Chapter 1 – Undead

Chapter 1 – Undead

Silence.

Just like when, in the middle of the night, your body wakes up right before a storm. Everything is still and silent and you stir and sigh just to hear something. Then a wind disrupts distant leaves, and you hear the first raindrop.

Maybe if I’d not gone by myself things would’ve turned out differently. Probably not. As it were I was walking the back paths, barely making out the cracks in the concrete under my feet to stop from tripping. The winter months were around the corner, and so was He.

Despite the silence, I kept my feet busy, squeezing out a dry cough to make a sound. Then He was before me.

I looked up. It was dark but for some reason His face seemed to have an inner glow. His eyes, without a doubt, held my gaze, locked it there.

“I want to take you in,” He whispered. He leaned in closer.

Almost without my noticing, I nodded.

He cradled my face in His cold fingers, and gently twisted it away from His.

I heard it going in rather than felt it.

Then the burning started to spread. Hesitant at first, it suddenly surged through my veins, hungrily devouring the human blood and leaving in its wake the new translucent replacement. He stood over me as I quivered on the ground, my body burning as I suffered through the Change.

When I stood again, my clothes and my humanity have been burned and eaten away. He – he who is now my Father – wrapped me in his coat. I closed my eyes into his hard cold chest. There was no sound inside the solid mass that’s his body. There will be no sound inside mine anymore, either.

~~~~

It’s taken the world a lot longer than we’d wanted to accept us – no, I wouldn’t say that they’ve accepted us; they never will. The politically correct term is ‘integration’. That’s what we tried to do as the superior race, when we could’ve easily completely taken over.

The Council, instrumental in keeping every one of us in line, has tried in every possible way to let the humans keep their power. But of course, this is impossible. The only thing that the humans have is an illusion, a false promise of power; for above every top rung of every ladder – social, political or otherwise – there is always a platform, unreachable by mortal feet.

It has been exactly three years – to the hour, in a couple of minutes – since Kellan took me in. I was one of the first since the Last Night. In many ways I was the reason that young Nobles and Third-Gens are allowed to go back to school. Under Kellan’s influential protests and the Council’s insistence for a fair treatment, Noble and high-ranking Third-Gens were allowed to resume their secondary education once they have either turned the human equivalent of sixteen or, if the young vampire was ‘taken in’ (or as many humans and even some vampires would call it ‘Draked’) at a very young age, they have proven to have complete control over their emotional needs (read: bloodlust).

While many private schools either outright refused to let in vampires, or started parallel classes with strict rules, Forreston Girls’ and Boys’ were the first state schools to have a complete (here’s the word again) integration system. I sat in classes with every other human girl, lunched with them – well, they ate lunch. If I was lunching the operative word would’ve been ‘on’ instead of ‘with’ – and even went to the beach with them on an occasion. I thought that was the start to a happy co-existence; you start with letting vampires back into schools, and maybe you can end with a totally fear-free life. But I quickly learned that as long as we are around, the humans will always be feeling the inferiority, and thus always wary.

Perhaps this point was the epitomic example of their wariness towards us, the ultimate betrayal to myths; we didn’t burn in sunlight. At least, Purebloods and Nobles like me didn’t. As the purity of the blood goes down the Gens, their reaction to sunlight becomes a lot more obvious.

Kellan was a Pureblood. There aren’t many of them around, and most of them chose to live further north, much further north, in romantic place such as France, Switzerland, Russia; places where people expect vampires to live – again, the politically correct term for the likes of us is actually ‘Night Dweller’ – but Kellan, being a self-proclaimed eccentric, decided to live in Melbourne, Australia. I’d asked him the reason to it, but he had only raised his long and (I’ve always secretly thought) pointy eyebrows and smiled. His fangs (on the streets known as ‘tots’, as in Tool Of Trade) had made a crisp chime as he raised his scotch glass to his lips, and realizing that I wasn’t satisfied with his answer, he merely moistened his lips and fixed me with his glare – nothing as passionate and hungry as the first glare he’d given me, never will be. “I want to be as far away from any of the Council business, and my brother, as possible. Besides, I find the wine here much more satiating.” I didn’t question him any further; not only because ‘wine’ was a term used among the higher classes of vampires for ‘blood’, but because he’d found me in Melbourne.

