A/N: Thanks for the reviews, guys! I'm so glad there are still old readers keeping up with my lazy habits.
Please tell me what you think of this first chapter in the past. If there is a time when you feel completely bored when reading any part of this story, please let me know and I'll try to spice it up! I want to be historically accurate, but this is fiction, after all. :D And if you get lost with all the history stuff, I'll be glad to explain anything you need!

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Book One
Chapter One
A recollection of the past between 1837-1850
The Year a Demon was Born

Why did his memories betray his mood? The vampire with the memories sat in his new office in Paris, relocated from New York, perfectly content and minded of his own business. The clock spoke five in the afternoon, but it was not late enough for the sun to disappear outside, so his curtains were drawn over the large glass windows that would have otherwise given him a lovely, mountaintop view of the pulsing streets of lively Paris, and if nothing else, an exceptional glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.

The vampire sat comfortably in his desk chair with his feet propped up on the polished wood and paperwork; it was a lounging position very becoming of the man these days. All his time was spent with the woman he loved, and when he was not doting upon her, he relaxed without a single worry. His mind every moment was not filled with agony as he thought and failed in his methods of eliminating that vengeful beast. Life was good after the defeat of Courtney Vengeance, his sworn enemy and destroyer of hope and happiness. With one less evil gone from this earth, he could finally focus on the more enjoyable things in his life. His mind was free to wander, however, he wasn't one to willingly think of the darker moments in his past.

This was where his thoughts betrayed him; his mind replayed a scene in his memory, like a rolling movie projector playing of its own mechanical accord, of when he killed Mary Lockett, the mother of Allison and the then Queen of Aldorra. As he explained to the poor woman then, her death was needed to make the dominoes begin to fall into place. After her death, Taylor only had to manipulate a safe meeting between Lukas, a vampire trapped in a one-sided love with the beast, and Allison, the mortal lookalike of the beast. After their meeting, all that the man with his feet on his desk had to do was keep certain variables in check and contain the situation so that the independent factors worked as they were supposed too... To the love of his life, this plan seemed complicated, but to him, his devious plan made perfect sense, and best of all, it worked. Courtney Vengeance was dead and he was free to love his lover with all the passion in his heart without any distraction of revenge.

Yet, there was still one factor to the experiment that continued to work independently. She currently walked down the hallway toward his office with a vase full of bright flowers in her hands.

She knocked once but didn't wait to be let in. "Livraison," called a somewhat mocking, delightful tone of a woman with long, darker blonde hair. Her figure was exquisite, but her manner was too bold and brash for the vampire Taylor to be comfortable with. The woman set the vase on the far side of his desk, but the aroma was suffocating still. The man at his desk brought his feet down to the floor and sat up to receive his guest.

"What a lovely surprise, Allison," he greeted, though the politeness didn't reach his eyes.

"You needn't act cordial with me, Taylor. You may be fancy and proper on the outside, but on the inside you love to kick back," Allison replied wittily. "I never saw a hair out of place before I killed Courtney and now it seems like the messy, unkept style is a good look for you. I think your tie might also be crooked-" She stopped when the man pulled out his shirt to look at his tie in a quick panic. "Oh no, my eyes were only deceiving me," she added playfully. Taylor and his coal colored eyes began to glare.

"I thought Lukas wasn't letting you come 600 kilometers within Aldorra for the next ten years so that nobody recognizes you from your human life." His implications for her to go away were clear enough. Allison pretended to hear nothing out of the ordinary.

"I convinced him to let me visit France so that I might see you. I never did properly thank you."

"For what?" He asked, honestly stumped.

"It's only been ten years! Have you forgotten already? My pregnancy of course. Surely I would have died if not for you. I owe you my life, and the life of my first born."

"Hm. And these flowers are a token of your gratitude?"

"No, these flowers are for Julie. I didn't bring you anything, I'm afraid. Besides, is there anything you desire you do not already have? Anything I could have bought with money would be worthless, so I only bring my verbal thanks. Thank you, Taylor Halling."

"Ah, it's Taylor Halen, now," he corrected. "Just as you are now Allison Hawthorn."

Allison arranged the flowers carefully before looking at the vampire Taylor with a satisfied grin. Her ears secretly loved hearing her new name, a name not connected to any concrete royalty or predetermined legacy. Her smile disappeared as an underlining guilt surfaced.

"Tell me, Allison..." Taylor commanded gently, "Do you miss your family? You left them while they were alive and possibly in need of your human presence. It must sometimes eat away at you."

Allison touched the petals of the flowers gently now, as if she were cradling their weak, delicate bodies from bending into the idle breeze. She did not open her mouth to answer, but the sadness in her sapphire eyes conveyed her story well. "It's not like a had a choice in the matter, now did I? Death was inevitable before I turned thirty; whether I let it claim me by ground or fang, well, that was my decision." She glanced his direction with familiarity. "Forgive me for delaying my answer, but after you became a vampire, did you leave any family behind?" She held a somber curiosity. "Luke told me a little about your past, that you were turned against your will during the American Civil War."

