-prologue!-
Love is described in many ways and takes many forms. Some define love as sexual attraction between a man and woman with love being nothing more than a simple evolved trait. Others define it as seeking a long-term partnership with someone because the two people enjoy each others company. There are thousands of different ways to describe the passionate explosion between two people called love, but all definitions have their limits on what isn't love and what isn't natural. Can love exist between different species, or is it just a sexual lust from seeing something remotely close to your own people? Can love between a predator and prey form, or does the predator simply use his prey for their own needs and gives the prey only enough attention to make them stay.
Society has recently resurfaced a more sexualized vampires, with a lust for humans, demons, other vampires, and pretty much anything that could look human. There are stories in which vampires are depicted as soulless monsters, relentlessly feeding on human flesh. In others, they are tormented souls, forever held captive by their thirst. Is it really fair to put them in such boxes though? They can cry tears of blood, have wants and needs, and have their own sexual tastes. Does their unbeatable heart still carry human longings for love? Could it be that we as a people naturally want to label groups and damn or praise them as wholes? We humanize our technology and will shout at it when it doesn't work. It seems strange that we dehumanize things that are so close to being human. Vampires, ghosts, werewolves, aliens, and all supernatural beings have a spiritual heart that aches, yearns, and hates just as ours and we must stop trying to label them good and bad because we are very much the same with the greater good and the terrible evil that resides in all men's hearts.
A hundred and ten years ago, there was a young vampire of less than a hundred years turned, grew tired of a life in a coven filled with true monsters. They had a special love for torture and sadistically playing with their food before sucking the victim dry. The vampire stabbed his sire with a stake during a steamy sex session one night and went on to kill sixteen of the twenty-five member coven. The ones that were left were strong and swore vengeance on their former brother. He finally lost the group after their thirst grew too strong for them to ignore.
The vampire sought the help of a magical fortune-teller to defend himself against the other vampires. She listened closely to his story and felt sympathetic to the poor boy. His name was Damion. He had been turned when he was sixteen years old and for the first ten years living with the coven, survived the role of sex toy, often left alone for days at a time chained to the wall. When his will was thought to have been broken, his sire released him for his imprisonment and encouraged violence in the young man. Damion acted for as long as he could until he snapped one day after witnessing his sire spend several days raping and torturing a girl who looked to be fifteen.
The fortune-teller pulled a large, violet-blue potion from her cabinet and set it on the table. She gingerly stroked it with her wrinkled fingers that were covered in dozens of dazzling rings, before speaking with a raspy, but powerful voice, "This, this is what you seek. It is my finest potion for vampires. Every drop you drink will give you one week of sunlight and will hide your sent. It will hide you for thirty three years. Be warned, this potion was made with a flower that no longer blooms, so once this potion is gone, I cannot help you anymore and you will no longer be able to run from them any more. In your future, I see love and it will bring more happiness than you could dream...if you let it. You have become attached to your coven's sadistic and cruel ways whether you accept that or not. A dark seed has been planted in your heart. If you give in to your drive to control, you will lose all that you love."
"What is the price of the potion?" He asked hastily, ignoring her warnings.
The elderly woman smiled and Damion couldn't help but cringe as he saw the maggots crawl through her teeth. She cackled and picked up the potion to lock it away. "More than you could afford."
Damion bolted up, "I will pay any price and do anything you wish of me, please tell me how I could pay you! They will finish their feeding soon and dawn approaches!"
The woman waved her hand towards him to sit, "Be calm, you silly boy, I'm getting to a way," He sat with a deep sigh of relief, "I will place a spell that will scatter your smell across the entire planet for a hundred and fifty years. The spell cannot be cast twice. I will also give you the potion. In exchange, you will serve me for one hundred years without question and when your firstborn has his thirteenth birthday, you will give him to me for five years."
"I will sire no one, why would I curse someone else with this hell?"
"You will sire vampires, but that is much further in the future. You will have children of vampiric and human blood. They will be of a rare few to survive through infancy with the potential to create a new breed. Your possible future suggests between four and eight children. Are you willing to sign your child's life away for five years along with a hundred of your own?"
"Yes, but I will never lay with a human, I will bare no children, nor will I sire any vampire brats."
The woman held out her hand while the sun started to rise, "A deal then?"
