VII

The Dead Lieutenant is apologetic. His face is in shadow, but the lamp illumines his desk. From a drawer he pulls out a file. He begins to rifle through it, sorting photographs and documents towards the front. “Facts, facts. You only want the fucking facts, when all I got are conjectures. OK, then. Just the facts."

“One. This has happened more and more frequently recently. I mean, Baltimore ain’t an old city, in the grand scheme of things. But this is happening. It is still happening. Vampire homicides, committed by what must be vampires, with all the usual suspects and the grudges safely out of the way. But Kindred. Or something like Kindred. They do things that a regular guy couldn’t do. Find their way into places a breathing guy couldn’t go. And whack our people."

“Two. No one sees them coming.” He sits back, pushing the dossier towards me. “One thing in common all of these attacks have is that no one had any warning that they were targeted. No pattern in politics. North Side, East Side, West Side. Rich neighborhoods, poor. No warning."

“Three. The only reason we have to call them Seven is because when they’ve whacked some sorry fucker, they leave a calling card.”

He shows me a picture. A wall in a run-down residential house. A skeleton in a new business suit, a few shreds of rotting flesh on the bones, the skull separate and sitting neatly on the lampshade. On the wall, written in blood, three figures. V, I, and I. The Roman number seven. “Never the figure. Always the Roman numeral. We see it and we see a number, but it might not be a number at all. It could mean anything. Vampires In the, uh, Inferno. Victims’ Inadequate Escape.”

“That doesn’t start with an ‘I’,” I say.

“Fuck you,” he says, simply. “Point is, it could mean anything.” He is warming to his subject.

“Four. They don’t talk.” He pulls out a witness statement, looks like he’s going to read it out to me. He doesn’t. He puts it back. “So there was this one guy, Gussie Weems, who was on the Johns Hopkins campus, shadowy sort of fucker, and he gave me a sworn statement he saw the guys who beheaded Father Andrew. He says he watched the motherfuckers come up and stop him, and they had maybe a minute of just standing there. And they did not say a single. Fucking. Word. And neither did Father Andrew. Then they took him to pieces and he couldn’t do a single thing to stop them.

“Five. If you see them, they’ll get you. Night after he gave this statement, swearing that he was fine, that they never saw him, Weems got dismembered. All the parts burnt, five little bonfires, except his head. Big Roman seven on the wall of his squat. Bye, Weems."

“Six. Aside from Weems, we don’t have a motive. At least none we can make sense of.” He throws down sheets of paper, one by one. “Sanctified priest. Carthian soldier. Acolyte prostitute. Cop. Nerese from City Hall. No apparent reason why.”

He pauses, steeples his fingers. Only his hands are in the light. “Seven. And this shows how fucking circumstantial we have to get here, every ‘Seven’ homicide occurs within 72 hours of a confirmed sighting of an Owl. The victims weren’t there when the Owl was. It could be a coincidence. It could be connected. It’s the only pattern we can find.”

I lean over to take a closer look at the papers. He reaches across and snaps the folder shut, withdraws it before I can say another word.

The interview is over.

Reasons they might join VII: They are mad. Their morality does not allow for the existence of vampires. They are controlled by something else and are not responsible for their actions. They are on a mission. They have orders. They are holding an ancient grudge. They are afraid of something more terrible than the Kindred.

The big picture: They are vampires who hunt vampires. They leave behind the wreckage of their Kindred victims, often creatively destroyed, along with the three characters that make the Roman numeral for seven, displayed prominently on a wall, or a sheet of paper, or on a screen. And that’s all. They are the subjects of whispered rumor and terrified speculation. The fear of VII is the thing the five great covenants have in common.

Some connection between VII and the Strix seems to exist. When the Owls come, the hunters of VII are not far behind. But what? Do they serve the Owls or hunt them? Are VII the tools of the vampires’ destruction or their only hope for salvation from their shadowy screeching nemeses?

Where they came from: Where VII came from is a mystery. Are they old or new? Do they go back to the days of Rome or are they a new phenomenon? No one is sure. Seven rumors occasionally filter through the Cacophony. Any one of them may be true. More than one of them could be true. None of them may be.

They do not know what they are doing. Every vampire of VII has been brainwashed, and hunts in a post-hypnotic trance, triggered by some obscure cause, for reasons lost to time. Any vampire could be one of them without knowing it. You could be one of them.

Their minds and souls have been broken and remade by the God-Machine, and now, like clockwork corpse-dolls they serve a corrective work, destroying other vampires, or kidnapping them, that they too might become mindless destroyers; only the God-Machine knows why only seven exist in any domain at a time, or why they leave their mark.

They are led by a lost clan, the princes of a city destroyed in the days of the Old Testament due to God’s wrath upon the dead, following some terrible mission to restore their long-destroyed city’s fortunes in the eyes of God. What looks like the Roman number seven is really a sigil from a long-forgotten alphabet, the sign of the forgotten clan.

They are vampires who have escaped the mastery of the Strix somehow (perhaps through a ritual known only to the vampires of VII), and who now hunt down the Owls and their servants and allies. Since the Kindred do not know whom the Strix have corrupted, VII’s victims appear random. But they are carefully chosen.

They belong to a mystical cult (its acronym VII) who practice a powerful form of blood magic. They offer Kindred a simple choice: Join or be destroyed. Joining brings with it terrible consequences, perhaps even the bartering of its members’ souls.

A human king betrayed by the Kindred in the Middle Ages begat seven families, who themselves became Damned the better to pursue and destroy the Kindred. Who knows what they might do should they ever succeed?

They are not true vampires; rather, they are the supernatural doppelgangers of vampires, shadowy beings, perhaps creations of, or slaves of, the Strix. They mirror the Kindred. Every one has one vampire whom it must kill, at which point it too ceases to exist. Only seven exist at a time.

Their practices: They hunt silently. Somehow their victims fall prey to the silence too, as if it were some sort of trap, or plague. They do not seem to need to communicate. If they are following their victim for more than one night, they give no sign, because they are effective enough that their quarry has no clue. It is more terrifying to consider that they may need only one night to do their work. VII does not warn you. The three characters “VII,” displayed prominently by a victim’s remains, often provide the only clue that they are the perpetrators.

Not all instances of a Strix sighting precede an assassination by VII, but most of VII’s murders follow a sighting of a Strix.

As hunters and soldiers, these vampires are calm, efficient, and apparently emotionless, far removed from the Firebrands of the Carthian Movement or the baying Acolytes. No one has ever seen a vampire of VII frenzy.

Does VII teach blood magic to its hunters? Sometimes evidence of rituals — odd objects left behind, the remains of a magical circle, some other thing — suggests a system of magic unknown to the other covenants.

VII’s vampires do not seem to be concerned about what happens to them. Will they destroy themselves when their work is done? Do they consider themselves different?

Nicknames: The Fallen Princes; the Betrayed; the Sages; the System; the Wraths of God; the Trumps; the Imposters

Stereotypes: Humorless soldier; conscience-stricken detective; horror-haunted madman; unsuspecting sleeper agent; seeker of revenge; man or woman out of time; cult member

When they are in power: VII do not come into power. If they have the upper hand, vampires disappear, one by one; and soon no vampires are left, not even VII.

When they are in trouble: No one would know if the vampires of VII were in trouble. They hunt the Kindred, and then they are gone. A lucky or resourceful neonate might find out why — or end up joining them — but until then, where they go and where they come from remains a mystery.