THE NIGHT IS DARK AND SILENT. A half-moon shines through the old windows of the decrepit warehouse—the metal framing of each pane is stained with rust and decay, and some glass panels are shattered while others are altogether missing; the whole ones are opaque with dotted hard water buildup, meaning that Jaerim has to duck below one of the broken windows on the second floor industrial walkway to better understand what is taking place just beyond the property.
He’s sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest and hands clasped around his legs. With enough focus, he can listen in on the conversation. The words are faint, muted as if he’s listening from underwater, but it’s enough to understand. There’s three—maybe four of them—and they’re sending someone in. Jaerim closes his eyes, concentrating on the eventually approaching footsteps.
The southern outskirts of the city are a dead zone. It’s been years since the textile factories went up in flames, and with so much tragedy lingering in one spot, no one has attempted to revitalize the area. It certainly doesn’t help that the likes of him are skulking around here. If he were to guess, Elias is behind all of the fatal accidents, and now Jaerim obediently rips into anyone encroaching on the territory. The Camarilla is getting closer to cracking down on their whereabouts, and as much as Jaerim hates the Sabbat, he doesn’t want to die.
With a calm sigh, Jaerim soundlessly leans toward the railing and watches the vampire stagger in weakly. He regards him in an impassive state as if he were looking into a fish pond, each blink a consideration of his morality. He could land upon him with ease and in one motion separate head from body, but he has found during these nights that there’s something dense, a root, growing in the background of his thoughts. Elias is teaching him to scorn joy, scorn tragedy, scorn variety, scorn light. Jaerim toils erratically, at times understanding his position as a rejected creature of dusk, hopeless against the alive masses. Paradoxically, it is also from all this violence that he calibrates his capacity for kindness.
The vampire below can hardly walk in a straight line, seemingly extinguished by the telltale signs of hunger, and yet there is a strange lucidness about him, a sad but docile strain in his essence, but it holds Jaerim’s gaze for all that. In a quiet gesture Jaerim throws a broken-off piece of plaster at him. It bounces off his shoulder harmlessly, and when he looks up, two black eyes meet his gaze from the darkness.
“Hey,” Jaerim leans against the metal railing, looming above like a lazy feline. His gaze softens when he asks: “Are you alright?”