LIANNDRA

Lianndra’s wrists quivered as the wind gained momentum and power. He was in the midst of a battle that might never end.

He might be too weak to best Tispith and have to fight her again. He hoped that that would not be the case, he hoped that he didn’t have to experience the indignity and pain that came with being crushed into a bloody pulp. The last time it had happened had been the worst thing he had ever felt. It had taken almost two years before he was able to bend his knees without them buckling, before he was able to walk among mortals again without them running away in fear and disgust.

He focused his mind’s energies to the task of pushing Tispith back and giving himself room for thought. Her scream was a terrible thing, it had the power to both kill and stop a person from even being able think, and what he needed most at the moment was the ability to think. Otherwise he would never be able to stop her and give himself the time to seek out where her body lay.

His mind stretched like taffy as he pushed it out. It came into contact with the hard immovable wall that was her mind and will. He grit his mental teeth and began to pound on that wall, trying to find even the most miniscule of cracks in her armor.

There was nothing. It was a perfect shield, no cracks, no breaks, no weaknesses, nothing. All there was, was the power that she used to make her wall, the power she was getting from somewhere, somewhere that wasn’t exactly a part of her.

Lianndra mentally grinned and went after that small line that led to her energy source. She was getting the energy from somewhere close to herself, somewhere extremely close, so close that it was on top of her, so close that it was inside her own mind. So close, and yet so very faraway.

~chelsea? chelsea is that you? do you hear me chelsea? are you still in there or are you fractured? is your personality splintering already? chelsea, if you can, answer me.~

There was an empty silence, no trace that there was anyone listening.

~please chelsea, i need you to help me to handle tispith. she’s out of control and she’s hurting people. chelsea?~ There was a note of desperation in his mental voice.

Still there was no answer. There was just the blank nothingness of no one listening.

He sighed. He would have to handle the situation by himself. That’s when he heard it, a faint wailing sound coming along the channel he had attached to Tispith’s mind.

He smiled suddenly. He knew what was happening, or rather, who was happening.

The wind that raced through the room like some kind of banshee storm gave one last shriek then died to stillness. Chelsea had heard his call and she had done what she could, which was to stop Tispith from tearing them all to shreds.

~thank you,~ he said to the empty seeming silence that he now knew was a silence filled with hidden truths and the ears that listened.

"What happened? What stopped the attack?" Dezi asked.

Lianndra smiled mysteriously for a moment, then broke down to tell the truth. "It was Chelsea. She stopped Tispith at the source."

"What source?" Chris asked. His voice was back to its usual timber, the fear and defensiveness that had filled it since they’d taken him from Sonny’s place gone.

Lianndra grinned at him, glad to have his friend back. "The Queen was using Chelsea as a power source. She was draining her to power her spell. That’s how she was able to do so much for so long and still have the energy to make both the wind and a protective barrier around her mind that I couldn’t break."

"Wow, she must be really strong," Chris said.

"That’s an understatement. She’s powerful and dangerous," Lianndra said. "The Queen is someone to watch out for. She can be mercilessly cruel when someone makes her angry."

"I wasn’t talking about the Queen. I was talking about Chelsea. I can’t believe that she’d have the guts to help us out like that. I mean, she doesn’t even know us. All she knew was that we were in trouble, yet she went out of her way to help us, isn’t that nice to the extreme?"

Dezi was jealous, it was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. It was hard to tell how Chris managed to miss it.

"Big deal, it isn’t anything any of us wouldn’t do if we heard that another vampire was in trouble." Even her tone was uncharacteristically sharp.

Still Chris didn’t notice. "I think that it was nice and I don’t believe that everyone would do what she did, no matter what they say." Wrong words.

Dezi’s dramatically curved eyebrows hooked in toward the center of her brow. "I doubt very much that you know what you’re saying, so I won’t hold it against you, no matter how ignorant you are about what you’re saying and who you’re saying it to."

Chris blinked his eyes in puzzlement. He had no idea what he’d said that could be so wrong. Lianndra could only shake his head sadly. His friend was in for a tongue-lashing at the very least. Oh well, at least it wasn’t him.

Lianndra turned away from them to look down at Phang. The man was still huddled against the back of Lianndra’s legs, his face terrified.

"What is it Phang? Why are you so afraid?" He had to ask. Phang had been a faithful servant and companion for more years than most people could ever hope to see. There was a certain amount of compensation due.

The Chinese vampire grimaced and slowly released his death grip on Lianndra’s legs. "Master, I apologize for my fear, it is just that in that Gods cursedly horrid wind, I remembered the fate that took my family and almost took me as well."

"What do you mean?" This was something he had never heard before, the fate of Phang’s family. It had always been a big mystery, the events that had sent Phang along the path that had allowed the two of them to meet and resulted in Lianndra granting Phang the BloodTouch.

