Chapter Text
In your life before, when you were still human, with a beating heart and hot scarlet life pumping through you and hopes and dreams and fears, you were taught never to trust a monster. You were taught that the ones you should be the most wary of were the ones who, on the outside, looked exactly like you. They smiled the same, they laughed and they cried, they even wore the same clothes as you did and formed families just like you used to have. You always asked your father the same question, how he knew so much about them and why he was so insistent that you stayed away from them if he’d obviously encountered them enough to know this much and still live to tell you the same stories by firelight as you moved from village to village. He never answered that, only ending each lesson with the same thing he insisted you hold tight to and remember, if you remembered nothing else: never trust one, no matter how hard they try to earn it.
You were never taught what you were supposed to do if you became one.
As a child, despite your kingdom and the neighboring one being at odds with each other, life remained peaceful until one day it didn't, and that peace was broken.
The neighboring kingdom had chosen to attack. The orders from the king were brutal and clear: kill all the married and older women, keep the men and boys alive to be used for labor, and reward the unwed soldiers and nobles with the girls, and unmarried young women, to be used either as maids, or forced into marriages, or worse. By some miracle, even though your mother had been killed, you and your father had escaped. Life was never the same after that. You imagined that one day, after you’d gotten far enough away, your father might find somewhere adequate to settle down, but that was never the case. Instead, you were instructed to keep to yourself, and not form friendships or give out any information about yourself (and he’d even given the two of you new names to use in every new village), and then after so long in a new place he’d pack you up, always in the middle of the night, and you’d leave for somewhere new with a different identity once again.
Around the third or fourth time you’d been made to leave is when he started telling you about the monsters, and how it was important that you never let one convince you to trust it.
Five years ago, after just a few weeks in the newest settlement (and by this time you’d lost count of which number it was– you were in your 20s now and had moved so often and had so many names you nearly forgot who you’d been for the first eight years of your life), he’d woken you up in the middle of the night like he always did when it was time to leave, except this time, instead of his usual calm and quiet, he was in a visible panic. You’d been shaken awake, and you knew what that meant, but as you reached for a bag to begin packing what you could carry, he’d grabbed your wrist and said, “There’s no time, we have to go now. Leave everything and hurry.”
And then you heard it: the sound of the angry mob fast approaching your little home on the edge of the village.
You hurriedly put on your boots and your cloak, and then you and your father slipped out of the window and into the shadows. He led you between buildings and around corners, switching between silent creeping steps and full sprints, but you realized before he did that the two of you were surrounded, there were villagers everywhere, and eventually there would be no more places to hide.
That time had come soon; the two of you were spotted. Villagers grabbed onto you and your father and pulled you apart. You screamed, kicked, demanded to be let go and to know what the hell was happening, but none of it was of any use. Your father disappeared from your view.
A cloth sack was thrown over your face, your feet were bound by the ankles, and your hands had been tied behind your back, and then you were dragged onto cobblestone and forced onto your knees. You squirmed and jerked around and cursed your unknown assailants and then you were abruptly hit so hard in the face that it disoriented and silenced you. Your lip stung and you could taste blood dribbling out of it, both onto your tongue and down your chin, soaking the cloth over your head.
Then you heard your father again, demanding to be let go, insisting on his innocence, and then begging that they at least take mercy on you.
The cloth was removed from over your head and the sight in front of you made you gasp and nearly brought you to tears. You fought the tears, though, refusing to allow your assailants the privilege of seeing you shaken like this.
Your father had been tied to a stake. The preparations were made for him to be burned, and your blood ran cold knowing you were likely next.
“Father!” you yelled. “Let him go!”
One of the men keeping you in your kneeling position grabbed a fistful of your hair and forced you to look up at another man who had begun to approach you. That man knelt down, grabbed you by the jaw and turned your face side to side, examining it like you were some sort of prized pig. He released your jaw, but the grip the other man had on your head remained, forcing you to stay looking up.
“Surely you must have known that the family business would come to a brutal end one day,” he said tauntingly.
“We have no business,” you insisted, words coming out like venom. “We’re nomads. We help farm and we tinker. That’s all.”
He stood up and turned around to face your father. “You’ve trained her well. If I didn’t know any better, she’d surely have me convinced that you’d kept her in the dark.”
