"Christopher." The greeting came in the form of a males voice, not too far from him, a vampire who had been across the world in their long existence. He hadn't been to New York in the last century and had returned only a week ago to the scene, dressed in his punk rock look and boasting the talent to take on the wardrobe. Stubble on his jaw and the fringe of his hat shading his eyes to the majority of the people inside of the club. James leaned back against the bar counter, his elbows on the surface of the wood while he looked out over the crowd as they drank and danced in the most mortal and careless of abandons. He knew many of these humans would head home, drunk or high and few of them would leave alone though it wasn't them he had come here for anyway; unlike most vampires he found that alcohol helped sate his endless hunger for the mortal life source that many wasted and spilled. His own was kept in a small flask in his jacket, ready n case of an emergency as he learned not to leave bodies laying around for human police to find. He'd lived through the witch burning and the hunt for vampires; he survived for a reason. 
 
He wasn't the type to pick his victims at random, blue eyes scanned the crowd while he stood stock still, watching the humans as they moved about in slow motion that would appear as high speed to them. He remembered why he had come to the city in one of his first rages; killing senselessly without feeding and tearing the corpses to bits before moving onto the next town after a woman had found him. She had been a vampire as well, older and stronger than her though she didn't look as if she planned to kill him, only help with his little ripper problem. "You've been killing again." The man observed without looking at the younger, blonde vampire. His eyes landed on a female in the crowd, blonde as the sun and she recognized her from a picture in the newspaper - both human and underground - and remembered her as one of the humans kidnapped by an underground Vampire Syndicate bent on making and selling more addicting blood slaves. He could smell her from across the room, tainted by alcohol and covered in sweat but after he blinked she smelled just like a regular human again to him as he turned his faze toward her friend. Humans were just food, but the best survivors and predators never ate in the open or left evidence of their feeding. 

[hr]

The young woman sat alone in the large park, hidden up in a tree where she leaned against the tick truck and sat with one leg bent and the other hanging over the branch she rested on. A long black sweater covered her torso though she didn't have the hood up and let her long white hair hang loose around her shoulders. Red lips puckered around the joint between them, breathing in the light smoke and letting it settle before breathing it back out again. Drugs were easy to find in New York she found, since she'd moved here a week ago after being released in the city with a bag of clothes and an unlimited credit card she didn't have to pay for. She'd found a small apartment in the less formal part of the city and bunkered down where she'd hooked up the internet and a system around her small place to alert her if there was any chance of an attack again. She'd been asked if she thought vampires existed, and her answer had proved the reason she hadn't been killed that day and why she'd been released instead of having to find a way out like the other girl. 

Thinking back she remembered looking at the blonde, sleeping on the bed she was chained to while her own cuffs were undone and the men escorted her out of the building in the middle of the night. Many had died during the experiments they had conducted upon them and she didn't know if the other girl was dead as well; all Rhaenys knew was that she was alive now and she would continue to survive while being hunted by vampires and haunted by nightmares. It was dark out, and well passed when she should have gone home but the small girl didn't care much for her own safety anymore now that she had been taken and changed in a way that shouldn't have been humanly possible, but whoever it was had given her th means to live away from her family and go to school without having to work for the money to support herself. And she was alive, so she must be important to some degree if they hadn't allowed her to be killed, or hadn't simply terminated her while she was there with them. 

She shifted in the tree, the leg of her black jeans shifting as it caught on a short sharp edge of the branch and she stretched, dropping what was left of the join to the ground where it puttered out. As she stretched her sweater lifted to reveal a thin strip of pale white flesh, unmarked by scarring or bruising. Since coming here she had not been harmed once, though she couldn't help the scars on her arms and legs, the damage to her soul and the deep feeling of emptiness inside of herself. She leaned back against the tree and allowed the high to do it's job and lull away all of her worries.