The male vampire did not reply immediately. He took a golden pocket watch from his pocket and checked the time, closed the face and glanced at the door. In his mind he tried to calculate if it grew late enough for Julie to fetch him and the two of them be about their business, and leave Allison alone and their questions unanswered. The pocket watch said that time enough existed to answer Allison's question, and perhaps if he invited her along to wherever Julie wanted to go for the evening, enough time existed for a large part of his mortal biography.

"Please, sit," he told the woman; Allison obliged him. "Do you have plans with Luke for the night? What I have to say may bleed into later hours of the evening, if you want to hear it."

Allison leaned back and made herself comfortable. "Actually, Luke isn't going to be here until tomorrow. I have all the time the day and night has to offer." Her attitude reflected one of inevitability. Taylor glanced at the door again, hopeful to be rescued, but after he realized the femininity of the desire, he dismissed it and faced his audience. A painful nostalgia filled his cold, coal eyes.

"There was something about the south that would hold my heart forever. I can dress in the fine suits and drink the best bottled blood that our kind, the vampires I mean, can supply, but behind the costumes and charades I suppose I am still that hard working boy from the south that yearned a good days work under the sun. As our current state would allow, that will never be able to come again. The sun was a necessity taken from me that fateful day on the battle field, a day where blood ran from brothers and fathers and sons and stained the very soil of their creation.

"But that particularly bloody portion of the tale came later on," he digressed. Allison already leaned forward in her seat, peaked with interest from his introduction alone. He couldn't suppress a small smirk.

"Keep in mind that you need to have an open mind about the culture of the southern United States during the antebellum period," he warned this audience politely. "My year of birth stood at 1837. I was born into the American southern aristocracy and resided on a brilliant plantation for all of my childhood. We lived in the south, Georgia to be exact, where it was the custom to own slaves as both servants and laborers and hire an overseer to run productivity in the fields. We raised cotton, rice, indigo, and almost only locally, peaches at Laudington**, the name of our plantation, and it was this business that kept our family's name and status. (** not official; any ideas?) The Halen family grew crops using slaves for nearly a hundred years before then, no one ever had a problem with worker conditions when the cotton was needed, but when there was plenty to go around... Anyway, my father swore loyalty to his union and his state, graduated from West Point and served in the military for several years. He retired as a Colonel after the Mexican War with a slight gimp to his left leg, he returned home to run the plantation just as his father taught him too. His wife, the lovely Carolyn Mae Richmond (her maiden name), blessed him with three sons and was pregnant with another child in the autumn of 1843. My mother was an Englishwoman, a fresh legal citizen of the United States upon marrying my father, but born in England and came from the diplomatic Richmond family. I know for a fact my father didn't marry her for money or vise versa, both families were loaded all the way up the family tree. My father treasured Carolyn Mae, but she missed her home across the ocean, I could tell, yet she lived without complaint in southern America. One reason she stayed there was because she loyally loved my father, another, because of the peach blossoms; she absolutely adored their view and color."

"You sound like you admired her very much," Allison noted softly. There was a certain empathy in her eyes, she knew they both loved and respected their mothers and that both were gone forever.

"My mother was probably the kindest soul I've ever met, and that includes Julie." Allison was absolutely beaming as Taylor spoke. His tale paused as he sent her a questioning look.

"It's refreshing to have you open up and talk about your past. It makes you seem very... human. I mean real, not just a calculating and devious vampire."

"I'll take that as a compliment." He supposed the civilized nature was enjoyable, and he did want his tale to be honest as he told her. "Trevor was the eldest son, the son that set the level of success required for the sons who came after. He was the carbon copy my father wanted from all of his male offspring. The day after he was born in 1829, my father signed the Laudington Plantation inheritance to him in the will. Because of this inheritance, he became well-educated in economics and politics and followed after our father by attending school at West Point. The north was ever so dependent on the south's natural resources, as the south, begrudgingly, was to the manufactured items from the northern factories and provisions grown on northern plains. This balance of north and south, agriculture with industry, was merely a toddler in the basket of the American soil; the country was going to see it's first century of birth only two decades from when I entered the picture.

"The next son, Travis, saw what the brother before him accomplished and instead of competing with his elder for our father's respect and ownership of the plantation, he deserved his own way into education. He attended at West Point but later studied the medical practice, eventually after fighting his part in the conflicts after the Mexican War he married a fine young lady from the north and became a doctor. He gathered his certificate to become a doctor in the north, much to our father's dismay, and lived in Missouri with his bride, but he was more successful than the elder brother, and by success I mean richly. The old man couldn't complain.