"A long time ago, when I was on the brink of manhood but still a boy nonetheless, my family and I lived on a high cliff that overlooked an ocean filled with wild waves that crashed over the reefs below. During the day the waves were a constant murmur in the background and I was lulled to sleep every night by the answering whisper of the wind. The sky and the ground never seemed to meet, there was always a misty rise of water sparkling everything with tiny rainbows in the summer and a gentle fog in the winter. It was a lonely place, but beautiful to me. Only my family lived there. Others said that the cliffs were cursed and that to live there was to court death. We did not believe. We were very rich and very arrogant in our power. We believed that even if it was the dwelling place of ghosts and demons, they would not hurt us because we were great, we were as they and we carried our honor wisely. We should have known better, we really should have listened to what the people said.

"It was not ghosts that they spoke of when they said the cliff was cursed. They spoke of the wind. The cliff was made in such a way that it curved up into a wall with a flat space above it shielded from the southern wind by an overhang of stone. We called it the Claw because of how it looked, not even thinking about what living inside the Claw would mean.

"We made a lot of money for four years and the Claw protected us from harm, but it also gave us power over the peasants who called us the Children of the Claw. We were proud, very proud, so proud that we never listened to weather warnings, what need did we have of such things? We were the Children of the Claw! We were great, we were powerful… we were doomed.

"For years the Claw had protected us from southerly winds and we thought it was the ultimate weather protection. And so we did not think anything of it when a wind came up from the north," the Chinese vampire’s face had twisted in horror as he spoke. Lianndra could feel his own face twisting as well as he realized what would happen if the wind had been strong enough. Phang confirmed his thought.

"The wind tore the roof off of our house it was so strong. We knew that our only chance was to escape out of the Claw and make it to the backside of the overhang where the wind would not be able to get us. My family, two brothers and a sister, Niani, as we called her, our little rose that we loved so dear. Everyone made it out except for Niani and my father. Niani was crushed under the walls when they collapsed. My father tried to help her and was swept over the side of the cliff to land on the reefs below, his body smashed by the oncoming waves. He loved Niani so very much. He was only trying to help her, but instead he died, leaving us to fend for ourselves.

"In one day, my family was ruined. We had nothing left. Foolishly, we had stored all of our liquid assets in the house and they were swept away, swallowed by the greedy sea. And because my elder brother was not yet a man, he could not take control of my father’s business, and a woman was not allowed to hold property which kept my mother from keeping my father’s lands and goods, so everything else we had was taken away. We became beggars in the streets that we had once walked down with proprietary strides. My mother turned her face to the wall and never spoke again. It took her a year to die, slowly fading away bit by bit until there was nothing left.

"My oldest brother worked himself into an early grave, he tried to do too much. He worked and acted as a father to us. He gave up his childhood. He was too young for the responsibility of caring for us and the only job that he could get was not something someone so young could properly do. He was barely fifteen and he was working in a factory seventeen hours a day. I will never know what happened to my other brothers. I left on a ship for the new world the day I turned sixteen, where I was promptly chained, named a Yellow-Dog and was made to lay down track for the railroad."

"That’s when I met you," Lianndra said slowly, truly realizing for the first time what he had saved his friend from. Realized the kind of horror and degradation that Phang had been made to feel, then had been lifted away from by a Hungry vampire. Sometimes it was a bit of a shock to learn that other people had their own stories of tragedy and life.

Phang nodded. "Yes, that’s when you came. Only for me it had been a long time since the Claw, though the time had passed slowly. By the time you appeared, I was twenty-six years old and the best years of my life had been wasted. The house was ruined when I was twelve, so between then and until you came, I had been a servant and slave for fourteen years. I would never have been able to be the person I should have been, it was just too late, that time was gone.

"Yet you gave me back life and hope and true purpose. You lifted me from the slavery my ignorance bought me and gave me everything. Now that same wind that ruined my life is back again, only this time there’s a mind behind it, a mind that will stop at nothing to hurt you, even if it means killing me and leveling the Club. Can you understand the horror that I felt when that wind started up? I thought that it was all going to happen again, only this time it wouldn’t be my father that was swept away, but you," there was a childlike quality to his voice. It was the voice of a child that had lost everything and wishes not to lose anything more. That can’t lose anything more.

Lianndra could see in Phang’s eyes that the Chinese vampire had found someone else on which to focus the affection a son feels for his father, and that person was Lianndra. There was only one thing to do. Lianndra leaned down and hugged the other vampire around the neck, nuzzling his face against the feathery soft white hair, breathing in.

Phang held him tightly, his face pressed against Lianndra’s stomach. "You promise you won’t leave us? You’re all we’ve got."

"Us?"

