The spectacle of landing a jet black helicopter onto an empty lot around other buildings and establishment right next to a busy Los Angeles street was a sight, even if it went wholey ignored by the pedestrians in the area. Of those in vehicles only half-glances were tossed in passing. It's not as if any citizen of LA wasn't used to the sight of private air transport, and helicopters were becoming more and more popular as a way to avoid the choking traffic of the PCH or the 405 and simply, and easily, just get out of town. 

An Asian man wearing black aviators was a deft touch at the controls of the flying machine, the powerful chopping of air by the blades sending gusts this way and that all about the area around the landing zone didn't last very long, all things considered, the red and green and white lights that were active during night flights by FAA mandate flickering as it landed and the engines died quickly. 

A door behind the cockpit opened, and Eva hopped out with an unnatural easiness. Her face alive with a grin as she looked to the PI, and motioned for him to come on. It wasn't until he was in the chopper that she moved to hop back in herself, Samantha already straped into a leather bucket seat, a smartphone pressed to her ear, her conversation quickly wrapped up as the two Kindred climbed into the back of the helicopter.

"This is Samantha Hart, my personal assistant." The blonde pin-up's smile was welcoming and warm, even if there was some residual distance to it. Eva's tone was flat, but it gained humor as she introduced the woman to Saxon. "She probably knows everything about me you wish you had in your files."

"Oh," Samantha cut in, with the look of someone disapproving of such a blatant understatement. "Much, [i]much[/i], more than that."

It made Eva laugh as she turned her body to click her seat belts into place, before turning back to Saxon after she was secure. "Right." And there, at light laughter, Eva left it until the helicopter was ascending, tipping it's nose just slightly down, and plodding through the air in a distinctly forward motion--over buidlings, hills, beach houses, and quickly over Santa Monica and past along the coast and the PCH into Malibu.

"The city's watched, I'm sure I don't have to tell you. And what I have to discuss with you...it's something that can't get out. I work for someone here in Los Angeles. It's always been something of an artistic partnership. But recently my partner is not the same, and I'm afraid his well being is often an extension of how goes the city of Los Angeles. When I returned from overseas just in time to catch LaCroix's nasty fall, and the new Anarch uprising, I knew something was wrong. Too much had been allowed to happen, from LaCroix himself to Smiling Jack to the gang wars. It was as if suddenly for the first time in LA's history there was a massive brain drain at the top, and those with enough balls and resources were filling in."

It was enough to make her frown openly. "Maybe the new players are worthy, maybe they aren't. Without the steady leadership at the top, it won't matter--it'll only be a matter of time until the Camarilla comes in and makes the world of Night uniform as they see fit," a prospect her tone was too soft to make it obvious whether she approved or disapproved, "I was always hoping for something better for LA. Something unique. Los Angeles is a lot of not so great things, but it's still a world center for the arts, and a center for turning art into capital. I fear what Camarilla or Sabbat control would do to that. But if my partner refuses to do anything? What am I left to do? I've kept all the plates spinning so far, but how long until they start to fall?"

Eva grew silent as she sighed, and let her eyes fall onto the blonde woman, and the amused smile she held as she watched the world fly by out the window. After a long silence, Eva looked away from Samantha, and out the same window. Even as she spoke up, and spoke to Saxon. "I'm not trying to fight the same fight everyone else in this town is, Saxon. My battlefield is invisible to most, never seen and never heard of before. I would like it to stay that way, but I'm afraid I have to pull some people into this secret little war of mine. If you have questions, any questions, I would ask them now. Before we land."

He remained silent, both when copter landed and when he was ushered on board. He greeted Sam with a nod, reserved only in terms of words, it lacked the hint of distance she had shown him. Her response confused him somewhat, small enough that a kine may not have picked it up, but still, perplexing. In the few previous times he had travelled over LA by air, he had been enraptured by the city, now, after only a few moments of gazing out across the land of a billion lights, his eyes returned to Eva, before uttering his first words of the flight.

“There are no files. Not anymore.” 

It wasn’t bitter, although it could have been mistaken for such, an admittance perhaps, that he was no longer watching, following her. Those who had known about his extensive project to track her down had often labelled it an obsession, perhaps it had been, but it was not just because of who she was. Kindred often forgot his clan, he may not have been a great artist or performer, but he was stuck in his own form of art. The hunt for Eva had been his muse for so long, but as soon as it was complete, at least for now, those files had held no lustre as they once had.

Saxon listened intently to what she had to say, processing and calculating. To an extent he trusted her, but even still what she said went through the first process, whether it was possible, and then the second, whether it was probable. From what he knew about her, the pause it took for him to believe her didn’t even register, not even for a kindred. What took longer however was to project his own role in such things.

