Silent Restraint

The following is all in Amare's POV. Enjoy.

Okay, then. I guess it started before I was born.

There was a vampire, his name was Cutberto, and he was from Germany when it was still Prussia, if that gives you any idea of how old he was. He was a scientist and he spent the first few decades of his life as a vampire trying to come up with a cure. Instead, he found the Serum. It was completely by accident, but Jason heard and he hired him... Who's Jason? Jason is the man running this. All of this. And he has been for the last... god knows how long.

Before Bert, it was just the trafficking ring. Vampires were slowly dying out and they needed a means to survive. The Alpha really couldn't care less. As long as his race mostly survived and he got his human children to feed off of, he pretty much let everything go. Natural selection, I guess. You know, the smart and strong ones survive, the hunters get the weak ones. So Jason got everyone together and started this. It started with only a few nests. When I left, there were forty nests in on it and growing. I guess that's why Garth called it an apocalypse. But I don't think world domination is Jason's plan. I think he just wants it-- never mind. I'm getting ahead of myself.

So they began testing and doing all this stuff, but all of their subjects died. And finally, they found a version of the Serum that would probably work. The first girl was fourteen. She died in a week. Which was, as far as Cutberto was concerned, an improvement from three days until a subject of any age, shape, and size would bite it. So he tried it on someone older and younger, trying to figure out which bodies could handle it. The older one died in a shorter amount of time, while the younger one lived. And so their test subjects got younger and younger. The one-year-old lived for nearly ten years before it died.

And then they found us, me and Perenna.

They sent Evagoras to go get us... Evagoras is one of the oldest vampires in existence. Next to Jason, of course. But even Jason is a few centuries younger than Evvie. He was one of the first. He was also the one they put in charge of us. They took us when we were two months old. As far as I know, they killed our parents to take us. They gave us yearly injections of the Serum for the first three years to make sure it was set in our blood....

What does the serum do?

Well it definitely doesn't cure vampirism. It kicks a human's immune system into overdrive. Like, hardcore. I- we- never get sick. Wounds heal fast. And we produce blood at an 'incredible rate'. Not exactly as fast as you can drink it, but you can drain us nearly dry. Give us ten minutes and we won't even be dizzy. Hungry, but that's it. And that's easily fixable.

So me and Ren grew up here. In this house. They treated us like daughters. We were spoiled. And we were fed off of from everyone in the household. When we were only a few years old, Bert died. He was killed by a hunter. And he took the recipe with him. No one knows how to recreate the Serum. Me and Ren are the first and last of our kind. They call us the Valens.

When we were ten, they started sending us around as a sign of good faith. Evagoras would take us to one nest or another, let them feed on us, and then bring us home. We would go all over the world, feeding vampires. It was horrible, if you think about it, but we thought it was natural. And Evvie would never let them drink us more than half-dry. He protected us.

I started realizing that everything was wrong in my teens. I never really understood why Evvie was always so grim when we took the trips. And then one time I ditched him, in California. We were going through Yosemite National Park, just me and Evvie and our guards, Mason and Tate. I had to be fourteen, maybe. Maybe thirteen. Right before I ditched the party. We spent the night there and I snuck out. There was a group of kids on a trip with their school. They were my age. It's not like I was totally oblivious to how different I was. I knew that most people my age aren't human cows, and I knew that, to a degree, what was being done to me wasn't okay. But when I met those kids, it just clicked. This was wrong.

I talked to Evagoras about it. You should have seen the look on his face. He was almost... proud of me. That I knew there was something wrong with this. That was the night he promised he would help me get out at all costs.

And then, about a year later, I guess, I was in West Virginia. Evvie had me at a nest who'd been part of the ring for decades. The nest leader was letting his mate feed on me and one of the other vamps ran in and said something about hunters. Evvie had me in the basement and in a cell in seconds. I'd never seen him so scared, not even when I told him I wanted out-- away from these monsters.

He locked me in a cell with the other girls, and then he was gone. Your dad and Bobby came down those stairs, and I think that was the first time I realized that I was going to be free.

God, in that moment, those two men were my heroes. When Bobby brought me home, I would ask if your dad was stopping by all the time. Of course, he only ever stopped by once... Mmmm, I actually think he was looking for you. I don't know where Dean was.

A while later, Bobby sent me to go train with Rufus. I'd been asking him for as long as I'd been there to train to be a hunter. I think I mostly liked the irony of it. From prey to predator. So Rufus took me in, rather begrudgingly, but I think he was kind of excited to have a prodigy. And, I kind of kicked ass, if I do say so myself.

And then, because my life wasn't interesting enough, Evagoras found me again. I was eighteen then, and still training with Rufus. We decided that it was dangerous to keep in contact, but Evvie had been slowly doing his part to unravel the ring while I was gone. He was looking for a way to get Perenna out the way I had, and had gotten a few of the smaller nests to back out or had left clues for hunters so they'd get wiped out. Somehow, Rufus found out after he left, and I had to tell him everything. His reaction was to just train me harder. And I couldn't refuse.

When I was twenty, he gave me the Dodge and a bottle of Blue and let me go. The rest, you know or is unimportant.

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Sam sat back, still unsure what the goal of her story was. She was staring at him and he didn't know if he was supposed to say something or not. She looked at him for a moment longer, then stood and walked over to him. Her eyebrows were furrowed and her body was tense-- it was radiating off of her in waves.

Suddenly, she leaned down and kissed his cheek, then escaped the room quickly and silently, leaving Sam to his thoughts.