"Then, resting in the shadow of the riches acclaimed by the offspring before was the youngest son. Me, Taylor the trabaja*. (* Spanish for hard-worker) My heart belonged to the south and the agricultural landscape of cotton stalks and peach trees nodding on the golden hills that I was born and raised on. I knew I didn't belong to military schools and the plantation operation, but my father was leaning far down my neck with weary eyes to watch me become just as successful as the sons before me ,yet with hopes I didn't catch any 'Yankee fever' the middle brother brought back to the south with him.

"The Halen family didn't end there, however. The child my father hoped to be another son in my mother's womb was born a beautiful black-haired daughter. Her birth blessed us on a cool autumn evening, her cries of vitality and life sang to the twinkling stars in the melancholy blue sky looming above.

"My mother passed away a week later.

"The family doctor told my father that she contracted an infection from the delivery and she couldn't manage to regain her health with the cold of the nights after the birth. Devastation took a tight grasp over my household every night thereafter, and its vile hands never seemed to relinquish. I remember the night before her death more clearly than any other memory starring her I possess. I was only seven then.

"My mother was a beautiful ivory-skinned lady with the accent and posture of an Englishwoman. Black hair with length and luster as appropriate with curls always seemed to drape over her shoulders in the prettiest of angles no matter the situation, even death. My mother's favored household slave, Millie, sang to the nameless newborn in one corner of the room while my mother rested in the other on her deathbed of hand-quilted blankets and cotton sheets.

" 'Taylor, it's always a joy to see the face of my youngest son. Your brothers haven't stopped in to talk with me today... did you know that?' she asked me. Her voice was dry, her forehead was covered in flaky sweat from the latest fever. I sat by her side, a young boy looking scared and almost desperate as his mother lay in the bed, the Angel of Death looming in the darkness.

" 'Mother, Pa is optimistic you will recover any day now. He says you did it with Trevor, you can do it this time, too. I believe him,' I said.

"My mother smiled with a certain laughter in her bright, hazel eyes. Eyes that sparkled for only a moment before they dimmed again under the light of the oil lamp on the table next to her. 'Your Pa... Never wants to accept defeat. I love him so,' she replied. I didn't understand what she meant.

" 'What do you mean, mother?' My voice or face must have leaked panic, because I worried her. My stomach churned as I realized I'd caused her dismay.

" 'Calm down, my darling. Everything will turn out the way that God intends, that is what I mean. Have you seen your beautiful new sister?' She quickly changed the subject and motioned for Millie to bring the sleeping baby. Not even a week old, the tiny little infant wrapped in a peach-colored blanket rested with every speck of innocence a baby girl could possess. Her tiny form fit perfectly into my mother's cradled arms as the slave passed the nameless daughter to her. 'I haven't decided on a name for her yet, I should very soon.' Her eyes were glazed over in a hazy dullness as a soft smile gifted her chapped lips. 'What do you think she should be called, Taylor?' My mother pressed gentle fingers to the infant's skull before resting her loving eyes on me. I looked upon my new sister with wonder; she was the first baby I'd come into close contact with. I was intrigued.

"Such innocence, as I mentioned. She had the same ivory white skin my mother and I shared, much paler than the tanned southern skin of my father and elder brothers. On top of her tiny head rested thin strands of the black hair that was as black as mine, her nose was pointed like my mothers, not flat and stubby like my fathers. I smiled as the tiny infant yawned in her bundle. I knew she must have been dreaming of wonderful, colorful dreams.

" 'She looks like you, Mother. Give her your name.' I told her.

" 'Carolyn? You don't say...' My mother smiled with the recognition of it. 'Carolyn Taylor Halling. How about that?'

"I blushed. 'You don't have to make her middle name as mine.'

" 'Why shouldn't I? You've named her, darling. Would you promise me something?' She asked. The airy, weak tone returned over her as she held Carolyn close to her. I realized that my mother looked exhausted, the light from the lamp flickered over the dark bags under her gentle eyes.

" 'Anything, Mother.'

" 'Take care of your sister. Protect her as an elder brother. Make sure she marries as honorable man, keep her safe until then. Would you do that for me?'

" 'Of course.' I promised. My mother seemed satisfied, she then carefully handed Carolyn's baby bundle to me. 'Support her head, and carry her back to Millie,' My mother instructed. 'I love you both, more than anything.' Her last words of the evening sounded more like a goodbye than a goodnight.

I received Carolyn and with the softest embrace, and with the most careful steps I could take I walked across the room and handed my baby sister to Millie. I couldn't keep my eyes away from her face, it was so irresistibly round and pure. As I viewed her angelic, sleeping form, I vowed to keep my mother's promise. From that moment on, Carolyn was my responsibility.

