Bugstomper had warned me. He told me I'd feel a hunger like no other hunger I'd felt before after I woke up. It was painful and maddening. I lashed out against him when I first came to. My senses were confusing me. I was hearing and seeing the world differently. My sense of smell was no longer the same. Things felt differently. I couldn't wrap my head around it, and the hunger. Gods the hunger I felt. Was this what I had to look forward to for the rest of eternity?

Bugstomper took me out into the night. It no longer felt cold. I was dead. I didn't need the warmth anymore. He told me I had to find my own victim. 'No one can see you feed. And remember, you must not kill them,' he warned me. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to know when they were near death, but the hunger was overwhelming me and I didn't care.

As we walked the streets, a smell suddenly came to me. My head turned in the direction I sensed it coming from. I saw the smile on his face just before I took off in that direction. I could see a group of men before Bugstomper suddenly cut me off.

'Stop. Remember what I told you,' he scolded. 'You can't even show the slightest hint that anything is wrong. Use your charisma, your charm to lure one away.'

I growled. I actually GROWLED at him. I was hungry. I didn't care about these games. I was hungry!

He watched me closely. He knew not to trust me yet. He was right. There wasn't a chance in hell I was going to listen to him.

I walked up to the three men slowly, calmly.

'Please sirs, have you seen my brother?' I asked them. 'We got separated and now I cannot find him.'

I saw their grins. I knew what was on their minds. The bigger of the three walked away from the group and toward me. He told me he'd help me find my brother, that I shouldn't be walking out in the streets all by myself, being such a pretty little girl and all.

The moment we got out of sight and into an alley, he threw me against a building. He didn't expect me to fight back though. I twisted his arm and brought him to his knees. As I loomed by his neck I suddenly stopped. I was about to drink his blood. Somehow that thought hadn't occurred to me last night. I hesitated and the man grabbed at my hair. I screamed out at him and slammed his head into the ground.

'What are you waiting for?' I heard Bugstomper snap. I hesitated again but finally bit into the man's neck. The hunger was going away as I drank his blood. I kept drinking, and drinking. Drinking more and more. Not paying attention to the obvious signs that the man was dying. Bugstomper had to pull me off him and carry me off to get me to stop. I was still hungry though. But at the same time, I was sick. We'd barely made it away before I collapsed to my knees and threw blood back up.

"What the hell have you done to me?!" she screamed.

"It was your choice, not mine," Bugstomper said.

Something in her snapped. Her eyes fixed on him, her look angry, stinging at his un-beating heart.

"So that's why you wanted me to choose? So your conscience would be clear?!"

"You think it's clear?! I have to watch you suffer knowing that even though it was your choice, I did this to you! You had no clue what you were getting into. And I chose you damn it! It's because of me that you're the creature you are!"

Suddenly she began to feel bad for him. He had to watch this every single time he turned someone. Surely that couldn't be an easy thing to do.

"You have to learn when to stop," he said finally. "The more you feed and kill, the more you feed your inner beast. When it is strong enough, it will take over you, and our way of life could be destroyed if a vampire ran rampant like that."

"But that one – that killed – "

"To him, your parents were in the way. They must have seen him and he ignored the rules of the Camarilla and killed them."

"The Camarilla?"

"It is the legion of undead. Though not all claim to be part of it, it claims every vampire as a member of its ranks. Because you are untrained in your abilities, right now I want you to trust no other vampire but myself and any I may tell you are safe, like those of our clan. Some that do not follow the ways of the Camarilla are likely to attack you in the open."

"So clans get along so long as they follow the Camarilla rules?"

"They have their issues with one another, but those that accept the rules of the Camarilla will not break what we call the Masquerade."

"What's that?"

"It is how we sustain our way of life. It is why we can feed on people and society doesn't know we exist. We are not to let any kine, or mortals that is, know of our existence. There was once a great war that nearly wiped out the vampire race. We don't want that to happen again."

"I still feel hungry," she said, after taking his words into consideration for a moment.

"You will for a while. This is the first test: resisting the beast. Some vampires do not resist this urge so well. They kill their victims and they over indulge. I don't expect you to flawlessly pass this. That is why I am here. That is partly why the Camarilla do not want us to sire someone unless we have permission. We don't want over population and we don't want vampires running around under the control of their beast."

Rhya looked up into the night sky. Night wasn't so dark anymore. She saw as well as she would have in the daylight. Her senses were stronger. Things affected her differently. She remembered the man she'd fed from. She smelled his blood, heard his heartbeat before she even came near him.

"Is Alannah suffering as I am?"

"I told you –"

"I can't just forget about her! She's my sister! We're bound in blood and soul!"

"You are no longer bound in blood. There is nothing to tie you to her now except a name that will be lost to time."

'We'll always be bound,' Rhya thought to herself. She was sad at the thought of never getting to see Alannah again. They had been best friends.

"Come. You need to feed more," Bugstomper said after a few moments of silence. He knew what she had been thinking. He knew her sister could be the fall of yet another chylder.

I fed again that night. Two more times. Each time I had to be pulled off my victim. Each time I threw up afterwards.

I still felt this overwhelming hunger. But dawn was nearing. We wandered back to the empty house that night. In the attic of the old house were several coffins.

"This is a safe house for us. Often times one will come here to embrace a kine," he explained to me.

The realization that I was dead finally occurred to me. I suddenly felt sad and afraid, yet alive all at the same time.

Reluctantly, I crawled into the coffin my sire had opened for me. I'm not entirely sure I slept at all that day. Or for the next several for that matter. I had a lot running through my mind. But the one thought that hurt the most, was the thought that I'd never see my dear sister again.