Once upon a time, in a small town in France, there was a small girl named Margot. She believed in many things.
She believed in Santa Claus, for instance, and she believed in magic and fairies.
She believed that in the darkest corner of her bedroom lurked a monster. And she believed that at night it would come out and dissolve into the rest of the darkness, sliding into her worst nightmares and making her cry out in her sleep. And if she ever woke up from the nightmare, it would clamp its white hand over her mouth, smothering her; it would then bite her neck and suck all the blood out of her.
The typical wildness of her imagination liked to think that the monster was a vampire.
"Come now, Darren," Larten Crepsley snapped. "You can do it."
The boy was choking and gasping for air. Blood was on his lips: human blood.
"I ... can't ..." he choked. "I ... I can't." A swift, hard blow was delivered to the side of his head; his mentor was losing patience. "Ouch!"
"You are no longer human," the three-century-old vampire growled, pointing a sharp-nailed finger at him. "You are a vampire - half, anyway. You are a half-vampire and it is time you abandoned your human ways."
"I may be half a vampire," Darren reasoned, "but I'm also half a human. Why should I give up being human so soon?" He looked pleadingly at his mentor. "Just give me some time. I'll ... I'll get around to it, I promise. But I'm just ... not ready yet."
Larten looked coldly at him, then lowered his hand. "Very well. But do not blame me if you collapse from lack of blood."
"I won't," Darren promised, grinning from ear to ear. "Now let's get back to vampaneze-hunting. Um, exactly why are we here, again?"
Larten took a deep breath, then exhaled heavily. "A woman I knew several years - decades - ago lived here. She may be dead, but her descendants are not. I will not leave them to the violent whims of the vampaneze."
"Oh?" Darren nudged him, still grinning. "A woman you knew, huh?"
"I wish not to speak about it," his mentor said calmly. He looked up at the nightsky and the stars twinkling brilliantly at him from it.
A scream tore through the deathly silence of the night. Darren jumped.
"Mr. Crepsley?"
The vampire was grim-faced.
"Let's go," Darren said.
When Margot finally reached her grandmother's bedroom, all she saw was darkness. There was no light; there was no sound. Perhaps the moon had gone to sleep, too, abandoning its job of keeping the night at least a little bright.
Or perhaps she had gone blind.
Suddenly her heart began to pound and voices in her mind screamed at each other. Total, silent panic for a moment.
She knew the thing was there. She knew that if she made a single sound--and if this creature could detect sounds that she couldn't--she would die.
Throwing caution to the winds, Margot swiftly brought her hand up and flicked the light switch. The lights came on with that familiar, small tinkling sound. And then the scene was clearly laid out before her: the pale body of her grandmother, the creature that now looked straight at her with its unnatural eyes and the ruby-red blood that shimmered on its lips.
"We were too late," Darren said bitterly.
He kicked the corpse of the vampaneze aside and looked around the room. His gaze settled on the bodies of the unfortunate Margot and Dianne Saule for a long moment before moving towards Larten. "Mr. Crepsley?" he said slowly. Even he could hear the sympathy in his voice.
The orange-haired vampire's head was in his hands. For the first time since his blooding, Darren could see how old Larten Crepsley really was, and how human despite the vampiric abilities. It was what the vampires and the humans had in common: the ability to love, and then to grieve.
"Where have the gods gone?" Larten said quietly. He had not looked up.
"Mr. Crepsley?" Darren said again.
Larten sighed. He'd decided, from the moment he had first laid eyes on his former lover's dead body, that he would never look at it again. "Let us go," he told his assistant. "We have no further business here."
"But Mr. Crepsley ..." Darren hesitated. "Don't you want to bury ...?"
"That is not for us to carry out, Darren," the vampire said coldly. "Come along." He moved towards the window and swung his legs out of it, then his head, then the rest of him. "Quickly."
Darren followed suit. He stole another glance at the scene behind them and felt his breath catch. The marks on their necks. The absence of blood. Superstitions would hold them, the vampires, guilty of the murders.
Darren Shan could not explain why he felt so downhearted, nor why he had such trouble sleeping the next morning. If he'd dared to check, he would know that Larten's eyes, too, were wide open, staring at the inside of his coffin, seeing corpses everywhere in the darkness.