From NOCTURNES IN PURGATORY by Joseph Armstead:
She was an extremely petite brunette woman with an hourglass figure defined by the lean muscularity of a gymnast or platform diver. She wore black and gray denim camouflage pants tucked into black lace-up biker boots, and purple lipstick on her bow-shaped lips. Very “hard rock,” avoiding looking at all trendy, and yet there was something unattractively unapproachable about her, something a little dangerous.
Her name was January Ulrich and she had just turned ninety years old three weeks ago. She hadn’t celebrated her birthday with anyone other than her cat, a one-eyed, twenty-five pound, black short-hair tomcat she had named Griswald. An outlaw and a social reject, most of her friends were either dead or on the run. January’s few surviving family and relations had gone to her funeral eleven years ago, thinking she was dead. Biologically, she was dead. But they wouldn’t have understood that. It was best the way it had turned out. They didn’t need to know what had really happened to her.
They didn’t need to know that people mostly referred to her now as “Cold Janey.”
Once upon a very dark time, January Madison Ulrich had been inducted into the secret sisterhood of Bloodwitches, the oracles and shamans of Moon-Chosen society. She had surrendered her humanity and tethered her biology to the arcane technology, mutagenic treatments through chemicals and cellular implantation, of wampirii alchemical science. Too late, she had learned her mistake. Too late she had learned what murderous things she was expected to be a party to as a Bloodwitch. And too late, she’d learned that Magick, actual Reality-altering, physics-defying sorcery, demanded an awful price from its practitioners.
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