Chapter 12 – Amelie's Secret

Amelie's POV

He looked exactly the same; long silky brown hair that hung back in a ponytail, hands that were so thin you could see his knuckles. He even wore his favourite shirt, the shirt that he used to wash straight away if it ever got dirty in case we had to travel somewhere. It had a faint gold background that was covered in brown patterns, and he wore with it a brown waistcoat – and to go with his favourite shirt were his favourite brown trousers and a new pair of brown leather shoes that gleamed in the light of the sun. He always loved that outfit because it brought out the colour of his eyes, eyes that held such a warm golden colour – eyes that only his family bloodline were lucky enough to have. But in those eyes, the love and care that had lived in them centuries before were gone, replaced by a rage fuelled determination. The love he had felt for me was just a blurry nightmare to him now.

And then there was Morley. He too looked the same, his dark brown eyes – eyes that were so dark they sometimes looked black – had always hated me, even when we were supposed to be friends back in the very beginning he had hated me with a passion. He, unlike Sam, had been well treated well by his father in the ways of food before ever being turned, so the fat excess stayed with him from then onward. His clothes weren't some that I had seen before; he wore a suit, a shirt and tie, a coat and trousers. All black and white, as if at a funeral – but that was probably the intention.

The men standing behind them were just as they had been back then also, though I could remember few names. They all wore ordinary clothes that you were more likely to see in this day and age than the clothes of the leaders; because that's what they were now.

Leaders.

Sam and Morley were the leaders of their people, of which had once been my people, and they were forcing me to tell the people that I loved and cared for the secret that I could not find the strength to muster. But that was no excuse, the only way that any of us were going to escape was for me to tell them how I became a vampire, and I was to tell them now.

"My father..." I began, and I was interrupted by the person who had told me to do this in the first place.

"If you are to tell the story, you might as bloody well tell it right." Morley retorted. "Our fathers..."

"Of course," I nodded my head with fake appreciation. "Our fathers, Sam's, Morley's and my own... They were scientists – when they were human anyway." Claire and Myrnin both looked at each other, and Shane, Eve and Michael all looked at them. "They loved the world of science, of how things worked and how things became. They loved it so much that they wished to create it, to think of something that nobody else had thought of, to do something that no one else had ever done before."

I took a deep breath and continued.

"They started to experiment. They had done so before, but in vials and beakers, never once on a living thing. But these experiments that they began to carry out, they were done on animals – rodents, to be specific. Mice, rats, squirrels... Anything that they came across became the victims. And one day they found an ill mouse lying outside their door, and as they were out of rodents, they decided to experiment on this mouse.

"They believed that they could cure the mouse of the disease that it carried, the disease that they did not know would result many years later in the black plague – though not even the greatest fortune teller could have predicted an outbreak like that. And so they conducted experiments on the creature and recorded the results, and then three months later – when we were just sixteen years old, and my sister Naomi was just fourteen – they managed to cure the mouse of the disease.

"It was a miracle, they always said. And they were so proud of themselves that they kept the rodent – as they had grown fond of the animal that had allowed them to do something entirely different, entirely unique – and fed it like they would have fed a pet, held it as they would hold a newly born baby.

"We used to sit at the back of the room and watch as they cared for this animal more than they ever cared for us, and I do remember feeling like we were thought of as nothing but unpleasant children to the fathers that were supposed to love us. But then three years later, when they realised that the mouse had grown no older, and had continued to bite them for the years that they kept it, they knew that they hadn't just cured the mouse, but granted it with immortality."

I sucked in my breath and tried to stop the tears that threatened to fall as I thought back to all of the tragic days.

"This was their major breakthrough; this was the news that they were going to spread throughout the world... Until they realised that if they did that, then everyone would want it, the cure that granted them immortality. And they realised that they wanted it too, they wanted to be immortal, to live on for eternity as the strong and powerful vampires – that's what they had called them. But they had only tried it on an animal, and they were uncertain whether it would work on humans, or whether it would kill them."

I could feel myself shaking now; hear my heart beating a million miles an hour even when my heart did not beat.

"So..." I tried to force myself to continue but the words would not come.

"So...? Oh, come on. Don't leave us hanging, Amy."

I threw a glare in the direction of Sam and mustered up all of my willpower to continue. "So... They decided to experiment on humans. They decided to experiment on us."

Claire gasped and looked at me with an expression of sorrow and horror. "But, you were their children."

"And they wanted immortality more than any child." I breathed in deeply and carried on. "But when we argued – told them that they were insane, that they would kill us – they locked us in the Crypt.

"At that time, there was no ward that hid the escape, though there was no ladder. They managed to get up and down with a rope, taking us up for more experiments, putting us back afterward – making sure to leave no way for us to escape. But even when the changes were clear to us, we made sure to keep the changes unclear to them. So they carried out more experiments on other children, these people that you see here." I gestured to the hall of vampires. "At the time, these people didn't know what was happening to them, so the changes in them showed and our fathers decided that it the 'cure' was safe for human beings and took it. Leaving all of us to fend for ourselves, they left to discover the perks of being a vampire.

"We learned the ways of being a vampire on our own, helping each other to get through the terrible change. Two hundred years later – after we had learned how to be vampires and how to take care of ourselves without hurting anyone, a herd of vampires found us. At first we were confused; the only vampires in the world were us, our fathers, and the children that they had experimented on. But it turned out that wasn't true, and that our fathers (while discovering the perks of vampirism) had discovered how to turn a human into a vampire without any injections or science involved. So they had sauntered through country after country, turning innocent human beings and leaving them alone to fend for themselves. And along with the innocent, they had turned human beings that were willing to travel with them to create a vampire army."

The faces that looked at me were shocked and intrigued, as if they were listening to a scary fairy tale – which was one way to describe it.

"When we started making all of these discoveries, we decided that enough was enough. We made our own army of vampires that had been turned by our fathers, trained them and trained ourselves. What they had done to us, our own fathers, and what they were doing to other people, it made us sick. Immortality was just the beginning of a terrible war. So we called our army 'The VA,' as in The Vampire Assassins, because we had decided that we were going to hunt the vampires that followed our fathers; all vampires, good and bad."