, I was too busy picking myself up off the floor
where they’d thrown me. I sat in a chair as I looked around. The three of them,
staring at me waiting for my answer so they could move on to their more
important questions. My own dark brown eyes stared back at them, mocking, but
they didn’t falter. I didn’t expect them to. I turned my gaze past them; they were
stupid. I couldn’t understand how I’d even allowed them to push me this far.
Perhaps I was bored. 
	“It was given to me,” I said and I finally looked back at Jarred. “A
nickname.”
	“I can see why.” He looked me over again as if he’d never seen me before.
There was nothing at all fascinating about my appearance. Every day I wore
nearly the same thing: jeans, a t-shirt and my favorite leather jacket. All black of
course. They had no idea why. I didn’t have the need for dark clothing anymore,
but I’d grown so accustomed to my wardrobe after the last centuries I couldn’t
think of wearing anything else.
	I shifted in the moth eaten chair as I reached into my pocket. Derek
punched me then, before my fingertips had even touched my pack of cigarettes.
	My hair flew to the side with my head, masking my face from the three of
them. Masking my smile. They thought they had one up on me because I was
one and they were three. Actually, they were young. They had heard the tales, but
they didn’t believe them. 
	I pushed my hair behind my ear, turning my head back to face them. My
face was not bleeding, nor was it beginning to bruise, but Derek looked proud as
ever. He’d heard I was the Archbishop, and the bully in him would accept nothing
less than to humiliate me.  He would have been much more satisfied if others
would have watched, but he knew were he to do that in public...
	“Take it off,” Derek told me.
	“Not only stupid questions, but you want a strip show too?” I asked him as
I started to stand out of the chair. I got the butt of his shotgun slammed against
my mouth for that one. I fell back into the chair and ran my tongue against my
split lip. Fangs can be a slight hindrance, you know.
	“Your coat, not your pants, you idiot.”
	He cocked his gun and pointed it at my nose. I stared down the barrel,
leaning forward and pulling my leather off my arms. Holding the jacket up so he
could see my movements perfectly, I removed my cigarettes and my lighter from
the pocket. He grabbed the jacket from my hand and threw it behind him. He
knew my knives were in there. The knives I’d used to kill his clan mate.
	I leaned back against the chair and pulled a cigarette out as he lowered
his gun. I barely got the cig between my lips before the interrogation continued.
	“So here you are in all your glory,” Jarred said as he stepped around my
chair, holding his gun. Undoubtedly as he spoke, in his mind he was
congratulating himself on the way he executed my capture. Next his simple mind
probably drifted to going back to his communal haven, to tell his clan mates
about how he had me on my knees, begging for my ‘life’.  I could so easily read
his emotions it was all I could do to keep a straight face. He felt like a god, and
he nearly had a hard on for himself.
	“The Archbishop of Albany. I feel so honored,” he spoke just near a
whisper and while he did he leaned over my shoulder. I turned my head slightly
and blew a cloud a smoke into his face just as he inhaled. He stood up straight
again before he gagged.  He was the only vampire I knew allowed to live with his
disease. He had a sort of allergic type of reaction to nicotine.
	“And what do you have to say for yourself now, Black? Where is the army
you supposedly lead?” he paused, looking around the room for emphasis as he
slowly stepped around to my right side. I took another drag off my cigarette. “Or
perhaps the rumors are true. Everyone is turning against you again, aren’t they? -
Oh wait?! That’s not the way of it, is it? No no no, you left. Of your own free will
of course.”
	He crouched in front of me, resting his gun on his knee. I looked at him.
Sasha and Derek stood behind protectively were I to even think of kicking
Jarred’s head off his shoulders.
	“And just as you were thrown out-,” he cleared his throat. “Excuse me. And
just as you left the position of Regent, and then the position of Cardinal, you
intend on, uh.. leaving the Archbishop position in a few days as well. Am I
correct?”
