Lily

The pain is everywhere. A sharp, searing pain that seems to be spreading slowly into every cell of my body - as if an acid has seeped in and is burning everything in its path. Perhaps I have been poisoned - I can remember the slashing pain that started it all, the sharp teeth of - of some creature biting into my skin. I have no control over my body - my eyes will not open, my arms and legs will not obey any command. I can only scream - scream with every ounce of energy left in my body, scream till it feels like my vocal cords will tear and bleed with the pressure. I scream - for help, for someone, anyone to please help, please take the pain away - though the scream doesn't have any words. I can't bear it anymore, I'll go mad.. Please…

And then, suddenly, my pleas are answered.I lose consciousness of my body, and slip into a blessed dark oblivion.

Julian

Her heart was still beating. The venom had spread to all the other parts of her body - I couldn't suck or push it all out without killing her. Her body had not been drained of blood - she had been drugged, and the bites seemed to be strategically placed - as if they were only intended to inject the venom into her system. She was deliberately being turned. But why?

Another life lost. My mouth twisted in a bitter grimace. There was nothing I could do. This human girl would wake up as a vampire; I could only only save her some remaining pain before her transformation was complete. I moved her so that she was lying on the couch again, took her hands in mine, and closed my eyes.

Lily

Black.

I seem to have been in the darkness for a very long time, though I can't say how I know that - there is no movement, no change to show the passage of time. There's only a slowly rising awareness - an awareness that I can't feel my body, I don't know if I have a body. It's as if this present stream of thought is the only form of my existence, as ifI'm just abstract, with no frame, no physical substance. I realise that I ought to feel fear, ought to panic at this - but it's held at bay, I can feel nothing. I have lostconsciousness - physical and emotional. I can only think. So I do.

I think about facts that I know to be incontrovertibly true - facts that are the structural pillars of my consciousness, facts that make up the world in which my form exists.

I am Lillian Mason. Aged twenty five, a native of Salt Lake City, Utah. I live with my mother and my sister, Katherine - Kitty - who is two years younger and my best friend. Our father died in an accident when I was fifteen. I am a software developer - I work at Intel. Everyone calls me Lily.

I dislike fried onions and crave butterscotch cookies. I'm afraid of… adventure sports, though my memory hits a wall when I try to remember why. I read a lot - so much so that the details of stories are clearer to me than events in my own life. I read to escape the memory of… something , I can't remember. I don't date.

The world was still black, still unknown, but I knew myself. I knew what I loved, knew what I feared, knew that I had a sense of what was right and good, and what was not. My consciousness grew with every fact I fed to it, and as it grew, the lost awareness came back, slowly, gradually, till I could finally remember the pain, feel the remembered fear, feel the deep breaths I took, feel the hands that held mine.

I opened my eyes.

Julian

The girl was silent, her hands limp in mine, her face pale, but peaceful. One could imagine that she was just sleeping, but I could feel the weight of her consciousness in my mind, as I focussed on keeping her detached from it. She would not feel the pain anymore, I knew; my touch would take care of that. I stared at her closed eyes, my mind going back to the first day, the day that I'd discovered my gift.

Mrs. Shelby is a very old woman. The older boys in the village say that she is more than a hundred years old, and that she's secretly a witch who captures six-year-olds and eats them for dinner. I think they are just teasing me, but I always feel a little afraid of her - especially since that day by the stile.

Mother had sent me to the blacksmith's cottage to get the new brass pot that Cook wanted. I went walking down the small lane by the stile, when I saw Mrs. Shelby huddled down on the ground, her walking stick fallen next to her. I think she was sick - she clutched her stomach and her face was scrunched up.

'What is wrong, Mrs. Shelby? Are you ill? May I fetch someone?'

She looked up at me, her face looking more wrinkled with her face all twisted up.

'Give me your hand and help me up, boy,' she wheezed, and leaned heavily on my hand as she took her stick and tried to stand up.