"My mother did not survive the night. I may have been the last to talk with her, but I don't know for sure. With the passing of my mother's spirit from her body, a foul, dark aura enveloped our home. My father, who was always a stern and respectable man, became nothing but bitter and angry after that tragic event. The house slaves that my mother favored before her passing were ordered into the fields, work they were not familiar with, and everyday after my father was hardly ever kind, or lenient I should say, to the working negros as he'd been before.

"With life healthy within the daughter's chest, Carolyn became both a celestial blessing and an infallible curse all at one time.

"The only other memory I remember as clearly as my mother introducing me to my prized sister is the memories of her lullabies. She would sing me to sleep every night I wished up until I turned five years old, because when I turned five my father made clear that I was too old for such baby-like courtesies, but there was one song I remembered indefinitely.

" 'Let's see, where to begin...' She would hum a few tunes until she heard one she liked, and her voice began softly singing the lyrics of a song that would never again escape the walls of my mind so long as I was human or vampire.

"In response to aching silence,
memory summons half-heard voices
And my soul finds primal eloquence,
and wraps me in song.

If you would comfort me, sing me a lullaby.
If you would win my heart, sing me a love song.
If you would mourn me and bring me to God,
sing me a requiem, sing me to Heaven."

Allison watched Taylor only recite the words, but near the end of his chanting, a soft tune broke from his lips in the sound of a lovely tenor voice. It began cracked, as if he hadn't sang in a very long time. The haunting final words of the tune stuck in his listener's head without fail.

"After my mother's death, I saw it my duty to sing my treasured sister this lullaby each night. Millie the slave was a great help with raising Carolyn early on, and besides her I basically raised Carolyn myself.

"My mother died in 1844, and the following year my father attended to military duties in Texas to help the annexation and he would be absent from my and my siblings life for the majority of the next five years until he retired in 1849. With a plantation full of Trevor, Travis, an infant little sister, myself and 150 negro slaves living in their housing quarters outside the main home, things became isolated and somber and we learned our lesson of independence quickly. My father knew plenty of people who could visit us and make sure the four of us had everything we needed, but my eldest brother Trevor trusted nobody outside the immediate family and barely trusted the three overseers who worked for the Halen family. Shortly after my father took leave for Texas, Trevor heard a story from a gossiping mother of a nearby neighbor of a slave revolt in Virginia the passed summer. The revolt was small and easily put down, but this news put Trevor in a total fear of the capability of the slaves at our plantation. He knew they outnumbered us forty to one, he knew that even though their skin was a different color and he'd been raised to think they were mentally inferior to us, any man, or 'black beast' as he came to call the male slaves, was capable of murder or overthrowing us from our power over them. His little toleration for other people lingering in our home led us to lead a solitary life. Travis, Trevor's younger by two years, hated this, and eventually he came to dislike the south altogether with its reliance on the 'peculiar institution' of slavery. So long as I had Carolyn to entertain, I was indifferent to this temporary life style until our father returned.

"Both Trevor and Travis were torn over the loss of our mother, but they lacked the promise to baby Carolyn to take care of her and love her, therefore our baby sister was generally ignored by her eldest brothers and only grew close to Millie and myself in her first few years of life.

"Every day, Carolyn grew more vibrant and beautiful. By age one, the little clump of hair she was born with grew to a full head of shiny black hair identical to mine, her skin was soft and pale white like any girls should be, but her like-complexion was not the thing that drew her so dear to me. It was her eyes. Her eyes were the brightest hazel-green like the mother before her and they searched out of her head with such wonder and purpose.

"She wanted to look at everything when she was a bundle, and after she began to crawl and walk, she wanted to touch and keep everything she found pleasing to those eyes. As soon as she could speak, she coveted every thing she found pretty, and as soon as she could structure sentences, she would charm her listener into giving her what she desired. An extra treat, a few more minutes to play, a lovely handkerchief held by an old woman at church. By age five, I realized the life of isolationism my brother forced me to raise Carolyn in never brooded well with Carolyn. She would love any and every bit of attention she could get from the spectators at church on Sunday mornings, she relished in being dressed up and having Millie curl her silky black hair, she would curtsy and beg Trevor politely to be allowed to attend a dinner party at the Duncan's plantation several miles down the road. He could only oblige her, after all, who could say no to the spitting image of our mother?

"I found myself in that same dilemma. I could never say no to Carolyn.

"Not even on the day of her sixth birthday when she asked me to give her a tour of the slave quarters. The request was innocent enough, but very odd. A well-bred, proper girl like Carolyn shouldn't have thought twice about where the slaves who work for her live, much less want to see the dirty little bunks they lived in.

"I figured out her true motive for the tour a week later in the early morning, when I noticed a small figure dressed in bright green sneaking away from the plantation home by the view from my second-story window. When I squinted my eyes to get a closer look, I recognized the figure as six-year-old Carolyn, and she was headed straight toward the slave quarters."