"Me and the other vampires that you’ve Made or taken in. We all think of you as our father. Without you we’d be lost. If you were ever gone there would be nothing and no one to represent us to the Council, no one that would care for us the way you do, and all of the things that you’ve given us would be taken away by the mortals. And so, we need you more than we need anyone else," as he spoke, Phang leaned back his head to look up into Lianndra’s face, which was softening as he saw the look directed at him. A look of adoration, awe, love and respect all mixed together.

Lianndra smiled. "There’s nothing to worry about. I don’t plan on going anywhere, not for a very long time, maybe never. I guess you’re all stuck with me."

No one that has ever lost someone they love ever wants to lose anyone else. It’s a fear that they carry with them forever, or at least until they are absolutely certain that the people they love never want to leave them.

Now Phang knew that Lianndra would never leave of his own freewill. He knew that Lianndra really did love him and all of the others. It wasn’t something that Lianndra said; it was something that shone brightly in Lianndra’s face, a clearness of feeling that was visible for anyone to see if they looked.

The open feelings that they showed each other were okay for a moment, but after awhile everyone gets uncomfortable when there is too much. The only person that could ever withstand such a continuous barrage of love is an infant that hasn’t yet closed itself off from the world, hasn’t yet developed the emotional protections that time makes necessary.

"Oh, hm." Lianndra shifted uncomfortably and drew Phang up to his feet. "Come on, let’s go see how that new guy is. What’s his name again?"

Phang twitched his clothes straight. "Riely. He just signed on last month and is a rather young gentleman. This was his first assignment for you: to guard the boy and keep him from escaping. It’s rather sad, isn’t it? He hasn’t even really tasted of life and it’s over for him."

They turned to look at the corner of the room where a once handsome young man quivered in agony on the floor, blood pooling around him. His skin had been lashed by the wind, allowing blood to ooze freely. The skin that usually protected a person was no longer whole. There was nothing there. There was nothing to stop the loss of blood. There was no stopping his death, no natural way that is.

"Who said life’s over for him?" Lianndra asked archly, striding across the room to the man’s body.

Using a foot, he flipped the man over onto his back and stretched the body out.

The man whimpered in pain and tried to curl in on himself. "No, just hold still for a minute and I’ll end the pain for you, but to do that you have to trust me. Can you do that?" Lianndra asked, carefully enunciating his words.

The man nodded weakly. He would have sold his soul to end the terrible pain.

Lianndra went down on his knees, mindful of the blood on the floor. He looked at his wrist. It wasn’t so very long ago that he had Made Chris, now he was Making another vampire, one that was in the same kind of situation as Chris, desperately close to death, or at least wishing he was.

He sighed and nipped the vein on his wrist with one fang, watching as the blood welled up thick and slow, offering so much more than mortal blood ever could.

His blood offered forever life, forever death, never seeing the sun again, killing and maiming without end and a wish for death that never went away no matter how old a person got mentally. At the same time it also offered power, immortality, the ability to rule weaker mortals and vampires, and the right to rule any of the weaker species that walked the earth at any given moment. All mortal blood offered was life, and at the end of that, death.

He hoped that he was making the right decision, it was something he wondered every time he Made another vampire, damning them to walk the earth for all eternity. He was never sure if what he did was right and he thought that he would always wonder.

Everyone always says that they want to live forever, but so few really mean it. The ones that do are the ones that have to be watched closely, they are the ones that are willing to do anything to get what they want; they’ll lie, cheat, steal and kill, but most of all they’ll sell their souls for what they want. They will willingly say they’ll go to Hell as long as they don’t really have to. It’s one of the facts of life that those kind of people will always be around in one form or another, but when they manage to become vampires it means that they’ve gone beyond the usual imagined step and have passed into reality. And when that happens, there is no way to halt a person that is willing to do so much to get what they really want. They are unstoppable in their search for power and greatness.

Now, as Lianndra gazed down at the security guard’s face and prepared himself to Make another vampire, he had to wonder. What if this man turned out to be just another dreamer that crossed the line? What if he had applied for the job for the express purpose of the opportunity it represented?

Lianndra shrugged, in that case he better hurry and not let a go-getter like this one get away. He tipped his wrist, allowed the slow moving blood to run off into the man’s mouth in a dripping waterfall of blood.

Riely choked for a second, gagging with the horrible wheeze that only came to the very old or the badly wounded. Then his throat contracted and he began to swallow the blood as it fell, his mouth moving with a kind of desperation, not wanting to waste a single drop.

Looking at the man Lianndra felt the closeness he always felt when he Made a new vampire. There was a bond between them now, a bond of blood.

Whoops, that’s what he had forgotten.

He quickly pulled his wrist back. He had forgotten one step. It was the first time that that had ever happened to him. Either he was getting old or his concentration was slipping.

If there was no true interchange of blood, an animalistic vampire might come about. They were terrible creatures ruled by their Hunger, their human intellect burned out of them, only their mindless need to Feed remaining.