	I have to admit, he’d done his homework.  It was true that I’d left Regent
and Cardinal without second thought. It was also true how from that day forward
I’d sworn to myself I’d never get into politics again, yet here I was. Archbishop of
a filthy, disorganized town of backstabbing fools. And worse yet, made to co-exist
with the Camarilla. It was disgusting. 
	I decided to play with him.
	“Pine cones and hollyberries,” I sang, barely containing laughter at the look
on his face. “Popcorn for you, apples for me. Red stri-” Jarred hit me then, hard
this time. For him at least. It was then I busted up into hysterical laughter. 
	So Sasha shot me in the leg.
	I winced and the laughter stopped. My hands moved straight down to the
bullet wound and my blood seeped between my fingers. Yes, it hurt. Of course it
did, but neither of them took into consideration of my derangement. Or that fact
that my brother was standing behind them.
	Damon jumped on Sasha, knocking the gun from her hand while tackling
her to the floor. The distraction was perfect for me to use the mild concentration
it took to wrap Derek in his own shadow, while I grabbed Jarred by the head and
twisted, then pulled. The loud pop of his neck dislocating was music to my ears. 
	I looked up just in time to see Damon pull his dagger and stick it through
Sasha’s head. Derek screamed while the shadow held him. I stood and walked
over to him. He struggled against the darkness, but it wasn’t anything he could
possibly understand. I bet now he wished he’d have believed the tales of vampires
being afraid of their own shadows. Too bad it wouldn’t have helped either way.
	“Hush, Derek. You’ve been a childe of the night for how long now and
you’re still afraid of the dark?” I reached out and grabbed a hold of his chin. The
blood on my hands smeared across his face and I grinned at him. A dark, evil
grin I’d perfected over the centuries. It got it’s desired effect, especially from a
fledgling who thought he was an Elder. Had he been capable, he’d have pissed
himself.
	After decapitating Sasha, Damon stood and watched. He stood behind me,
his face visible to Derek over my shoulder. Another move of perfection for us,
performed for only those cheap Camarilla who thought they knew it all. Damon
and I appeared one in the same. My identical twin in every physical way, and
almost in thought. Only those with heightened senses or Auspex could tell us
apart. Unless they’d been around us long enough to know I preferred my jacket,
and Damon, his leather trench.
	I bit his neck and drank from him. With my age had come the inability to
sustain myself with mortal blood. From the mere glance I got of Damon I could
tell he’d already fed tonight so Derek was all mine.
	Instead of holding him back, the shadow was soon holding Derek up. I
leaned back from him, his blood on my lips. His eyes mere slits as he looked at
me, barely conscious. I entered his mind then, feeling everything he was at the
time. My lovely little derangement caused me to do it, and allowed me to do it.
Biting into his neck again I drained him quickly. I began to feel euphoric as he
slowly slipped into death, final death. I released the shadow and his body fell to
the floor with a thud.
	The smile widened on my face, showing the blood staining my teeth and
lips. My mind returned to me when Derek died, and I turned around to face my
brother. 
	“You’re a sick fuck, Black, you really are.”
	He licked the blood off his dagger and slid it back into the sheath he had
strapped to the inside of his trench. I leaned over to grab my jacket off the floor
and put my cigs and lighter back in the pocket.
	“You’re no better than I am,” I said, putting my jacket back on. A groan
came from Jarred and I glanced over at him.
	“The hell! I’m not the one getting off on killing other people, now am I?”
he mentioned it as if we’d never had that conversation before. He knew all about
my derangement, and he knew why I had it. All it did was remind him of why he
existed, and he couldn’t stand it.
	“I’m not going to get into it with you again, Damon. I don’t need the
headache, and neither does Ella.”
	I stepped over to Jarred and found my still lit cigarette butt on the floor. I
picked it up and crushed it out on his forehead. He screamed.
	“Now you go back to your little Prince and you tell him that this is my
city,” I whispered to Jarred. 
	“Black,” Damon said.
	“And tell him that next time he wants to fuck with the Lasombra he should
at least send someone who might pose a challenge,” I continued, grinning at
Jarred, seeing his neck was laying at an uncomfortable angle with the rest of his
body. 
	“Black,” Damon persisted.
