CHAPTER 2

Before we can go further with the story, allow me to introduce myself.

My name—my real name—is Marya Dragulia. I am the daughter of the man known in pop culture as Count Dracula, who was actually going by the name Vladislaus Dragulia. His third bride, Regina, was his true mate and my mother.

There were quite a few details Mr. Bram Stoker got wrong in his novel, but considering his close relationship with the Volturi, I was certain the wrongful parts were added deliberately.

For instance, the hero of the story wasn't an innocent 19th century Englishman travelling abroad to sell property. He was a greedy philosopher from Greece in the 1300s BC who tricked my father into giving him his blood to study it. As my father was a very curious man, he was fascinated by what the philosopher could find in his blood, especially since, at the time, no one knew what that blood had the power to do.

Being the first of his kind, created by Lucifer himself, my father had learned everything he knew through trial and error, and that included the creation of other vampires.

He knew from the beginning he was venomous and that his bite would suffice to create companions, and that was the sole manner of how he went about creating his family until he met my mother. By then, he already had two wives—Domina and Dea—and multiple "children" with them; all of them created through his bite. My mother was no different until the second she opened her eyes after her change. When she did, an instinct awakened in him that he hadn't felt before.

The instinct to procreate … in the traditional way. Before that moment, sex had only existed as a form of pleasure.

Just like any species or creature walking the earth, vampires had two basic instincts: survival and procreation. However, for the longest time, it was believed vampires couldn't have biological children, but the truth was it was very much possible as long as the two vampires were true mates.

Although, a vampire finding its true mate is a very rare phenomenon, but my parents were, and it was through that occurrence I was born.

Vampires like me and my family, real vampires as I saw it, could easily blend in with humans. Apart from our slower heartbeat and supernatural beauty, nothing really stood out about our appearance. We didn't have a universal denominator that identified what we were because all of us had different eye colors and skin tones. Only our metamorphosis revealed what we truly were.

When we wanted to, we could transform ourselves into terrifying, winged, devil-like creatures with gray skin, long fangs, ice-blue eyes, and claws for hands and feet.

That was the biggest difference between real vampires and the modern breed that existed today.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My birth took place centuries after the Greek philosopher had acquired my father's blood.

Since he never heard anything from the philosopher and so many years passed, my father naïvely thought the man had died before his research was complete and quickly forgot about it as he went about expanding his family and finding my mother. Never in his wildest dreams could he have anticipated what would actually come of it.

You see, the philosopher had injected my father's blood into his own body, along with two other men. They had hoped to gain my father's physical abilities and his hypnotic power without the thirst for blood to create a new, superior human species, but in their enthusiasm and inexperience, they hadn't thought to experiment on animals first and inadvertently created a whole new breed of vampire.

These vampires became an odd mix between human and a vampire's morphed shape. They didn't grow wings or get long sharp fangs, but their complexion paled considerably, their eyes became ice blue, and their body temperature dropped. They gained all the physical abilities of true vampires such as speed, strength, agility, sharpened senses, intelligence, bloodlust, oral venom, and beauty, but it was more like a watered-down version of the real thing. And they didn't acquire the power of hypnosis, although they developed gifts of their own.

This trio of men—Aro, Caius, and Marcus—were quickly devoured by their greed for power and superiority complex. They started to create more of their breed—wives for themselves, and gifted guards who protected them—and they devised a plan to throw my father off his throne.

All that time, we were ignorant in our little bubble of happiness in our hometown of Sighisoara. I had recently turned 1500 years old, and I had received a gift of bottled blood, donated by the children of the village below our castle, which was the most fragrant and delicious blood a vampire could consume.

Our subjects in the village didn't fear us like the fraud Bram Stoker wanted people to believe. They saw us as pagan gods and happily sacrificed for us and gave us blood in exchange for protection. We had an agreement all of us were pleased with, and our village was the safest and most prolific village in the world.

The bottled blood we believed was a gift had actually been poisoned by the Volturi. They had polluted it with dead blood—blood taken from a corpse as compared to donated blood taken from a living human—but the amount had been so small, neither of us smelled it at first.

Dead blood was lethal to real vampires and caused them to hemorrhage instantly after consuming it, and had I not smelled the hint of death before I took a drink, I would have died along with my father. As it was, I was too late to warn him. My entire family—my parents, my aunts, and my "brothers and sisters"—all died that night because if a true vampire died, all those who shared venom with him through a bite, died as well. Sadly, the modern breed had an advantage in that they didn't share that weakness with us.

Just before he bled out, my father gave me the instructions that would haunt me for the next millennia.

"Marya, my beautiful swan, please, save as much of my blood as you can, and when my heart stops, take my body, and take your mother's body, and hide them in the tomb I had built for our family." With weak movements, he wiped away the tears running down my cheeks. "Don't fret, my most beloved treasure. We will meet again, and we'll reunite our family."

The newly formed Volturi coven didn't know of my existence, and that was my savior. As they were occupied with burning down my family's castle, I was able to morph into my other shape and flee to the sky, my parents bodies clutched in my arms.

My father had built their tomb in a hidden location, and when I was certain their remains were safe, I flew back home to see what I could salvage from the rubble of my former home. It had been painful to walk through the once magnificent castle and find the charred bodies of my family littered all over. My aunts died in each other's arms, and I took a moment to mourn them.

In my father's study, there was more destruction than from the fire only. It was clear the Volturi had ransacked the room and taken what they believed to be valuable. It made me angrier than before, and I thirsted for revenge, but I knew my father wanted me to be smart about it. It wouldn't be enough to just kill them.

I had known my father had written a codex filled with rituals and knowledge he'd acquired over the many years he'd walked the earth, and I was certain I needed it in order to get my parents back. However, it was gone, and the chest in which he'd kept it had been broken open, so I could only assume the Volturi had taken it.

Initially, I had feared they would destroy it because of the information it held, but then I remembered my father had told me there were only three creatures in the world who could read it: himself, my mother, and me. He had written it in a long-extinct language, which he'd only taught the two of us. Not even my aunts could read it.

That gave me hope. The Volturi's greed wouldn't allow them to destroy what could possibly be of value to them, and until they could translate the language, I deemed the codex safe.

Of course, I hadn't anticipated how they would send the codex all over the world to different highly intelligent men in hopes of translating it, and it made my search for it painstakingly slow. For hundreds and hundreds of years, I had to live among the humans to hide and silently collect all information I could need—like how my father's resurrection could only take place on the anniversary of his death—while I witnessed the new breed of vampire spread all over the world.

To keep the Volturi ignorant of my existence, I changed my name to Isabella Marie Swan to subtly honor my father's nickname for me, and I kept to the shadows, only moving around at night.

Hence the reason I was at the hospital that night. For the first time in centuries, I knew exactly who had possession of the codex, and I was determined to get it. However, everything quickly got complicated when I looked into Edward Cullen's eyes and heard him speak to me.

The connection was instant and undeniable.

Edward Cullen was my true mate.