CLAIMER:
Okay, this feels so different writing such a thing. *hehe* This is just to let you know that Angelica, Marius, and Paz belong to me.
A/N: Okay, just to clear up some things: I get the feeling that some people reading this story think that -my- Marius is the Marius dreamed up by the WONDERFUL Anne Rice. This is NOT the case! I only liked the name, and when I tried it out it fit all too well. I will bow to Mrs. Rice's plea and not write anything associated with ANY of her stories/characters. I am nowhere NEAR good enough to write anything based on her beautiful characters...I've tried. Didn't work.
In short: Marius is mine, not Mrs. Rice's. Promise!
Marius watched the girl pull her knees up to her chest and hug them tightly to her out of the corner of his eye. The vampire sighed. In sixty centuries, he had seen humanity come and fail. He had seen the coming of the Lord, and had been cursed by Him. He should have died before the Man came...and Christ knew it. He had damned Marius and all of his kind for all eternity.
If only it had been that easy.
Paz whimpered beside him, and he leaned back on the park bench and wrapped his arms around the girl. He felt her collapse into him, and couldn't help but smile. What courage she had shown Angelica! Marius wasn't sure he could have any more pride for the mortal girl...standing up to Angelica like that, let alone some strange vampire. Not all of his kind resembled Marius in his values.
From day one, Marius had hated the idea of being a vampire, and had turned himself into a sort of a Vampyric Rebel. He loved the immortality of it, but that was where it ended. He loathed being condemned to the shadows, being forced to lurk in the darkness for the rest of eternity. The bloodlust. The never-ending anger. Take your pick of everything a vampire was entitled to: the only thing he liked was indeed the immortality. After all, that immortality had brought him to Paz, hadn't it?
"Come, Luv. Darkness shies from the morning light in the final stand of darkest night." Marius pulled a bewildered Paz Johnson to her feet. He slipped up for a moment and let himself see inside Paz's tortured soul. He gazed into her eyes. In that one simple instant, Paz had unknowingly let her guard down, and in those unending blue depths Marius saw not a woman, but a lost little child that was afraid of the dark and everything that came with it.
Paz looked up at the demon with wonder in her blue eyes. "That's...As The Night Shies From Day...how did you...?"
Marius was amused. The woman knew more than he had imagined. "How did I know it?" Paz nodded. "I wrote it, Luv. A long time ago...when all I had to do was live my...unlife, I suppose."
"It's my favorite, Marius. Tell it to me, please?" Paz's eyes pled her case with the vampire, and he picked her up into his arms in response, moving silently across the leaf-covered ground as if she weighed no more than a sack of feathers. Marius sighed, and then began to recite the poem softly.
"Darkness shies from morning light
In the final stand of darkest night.
And in that final hour
Thine Princess emerges from the window of her bower
To gaze at thee one final time
Before the sun doth come out to shine.
The Night doth give the Day a good fight
But in the end, the Dark Armies do take flight.
Night gives off a final stand,
And those of us retreat who all are damned
And so as the night shies from the day,
We are destined to continue on this way
Until finally
Thy Princess returns to set thee free."
Marius looked down at the woman who had fallen asleep in his arms, and smiled. She was so innocent: it was hardly fair for her to be mixed up in such as mess with Angelica...but she had chosen as well.
She chose him.
But she had also, in choosing him, chosen danger and hardship and possibly even death. Marius shook his thoughts away. No. She wouldn't die. If worse came to worse, he could - and would - Change her. Marius arrived at his crypt and pushed open the secret chamber he had found and turned into a bedroom on the south wall. He laid Paz on the brass four-poster bed, and pulled the blankets up to her chin before kissing her forehead. "Good night, my love. I shall see you in the 'morrow."
With that, the vampire whisked himself away to his coffin, and fell into what began as a lovely sleep, dreaming sweet dreams of Paz and himself, but things grew horribly worse as one woman entered his dream: Angelica.
...
Angelica paced the length of the foyer room in a mansion she had all but bought outright. Truthfully, she had taken its owner, drank from him herself, and then tossed the leftovers unceremoniously to her minions. She cared not about how they died...just that they did. None of it mattered much to her anymore. She was alone, and not even her Childe could help her through this. He wouldn't.
Truth be told, the ancient beauty was insecure...about anything and everything. She had only taken Marius as her Childe so that he would one day take up her mantle and stay by her side for eternity as her lover and King. He had no clue as to what she was. For all that she knew, the boy had thought she was a simple vampyress, and not the Queen of the Damned herself. Angelica, contrary to popular belief, was not the First, not even close, but she had killed the First and the Second on the way to usurping the throne she held within her unbeating heart. Angelica was the Fourth: the fourth vampyr ever created by the Helldaemons of Earth, and she was proud of it. She had openly boasted of it in her early years, and hadn't learned her lesson until the Second had nearly bested her in a duel.
Angelica had come to her senses and lashed out, killing the First and the Second in a matter of moments. The vampyr who had been the Third quickly vacated his seat, fearing for his unlife, and ran away to never be seen again. After that night, Angelica had found herself utterly alone. She ventured through country after country, had seen the thirteen colonies rise before her eyes, and watched as the New World was populated, gained a government, fell apart, and joined back together anew. She was old, and she was Death's incarnate.
The vampyress cast her jade eyes about the room and took up the novel she had began to read the previous night. The Lord of the Rings. It was as far from the world of the Vampyrs as she could get, and that was why she loved it. Into the night she read, drinking slowly from a glass of crimson blood that was refilled by slitting a young girl's wrist over and over again. Her minions could only gaze at the beauty and wonder how she could construct such a tantalizing facade before her adversaries, and let it down just as quickly when she was beyond their reach. She would remain to them a mystery...just as all of their talents went unknown, and the questions they harbored went unanswered, just the same as had been done to Marius so long ago.
Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
