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wouldn’t. It was probably an unconscious reaction to the implicit threat of the vampires’ presence, but it made them easier to spot. At least, though, it also made it a little easier to see.
    Calais was a trendy clothing store, open late into the night, as so many of the stores on the street were. In the store’s window, pale mannequins in dark clothes were covered with long veils of semi-transparent gauze. The gauze made it difficult to distinguish the fashions displayed underneath, the dark clothes and reflections in the glass blurring the distinction between the crowd outside and the silent mannequins in the window. The shrouded dead surrounded by restless spirits. That was probably the intention. Miranda stopped. “Tolly?” she
    asked out loud, ignoring the people brushing past her.
    There was no response. Blue went into the store and came out again a moment later. “He’s gone.” He looked at Matt.
    Matt straightened his jacket. “Tell me who we’re following, first.”
    Miranda was looking across the street. Another woman had stopped over there, staring at them, her face hostile. Then she was gone. Miranda frowned. She had been hoping that this would happen later rather than sooner. “They’ve seen us.”
    “We’re following a Camarilla vampire,” Blue told Matt. “We saw him feeding in a car while we were waiting for you.”
    “On St. George?” A cruel smile spread across Matt’s face. There were two sects in vampire society; two competing ideologies that fought each other. The Camarilla, weak, bound by tradition and fear of human attention, was one. The Sabbat, strong, wild, free and unafraid, was the other. The Camarilla might rule the majority of the vampires in the world, but they hid behind a Masquerade, concealing themselves from mortal eyes by pretending that there were no such things as vampires. Denying their own existence. The Sabbat knew better. Mortals were nothing. Playthings, more than willing to deny the existence of vampires of their own accord. The vampires of the Sabbat had nothing to fear from them. The Sabbat ruled Toronto. A few lingering refugees from the Camarilla were... tolerated. Within strict limits. “That’s out of bounds. Why didn’t you stop him there?”
    “We wanted to punish him here. In his own territory. But we’ll be in trouble too if we don’t find him before
    the welcoming committee gets to us.” Miranda turned back to her friends. “Find Tolly, Matt.”
    “Where was the last place you saw the kook?”
    Blue growled and pointed to a half-shadowed doorway. Matt stepped into it and put his hands flat against one wall. Matt could sense things that humans and many other vampires couldn’t, the only one in the pack with that particular ability. It was one of the few reasons that Miranda tolerated him. One of Tolly’s abilities was to hide, so completely and sometimes so impossibly that only Matt could find him. The gifts that came with the Embrace were varied and strange, but always powerful.
    Matt’s hands were like huge white spiders creeping over the wall as he slowly felt for the psychic impressions that Tolly’s presence would have left behind. Finally, he nodded and pointed. “This way,” he said, leading them back the way they had come and around a corner. He paused, head slowly turning from side to side, searching for Tolly.
    “Where is he?” demanded Miranda.
    “I...” Matt’s head snapped around. “I see him. Come on.” Hurrying down the block, he stopped in front of a tall, iron lamppost, one of the kind erected by the city government in an effort to beautify parts of the city. Matt rapped on it, his knuckles ringing against the metal. “Tolly.”
    An arm, then a leg, sprouted out of the lamppost. More accurately, they came around the side of the lamppost as Tolly stepped out from behind it — or beside it. Miranda suspected that whichever side of the lamppost she had been facing, Tolly would have seemed to come from behind it. He