Chapter 27

December Eighteenth

As he had every night since the boy had killed the mysterious fledglings, Marcus stood vigil on the top of the U.S. Steel Building in downtown Pittsburgh. His hope was that the sixty- four story vantage point would extend his ability to detect others of his kind, and let him know immediately if they so much as entered the outskirts of the sprawling city.

That they would come he never doubted for an instant. The ones whom the boy had slain were far to young to be working on their own. Eventually, their master would either send others or come himself to investigate the loss, and then Marcus would hopefully have the answers to his questions: Who was the master who tread so perilously close to violating the law? What was his or her intent? And, most importantly: Where was Mother?

He stood completely motionless as the wind whipped around him. Because he did not wish them to, none of the people on the streets so far below took notice of his presence, even when the moon silhouetted his form.

When dawn was only a few hours away, he stepped off the edge. After he had plummeted down nearly two thirds of the building's height, he reached out with his mind to brush lightly against the side of the building, slowing his descent. As he touched down on the sidewalk without a sound, a businessman, hurrying along to start his workday early, walked past, taking no notice of Marcus or his sudden appearance.

On his way back to the park in which he still spent his daytime dormancy, he stopped at the largest of Oakland's hospitals. There, he passed by the rooms in the critical care unit like the angel of death, feeding on the life force of those least likely to recover. He could obtain more sustenance from the healthy, but with an unknown potential enemy at work in the world, it was better not to draw too much attention to his presence. Chaos erupted in his wake as the lines on a number of different monitors inexplicably went flat.

Once sated, he turned his thoughts to those he had imprisoned far to the north. He was loath to abandon his nighttime vigils, but they had to be nearly out of food, fuel and batteries. He would prefer not to let them die; they were unusual enough that they might have some use.

If only he had managed to master the art of projection, he might have maintained a semblance of a watch on the city as a dominated mortal drove him north. Unfortunately, all of his attempts in that area had met with failure. Mother had often told him that he invested too much of his sense of identity in his flesh to allow his mind to break free of it.

As he lowered himself into the cold but comforting embrace of the earth, he decided that he would wait until the end of the year. If, by the close of December, no other vampires had come, he would abandon his watch for the evening it would take to resupply his prisoners.