Blood at Dawn — Monday, 18 June 1990, 9:00 PM

Modius’s Mansion, Miller Beach Gary, Indiana

Darius sat in the armchair across from a prince who’d been reading people since Napoleon and told the truth. Most of it. The parts that served. The parts that bought time and goodwill and the specific currency of a neonate who solves problems his prince didn’t know existed.

He told him about the spirit and the boy and the sorcerer on Pennsylvania Avenue. He told him about the fire in the Wasteland and the sound the door made when it closed. He told him about the federal sedan on the lakefront road with the photographs and the notebook heading: WIERUS.

Modius listened the way Modius listened to everything: with the piano lid open and the Auspex running and the Conniver’s mind drawing lines between every point on the map until the geometry either pleased him or didn’t.

“How did you identify the spirit?” The probe. The question designed to touch the nerve.

“We did our own research. Raided the public library for the occult books.”

The lie landed wrong. Darius felt it before he saw it: the prince’s face going still, the eyes narrowing, the specific temperature drop that meant the Auspex had caught something the mouth tried to hide.

“The public library.” Flat. The words placed on the table like evidence. “You identified a Goetic spirit through the Gary Public Library’s occult section.”

The silence after was the kind that has teeth.

“You’ve been honest with me tonight, Warren. Almost entirely. That’s why I’m going to give you one chance to answer the question I actually asked.”

Darius gave up Michael. The name came out clean because the calculation was clean: the Malkavian in the cemetery was worth less than the prince’s trust, and trust in the Jyhad is the only currency that doesn’t depreciate. He said the name and he meant it and the conscience that would punish him for it later was a bill he could pay when it came due.

Modius heard it and filed it and moved on to the docks, and Darius feigned ignorance with the last of his Willpower and the prince’s Auspex stuttered on something, distraction or fatigue or the specific blindness that even elders suffer when they’re processing too many revelations in one sitting, and the docks question went unanswered but not unasked.

“You’ve been busy, Warren. More busy than I knew. More capable than I assumed. That’s either very good for me or very bad for me.”

Then the brooch. “Where is it?”

“In the car.”

It wasn’t in the car. It was in Sable’s jacket pocket at the Fifth Avenue studio. Darius drove to the BP station, called the studio line, got nothing, drove back to the mansion empty-handed, and told the prince he’d left it at home. A third tomorrow. A third promise stacked on the first two like IOUs from a debtor who keeps showing up with explanations instead of payments.

“You seem to have a great many tomorrows, Warren.”

The interview ended without the piano lid closing. Modius watched him leave and Darius could feel the gaze on his back all the way to the car, the weight of a prince recalculating the value of a tool that had proven itself useful and unreliable in the same evening.

He drove home. The west-side apartment was dark. He sat at the kitchen table and thought about Michael in the cemetery shed with his paintings and his candles and the trust that had taken five months to build and one sentence to betray. The Malkavian had given him the information that saved Allicia’s life and Darius had traded his name for the privilege of lying about a library.

The mathematics of survival. The architecture of self-preservation. The specific weight of a man’s name given to a prince who collects people the way other men collect paintings, and the knowledge that tomorrow he would have to put the brooch in Modius’s hand and the day after that Michael might find a Dominated guard standing outside his shed and the day after that the machine would keep turning because the machine always keeps turning and the man inside it can either turn with it or get ground down.

Darius closed his eyes. The kitchen was cold. Gary was quiet. The game was the game.