FLYBY RUNDOWN: Desert of Ghosts is a messy Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines remix with no player-character to save the day. It prioritizes vampiric faction conflict for LA rather than the quest for the Ankaran Sarcophagus. Some heavy world changes inside.

CONTENT WARNINGS AND DISCLAIMERS:
This story isn't intended as an expansion, restorative work, or a writing critique of Bloodlines; it's just a wacky shake-up of something I love for fun. It's also not an endeavor to rewrite Bloodlines as a morality play or serve as an emotional fix-it fic. (Nothing against fix-its; just know that this isn't one!)

1. ADULT CONTENT: Desert of Ghosts is written in an assortment of close third-person POVs. Some characters in this work are sexist, racist, classist, ethnocentric, evil little dipshits. The narrative existence of these negative themes, shitty worldviews, and bad ideas is an attempt at rendering believable character psych profiles and acknowledging contemporary socio-political situations (especially in the United States); it isn't an endorsement.

For your psych wellness, a list of potential major triggers follows:
a. Graphic (described in scene): homicide; physical assault; terroristic acts; abduction (of adults); mass shooting; blood, bones & gore; animal attack; explosives; torture (of adults). There is a lot of violence and character death in Desert of Ghosts, but there are no rape scenes.
b. References (mentioned in brief passing, but not described in-scene): substance abuse; sexual abuse; human trafficking; suicide; domestic abuse.

2. CANON. For the love of cheddar-loaded baked potatoes, please don't use Desert of Ghosts as a handbook to canon. This story respects major elements of VtM lore, but with tweaks and omissions—some minor personal taste details, some significant clanbook alterations. If you have questions about what is and is not canon, please consult official resources, or send me a private message.

-o-O-O-o-

NOTES ON VERSION 2 FOR RETURNING READERS: Desert of Ghosts is Byzantine Black if Byzantine Black was your high school crush at the 10-year-reunion. You thought he'd be a scrub forever… and OK, he still kind of is, but he's a scrub you might let touch your butt, if Hozier was blasting and you watched him wash his hands first.

That but serious: I rewrote Byzantine Black. Line-by-line. The whole thing. There are several reasons why I feel this was necessary, but they mainly boil down to these four:

1. I wanted friendlier syntax, better dialogue, and snazzier voices.
2. I'm creatively better-researched, and thereby able to air new content and retooled characterizations I previously shied away from.
3. I was never happy with the ending, and
4. Some of it was SO embarrassing. I was a teenager trying to get into college when I wrote most of the original draft; now I teach at college. Super weird to measure your life progress in effing fanfiction, but in a literal sense: I grew up.

Granted, there's cutting to be done, lazy prose to overhaul, and typos to be busted, but I'm at the point where I feel more or less comfortable re-releasing.

WHERE'S THE END?: It's being completely redone! There will be a new series of ending events to replace the old chapters; you may recognize some scenes, but the vast majority will be rewritten, replotted, and expanded. I'll be finishing and uploading this new ending serially, chapter-by-chapter. This gives you the opportunity to enjoy that episodic new content feel again, if that's your thing. If it's not, you might want to check back with this story later.

That's it for now. Thanks for everything you did and do! Hugs, everybody.

(Except for you, Vandal. No hugs for you. Too dangerous.)
-rn

Fire Dogs

Here's a story for you:

In the City of Angels, a rich white man is born grown. Blue-eyed and blond-headed, he comes into second life—a sharpening of his first life, if you please. A new, better, sleeker life, one with all the baby fat scraped off. He comes equipped with everything a rich white man needs. Got good bones, nice front teeth, a loft with a waterbed and a chandelier; he has stock options; he has Italian cuts and a sponsor with heavy pockets; do you understand, he has stock options; he has accumulated interest; he has a big bureau car in passionless, bad mother black. He is born-again like a Baptist is. This Aryan prince, whose name is not important right now, is what other rich white men like to call a go-getter. He is starting off pretty high and is upwardly mobile. He is young people. He is on the way up.

