Vampire: The Masquerade is owned by White Wolf Publishing. My use is in no way meant to challenge their copyrights. This piece is not intended for any profit on the part of the writer, nor is it meant to detract from the commercial viability of the aforementioned copyright. Any similarity to any events or persons, either real or fictional, is coincidental and unintended.

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Chapter 5

I

Erica had just fired off a burst from her Uzi, hoping to provide enough cover to allow Michelle a good look at the Explorer when she lobbed her grenade. The Ventrue antitribu was reasonably certain she had hit something, but the inky blackness that suddenly blocked her vision prevented her from knowing for sure. "Shit," Erica cursed as she held her body perfectly still, closed her eyes, and fired at the pinpoints of light that she saw. 'Echoes of muzzle flashes,' K.T. had once called them, and Erica remembered this particular lesson well. K.T. had been instructing her in methods for dealing with snipers, and this particular tactic had been simple – freeze, close your eyes, and fire directly at the light that's echoing on the back of your eyelids.

Erica fired three more bursts; the first two resulted in the sounds of ricochets off of metal and glass, but the third one elicited a grunt of pain from one of her targets. Any further sound was blocked out by the sound of a tractor-trailer on the highway locking its wheels and overturning up on the highway. Guess that's a pretty big shroud of darkness, Erica realized. Moments later a thunderous jolt of metal slamming into metal erupted from the roadway, announcing that another vehicle had run straight into the overturned truck.

"Erica!" Michelle screamed, her voice on the verge of panic. "I can't see anything! Why can't I see anything!"

"Fuck," Erica growled, instantly remembering her friend's acute phobia. "It's okay," Erica called out, her voice punctuated by the screeching of tires from the roadway above as another car encountered the accident at the far side of the shroud of darkness. There was no collision this time, though, and Erica prayed that the road was still clear enough for her and Michelle to make their planned escape. Erica emptied the rest of her clip and, staying crouched low to the ground, moved quickly in Michelle's direction as bullets whizzed past her head.

The Gangrel had only been about six feet to Erica's left before the darkness had engulfed the gun battle, but the Ventrue antitribu was certain she had gone at least ten feet before she decided Michelle must have moved. She's looking for a wall, Erica realized, recalling Michelle's tendency to bolt in any given direction in search of a wall – or preferably a corner – in order to help her get her bearings. And she's not likely to find any walls out here in the open.

"Erica!" Michelle yelled again, this time from Erica's right. "What's going on?"

"They're shooting at us," Erica yelled, wishing that the darkness would lift so Michelle could get back in the fight. Or so I could see well enough to shoot her myself. "Get back in the goddamn game or they're gonna get away!"

Erica was shot three times before she was able to chastise herself for yelling and giving her position away to the enemy. But one of them can see me right now, she reminded herself, being somewhat familiar with the blanket of shadows that she was certain was the result of the vampiric ability of obtenebration. Practitioners of obfuscate could also conjure shadows, but Erica knew that Michelle's ability to see in the dark would penetrate a shadow created with obfuscate; such was not the case with obtenebration's darkness. Only the creator of the shroud would be able to see, and Erica was certain that he was busy getting his friends out of the dark so that they could make a clean getaway. If he was gonna use the dark as cover to approach and kill us, I'd probably be dead already.

More bullets were fired in Erica's general direction, but she had been able to move by then. A ricochet grazed her thigh, but that was merely a scratch compared to the bullet she'd taken in the gut. The pain was starting to incapacitate her, and Erica found it impossible to concentrate enough to mend the wound; she was far too busy firing at her enemies, keeping herself moving to decrease the chances of being shot again, and exhorting Michelle to get her head together and re-join the fight. Son of a bitch is gonna get away, and I'm not gonna get a chance to tag whatever car they get their hands on. All this way, and he's gonna slip through my fingers.

"No!" she heard Michelle scream defiantly. Erica immediately shifted her weight toward the Gangrel's voice, convinced that her assumption had been incorrect and that the caster of the shadow was indeed looking to finish them off. A flurry of gunfire cam from Michelle's position as she fired straight through the entire clip in her 9mm. The sound of shattering glass came from up ahead, and moments later there were screams. Male screams, Erica noticed.

"Where are you?" Michelle called out. Her voice was back to being under some semblance of control. "Are you hit?"

