Chapter 1 — Ashes to Ashes on Chicago Chronicles

Rescued from Victory — Nights 3-4, January 1991

Wed, 02 Jan 1991 23:00:00 +0000

Sears Tower / Wacker Drive / West Side 7-11 / Tell It All Offices / Standdown’s Warehouse / Starlite Motel Chicago, Illinois — January 2-4, 1991

They woke in a dead man’s room and the cold had gotten in while they slept — not through the walls (the walls were concrete and steel and built to hold a Prince) but through the glass at the end of the hallway, where January pressed itself against the 107th floor and the radiator had quit because the only person who knew how to fix it was Julian Curry and Julian Curry was in the office down the hall with a bullet through his head.

Vacant Haven — Wednesday, 2 January 1991, 9:30 PM

Wed, 02 Jan 1991 21:30:00 +0000

Sears Tower, 107th Floor — Lodin’s Haven Chicago, Illinois

The town car pulled away from Daley’s and Sable counted the seconds before anyone spoke. Belthazar sat in the front passenger seat with his coat folded across his knees. He hadn’t looked at either of them since the restaurant. The driver was a ghoul with the stillness of someone who had been told not to listen, not to remember, and not to exist unless the car needed turning.

Dinner with Ballard — Wednesday, 2 January 1991, 4:29 PM

Wed, 02 Jan 1991 16:29:00 +0000

Daley’s Restaurant, Gold Coast Chicago, Illinois

The ghoul held the car door at the Hyatt’s lower entrance, and the cold came in like a blade — sixteen degrees and dropping, the kind of January that turns breath to glass before it leaves your mouth. Sable slid into the back seat. Darius followed. Neither spoke. The town car smelled like Armor All and something botanical, an air freshener that cost more than her first month’s rent on State Street.

Welcome to Chicago — Tuesday, 1 January 1991, 4:28 PM

Tue, 01 Jan 1991 16:28:00 +0000

Skyway / Succubus Club / The Cave / Field Museum / Soldier Field Chicago, Illinois

The Skyway was two lanes of frozen asphalt and the skyline getting closer. Gary shrank in the rearview mirror the way a bruise fades — slowly, and you kept touching it to make sure.

Twenty-five minutes. That was the distance between a dying city of seven vampires and a living one with a hundred. The Wastelands rolled past the windows on both sides — tank farms, refineries bleeding orange flame into the January dark, the skeletal remains of factories that had closed before either of them learned to hunt. The Cutlass rattled over expansion joints. Behind it, Sable’s Buick held a steady two car lengths.