Tom Mitchell was a widower and a devoted father when a vampire took his life and remade him into something that could no longer walk in the sun. Yet even in death, Tom could not sever the bond with his young son, Cyrus. He watched over the boy from the shadows, sometimes taking him to the Santa Monica pier at night, letting him ride the carousel or eat cotton candy under the neon lights. Cyrus never understood why his father only came after dark, or why he always seemed a little colder than he remembered — only that he loved him.

Tom lingered at the edges of Cyrus’s life as the years passed, a silent guardian who could never step fully into the world he had lost. But in 1950, when Cyrus married and had a child of his own, Tom’s presence became harder to hide. When Cyrus’s mother‑in‑law tried to keep the vampire away from her grandchild, Tom killed her in a moment of instinct and desperation. Horrified by what he had done, he vanished into the night and did not return for fifty years.

In 2000, Tom came back to find his son an old man, frail and fading. Cyrus recognised him instantly — not as a monster, but as the father who had never truly left him. Tom cared for him in the quiet hours, helping him walk, listening to his stories, sitting beside him as the world grew smaller. For three brief years, they reclaimed a sliver of the life they had lost.

Then, one night, a Slayer found Tom. She staked him cleanly, dust rising in the air like a final breath. Cyrus, trembling and grief‑stricken, watched his father die for the second time.

The Slayer, seeing the devastation on the old man’s face, tried to comfort him. She asked if the vampire had been his son.

Cyrus could not answer. He simply stared at the empty space where his father had stood, mourning the man he had loved, the monster he had forgiven, and the ghost who had walked beside him for a lifetime.

In 1997, Drusilla was captured by a human inquisitor and locked in a stone cell beneath Prague. He strapped her into a torture chair of his own invention, convinced that vampires could feel nothing but pain, and determined to carve a warning into her memory for all her kind. As he worked, Drusilla drifted into visions of the things that delighted her — lost little girls at the fair, little boys who wandered too far from home — trying to drown the agony in the sweet music of her madness. But nothing held. The pain dragged her back again and again, until only one thought soothed her: Spike, whispering love in the dark.

Across the city, Spike lay broken beneath a bridge, a mob having shoved a stake into his chest just shy of his heart. He clawed his way out of the river mud, fury burning hotter than the wound. He tore through Prague’s streets, killing everyone who stood between him and Drusilla, leaving a trail of bodies behind him like breadcrumbs of vengeance.

In the torture chamber, Drusilla’s mind finally slipped into a catatonic stillness, her body limp in the inquisitor’s chair. Believing she had broken, he paused — just long enough for Spike to arrive. Spike ripped the man apart without ceremony, blood splattering across the stone walls. Then he lifted Drusilla from the chair, cradling her as though she were made of glass, whispering to her as he carried her out into the night.

Outside, beneath the cold Prague moon, Drusilla stirred in his arms. She thought of how no one else understood the love they shared — the devotion, the hunger, the exquisite violence that bound them. Spike kissed her forehead, promising her new delights, new horrors, new worlds to ruin together.

Hand in hand, they made plans to travel to the Hellmouth, eager to taste the Slayer’s blood and dance in the chaos that awaited them.

Angel walked through the snow, the cold biting deeper than it should. He had come here after she died — to Tibet, high above the world, as far from civilisation as he could manage. Yet even here, in the white silence, something flickered ahead. A faint light. A doorway. A diner barely visible through the storm.

Inside, he found only emptiness and a waitress who looked strangely familiar. She asked what he wanted. He didn’t know. She brought him a mug anyway. The first sip filled his mouth with human blood. He spat it out and fled, the waitress calling after him, her voice sharp with hurt. “What? Mine’s not good enough for you anymore?”

Outside, Angel saw breath in the air — his breath. A little girl appeared at his feet, laughing at him for being silly. She looked like his sister.

Then she was dead, staring up at him with cold, accusing eyes. “Don’t tell me you forgot. You killed me even though I begged you not to — and you don’t even remember?”

He ran again, crashing through a treeline toward ancient ruins. Memory clawed at him. Beneath a half‑buried stone he found a hatch and reached for it — only for Jenny Calendar to appear before him. He tried to apologise, but she simply led him down into the darkness. They walked a long corridor. She warned him not to open any doors.

A knock sounded from the nearest one.

He opened it.

Jenny stood inside, her neck broken, her head lolling. “I told you not to, Angel. Why can’t you spare yourself?” The floor vanished beneath him. He fell hard.