He turned back to you. “But I know your kind. That kind of work is always passed down until the last one fails to produce an heir. You’re fooling no one. Confess to your crimes and repent, and I might consider your old man’s punishment to be enough for you both.”
You gave your father a pleading look, then your eyes went back to the man.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I swear it,” you said. “This must be a mix up, or we’ve been framed. I’ll not confess to something neither I nor my father have done.”
The man knelt down and leaned in so closely that the tip of his nose brushed yours.
“Then you both will burn like the demons you consort with.”
He stood up swiftly and turned around, then he pointed at a group of people holding lit torches.
“Show this treacherous whore what happens to those who betray their own for a beast!”
The fire spread quickly from the torches and you screamed and cursed as the flames began to devour your father right in front of your eyes. The crowd jeered, clapped, yelled, taunted, and you were disgusted at the sight. You hoped the fire would consume them all, prayed to any god or being who would listen to free your father from his agony and burn this wicked place to the ground.
Your father coughed and thrashed around as you watched in helpless agony, refusing still to let any of these freaks see you cry. They wouldn’t get that satisfaction now, and you’d do your damndest to make sure they still didn’t get it when it was your turn at the stake.
And then a crack was heard suddenly and the crowd went silent.
A villager had fallen to the ground, their neck in an unnatural twist and their face frozen in a mixture of surprise and pain. Then, mere seconds later, another villager met the same fate.
“The demons!,” the man standing in front of you shouted. “They’ve come to save their servants!”
The crowd began to panic, some people dropping their torches entirely and running in whatever direction was the most clear. More people dropped dead, and before your father fully succumbed, before the flames burned too much of his throat, he mustered up the last of his strength and shouted at you, “They’ll honor the deal just as I have! You must believe me, go with them and never look back! I’m sorry! I love you!”
The flames fully covered him now and then, he was gone, reduced to a burning pile of lifeless flesh and smoke. The two men holding you down lifted you up by the arms and began running. You kicked, spat, and fought as hard as you could, but their grip never wavered. One of them briefly looked down at you with a smile so evil it sent chills down your spine.
“You’ll be wishing you were burned at the stake when you see what we’ve got in store for you,” he said, and then he and the other man snickered as they moved.
Two men, whom you knew did not belong to the village, suddenly appeared in front of you and your captors from above, like they’d just fallen from the sky. The captors stopped and attempted to change direction, but in mere seconds they’d been surrounded on all sides; you counted six, but saw two more approaching in the distance.
“If you value your life, you will hand us the girl,” one said, voice calm yet stern at the same time.
“We’ll do no such thing.”
“She’s a prisoner of our village and we will not release her to you, demon. She will pay.”
“Very well, then. Make peace with the knowledge that you were offered an exit and chose to die fools.”
The people—the things–surrounding you bared their teeth and snarled all at once. You closed your eyes tight preparing for the worst. Then you felt the grasp of your captors release, and before you could hit the ground you were in a new set of arms, and then you were moving again, fast, further and further from the village until the screams and chaos died down into silence.
When you opened your eyes, you were in a grass clearing illuminated by the silvery glow of the moon. The arms carrying you belonged to a woman. She set you down in the grass gently.
“Hold still,” she said. She pulled a knife from her boot and cut your ankles free, then circled behind you and released your wrists. She came back around and slid the knife back into her boot, then sat in front of you and reached for your hands. Her grasp was tender and ice cold.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
You gazed at her, then at the others from before approaching in the distance, then back to her. “Are you going to hurt me?”
“No, we promised your father we’d protect you.”
“My father?” His final words rang again in your head. A deal mentioned, the deal–what deal?
The other seven in the group reached the clearing where you and the woman were seated. The man from before, the one who demanded your release, called to her.
“Katarina, come.”
The woman, who you knew now was called Katarina, gave your hands a gentle squeeze.
“Please stay here. Give us a few moments and I assure you that you will receive answers. I know you must be very confused.”
“Sure, stay here,” you said. “I’ll sit right here.” Not that you could run anywhere, anyway. You were in shock from everything that had just happened and found yourself frozen in place, trying to make sense of it all and process it.
