The night of the Great Revelation was complete and utter pandemonium.
The announcement was made on just about every major television station in existence. Radio stations, too. It was extremely well-coordinated. In the days that followed, stories were told of people in the streets who had packed themselves into crowded bars, restaurants—really, any store with a functioning television—to watch the breaking news reports telling them that yes, vampires really do exist.
Even though I'd grown up around them and knew that vampires weren't all that uncommon, I think it didn't hit me until that night just how many of them there really were. As Gran might say, the world was far bigger than my small corner of it.
Sophie-Anne had set up a press room within easy mind-reading distance of the panic room, where I was safely tucked away. For almost two hours, Sophie-Anne stood at a podium and answered questions about vampires. Andre handled the questions about the new synthetic blood, since he'd been the one to try it. The Berts stood guard and looked grumpy.
Two reporters wound up having to be detained during all of this; it was mostly a "better safe than sorry" call on my part: one of them was wondering about how many different ways vampires could be killed, and the other was pretty quickly convinced that vampires were the reason his wife was cheating on him. At worst, the latter was insane; at best, he might have had some jealousy issues that I didn't want him taking out on my people. In any case, they were eventually released just outside the palace gates, unharmed but lightly glamoured.
I really wasn't comfortable with the idea of my Queen being out in front of such a large crowd. She assured me that she was well protected. She had the element of surprise on her side; while humans might have suspected the existence of vampires over the years, they were ignorant about vampiric abilities. They had no idea how fast a vampire as old as Sophie-Anne could move. If someone shot at her, she could easily travel twenty feet between when she heard the bullet leave the chamber and when it could have hit her if she hadn't moved at all. Besides, she said, as long as she wasn't decapitated or staked through the heart, she could recover from anything.
I had no use for her logic; I still didn't like it. I was pretty certain that Andre and the Berts agreed with me, but they knew better than to argue with her repeatedly about it—something I had no qualms over, so long as we were in private. I would never argue with her in front of anyone; I loved her too much to disrespect her in that way. I wouldn't even do it in front of her own children, although I'm sure they were aware that I'd done so on more than one occasion.
I watched Sophie-Anne's press conference on one of the monitors in the panic room. As much as I wanted to check out some other news stations to see how the rest of the world was taking the news, I needed to be able to focus on my own job. My Queen's safety was a far higher priority. The more important network broadcasts were being taped by someone in the palace, so we could watch them all later if we were so inclined.
Throughout the evening, each of the Area sheriffs checked in at their specified times. It was just about every other hour, but with slightly staggered times so that we didn't miss any of their calls. I wasn't the one answering the phones, but one of the monitors—there really were almost a dozen of the damn things in that room—was displaying a log of all of the palace's incoming and outgoing calls.
I didn't have time to evaluate the strange relief I felt every time I saw the number with the Shreveport area code pop up on the incoming call list.
An hour before sunset, the palace was once again safe, emptied of all strange humans (who was I kidding—all humans were kind of strange) and we had ourselves a not-so-little party. It was a celebration for having gotten through the night relatively unscathed.
We really were lucky. Other parts of the world didn't take the news so well. Some of the vampire announcers in the Middle East and parts of Africa were taken out by angry mobs when they tried to leave the news station buildings. A few nutjobs in Utah decided that it was the end of the world and killed off their entire families before killing themselves.
Then there were the people who went crazy in the other direction. In some cities in the States (most notably: New Orleans, Chicago and, oddly enough, some small town in New York called Caldwell), hordes of women (and some men as well) ran around desperately baring their wrists and necks at anyone they suspected might be a vampire.
More than a few vampires in those cities were very well-fed, that night. The humans seemed surprised to learn that there were no casualties amongst those willing donors.
As the hours turned into nights, and the nights turned into weeks, the reaction of the general public changed and shifted. Back and forth it went, swaying between positive and negative.
Sophie-Anne likened it to a pendulum that had only recently been set into motion. The reactions would swing to one extreme, then the other, then back again. With each swing, those reactions would be less and less extreme, until finally they evened out. Sometimes a random event would give the pendulum a slight push in one direction, but it would never revert to the wild swinging of the initial announcement. It took time for that pattern to really be visible to me, but I was greatly comforted when I realized just how right she'd been.
Still, there were a few things I didn't quite like.
Willing donors, while goofy in their own ways, tended to be amongst the nicer humans I'd met. A fair bit of the public reaction to them was highly negative. They were called fangbangers, which I felt was a remarkably crass term. Since no one knew any different, I got lumped into that category.
The first time it happened was after a "dinner" that Sophie-Anne had taken me to. It was some vampire-human relations thing, but it barely qualified as an actual dinner. It took place shortly after the Great Revelation, so the people who organized it weren't entirely up on their protocols. Rather than offend anyone—be it vampires by serving human food, or humans by serving synthetic blood—the organizers opted to not serve any food or refreshments. (Of course, in so doing, they managed to offend everyone, since we were told it was a dinner, but were then sent home hungry.)
I had gone to the event with Sophie-Anne, as both her pet and her personal assistant. Keeping track of all of the human minds during the event had worn me out, and somehow I didn't catch the thoughts of a roving pack of paparazzi that was waiting outside. They got pictures of Sophie-Anne and me as we were leaving, arm in arm.
