The first thing Vachon noticed was the dirt in his mouth and nostrils.

I'm buried. How did I get buried?

Fuzzy thoughts and memories that weren't his filled Vachon's head, a blond child being brought across, slaughtering innocent people, anger, hatred, it consumed him.

The stake, Tracy took out the stake!

Panic started to set in, Vachon was still alive, still being driven mad and on top of it all he was buried far deeper than he had ever been before.

Why did she take the stake out? Dammit Trace!

As his thoughts centered on Tracy, Vachon realized something, he could push the other vampires thoughts and memories away. It wasn't easy, but he could do it. This gave him some hope, being unconscious for so long may have been exactly what he needed to heal.

No, that's not it. Something else happened.

Pushing his own consciousness further to the surface, Vachon realized the other vampire's link was broken, whoever she was, she had been killed and with her had died the evil that had consumed him.

He was still injured though, but nothing a few bottles of blood wouldn't heal. Her memories were another story, they would haunt him forever, but at least they weren't overpowering.

Extending his senses Vachon felt for the sun, it was low in the western sky and would set within an hour. About enough time to dig himself out.

When he got back to the church, the first thing Vachon did was find his wrist watch and check the date. It was March 2nd, he had been buried and thought dead for over two months. Urs was dead, he had known that as soon as he was free from his grave. Screed and then Urs, and Bourbon was somewhere in Europe. For the first time in centuries, Vachon felt truly alone.

He sat down on the stone steps in the basement and pulled a bottle of blood from the one of the crates next to him. It was stale and had lost most of the flavor of the person it had come from, but it would heal his wounds and that was all that mattered.

Throwing his head back, Vachon finished the bottle quickly and reached into the crate for another and instead found a wooden stake. Pulling it out of the box, he examined it, his dried blood caked on the point.

Tracy must have put there after she pulled it out, she probably didn't want to look at it.

He could see Tracy doing that,not wanting to bury him with the stake still in, she probably wanted to give him some dignity in death. Vachon smirked at that thought, there was no such thing as dignity in death, he had seen enough people die to know that. But Tracy's mortal ideals had saved his life.

Tracy Vetter had had a terrible night, her partner had left her in the car to call for back-up while he had gone ahead to catch the perp. Nick did that a lot, running off to do the real work and leaving Tracy safe with reports. She was getting sick of it. Of course, it didn't help that today would've been exactly ten months since she had met Vachon, if he hadn't left without telling her that is. Not only had him leaving hurt more than she thought possible, but she had been getting terrible migraines every time she thought of him. Walking into her apartment, Tracy slammed the door and threw her keys down on the counter. It was then that she realized the lights in her apartment were on. She instinctively reached for her gun, someone was in her apartment with her and she wasn't going to let them get away with breaking into a cops home.

"Are you gonna say freeze?" a familiar voice called

Tracy whirled around, standing in the doorway of her bedroom was Javier Vachon, his long dark hair a mass of frizzy waves, his leather jacket had a slight coating of dirt and a small holes was in the chest of his shirt. He looked like hell, but all that mattered to Tracy was that he was there. Setting her gun down, she walked over and hugged him. They stood there for a few moments just holding each other, Tracy glad to have him back and Vachon glad to have someone left period. Pulling away from the embrace, Tracy stepped back and slapped Vachon across the face.

"What the hell was that for?" He demanded

"Are you serious?" Tracy snapped back, her voice filled with hurt and rage "You leave without so much as a 'Hey, it's been nice knowing you.' and you actually have the audacity to ask me that?"

"Leave? I didn't leave!"

"Oh really, then where have you been?"

Studying Tracy's face, Vachon realized she was serious, she had really though he'd just moved on.

It could only mean that someone had tampered with her memories. Tracy was a resistor and sensitive one at that, removing him completely from her memory would've been nearly impossible, but tweaking a few of those memories was different. What he was worried about was what they had to do to get her to be that complacent.

"If you had let me finish," Vachon said, trying to think up something convincing " I was going to say I didn't leave permanently. I was coming back."

