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Winter fidgets with the black velvet choker around her neck as the dimly lit elevator ascends; the choker one of the few things she kept after her sire, Ángela, turned her. Ángela not her sire’s real name, of course, just the one she adopted when Ángela’s own maker brought her into their world. Just as Winter began as someone else – a name she already can’t remember, one that belonged to someone so small, so easily missed she slipped through the cracks of the world, until Ángela found her in the dark. But she is vast now. Part of a legacy, a clan of women who feed on little people with little dreams; on the ones that don’t matter.
Cattle, she thinks with disgust. She can still remember some of what it felt like to be one. And she’ll do whatever it takes to never be that weak again. Already, even though she’s only been blessed a matter of months, she wields power she never could have dreamed of when her blood still ran warm and Boston’s pale sun kissed her skin.
Though, in a world of hierarchies, power is relative. Which is why, though her balance and muscle control are far beyond a mortal’s, she’s still extra careful to keep the tray of blood-filled takeout coffee containers in her other hand as still as possible as the elevator rises up the long ascent of the conglomerated clans’ nest tower.
She stands straighter as the elevator dings to tell her it’s reached her clan’s floor. Winter flicks her head so her trailing, silver tresses spill artfully down over her black top, her bare back and bone-pale arms catching the soft candlelight her clan’s nest employs across the office floor. The windows wrapping the tower long ago replaced with darkened glass that lets only the barest hint of light in; the once-stunning views of the Seaport District, and the Waterfront beyond, sacrificed in favor of practicality; an understandable preference for not dying by sun’s touch. Though there are rumors that some of the eldest members of the clans left small numbers of the tower’s original windows in place in their own offices, chasing the thrill of flirting briefly with death without consummating that courtship.
Winter doesn’t know if the rumors are true. She’s never been that high in the tower. She keeps to the rules; to the structure, corporate and otherwise, that keeps them alive and safe. A structure built on seething rage and resentments spread across the long span of their combined clans’ histories, stoked annually by remembrance bacchanalias to honor their unholy dead; banked never less than smoldering by the injustice visited on them by the Maidens of Marrowmont – when those once-allied undead women drove Winter’s people out of their city; out of the cage the Maidens built for their great beast.
