Darkness in the Low Country Ch. 01

"How...how do you know...know my name?"

"Oh, Frank, I know everything about you. Your mind is weak, very weak. I know you are married and have a child, and well...let's face it they really are better off without you, I know you go to church every Sunday morning and get drunk and beat your wife almost every Sunday night, but you know why I choose you, Frank?" Natalie asked him in flirtatious tone.

Frank shook his head, he could no longer talk.

"Because of Stephanie. You know her don't you, Frank, the little nine year old girl who lives in the apartment next to yours and who is too scared to tell her mother about what you do to her. There are a lot of evil things in this world, Frank, I am one of them, but of all the evils I think you are the worse kind and I just can't abide child molesters."

Frank did not even have time to beg before Natalie sank her needle sharp fangs teeth into his neck. The pain was awful, terrible, something he could not bear and he wanted to scream but for some reason no sound came out of his mouth. As Natalie drank and fed on the man he felt her enter his mind she made his pain worse and he tried to beg again, this time just for her to let him die.

Natalie drank her fill and let the man fall to the ground and she wiped the blood from her lips. "God, cheap whiskey. I hate cheap whiskey."

She stood over Frank, who was curled up in the fetal position crying, and dropped the knife they held to her throat next to him.

"Now, Frank, be a good boy and cut your throat for me."

Without hesitation, Frank reached out, picked up the knife and brought it to his throat and quickly stabbed himself in the neck deep and slashed the knife across his throat.

Natalie smiled and walked out of the alley leaving Frank to gurgle in his own blood as he bled out. Natalie walked back to her loft, her hunger for the night satisfied.

When she got home it was about two hours before sunrise and she decided she had time for a bath before bed. After her bath she double checked the curtains to make sure no sunlight would come in and lay in her bed waiting for the sun to rise and she would sleep.

Her king sized bed was comfortable and she giggled at the myth vampires had to sleep in coffins, in fact they could sleep anywhere out of the sunlight.

"Stupid Vlad," she talked to herself again. "Making that nonsense up when he told Stoker his story. Most of it was untrue and all to impress that silly twit of a girl Mina. I never liked him anyway nor her. I am glad the Council had them killed for revealing to a mortal we existed. Even if everyone thought it was fiction he should have known better."

She then thought of the things Dante told her earlier. She was not afraid of Slavic, not in the least. He as only about six hundred years old and true he was one of the strongest Masters of a city in the America's and his territory covered all of New York state and into New Jersey, but still he was too young for her to fear like any Masters of a city in the "new world". They were all so much younger than the Masters in Europe and other parts of the world. If she wanted, she could take any city she wanted in America very easily. But she did not want that. She wanted to be left alone.

As for the Council, she knew she truly had nothing to fear from them, not anymore. They hated her and her existence that was true, but she paid for her crimes when they punished her and then they exiled her form Rome. So she paid her price for peace with them and that payment almost cost her, her sanity.

The Templars were of no concern to her either. The centuries old organization was weak now with all the reforms in the Catholic Church over the years and they had not hunted her kind in years.

It was the other one that gave her chilling fear. If her maker was looking for her, she had every right to be afraid. One did not take Cassandra lightly and live, but Natalie also knew that if Cassandra was looking for her, it was not her life she wanted and that she feared even more. Natalie knew how cruel Cassandra was. He maker was like a cat, she liked to play with her food before she ate.

The sun rose and Natalie's thoughts ended as she slept. With the coming sunrise she had no choice but to sleep as her body became like a corpse. Even in her sleep of the damned, she could dream and a dream she did; no not a dream a nightmare, one that had plagued her for the past several months.

In her nightmare she was pulled from her sleep of the dead. She had no choice but to wake as if some force was tugging at her mind and body. She was in the ground and unwillingly dug through the earth until she reached the surface and was greeted not by the night but by the sun. She screamed as her body started to burn and all she could see in front of her was a shadowy figure; a boy or was it a girl? She could not tell; all she saw was blue hair as her body burned to ashes.