Okay, I realise it's been a very long time since I updated, and I'm hoping interest in this fanfic hasn't been flagging too much, but I just wanted to apologize for the long delay; med school really takes out sizable chunks of your time.

Other than that, I'm hoping to update a lot more regularly now, and I'm well on my way through the sequel to this story, so hopefully I'll have it done by the time I've finished uploading all of this one.

Once again, thanks to all those who reviewed, and also to my beta-er, who convinced me to renew work on this after it had been languishing in my computer for a year.

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In Egypt, Alexander looked through the opening of the pyramid, apprehensive. Just because he was a vampire did not mean he had to like dark and confined places.

"You sure this's the place?" he asked Francis, who was standing next to him. Alexander had forced him to drink blood, his own blood, and now Francis was damned near as powerful as himself. The twenty-five hundred year starvation had done that.

"I'm certain," Francis said. He had not been happy about drinking the blood, but realizing how important the blood had been, he was willing to amend his pacifist policy a bit; snakes and rodents were fair game. Humans, however, remained strictly off-limits.

"Even with the calibre of the shielding done, I can detect him from this close. I am now, thanks to your blood of course, powerful enough to detect the thought of any man in the hemisphere I'm in, as well as those of some astronauts close to earth. I know he is in this pyramid for certain, though I do not know why you want to raise him from his slumber.

"Nur shall rally us. No more shall we skulk from shadow to shadow, fearing the eyes of mankind, fearing that they shall expose us to the sun while we sleep!"

Francis stepped away from Alexander, startled at the passion in his voice.

"I know you can survive the sun," Francis said, trying to convince Alexander not to waken the most powerful creature in the world, "and you could take out an army on your own. Why would you need a crutch to support you?"

"Goading me will not stop me for doing what is best for our kind," Alexander hissed, his long blonde hair forming a wreath around his pale face as he disappeared into the dark chamber. Francis called out behind him, gingerly stepping into the tomb himself.

""But surely you remember that Nur locked himself here before almost any of us because he felt he was too great a danger to the world. He had his survivalist theory, and he knew that only he could survive what his qualifications were. You shouldn't let him loose on the world. Might he not kill you for it?"

There was no reply from inside the tomb. Sighing, and flexing his newly healed legs to test his muscles, he stepped over the debris and went down the dark passageway, his vampire feet making no noise any human could detect.

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In the hotel room, Jessica sat on the bed, holding James protectively, but being careful that she touched him only with her gloves. Her eyes were watering, but firmly fixed on Remus. Madeline sat on her other side, stroking her shoulder, trying to calm her down. Remus stood against the wall, a sentenced man about to stand trial.

Jessica had absorbed enough memories in their brief contact to realize he was nothing close to what he had claimed to be, and Madeline, with her telepathy, could read this from her mind, though not from Remus himself, as he was too powerful. She was apprehensive of Remus, though she could not bring herself to believe what Jessica saw was true; all the bodies, all that blood, a trail stretching back a thousand years.

James simply knew that something had freaked out the two most important women in his life, and he was going to hurt Remus for it. All he needed was the slightest indication that Remus was about to hurt them more, and he would go berserk, even though he recognized the fact that Remus was much more powerful than him.

After a silence lasting about five minutes, punctuated only by Jessica's sobs, Remus spoke.

"Jessica," he began, but James was on his feet, claws extended.

"Ya ain't earned the right to call her that, bub," he growled, while Madeline looked in horror at the claws; she had not tried to read his mind to find out more about him, feeling it would be betraying his trust, and thus, knew nothing about his mutant powers, as he knew nothing about hers.

"James, let me-" Remus started, but James interrupted again.

"Say what ya haveta say, bub, but don't say our names with your dirty tongue. I'm givin' ya one speech before I take Jess outta here."

Remus took off his glasses then, letting them look at his eyes. He then picked up a vase from the table next to him and charged it lightly. It glowed crimson, then crumbled into ashes without exploding.

"That was my power as a mutant," he remarked conversationally. "Of course, it can vary in terms of explosive power and charging time." He paused while they stared at him silently, knowing this was not all he would say. They were all mutants, so this revelation did not have the effect it would have had if he had told a room full of people.

He waited for a second, letting them take one more good look at him, and then ran to the mirror on the opposite wall with superhuman speed, knowing their eyes could not follow his movement.

"That was part of another power of mine," he said a few seconds later, after letting them think he had vanished into thin air. They jerked their heads around to look at him. He waited until he was sure they had gotten over their shock, and then he lifted the full length mirror with its wrought iron frame right out of the wall with his vampiric strength.