"And you couldn't have told me that?" Tracy said, her arms crossed over chest.

"No, Trace listen, there was a very old and powerful vampire loose and she was killing us off. I got away from her but I've been hiding out and healing ever since."

Not really a lie, just omitted truth.

Tracy's expression softened, and she put her arms down at her side.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I was hiding out in the woods Trace" he said, a half smile playing on his lips "Not exactly a lot of phones out there."

Tracy smiled at his joke and hugged him again.

"I'm sorry I hit you." She said

"It's alright, I'm sure I'll do something in the future to deserve it."

Nick Knight walked into his loft, he had gotten off early tonight and couldn't be more thrilled. He had been very hungry lately and being around all the blood involved in a crime scene didn't help. Walking over to his fridge, he pulled out a bottle of cow's blood, pulled the cork out with his teeth, blindly spat it across the room and sat down on his leather couch to enjoy his dinner. It took almost half the bottle but the hunger in Nick finally started to subside.

Leaning back, he let out an exasperated sigh, it had been a long week. Tracy was giving him more and more flak about running off and leaving her behind to do the grunt work while he did the actual police work. Life had been so much easier with Schanke, all Nick had to do was occasionally throw Schanke a bone of glory and he was happy to be in the background. It didn't help that Tracy was a resistor and Schanke had been easy to hypnotize. Anytime Nick's former partner had caught him doing something that wasn't humanly possible he would just tell him to forget and he would.

And occasionally wash the car too.

A pang of guilt hit Nick, he had very often taken advantage of his former partners human weaknesses. But what bothered him more was his desire for his current partner to be that weak-willed. Lacroix had found a way though and Nick had always wanted to ask exactly how he had done it, but decided against having that particular temptation.

Ignoring those thoughts, Nick reached over and hit the button on his answering machine.

"You have one new message: Knight! It's Vachon. Look I know you're surprised to hear from me, but we need to talk about Tracy. Meet me at the Raven, I need to get some things settled with Lacroix."

Playing the message back, Nick tried to figure out who had really called him, it sounded like Vachon, but it could have been a trick. What made him more suspicious was that the message told him to go to Lacroix. In his eight centuries, this had happened to him more than once. But his master had agreed to let him live his life without interfering, Nick knew it could be real, he just didn't know how.

Lucien Lacroix was surrounded by paperwork and file folders and looked as if he would rather walk out into the sun than go through them. His old friend Aristotle sat next to him, typing away on his laptop, trying to get everything done as quickly as possible. The offending papers were specifics on all the vampires Divia had killed, the mess needed to be cleaned up.

After her two night rampage, Divia had killed over forty of the younger vampires in the city. Masters, children or siblings needed to be contacted, bank accounts and properties had to be transferred and severed community connections needed to be reestablished . Until this was done, Lacroix was not allowed to move on.

"All right," Aristotle said "who's next?"

Lacroix picked up the next file and handed it to his friend.

"Ursula Comstock," he said looking it over, " one hundred twenty-five years old. Master is Javier Vachon. Why does that name sound so familiar?"

"He is also one of the deceased." Lacroix said, frustration filling his voice.

"Oh, well hand me his file then, we can get them both done at once and move onto the next."

Lacroix started going through the large pile, it was in alphabetical order which meant Vachon's was somewhere near the bottom, he hoped. Many of the vampires they had processed were either under their current aliases or their original names, unfortunately the paperwork didn't say which it was so locating the proper files or even explaining to their master who had died was a much more difficult task then it needed to be.

Of course, if the rest of community kept better track of their children, as I do, this task would not be so daunting.

Finding the file near the top in the J's, (due to the fact that his first and last names were mistakenly inverted) Lacroix handed it to Aristotle, stood up and walked to the bar for a drink.

"Come now Lucius," Aristotle said, using his mortal name "this can't really be bothering you that much. We should be done with all this paperwork in the next three to four months and then it should only take a few years at the most to properly reestablish the community. And what's a few years for those as old as us?"

Lacroix said nothing, he instead pulled a bottle out from behind the bar and filled two glasses with it.