“Something has been wrong in LA for longer than LaCroix, even the Kine have felt it, a building pressure in these nights.” The Toreador were the closest to the Kine of all the clans, and that particular trait, Saxon exemplified even more so than others. For years, patterns had been starting to form between the issues the Kine had brought his little company, Eva’s description did much to confirm what he already believed, rather than provide new information. A deeper insight for a problem he had already been working on.

“It wouldn’t even have to be you, for me to take this. LA and mystery, my true loves.” He spoke, eyes turning from the beautiful native kindred to the cityscape of LA once more, it was a far cry, and at the same time completely the same, as the city he had first seen with mortal eyes, coming to the big city to fight for a dream that to the countless others flooding West would have seemed so mundane. Who ever heard of the man who moved to the City of Angels to become a policeman.

“Do I get my own helicopter?”

That only made Eva laugh. “No.”

It wasn't but mere minutes until Los Angeles and Santa Monica faded away behind the hills containing the city of Los Angeles in it's valley, the green and gold and ocean blue of the Malibu landscape rolling up beneath up. Unlike Los Angeles, the hills in Malibu were dotted with private mansions, just as the sea side cliffs were. Inbetween the two were the PCH, a two lane freeway that snaked along the coast from Santa Monica up through Malibu to Camarillo, Oxnard, Ventura, then Ojai, the fruit fields of the large Fruit corporations, before the seaside resort town of Santa Barbara, and up past that went the PCH--all the way to San Fransisco and the Bay Area. 

Saxon knew the area well, as he did most of the out laying regions. His eyes tracked landmarks in the dark, some even he couldn’t see, but that his mind knew would be there, shrouded in darkness. The countryside had brought new danger in his life as a kindred, of the monsters that prowled in the night, seeking vampire blood. It was refreshing to see it all once more without such dangers.

[img=http://i1203.photobucket.com/albums/bb396/rubixon/howem1_zps3cfcd11f.jpg]

One of those dots on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Malibu coast started getting larger, and larger still. When the hill top mansion came into view, it was a reflection of dying twilight on the glass walls and the shifting fire lights scattered around the exterior of the home; around an infinity pool, lining a wooden exterior wall like a great brazier, and finally the blinking lights of the helipad on top. Eva waited for the tell-tell 'thud' that signified the chopper had returned to the safe embrace of gravity and land. 

The first one out was Samantha Hart, who appeared on Eva's side of the helicopter almost as quickly as she'd jumped out the other side. Eva tried to shoo the tall blonde away, but Samantha just grinned and took but a few feet back. The turboshaft engine's whine slowed to a dull groan as power was cut, the pilot out almost by the time Eva was out. 

There, grinning like an Asian Top Gun, what with the aviators and flight suit, was the pilot of their helicopter. Eva waited to Saxon before slipping her arm into his, and presenting him to the Asian. "This is my friend Eto Abe, a Gaki and one of the oddest additions to my little Coterie family. He's been on the Kuei-jin surge for me the past year."

Grinning then smiling, the man excitedly took and shook the PI's hand. "Yes, yes, Saxon-san. Your name is on the lips of many--not usually in happy tones, I fear," he added, before laughing. "Excuse me, I need a shower, and a drink."

An initial look of surprise had broken Saxon’s calm, although it was put to rest quickly. For the moment, he had questioned whether Eva had embraced, or made a ghoul of a man from the territory of the Kuei-Jinn or Gaki. That would have been risky, the revelation, both of her words and by his own sense, that the individual was a Gaki himself, was, oddly enough, far less surprising when it came to Eva. The handshake was equally returned with similar force, and Eto Abe’s words met with a grin.

Fire whipped from pits on either side of the helipad, the rest of it bordered in tropical flowers leading to a white cement wall, and opened glass doors leading into one of the many lounges in the house. A house of white walls, bright yet indirect lighting, and lush white furniture so comfortable it was like hopping onto a cloud, flat screens located strategically around the house of white walls and dark wooden walls. 

Once inside, Eva disappeared from his side and motioned for him to sit. "I was born in one of the valleys in this area. I was one of those 'native heathens' to the Catholic white men their Empire sent to explore their New World, my home. Can you imagine? Masters of their universe, the Kindred elders of the time literally," Eva chuckled, as if it were funny, "chomping at the bit to see the marvels their mortal slaves reported experiencing from their journeys. They started taking pretty girls to take back to the Old World."

She'd stopped laughing, then. Not a single show of amusement left to her. "When I finally got back home from my time in the Old World, I came back a Kindred, but I felt more like a Goddess coming down from up high to lay waste to old enemies. But when I got back, I saw nothing I recalled. Forests had been felled, valleys flooded for irrigation...my people huddled in Missions, paid nothing for endless labor. There was a rancher named Don Sebastian nearby that was employing natives and paying them fair wages. Interested, I came to what would one day be called Los Angeles. You know what I found?"