"That was another part of this other power," he remarked, effortlessly twisting the frame into a figure eight, breaking the mirror in the process. Then he picked up a shard of the mirror, and walked around the bed, standing right in front of Jessica.

"This," he said, his voice low and intense, dragging the sliver across his wrist, "is the third manifestation of that power." Despite her repulsion for him at that moment, Remus saw Jessica's eyes tinged with fear for his safety – if not his sanity – as she saw him cut his wrist.

The wound healed almost instantly, as his vampire body went into overtime to conserve its precious blood. He watched as the few undried drops of blood fell to the carpet below, their color much more vibrant then human blood, the difference clear even to human eyes.

"And all this," he said softly, even the blazing color of his eyes muted, looking at each of them in turn, "is after I have been weakened, and after not having fed today."

"What is this power?" James asked, in his surprise forgetting to address Remus as 'bub'.

"I," Remus replied, his eyes glowing crimson again, his bearing more erect, regal, in fact, as he looked down on them from a pedestal they could never hope to reach, "am a vampire."

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Alexander was standing arms folded, staring across a gully as Francis finally caught up to him. The floor had collapsed, God only knew how many centuries ago, to create a sharp cleft that no human would ever have a chance of crossing, and perhaps no mutant or vampire either. It stretched for what seemed to be at least a hundred meters, a large distance considering neither of them could fly. The chamber soared to at least a hundred feet, and Francis correctly estimated that they were right under the apex of the pyramid.

"Finally," Alexander murmured, his voice barely audible, even to Francis's vampire-keen hearing, "I was beginning to think you had gotten lost in the catacombs."

"I saw the holes you had blasted," Francis said, his voice indicating how unnecessary he thought it had been. Alexander smiled humorlessly, picking up every thought from Francis's head without even trying to.

"I waited for you because I figured you wouldn't know how to get across," he said, still staring at the gully. "Now come on, follow my lead."

"What are we going to do?" Francis asked; his brain unable to come up with a solution. Alexander, however, was older, and had not spent his entire immortal life bound to a wheelchair. He knew the extent of his powers.

"We jump." He stated simply.

"A hundred meters? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Francis asked incredulously, thinking that Alexander was joking for some reason.

Alexander did not reply to the question, but said, "Hurry up now, I want this done tonight. I don't want to spend a day in this tomb." Then he took a step back, just one step, and then ran forward and jumped across to the other side, his arms outstretched and his trajectory nearly flat, his hair streaming behind him.

Francis stared.

On the other side of the gully, Alexander turned and waved his hand. "Come on, you can do this," he said, barely raising his voice above a normal speaking level, "Nur's tomb is only a few chambers ahead."

Francis walked up to the edge of the gully and looked down. Even with vampire sight, he could not fathom the bottom. If he fell in, he would not die, but he would probably not be able to climb out, and spend the rest of eternity in it. Alexander would undoubtedly leave him down there.

He walked back to the wall, counting off the steps. On the other side, Alexander impatiently waited. Then, taking a deep breath, though as a vampire he had no need to breathe, he ran forward.

He was at the edge of the gully almost before he realized it, unaccustomed to his enhanced speed as he was. He jumped then, an awkward jump, expecting he would jump as high as Alexander had, only a few feet above the ground.

But Alexander had long ago learned to control his movements, and Francis, bound to a wheelchair for about twenty five hundred years, had no control over his. He looked up, then clenched his eyes and ducked his head as he saw the ceiling rushing to meet him. The rocky surface scraped against his bald skull, and he started to fall, landing with a thump at Alexander's feet.

"Vampire hair can barely be cut by a sharp knife," Alexander remarked conversationally, helping Francis to his feet, "and that too if someone with vampire strength is holding the knife. Sadly, you were bald when Magnus made you. A vampire is frozen forever in the form he was in when he died. Our hair, our nails, our beards, they all stay the same lengths they were at the moment we died. They change slightly though; the hair grows fuller, more lustrous, while the fingernails turn as clear as glass." He peered at Francis's head. "Have you healed? Good, we can continue on now."

They walked into the next room, Francis still gingerly rubbing his skull.

"Er, won't Nur have guards, or something to prevent him from being disturbed?" Francis asked Alexander as they walked on, their vampire eyes seeing quite well in the pitch darkness.