So this moving-up man lands flat-footed in boomtown LA. Time to paint a picture of him—because you'd be smart to recognize a man like this, wouldn't you, now.

He is:

Suave, symmetrical, clean-cut, gelled-up, a smooth fucking operator with a Cloroxed grin and a hungry shine. He smells the blood in the water first. He is button-down violence with some hip red cufflinks. Man, if you catch his attention, this kid will never let you go. He will dog you like a fool. He is Nordic; has some Viking in him, somewhere back there. He knows how to crack the whip and how to duck his head and row. He is cool. He has never not had a gym membership. He is made of long, weedy muscle; tall calves, thin legs; probably does pull-ups on the closet beam before bed, with the off-blacks of his dry cleaning hanging behind him. Probably played tennis in college; probably did college at Northwestern or Vanderbilt; not quite smart enough for Harvard, not quite sharp enough for Stanford, not dreamy enough for Yale. Of course he is a little bit baby-faced. He stands from the soles of his shoes to that famous gold-blond somewhere between five foot eight-to-ten. He's about, oh, yea high.

He's a Mr. Big Man, our guy. He does not let little things get him down.

Watch him. He leaves his apartment looking like a champ. He takes the stairs at a canter when the elevator's too slow. He busts through those lobby doors like The Angels are waiting on him – strides out of Skyeline, briefcase and fancy watch, sports coat neat and scary, shoulders trying to seem broader than they are. He's got an Ivy Leaguer's belligerent clip, and that blasé, top-down skip-hop of the National Young Republicans. He's across the street and into the parking lot. His tie knots could probably break some little girl or little boy's heart.

This is how a big man walks.

He showed up three months ago like he belongs here. Where doesn't a rich white man belong, you might ask—good-looking kid like him, popular opinions, fresh out of that MBA? He's here to get big, ain't he? Los Angeles is big-time for big people—big as a boomtown gets. It's Gold Rush territory. It is Not The Sixties Anymore. It has American dreams, this place. It has palm trees and orange juice and film options and giant, red trees and it has massive towers and sharp corners and country suckers and mean fuckers who will hold you down and brick you if they can; it has men who only deal in six figures and who are looking for bloodthirsty partners all the time; and kid, it has women, not just the people but the but the idea: salad women and sexy women and loose women and serious, capitalist, break-your-bank, put-you-down, buy-you-out women and all kinds of women a big man like this wants to meet. He calls everybody back, always. He sees no reason why we can't all be pals here. He says wait a minute, don't come to me, I'll come to you, because that's the swell kind of guy I am. This is how a big man gets in.

Things starting to blend together now? Starting to look like these big guys are all alike? Darlin, it is a goddamn sea of bluebloods out there, and easy to lose sight of our principal character. He's really just middle-management. He's a trooper, our guy—somebody who carries a rifle and a company badge and honks yessir! He came into this thing on accident, tell the truth, but he was given great clemency. He now calls himself a self-made man.

Keep your eye on the ball, here. After all, we're still talking about just one person—a boy with ambitions, a bratty name, and a nasty red tie. Kid, believe it or not: we are not talking about Prince LaCroix.

Except that we are, in a way, because—you peel back the armor and the million-dollar grin—you'll find that snakes, inside, are all the same.

Our snake of the night rolls into Angeltown like plenty of them have rolled in before. He is made for that platinum member gold card A-list and he expects to be listened-to. He says honey, I'm home.

But honey, there's a problem. There were some pretty big people already here.

LA has a history of building up and burning down. It's riots, riots, riots. Big people chew on the little people until one of those little people has had enough, finds some of their own teeth, and learns how to chew meat, too. All things in time, obviously. You start out eating little snakes. Baby snakes, here-n-there, and then you move on to small snakes. You eat enough of those, you feel yourself expand; you begin hunting bigger reptiles; you get immune to the poison; you start salivating when you see the middle-management. You know how to handle serpents like these. You chase them down and flatten them out and stomp their heads. You rip them skinless and open their flesh. You get their tender, fatty hearts in your hands and like striking oil you wring the black out of them. You catch these snakes by the throat, and you choke them before they can even think about biting-back, and you squeeze.

