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blood, there was a price
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162
to be paid to the vengeful God who, after all, had set the curse in motion.
Kendall would perish in service to Owain, or perhaps she would outlive her
usefulness, and he would withhold from her the transformative vitae, which by
that time would have extended her existence long beyond her natu-
ral time. She would wither. She would die.
No.
Owain opened his eyes.
It will not be so.
Owain would save Kendall from her predetermined fate
not, he told himself, because she deserved any dispensation. For what mortal
was truly innocent?
And not as an attempt to lessen the stain of corrup-
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tion upon his own black soul. Instead, by saving her, Owain would manage to do
on behalf of another what he had failed to accomplish in centuries of
unlife evade the judgement of the wrathful Deity who allowed, who had caused,
Owain s lingering, nightly damnation. Owain would release Kendall from service
to him. He would free her before it was too late for her to lead the rest of
her mortal life, before her time, like his, had passed.
They watched Nicholas for several more nights but came no closer. Ever so
often, he would catch a glimpse of glaring eyes, and the snarling wafted in
and out of his awareness. They kept him under constant scrutiny, and at times
Nicholas heard the voices of their minds.
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Outsider. Intruder. Our forest. Outsider.
Or were those the voices from the other side of the Veil? He couldn t always
be sure. One world wrapped around the other, fused, shifted, disap-
peared only to emerge again.
The watchers, for the most part, stayed out of sight. Less hesitant were the
legions of restless dead.
They tromped carelessly through the forest and brought Grunewald to life with
scrabbling, erratic motion, like the flight of hundreds and thousands of black
leaves upon the breeze. Nicholas lay ex-
hausted as the shades crawled atop him. They slithered past one another,
jostled one another aside, to come close to him, to touch him. They lifted his
limp arm and cackled with glee as it fell again to the earth, ten times,
twenty times. They suckled and slavered at the cuts and scrapes upon his body.
The more daring forced open his mouth, pressed their amorphous corpora down
his throat in search of that which drew them.
Nicholas balanced precariously between the world of the watchers and the world
of the wraiths.
During the day, he found the slightest release as his shade-bloated body sank
into the earth. For a few, far too brief hours, he was swallowed by the
silence of the grave, but then when he emerged af-
ter sunset, it all began again, and every night more of the legions of the
restless dead found their way to him.
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164
They came in awkward, obscene gaggles of pitch black. Unused to the hint of
corporeal form that contained them, they stumbled over one another, lashed out
at one another in their frustration to touch Nicholas. They climbed over one
another, scraping and clawing mercilessly in pursuit of their goal. Here, a
wraith was swallowed beneath the ris-
ing tide of his brethren; there, another took umbrage at the aggressive
advance of a rival and ripped an arm-like appendage from the offender, who
howled and jabbered in pain. A pack of shades, like dogs beneath the butcher s
table, pounced upon the discarded limb.
All the while, Nicholas lay helpless, poked and prodded, overwhelmed by the
immensity of the shadow brood that engulfed him. The Rent was growing
ever-larger, ever-brighter, around him. Less and less frequently did he see
the trees of
Grunewald; seldom did he hear the rush of the river. These sights and sounds
were distant and vague, one-dimensional remnants of a world he was being
pulled away from. They were subsumed by the hungering, gibbering dead.
Nicholas fought off the weight of the dead and climbed to his feet. Squirming
shades tried to latch onto him, to hook their claws into him. A few managed to
hold their places. The rest slid down his leg and immediately began to
scramble up again. Nicholas stood atop a precipice. Behind him
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165
Dark Prophecy lay the increasingly insubstantial world of the body.
Before him gaped a huge chasm, the bottom and the far side obscured by the
light flooding through the Rent. The tear in the Veil was growing. It pressed
toward the edges of the chasm, reached for
Nicholas, and just as the restless dead in the physi-
cal world clamored after him, the shades streamed through the Veil. Their
forms passing through the
Rent were packed as thickly as a plague of locusts, and the brilliant,
blinding light appeared to flicker.
Nicholas was drawn to the light. It called to him, found reflection within his
soul.
Why are you still here?
Countless hands caressed Nicholas s bare chest, sifted through his hair. They
urged him forward, toward the consuming light.
Why are you still here?
The light beckoned. The shades smelled blood, real blood, as Nicholas leaned
over the edge of the cliff. But the voice& it came from another source& from
behind him.
Leave us now or die.
The blinding light was a part of Nicholas. It not only washed over him but
emanated from within him as well. He could not for long keep it at bay.
But there was a voice, a challenge from& from that other world.
Slowly, Nicholas turned away from the chasm.
A thousand furious shades bayed at him like wolves
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166
at the moon, but he did not pause, and as he turned, the light dimmed. The
otherworld receded.
The din of the shades spiraled away, water down a drain. The shades, too, were
sucked back to the otherworld. They dug in their claws and teeth and voiced
piteous wails, but faster and faster they dis-
appeared, until finally Nicholas stood firmly amidst the world of the flesh,
face to face with another of his kind.
Leave us now or die, said the other Cainite.
Nicholas, not yet fully comprehending the words, stared blankly at the
stranger.
Gangrel.
Through the echoes of the otherworld, Nicholas could feel the connection of
blood. He could feel the blood flow-
ing through this Gangrel, back through his sire and his sire s sire and his
before him, back through the eons to a common source. Nicholas was suddenly
growing warm. He tried to tear at his clothes but realized they were long
since gone. The light was rising within him again, the fire of ages. He heard,
as if from a great distance, the screeching of the shades.
Nicholas s attention shifted back to this world, to the stranger standing
before him a wild-haired man with bloodlust in his eyes. Nicholas raised a
finger to the air and, from their common source, traced the stranger s
blood thrice-great grandsire, sire s grandsire, sire& . Nicholas concluded his
ci-
pher with a name upon his lips. Lutz.
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The stranger opened his mouth to speak but came up short. A throaty growl
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