"Yes, a deal." Damion shook her hand and the deed was done. He stayed with her for the full amount of time serving her without complaint or rest. Once he left, he settled in a small southern town and tried to find work, but no one would hire him, so he went to the north and found that he needed proof of education. He enrolled in high school and after six years, Damion accidentally fell in love with a sweet girl named Stephany. When she was eighteen, Damion finally had to confess to his condition after staying with her for too long and his hunger growing. He got up to leave disgusted with himself and heart- broken, unsure if he could find someone to nibble on quick enough before finding an animal to drain. Stephany grabbed his hands firmly and his body hissed in longing as he tried to resist her, but then she grabbed his head and gently led it to her neck.
"Drink from me." Damion unable to resist sucked her furiously and had to force himself to stop after tasting the most delicious blood in existence. He licked his fangs as blood dripped from his teeth and he was nearly to tears with self-loathing, but Stephany grabbed his face and kissed him deeply. They pledged their love to each other and from that day on they were officially a couple. They got married two and a half years later and Stephany had her first child, plus one, ten months later. (Presently they have four children; Demetri Ulysses and Lucinda Marilee, who recently turned nine, five-year old Dominique Hendrix, and two-year old Cornelia Audrey)
During Stephany's first pregnancy, it became obvious that Damion and Stephany's children would never fit into normal society. The children fed off their mother's blood. The pregnancy lasted ten months with Stephany bedridden for the last four months, barely able to move. Damion would have to take her once a week to an unsanitary hospital that laid on the border between the underworld and earth.
Going to and from the underworld was a right held only for supernatural beings. Having even one drop of supernatural DNA would allow for access, but Stephany was completely human and couldn't go to the nice hospital just a few yards away. The hospital that they were forced to go to was decaying. There were bloodstained floors, holes in the roof, broken windows, and walls thin enough to hear screaming from six rooms away. The doctors were rather lazy and ill-informed in the medical arts. While the nurses were kind, most were bewitched zombies with green skin and missing limbs.
Their doctor, Gregorie Janas, advised them to abort the children, because most hybrids were born in pain and would shortly die afterwords, twin hybrids surviving were even rarer, and the twins would take so much blood from the mother that the babies would kill her in the first six months. Stephany refused to kill her children and Damion supported her decision, but he was worried for his young wife.
The hospital would supply her with potions and blood supplements, but the medicine could only give them in small doses to prevent abuse. After, another two months of traveling back and forth from their home. Stephany found herself too fatigued to return home and begged to have them move closer to the hospital. Damion didn't like the thought of being near the underworld because of all the dangerous creatures that would come to and fro from the gate. He also knew that his coven would be coming through the area often, but he knew that Stephany wouldn't be able to handle traveling for the last few months.
Damion tried to appeal to the hospital's director to get him to give them larger doses of medicine, so they wouldn't have to travel every week, but the director could not be swayed. Then, he tried to get Dr. Janas to go against his boss and write a larger prescription, but the doctor refused him just as firmly. With no other choice, Damion agreed to move.
Stephany stayed at a hotel for a week, while Damion searched for a suitable home, refusing to let them live in the disgusting, small houses that were for sale near the gate of the underworld. He got lucky and found a magnificent house occupied by a small family of spirits. The spirits were looking to relocate to the underworld, but had no underworld credits, only worthless human money. Damion offered them two thousand credits for their current house. The money he gave them would be enough for them to buy a grand house without debt. They bartered for a bit and the ghosted agreed to leave the large house fully furnished for three thousand credits.
It was a lot of money and left Damion with only twenty-five credits left. He'd hoped that he could give his children store-bought blood, but it was clear now that they would have to feed off of him. Vampire's blood is toxic with only three exceptions. One, was with vampires had been turned in less than fifty years. They were able to feed off other vampires, but mainly only ate from their sire, or left over blood from the coven's victims. The second was sire's blood. No matter how old a vampire was, they would always have the ability to drink from their sire. The final exception was half-vampires that could feed off of other vampires.
The money was well worth it though. Honestly, the house was more like mansion. It had six regularly sized bedrooms plus a master suite, but only three bathrooms. Of coarse, three bathrooms would work fine for them at the moment. It was an old Victorian era house with boarded windows and a few dents, but it was sturdy. There were lots of old deco left behind that Stephany greatly appreciated.
Damion cleaned the house himself, so Stephany would have a nice place to give birth. He hired a professional doctor to make a house call on the night of the birth and help with delivery. It took nine hours to deliver the twins, but both parents were ecstatic to see their children alive and healthy with no deformities. Nine years later is when the real story began though.
An: thanks for reading le prologue!