	I stood and nudged Jarred with the toe of my boot, hearing the broken
bones of his neck grind together. He screamed again. It would be a long time
before that healed, but I wanted him alive. I wanted him to hate me. Killing the
people that hated me the most always felt better to me, and how I loved to give
them a reason.
	“Black!”
	“What?!” I said, quickly turning to face Damon.
	He shifted his weight from one foot to the next. “Let’s go to the bar.”

	How we loved to walk the streets together. It drew attention. Two identical
twins, the only difference being our coats. Our hair color was black and the same
length, our eye color was dark brown and our height was 6 foot 1 inch. We both
weighed the exact same amount of 185 pounds, and we had no discernible
markings on us. We both appeared the exact same. Ella had done a perfect job
on him.
	We called each other brothers, but we weren’t. Very few knew the truth of
us, of Damon really. But Damon.. he couldn’t stand it. He dispised his own origin
and threw fits about it occasionally. It was like some sort of cycle for him.  A
vampire with depression. I spent a lot of my time alone trying to think of a way to
release him from it, but there wasn’t any way. He was trapped, and he couldn’t
bear it. Had I known it would have turned out this way I would have never
accepted my sire’s offer. But I was selfish then, and I didn’t understand anyway.
No one did.
	It was snowing. I hated white, as did Damon. Jarred wasn’t all that far off
when he thought I might be leaving my position again. Only, he had the wrong
reason. I detested snow, and I longed to live in a place that defied winter. I was
sick of trying to fake my breath in the air with cigarette smoke. Of course, were
this a Sabbat controlled city I wouldn’t do it. The Camarilla and their precious
Masquerade.. bah. Unfortunately we weren’t quite prepared for war, but we were
getting closer. Soon I would stop wasting money on cigarettes, and walk the
frozen streets without fake breath.  Sometimes I wondered if the mortals would
even notice.

	I looked around as Damon and I headed for the bar. The mortals were
cuddled up in their thick winter coats, the flurry of snow hitting them and melting
on their skin. As for Damon and I, our jackets were not done up.. what is ‘cold’ to
a vampire anyway? The snow would hit us, but not melt. Sure, it would collect in
piles on our hair and shoulders, but when it hit our faces it merely fell off with the
next gust of icy wind. Once pointed out, one might think it would be an obvious
thing to detect, but no one noticed. No one cared. Barely any noticed our
absence of reflection, also.
	It took us a while to get there, but time was not something we cared
about.  The bar was apart from the rest of the city, perhaps that’s why only
vampires and the mortals that knew of us went there.  Of course, there was the
occasional wanderer, but they didn’t last long, or maybe they were made
someone’s ghoul.  The bar had a very bad reputation of murder and death, but
the police were too afraid to come out and question us. They felt that we all must
have heard the rumors at one point and took our lives into our own hands by
going there.  Of course, it didn’t matter what the police thought anyway. We
owned them.
	A forest on the east side, a lake on the west, the bar was a pretty fancy
place. Two stories with a balcony overlooking the Courtyard, and the fireplace was
always lit. The Gangrel took it upon themselves to provide the wood. It was all
they were good for anyway.
	We only entered via the door if we didn’t have the strength to do it the
right way. The right way being through the shadows we controlled.  Stepping into
the shadow the bar itself casted against the moonlight, we stepped out of the
shadows again inside the bar, as if we’d walked right through the wall. It was
called Shadow Stepping, and rightfully so. Only those of us with a decent
knowledge of Obtenebration could do it.
	It was not often I allowed myself to look less than perfect, so the bullet
wound in my right thigh was quite obvious.
	“Black, what the hell happened to you?” 
	I looked up and saw Ella.  The only vampire I’d ever met older than myself,
and I had known her my whole life.  We’d had our good times, and our bad
times. There was the occasional ‘tension’ felt between us, but nothing to be
concerned about.  She liked Damon too much to kill him.
	“I got shot, Ella, what the hell does it look like?” I said to her.
	“And if I wouldn’t have been paying attention he would have had much
worse than just a hole in the leg,” Damon added.
