Daughter of the Night

Needless to say, the first thing I did upon escape was feed. The monster had almost entirely consumed my body, and it was all I could do to find any sort of thug. When I did finally corner prey, there was, as usual, no challenge in the hunt. The fire in my throat died down, but I was forced to set out after another human because I was far from sated.

Three more kills later, I was blissfully full, but my conscience was worse than ever. No matter how much I tried to justify these kills, as long as they were alive, these people would have had an opportunity to rectify their wrongs. Because they made one bad decision and I just happened to be in the area, their lives were cut short. Who was I to play god?

Even more than the usual guilt trip, though, was my conversation with Aerrinaekaiyan. It wasn’t that I was going soft on him. It wasn’t that at all. If anything, the longer I was away from him, the more I loathed the idea of laying eyes on him again. Every word that came out of his mouth was a lie, every single word. He may say otherwise, but how would I ever trust his claims knowing that it was I myself who trusted him, and not an alien thought that he planted in my mind? The more I thought about it, the more sickened I became.

The sun was close to rising, and I could still feel its touch on my skin from the fluorescent lighting in the Faerie palace. Which, by the way, I had discovered was mostly underground. The entrance was in one of the numerous subway stops under the buildings of D.C., but getting in and out would have taken a lot of good timing and dexterity. That is, assuming one couldn’t turn one’s constitution into shadow.

It took only a minor effort on my part to locate a plot of uncontaminated soil shaded from the sun. This time the land was under an old apartment complex that was still being used, not that I minded.

My eyes fell shut and my last coherent thought was one cursing the Summer Knight before I lost myself in the lull of the sun’s oppressive rays.

*******
The girl had never shared that afternoon’s events with anyone, instead preferring to pretend that it had never happened. That didn’t stop her from jerking awake in a cold sweat most nights.

It was one night several weeks later that it returned for her. It was perhaps the only moment she had ever let her guard down; she was asleep in the arms of her fiancé. The summer night was hot, so they had left the window by their bedside open. The light breeze stirred the curtains oh so slightly.

When she came awake her immediate action was not horror. It took several seconds for that to set in, and by that time it was too late to scream.

“Is he your lover?” the black voice hissed, reminding the girl of scraping shards of glass. She would have denied it, but the voice would have known the truth anyway. So she said nothing.

The black night seemed to gather outside her window, yet it didn’t enter. Terrified, she shrank back into the embrace of her fiancé’s arms, eyes wide at the stain of darkness against the window.

“Do you love him?” the disembodied voice asked with an undertone of scorn. The girl’s face cleared temporarily. With no trace of fear, she replied with a solemn “yes”.

Something of the night seemed to peel apart, and that was the first glimpse she saw of the white, serpent-like fangs. Laughter like hot coals met her ears, and she tried to block it out with her hands.

“Then I shall kill him,” the black voice stated. It wasn’t a question, or an ultimatum. It was a fact, a death warrant with the ink still drying on the parchment.

“No!” the girl gasped. “You can’t!”

“I will,” the voice whispered, “because he has stolen what is mine. Already you seek his protection from me.”

The girl looked at the man whom she had pressed herself against, horrified, before shoving herself roughly away from him, toward the window.

“I do not! Please, don’t kill him! I’ll do anything!”

The cloud of darkness pressed harder against the wall of the house, eager, as if it had been waiting for such a statement.

“Will you?” the voice questioned.

“Yes!” the girl exclaimed, her voice cracking with desperation.

“Come outside.”

The girl’s hands gripped her bed sheets convulsively.

“Come. Outside.”

The girl’s head turned toward her fiancé, but for an inexplicable reason she knew he would not wake at her touch.

“Girl,” the voice warned, “you try my patience.”

Numbly, the girl slipped from the bed and rose to her feet. She left the comfort of the bedroom and padded silently down the hall, through the foyer, and to the front door. She could sense the darkness collecting itself on her porch.

Tears streaming down her face, she opened the door. She could feel the eagerness of the dark mass before her, but she made no move to pass through the doorway.

“Come to me,” the black voice commanded. “Come!”

With a fleeting thought of her lover’s safety, she stepped over the threshold into the outside world where the cloud of darkness waited.

She was unprepared for the slamming of the front door, so hard that she heard the hinges creak and the shutters on the windows rattle. She bit back a scream.

There was no way that she could prepare herself for the solidifying of the night, however. As it took form, all she really saw were the vermillion eyes. Pale white hands shot forward and grasped her arms, and she tried to rip herself away purely on instinct.

Angrily, a white hand clamped around her throat. She choked, struggling for air against fingers with a grip of stone.

