On a cool spring evening, with the last light of sunset fading from the sky, David stood on a hilltop and adjusted his hat as he surveyed the city ahead. He had been a vampire for more than eight months now, and had been hunting in earnest for nearly six, and the vampires around the half dozen desert cities were starting to become a little more wary. They didn't know what was killing them, but even solitary as they tended to be, they were beginning to suspect that they were being hunted.

So David had decided to take a trip north. There was a pair of cities there, close enough that the occasional caravan crossed between them and their more southernly fellows, but far enough away that rumor of his hunting was unlikely to have spread this far.

Aidan had remained behind. He seemed restless and preoccupied of late, but he refused to talk about whatever was bothering him. So David had gone without him. He was confident now in his skills, and didn't need the older vampire's presence, much as he enjoyed having Aidan around.

The city in the distance was a glowing blur, and he sighed. Once perhaps he might have been able to appreciate the subtle differences between one city and another, as he had noticed the differences between the ruined desert city and the city by the bay, but now they were all the same, only their glowing barriers visible to his sensitive eyes. He couldn't sense any other vampires right now, but he suspected they would be around. Sunset on the edges of a city was always the best time to find them, because they haunted those borders nearly every night, not wanting to miss the chance at finding an exile and getting human blood.

David wondered sometimes, now that he could look at the system from outside, if the human leaders, the governors and judges and police who made and enforced the laws, knew how deep their hypocrisy ran. They had beat him and spit on him for being a "sympathizer," for having done one small favor, all unknowing, to a single vampire. And yet their justice system, their method of dealing with major crimes, benefited all the vampires immensely. Without the exiles, their only possible source of prey would be the caravans, and they would probably lose quite a few of their number in failed assaults on the heavily lighted and heavily armed travelers, and even more in fights among themselves for limited prey. But then, he mused, human losses would be fairly high as well, and more caravans would be lost entirely. I suppose that if the human leadership understands how their exiles feed the vampires, they may well still continue to do it, to keep the caravans safe. But that doesn't make their hypocrisy in any less. His musings were interrupted by a faint, distant sound of footsteps. He sensed no vampires near, not yet, so the sound must be that of a human. Swiftly and silently he moved through the night, and although he knew it was probably very childish of him, he couldn't but help take a certain pleasure in the way his cloak swirled out behind him as he moved. He approached the road but kept a little distance from it as yet. Soon he saw a single form walking along. It was a human, male, tall and rather broadly built, who moved with a steady and unhurried gait on the road between the two sister cities. No doubt an exile from one, hoping to reach the safety of the other, though most such that Aidan had seen went much faster, or else much slower after having exhausted themselves running during daylight. This man walked as if there was nothing else in the night, simply covering ground from here to there.

David paralleled the man's course. He wasn't going to attack the exile, though he felt the need for human blood lurking in the back of his mind. It had not yet been long enough that the need was urgent, but it had still been fairly long, and he would take the chance to get human blood if he could. But for now he merely walked along in the desert, keeping the man just in sight, and moving quietly. The human couldn't possibly spot him, but he would know if any other vampires drew near.

They moved in parallel paths that way for nearly an hour before David sensed another vampire approaching. A single source, moderately strong, coming from out in the desert on the far side of the road. It might be one vampire or it might be several, there was no way to tell. David sprinted ahead of the slower-moving human and crossed the road well out of the man's sight. Then he took up his parallel course again, this time keeping between the human and whatever other vampires might be out there.