“Thank you,” said Katarina. She stood and joined the others as they formed a circle, speaking in hushed tones and whispers you couldn’t make out. As promised, after a few moments, they all approached you. Katarina offered her hand and you took it, and she pulled you up to stand.
“Did your father ever speak to you about beasts?” the man, who you’d come to the conclusion was the leader of the group, asked.
You nodded. “Yes, quite a lot actually. He said never to trust one.”
“But you went with us, anyway?”
“His final words were that a deal would be honored like he’d honored his, and to go with you. He's never given me a reason to distrust him.”
“But you were never aware of a deal, were you? You were told to avoid us.”
“Yes,” you admitted. “I suppose he hid this from me until he no longer could. He…” lied, you thought. “He lied to me.”
Your face fell as the realization hit.
“It wasn’t malicious,” Katarina said. “It was the right thing for him to do.”
“He was doing as a father should, protecting his daughter,” the leader added.
“Protecting me from what!?” you asked, the question coming out more forcefully than you meant to. You could feel yourself getting worked up now. “He was burned at the stake and I was next because of this thing–this deal–how was that protecting me?”
Tears began to well up in your eyes. “And who are you anyway? How does he know you, and why did he want me to go with you!? Nothing makes any goddamned sense!”
Katarina opened her arms to you and you threw yourself into them, bawling into her chest. She stroked your hair in the way you remembered your mother doing when you’d wake up upset from a nightmare or come running inside in tears with a scraped knee. The others only watched in silence, their faces neutral as they waited for the leader to continue.
After you’d calmed down, your cries reduced to sniffles, the leader began again.
“My name is Julius, and I am the leader of this coven. I know your father imparted knowledge about our kind to you, and I know he warned you to never trust us until tonight, which I’m sure was confusing to you, or concerning. You deserve to know why– why he tried to keep you away from us, or any kind of non-human being, why he had a deal with us, what the deal was, and why he never told you about it. Allow me to start with a question: when your village was attacked, the one you were born in, did it ever occur to you that your escape happened a bit too easily? No soldiers keeping watch on the outskirts chasing after you, just slipping away and starting anew as if your old life never happened?”
You thought about it. “Maybe a little, but…I was just a child. I was just thankful we got out at all.”
“There are vampires who feed on the first living person they see whenever the need arises, and there are vampires who make deals with humans for easy access to food. Most vampires will also monitor opposing kingdoms when war is on the horizon because it’s much easier to feed on people whose families have accepted that they might die in battle, and our way of feeding mostly goes unnoticed when the attention is turned to swinging swords and ducking arrows. We were there the day your village, and kingdom, were attacked, and went mostly unnoticed until your father…but he didn’t alert anyone to our presence. He motioned for me and my cohort here, Aleksander, to follow him, and he led us straight to two hearty soldiers who had just beheaded a man. The soldiers more than satiated us. We were grateful and promised him we wouldn’t feed from him, not even the little sips that make a human woozy but don’t actually kill them. But he needed a favor, and was willing to make a deal with us in exchange.”
“Getting out…” you whispered. Julius nodded.
“Yes, precisely. Help get him and his little girl out safely, protect you from harm, and he’d continue to find us food, the best of the best. He had an eye for knowing whose blood would be the healthiest, quench our thirst to its fullest, and he pushed down endless amounts of guilt and turned on his own morals because he intended on doing whatever it took to keep you safe, never have you in the position you were in during the raid again., This is why you moved so often, to avoid suspicion. Keeping you safe included two things: on his end, discouraging you from befriending things like us so you’d never be tempted to make a similar kind of deal. He wanted you to be able to settle somewhere permanent one day, have a family and a life when he finally found a suitable husband for you in a place he felt was good enough, instead of doing what he had to do. On our end, keeping you safe included rescuing you in the event that he ever did get caught, because he knew that you would be accused and sentenced to death along with him despite your innocence.”
The pieces of the puzzle connected in your mind. The moves, the name changes, the insistence on never allowing any friendships to bloom and never letting people know anything about you except that you were nomads who were looking for work and enjoyed exploring.
