Disclaimer: I don't own Oblivion, and enjoy!

Skingrad was a beautiful city at night.

Fireflies darted under the streetlamps like benign will-o-the-wisps, while the stars and twin moons cast a a soft ambient light over the ornately carved statue of Rislav the Righteous. A man – clearly out of town, by his dark cloak and rather shady appearance – drew in a deep breath, savoring the town's air. A quaint, nearby patch of flax and ginseng flowers lent the most predominant fragrance, but he could also draw in a much more sublime aroma – fresh grapes, cheese, and the honey of sweetrolls... Yes, it had been a while, but this place hadn't changed in the least. His old friend certainly knew how to run a county.

To say that the hooded stranger did not leave home often would be an understatement. He was the type who tended to deal with paperwork rather than the more... hands-on... business he had been assigned to undertake now. It wasn't that he was unskilled in this line of work – he was easily among the best – but he'd gotten the desk job simply because he was the only one in the Cheydinhal sanctuary that could stand it.

Vicente Valtieri was in Skingrad to end a life, but to hell if it meant he couldn't enjoy the fresh air for once.

The contract was a simple one. A certain Lazare Milvan had apparently made enemies on the wrong side of the law, and said enemies had called on Sithis to welcome him to the void. The contract had not requested a specific form of murder. Normally, this meant Vicente would treat himself to fine dining along with the payment in gold, but he was a careful man - leaving drained corpses behind in this particular county would attract attention that could be very inconvenient for a dear friend...

His target was apparently a Breton noble living in one of the large houses on the north side of Skingrad, not too far from the Mages Guild. Which was where he stood now; it wasn't so late that the door would be locked, although he'd brought along a few picks just in case. He tested it – sure enough, it was open, not that a padlock would shut out the Night Mother's will. He pulled the brass knocker and took a step back, his cloak rasping on the cobblestone. His fingers drummed a staccato rhythm on the hilt of his glass longsword as he waited. It had been a long time since it had tasted blood, but its edges were as honed as ever.

A man with mordantly blonde hair in green brocade finally answered the door after a rather long period of time, giving Vicente a very critical look.

"Greetings, Mr. Milvan," the vampire said, inclining his head. "A fine night to you."

No harm in being polite, he supposed, although perhaps he really was desperate for some new people to talk with if he was resorting to conversing with his targets.

"I have no time for you, peasant. Sir Lazare Milvan would never be caught talking to one of low birth such as yourself. Begone."

Under his hood, Vicente blinked.

I can see why somebody wants you dead, he mused. Honestly, people these days.

Well, now was as good a time to get to business as any...

"Ah," he said, still in his smoothest cadences as he slipped into the foyer and pulled the door shut behind him, "that is a problem."

His sword arm lunged forward, and Sir Milvan's haughty expression had a moment to contort into dumb surprise before it froze entirely, blood dribbling from his slackened mouth.

"You, my dear knight, have an appointment with Sithis, and he does not take no for an answer."

0o0o0

Not long afterwards, Vicente found himself lounging against one of Tamika's barrels of grapes, absentmindedly cleaning off his blade with a bit of cloth.

If that man had been a real knight, then he, Vicente Valtieri, was one of the Nine Divines.

Oh, he'd certainly had a suit of armor, polished to gleaming perfection and displayed proudly in a hall full of medals and heirlooms. The scabbard of his sword, too, had been burnished brightly and inlaid with semiprecious stones. The blade inside had rusted so severely that he'd had to shimmy it free. He doubted that the Breton had used it in years.

Well, he certainly wasn't going to get the chance now, lying in a pool of his own blood.

At least Milvan had been alone. If he hadn't, then Vicente would not have had the liberty of loitering in one of his favorite counties for a few hours afterward, enjoying the flavored air and debating what he could say to Janus if he broke in through his window again to say hello. Truly, coming in through the front door and greeting the target had been something of an arrogant move on his part. Finding a more unorthodox entrance would not have been difficult - nor would traversing unseen. Of course, he did have that little phial of poison at the ready if he'd actually been invited inside, but the whole show had been an entirely unnecessary complication. Perhaps cabin fever was finally catching up with him.

It was then that he heard the faint hum of voices.

As a creature of the night, all of his senses were keener than most – but even as it was, in front of the Chapel, he couldn't make out what was being said. The half-muttering, half-whispering had to be coming from behind it, too, unless his ears were playing tricks on him. His interest was immediately piqued. Secret meetings at... he glanced at the clocktower... two-thirty in the morning? He tsked. Amateur. The darkest of dealings occurred either behind closed doors or in plain sight. Furtive late-night meetings in secluded locations loudly advertised themselves as sordid... and attracted all nearby guards, he knew from his line of work. But there was nobody around, barring him. And he was definitely not guard material.

He could have just ignored it, but as fate would have it, Vicente was bored. Odds were, he wouldn't have to take another contract for another few years. He was generally only assigned contracts which specifically required his talents as a vampire, which were very rare, or when the workload piled up enormously, as it was now. With the Emperor's death and the entire world seeming to think the world would end tomorrow, everybody seemed to want to get their grudges settled today. It was amusing, really. And anything to let him stretch his legs every now and then.

