Please note: I have changed the setting (instead of London, Vampyre takes place in a small village), and the name of the characters (Carlisle Cullen is Holden Statham). Let me know what you think of how the changes fit into the story, if you wish to comment
Vampyre
A terrible hiss erupted from the canopy of the trees. Every time Holden captured a mere glimpse of an edge of the witch's dress, she flitted away, leaving nothing but a scattering of leaves. The fog was no help. It dampened everything, which added a certain eeriness that only the devil could have created. The very idea that it may even be the devil cast upon them continued to entertain Holden's thoughts, an endless struggle between reading the witch's moves and keeping the men out of harm's way.
The broken hiss slowly twisted into a growl, a rumbling noise that came deep from the witch's inner workings. The wind kicked up, furious and dank with the fog.
Just then, several things happened at once. Screams echoed everywhere, in every direction. A few of the men cried out in pain at they were hit from all sides by what appeared to be nothing. Within the chaos could be heard a whipping noise that rang around the group. One thing was for certain: the witch had escaped her haven from the canopy.
She saw Holden as he scrambled about on the ground, searching for the bow that was dispelled from his hand during the commotion. She lunged forward with a thunderous sound, and the witch kicked the bow away from his grasp, while he was forced to retch from the quiver that rippled through his stomach. When he looked up again, he saw the witch as she stood above him, snickering darkly. She only smiled down at him. Her white-green eyes gleamed satisfactorily with the victory she knew she had won – if only for a moment. For in that instant, Holden was desperately trying to unearth the arrow beneath him, the point wedged between the ground and his thigh. The bow lay far from arms reach, but he thought he could subdue her, somehow, with the arrow. Then he would find the nearest sword and drive it through her heart.
The point was wedged far too deep. He would be dead before he could free it. What he needed was a distraction. However, what could possibly deter her?
He needn't have thought long. The witch spoke to him, her mouth emanating steam as her icy words filled the stillness, "How could you have thought that your mob would stop me, with their torches and pitchforks and --" she picked up the bow – "this? All merely obstacles that allowed for more fun. You will not succeed in your dealings, vicar's boy, least of all killing me. Especially not after you butchered and burned..." A shadow fell across her face. Holden thought he saw a hint of pain before a hateful sneer replaced it.
Holden's arm jolted as he freed the arrow, gripping it firmly in his fist.
Determined to keep her distracted, he said, "Say what you want, witch. My deeds have all been fulfilled purely and using innocent means; while yours lay side-by-side with the devil's."
"Fulfilled?" She shrieked. "This coming from the son of a reverend who does not acknowledge what you do, even if it is filling the slob buckets."
It was the perfect moment.
"Do your worst," he said.
The witch knelt down to his level. They were face to face. Holden could smell the stench of her crooked breath, in and out. Inhale, exhale. Life, death.
Holden swung the arrow as high as he could and whipped it down. However, the witch caught his arm before it could even prick her pale skin. She smiled at him, an entirely evil grin.
"It will not be that easy, vicar's boy," she said.
Her teeth shone brightly in the dim forest light. Her incisors dripped venom, a lethal fusion. Holden was gripped with fear, the arrow falling from his grasp. This witch was not only that, but a vampire as well. Such a permutation was unheard of, not a whisper on the strongest of winds in all England.
Before she broke his flesh, one of the men cried out from behind her. She did not have the time to react. He drove the sword straight through her. Holden quickly retrieved the arrow and plunged it into her heart.
Her final scream caused the wind to stir and the trees to sway violently. Several branches fell down and narrowly missed Holden and the other men. Rain splattered them, coming down in mad drifts; lightning and thunder clashed in the sky every other second.
Then it all stopped. So suddenly, that Holden was not sure if it had happened. Dust blew about them as they watched the witch disintegrate before their eyes. Indecipherable whispers skipped on the wind. The witch was gone and so they thought they could live in peace, for as long as possible.
Back in the village, the wives of the men were awash with the relief that they were all safe. Each family greeted their father and husband back with many hugs, kisses, and tears of mirth. Holden walked through the street, past all of the families, to his father's vicarage, a small wooden cottage that stood off from the village a ways, close to the forest.