"That is one of the reasons I brought you along," Alexander replied, his eyes focused on the passageway ahead, "you were a telepath before you were Born to Darkness. I'm counting on you to detect any life forms." Before Francis could reply, they both heard noises from the next room. Alexander glanced at Francis, who shook his head.

"I can't sense anything," he said, but his voice had dropped to a whisper of its own accord.

Suddenly, as they stepped into the next chamber, hundreds of torches were lit. Shielding his eyes from the sudden glare after hours of darkness, Francis could make out vague, human shaped figures all around him, but his brain still told him there was no one in the room except for him and Alexander.

There was a movement, and the wall behind them collapsed, cutting off escape to the passageway they had come from. The beings all around them converged slowly.

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Back in the hotel room in France, Remus the man sat composedly as he watched James practically rolling on the floor in laughter. Remus the vampire was not around; he was probably still recuperating from his ordeal.

Jessica and Madeline were not laughing. Jessica knew what she had absorbed from his mind was true, and Madeline knew what she had read from Jessica's mind was not a flight of fancy. They both edged away from him, as if thinking they could outrun him if he tried to kill them.

James was wiping a tear from his eye at the moment. "A bleedin' vampire, he said he was a bleedin' vampire! Why aren't you girls laughin'? He said he was a vampire!" James paused then, looking at the expression of terror on the girls faces. Understanding dawned on his, then. Without any thought for his safety, he extended both claws and charged Remus.

Remus caught the claws, and looked down into James's face, watching his bared teeth. Then he smiled, not the charming smiles he had given Jessica earlier, but a broad one, baring all his teeth. His fangs were bigger than James's. Still smiling, he let go of one of James's hands, feeling the claws stick into his stomach. He watched as James's expression turned from one of blind fury to one of extreme shock.

Then he flung James into the twisted framework of the broken mirror with one hand.

Madeline screamed then, and she stood up, eyes blazing, lifting everything, bed and Remus included, off the ground. From the corner of his eye, outside the window Remus saw a car floating upwards. Jessica sat frozen in shock as she realized Madeline was doing this, as she and James were not aware of Madeline's immense power. James had gotten up, and he also simply stood and watched as Madeline advanced on Remus.

"Madeline," Remus said, trying for some damage control, "I did not hurt James at all. You can ask him, he's standing right behind you." Remus wanted to avoid a fight.

Fat chance.

"How dare you touch the man I love?" she asked, in a tone that had all the danger of an H-bomb.

"Er, darlin'?" James said, ecstatic that she had said she loved him, but wanting to tell the truth, "I'm unhurt."

"She's telepathic," Remus muttered, his eyes still focused on Madeline's, "she can tell that. She just wants an excuse to try and kick my ass."

"Try?" Madeline asked as she hurled everything smaller than a table at him, her voice rising an octave, "try?"

Remus simply stood there, still looking only at her, hands by his sides, exploding everything big and letting the smaller objects break themselves as they hit his body, which might have been carved from marble.

"Don't do this, Madeline," he pleaded again, "I don't want to hurt any of you."

"You threw James into that steel!" Jessica shouted, getting off the bed, which was wobbling as Madeline lost her control, "you don't want ta hurt us?"

"His healing factor's already taken care of any injury he had," Remus said, watching the blank expression on all three faces. "James, didn't you know? You can heal much faster than normal humans."

Evidently, after all those years of bar fights, he still hadn't realized. He must have been too drunk on all the twenty, thirty separate occasions. Jessica, obviously, could not have known, and Madeline could not pull the information out of his head because he did not know it.

The shock was wearing off. There was too much information for them to handle in one night, and the night was nearly over. He had to take them with him, and the coven headquarters were not a good place for three mortals.

"All of you have to come with me," he said, knowing that they would not accept.

Well, duh.

There was no spoken response, only a table hurled at his head. He shifted his head a few centimeters to the side and moved it back as soon as the table had bounced back, knowing it appeared as if the table had passed through him.

"You have to come with me," he repeated, "please?"

Three faces looked at him, two filled with hate, and one with a disappointment so deep it broke his heart. "Not your knight in shining armor, am I cherie?" he whispered, his voice barely audible even to his ears. Then he used his empathy on them for the first time since entering the hotel room, convincing them that they were very tired.

He watched them drop off, one by one, and then he leapt out the window. There was just enough time till sunrise for him to feed, and then come back to collect them and take them to his mansion.

He hit the ground ten stories below, and faded into the darkness, his footsteps making no sound on the cobbled pathway.

