Boyana Luben

Brian O'Reilly's Retainers

Sobriquet: Anna...

Appearance: Boyana stands 5 foot, 9 inches tall when she is barefoot. However she prefers to wear dark professional looking athletic shoes which make the long hours she spends on her feet bearable, and far more practical should she need to chase a suspect or flee a dangerous situation. She wears her dark, lustrous Bulgarian hair a few centimeters past shoulder length, usually loose and despite all her efforts, a bit disheveled. Her gray eyes are as dark and stormy as the peaks of the Balkan Mountains where she was born. Her face is narrow with a fey cast, beautiful but bitter, like the dark elves of Slavic legend. Boyana's build is distinctly athletic which she maintains with a daily routine of exercise learned in the Bulgarian army. She loves to wear pinstriped silk suits sans tie with long-sleeved white business shirts and her customary fedora pulled down low over her eyes. Her only concession to femininity are her painted fingernails which she keeps short and neat. Her voice is naturally husky and made more so by years of smoking, which she has given up for the habit of chewing gum, which she does with a vengeance, especially when stressed. Boyana wears a small arsenal in the form of a 9mm Arcus 98DA pistol slung beneath her left arm, pepper spray and a small taser carried in alternating jacket pockets, a small combat knife strapped to her right calf and a backup Makarov in a mesh holster located in the small of her back. She only wears body armor when expecting trouble.

Behavior: Anna is highly intelligent and well educated in the practical arts of investigation and police procedure. Unfortunately she can be gruff and taciturn with more than a little sarcasm, these natural tendencies are curbed by an intense professionalism and by rare bouts from a well hidden but healthy sense of humor. Anna is naturally alert which is heightened by well earned caution. She never enters a building without identifying all the exits and she usually has an exit strategy for every situation. Likewise, when she enters a public place she carefully looks over every single person and makes note of their locations, general appearance and what they are doing at the moment of her entry. These deeply ingrained habits are made easier by a trick of memory that allows her to recall all that she sees and hears with perfect clarity. While a lifetime of security work in an impoverished former Soviet nation has left her dubious of human nature, she is in general a positive person with a strong survival instinct. Undetected by most people, Anna possesses an adventurous imagination that allows her to transcend the day-to-day tedium of security work. She loves old black and white films, science fiction and like all Bulgarians, a good round of drinks.

History: Boyana was born in 1978. Her father was a local constable and his wife the daughter of a local farmer. Boyana was actually born in the same house as her father in the village of Babintsi, just outside of Teteven in Bulgaria. The village was small, but the family regularly traveled to Teteven to obtain groceries and other necessities. Otherwise, Boyana and her mother stayed in the small village, where they cleaned, cooked and managed a garden behind the old house. The constable, her father, worked in Teteven ensuring the security of the small city. But he was killed during rioting that occurred with the fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s. The death of Boyana's father profoundly affected her and her mother, who was devastated with her husband. Without her husband's income, Anna's mother was forced to rely on her meager skills in farming and that process aged her beyond her actual years.

The final years of Anna's primary education passed in a painfully quiet way and when the chance to enter secondary education in Sofia arrived, she jumped at the chance. Her mother once again began to grieve, for in losing Boyana, she was losing the last bit of her beloved husband and the short years of happiness they had shared. While Boyana loved her mother, she simply couldn't stand the quiet country life any longer and with the selfishness of youth she left for university in Sofia. The first year of Anna's studies went well, and she took a summer job in the big city, made friends and partied hard. Academically her second year in university didn't turn out so well, but socially she was blossoming with a number of potential lovers and better jobs opening up as her social skills improved. Unfortunately that was when she fell in with the wrong crowd, in this case the Bulgarian mafiya and their groupies. That year taught her a number of tough life lessons and gifted her with some useful, if illegal skills and a couple scars.

Her academic failure led to enforced financial independence and rather than go home to village life, she cast about for work that would keep her in the capital. For a year she moved from one minor job to the next without finding a career. Her university friends slipped away, moving in different circles, graduating or returning to whatever life they had before university. Anna frequently moved into smaller apartments until she was living in little more than a large closet in a 19th century building owned by a slumlord who housed his tenants ten or twenty to an apartment. Desperate for anything that wasn't pure drudgery or prostitution, she joined the Bulgarian army. She went through the equivalent of boot-camp for women and signed up for training in security work. Within a year she had her own quarters and was trained to handle firearms, dogs and drunken superior officers. Despite her skill and ambition, she hit the glass-ceiling fairly quickly and unwilling to sleep her way forward through the ranks she was relegated to a relatively stagnant position in military security doing female detention work. With only a limited career available in the chauvinist military of Bulgaria, she finished her bid in an unremarkable fashion and reentered private life to pursue police work.