You get a little bigger and a little spookier every time. You get meaner and meaner, until some of those big man snakes don't look so big to you anymore.

But come on, now – who wouldn't like our guy? He's eager to please. He's raring to go. He's got business to do and doesn't take anything personal, so it's hard for his people to imagine why any lowdown dog out there would want to do their little joint-stock thing harm. But say-it-ain't-so: he has detractors. He has a shortlist of people this big-man-boy has whacked to get where he is today.

He has made what you might call enemies.

He has got the wrong kind of eyes watching him now.

Watch him, walking around like nobody has ever wanted to roar the engine and run his skeleton down.

The thing about big men, honey, is that they get so puffed up on can-do, just-watch-me attitude, they can't see much else. So maybe that's the special issue, here. That's the species difference. A man like this, rich and white and college-degreed, can't even tell he's jaywalked into someone else's city, pissed everybody off. He has no real memory of drowning their children, stepping on their toes. What's a couple executions and a city or two between wholesome lawmakers like us, buddy? He's already swept the baby's bones under the rug. He lands his feet on the shore and he catches a whiff of that Gold Rush possibility and he starts dropping orders everywhichway. They're governors, these guys. They set up fences and tell other people what to do.

This is how a big man grows.

So this skeezy little fuck squeaks into LA, like he has some kind of right to—like a young Columbus, hitting an island and ramming down the empire's flag—like the divine visitor—and what eventually happens to white men who "discover" other people's land is bound to put a wrinkle in his Five Point Plan. This kid is delusional. This piece of shit thinks he can slide right in under the radar, him and the whole damn grand armada, prop up and take over another monster's domain. That's what they do, these limp-wrist cross-eyed trust fund baby Ventrue fuckers. This is how a big man moves in.

Watch him cross the street: springs over the curb, glances only one way, does not pause. Cars don't hurt me; bullets don't hurt me; the Brujah don't hurt me; nothing does. Watch the brand new plastic-capped laces of his narrow shoes bounce. He has got to punch-in and punch-out. If you were, say, waiting in your truck just down the block, your visors down, your windows rolled-up, your jacket hood pulled forward stakeout style, a knapsack full of buckshot and matches and wine bottles full of excess astrolite in your passenger side, you'd notice how this measly son-of-a-bitch moves from the places he's been toward the places he wants to go.

Watch him work: the kid has a prerogative to do what he's asked. He's a cleaner, himself—he hup-twos over fences, drags in defaulters, slaps 'em for contempt of court. He thinks that makes him important. He's heavy-footed on the gas and double-checks his collar crispness in his cell phone camera before kicking in a door. Worthless junior bottom-feeder thinks he's trying out for a big bad seat on the Scourge. He adds assassinations to his résumé instead of notches in a bedpost.

Most recently, this fuckwit Scepter-Childe barreled straight over the border, hot-in-pursuit, way out into Long Beach for a last-minute kill. But Mr. Big Man Kiddo knocked the wrong heads together that time. He snuffed a couple pretty good kids—kids who, unfortunately for our guy, were also Anarch soldiers. They belonged to one of Smiling Jack's fixers up in San Fran—some foxy, shades-wearing weirdo with a real Greek name and a thing for Puerto Rican boys. (Never could figure out what she was doing with Jack.) She had a mean ass break-action and some bones to pick. She had Nines Rodriguez's number. She had half a doomsday arsenal leftover from the Kuei-jin siege, just rotting out in a desert cave somewhere—and, for one small favor, she was willing to send a cut to her friendly neighbor downstate.