Kellan’s brother, Nicholas Dante, was in nearly every sense the King of Vampires, the Purest of Purebloods. He was the Head of Council, and even though he did consult the Elders, mostly his word was Law. That in turn made Kellan the next ‘head honcho’ as Callie had said. Sometimes I understood Kellan’s need to escape from his brother. Kellan adored Uncle Nick, as did I, but Uncle Nick was always too engrossed in politics. While Kellan agreed with some of the ideals regarding co-existence, it’s the under-the-table plans that had him worried. Uncle Nick has two children he’d Draked, Colin and Amy, twins by birth and twins forever. They live with Uncle Nick in a cold mountainous place in France.

Kellan and I live in a large (understatement) gothic mansion at what is considered as ‘just out of town’. I firmly believe that when Kellan built the estate he was merely making it so big because he could. Even with an entire generous section belonging to the servants, another one to the human servants, and yet another, even larger and cosier section for the escorts, there were still too many corridors that could hold running races, too many unused halls that Callie could have imaginary balls in, too many drawn rooms where the escorts could be violated.

It seemed that Laela and I were the only ones who really respected the escorts and Laela only because she is my maid. It was a strange notion for me at first. Kellan had encouraged me to Drake Laela, who had been my human servant since my first night. After a few months of having to stay awake at odd hours of the night, both Laela and Kellan decided that it would be best if Laela were to become one of us. To ensure her eternal loyalty towards me, Kellan wanted me to Drake her. I did a clumsy job and the Draking resulted in her having a purer blood than servants are meant to. As vampires’ interaction with one another is based heavily on purity of blood, and Laela actually ranks higher than the other servants, she was usually shunned from the vampire servants, forbidden to interact often with the human servants, and left to her own devices as I was never home.

Callie was the only one brave enough to talk to me on my first day at Forreston. The first question she’d asked me was whether I was older than her mother. I replied that if I were still human, I would be sixteen. She reacted with surprise. When I asked her why, she said, “I thought you’d talk like Dracula.”

I laughed, forgetting for a moment to completely retract my tots – they were like claws in a cat’s paw, except it took a lot of conscious effort to completely retract them to resemble human incisors – and I noticed a few girls staring. “Haven’t you seen vampires talk on TV?”

Callie shrugged, “I was kind of hoping you’d talk like Dracula. You vampires are all so…”

“Normal?” I finished. “Boring?”

“Incredibly hot,” Callie cut in. “You all look like models. I thought maybe at least one of you would have pale skin and sunken eyes, you know, to live up to your name?”

“Kellan’s pretty pale and thin.” I thought about his pointy eyebrows and strong nose. “I guess he’s the closest we have to Dracula. He’s also my father.”

“How old were you when you were Draked?” Callie’s sudden turn in the conversation, her brashness to ask what other girls might consider as a personal question made me quiet.

“I was fourteen.”

“You don’t look it. You look older than all of us, actually.”

“We vampires all look different. I mean, we all look human but at the same time you only have to glance to be able to tell the difference between a vampire and a human. Maybe that’s why I look older. I’ll probably grow to look a little older before I stop ageing.”

That night I stayed over at Callie’s place.

Her dad died not long ago and her mum was like an ethereal being who drifted in late at night, settled in the kitchen for a small amount of time, and then was trapped behind a study door, where there was a dim stutter of television. When Callie had gone to sleep, and the darkness in the house could almost be tasted, the light under the study door would finally go out. The ghost would float into the bedroom, where there would be a short splatter of bathroom sounds, and then the ghost would be asleep, making even less of a presence that it was before.

I’d started to ask Callie about her mum, but sensed it was something that I shouldn’t pry into. To survive, I have to split open flesh, but this was a wound I wouldn’t open.