The mixing of blood was sort of like a filter, balancing out the toxicity of the vampire blood with mortal blood. It was sort of like how a body could reject a donor organ, being unable to incorporate the new piece into the old self. In the case of animalistic vampires though, the vampireness wasn’t rejected, instead, it overwhelmed the mortal part and left only a creature behind, no trace of passion or conscience or even intelligence left.

There was a one in one hundred percent chance of a person being an animalistic vampire when they were Made. The chances rose to frightening proportions when blood wasn’t interchanged before the Making; it raised the chances to seventy-five out of a hundred percent, three-fourths of the newly Made being animalistic, their brains burned away to nothing.

He had almost made a deadly mistake and all because his thoughts had wandered on to other things when they should have been focused on the task at hand.

Lianndra silently cursed himself and leaned forward to attach his fangs to the man’s neck and gave a small suck that started the blood flowing. He Fed until the man’s heart fluttered in his mind. Then he pulled back and presented his still bleeding wrist to the man’s waiting mouth.

First there was nothing, but after a few drops of blood landed on his tongue and slid down his throat, the man attached his mouth to Lianndra’s wrist and began to suck. It was not very much unlike the feeling a mother experiences as she feeds her newborn baby. The only difference here was that if the man was allowed to drink too much, he would become too powerful and Lianndra would shrivel up and die. It was just one of those things.

Lianndra watched as Riely vomited up his insides then limply fell into his own mess. The bright red and brown chunks of meat on the floor had gone from the useful parts of a human body to scraps of meat that a dog wouldn’t eat.

He shook his head sadly. What a waste.

Over the years Lianndra had slowly but surely formulated the idea that mortals were beautifully crafted creatures. Whenever a mortal became a vampire, something of that untarnished and crudely wonderful beauty was lost to be replaced by the polished beauty of a vampire. Yet even if a vampire is more beautiful, there is something empty in it, something that is left out of the mix, something that is essential for true and pure beauty. Something that he himself didn’t have, but missed when he saw it in others.

Even the most ugly of mortals was beautiful to his eyes and he couldn’t help being jealous of them. How could they have so much and not even realize it? It was a true and miraculous puzzle that only enhanced their beauty tenfold.

If he could ever go back to when he was mortal, he might change the past and keep himself from becoming a vampire just so he could keep the untouched and untroubled beauty of the human races’ childhood. Then he might never have seen the horror that he saw now creeping over the world.

When he looked at regular humans, he was starting to see the polished vampiric beauty in the faces of mortals that didn’t even know they had it. The new blood mixes over the last few years had created a whole new breed of people, a hybrid of the original species that was, oddly enough, more beautiful than the original.

A hybrid is a mixing of species, but in this case it was a mixing of skin and eye colors and the genes that caused them. Just fifty years ago a white man might not have ever dreamed that he would marry an Asian wife, now it was something that happened every day. It was an unstoppable wave that mixed all of the different colors of the rainbow together to create a new masterpiece from the original.

The reason why people were so difficult about mixing the colors was because they were like any painter, worried about how the colors would turn out. As any person that mixes colors knows, all colors mixed together will make an ugly shade of greenish-brown or gray. That’s how people thought. They were afraid that if they mixed the colors, the composition would be an ugly shade that would make them rue their decision. Now they know that if you don’t try something, there was no way to be all the way sure.

When someone finally got up the nerve to mix their skin color with someone else’s, they came up with a whole new color that was appealing in its own way. This started a whole skin color revolution with the result that the human race had taken the next step in evolution, acceptance of themselves and others.

When he saw this rising beauty and mental freedom, he was afraid. It was something he wasn’t a part of and never could be. They were experiencing whole new things and whole new trains of thought while all he could do was watch and wonder.

He was a dinosaur compared to them and there was no way that he could physically change to match them. They had already passed him by.

On the floor the guard groaned, slowly and ponderously shifting himself sideways out of the cold and wet puddle that had been, just scant minutes before, part of his body.

"What happened?" the man’s voice was blurry as he realized he was on the floor. His hand rose to his face and felt the smooth skin that held no hint of what the wind had done. Horror reflected in his eyes.

Lianndra smiled benevolently down at him. "You’re a vampire."

"What?" The tone was incredulous.

How come no one just believes the things they’re told? It would be so much easier on everyone if people just accepted what was said to them. Unfortunately, people have picked up the bad habit of asking stupid questions. Lianndra sighed.

"You are a vampire," he enunciated slowly and loudly.

"I heard you the first time," Riely said. "What I don’t understand is what the hell you’re talking about! A vampire? Are you nuts? Even if it were true, how did I get to be one, huh? Answer me that, smart guy."

"I turned you into one by granting you the BloodTouch when you were in so much pain. Don’t you remember?" Lianndra watched as the man’s hand rose again to his cheek, like someone that has had a dream only to discover that it wasn’t a dream at all.