"Get over here," Erica called out, immediately shifting herself slightly in Michelle's direction. More screams started coming from below, and Erica caught the unmistakable scent of burning flesh. A moment later Michelle's hand clamped down on her thigh. "Michelle?"

"Yeah," her friend answered. "Something's on fire down there. And from the screams I'm assuming it's the Explorer. I don't think those two guys got out of the back."

"What if it blows up?"

"Then we probably get set on fire," Michelle commented none too reassuringly but with a sarcasm that defied the terror that was all but paralyzing her. She started pulling Erica away just as more gunfire erupted from below. A scream followed, and then Horatio's familiar voice tore through the darkness, screaming in an inhumanly high pitch.

"You bitch. You're dead! You're fucking dead!" Any other words he might have added were drowned out by the man's agonized screams. Both Erica and Michelle could guess what happened – Horatio had caught fire.

"Even in the dark, the Rottschreck will get them," Michelle said, backing away more and making certain Erica was staying with her. The heat was starting to grow oppressive, and Erica could taste the smoke every time she drew breath to speak. "We have to go."

"I'm hit bad," Erica gasped, gritting her teeth against the pain. She felt Michelle hoist her up in her arms and half-stumble back up the hill toward the interstate. A loud truck horn blasted ahead of them, and a moment later glass sprayed across their faces as a second truck joined the growing pile of scrap metal on Interstate 495. 'Make sure you don't get hit by a truck or something,' Erica remembered Michelle joking before they had started the shooting. She almost jinxed us from the get-go with that comment.

"Oh God!" Michelle yelled, briefly stumbling awkwardly as she bolted forward in a celerity-fueled sprint.

A moment later Erica realized why. Gas. That second truck was hauling gasoline… it's all over, probably all over Michelle's feet, too. The heat that had been dying away since the pair reached the highway now flared. Michelle reached the edge of the darkness and kept moving as fast as she could. Erica, still carried by the Gangrel, looked back and saw an intense orange glow that was blotted out by a large hemisphere of darkness. Then the truck exploded.

In that moment it was almost as if the fire turned the tables on the darkness, dousing the shadows in a blast of light that then spread out and banished the night for a mile in every direction. Erica felt her hair shrivel in the heat and her head was starting to swoon. "Don't look back, Michelle," she warned. "Keep running and don't look back."

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II

"Well, it's been fun," K.T. said as he started up the brand new Indian bike he had just bought in Wilmington.

"And we didn't get shot up nearly as bad as we usually do," Yashida pointed out. "That was new and different."

"See ya 'round," the Gangrel said as he kick-started the bike. Johnny flashed a slight wave and walked in the other direction, allowing K.T. to ride off into the night, secure in the illusion that Johnny had no idea what he had been up to.

No sooner had K.T.'s form melted into the darkness than Johnny was thinking back over the gunfight along I-495. Michelle and Erica did a good job, he decided. They hit the Explorer, flipped it off the highway, and had their enemies pinned. The way they went about the attack tells me they weren't just going about killing random Sabbat… they were targeting those guys specifically. But why?

As he climbed onto his new Kawasaki Ninja, Yashida toyed with the idea of asking Michelle what she and Erica had been up to, but he discarded that idea quickly. If I ask about her and Erica, then she'll at least suspect – and probably know – that I was out here trying to stop her. And if I just ask what she was up to, I know damn well she's going to omit any reference to her newfound sidekick. The only way to pump her for information on this is to hope that she slips up someday. "But what was K.T. up to?" the Telemon asked the darkness around him as he pulled out into traffic, hoping he would be able to make it far enough west before sunrise so that he would be able to sleep safely during the day.

He went over the gunfight yet again in his mind. We were following a little back when Michelle punched it and Erica started hanging out the window with an Uzi in her hand. We fell back a little more, and when it became clear that Erica was going to take out the Explorer right there on the highway I killed the lights, ditched the Camaro off the side of the road, and we ran up to the accident site on foot. They'd already started shooting by that point.

Johnny thought very carefully, trying to figure out if there was anything he was forgetting. Just a few seconds of assessing the situation, and that was when K.T. came up with his plan. The Telemon shook his head in frustration as he remembered the rest.

"Test Michelle with a shroud of darkness my ass," the Telemon cursed as he recalled K.T.'s suggestion. As if his concerns had anything to do with Michelle and not his blood-bound companion. Johnny was almost offended that his friend thought he could be so gullible. If it was all about testing Michelle, he wouldn't have insisted that I wait until he was right on top of the Sabbat before I dropped the shroud, Johnny decided, remembering K.T. altering his form into a mist and descending upon the Sabbat right before the Telemon turned out the lights.

