Twelve Months to Midnight

Since it was rebuilt after the last great fire, London has been divided into two territories, with the Thames acting as an inviolate border between the two vampires that call the city home. But before the fire, its districts and boroughs were divided between six different masters in a triumph of power-sharing which hasn’t been replicated in Europe since. Nobody’s quite sure what conditions give rise to these temporary detentes . It may simply be an unstable equilibrium destined to fail from its very beginning, though some have lasted decades. Paris in the 10th Century had fourteen vampires co-existing. Rome under Marcus Aurelias had seven. New Orleans, before the Civil War, had nine. But the grand-daddy of them all was Babylon under Hammurabi. It is said that the king who wrote the first laws of man also wrote another set of laws; that he codified the rules that first brought stability to the vampire community, though another school of thought said that the vampires who lived under his

That said, it would be foolish to assume vampires have nothing to fear from werewolves in smaller numbers. When it first formed, the Fraternity had one hundred and sixty nine members. In the almost four thousand years since then, twenty seven have been killed by other vampires, a dozen by human hunters (including those working for the church), nine have simply dropped off the record, and fifteen died or were killed in unrelated incidents such as wars or natural disasters that left them nowhere to go when the sun rose. Of the remaining one hundred and six, a total of twenty lost their lives to werewolf packs. A nineteenth-century historian named Chorley once wrote that vampires were some divine balancing act; the lesser of two evils that “by the grace of God” kept the wild packs of supernatural animals from the door of civilization. Imports and Exports Saturday, March 18th, 8:05 AM Despite my family arriving here on longboats, something in the last twelve centuries had driven the seafar

It’s rare for a wolf in the wild to go solo, and almost unheard-of for a werewolf to do so. There’s a reason why ‘Lone Wolf’ is an idiom. Your typical werewolf won’t go down the shops for milk without four or five friends as backup, and none would be foolish enough to take on a vampire without the support of their entire pack. Despite vampires making their homes in cities and werewolves preferring the wild, they’re still two apex predators with strong territorial instincts sharing an ecosystem, and this has led to an unceasing animosity.  The last time a vampire was killed by werewolves was more than a century and a half ago in New Orleans. It took ninety werewolves, and more than sixty didn’t survive, but those that did still called it a victory. Aftermath Friday, March 18th, 10:21AM “You’re back!” said Tierney. “I am!” I called back. Tierney was working on a signal down on the tracks while Cormac and I stood on the platform of Connolly station about ten feet away. “You need more rail