"When you were hired one of the requirements of the job was that you had to go through a physical, and at the end you were given a little red pill that you were told was a new form of antibiotic that would keep you from getting sick for awhile. What it actually was, was a drop of my blood that was carefully treated and dried. When you ingested it, it became part of you and froze a copy of the ‘blueprints’ your body uses to keep its shape.

"What this means is that if you hadn’t swallowed it and the wind had torn your skin the way it did and I had given you the BloodTouch, you would have been in eternal torment. Instead, your body remade itself as a vampire, using the copy of the blueprints it had. Only the blueprints placed your body back the way it was three months ago when you passed the physical and swallowed the pill. Thus, you are no longer injured the way you were." Lianndra smiled and shrugged his shoulders, pleased with himself.

Riely looked down at himself with a disbelieving expression, staring at the smooth unbroken skin. Skin that was the same bronzed tan it had always been. Even as he watched, the color was sucked into his flesh, just sort of absorbed. His skin was now the same smooth white as Lianndra’s, untanned and somehow inhuman.

"Why do I look so different?" his voice held the evenness that only comes with shock. He was on the brink of hysteria and was barely holding himself together.

Lianndra smiled a gentle, calming smile. "You are a vampire now, and being a vampire entails a certain kind of look that we all share. Why, just look at poor Phang here, he’s white as snow. His own people thought that he was some kind of a ghost when he came back after he was changed. They just couldn’t understand what had happened to him. That’s when he left them."

"He had to leave his own people?" The now glowingly green eyes shifted from Lianndra to Phang. "Does that mean I’ll have to leave my family and friends too? Does that mean I have to give up my wife Bev and my little boy Calvin Junior?"

"Probably, yes," Lianndra said bluntly, not so much to torture the man as to get the pain out of the way as quickly as possible.

Riely’s eyes filled with unshed tears. He hadn’t Fed yet so there was only the shadow of a reddish tinge.

"Phang, you know what to do," Lianndra said.

The Chinese vampire nodded over his shoulder, already heading for the side door to the room that opened with special keys that only Lianndra, Kinisah and Phang had. There was a long dark hallway beyond the door that led to another locked door and finally the huddled shapes that were the leftovers from the nightly entertainment that took place on the second floor.

Almost all of the mortals involved in the entertainment were of a criminal nature. They were spied on the street, their minds were read for signs of guilt, then they were brought to the club on the lures of either free drinks, free entertainment from the club’s exotic dancers, or they were mind controlled into coming to the club. It was a very good deal for the vampires and Others. There were a lot of lowlifes in the city.

"Lianndra? Lianndra?"

He turned his head to see Chris still tied to the chair, trying to help Dezi straighten her broken legs out so the bones didn’t grow back crooked.

"I forgot about that." Lianndra hurriedly strode across the room to Chris’ chair and broke the ropes with a negligent seeming yank.

Chris stared down at the broken rope. "I thought you said for even a vampire this rope was unbreakable? How did you do that?"

"I lied."

"You lied? You lied! But I couldn’t break the ropes. How could you have tricked me like that?"

Lianndra smiled slyly. "That’s all it was, a trick. You believed that the rope was unbreakable and so it was--for you. Your mind’s belief in the rope was so strong that you couldn’t break it. I didn’t trick you--you did."

Chris stared at him with his mouth open. "But… but the rope… wouldn’t break… tricked me." His mouth quivered as if he were about to cry, then he suddenly launched himself at Lianndra, knocking the smaller vampire to the ground with a reverberating "thud."

They scuffled around for a minute and it would have been longer except that Dezi’s sigh interrupted them.

"Will you guys please cut it out?" she said. "This hurts really bad. Look at this stupid bone sticking out of my leg, it’s going to just keep on growing until it matches up with the rest of it, which is never going to happen. So unless you want me to be completely miserable, give me some bloody assistance, why don’t you."

They immediately stopped to look at her leg. The bone that had broken through the skin was slowly starting to grow, trying to match up with its other half. If it wasn’t stopped soon it would try to grow a whole new leg and then she would have two legs in the same spot, both splitting away from each other, kind of like a hair with a split end. Definitely grotesque.

Lianndra cursed and scuttled across the floor to jerk the bone back into place. There was a popping sound and Dezi’s eyes squeezed shut in momentary pain.

When her eyes reopened, Lianndra had already reset the other leg and the skin was already closing over the wound and the bones were knitting back together neatly.

She sighed in relief and stretched her legs out. "Thanks a lot. Next time, though, don’t cut it quite so close," Dezi said. "I could have been maimed for life at the rate you guys were going. Here, help me up." She held out a hand to Chris.

Chris helped her to her feet and accepted the hug she offered. Even if Sonny had been messing with his mind, he didn’t have to accept what the other vampire had done to him. It hadn’t been his fault so he wasn’t the one that had to hold onto the guilt.

