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The look on his face when he saw my mother… it haunts me to this day. But, thankfully, his shock, fear, sorrow, and outrage didn’t last long. The man dropped my mother’s body on the floor. It landed like a feather, light and pure white. He lunged at my father.
“Father!” I screamed, but it was a futile cry. The man with fangs killed him straight away, snapped his spine, and then drank from him until not a drop of blood remained. I fell to my knees. Stunned. Shocked. Horrified. And watched with unblinking eyes.
When the man was finished, he dropped my father’s body like a boulder on the ground and turned, preternaturally slowly, toward me.
I was shaking practically out of my skin.
With every step he took toward me, I shook more violently. He lowered into a crouch beside me.
“Let’s see if you taste as good as the other little one.”
I whimpered and tried to collapse in on myself, but my efforts were a failure.
He grabbed my face between his freezing cold hands. My skin burst out in gooseflesh like an allergic reaction to his vile touch. But his cold grip was nothing compared to the burning pain of his teeth. He sank his fangs into my wrist and drank. It was a single industrious swallow, and then… he stopped.
He froze. He backed away. He almost released me, then tightened his grip, staring at me with the strangest expression on his face.
All he said was, “You taste just like her…” Then he tilted his head to examine me in a better light as blood seeped down my wrist, my arm, and into my dress.
There was a strange look in his strange eyes then, one of consideration.
For reasons I may never know, instead of killing and draining me like he’d just done to the rest of my family, he planted a frigid kiss on my temple, said, “Happy birthday,” and disappeared out of the house. A touch of daylight still clung to the sky, but he managed to find his way out in the shadows.
He left me there in the darkness and I just stood there, until I remembered I was bleeding out. Then I staunched the flow of blood from my wrist with my mother’s dishrag and wept.
It was two days before the deer wandered in and found me. I realized it wasn’t a deer about two seconds after it entered. The deer was simply the skin that an impish ghoul was wearing. I killed it with a kitchen knife, but from there, I had no idea what to do with myself. I would spend the next years poor and destitute and fighting to make a life for myself on the streets.
Luckily, I learned how to defend myself, and I put the skills that I’d been forced to learn to good use. And I searched for the vampire who killed my family—I never gave up. I still hadn’t given up.
One good thing about vampires; they don’t change. And I’d know that face anywhere.
Someday I will find that impossibly beautiful murderer. God willing, someday soon.
At the sound of something shambling through the bushes, I realize I’m about to get tackled by a goddamn troll.
“Come out, you little bastard!” I call into the woods with my hands cupped around my mouth.
The rustling gets louder, and the troll pounces out of the bush.
I lift my knife up to the sky, and the troll skewers itself on it (they’re not the brightest of the monsters). I fall, stumbling under the weight of the fully grown gnome troll. He’s an angry dead blob of meat by the time I’ve wiped his remains off my knife. But I know he and the blight are just the beginning of my night under the stars.
Chapter Three
I’ve been walking a while, so long that I can just faintly see the outline of Baravia Castle over the distant tree line.
No one goes anywhere near that place anymore. They say it’s been haunted since the brothers D’Orsay disappeared. I say it’s just a stuffy old castle with nothing and no one in it. That said, seeing the castle as I have means I’ve walked too deep into the woods.
Better to turn around. It’s getting foggy, anyway.
But I don’t believe…
No, that isn’t fog.
Not quite.
It’s mist, and mist can mean a lot of things beyond basic condensation. I ready myself with my knife, and sure enough, the mist in the distance begins to take shape. I don’t wait for it to finish forming. I throw my knife at the mass, but the weapon goes straight through and hits the tree behind the mist. As I watch, the mist seems to move at lightning speed because, before I know it, I see a demonesque gargoyle sitting where the mist just was.
This isn’t a creature I’ve dealt with before and I’ve only heard legends of the gargoyle. I never actually believed in any of them.