"Thank you" Aristotle said, accepting the glass from Lacroix when he returned to the table, "so, It looks like Vachon's master was killed centuries ago, though her name isn't listed here."

"I doubt you would find it anywhere, apparently he was brought across by some native vampire in South America, she also did so to one of his bitter enemies making them twins. She killed herself the very next day by walking into the sun. She must have had quite the flare for theatrics, bringing across two mortal enemies and then leaving them to each other for the rest of eternity."

"Wait," Aristotle exclaimed, "I know this vampire, we crossed paths with him, what was it fifteen ninety-nine, sixteen hundred? Anyway, he was killing women all over London and not bothering to cover it up. He was so used to leaving his victims to rot in the jungle. I'm surprised he lasted five hundred years. Didn't he have a carouche child?"

"Yes, but he was killed when the sickness struck the community. And I believe his twin was killed in one of the bombings last summer."

"Well, that's a dying family tree. Oh wait, it seems he has one living child, Francois Bourbon, lives in Stockholm. Well I guess we'd better give him a call and inform him that Vachon's, Urs's and Screed's properties and finances are now all his."

"Actually" a low voice said, "I'd prefer if you didn't."

An amused look crossed Lacroix's face, Vachon was standing at the bar, drinking from the bottle that had been left sitting there.

"So you weren't dead when your mortal friend buried you?" Lacroix said, enjoying the irony of burying a vampire alive.

"Mortal friend?" Aristotle said

"Don't worry" Lacroix assured "I've already taken care of it."

"Yes," Vachon said as he took a swig from the bottle and then wiped his lips off out of habit "You did, what I want to know is why? Tracy thinking me dead would've kept her away from the community, thinking I had left would only make her look for me."

"Yes well, you'll have to take that up with Nicholas, he's the one who made that request."

Lacroix turned his head in time to see Nick land at the bottom of the steps to the bar.

"Well" Lacroix said " 'Speak of the devil' I believe is the appropriate term here."

"So you are alive." Nick said when he saw Vachon "But I saw you dead in Tracy's arms."

Vachon shrugged.

"She took the stake out," he replied nonchalantly

" Stake? I thought Divia attacked you?"

"Was that her name? Yeah, she attacked me, but she didn't kill me."

Nick looked confused, he wanted to know the rest, but Vachon decided to leave him hanging for a few minutes as he retrieved a glass, poured himself a drink, threw it back and then poured another.

"After her attack," Vachon continued as he sipped his new glass of blood, "I made my way back home, and proceeded to slowly go insane from her memories and thoughts."

"So how did Tracy stake you then?"

"She showed-up, said I called her, I don't remember doing it but I wasn't exactly of sound mind at the time. I realized the injuries were going to kill me and asked Tracy to stake me."

"But she pulled it out before it finished killing you." Nick finished

Vachon nodded, finished his glass, set it down on the bar and walked over to the table Aristotle and Lacroix were sitting at.

"So you can mark me as 'Alive' in the community database" he said to them." Or at least the equivalent of."

Aristotle shrugged, and made the necessary adjustments in his hard and computer file.

"What I don't get Knight" Vachon said, his voice becoming serious " is how you could give Tracy to Lacroix to violate."

"Violate? All he did was adjust her memories. You've tried to do it."

"And failed, Tracy is a resistor and there aren't many ways of dealing with them. But what Lacroix would've had to do was something I thought you were above letting happen."

A look of confusion crossed Nick's face.

"What are you talking about?" he said "Lacroix what does he mean?"

Vachon stared at Nick in disbelief.

"You really don't know?"

"Nicholas is not an active member of the community," Lacroix pointed out "he doesn't keep up with the new methods."

"Methods?" Nick snapped "What methods!"

Vachon shook his head, he couldn't believe Knight really didn't know.

"The only way," he said "to ensure a resistor is completely under your control is to cause there mind to go blank."

" 'Blank?' How would you ensure that?"

Vachon looked at Lacroix for help.

"Physical pleasure Nicholas."