Somehow, people were more scandalized by the idea that Sophie-Anne might be a lesbian than they were by the fact that she was a vampire.
I've said it before and I'll probably say it until I'm blue in the face: humans are strange.
When she'd shown me the article, it really bothered me. It was a nice picture of the two of us, but the reporter had called me a fangbanger. I had a good cry on Sophie-Anne's lap and felt better afterwards, but it took a while before the word didn't make me cringe.
Humans and vampires alike profited from the Great Revelation. Eric Northman opened the first vampire bar in the state, but it didn't take long before others caught on to the idea. He would probably never know how much I'd helped him out with getting Fangtasia up and running. He'd petitioned the Queen to make use of her telepath; since the club would be a front for his sheriff duties, he needed to make sure it was secure. It was a legit request, but very sneaky.
At the palace, we had special interview rooms where I could just hide behind a panel of mirrored glass. I could see them, they couldn't see me. I had speakers that broadcast everything that was said in the room, and I had a microphone that distorted my voice before piping it though to the other side. The entrance to my part of the room was hidden and not monitored on any camera.
Naturally, the waitresses and dancers who were applying to work at a bar in Shreveport weren't interested in driving to the other end of the state to interview for their jobs, even if it was a vampire bar. I watched Eric and Sophie-Anne as they negotiated my services. He had no idea that the telepath was in the room, listening to every word of their negotiations. Some of it was in French, but not all of it.
Eventually they agreed to neutral territory. I still had to go to Shreveport, but the interviews would not be held in Eric's not-yet-opened club. He wasn't too pleased about that, but he agreed to let Sophie-Anne's security figure out how and where the interviews would be held.
I hadn't done an outside job in years. It'd been so long, we had to review the security procedures. When I joked that we should just put an interview room on wheels, Sophie-Anne took the idea to heart.
We wound up tricking out a tour bus. In the very back there was a section that was part panic room, part interview room. All sides of it were protected by bullet-proof Lexan; the one side of it that faced the front of the bus was specially designed: it had a one-way mirror embedded in it. From the outside, you couldn't tell that it was any different from any other tour bus out there.
Inside, I had a bed, two monitors (with views that could be fixed or rotating), a separate ventilation system, a wireless speaker/microphone system that allowed safe communication, and a small fridge that kept me stocked with food and beverages. It even had its own tiny little bathroom; that was how I knew it had been designed for me specifically; if it had been one of Sophie-Anne's cast-offs, they wouldn't have bothered with a toilet.
It was all pretty fancy. I almost wanted to go on tour with that thing. At first, anyway. After the second night, I was more than a little stir-crazy. Thankfully, once the interviews were taking place, I had lots of minds to read. The busier I was, the faster time flew by.
There was something kind of neat about being able to watch Eric and his employees in their own natural habitat. He only had one child, a woman named Pam—or Pamela whenever Eric got frustrated with her, which appeared to be often. He seemed more relaxed in his own space, even though he was well aware that there were cameras in his office that were feeding directly into my monitors.
I knew this for a fact because the cheeky vampire waved at the camera on more than one occasion. He was like a kid with a new toy. Even if he couldn't take the telepath out and play with him (he was apparently convinced that the Queen's telepath was a male), he still got to make use of my services.
The most difficult part of the whole thing actually came weeks later, when Sophie-Anne and I attended the grand opening. I had to pretend like I hadn't seen any of it before, like I had no idea who the people who worked there were. It turned out to be more difficult than I'd thought. Doing the interviews and essentially spying on Fangtasia for a few days had gotten me pretty interested in its progress.
I don't know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn't what I saw. The colors were red and black, with occasional bits of gold trim. On the walls were posters of just about every vampire movie in existence. Some of them looked pretty old, and I wondered if they'd been purchased for the club or if Eric had been collecting them over the years.
Sophie-Anne had some serious mingling to do, and while everyone knew I was her pet, she didn't want to make me seem too important. She stashed me in one of the nicer booths and went off with Andre to make the rounds. One of the waitresses made sure I always had plenty to drink; aside from her, no one really paid me any attention. That meant I could people-watch to my heart's content.
In front of me were dozens of humans and vampires, mingling, flirting, drinking (out of glasses, not necks) and generally having a good time. On the surface, everyone was polite smiles, interested nods, and flirtatious banter. Just under that thin social veneer was the usual political maneuvering and jockeying for position. I suspected that the humans present mostly saw the thin surface; they were too new to these waters to know how deep they really ran.
Gran used to say that you couldn't learn to swim from watching movies about it, that the only way to learn how to keep your head above water was to get tossed into the deep end.
I had been born into one world and was raised in another. In some ways, I didn't really belong in either. Now those two worlds were coming together, merging at least a little. It was a given that my life would be changing, because that's what lives do. If you aren't changing, then regardless of whether or not you have a pulse, you aren't really living.
I sat, sipped my soda, and wondered what other changes the future held in store for me.
A/N: Yes, this really is the epilogue for this story. The sequel is fully outlined and the first four (out of ten) chapters are already first-drafted. Hopefully it won't be too long before I can start posting them. Consider this an intermission between acts. :)