Boyana found the police academy to be both different and familiar, in both positive and negative ways. The academy grouped her with like minded individuals of a similar age, but was run by the 'old guard'. While there was more room for advancement in police work for women than in the army, many of the same stereotypes held sway. She felt that her best possible future lay in police work, a career her father had followed to the grave; if it had been good enough for him, she felt could provide her with the life she had always wanted. This time, she avoided all the distractions and graduated at the top of her class and was immediately hired on with the Sofia city police.

Her first partner was 'burned out' former member of the Bulgarian secret police with a wealth of advice, virtually no morals and plenty of enemies from communist times. That was when the real education began. She received a crash course in how the world really worked and what it was to be a police officer in the new Republic of Bulgaria. Those were bittersweet days as Anna learned to combine her zeal, police skills and street smarts to stop crime. Initially she and Mitre worked the streets on foot patrol, but her ambition eventually led them to bust a drug ring in a case far above their pay grade. This in turn opened the door to investigative services and made her a number of enemies and attracted the attention of Mitre old 'associates', many of whom had become the leadership of the Bulgarian mafiya. They did a stint in the Bulgarian versions of both vice and narcotics. The years passed and when a narco bust lead to the discover of human trafficking and the seizure vast sums of cash, she and Mitre were marked for death. Assassins dispatched by one private security agency or another came for them both, but they only found Mitre. The old man took a couple of them with him in an uncharacteristic act of heroism that saved her life, but led to a fiery confrontation with the 'Powers that Be' and his death. While Anna never for a moment believed that one act could redeem his soul from a life apathy, corruption and violence, she nonetheless goes to the nearest church on the anniversary of his death, where she lights a candle in his memory and prays for his soul's eventual release from hell.

Regardless of prays or guardian angels, the cache of secret files that Mitre had bequeathed to her ended the threats to her life. She immediately received a promotion and a transfer to homicide where she would shine for several years before once again hitting the glass-ceiling towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. By then she would be in he middle thirties, a experienced police inspector and a rogue maverick with a reputation for getting her partners killed. That was when a demented serial killer gripped the city of Sofia in a bloody fist of terror as he stalked and sadistically murdered the promising youth of the city in a crime spree similar to 'Jack the Ripper' in England. As teams of investigators worked around the clock to catch the killer and put public fears aside, it was Anna who got closest to catching him. In the process she encountered Brian O'Reilly, a man that claimed he too was hunting this serial killer. But to stop this killer he assured her she would have to accept certain myths and learn to hunt that which could not easily be killed again. By the time they succeeded, it was far too late for her to escape from the notice of the vampires of Sofia. Thus she came to work for the onetime Ventrue prince of Sofia's night society.

She has not aged a day in over thirty years. Her domitor was forced from his position of power over that city and fled across the seas to the New World. Shortly thereafter he called for her and she came to serve him in Quebec, then later she crossed the Atlantic again so she could assist him in London, and now she resides in Leeds. While she would rather be closer to him in the city of York, he reminders her that Leeds has a small but noticeable Bulgarian population and as such she is less likely to draw the wrong kind of attention. It also allows her to interact with her own people and buffer the loneliness of immortality.

Recent Events: With a brand new identity, Anna has settled in one of the more upscale neighborhoods of Leeds and opened a new private detective agency in the posh downtown business sector. She has hired a number of office staff to fill her suite of offices and minimize the solitude of her work. For the first time in decades she is seriously considering training some 'new blood' to help her and thus she is looking around for potential new talent worthy of what she has to teach. On a personal level she has found a pub she likes where she can watch football, drink English beer, and watch the boisterous young men for a potential lover or two. But inside, she is a old woman entering he seventh decade and those pretty - pretty boys could be her great-grand children. Time is harder on the living servants of the undead, than the undead themselves realize.

• -- Boyana Luben's Statistics