Watch his place: Skyeline Apartments is full of small-time jewelry thieves, aspiring socialites and, of course, a couple no-good Camarilla do-boys like these. It's got art prints and leather couches. It's got talent hunters and Late Night hacks. It's got this no-count little shit living in a patron-paid flat on floor four—wide-screen TV, shotguns in his closet, angel fishes in a tank. He spends his company paychecks like a sailor. He picks up springbreakers and dumps them in the lobby to sleep it off. Gringo keeps a six-shot pistol in a cigar box like a cutie-pie. Thinks he's a gangster, this slick sack of shit. Thinks he's a prettyboy, a Mack the Knife. He won't look over his shoulder. He has a brand new plaque on his mailbox latch.

Even his name tastes despicable: Victor de Luca. Shit like that kind of makes you want to spit.

He gives people work to do.

And you better believe it: they've worked all night, The People—worked through sunrise, squinting and plotting and smarting off at each other and never ever resting their heads. Everybody wanted a piece of this job. Everybody wants to get a crack at the magic orphan, take a swing at the pet project of a Prince. So, like true-blue comunistas, they divide the labor equally. Damsel found the address. K-Al secured the supplies. Skelter built the package. Nobody got any sleep that morning, honey, but how can a good insurgent sleep when there's so much to get done? This is the work of redistribution, child. There was still a tangle of copper wire, rolls of duct tape, and a rash of gasoline stain on the basement floor. Only thing left was for somebody to plant it. Only thing left to be done was to sit back, wait a spell, and watch for the boom.

Watch this:

Our guy actually makes it across Dewap Road. He's up an incline and onto the lot and he does not even check the cars around him. Who'd have it out for me, he figures. He's the Prince's new deputy, Lackey Numero Uno. Bitchboy thinks he's untouchable. Checks himself out in rearview mirrors and storefronts and Coke bottles—unkillable, this guy. Probably folds his tighty whities. Probably looks in the mirror and dares his reflection are you talkin to me? It's funny for you, maybe, because that's exactly the size of neck you could grab in your palm and break open. Take the back of his skull and put it through the side of a bus. Smash into glass until the smirk crunches. Wrench off his arms and drive nails in his eyes and tear the forked tongue out, make him swallow that wicked part of himself, so a snake maybe comprehends the outrage of what it has done to the world again and again and again.

But who're we kidding, here. Snakes may do the math, but honey, they do not learn.

This is how a big man gets caught in a lie:

The Ventrue lose their minds if you get them cornered. They hit their kneecaps and squeal wahh! When all that karma creeps up. They play dumb when you start dropping names of the dead. They hit the high notes when you show the machete in your sleeve. They crank on the water works. They won't pipe the fuck down. They got the eye of your pistol gouging a dent in the space between their eyes and they try to speak what they guess is your language. They ay dios de mio but think of The People you. And you say I'm sorry, but what did you suppose was going to happen here, buttercup? It's natural order. Ventrue don't know how to bow out and die on their feet. They'll be sweetening you up and scrambling to crook you until you scatter their brain on a corner of the darkwood desk.

This is what a big man tries.

Watch him get in his car. This is a kid that saddles up and rides to war in a Pontiac, babychild. He is a G8 kind of kid with a scratch-proof polish. He stops for no-body. There's doors to open, do you understand? Doors to open. He has deals to seal and rings to kiss and other fish to fry.

He puts his briefcase neatly on the hood, pats the phone in his breast pocket, palms over his hair part, checks the time.

This is how a big man lets fly.

He gets his keys from the keyhole and his hand on the handle and he opens the driver's side door.

Boom town.

Nines Rodriguez drums his fingers on the steering wheel and lets that snakey kind of smile find his own teeth. And for his own sake he says:

boom

Gone.

The car lights up. It is toast. It pops and smokes and throws up some red in that star-bitten gold rush sky.

In the City of Angels, this is how a big man dies.

DESERT OF GHOSTS

Like firedogs in the wind.

Plath