When he entered the antechamber, Holden watched his father as he sat at the table and bowed his head over the age-torn leather bible. Holden stopped in the entryway and waited. He did not like to disturb him while he prayed. The reverend unclasped his hands and began to write a sermon.
"Father," he barely whispered.
Without looking up from his writing, the reverend asked, "Did you succeed?"
"Yes." Holden hesitated. How could he explain that they killed the witch but they no longer had her body to prove it?
"I must see her remains so that they may be disposed of properly."
"There are none to dispose of." The pen his father held hovered above the parchment. "What I mean to say is that she has been killed, father, I assure you, I stabbed her myself. After, though... she turned to dust. There was no body left."
The reverend paused and stared expressionless at his son. "How can you be sure, then, that she has not gone forth from this world?"
"She is dead, sir. What more proof do you need?"
His father's fist collided with the table and the echo resounded all around the vicarage. Rage sprang to his eyes, giving him an unholy shadow, the looks of which would have caused a child of eight or ten to burst into tears. Holden knew this face well, having seen it many times when he had come back from his ventures empty-handed or worse. It no longer frightened him.
"Have you no sense enough to catch a single witch?" The reverend riled across the room. "These matters are of importance and cannot be delayed. This village remains unprotected because of your incompetence."
"I told you, she is dead. This village need not worry about her any longer."
"You are too young to understand these matters. Perhaps it was a mistake to put you in charge of them."
"She is dead, father," Holden repeated, soberly.
"Her spells last longer than her very life, of that you can be sure of."
Holden did not trust himself to argue evenly with an ill-tempered old man, so he turned and walked out of the vicarage.
For the rest of the evening, he walked up and down the empty streets. In a few hours, it would be dark, but Holden would roam around the village all night. Most nights he did not sleep, preferring to engage in his ritual, tired though he was. His thoughts never rested, and so he never did. Instead, he paced through the streets, night after night, watching over the people, serving to protect them. He felt that it was his responsibility and that he would be the one to blame for any deaths in the future.
Tonight, there was an unseasonable chill, which sent shivers all over Holden's body. The air was thick with an unknown apprehension.
As he crossed the alley, he took notice of a hooded creature limping past the far left corner. Holden silently followed it, peering at it from behind the wall. The creature shuffled to a band of ten or so people. They looked ordinary enough at first glance, but then their unnaturally long fingernails and unsettling way of moving so fast without a single sound capture Holden's attention. The one that limped stopped and turned to face Holden. He hissed and flashed pointed, dripping teeth.
Holden slowly backed away a few steps and then broke into a run. Every door he came to, he battered and yelled for the men to meet him at the center of the village with their weapons.
They gathered and returned to the spot where Holden had seen the vampires. Nothing was there other than a few scavenging rats. He led the men through the streets, searching. How could a throng of vampires – a distinctive sight – disappear from a small village?
From behind the mob, a scuffle broke out; hisses and screeches punctured in between other odd sounds. Then, from the shadows of a small house, came the decrepit vampire Holden had seen, his limp had worsened. Now, it was as if he dragged his leg behind him. His eyes were the deepest ebony black, and his lips curled back from his razor sharp teeth. He leered at the mob, not in a hateful manner but a hungry one. Every once and a while, his tongue licked his teeth, checking their sharpness. With each step, his expression became more and more ravenous, and his body lurched forward, hurriedly. In the darkness, Holden heard the vampire call out in Latin to the others. Soon, they were in the alley behind him, ready to fight.
Holden commanded the men to charge, and the enemies flew at each other. Within that second, before the two groups converged upon each other, all was still; even the wind that had been so vicious throughout the night. An odd feeling crept its way through the street and found its way to Holden's mind. Within that second, the thought of an uncertain death ran through his mind. It was then that Holden worried about what would happen to his father. Would he be lonely? Would his heart harden into unbreakable stone, like these creatures? Would he choose to forget Holden?
Within that second, Holden forgot about his bitterness towards his father and chose to remember why he decided to stay with him instead of leaving with his anger. He remembered that day when the two exploded at each other. It had ended with his father telling him to leave, but Holden decided to come back knowing that if he left he would never come back, rifting them further apart. He also remembered his mother, what little he knew of her.