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"I can't sense anything," Alexander muttered, mimicking the words Francis had spoken earlier, "there are about a thousand or two thousand vampires in here, and you couldn't sense anything?"

They were standing with their backs to a wall, as the creatures closed in. the torches were extinguished now, all except for one which blazed somewhere in the back. The silhouettes advanced on them, silently, menacingly. Then they attacked.

As he leaned against the wall, desperately fending off the attacks, Francis suddenly had an answer to why he could not detect the vampires.

"They're mindless beasts!" he shouted to Alexander who had been cut off from him by a press of bodies. "I can't read their minds because they have none!"

"It took you long enough to realize that," shouted Alexander just before he disappeared under a pile of vampires that were trying to gnaw any part of him they could find.

Being a strict pacifist, Francis could not fight anyone, not even walking corpses like these. He climbed the rocky surface as far as he could, then tried to avoid being hit by the monsters.

"I'm not fighting them, Alexander," he shouted in the general direction of Alexander, still buried under all those vampires, "I cannot." He preferred death over a break in his moral code.

A blue burst of energy was the answer he got, spreading in a sphere that vaporized most of the vampires. Its epicenter was where Francis had last seen Alexander before he disappeared under the other vampires. As the wave passed over him, Francis knew that any vampire less than a thousand years old would have been burnt to ashes from the energy, as well as some weakened and starving vampires over a thousand years old. It hurt him badly, but he was already healing, and he would be back to normal before Alexander finished mopping up the remaining vampires.

Bright blue swathes cut through the darkness of the crypt, as Alexander took on what Francis estimated to be five hundred surviving vampires. The solitary glowing torch had not moved, and Francis could barely make out a figure standing there, a figure that stood straight in contrast to the zombies attacking Alexander, a figure that he was sure was commanding the attack.

As he was about to warn Alexander, Alexander finished off the last of the zombie-vampires, and looked at the torch. Something subtle moved in his expression, a shift so small that for a second Francis was not sure if he had actually seen it, or imagined it. But as Alexander walked forward, he realized what the change of expression had meant.

Alexander knew this man.

Cautiously, Francis followed, realizing he could pick nothing from this strange man's thoughts because they were too well shielded. Even if this person had been a man instead of a vampire, his thoughts would have been really difficult to detect. As it stood, he was a vampire as old, or older than Alexander himself.

A face materialized finally, a face which was whiter than any vampire's, even Alexander's, and Alexander had hid from the sun for thirty centuries. The whiteness seemed to be part of some mutation. Glowing red eyes stared at them.

A ruby in the middle of the smooth white face glistened as the man stepped forward.

"Alexander," he said, simply. Alexander also stood, still as a statue, his face that of a cruel God in repose, and they faced each other off. Francis could tell without any telepathy that this was animosity that stretched back before he was born.

"Nathaniel," was all that Alexander said.

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Remus was nearly rejuvenated, having killed two whores and a thug who had tried to rob him, all in separate parts of Paris, so that even if they were discovered – unlikely, as each body was ashes now – it would not seem the work of one man. He had woken up the secretary of the construction company that was renovating his house and told her to stop the work being done until further notice. He had taken provisions for the human's to his house.

He sped off for the hotel then, noting that sunrise was nearly ten minutes away.

Remus reached the hotel, and entered the room from the outside, flying up through the window. He then tied James to his right leg with the bed sheet and tossed Jessica over one shoulder and Madeline over the other. He didn't want James to fall off in flight, but if he did, his healing factor would probably help him live. If he didn't, well, Madeline would have to die too; she would go insane with rage if he died.

Checking one last time that James was securely tied, Remus flew off to his mansion.

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Remus the vampire was nearly back to his full power when he saw the half-built walls of the mansion in front of him through Remus's eyes. He would have smiled if he had had a body. The fool human was taking three people to an abandoned place hours away from any civilization.

Three people?

Three victims.

He watched silently, giving no indication that he was around. The human worked feverishly; sunrise was only minutes away, and he had to accommodate the three people because of some inner need for courtesy. He put the three on the old Mahogany four poster after thoroughly dusting it off, and then practically hurled himself into the earth in the garden.

Remus the vampire watched as the dirt closed over the body. His body. He made no attempt to take control of the body in those last moments, when the human Remus was about to sleep, and was vulnerable. He knew how to retake the body.

He knew exactly what he would do tomorrow night.

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They had not spoken for nearly five minutes. It might seem brief to immortals who had seen thirty centuries and would probably live till the end of time, Francis mused, but he was newly wakened to the endless possibilities at his disposal, and he was not going to waste any of his time in a stuffy tomb.

