Mors Factus Sum

The year was 2035 and as I stood and watched as the last of the opening main stage acts walked off I felt both a tingle of awe and a pang of regret. The announcer came on stage and mic in hand announced, "Bastards and Whores, are you prepared to embrace the Prince of Darkness?!". The audience screamed louder as the first eerie chords of Mister Crowley filled the arena. Ozzy has been dead for over a decade but with all of the advances in animatronics and three dimensional projection it was almost the same as it had been all those many years when I went to my very first Ozzfest. So many years have passed since then. Truthfully I expect that if any of these…children…new my true age I'd be laughed at and ostracized. Imagine a 53 year old man partying with the youngsters, even if I look barely half my true age. Ah well…the benefits of immortality. At least I can say "I saw The Prince before he was a corpse." I chuckled softly at the biggest joke of all. Prince of Darkness…I think not. I sighed and once again found that it was all too easy to get lost in the past and overlook the present. With that thought in mind I looked to my right at the young girl standing with me as she had all day into tonight. So beautiful and warm, so young, so naïve...so human. "Charlotte my dear, would you care for a beer or four?" I asked her and she looked at me with a smile and a most emphatic nod.

Several hours later, after listening to what must have been every song ever recorded by Ozzie and Sabbath and after buying my companion all of the overpriced drinks she desired, we slowly walked back to my car. Slowly because, for all her apparent grace when sober, this young woman appeared to be a very sloppy drunk. As we got closer to my car we passed through areas of near total darkness as some lazy attendant had forgotten or simply been too lazy to replace the overhead bulbs. As we walked I caught the faint scent of something…familiar.

"May I ask where you're taking that young lady?" The voice surprised me both in its unexpected appearance and in the barely restrained ferocity in the tone. I turned to face a young man of perhaps 17 years in appearance, however his complexion and scent told me that for all his apparent youth he could be seventeen or seventeen hundred. I looked at the monster in human guise standing before me for a moment, the tingling in my brain telling me that there was about to be a fight, before replying, "I wasn't aware that it was polite to invite yourself to another man's meal OR, for that matter is it any business of yours to enquire too deeply about the acquisition of such."

The bronze haired youth looked at me and growled, "Perhaps I'm making it my business and that young woman will be coming with us."

I whirled around and saw another vampire, a young woman, pickup Charlotte and prepare to take off with her. Outnumbered as I was I took the chance and lunged for the young woman. It was at this point that four things occurred, two expected and two unexpected. The first expected things was when my perceptions suddenly changed as my vampiric "talent" kicked into gear and through my eyes I could see both directly in front of me and a bird's eye view at my technopathic abilities linked me into the nearest satellite overhead. This of course lead to the second expected reaction which was the young man leaping at me from behind. The two unexpected events happened nearly simultaneously as I slammed face first into a vampire that, were he human, would have been described as a walking wall of meat who proceeded to put me into a crushing bear hug and a small elfin vampire ran headlong into the youth in midflight screaming "NO, Edward! It's not what you think! You need to stop this NOW!"

After several minutes of untangling myself from the meat wall, who's name I found out was Emmett, and having been introduced to the elfin Alice who had saved my life, along with Edward and Bella, who were apparently attempting to save Charlotte from the "Evil vampire scum" things relaxed a bit. Charlotte, having apparently burned off her buzz from the terror of her near abduction was still tired enough to be half out of it as the real discussion began.

"You need to meet our father." Said Bella to me as we stood in a rough circle in the parking lot of the arena, "Carlisle will most definitely want to meet another vampire who has chosen the vegan diet…plus…maybe I could talk to Charlotte. I've only been a vampire for a short time, relatively speaking, and I still remember what it was like being a human in love with a vampire."

Charlotte's eyes popped open in shock as I fell to the ground with laughter. I was laughing so hard that I never heard charlotte pop the trunk of my car and pull out the heavily dented aluminum baseball bat from within. It was the others' turn for shock as she proceeded to smack me over and over again with the bat putting more dents in its already pitted surface "I KNEW this would happen! I TOLD you it looked like we were together you ass! STOP LAUGHING AT ME! You are the WORST father in the WORLD!"

End Chapter 1