He hoped that Sonny was miserable. It would serve him right.

Lianndra saw all of this on Chris’ face and smiled to himself. Chris was on the road to recovery and along the way he had picked up a lesson that he could use later.

"Hey, what about me? What do I do?"

At the sound of that voice, Lianndra turned to look at Riely who had climbed unsteadily to his feet and was fingering the sticky and torn remnants of his clothes.

"For now you may wait," Lianndra said crisply. This was not one of his special vamplings, the ones that would go on to greatness when they got over the shock of the transition. This was just one of the employees, and not a very good one so far.

The man subsided sulkily. He was not used to being told to shut up. He was used to his looks bringing him the things that he wanted with a minimum of effort on his part. Only now was he realizing that good-looks only take a person so far. He had seen people on Lianndra’s payroll that made him look almost ugly in comparison.

As soon as he saw that he had put the security guard in his place, Lianndra relented. "How about you call Sully and have him send up a cleaning crew? This place is a wreck."

Having something to do brought Riely out of his momentary depression. He managed a weak smile and a nod that somewhat resembled a military salute. He may not have been the best person for a security job, but he would give all he had if it let him earn the respect and adoration that he craved. The respect and adoration that he saw on everyone’s faces when they looked at Lianndra.

He’s going to be trouble, Lianndra thought. He made a mental note to himself to have the man culled. It would save a lot of difficulties later on.

Why have a second rate security guard when he could have a first rate grunge worker? He wondered how well Riely could clean a toilet.

Just then the locked door opened and Phang came back in with two men on either side of him. Well, not exactly on either side of him, that was impossible with the way he carried them by their necks.

Both men had wet hair and freshly scrubbed faces. What diner wants to eat dirty food? Their eyes were squeezed shut in agony as Phang swung them around like two little kittens to drop them with a thump onto the floor.

"Please, please just let me go, I have a family. I didn’t see nothing, I swear. Just, please, please, plea…" the man’s begging was cut off by Chris’ fangs attaching to his throat. The man gave a loud exhalation of pain that turned into a moan of pleasure as the tiny bit of vampire virus in Chris’ saliva found his pleasure centers and activated every node to its limit. Even if he had wanted to stop the draining of his blood at first, he didn’t now. If Chris stopped, it would be an unbearable agony.

The man had been instantaneously addicted to the most potent of drugs, a vampire’s Kiss.

Chris made a mumbled "Thank you" to Lianndra and Phang as he sucked the blood out of the slightly quivering man. Finally he pulled away, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He didn’t want to kill a fairly innocent man for no good reason other than the fact that he was Hungry.

The man, on the other hand, had a whole other idea. He surged up off his knees and grabbed Chris by the front of his tee shirt. He had the bulging muscles of someone that regularly worked out.

"No, no, you can’t stop. Please, don’t stop. Keep drinking, keep drinking." The man that just moments before had been begging for his life was now begging for his death.

Chris looked at him hopelessly for a moment, then looked up at Lianndra, pleading in his eyes. He wanted someone else to make a decision for him, a decision that no one else could ever make.

Lianndra slowly shook his head. "It’s your call. You’re the one that’s going to have to decide. It’s something that I can’t do for you."

He felt sad. If Chris made the conscious choice to take a human life, the last bit of human innocence that had been left to him after the BloodTouch would be gone forever.

Chris’ eyes filled with tears and he broke the man’s grip, pushing him away from him with enough force to send him careening into the far wall where he was knocked unconscious. He would never know how close to death he had been.

Lianndra couldn’t help the small, sad twist to his lips. He wished that he could smile and show Chris the great pride he felt, but all he could do was remember a time when he had the option to make the same choice and hadn’t made the right one.

The loss of that last bit of innocence rested heavily on his soul. It was the one thing that he truly regretted, the one thing that he wished he could take back and knew that he never could.

No matter how much good he did or thought about doing, there was no way to take back the sin that he had committed when he had killed for the first time with full conscious choice behind the act. Before that he had only killed once and that had been because of his Hunger and the way it had taken control of him.

Once something happens there is no way to take it back, no matter how hard one tries. Sins can be atoned for, but murder is one of those things that can never be entirely paid back, no matter how much someone wants to.

Maybe if the person he had killed had been a criminal it would have lessened the weight of the sin on his soul, but it hadn’t been. It had been a kindly shopkeeper that had taken in a boy that he thought was hungry and helpless. And even if Lianndra had been Hungry, he had not been helpless, not until after he had realized the magnitude of the act that he had committed. Not until he realized that he was surely doomed to Hell. At that moment he had collapsed over the body and wept tears of blood over the quickly cooling corpse.