“We were unable to wipe out the village; some men escaped and it’s highly likely that they might go looking for you, and that would not end well. We made a deal with your father to protect you, and because he never once attempted to run away from us, or the deal he made, and this coven places high value on honoring deals to the very end, there are only two decisions for your future that you must choose from tonight that will guarantee your protection. You may stay with us, and continue your father’s work in exchange for never having to fear harm or death until death takes you naturally, or…you may go on your own and forge your own life, but in order to know that you’re safe without our lingering presence, we must turn you. We feel that those are the only ways to guarantee your safety without your only choice being to stay with us by force, be unable to live your life as you wish, and deal with the guilt and shame your father felt.”
“I have to choose tonight?” you asked. “Can’t I have at least until tomorrow night to think about this?”
“You must decide within the hour. If you are being hunted down, so are we. No matter your decision, we have to find shelter before sunrise and it must be far from here. If you take your father’s place, you will have to do what he did and go wherever we go. If you want control of that choice, of your own life, you must be turned so you are safe and able to survive on your own.”
“This is another reason your father kept us a secret from you,” Katarina said. “He did not want you to form an attachment that would make this harder for you if the situation necessitated it.”
“So the whole time, he knew things might come to this?” you asked.
“Not necessarily,” said Julius. “But we assured him that if something like tonight ever were to happen, we would take the aftermath into account, and weigh every option after in order to give you as many choices as possible.”
You wanted to cry, scream, run away, hit something, break something, anything. Everything you knew was wrong, and everything you loved was lost. You were content in life, despite the constant traveling, because even though your home had been raided and destroyed, you still had your father. Now you had nothing but the two options you were given tonight, and you had almost no time to figure it out.
“I need to think. Please, just give me one moment. I won’t be long.”
“Of course,” said Julius. “And please know that if there were any other paths for you to choose from, we would offer them to you. I wish there were. Unfortunately, life does not always give us an easy way out.”
You nodded, then walked a few feet away and sat in the grass to think.
No matter which choice you made, people would die. And you felt a pang of guilt over that for a moment until you remembered what happened to your kingdom as a child, the way your mother had been slaughtered mercilessly right outside your window, the things the opposing kingdom would have put you through had you not gotten away. You thought about your father on that stake again, the way his voice cracked and gurgled as he fought to give you that final message, the maniacal looks of joy and the cheers and the twisted celebration around you as your nostrils were invaded by the smell of his flesh being roasted alive.
There was a sickness spread among people that made them take joy in watching others suffer when they were faced with things they didn’t understand and refused to try to. Leading people to this coven, to be drained lifeless and left behind, sounded like good revenge, but it would never be good enough. You needed to do the killing yourself.
And your first targets would be the villagers who were so eager to impose punishment on you and then ran when their own punishment arrived.
You stood up and walked back to the coven, who stayed silent and watched as you thought it through.
“Tell me what I need to know about vampirism. I choose to be turned.”
“And you are completely sure of this? You can never return to your human state once you’ve been bitten,” Julius asked. Not to patronize you, but to make you confirm out loud to him and yourself that it was the direction you truly wanted to take. “You won’t age, and human contact will always be a risk to you. It could take you a long, long time to find companionship.”
You nodded. “I’m sure. I want to find my own way, do something in life that would make my father proud. And if I ever run into those people again…I want to be able to make them pay for what they did. I don’t care that it was wrong, or selfish of him. He did what any father would do and they burned him for it. He was all I had left.”
“Very well, I respect your decision,” said Julius. “Katarina, take her aside and prepare her please. She took comfort in you, so I feel it’s best that you tell her about the changes she’s about to face.”
Katarina nodded, then took your hand and led you to a spot far enough away for privacy. You decided to lay on the grass this time and watch the moon as she talked, and she laid next to you and began.
“You must feed every three days. You can feed every day if you wish, but three is a long enough stretch that you won’t draw suspicion and can move between settlements. Do not go any longer than that, or you’ll begin to weaken and experience some…catastrophic changes. Your body will deteriorate first, and then your mind. That’s a death sentence, because all sense will be lost and you’ll end up in a situation where you will be surrounded and overpowered.
“The sun will not kill you, but you’ll be sensitive enough to it that long periods of time in it will bring on a pain that will make it near impossible to do anything until night returns. If you must be out during the day, cover up. Hooded cloaks, gloves, stockings. It will still be difficult to see, but the coverings will help. Your ears will be painfully sensitive for the first few days, and there is unfortunately nothing you can do to alleviate it. You’ll have to push through the pain until you get accustomed, but it won’t take long– four days at most.
