Eventually, they’d all come, because the Danse necessitates social interaction. Even the talentless among them may come watch. Tonight though, it was all about what exactly this social club, dedicated to the art and talent of Sacramento’s unloving caretakers. Sitting down at a desk to plan things out was however no way for an artist to think and plan. Lucia couldn’t concentrate; she never could. Call her a kinesthetic learner, label her with vampire ADHD, but really there was nothing different about her from anyone who could interpret the arts.


And that was important. She rarely created, but often interpreted other works in her own way.


A Carthian younger and wiser than herself had once told her that it was impossible for kindred to create anything original. Everything would be a shallow copy of something they knew in life, or something they’d observed in mortal circles. Kindred would plagiarize without even knowing they had, passing off all they knew as something that sprang to mind from their dead brain, mystically inserted there by the curse.
Where did those ideas come from? Where did a kindred’s personality come from if not from what they remembered in life? All that was true were those memories and the hold the beast had over their souls. The Requiem was a constant fight between fading memories of oneself and the monster.
But when Lucia danced, when she sang, when she seduced an audience with her eyes and her manipulative subtleties, that little battle seemed to go on hiatus. When performing, no thought was necessary. It was muscle memory, something she seemed to have even as a kindred. It may have been hard to write a song or pen the words to a play, but she could perform the shit out of either one.


If she were Invictus it may have been a phonograph, but she had adapted already to digital music. An iPod sat in its dock, plugged into the wall of the shoddy warehouse. No one knew she was here, the goods inside weren’t worth any type of decent security, and she couldn’t afford better (yet). It made this empty stage the perfect place for her to toy with her art as she had so many times before. It was right beside the warehouse manager’s desk, where a piece of loose-leaf titled “Theater Club” now lay, a dozen or so scribbles beneath it.


Lucia took one glance at the paper, huffed out an unnecessary breath of fake air, and then hit the play button on the iPod, beginning to move to the music as if it’d been choreographed. Perhaps it had been. A dance stolen from some dance company; the movements are quick, precise, and erratic like well-tuned hip-hop mixed with a disco e-trip.




When she was done she simply packed up her things and left.