And the best he could come up with was that he wanted to help out the girls in case Michelle wasn't able to handle it, Johnny thought with a laugh. The Telemon thought it obvious that K.T. wanted to get into the fight without Erica ever having known he had been there; the only question he had was why.

The most likely answer was that K.T. had wanted Erica to think that she and Michelle had handled six Sabbat on their own. It was a perfectly good reason, and one that Johnny would gladly have accepted. Hell, if he had suggested that, I would have been right there with him, shooting up the bad guys, knowing that Michelle would have gotten the confidence boost of her life, thinking that she had been able to take out that many enemies while fending off panic caused by the dark. But the fact is, he never suggested that.

K.T.'s silence when a simple lie would have been perfect led Johnny to conclude that there had been more going on. All six were dead – dead and charred to ash. Guess it's not an unthinkable stroke of luck, having a fuel truck coming along thereat that time. After all, there are God only knows how many refineries all along the river in that area. But even without that, it seemed that K.T. made certain that the two Erica and Michelle did incapacitate on their own were extinguished before the shroud of darkness dissipated. One would almost think that he was trying to keep them quiet about something. This grows curiouser and curiouser.

………………………

Crazy bitch, K.T. seethed as he sped down the highway in the opposite direction. When Johnny had mentioned offhandedly that maybe it was Erica who had started the interstate chase of the Sabbat, K.T.'s stomach had twisted itself in a knot. While the Telemon had clearly been desperate to find alternative explanations, trying to find any plausible reason Michelle might not have been the one to instigate the two girls' chase, K.T. had been struck by a possibility that Yashida could not begin to guess. Erica was trying to find out what happened in New York, he knew. Maybe she happened upon a Sabbat pack and decided to take a chance, or maybe she actually ran into someone she knew from back in the day. Either way, I know that's what she was up to.

The Gangrel had no proof of his suspicions, and he was well aware that he would never be able to broach the subject with his companion. Erica was many things, but stupid was not one of them; K.T. had to accept the fact that he lacked the subtlety necessary to get into that conversation without letting Erica know that it had been him, and not her and Michelle, who had extinguished the Sabbat.

And of course, that raises another uncomfortable matter, K.T. admitted. It was Hassan who had allowed him to go out into the field, to leave his training early in order to get his companion out of an uncomfortable position. But he held back a fairly crucial detail – he didn't tell me that it was Erica, and not Michelle, who had likely started it all. Though maybe it was Michelle, he mused, now determined to convince himself that his gut instinct was wrong for the first time in decades. Maybe Michelle called up, and Erica got it in her head that they should capture a few of them alive. It could have happened that way. Though it could have happened that way, K.T. was certain that it did not.

"I'm gonna have to admit that Erica just isn't past needing to know what really happened," he told the night air. "This is gonna be a real problem someday… Someday she's gonna find a way to get at the truth, and I won't be there to stop her.

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III

"We should do this again sometime," Erica said with a smile as Michelle scanned the street for an acceptable car.

"Yeah, sure," the Gangrel answered noncommittally. She finally decided on a 2002 Chevy Impala and set to work on the simple factory model alarm. She took her time, not bothering to rush despite the fact that the Wilmington police were doubtlessly looking for both her and Erica; she simply hoped that getting away from the highway and stealing Erica a Mustang and herself the Impala would slow any police pursuit.

"You did all right out there," Erica commented as Michelle finished off the alarm and went to work on the door. That only took a few seconds, and then she was busy with the ignition.

"I got by," Michelle finally said. "That's really all I did – I got by."

"And what more did you want? I remember what you were like before DuPree." Michelle winced at the mention of the Sabbat bishop, but Erica continued. "You were never gonna win kindred bad-ass of the year, Michelle. You're damned good at what you do, so stop kicking yourself for not being something you couldn't even be before things got all screwed up."

"Screwed up?" the Gangrel asked caustically, wondering what other ways Erica might have been able to make light of being held captive for weeks and psychologically tortured to the point that she developed an acute phobia. "I'm a little more than screwed up."

"Not anymore you're not," Erica responded.

"Huh?"

"One of those bastards dropped a shroud of darkness and you fought through it."