Then it all came back to the present.
They crashed together and several men collapsed within a flash. Cries burst forth into the night, agonized. The vampires had the upper hand in strength, speed, and agility. However, the mob outnumbered the vampires, but barely.
Before he knew what was happening, an ancient vampire fell upon Holden, and he felt the ice-cold hands grip his shoulders and teeth sank into the soft flesh of his neck. He felt nothing but the numbing pain and the hot wetness, then. The vampire gasped with sustenance, for he had been starving for many days.
Someone pulled the vampire off him and Holden could hear screams close to his ear. Then he could not hear anything at all, nor see anything. He could only feel the burning pain that now coursed through his body.
When he came to, Holden saw that the fighting had ceased and the sun was beginning to rise. The fiery pain continued to slither through his body, pulsing at the base of his neck.
All around him there were bodies, some barely alive. He knew what his father would do when he would hear what had happened: burn the bodies and destroy anything else infected by them. The sudden panic grew within him, numbing his thoughts, but did not overcome the fire. Holden instinctively crawled in between two houses, and buried himself with old potato peelings.
There he waited, endlessly, for three days, biting back the pain that often seared through his entire body. Holden waited and waited for death to claim him; those three days he hoped for the end.
When it was over, though, he was alive, but as what, he wasn't sure. As he sat there and thought, the insatiable hunger grew within him. His sense of smell had grown so strong he could sniff out the little girl beyond the wall he leaned back on. The temptation was so strong.
So fast he was a blur, he ran for the woods, not stopping until he was miles away from the village, away from human beings. His thoughts were so muddled, mostly with the hunger and partly with the revulsion of what he had become. He shivered at the thought of it. Vampire. Blood-sucker. Murderer. That is what he had become. There was no conceivable way he could live this way, knowing what he could do.
Without thinking, Holden climbed the tallest tree he saw. He moved easily, cat-like, as if he was born climbing trees. He stopped on the top most branch and looked down. There must have been more than sixty feet between him and the ground. It did not bother him in the slightest. There was no queasiness in the pit of his stomach, no dizzying hype that people often felt when faced with great heights. No, Holden felt nothing except the new animal that writhed inside him. Though he had not lived with it long, he knew that he never could; and he especially did not want to give it the chance to empower him. It was evil, and Holden knew nothing else of it, nor wanted to.
The wind began to breeze by him. It felt so good. Jumping would be so easy; made even easier by the bark's dampness and the rotund way the branch curved. So easy.
Just like that, he did. Wind rushed and branches whipped past him as he fell further and further down. Holden closed his eyes right before he met his fate.
The ground came swooping up and Holden landed, without a crack from his knees. His legs hadn't buckled and he hadn't landed on his neck or back. Aside from the anxiousness he felt, Holden was more than fine. This was what scared him. He jumped from sixty feet above ground and he had not flinched from any of it. The worst of it was the hunger that continued to grow within him, becoming stronger and stronger. The animal instinct told him that if he did not feed soon he would become weaker by the minute.
He denied it and starved himself for four days. He stayed clear away from any living creatures, especially people, and camped in abandoned caves and the occasional tree. In those four long days, Holden tried to drown himself, but found that breathing was not a necessity to him anymore, more of a habit from his human ways. During the day, he would sit alone, rebelling against his new nature and continuing to be disgusted with himself. He often thought of creative ways to kill himself, but learned that it was not an easy thing to do. At night, he walked through the forest – still unable to sleep – discovering the new talents he had acquired.
On the fourth day, he awoke to the smell of venison, sweet and dirt ridden, a herd of maybe twelve. He heard them before he saw them. The deer were maybe a mile off, but when they appeared before Holden, he lost all control. He flew from his hiding spot and attacked, the animal dominating him.
His eyes flashed from a deep charcoal black to a reddish shade of topaz as the blood finally quenched his thirst. Afterwards, he knew he had an alternative. He did not have to be the monster that he despised. He did not have to be a murderer. Holden would go on living as a vampire, but not a blood driven creature. This was his hope, and his soul was his sacrifice for the damned eternity he did not choose, but was instead thrust into it. He would forever be known as a vampire.