A fledgling prince restlessly pacing the battlements. A Tremere novice walking the razor wire tightrope.
In the wake of the Camarilla liberation of New York, the real battle is just beginning. A floodtide of refugees, immigrants, opportunists, prospectors, pariahs, carpetbaggers, Anarchs, pioneers and outlaws washes over the city—each of the newcomers intent on carving out his own piece of the blood-red Big Apple. Everyone has a dream, or at least a scheme.
Antigone Baines thinks of herself as the veteran of many lifetimes. There is a trick to picking your way along the Widow's Walk—the treacherous precipice between the quick and the dead—and dancing away again, unscathed. A magic of names. Among the halls of the Chantry of the Five Boroughs, Antigone is usually called Novicia in accordance with her rank in the steel-jawed hierarchy that she has come to know as the Tremere Pyramid. Sometimes, in scornful whispers, they call her Jackal, because that is her job: Pyramid security. Like Anubis, the laughing, jackal-headed, warden of the dead, Antigone keeps careful guard over the house of the undying. She cannot, however, anticipate that her job is about to become rather more complicated.