	“I could have took all three of them down, and you know it, D.”
	“Then why didn’t you?”
	“Black, you are the most arrogant bastard I know,” Ella said.
	“And it’s what you love about me, isn’t it Ella?”
	She growled at me. I laughed a bit and Damon lit up a smoke. Both of us
smoked indoors out of habit, especially during the winter months.
	“Someone should take you out back and beat you,” Ella added.
	“Go ahead and beat me, Ella, you know what’ll happen.”
	“Yeah, you’ll need to take a cold shower.”
	We grinned at each other then, but left it there. Were we to get any deeper
into where that conversation was leading, we’d have spent the rest of the night
trying to convince Damon that he wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. I
glanced at him before I walked over to the bar. He was looking down at the floor,
and I knew he was thinking about it again. He was heading back into the down
part of his ‘cycle’ as I call it, and Ella knew it as much as I did. We hated it, but
we were used to it. No matter how used to it we got, though, we never learned
what it was that we had to do or say to get him out of it any faster, or to keep
him out of it. It was just something as inevatable as upstate New York snowing in
the wintertime.
	Cam reached behind the bar and handed me a bottle of Crown Royale.
That old man had been in this city longer than I had. He was one of the mortals. 
I usually didn’t put up with having mortals around.  After all, I had no humanity
left in me, it was instinct to torture and kill them.
	‘You’re superior to them now, Black,’ my sire said that to me the night
after he embraced me.  ‘They are your food, not your friends. I can tell by
watching you that at first you’ll kill them quickly, but after a while you’ll turn
around. You’ll learn to play with them first. Especially you, my dear childe,’ he
grined at me. He was talking about my derangement. The Malkavians had
explained to him what it would do to me, but they knew I would find out best if
left to it.  My own little derangement given to me to take the place of the one
they removed. He looked me over. ‘So, how’s your head?’
	The Embrace. No torture in the mortal world could have prepared me for
the ‘tests’ the Lasombra put me through. I had survived the Creation Rites, even
with my derangement. So did Damon and all his questions.
	‘First we drain you, then you drink,’ my sire said as he started to explain
what was going to happen in the next few moments. His friends were digging a
hole nearby and I eyed it then. I didn’t know at the time that was to be my grave.
	‘Alright, do it then.’
	‘Eager, aren’t you?’ he grined at me. ‘But I’m not done yet.’ He put a hand
on my shoulder and took a step closer to me. He whispered to me then, the
speech his sire gave him, and his sire before that.  The speech of how the
Lasombra were above all, even our own kind.  That only our clan had the
perfection of mind and physical ability, and that was why we led them.  I didn’t
understand at the time what he meant and I really didn’t care.  Perhaps it was a
pep talk, given to me before I could understand so I would fight to make it
through the Rites.  Who knows.  I killed him shortly after anyway.
	Of course he did the typical thing. Drained me of my mortal blood, cut his
wrist and fed me from him. Now even mortals know how it’s done, and when
mentioned they’re like, ‘Yeah, I saw that in the movies.’  There were a lot of
things in the movies now. Garlic, crosses, running water.. it’s all in there.  Too bad
it’s all bullshit. The next thing that happened to me never showed up in any
movies.

	I grined as my thoughts drifted. I could laugh about it now, of course.  At
the time, I was screaming.

	The hunger I felt was unbearable. I drank from his wrist violently, and had I
been able to pay attention to anything else, I would have noticed that my sire
took great pride in that. It was why he chose me. He saw in me a passion, of
what I don’t know, but he saw it, and that’s all that matters I guess.
	He pulled his wrist away from me and I fell over on my face on the
ground. I was yelling, the pain.. indescribable.  As if that wasn’t enough..
	I woke up in pitch black darkness. I was stuck, barely able to move at all. I
screamed and thrashed around like a madman. My senses came back to me
then. I could smell dirt. Pausing for a moment, I remembered the hole. I was
buried underground, and they were undoubtedly waiting for me to dig myself out.