"Who are you?" he asked, though he was sure he had some idea. Some few legends described a vampire just like this one, one with glowing eyes and a ruby in the middle of the forehead. The vampire looked at him with a somewhat amused expression on his face.

"I've not been gone a thousand years, and you strike my name from your fancy book of vampire legends, Alexander?" he asked, his voice seeming casual, but having a cutting edge.

"Well, there was some new material coming in," Alexander rejoined, equally cool, "and sadly, there was not enough space for you. Besides, you hardly deserved to be called a legend."

The other vampire kept his face expressionless, though his voice showed a miniscule trace of anger. "New material, you say? Oh, I see, it was that boy, wasn't it? The reason you sent me into this rotting tomb, what was his name?" the vampire asked rhetorically. Suddenly he appeared right in front of Alexander, standing inches from him and staring right into his eyes.

"Let me tell you, Alexander," he continued, staring with a gaze that would have made a lesser vampire quail but still speaking in that calm voice, "because I remember it well. Your pet project, Remus."

Alexander seemed equally unruffled. "If you had not tried to perform experiments on him, there would have been no need for this. I warned you to back away."

"And when I did not, you sent Magnus to convert him into a vampire, while you brought me here. Do you know what happened after you sent me into the tomb and sealed it up?" his voice was quiet still, but it seemed to Francis that he was a step away from exploding.

"Did you know?" he asked again, his eyes still boring into Alexander's, "that the small piece of Nur's awareness that is still awake captured me, allowed me no chance to escape. Of course you knew; that was the reason you sent me here; because you knew no other place could control me."

Nathaniel backed away then, and suddenly stomped on the floor, hard enough to break it. The floor shattered, and Francis was falling. He fell what seemed like a hundred feet, and landed on his back on some Egyptian tiles, breaking them. He was winded, and lay there stunned for a moment. Then he started to rise, but before he was even on his feet, Nathaniel was talking. Apparently he and Alexander had landed on their feet.

"For a thousand years I have been Nur's 'bodyguard.', as per the wishes of the conscious remains of his awareness. The only thing I was allowed to do was entice travelers into the pyramid, if they were within a range acceptable to the consciousness. And the travelers I got were to be the army. How? I had to drain their blood, but I was not going to give all of mine back, Nur notwithstanding.

"I gave each dying intruder a drop or two of my blood, enough to make them walking corpses, and I spent a thousand years building an army. An army you destroyed in ten minutes." He smiled thinly, bitterly as he walked into an adjoining chamber. Alexander followed him, Francis right behind them.

"I was not even allowed to go into the inner sanctum where Nur is," he said, his voice still emotionless. Francis was getting more edgy by the minute; he had no idea what Nathaniel was going to do, but it didn't seem like he would be content to show them the door to Nur's sanctum, and then fade into the darkness like an efficient butler.

"Must you bore us with your incessant list of grievances, Nathaniel?" Alexander asked in a casual tone as he followed Nathaniel down a long sloping corridor. The only sign that Nathaniel was angry or irritated was a subtle squaring of the shoulders. "I warned you that you should leave the boy alone. It did not have to come to this."

"Why did you want the boy so badly?" Nathaniel asked as he made his way further down. Francis could make out a room at the foot of the passageway.

"I had my reasons," Alexander stated simply. "Are you going to try to kill us now, or later?"

Nathaniel laughed; a laugh that would have chilled Francis's marrow if he had any.

"You misunderstand me Alexander, I am not going to lay a hand on you." He led them into the room, which was empty. At the end, two massive doors stood closed.

"Behold," Nathaniel stated simply, "the inner sanctum."

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Okay, that's the end of chapter four. I just want to add a few things that everyone who's reading this should know: There are only nine chapters in this story, so that would mean we're almost halfway through. Now some of you are probably thinking that we're moving way too fast, I mean think about it; Jessica, James and Madeline know Remy's a vampire, and he's already captured them. That's something that should come at the end of the story, isn't it? Well, be prepared for a change of pace in the story after this, and trust me, it gets more complicated than this. I've created a whole alternate world, and you're going to meet all the important characters in it. And though the story will remain mainly about Remy, it's going to branch out from there, and we'll see a lot more main characters come up.

Hope all of you people reading this are enjoying it. Please, please, please review, it's really very heartwarming. Questions? Flames? Send 'em all, and if you think I'm not clear on something, or am taking too long to update, tell me.