Prologue

A band is playing, their off-beat fusion of pop and folk music drifts through the bar and settles upon the occupants, all too uncultured to recognize the original tune, even if the band had not mangled it. The waitress approaches. She coughs and hacks until I’m sure she’ll suffocate, then clears her throat and makes me wish she had. “You need anything?” Her voice is like nails. Humans amaze me. They live such a fleeting amount of time, but they insist upon making it all the shorter. She pulls out another cigarette and places it lovingly between her lips.

“I’m fine thank you.” I say for perhaps the fourth time. She looks at me for a few seconds, then walks to the next table where a group of raucous old men all seem to get the same look in their eyes at the same time.

Why had I come to this place? Why had I come back? A small group of people begin rubbing up against each other in time with the overly chaotic tune the band had turned to in hopes of getting more attention from their audience. I suppose it was their way of dancing. They had no dignity, no grace, no...soft, haunting beauty in the way that they moved. Not like her...

Damn it why had I come back here? Nothing was going to change. Nothing ever changes, The waitress with the voice like nails will keep smoking until she no longer has a voice, she’ll die of cancer or some other complication brought on by her destructive habits. A girl will leave here with her friends and their pretty faces will be smiling at passerby from missing posters in a week. Rapist, serial killer, one of my kind, what does it matter? Most of them don’t even appreciate the breath of life they’re given.

The band is playing a slow song now and the couples stand in place, swaying back and forth, as if in a trance. “I love you.” A man whispers into the ear of his partner. She lays her head on his chest and closes her eyes and he goes back to checking out a girl at the bar. They whisper lies in the dark, and everything’s just fine. What do they know of love? None of them know, not a single one of them. They won’t live long enough to learn these things as I have. Like children born with an incurable disease, that dark thing called humanity. They never had a chance. They can delude themselves into thinking that they’re happy, They build their empires with smiles on their faces and in the end I’m the only one left to watch them burn to the ground. They never live long enough to lose anything. They will never know true loss. I envy them.

This is the world I live in now, but it wasn’t always like this. I get up and leave without a backwards glance.



I was the first of my kind. The very first vampire, and the first to perpetrate the act of bringing more into this world. I am responsible for roughly a third of the kidnappings and about just as many of the murders This world has known over the centuries. Directly or indirectly.

I was born this way. No choice was given to me. I was the result of a freak accident that took the life of my parents and left me quite a bit...different than others.

I can't eat human food. It disgusts me, and leaves me vomiting as my stomach cavity rejects what has no right to be there.I live off of the life of humans, the flowing red nectar that pulses within them. I can go out in the daylight but I prefer not to because it becomes easier for humans to recognize the subtle differences that make me what I am. My eyes are the most easily recognizable. After I have fed they are as red as the blood I gorge myself upon, when I am not well-fed they are as black as pitch. My mood varies with this as well, I am far more irritable when thirsty, and far stronger as well. Next they might notice my skin. I am extremely pale, Not as much as an albino, but close enough for the eyes of the general population. This is, of course my excuse on the rare instances I have reason to venture outside during the sun lit hours. I suppose this is where the legends come from. I do not however turn to ash in the sunlight. I do not even turn pink. My cells are very different than yours. They reflect the radiation instead of taking it in, making me look all the paler.

I am Immortal. My body has it's own defense from dying of thirst. As I mentioned before, the thirstier I get, the stronger, But not only that, I become more aggressive, more...animalistic. I would kill every human within a mile radius before I died of thirst. I learned this once before, when I was young and had ideas of destroying myself. I did not like what I was and thought perhaps It would work. I didn't try it again. The planned harvesting of a few seemed better than the massacre I committed on Easter Island. Yes that was me. It's a long story. The immunity to disease took me a while to discover. I had fed on a human that had contracted small pox. I discovered this after the deed was done and I was worried, but nothing happened and my suspicions were confirmed upon further attempts to discover a weakness to what I was. I will never die of disease. I am immune to them all. I am, in fact, nearly invulnerable. The only thing that could ever hope to destroy me is the same force that created me, that mysterious creature in the Carpathians If even it still lives.

The ones I have created however, they are not quite as invulnerable. To humans perhaps, but I have killed many over the years. Territorial disputes, annoyance...They tend to get in my way. I have destroyed far more of them then I have humans, far more. In this way I can at least feel that I am atoning for what I have no control over, and sometimes have no wish to. I am a predator, and I cannot always stop myself. Sometimes I prefer not to even try. Not all humans are good after all. Most aren’t. This is how I met her.