Konstantin prowled the streets of the city, looking for some trace of Elanah, of what had happened to her, or, failing that, someone upon whom to release his frustration.
She'd not returned to him for several nights. He knew that most would assume she just left, or perhaps had gone back to the mysterious sire who had sent her here in the first place. Konstantin did not believe either of these things. His assumption was that something bad had happened to her, that most likely she was torpid somewhere or had experienced final death. Perhaps she had simply run into something more powerful than she could handle, but he couldn't shake the suspicion that her getting close to him had doomed her, as it had others in the past. Some had been destroyed by his enemies, others by their own hand. The result was the same either way: those he got close to did not survive.
Tracking someone within a city was never an easy thing, and even with his newly-developed heightened senses, he was having no success. Occasionally he'd find something that suggested progress - a boot print like hers, or a faint scent - but these never led anywhere, and he was starting to think he was just finding what he hoped to find.
Konstantin had no personal enemies among the kindred of Sacramento, or at least none known to him. Try as he might, he could not think of anyone he might have offended enough that they'd want to hurt him. The most likely scenario was that she might have fallen to those among Sacramento's underworld who reseented Konstantin's involvement in the city's prostitution trade. She had come to see him at Cat's brothel a few times, after all, so perhaps anyone looking for him might have connected the two of them. Still, it was hard to credit her easily falling to a few mere thugs.
There was always the chilling possibility that she'd been taken by Horizon. He preferred to not think what that might entail. Or that the sire had come for her, or sent someone to destroy her for defying him. He considered those possiblities, looked for any evidence for them, but found nothing.
"Alone," he whispers to himself as he crouches in a dark alleyway a few blocks from Cat's place. "Is safer for those important to me, that I let them get only so close."
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