He would not have to feel the flames for a long time, but he knew that when the time came, the reckoning of his sins would be of such great proportion that it would be impossible for him to pay the bill he had raised. Not even after an eternity of torment.

Lianndra sighed and nodded at Phang to rid the room of the unconscious man. Even living bodies begin to smell after awhile, especially one that has just slid through a pile of blood, meat chunks and feces. In a few minutes the man would start smelling very ripe, and even if a vampire is impervious to most bad smells it would still be annoying, not to mention disgustingly unsanitary.

Phang grabbed the man under the arms and threw him through the still open door of the backrooms. In a few minutes that still darkness would be filled with the sounds of cloth tearing and maybe even the screams of a man in torment. The Raveners were always willing and a new body would be much appreciated in their search for unholy copulation. Soon the man would be traveling nude in the fashion of the Raveners, his face and body streaked with scars from the many attacks he would take in his search for supremacy.

The Vampire Club certainly was not a place designed entirely for vampires or mortals. The Others that visited were of varying species, species that no mortal had seen in a thousand years or more, not in their natural forms at least. Vampires aren’t the only ones that can move freely among the mortals after all.

Raveners are only one species of the Others. There once was only one of them, as there had once been only one vampire. Over time the Ravener had found a way to change mortals into one of its own. It, that’s the only word to describe the Ravener, it. They have no sexual identity, no matter what body they wear.

That one Ravener came across a mortal and through sex changed that mortal into another Ravener, a companion. After awhile there were more and more Raveners, so many that rules had to be made to keep down their population. If every mortal on Earth was a Ravener, vampires would starve, and no one really wanted that to happen. And so the Ravener species was pared down to the brink of extinction, where it would stay for the rest of the time that Others walked the earth.

Raveners earn their name through their voracious appetites. They don’t experience intercourse in the same way as humans or animals. During the act they scratch, bite and chew their partner, that is why all Raveners are horribly scarred, they don’t cut their nails and they don’t stop at just drawing blood. They are willing to grind a person’s face into hamburger in their search for pleasure.

When they are done, they leave their victims in the muck and go off in search of some other unsuspecting creature. The person that is left behind is changed. Something happens during the attack, something that transfers the Ravener sickness from one person to another. The person that had just minutes before been a sane and respectable human being would rise up as a Ravener and search for someone that might satisfy the horrible cravings that they suffer from.

Thus the Raveners continue, no longer running free in the wilderness but drawn into the service of their vampire lords. They live in their designated areas and satisfy themselves on a vampires living victims. They are a vampire’s version of a trash compactor--an easy way to get rid of the unwanted remnants of an active life.

Lianndra sighed. "I don’t know why we need to get rid of people like that. I really wish that we didn’t have to. It’s just that those kinds of people never change, they’re not even good enough to become culls. It’s sad really."

He sighed again and appraised Riely with his eyes. He hoped that the man didn’t end up being less than a cull. For mortals there were the Raveners, a door that was shut for vampires. What this means was that since vampires can’t become Raveners, their fates are much worse.

He remembered a time when he had seen a vampire that was less than a cull being taken care of. It was an incident that he wished he could forget, but knew that he never would, no matter how hard he tried. The horror of it was burned into his mind forever, staining him black inside.

He swallowed. He refused to think of that. Refused to remember the fear that had gone through him when he realized what his fate would have been if he hadn’t been Made into a vampire lord, if he had been less than himself. He purged the thoughts and fears. He was Lianndra de Voight, nothing less than that.

"Come on, let’s get out of here. Let’s just leave Riely here to Feed. We don’t need or even really want to watch, do we?" Lianndra asked, tilting his head.

Chris and Dezi shook their heads.

"No way." Chris was acting more and more like himself. That strange expression had left his face and he was again the calm and rather amiable fellow that he normally was.

He was a regular person inside, but on the outside he was a vampire. Even if he’d just Fed, even if he had just allowed something to happen that he knew was wrong and had somehow managed to overcome an act that was worse, he was still a regular person inside.

There was still an innocence to Chris, an unbroken shell inside his mind, and Lianndra was glad. He had worried for a minute. He had feared that Chris might take the plunge that he had, would kill in cold blood, with full intention of murder in his heart. Instead, Chris had found the strength that Lianndra himself hadn’t been able to find, had not let his instincts control him.

Chris had passed the test, the test that he himself had failed so long ago when he still had his own innocence. Lianndra still felt the shame of that failure. The test was a measure of the innocence that was left in a person after the change, the test of how much innocence there ever was there in the first place. And though Lianndra was young in years when he had become a vampire, he had never truly been innocent in the conventional sense, not since that innocence was torn away from him when he was too young to really miss it. Not since a family friend had taken his trust. Not since his parents had been unable to protect him from the horrors that came with living.

