Book 2: Chapter 2: A Layer of Lies

The night air inside the Mystic Mansion felt heavier than usual, as if the walls themselves had absorbed the tension of the city’s unraveling. In the parlor—silken drapes drawn, candlelight trembling—the coterie gathered to make sense of the political fractures tearing through San Francisco.

Tekki’s death at Hell Ultra Club still echoed like a gunshot through Elysium politics. Graham Corey’s sacred ground, once untouchable, now stood deconsecrated, sullied by violence and humiliation. Worse, whispers slithered through the streets—Damien Bolden, bold to the point of recklessness, had openly resisted Corey’s majesty. The city buzzed with it. The Beast in every Kindred seemed a little closer to the surface.

Into this fraying calm stepped Graf Orlock, pale as ever, but troubled in a way the elders seldom let show. The conversation turned inevitably to Flek—usually meek, quiet, nearly invisible. Yet last week, at the Primogen’s gathering, he had moved like a different creature entirely. Confident. Strange. Wrong.

As Graf spoke, his voice faltered. Valmont, subtle and curious, reached out with Auspex… and felt it: a flutter of nostalgia, a shimmer of unease, and beneath both, a cold, quiet fear. Graf was hiding something about Flek—something deep enough to shake him.

Before the tension could tighten further, Valmont’s phone rang.

Dean Hawkes. Urgent. “Meet me at Pitt and Kent. Now.”

The bar was a ruin—its neon sputtering, its windows fogged with despair. Hawkes waited in the dim light, looking older, the weight of his former title—Governor of San Francisco—pressed into the lines of his face. He spoke of the past, of Prince Nathan Kent, of nights when he alone vetted every new Kindred who dared enter the city. He still remembered them all. Their sins. Their secrets.

When Valmont confessed that multiple predators hunted Pip Dark—her back burned with the arcane Murran spell—Hawkes grew grave. Renwick sought her. The Ventrue in Phoenix hungered for her. Others too. The city was tightening like a noose around one Gangrel girl.

“If you find her,” Hawkes whispered, “she must be hidden.”

And he told them of Bellatrix Vonner, a Gangrel elder with hideaways so deep that even memories struggled to find them.

Dean also promised Valmont a copy of the Necronomicon, a lifeline for the Toreador stumbling blindly through ghost-haunted realms. Then he spoke of Flek as he once was: radiant, adored by Toreador, charismatic enough to warm even Vangard’s icy demeanor. A far cry from the cringing creature serving Kiren the Angry.

But the revelations didn’t stop. Ernie Bould, anarch and ex-Tremere, warned Hawkes that the Tremere mechanicians pursued the Murran spell as well. San Francisco was becoming a crucible, and at its center stood Pip.

And she was hiding in the Sutro Baths.

The ruins greeted the coterie like a memory with teeth. Valmont heard it first—a ghostly hiss: “I haven’t forgotten…”

Blood stained the air like a promise. On the second floor, two wolves the size of nightmares blocked their path. Behind the door they guarded drifted a voice—soft, aching, beautiful. Pip’s song.

Before they could enter, a tall, unmovable figure filled the doorway.
Kicking Horse.

An ancient Gangrel, carved from earth and spirit, with eyes that had watched centuries burn. “No harm will come to her,” he warned.

The tension broke only when the coterie insisted they had a way to protect Pip—Bellatrix. Slowly, reluctantly, Kicking Horse allowed the walls around him to lower. Pip, frightened but hopeful, agreed to leave.

The group stepped into the night toward Damien’s car. That’s when Pip gasped. Her tattoo—normally dormant—flared a violent, searing red.

A silhouette stood on the hillside, still as a gravestone. The coat around him billowed in the wind like wings.

Pip froze.

The figure stepped forward, and the night seemed to recoil.

Renwick.

“My child,” he called out.

All eyes snapped to Pip.

But before anyone could speak, Renwick’s voice rolled across the hill again, deeper, colder, intimate:

“My child. How are you, Damien? It’s been a long time.”

Silence collapsed around the group.

Damien’s breath hitched. The truth landed like a blade:

Damien was Renwick’s childe.