	Up. Where the hell was up? I dug in front of me, clawing at the dirt. At
that point I was still trying to breathe as if I needed air. I was gagging and
coughing on the dirt, until I finally just stopped. I was digging down, not up. The
ground I was clawing at was hard and if it were dirt just packed in around me it
would have been much looser. 
	It was hard to turn around, but I did it. I dug up this time, searching for
light.  I paused again. What if I’d been unconscious for longer than I thought?
What if it was day outside and this was some sort of test in a test?  The hunger
came to me again, and it told me to get out.  I dug again in the same direction,
growing more and more frustrated.  That’s when I punched at the dirt. My fist flew
up and it broke the surface of ground.  I pulled my arm back down and I glanced
at the beam of moonlight shining into the hole as if I’d never seen it before.  I
hadn’t. Not like this, anyway. The color it gave off, the way it reflected on the fog...
	I clawed my way out of the hole then and heaved myself up, laying on my
back on the ground. I was covered in dirt and blood. I looked up and saw my
sire’s face. 
	‘Welcome to the Lasombra,’ he said. ‘Welcome, my childe.’

	“Are you gonna drink that any time soon, or are you just going to stare at
it? Cause I’d like to get paid you know. I’m sick of having to whore myself
around.. hey wait.. no I’m not. Nevermind,” Cam said.
	I laughed at him. Cam was the bartender, an old man well on his way to
death. Every time he lit up a cigarette he gagged on it. He’d been offered to join
us by a lot of people, but he never accepted. He never would.
	“Oh how the mighty have fallen,” Voulg-Zangor Qu'Aanensen said, and
laughed at me. He did that often, along with picking on my obcession with my
lack of reflection.  “I told you that if you didn’t stop torturing the Ventrue they’d
catch up with you.”
	Voulg’s stench was hideous. So was his looks, but that’s not something to
be brought up in conversation with the clan leader of the Nosferatu Antitribu.
Actually, my obcession with reflective surfaces was not something many dared to
bring up either, but I took it from Voulg. I had no choice really. He was good at
what he does, even though what he did should have meant his death. I saw it
another way. He was a invaluable asset to the Sabbat cause, not something to be
disposed of without first making the proper use of. Which is why I didn’t send for
him to be killed when I found out he spied on me in the Lasombra cathedral. 
He would tell no one else of it’s whereabouts, I was sure of that.  He took too
much pride in finding it himself, the hell if he would pass on that sort of
information.  That and he needed me just as much as I needed him.  For now.
	“Derek is dead, Sasha is dead. Jarred and his broken neck will be found
eventally and brought back,” I said.
	“That’s it? A broken neck? Black, you’re getting soft in your old age.”
	“Perhaps I should have brought him here and left him to your creativity,
Voulg? I don’t think so. I needed him to deliver a message.”
	“Being?”
	“We’ll have our war soon, Voulg, have no doubts about that.”
	“You really think you’re ready, Black?” Voulg asked me.
	I turned around in my stool and faced him. I glanced over his shoulder into
the room. Ella, Shame, Damon, Lorelei, Adia.. of course that was only five, but
there they were. There were many more, of course. Shame was an outsider from
Atlanta. The Bishop to be exact, and by allying with her I got the support of her
city as well. That and she found herself in love with my brother.
	“I haven’t the slightest of doubts, Voulg,” I said, looking back at him. “We
have the people, the need and the determination.. now we just need the
organization.”
	“I’m organized, Black, I’m waiting on you. Are you ever going to get off
your ass and stop playing games and start leading these people?”
	“If I call a meeting will you come to it, Voulg?”
	He grined at me, it was sickening. “Perhaps. Speak at the meeting as if
I’m there.”
	“At the very least send some of your people as abbots. We don’t need any
god damned Camarilla spying on us, now do we?”
	“Of course not, Black. I’ll see what I can do,” his grin widened and
suddenly his shape seemed to be that of an old man. Obfuscate allowing him to
fake different appearances, it seemed like a harmless blind man walked slowly out
of the bar through the back door and out to the subway system.