When he rose, Angelus was chained to a wall, one hand free, fangs gleaming. “Not me, Angel. You. Before the blonde. Before the hair. Before the soul. I’m the only thing that’s ever given you direction. Even this saviour phase? It’s about me. You feel me breaking loose every time you close your eyes. Why don’t we drop the act?”

Angel looked at him and nodded. “You’re right. About all of it.” Then he stepped forward and secured the final chain, locking Angelus tight. The monster snarled, but the fight was over.

Angel turned away. “It doesn’t change anything.”

A door appeared. He walked toward it as Angelus called after him, voice echoing through the chamber. “Sometimes I think you’re just the soul they shoved into me. Nothing more. So tell me, Angel — in your heart of hearts, what do you see when you look in the mirror?”

The question hung in the air.

Angel woke in his Dublin hotel room, days after his strange, uneasy holiday with Illyria. He crossed the room, passing the mirror.

He looked.

He saw nothing.

In a world where vampires had stepped into the light of mainstream society, Tuesday nights in Nashua, New Hampshire still felt unbearably small. Jacob spent his evenings numbing himself at the local arcade, losing hours to flickering screens and the dull ache of another bad day at school. When he stepped outside, a sultry blonde college student named May drifted toward him, drawn by something in his loneliness. They talked easily, a spark of attention Jacob hadn’t felt in years. His best friend Alexia arrived, trying to reach him, but Jacob slipped away into the night.

He found a vampire instead. Sebastian sat in a parked car, elegant and bored, and Jacob knocked on the window like a supplicant. Sebastian fed on him — a sharp, dizzying high that Jacob welcomed with desperate relief. When Sebastian tried to turn him away, Jacob begged, and the vampire took him to others who were more than willing to drink from him. Jacob returned home dazed, his frantic mother assuming drugs, not fangs. That night he hallucinated Alexia as a vampire, arms cradled around him.

The next evening, after another hollow session at the arcade, Sebastian and his friends cornered Jacob again, hungry. When he refused, they beat him nearly to death. His next vision was May — not Alexia — holding him. He woke in her dorm room, the sun barred by blackout curtains. May explained she had found him dying and sired him. Now he waited out daylight while she taught him the rules of his new existence.

That night, May took him to the arcade, where Jacob fed for the first time. Later, Alexia found him, frantic and hurt, demanding to know where he had been. Jacob told her about the attack, but she tried to warn him — vampires weren’t the glamorous outsiders the world pretended they were. As they argued, Sebastian appeared, congratulating Jacob on his transformation. He brought Jacob home, where his mother, shaken but loving, accepted the truth and helped him move into the basement. She warned him about vampire killings around town, reminding him that he was still her son, still someone she feared losing.

At the arcade, Alexia pressed Jacob about his strange behaviour until May arrived. Realising what she was, Alexia staked her. The crowd recoiled, cursing Alexia for killing a vampire. Jacob, furious, revealed his own transformation and accused her of believing lies about vampires hurting people. Alexia, shaking, confessed she had never wanted to be a Slayer — she had wanted a normal life, not a destiny soaked in blood.

In anger and betrayal, Jacob bit her. As Alexia slipped toward death, he held her in his arms and offered her the choice he had been denied: die human, or rise as something else beside him.

After vampires were exposed and folded uneasily into mainstream society, Cyn found herself chafing under Harmony Kendall’s new rules — no feeding, no hunting, no being the creature she had been made to be. She felt declawed, domesticated, denied the thrill that once defined her. Her roommate Ash, meanwhile, revelled in the attention. Humans flirted with danger now, drawn to vampires like moths to a flame, and Ash basked in it. They went clubbing together, neon lights and pulsing music blurring the edges of the night. When a man approached them, eager for the novelty of a vampire encounter, Cyn lured him into an alley and drained him dry, savouring the forbidden rush.

The kill awakened something in her — hunger, yes, but also purpose. She agreed to go out more often, pretending it was for fun while secretly hunting for her next meal. Ash brought a man home, laughing as she fed lightly from him during sex. She invited Cyn to join, and Cyn did — only to drain the man completely. Ash recoiled, horrified. The argument that followed was vicious, two visions of vampirism colliding: Ash insisting they adapt, Cyn insisting adaptation meant extinction.

In the end, Ash made the choice Harmony’s world demanded. She staked Cyn cleanly, dust settling across the apartment floor like the last word in an argument neither of them could win. “You should’ve changed with the times,” she said, standing over the ashes of the friend she had loved, the roommate she could no longer recognise.