She waited for a response, her eyes big and bright and poised.

“Physically? A small agricultural community I imagine. Ranches. Don Sebastian was Kindred, I remember from my earlier studies. The Exact account, well, that along with what you might have felt I can’t even guess at.” His own eyes, green, but he felt couldn’t have rivalled those that he was looking into, for once seemed lost. When talking with those he trusted, he wouldn’t pretend to have knowledge where he did not, but despite being kindred, the time her memories covered, his mind still failed to wrap around. His family had still been poor, near starving farmers under the reign of interchangeable Germanic princes. The thought that the woman in front of him, who had in many ways played such a grand part of his own life predated even his parents was astounding.

“Tell me.”

"Toreador, Fifth Generation." Eva's bright beauty took on a cloud of confusion as the next part, "He was a child. Embraced at Thirteen, born not to far behind me...but at stuck at thirteen? I've never met a more paranoid individual. On a helicopter in the sky I'm still not exactly sure it's safe to talk. Here," Her eyes went this way and that around the millions dollar home. "It's safe, even from him. Poor kid. Not too long ago I had to go abroad for Hollywood business. It's all about relationships, showbiz, all around the world. And even I can't escape some people that require an in person meeting."

Eva stirred, her body moving to the front of the chair she'd sat in. "When I came back...LaCroix had just been disposed. But something was wrong with the kid. He'd lost his nerve, isolated himself and retreated away from everyone except me. That's a problem. I need him. Don Sebastian was a Prince in name only; the kid ran him. Then the kid developed a crush on an Anarch and there's your first revolution. The second happened because the guiding force behind the city since before it was a city just stopped. It's like torpor of the soul he's in. So I've waited as long as I can."

Her eyes dipped towards the floor, what humanity remaining to her struggling with what came next. "I need him. Or his power."

As Eva recounted her discovery, Saxon frowned. A combination of details, the fact a kindred would embrace a kine so young, trapping them in a body preparing for change that it would never undergo, then the fact the child could manipulate and control other kindred on such a grand scale. Even Eva. Despite his relative mastery of it, the twisted nature of Kindred society often still managed to surprise and perplex him. He’d often considered that much of the events of his own, as well as the lives of many kindred were secretly manipulated by a greater party, but he would never have suspected a child. The smirk grew on his features after. That’s exactly how it had managed to occur, and nothing that old could be a child any longer, even one trapped in an adolescent shell.

It dawned on him he’d never seen her confused before. Surprised maybe, but the conflict on her peerless features was new, almost unsettling for the man who had come dangerously close to idolizing her once. That was nothing in comparison to seeing her head drop slightly, to see doubt and struggle. Only after blinking away the surprise, did he realise one of his hands was placed on her knee, the other, at her chin, tilting her head back up to him.

“Such power, that of a kindred and of the controller of a city of teeming souls, should not rest with a mind caught in childhood, not one who would risk everything in his paranoia. Perhaps that doesn’t make things easy, but it makes them right.”

It was unexpected. And for Eva, there were very few things in the unlife that were truly unexpected. Her mind was coiled around the black deed that she knew, if Los Angeles as she knew was going to have a chance, would have to be done. It was disturbing, it was unsettling, and it made her sad. Then she felt the presence of touch; and her eyes jumped with shock--even if it was the only sign of shock or surprise to physically manifest itself. 

If only Eva could've seen herself in a mirror, she might be surprised once more: to find a smile on her lips. "Thank you. I wish a pep talk was all I had to ask of you...but it's not. I need you to be there with us. You're quite the survivalist with a lot of knowledge about this city...in case something goes horribly wrong for us, you need to get out as fast as possible. And stay very, very low for a while."

With the very real threat upon her lips, there was no place for the smile. Not now. "If you're ready, we leave now."

He was standing the moment she finished speaking, offering her a hand to stand as he did so. When he spoke, the usual grin that showed whenever he discussed his own exploits was missing, the tone in her voice had told him all he needed to know about such a time being passed.

“Thankfully, pep talks aren’t my speciality. Don’t worry, I’m usually the one tracking people down, I can hide like the best of them.” His infliction, and the way his eyes met with her’s suggested that he might even be in the presence of one of the aforementioned best. “I have a habit of noble causes anyway.” That’s what he liked to think of himself anyway, all of his noble causes had other motivations, and he wasn’t sure if he’d have accepted such a plan from anyone else. But it wasn’t anyone else who was asking him, if that made the difference, so what.