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Footsteps in Blood
Four years ago, David Burnham was embraced into the Danse Macabre. His sire was a Nosferatu named Guido, aligned to Arabella Velissia’s ‘Circle of the Crone’ Covenant. It was Arabella’s idea to set up a “sire-and-run” incident for several reasons, not least of which to implicate her rivals the Lancea Sanctum.
A coterie of Kindred named Alexandria Barnett, Samson Jeffers, Joseph Mason and Steven Knight tracked down Burnham at the request of the Herald, Kellé Fraser. He was found attempting to flee from San Antonio to Mexico, but the coterie persuaded him to stay, and their mentor Fernando de la Cruz offered to help him adjust to his Requiem.
In tracking down Burnham, however, the coterie came into contact with two mortals of particular relevance. The first was Burnham’s erstwhile girlfriend Mary Tate. David had related the tale of his Embrace to her and she was considered by De la Cruz to be a threat to the Masquerade. To this end he ordered Jeffers to murder her. This the young Vampire did, and subsequently had his memory of the deed erased by De la Cruz.
The other mortal was a journalist for the SA Star newspaper called Kevin Chambers. Chambers probed them for information on Burnham but they eventually managed to shake him. Chambers thought little of the coterie until he interviewed Mary Tate and discovered the coterie had visited her.
Meanwhile, a Vampire named only ‘Addington’ had discovered Arabella and Guido’s siring conspiracy and planned to bargain with De la Cruz for the information. Arabella tracks down Addington and kills him, planning to implicate him as David Burnham’s sire. However, she could not foresee how clever Addington had been.
Addington left information with his associate “Green” Jack, who approached the investigating coterie and helped them discover the truth about Guido. From there Arabella was implicated but as no strong evidence was forthcoming she was not directly punished by the Prince. Her reputation was damaged of course, and Guido was executed. Arabella was also relieved of her position as Hierophant of the Circle of the Crone.
The coterie were afforded much respect for uncovering this conspiracy; but they did still have the loose end of Kevin Chambers who was getting too close to exposing the Masquerade. The coterie ransacked his office in an attempt to find out how far his influence had been spreading. Once they had dried up all of his resources and contacts they waited for him at his home, before executing him and framing it as a suicide.
However, Burnham obtained a copy of the casefile from Chambers’ office, and managed to trace Mary’s killer to a man matching Samson Jeffers’ description. After Jeffers and the coterie deal with a trouble-causing Bruja biker gang, Burnham attacks him and the resultant fight ends with Burnham’s Final Death.
The coterie then discover that two murders have taken place recently; Antonio Rodriguez and Sara Edwards, sires of Alexandria and Joseph respectively, had been killed in their Havens. In Rodriguez’s apartment, the symbol VII was found marked on the wall.
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Rise of the Seven
For weeks, the Kindred of San Antonio were running scared. Something was hunting the hunters, and only a conveniently-timed scapegoat allowed the Prince, Karina Galen, to bring a measure of calm to the Vampire populace.
Samson Jeffers found himself torn between his inner Beast and Man, and steadily lost his grip on humanity, becoming a true monster. He killed randomly, indiscriminately and passionately until he came to the White Rabbit Club, where he was finally brought down in a hail of bullets and fire by Gabriel Takeda, who took Jeffers’ place in the coterie.
Karina Galen laid the blame of the VII murders on Samson, and that he was now Finally Dead allayed some Kindred’s concerns. However Karina knew it was only a matter of time until her city was attacked again, and to this end her Sheriff Neil Steinbeck commissioned the coterie to find out about the mysterious sect VII and, more importantly, how to defeat them.
The coterie’s investigation took them from San Antonio to Valencia, London, Calgary and Los Angeles before they tracked down a Vampire named Maxina Leyanis, who survived a VII attack many years ago, and witnessed the only known interrogation of a Sevenite. In the meantime, word reached the coterie that VII had struck again, killing the Prince’s Herald, Kellé Fraser.
Once the coterie tracked Leyanis down in LA, she revealed a startling truth; VII must be summoned, which meant that someone in San Antonio meant for them to be there. With her help, the coterie tracked down the culprit as being Thomas Golden, an ally of Karina’s. His idea was to eradicate all of the ‘criminals’ from San Antonio’s population. However, he did not know that the Prince herself was deemed such by VII, as she had murdered & diablerised her sire.
Helped by Fernando de la Cruz, the coterie confronted two members of VII at Karina’s penthouse and, after a difficult struggle, defeated them with the help of a ritual cast by Maxina Leyanis. However, the revelation of Karina’s crimes are not forgotten, and she seeks penitence from Fernando de la Cruz.
The verdict delivered by De la Cruz and the Lancea Sanctum, who took control of San Antonio, was that Karina would be spared execution only because of her admission of guilt, though she would be forever banished from the city. She accepted the sentence and disappeared that very night, leaving her city in the hands of her sworn rivals.
Three years have passed since that night, and once again things are stirring in the city of San Antonio...
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