"I panicked and only managed to get a few shots off because my life depended on it," Michelle countered. "You know, with my luck, sure… I was able to get some shots off. But it was probably me who hit the gas tank or their Molotov cocktails and got them roasted before you could get your information or whatever it is you wanted. Not that the fuel truck made things much better."

Erica nodded slightly, as if she had already considered that very possibility, but rather than launch a more characteristic, stinging rebuke, she continued her efforts of encouraging her friend. "And do you honestly think you could have done even that much a year ago?" she asked.

"If I had to."

"Maybe… maybe. But I know things got a shitload more desperate at Disney before you pulled yourself together and started thinking straight. And even then, as soon as it was over you fell right to pieces again. That didn't happen this time, or haven't you noticed." Michelle hadn't noticed, and now she was starting to feel a little foolish.

"Okay, so maybe I'm a little better now," the Gangrel admitted.

"You're a lot better now," Erica replied. "And you know how I know for sure?"

"How?"

"You turned off the dome light when you were hotwiring the Mustang's ignition," Erica said. "I don't think you even noticed, but I did. In every car we've stolen between here and Pensacola, you turned on the dome light before you ducked your head under the dash or anything. You couldn't even handle the darkness in a parked car, but you did tonight. And you did it without even thinking about it, as if dealing with the dark was natural."

"Holy shit," Michelle mumbled, realizing that Erica was right. It was something so trivial, so insignificant, that she hadn't even realized she had done it. "So like, baby steps."

"Baby steps," Erica agreed. "Can't reach the finish line all at once."

"I guess that's advice that could go for you, too," the Gangrel commented, turning to the Ventrue antitribu, giving her her undivided attention now that the wiring was all set up and ready to start the car.

"Huh?"

"Whatever it was you wanted from Horatio, I guess it'll have to wait a little bit. And sorry, by the way, if it's my fault things went south on that. But there've gotta be other people who have the information you want."

"I suppose. It's just that… I don't know. It just pisses me off, ya know? We had them dead to rights, and then one of them must have tried using one of those Molotov cocktails without seeing where he was throwing it. What the hell are the chances of something like that happening? It pisses me off so much."

"Give it time. You'll get another chance eventually; and when you do, give me a call."

"So you think you might go through something like this again?"

"It was fun," Michelle responded with a grin. "It's sorta like the stuff Johnny and I used to do back in the day. So yeah… I'd do it again."

"Then make sure I always have your cell number," Erica said. "You never know when I might be giving you a call."

Michelle nodded and smiled as she started the Impala, then pulled away into the night, trying to determine the fastest way out of Sabbat territory and into safety. First north, and then west to Harrisburg, she decided. I sill know a couple of people there, and maybe my dad can come out and help me get a train ticket or something.

The Gangrel turned on the car stereo, scanning for something to listen to and finally settling for a hip-hop station that was playing 50 Cent's In da Club. She cranked the volume and rolled down the windows, shocked at how good it felt to be out alone in the middle of the night, despite the fact that her life would likely be forfeit if she ran into any of her kind in that area. She was not over her phobia; she knew that much. Shadows at the edge of her headlights still attracted undue attention, and she found herself completely unwilling to risk so much as a glance into the back seat, but she felt the thrill of one who had just overcome the first of a series of obstacles. Now the rest of her journey not only seemed possible, it seemed like it was only a matter of time.

………………………

Michelle was long gone by the time Erica turned over the Mustang's engine and pulled away from the curb. Like the Gangrel, she was concerned about the possibility of running into Sabbat before she could reach Camarilla-held territory. But at least I've run with the Sabbat, she reasoned. I can make up a name and fake being one of them if I have to… I doubt they'd be able to figure out who I am before I'm able to slip away to safety.

Weighing more heavily on her mind were concerns about her past. And her future. She started thinking once again about the thoughts that had surprised her in Birmingham. An attack on her targets had disrupted her train of thought that night, and she and Michelle had been busy enough since then so that she had not had an opportunity to return to what she had to admit was an uncomfortable epiphany.

I've spent years wondering what really happened in New York, trying to figure out why the Sabbat wanted me dead. It's occurred to me to wonder who did it and why, but I never really focused on those questions because I always assumed that knowing what really happened would answer that. But I've never asked the other two important questions – how did K.T. know the people who altered me, and why didn't they alter him, too?

To be continued………………………………………