Curious in spite of himself, the vampire shimmied up the stonework, carefully making his way across the chapel roof until he sat at the back edge. Peering down, he was met with a mildly unusual sight – although by his standards, it was fairly unsurprising. A slender, brown-haired Breton woman, perhaps in her early twenties, by the angles of her face - Vicente had to admit, he had not been studying women for a long time – was speaking in low and rather urgent tones to a Bosmer who instantly set Vicente's hackles up. There was just something about him, something unpredictable and wrong. He was not unfamiliar with this sort of intuition – as a vampire, he was much more in touch with his instincts than the living. By walking the fine line between civilized man and feral beast, he had gained a rather tenuous but unique position; he enjoyed most of the benefits of society amidst his own... unique... family - the rest of society, less so, as the few times he'd tried to walk into a tavern without his hood up had not ended well - while gaining strengths and aptitudes that his mortal Brothers and Sisters could only dream of. And one of those instincts was screaming a clear message to his brain.

This man isn't stable.

"...I went and tailed him all day, but Surilie wasn't following you. Glarthir, there's no need to be afraid – nobody's spying on you, I'm positive. Snap out of it."

Glarthir? That name rung a bell. The vampire frowned slightly to himself, trying to place it... Ah. In a few of his correspondences with Janus Hassildor, his friend had mentioned a mad resident in town that occasionally stirred up troubles with wild rumors. Apparently, Glarthir had actually called out the Count as a vampire once, but nobody had believed him due to the fact that he'd already accused Hassildor of being a Telvanni warlord, a were-shark, and Akatosh in disguise. From what Vicente had read, this Glarthir seemed like the type to walk around while holding conversations aloud with nobody, wearing eccentric clothing and creating paranoid alter egos for every citizen in town.

What Vicente was most definitely not expecting was for the Bosmer in question to pull out an axe on the now-paling girl.

"I knew it!" the Wood Elf seethed, flecks of spittle flying from his mouth. "I thought I'd been paying you enough. What did they approach you with, then? And when! I had my suspicions when you tried to clear Peneles, but now I'm certain. You're one of them. They're all after me, and you were always in on it! Maybe this will send a message to them to stop spying on me."

It didn't take an assassin to catch the meaning behind that.

"Glarthir, wait!" the Breton cried. Absolutely no use, of course – the madman was on the warpath. He lifted the war axe, and she raised her hands as if to shield herself; a spell began to dance at her fingertips, and then shattered outward in a series of fragmented sparks as the Wood Elf brought his axe down.

Vicente drew in a sharp breath, the sweet tang of blood flooding his nostrils. The blow had caught the Breton on the arm as she'd tried to protect her face; not a fatal wound by any means, but it was definitely painful, and the shock of it would hamper even an advanced mage's ability to form spells. She appeared to be otherwise unarmed, not that she had much muscle to use anyway – her lips opened in frantic, silent lines of arcane language, but she could barely muster a few sparks, much less a complete spell. As Glarthir prepared for a second strike, she opened her mouth in a ringing scream – but there were no guards around.

He wasn't quite sure why he did it. Being an assassin didn't necessarily make one a psychopath, and Vicente Valtieri was the type of man who would rather sit down with somebody to hold an enlightened conversation about books or art than stab him repeatedly and dance on his corpse - and he'd trained plenty of that type, ugh. Furthermore, he wasn't on contract.

But regardless, the vampire did not make it a daily habit of saving lives, much less those of pitiful mages who couldn't even cast a simple shield spell upon receiving a wound. And he hated the screaming ones.

Either way, Vicente found himself reacting before he even recognized that he was going to interfere. He slid off the steeple and landed on the ground as silently as a Khajiit in the forest, twisting around and bringing his longsword up through Glarthir's ribcage in one fluid motion before the Wood Elf could even register the appearance of a another person. The Bosmer's eyes widened in a rather amusing look of quizzical horror, and he crashed to the ground as Vicente withdrew his blade, blood soaking into the grassy ground like spilled wine.

His hood had flown up a bit in the fall; instinctively, he pulled it back to cover his gaunt features. It wouldn't do to have the damsel in distress start screaming for the guards to save her from the scary vampire, he mused. Well, Sithis would have to make do with a lunatic for the night rather than a young maiden. It was still an addition to the Breton noble that he'd been designated.

Wordlessly, he sheathed his sword and faced the Gold Road. Yes, he was ready to return to the Sanctuary – he'd had his share of Skingrad. In any case, the guards would be arriving soon, given the screaming, and he so did not want to have something like that spoil his evening.

"Wait," panted a voice from behind him, and he paused, pivoting around slightly.

The girl was getting to her feet, her eyes trained on his face; only what she could see of him, he reminded himself. Whether this was because she wanted to keep him in her sight or because she was determined not to look at the very dead Bosmer that was staining the ground so near her, he wasn't sure. Closer up, he could make out a bit more of her looks. She was fair-skinned, with a smattering of freckles across the top of her cheeks. Her eyes were the pale blue of ice chips, but without any of the cold - any steel she might have held was lost behind blatant fear. His initial guess on her age hadn't been wrong - her cheeks were in that transition stage between soft childhood fullness and more angular maturity, and her overall slim figure was a result of legs that seemed a little too long for her body.

She was doing her best to keep a steady, unaffected facade, but he could hear her heart racing with the shock she'd so recently underwent, and her hands were shaking as she brought up a flickering white flame of Restoration magic to heal her arm. For a long time, she just stared.

"Who are you?" she finally managed to ask.

Under the hood, an involuntary smile tweaked the vampire's lips.

"Nobody," he replied, and turned away.