Numb hands fumble the lock on his door. Garrett nearly topples into his suite at the Chapter House a couple of hours from sunrise, and blitzed out of his mind. He sniffs as he checks his phone, turning it off as more messages as Kine from the party ask where he went so early between updates on his stocks, and urgent messages from his business partners asking for a man that doesn't exist.

He throws his jacket on the pile of folders and journals he had been sorting through, not in a state to properly engage in that specific chore. Flexing the static out of his fingers, he pours another shot from a bottle of Peerless, watching the field outside the shared mansion in the darkness. Forgetting the glass, he tilts the entire bottle to his lips as he reiterates the last three months since arriving in Sacramento.

Bizarre was one word. For the old dog it was the mental equivalent of a sucker punch, invited to live among his Covenant again hours after talking to the Grand Wyrm in a bar. Suddenly he was screening potential members, and the tenacious Daeva requesting he study under her barely a blink after her first student was lost. He had a student.

He dials in for the magnet to release and moves to the patio, tapping the bottle against his hip. He aired his frustration at a Gangrel meeting and didn't suffer the beat-down he had baited. Atticus didn't shoot him in the back of his head when he dragged him into the woods after his joke could have been interpreted as Code. Now they just repeated the drinking pattern like they had been doing this forever. The Priscus shook his hand and asked to hand over her title, after he had nearly split the Clan between Dragons and Not. He wasn't done with the Harpy. He had played a dangerous game, and was winning. He suddenly laughed to himself, sliding against the wall of the house as he dropped to the ground. He would have to thank her for inspiring him to care for the first time in a while.

A lone hawk circled in the dying night, early and closer to the ground as it scouted the field for movement. On a whim, a hellish screech is mixed with his whistle as he calls the beast. The hawk circles with interest, and once he locks its gaze he has the weathered bird balancing on his knee, cutting the fabric and cold skin as it tries to secure a grip. Somewhere beyond the veil of alcohol he remembers he was supposed to show Dirt Nap how to increase his hold over the lesser creatures of Earth, and he laughs again. The hawk startles, almost whipping his face with its wing and he hisses at it to settle, crushing entirely on its instinct to flee with the force of his own magnetism.

In a moment, he sees himself in intense detail, glazed and sightless from the marbled eyes of a corpse. He's sober and terrified at the sight, recoiling with a shout that comes out as wailing screech, heat thundering in his chest.

"Scheiße!" he gasps, straightening as he is back in his own body and the hawk has skipped to the rail. He grips where the organ should be functioning, back to the flood of poison and flesh reanimated with Vitae. His vision is back to the heightened spectrum of a Kindred, different from the razor focus and searing colour. The sensation made him sick, stumbling to the rail to spill the vat of liquor stored in his useless stomach. He held his face, shaking. He had been dead for a lifetime, more familiar with his condition than what it was like to be alive.

Nothing could have prepared him for that.

He peers at the beast under his thrall from between his fingers, gears turning.

Embrace change.

Attention drifts back to the horizon; a dull grey signalling he had to sleep. Feverish attention back on the hawk.

Did he?