Frenzy

Alan Wolfe kept his eyes down as the bell jingled. It was a quiet sound this late at night in the empty store. He walked to the rack of sunglasses and spun the large plastic cylinder.

The explosion. Someone had set fire to a computer store, blown it up with some incendiary device. It was all over the news, but they didn’t know much about it. Usually by now the police could tell the media things like what kind of bomb it had been, professional or homemade, what accelerants were used. But all that went out into the newspapers was the damage done and the fear in the small city.

With Ventrue behind both the media and the police, Alan wondered why nothing was being done to find out what happened and to stop the panic. Wolfe had half expected to read in the news that a freak gas main explosion was the cause of the destruction.

He knew it was more, though. Alan had been riding the streets and had seen two figures come out of a broken window in the store. They had a good lead on them, but Alan gave chase; it was what he did. When he dismounted his bike in the alley next to the store and went up the fire escape ladder as he chased them to the roof, he could smell their faint scents. But for some reason, he couldn’t place them.

The two dark shapes leapt from the top of the building, their leaps carrying them easily across the side street to the building on the far side. As Alan crossed the rooftop to give chase, he had a sudden flash of vision, one of the occasional surges of insight he’d had since learning Auspex. He saw the building erupt into flames just seconds before the bomb went off.

It had been enough time for Alan to sprint to the edge of the roof and throw himself off as well. He choose the opposite direction that the bombers had taken, choosing the cover of a larger building rather than the chance to catch them. He would only have that chance if he survived this blast. He hit the window of the taller building, glass shattering around him and slashing at his face and hands. He rolled into the building and threw himself behind the first piece of large furniture he could find.

Flames roared into the building just behind a shockwave of heat. Everything burst into flame as the fire surged at the Gangrel. His beast roared in fear, instinctually rebelling against one of the only things that could truly kill it, and Alan struggled with it. The fire slammed into him, and the beast seized control. Consumed by fear, he ran smoking from the building.

Alan recovered himself a few blocks away. He had not caught fire, thankfully, though he was badly burned. The supernatural fortitude of his clan might have saved him, although he knew that for a Gangrel he was soft and weak. Wolfe seethed at himself, angry for his loss of control.

But it had happened, and it could not be taken back. Alan selected the darkest pair of sunglasses on the rack and tried them on. It turned his gaze into something hard and black and cold.

He went to the register and dropped the sunglasses on the counter along with a crumpled wad of bills. The clerk rang them up and straightened out the bills. He looked up just as Alan was plucking the tag from the shades and made a surprised grunt.

Wolfe looked at him for a moment with his tawny yellow eyes, eyes that belonged to a wolf, not a man, and slipped the shades on over them.