He had accepted an evil that he hadn’t really wanted and hadn’t understood--an evil that he had been unable to resist for the sheer freedom and stability that it had seemed to offer. He had become something unnatural, something he hadn’t wanted to be and hadn’t, in fact, really known existed. It hadn’t been a hard decision because he hadn’t thought about it before he made his choice, and if he could he would have gone back and changed his mind--maybe. Or maybe he would have made the same choice again. Maybe what he had was better than what he didn’t. That’s the way it is sometimes, and no one ever knows the consequences of their actions until it’s too late.

The life that he had now was one that he had grown to like and enjoy in some kind of twisted way. It was as if all of the dark urges that ever came to a person had been distilled with the change and was multiplied by a hundred or even a thousand fold. Which meant that even though he should have hated what he had become, in a strange way he had to admit that he rather enjoyed the good life of a vampire lord. Forget a moralistic viewpoint. Life was damn good and he would never give it up, that was why he was what he was--a cruel and calculating killer, a taker of human life purely for the purpose of filling his belly and enjoying the hunt.

Life was good.

Chris was innocent and Lianndra was not. It had nothing to do with being naive or ignorant. It had to do with the inner protections that kept the mental core of a person pure and didn’t allow any of the things that come with life to blemish its crystalline surface. It was the thing that people call innocence, the thing that allows a person to enjoy something without thinking of consequences or ways that that something could be used for personal gain. It was the thing that let little boys and little girls play together and ask direct questions without fear of something dark lurking under the surface of what answers the other person might give.

Innocence allows people to be what they are and not try to be something that they’re not or to cover their own wishes in a glistening layer of self put-downs and emotional platitudes. It was the thing that kept people happy and carefree with their lives. It was the emotional buffer that dampens down the pain that comes with living. Innocence is that thing that is not seen, heard, or even really thought about, but which is always felt and always instinctively recognized in others but never in oneself.

People seeing true innocence for the first time are usually stunned. They don’t know what it is, but on some level they recognize it and are jealous because they know that they don’t have it. The people that are the most innocent are usually the ones that don’t even know that they are, the ones that coast through life surrounded by a cloud of protection. Even when something painful and emotionally stunning happens, their innocence allows them to bounce back from that pain stronger and more self-confident than ever before.

Lianndra envied Chris his innocence, knowing that he had lost his own long before. He had lost his innocence far too early. He didn’t get to experience it past the age of six and the loss of that emotional filter showed in how far he had progressed into the vampire mind.

Children need some way to balance their emotions, their innocence helps, and since his own was long gone when he first became a vampire, he overdid it with the rebalancing job and became the ultimate killer. He could kill anyone at any time without even a thought to remorse and the things that come with it. There was nothing to control him--the controls that keep a person in check had never had the time to form in his mind.

When he had first realized how different he was from the people around him, he had gone insane with jealousy and had set out to kill all the innocence in the world. That had been the worst time of his long life, it was the time when he had written the Book of Vampires. The last time he’d read it, he’d had to wonder what in hell he’d been thinking; it was a ragtag assortment of mental depravity, mostly due to the way life had changed so quickly and the way things had caught up with him.

All of the horrors of life, the social degradations that were commonplace, as well as the wild killings on the streets, had all been dropped on his unprepared mind. When his mind had realized that there was nothing out there to protect him, his thin veil of control had snapped and for a few years he was a ravening monster, killing and killing and killing without any thought to families, to children who found themselves suddenly orphans. He had been plunged into reality and he didn’t like it, so he changed it.

In the reality that he created, he was the one that everyone had to be afraid of, and if everyone was afraid of him, who would dare to hurt him? He had become a nightmare come-to-life in his search for some way to protect himself from the things that he was most afraid of. Other people.

It was as if he had a great thirst that he quenched with the lives of those that would never have dreamed of hurting him intentionally. He envied those that were innocent, so they were the first that he tried to corrupt with his own evil. That was the overriding reason that he had made Chris into the monster that he himself was, rather than letting the boy die as he more rightly should have. He Made Chris for revenge, in a need to get back at a world that had taken his own innocence from him.

The only problem was that all of these realizations were internal and he didn’t know them in his conscious mind. So there was nothing between his need to kill all innocence and Chris, the most innocent and unaware of all. Yet another child corrupted, melting away from the inside out without ever knowing what he was losing, not until it would be too late.

He liked Chris, even loved him, but there was no way that he could stop an urge that he didn’t even know existed. Lianndra’s innocence had been torn away and that was a very sad thing. Not because of what it had done to him, but because of what it was doing to Chris through him. He was going to do something that he was forever going to regret, and he didn’t even know when, how, or even that he was going to do it at all.

All he knew was that there was something wrong with him. He didn’t usually think so much about the things that he did. He just did them and did them well. So well that he never had to do them again. Which meant that if whatever he was going to do took place, there would be nothing that could stop him. He was invincible and unstoppable. He was doomed.