Those old coveralls let you pass as a maintenance worker just about anywhere; they were better protection from prying eyes than any Nosferatu's invisibility arts.
"Carrying water for the Ivory Tower, eh, Krarr?" Julian said with a little chuckle, hoisting the plastic gallon jugs out of the back of the Tracker. Each read ¡Buena suerte! or something like it in blue Sharpie.
You didn't laugh. This wasn't humanitarian work.
Or maybe it was. The desert Princes still fear the thing that slept under those sands. They told you that if it woke up hungry, it would tear this land apart.
"How long you think we're gonna do this?" Julian asked. Julian talked too much, but sometimes he cut through the bullshit with words that carried a constellation of meanings. How long: decades? Centuries? We: neonates, nothing but larvae in the eyes of their elders. And this: this awful work.
Julian laughed at that. "You understand that you can't work your way up if no one retires, right? The Prince of Tucson was born the same year as Suleiman the Magnificent. Isn't that an interesting and fun fact? And he's not going anywhere. There's nowhere to move, Krarr. They have all the food, all the money, all the places to hide from the sun. We have a lime green Geo Tracker. Actually, I do. You have a jumpsuit with someone else's name on it."
A hot desert wind whipped Julian's black hair around his head as he counted the gallons of water. The Camarilla gave you a job they considered necessary, even vital. Desperate migrants stumbled through this part of the desert, fleeing violence in Mexico and Central America for the promise of a better life in the States. Without water, many died. Aid groups dropped water and supplies for the migrants.
The year before, the Camarilla had infiltrated and supplanted one of those aid groups, replacing their members with…you and Julian. Your job: position the water above the scattered lairs of the Nosferatu elder, the one known only as Reremouse. The victims he claimed would give him enough blood to prevent his full awakening.
"This sucks," Julian said as you checked the GPS coordinates on your Garmin. "I mean, I know what we are. I know what we do to survive. But this is just so…so stupid! It's inefficient and wasteful. This was how the world ran two or three centuries ago, Krarr, before anyone invented flowcharts or assembly lines."
The moment you understood what you had become, you knew that you would have to make certain sacrifices in order to maintain your undead existence. The Beast needed to be fed, after all.
But there were limits, and this was yours. You and Julian didn't even need to say anything. You just threw the water back in the Tracker and drove off. You dumped the plastic jugs a few miles up the road.
After a long silence, Julian said, "The thing about our masters is they don't actually have very long memories. All us neonates look sort of alike to them. We'll keep our heads down for a few years. If anyone asks, we'll say we got run off by, I don't know, werewolves or Anarchs or something."
"We still don't have any money," you reminded the Assamite.
"Well, it's going to be a bad fucking couple of years, Krarr," Julian said.
It wasn't actually that bad for Julian, though. A few months later, Julian got his money, though you never learned how. Something to do with venture capital interested in the software he was developing? Anyway, one night he just disappeared, leaving you with the Geo Tracker, a stack of CDs with file names written on them in blue Sharpie, and instructions to deliver them to an industrial park in Austin. You looked up his new company, 2100X, which was apparently located in Denver. But you could never find an address or a contact number. And that's been your life ever since.
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