Rook

vaguely see a figure inside.
    More logs are added to the fire, and the heat in the room rises until you can feel the sweat prickling your shoulder blades and trickling down the small of your back. Soon the air is hot in your throat, and then you see that, like yourself, the egg has begun to sweat. Beads of ruddy fluid, like dirty blood, are materializing on the surface, and the shell itself has become a little more transparent.
    As you watch, you notice that the egg is softening, changing shape. It is flexible. And then, near its top, a hand tipped in talons tears through the shell, sending rivulets of blood and albumen leaking down the surface and onto the pristine carpets.
    All the while, you know you cannot make a sound.
    The hand rips the now-leathery shell down, pulling chunks back inside. The material tears entirely, and a torrent of the fluids spills out. The thing inside emerges awkwardly, its mass of hair tangled, and its skin dyed bright by the birthing fluids. It slips, its limbs giving it problems, and falls to its knees on the carpet. As you watch in horror, it throws back its head and screams.
    The sound is not human.
    After long minutes, it finally stops screaming. And then, unbelievably, it begins to tear at the egg and eat the pieces. You have stood strong throughout this whole occurrence, but this is too much. You can feel your gorge rising, and you have to get away. You move out of your hiding place, and it cocks its headat you, then moves hesitantly in your direction. You tear away one of the tapestries, behind which a window is concealed, and throw yourself desperately through the glass, out into the snowy night.
    As you flee, you risk a look back through the falling flakes and see a figure standing in the window, watching you.
    These were the circumstances of a vampire hatching as described by Eleanor Thurow, an agent of the Checquy who was gifted with chameleonlike abilities and an inquiring mind. It was not actually Alrich’s hatching but that of his sibling, Pitt. Alrich was born one week later.
    At that time, the Checquy did not officially believe in the existence of vampires. The organization’s formal position was that vampires were nothing more than the villains of gothic novels, poorly adapted from Eastern European folktales. Pawn Thurow, however, had spent some time in Eastern Europe among the folk, and while she had not actually seen a vampire, she’d heard anecdotes. Very convincing anecdotes. When she returned to Britain, she had asked some mild questions and received sharp responses.
    One Rook had actually sneered in Pawn Thurow’s face, declaring in front of several witnesses that “only the most credulous and naive of minds could believe such ridiculous and unlikely fantasies,” which must have been pretty rich coming from a man whose entire lower half consisted of a sort of sparkly fog. In any case, Pawn Thurow was undaunted by the scorn of her (nominal) superiors, and she embarked on a private project to track down an example of a vampire.
    What Thurow had done was in the best traditions of the British Empire: she had simultaneously discovered a species and gone to war with it. Thus, the official position of the Checquy on vampires went almost instantly from “Don’t be ridiculous, you silly girl, there’s no such thing!” to “Right, they do exist, and they appear to be killing us.”
    Thurow had tracked down Alrich and Pitt’s creator after months of detective work. I’ve read her journals (which is where I found the above description), and she appears to have been a very dedicated and clever woman. She was also no stranger to dangerous situations, since her abilities and temperament had made her ideal for infiltration and close surveillance. This was a woman who had stood unseen and watched, disapprovingly, as the head of a cult that worshipped emotion tried to sire the personification of hatred with anadoring disciple. After shooting both the would-be parents (in flagrante delicto), she slipped through the congregation of horrified onlookers and opened the gates of the compound to the Checquy soldiers.
    Also, earlier that year, she had spent several months on the street pretending to be a prostitute. This had been done as part of a loaner program with the Metropolitan Police, who at the time were seeking the notorious murderer of several unfortunate sex workers. It’s worth noting as an aside that even the Checquy never figured out who Mr. The Ripper was or