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The woman bristled with weaponry. An untrained eye would see a tallish redhead in a black leather duster coat and sensible boots. Oren Stolt knew better. He could see the way the coat swung heavily around her long legs, weighted. She walked with a slight limp and he suspected a sword or crossbow quiver strapped to her leg.

She made her way up the deserted street, fully alert even at this hour, which looked good only to suicides. Oren stepped out of the alley and tried to fake going about his business. He heard the distinctive sound of a crossbow's crank from behind him.

“You. Ungodly. Stand and identify before I shoot you in the back.” Her voice carried, cold and flat. He wondered if she was one of Jacob's. Oren hated working with Jacob's people. The renegade Immortal trained only psychopaths and he removed their pleasure centers before he released them into the wild to hunt their own vampires.

He stopped, raised his hands to show they were empty. “Oren Stolt. You one of Jacob's?”

She stepped into his line of vision, the pistol-grip crossbow with a sharpened stake in it and a Magnum in the other hand. “No, I'm one of Clarissa's.”

Oren breathed more easily. Clarissa was a stickler for rules and one of the sanest Immortals he knew. All the Immortals went a little mad in some way. The trauma of waking up after being dead tended to shake their world to the foundations. The atheist ones had it worst, he knew. At least the monotheists had a myth to explain it, inadequate as the story was.

Now all he had to do was stay alive long enough to explain who he was.
The woman used the hand with the Magnum to flip a lever on her eyeglasses.

“What are you? You don't register as vampire or demon or werewolf.”

“Three-quarter demon,” Oren said, giving her the grin with the fangs in it and letting his eyes shade to solid black. “Sired by Carreau, he who is without mercy.”