“So fragile,” the corrupted voice breathed against her neck. Her voice caught, and her muscles seized up of their own accord.

That was the only warning she had before the white fangs plunged into the side of her neck, white-hot and razor-sharp. She opened her mouth to scream but was instantly paralyzed as an ice-cold burning sensation crept through her veins.

She could do nothing but struggle in the prison of her mind as she felt her lifeblood drain from her body in a rushing torrent of agony.

What seemed like lifetimes was only a few seconds, and then the snakelike fangs were retracted from the base of her neck.

As soon as that, the shadowy form was gone. The girl was left standing for several long minutes as she slowly regained control of her body, feeling the wounds on the her neck close with alarming speed.

That was the first of many nights that Dracula came to feed.
******

I started awake like a cat thrown into water, my hand flying to the base of my neck. Instead of bite marks, there was only the blackened skin in the shape of a cross.

I inhaled, then exhaled, and then inhaled again. I had no rapidly beating pulse to slow down, but the exercise still calmed me down.

I hadn’t had that dream in a long time. That I had now of all times definitely said something about my mental state. I put my head in my hands and massaged my scalp.

It was not the first time that I realized something quite obvious; my life sucked. My self-confidence had tanked after realizing that the Fae had manipulated me so easily and my old wounds had reopened after losing Aaron. For that was what he was to me; lost. And if anything, I had to be more wary here than in New York because of the Fae. The Fae and its Summer Knight.

I was beginning to drown in my own self-pity when I had the best epiphany in years. I needed to cut loose. It took a few seconds for me to recognize the magnitude of the idea, and a few more for it to grow on me, but finally it took hold.

I was letting myself be controlled by cowards like the Fae and my own past, but that could only go so far. I was me, after all. Enough was enough, and I was fed up with letting others control my emotions.

I knew that while I could never let go of my history, distant or past, but that certainly didn’t mean I couldn’t forget it for a while.

Aerrinaekaiyan was wrong when he said that I never interacted with other supernaturals. A more correct phrasing would be that I almost never interacted with other supernaturals. After all, how did he think rumors of my similarities to my blood father had spread?

With a new gusto, I abandoned the dim basement of the apartment complex and burst into the night.

A light rain was falling, but I paid it no heed as I shed my form for the wings of a Great Owl and began a steady flight out of the city, leaving the Fae capital behind.

The ground fell away below me as I tirelessly pumped my wings. Although I wasn’t sure where I would find one, I knew the signs to watch out for. I broadened my taste of the horizon and flew where my senses directed me, towards the scents of fellow vampires.

It took me maybe two hours to find a place a safe distance from the city, but the night was still young. I could hear laughter and music coming from the tavern, all of it inhuman. The smells of alcohol and blood both wafted from the open doors and the glimmers of strobe lights flashed through the doors.

I landed lightly on the sidewalk across the street, but I paused before entering and looked down at myself.

I never had to worry about my hair because it was always straight and glossy. A vampire thing, I assumed. My wardrobe, though still relatively clean, showed more wear. It wasn’t that I had grown tired of it; it just wasn’t quite right for tonight. I was going for something… slinkier. Much slinkier.

It was a matter window-shopping in the small town. The stores were all closed, but I was planning on leaving money again. After locating a small boutique, I found the perfect dress. It was a small black number, a halter-top that covered the tops of my thighs and clung to my curves. Small black sequins covered the whole thing and threw light in all directions. I also selected a pair of stilettos that tied around my ankles with broad black ribbons.

I may have to explain my actions here; I was by no means a partier. Usually, I hated scenes like this with the lights, the smells, and the people all packed in too closely for comfort. But every now and then, every few decades, an exception would come up. The accumulated solitude and the stress of dealing with my own person would demand some sort of release.

Where I would normally lurk in the shadows, I would take the spotlight. Where I was the predator in the night, now I would be the predator exposed, but no less lethal for it.

More than that, it was an instinctive urge. Call it the monster if it pleases you. I don’t have to explain myself. I am a vampire, and I do what I feel like when I feel like doing it. And even we creatures of darkness need a change of scenery every few decades.

Or as close as it comes to a drug to forget our sorrows.

I left my regular clothes under the window of the boutique and the money on the register along with a note. I kept my leather jacket, though.

I had never worn stilettos before; the last time I had done anything like this, such suicidal contraptions had not yet been invented. It took some practice before I got the hang of it, and some more before I was confident that I could maneuver in them under any circumstance.

I went up to the club entrance and eyed it warily before entering. This was, after all, my last opportunity to bail ship. But the part of me that craved attention pushed me through the door and to the other side.

