She jumps as a man leans against her, putting his hand over hers as he speaks.

“Don’t bother, I’ll wait for Anastasia until she gets here... you go on home,” he smiles.

Turning, she looks relieved. “Pietr, quit sneaking up on me! I swear you’re always so quiet!”

Pietr just looks at her and grins. “Well, if you weren’t trying so desparately to avoid the boss, you would have heard me walking up the street.”

The clerk shrugs and pulls her sweater tightly about her, “You can stay if you want, I’m not getting paid enough to deal with her. She’s your problem.”

Pietr chuckles and watches as the clerk gets into her small car and pulls away from the curb, the black smoke belching from the tiny diesel. Someday, he thinks, he’s just going to have to hand her over to his friend the Brujah for an early morning snack.

He opens the door and saunters inside, the wind blowing the door shut, the impact hard enough to rattle the glass pane as it closes. Knocking over a stack of books that have been left in the narrow walk-through, he mumbles curses as he tries to put several pages back into one especially well-worn tome. Looking up, he sees her looming through the glass, her pale face accentuated by the black lettering of the shop name, “Anastasia’s Oddities.”

Obviously in a black mood, she snaps at him. “Don’t you have better things to do than tear up my treasures?”

Sheepishly rearranging the stack of books to their former position, Pietr answers, “But I ran across some information you might be interested in.”

Pulling a small notebook from his pocket, Pietr tries to tell her the latest fruits of his labors before she cuts him off.

“Save it for your formal report. Now go watch the street and let me know if you see any feeding activity in the neighborhood. I need to get together some saleable information for the meeting next month.”

Pietr scoots out the door as Anastasia turns to her bookmark from last night’s reading.

Sitting back, she scans shelf after shelf of books for a title that looks promising. Sighing, she shakes her head and bemoans the fact that she had not done more research before she became enlightened. Of course, her work comes much more easily now, and she is seldom interrupted by customers during the dark hours of the night.

Turning off the electric lights, she lights a single taper and hunches over the book, mumbling softly as she struggles to form words from the arcane symbols.