2006, 6th February,

Miami, USA,

Miami was colder than Ksenia had come to expect, temperatures routinely plunging down to negative 10 Celsius, and more snow than she had seen since she moved to this part of the globe over 70 years ago.

There was a strange unease in the air, and several of her younger kin had migrated to the west coast to escape it, several of them even employing the services of her coven to make the journey while concealing themselves from the rays of the accursed sun.

She had been contracted for another ritual tonight, a rite of skin changing, a rite she had not employed for a very long time, and the employer had been most accommodating, even volunteering to procure the sacrificial target himself.

Smelling his desperation, Ksenia had extracted a larger fee than she usually charged, and he had paid without hesitation.

This, more than anything, had given her pause.

A man this desperate to change his skin was running from something, and whatever it was, Ksenia hoped it hadn’t followed him here.

She walked through the front garden of her villa, through plants that truly came to life only at night, just like her, jaws snapping and thorns rustling with carnivorous glee, made healthy by a plentiful diet of blood seeping into the soil.

She had to prepare her sisters for the ritual, and await James Kirkman.

The inside of her villa was dimly lit, the air heavy with incense; not because it was required for the ritual, but because it helped dampen the smell of the blood.

“How long is he going to take, sister?”

Ruby Fernandez, the youngest member of their coven spoke up, pulling her gaze away from a diary she had buried her nose in.

Ksenia was about to reply, when the doorbell rang.

“Looks like our client is as impatient as you are, Ruby. Sisters, prepare the altar for the ritual.”

James Kirkman appeared to be a well dressed young man, his appearance currently ever so slightly dishevelled, another man draped over his shoulders, middle aged, clad in a gown, his face covered with bruises.

Seemingly, James had snatched him from his very home.

Ksenia did not ask the identity of the man, for discretion was a service she offered to her clientele, simply ushering James inside.

“Place the man on the altar at the centre, and we can begin.”

Ruby fidgeted excitedly as she prepared the blade.

“Can I be the one to cut tonight, Ksenia?”

“No. You may not. Hand it over.”

The muscles in Ruby’s jaw clenched, but she handed the blade over without protest.

Ruby was certainly talented at the cutting, but she seemed to take too much joy in the act itself.

Ksenia had nothing against her zeal for bloodshed, but structuring the energies released through the ritual required focus.

Ruby was unsuitable for this task particularly.

Ksenia rid the man on the altar of his shirt, placing him on his stomach, as he feebly groaned, then placed the cool edge of her blade on the skin of his back.

And then she dug the edge, and pulled a cut over the spinal column, and the man shrieked.

Red meat was exposed as taut flesh pulled apart, and the man keened, thrashing helplessly against his restraints.

Then she pulled the cut up to the back of his skull, then forking it into a Y-shape, as her coven sisters chanted in a circle around her.

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Ksenia resisted rocking forward on her heels as the sharp scent of blood suffused the air around her, structuring the energies released by the sacrifice’s agony to the rhythm of the chant.

The chant was merely a mnemonic, but a tried and tested one, along which blood witches had structured their rituals for millenia.

James witnessed the ritual wordlessly, pupils constricting as the scent of blood teased his nostrils.

It was imperative to the purpose of the ritual that the skin come off in one intact piece, and Ksenia maneuvred the blade deftly, making forking cuts when she needed to, and slicing along the medial parts of the man’s limbs.

The sacrifice had stilled, a breath away from death, as the blood loss and the shock of the pain robbed him of consciousness, and Ksenia cut further, focussed on the chanting around her, as blood pooled around her feet.

Ropes of red muscle and yellow adipose were exposed as she gingerly pulled the skin away.

Now came the part where James was required to participate.

“Strip, and step forward.”

James’ hesitation was met with stony silence; Ksenia would elaborate no further, focussed as she was on shaping the energies of the ritual.

So James rid himself of his clothing, and stepped forward, iron grip on his self control as he struggled not to forget himself through the thickening scent of blood.

And Ksenia draped the skin on him, and his flesh began to tingle, rippling like water.

The chanting grew to a crescendo, and James was struck with the sensation of a million steel toed centipedes crawling over his skin- not painful, but not a pleasant sensation either.

And then it was over, and James Kirkman stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by blood witches, naked and covered in blood, now in an entirely different skin.

The man he was now was in his mid forties, older in appearance, if not age, than he had been before, hair greying around wrinkled temples.

“Your fangs aren’t gone, if you were wondering. Nothing we can do about our nature,” Ksenia said, licking the blood from her fingers.

Behind her, the rest of the witches advanced on the skinned corpse, fangs bared, and James resisted the urge to advance himself, having specifically sated himself earlier in the night to avoid temptation- the blood meal was included in the coven’s payment, after all, and helping himself to a sample would be ill mannered and ill advised.

“Are we done here?”

“You’re sure you haven’t led whatever was pursuing you back to our doorstep?”

James flashed her a lop-sided smile.

“As sure as I can be. Besides, I was hardly important enough to pursue so relentlessly.”

Ruby looked up from her meal, lips stained red.

“Pursued by who, exactly.”

“It’s not our place to ask, Ruby,” Ksenia interrupted, “Besides, I’m guessing James came in from the Eurasian continent. In that case, we really do not want to know what he’s running from.”

Ruby rolled her eyes.

“Again with this talk of purebloods. You wouldn’t expect vampires to have boogeymen keeping them up at night, but here we are.”

James and Ksenia both shot her a look, even as the rest of the witches shifted uneasily, sharing glances among themselves.

“You’ve never seen a pureblood, have you,” James surmised.

“She better hope that it remains that way,” Ksenia remarked, then turned to James and said, “I believe that concludes our business. Good luck with your new skin.”

Ruby watched James pull on his clothes and disappear into the night, as she washed up at the basin.

Then she followed suit, gripping the brass doorknobs harder than necessary on her way out and leaving them furrowed with imprints of her fingers.

For the first night after her turning, she had been lost and confused.

Every night after that, she had revelled in her newfound power.

But with that power had come the rankling realisation that there was more hiding in the night than she had ever been aware of, higher up the food chain than she was even now.

But ever since she had joined Ksenia’s coven, she was beginning to realise how untapped the potential of her species truly was.

But Ksenia herself was unimaginative, unwilling to explore the boundaries of what was truly possible with these powers.

So Ruby had taken to exploring other avenues.

She hugged her overcoat close, shielding herself against the uncharacteristic cold as she made her way home.

“I’m back, Professor.”

Dr. Bradley Hunter did not turn to look at his former student- something he would not have done even if was still possessed of his eyesight.

After all, he was not with Ruby of his own free will.

A gifted professor of Molecular Biology at the University Ruby had attended, now little more than a captive for the vampire, subject to her every insane whim.

“Got a new audio sample for you tonight, professor. After you’re done listening, I can fill you in on how I saw one of us literally don another person’s skin after skinning them alive. Busy, busy night.”

Saying so, she deposited the recorder she had used to record the chant they used for the ritual, a chant Ksenia claimed was simply a mnemonic, but Ruby took nothing at face value, exploring all her options.

As the professor listlessly listened to the recording, Ruby headed to the freezers in her basement to inspect the results of some of their previous experimentations.

And she pulled up a glass jar with a brain floating in formalin, perfectly spherical with it’s hemispheres fused together.