At first, I thought my hands were paining because she was holding my hand so tightly. Then, I suddenly knew - I knew how much her stomach was paining - I could feel it in my hands - I knew that there was something there - a hard ball - almost like a stone!- which was not supposed to be there. It was cutting her stomach, hurting her. I frowned, closing my eyes. If only I could crush the stone into powder, I thought, imagining it - and suddenly, I felt like I had done it. I had crushed the stone! It wouldn't hurt her anymore!

I opened my eyes, grinning in excitement. Mrs. Shelby was staring at me, her hand still in mine. She stood up straight and snatched her hand away. Her eyes opened wider and she whispered, 'Sorcerer'.

I shook my head ruefully at the memory. I had turned and run all the way back home that day, afraid of the accusation I had seen in the old woman's eyes. It was the first time I had seen that my touch could heal, but she had made me feel that it was something to hide, something dangerous. It was a danger, alright - a danger to myself. The world in those days was harsh on anyone who was out of the ordinary - innocents were accused of witchcraft and tortured, burnt on stakes… my throat tightened in remembered grief and anger.

I dragged my mind back to the present. I was becoming more and more puzzled by all that I had found. Trevor seemed to be following Christopher around willingly - I tried to suppress the spurt of pain at the thought of his betrayal - they had deliberately brought this human girl to this ramshackle house to turn her, and then left her unguarded. Why? Had they left, only to return in a while? I had to continue following their trail - but I couldn't leave while the girl was still in pain. It was like there was a clause to my gift - the impulse to heal will supersede everything else - like a version of the Hippocratic oath of my own, programmed into my brain. I could never just turn away and ignore it.

I wasn't paying much attention to the girl, my concentration on keeping my hearing spanned as far as it would reach, in case the others returned, so I didn't notice anything wrong, at first. My touch acted as an analgesic as well as an anaesthetic - it took over the other person's consciousness completely - they could not move, or even think - until I released control, and I had so much practise with handling my power that I didn't even need to think about it. And then I heard the voice.

I am Lillian Mason.

My hands nearly jerked away from hers in shock. It was her. It could be no one else - I would've heard them from a mile away. It was her, even though it was impossible that it should be her. For a split second, I wondered if my powers had weakened. But, no - the mind that I held prisoner with my own, to save her from feeling the pain that was an inevitable part of transformation, the mind that I could still feel under my control - was numb, as it was supposed to be. What was happening? I had never experienced anything like this before, in centuries of healing. Something else was afoot.

I could feel it now. As easily as I could feel the damaged insides of people who were diseased, I could feel the words being willed into her mind, as she strove to gain consciousness.

..aged twenty five, a native of Salt Lake City, Utah. I live with my mother and my sister, Katherine - Kitty - who is two years younger and my best friend..

It was not a battle of wills - she did not fight against my control, she merely created her own. She did not batter against the wall that was in place, but merely found a way that avoided it altogether, almost as if it were not there. It was unbelievable, impossible - except for the fact that it was happening. Who was this girl and what was this strange power she had?

I saw her - really looked at her as a person, instead of as a patient, for the first time, as she spoke into my mind, her words strong and true. She was beautiful - but that she would be, now that her transformation was merely minutes away from completion. Brown hair, a rather petite figure, an oval face - she looked young, maybe twenty. At first, I'd been too shocked to block her words, and then… I didn't want to. There was something so.. honest and pure about her words, the truth laid out in uncompromising words - words that spoke of her resilience, with that touch of wistfulness that reminded me of another life. The boy who had believed that life was always filled with hope and happiness and justice was no more - I stood, cynical and weary, in his place - but her words reminded me of him, and my hands tightened a little on hers.

She opened her eyes.

A/N: Yes, I skimmed past her transformation - it was only needed to introduce Julian and her powers, anyway. I've tried to redefine the word 'consciousness' somewhat, for the sake of explaining her gift - there are three parts to it here: physical, emotional and rational - and she doesn't lose the third. Yeah, I know, it seems confusing - I hope it'll become clearer as the story goes on.

Julian can heal through touch; in the memory described, he dissolves the woman's kidney stone - I called it 'stomach', because I don't think a six-year-old can differentiate between the stomach and the kidney, at least not in 17th century England. ;)

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