“Animal blood will work if there are no humans around, but it only satiates for a few hours, so do not wander too far from society unless you wish to decimate the animal population around you or starve. And finally, religious iconography will not kill you. Holy water does nothing, and these new churches that have been springing up are not the barriers their believers think they are. You will not turn into ash if you walk into one and a cross will not repel you.”
“Okay, I think I can remember that.”
“You cannot think you will remember, you must commit this to memory. Your survival depends on it. And one more thing: the myth that we need to be invited inside or else we can’t step in is also untrue. Humans have been telling themselves that to make themselves feel safer, and we go along with it sometimes because it can be used to get a human to weaken their defenses. You could think of vampirism as a form of…evolved human, if that makes sense. Humans with different diets, different sensitivities, and much better strength. Humans are predators in nature, after all. We’re simply a superior species of human.”
You sat up now, and then so did she. The group made their way to you. You took a deep breath.
“I’m ready,” you said. “And before we do this, I just want to say thank you. For giving my father a chance, and making sure we were okay, and…for holding true to the deal you made with him, even though he’s gone now. You could have vanished and left me behind without him ever knowing it happened, and you honored your word instead.”
“It’s true what he said, not to trust us,” Julius said. “There are many vampires, and other supernatural creatures, who thrive on trickery and deceit. We have chosen to uphold a better standard, which is uncommon for creatures like us. And, there are benefits in choosing to work with humans rather than treat them purely as prey. Your father kept us well fed for years, perhaps even spoiled us a little, and it was because we chose kindness.”
“I’m not sure I can live up to that right away,” you admitted.
“You’ve lived seeing the worst in humanity,” he said, “and I don’t fault you for feeling less than forgiving. Forgiveness is something to be earned, and I have yet to see the work being done to earn yours. Now, I’m afraid we’re running out of time. We must make haste. Shall we?”
Katarina turned you around and supported you from behind, and then Julius stepped forward, tilting your neck back and leaning in. The rest of the coven circled around you and watched quietly.
“I have to warn you, this will not be a painless process. But it will be over quickly, and then you are free to go. I believe rebirth will be good for you. Take your last breath and relish it, now, and close your eyes.”
You breathed in as deep as you could, holding it in and committing the feel of cool, fresh night air in your lungs to memory, and then you breathed out, and Julius bit.
At first things went black. You felt a fire in your chest as your heart came to a stop, and then your eyes closed and you faded into a void, and then you woke up. And holy fuck, you burned.
You writhed and screamed, every inch of your flesh and every muscle and tendon underneath it feeling the way you imagined your father must have felt at the stake, and your bones felt like they were cracking, and healing, and cracking again over and over in a nonstop hellish cycle. Katarina held onto you tight, lowering herself down until you were on your back, in even more pain than before because every point on you that made contact with anything else severely magnified the burn. Julius lowered down next and with a knife he pulled from his belt he cut into his arm, and Katarina held onto you as tight as she could while Julius allowed the blood to fall from his arm to your lips.
“You must drink from me now for the transformation to complete! Drink, or you’ll die!”
You opened your mouth and he lowered his arm even more, and the blood spilled onto your tongue and down into your throat.
And then in an instant, the pain began to subside until it was nothing more than a dull ache.
Katarina relaxed her grip, and then she and Julius helped you to your feet.
You looked around. It was still dark out, as nighttime should be, but you could see everything anyway, and you could hear an animal sneaking along the forest floor far in the distance, something else you couldn’t do before.
“I feel…” you started. Alive wasn’t the word. Neither was good, though you didn’t feel bad either.
“New?” Katarina asked.
That was it.
“Yes, new. Stronger. Unafraid.”
Katarina offered you a final hug, one you gladly accepted, and then Julius put a hand on your shoulder.
“We have to go now,” he said. “We don’t have long until sunrise.”
“Thank you again, all of you, for everything you’ve done for me and my father.”
Julius nodded, and then in the blink of an eye, the coven was gone.
You stared at the moon for a while longer, chose a direction, and ran.