One thing I should explain is the system of vampire genealogy. A vampire can only be created from a human, and that human must be fed on by a vampire and then be given the blood of that same vampire. If this cycle isn’t completed, there will be no newborn vampire. The parent vampire of the newborn, the one that gives the blood, is known to the newborn as the ‘blood parent’. The next thing is that all vampires descend from Dracula, the father of us all. He is the first generation of vampires. We refer to him as ‘tier one’ for that reason. Besides being our creator and father, he is the most powerful of us all. He is pure, and there is no reason to believe that he was ever once human. The vampires that he creates directly are known as ‘tier two’ and, next to Dracula, are the most powerful among the race. I, for better or for worse, fall into this category. At first, Dracula made many vampires, but then he realized the threat they posed to his seat of power and cut back severely. At any rate, the vampires made by the second generation are the third generation, and so on. The most numerous tier these days was tier seventeen or so. The first three tiers are known as ‘the Ancients’ because presumably they’ve been around a long time. As far as I know, I was the most recent tier two vampire that Dracula has made, although my sources are estimated at best.

Another useful piece of information is that a vampire’s features do much to illustrate their tier. The more powerful the vampire, the more they take after Dracula in their appearance. I take after him in my features, which is how I suppose the Fae heard the rumors of my existence. Other tier two vampires could be mistaken for my siblings, if not my twins. The later the generation, the more diluted the vampire features become. A tier seventeen vampire will have fangs and may be paler than they were as a human, but that will be all that gives them away. They can eat human food, they don’t crave blood to the degree that I do, and they have some resilience to the sun. Of course, to them shapeshifting is a mere dream and the ability to destroy brick walls comes with far greater difficulty. Of course, I’m not saying they’re not powerful. And they are immortal, at least from age.

The reason I was such an invaluable ally to the Fae was because Dracula’s weaknesses were my weaknesses, and his strengths were mine.

The later generations have to treat us, the Ancients, with great respect, because usually those like me had direct ties to the father of us all.

I hate vampire genealogies.

I entered the club confidently, abandoning my humility and wariness at the door.

Down a long hallway and a flight of stairs was the club. A long bar stretched out against the wall, lined with bottles of liquor and whiskey and rum. Red stools were lined up along the bar, most of them filled. Tables were also lined up around the dance floor, which, as far as I could tell, was packed.

I prowled up to the bar and set my hand lightly on the table. The bartender, a portly man with a classic Italian mustache, bustled over at my call. He was chewing on a cigar as he did so, a fang visibly poking into the casing.

“What can I get for you,” he began while running his eyes over me, “-my lady?”

I flashed him a predatory smile as I slid a bill across the table. “Tequila cocktail.”

Another vampire floated up behind me, eyeing my figure from behind. “I’ll take your coat for you,” he said smoothly.

I slid out of the leather and handed it to him without a glance. “My thanks.”

The bartender slid me my drink and I caught it deftly, studying it briefly before taking a sip. The closest low-tier vampires had ever come to drinking alcohol was combining it with human blood so that it was digestible.

While the alcohol tasted good, I would be lying if I said it had any effect on me whatsoever. We vampires liked to pretend it did, though.

I rolled the drink around in my mouth, appraising the dance floor. There were vampires of all shapes and sizes, although to my relief it appeared that this was a higher-tier club and I was the only Ancient present. If there were others about my strength, they would recognize me. And that would have spoiled my evening.

After another drink, I rose to my feet, grabbed the vampire who had been wooing me on my left, and dragged him out to the dance floor. I paid little attention to his features, but when I got to the floor I let myself move with the beat and lost myself with him.

The music pounding through my mind was my only coherent thoughts as I lost myself amongst the crowd of bodies, all of whom were watching me from the corners of their eyes. The female vampires watched with jealousy, and the males with lust. I played with their feelings as I danced, giving flirtatious smiles and seductive winks whenever it pleased me.

I couldn’t tell you exactly how long I was out there. I lost track of time, and space, and even the faces of the people that surrounded me. I danced with a lot of vampires, seduced at least as many, and forgot all about who I was or why I was here. Which was, of course, the intention.

Eventually I tired of the endless music and the beat driving through my frame. I knew what I wanted, though, and reached behind me to grab the wrist of a vampire that had been trailing me all evening. I can say that he had blond hair, and dark eyes, and was handsome, but not memorable at all. He was perfect.

I led him through the crowd, who, realizing my intentions, parted easily for me and even cheered me on. I gave a savage grin and led the vampire upstairs with one purpose in mind.

Lose myself and gain control.

As soon as we were alone, I turned to the vampire with a smile and wrapped my hands around his shoulders, drawing him towards me.

That night will forever go down in my mind as a much-needed break. I hold no regrets.