When I walked into the great room, it was littered with the carcasses of dying and dead young men and women. Aare sat in my chair and on his lap sat a young emaciated woman who resembled a skeleton, nevertheless, he continued feeding on the large vein in her neck and looked up only once to see me standing glaring with disgust at him.
“Why don’t you put her out of her misery? You don’t want her anymore. What is it about you that just wants to punish and abuse?” I asked him. I knew the answer. I knew him since he was a boy. A cruel little boy who tortured animals and children.
He took a few seconds to answer me, “I do this because I can.” And that mischievous smile I saw cross his face reminded me of when he was a child and how harsh he had been and how monstrous he had become.
My eyes followed the young woman and sitting in the chair next to mine, the queen’s chair, Samantha sat peering at me with her cold dead eyes. She brushed the girl’s hair with her long fingers trailing down the dry yellow hair as if she was giving comfort, but she and I knew what she was doing. She couldn’t wait until Aare had finished with her where she could use her as one of her lab rats to complete her serum to cover up the fact that she was over five hundred years old. How old I didn’t know and when I first met her it was irrelevant to a young man with his first sexual experience.
Then I only thought about how beautiful she looked and my need for sex became ravenous until I learned to control myself.
Once her eyes were warm and her body supple and receptive. Her thoughts then wasn’t how to keep herself young because she was young, but as I never aged and she had begun to age she saw the difference in me and her. I would live on and she would die if she didn’t do something. She did find a way to follow me into the next century and keep her beauty. At first I didn’t question how she did it, but then soon I found out from Aare.
Aare was assisting her when I no longer would. He was her partner in crime then and now, and when he no longer needed her to satisfy his sexual appetite, at that point he began to keep the young women for himself only relinquishing them when they were drained of everything he needed.
“Is that all you’ve been doing? Killing the locals. Don’t you know someone will miss those young people and come here to investigate?” I warned. I knew this couldn’t go on much longer and I even warned my father and mother about his. If they were to exist they would have to find a substitute for their food supply.
“Let them,” Aare said. “They can’t get access unless we allow them. Besides, I pay the town and the mayors enough where they will sweep everything under the table. There will be no need for them to look for runaways. And some of the town leaders are anxious to become vampires. They want to become immortal.” Aare gave out a small laugh. I knew why because being an immortal wasn’t what they had imagined.
“I’ve convinced them that it will take some time. And like that I can do whatever I want,” Aare said extending his hand in Samantha’s direction. The young feeble woman took his hand and he lifted her back on his lap.
Aare looked at me with a raised smile and sunk his teeth into the girl’s neck. She didn’t flinch. I suspected that Samantha had given her drugs she had cooked up in her lab. The look on the girl’s face, and her eyes black and lifeless told me all I need to know. I had seen those kind of eyes before.
“Is that what you call them runaways? Well I’m modifying how the police force search for runaways, and there won’t be any more feeding on humans.” Aare eyes shot to me and he smirked with droplets of blood dripping down his shirt. “I’m the head of the council now,” I said. Aare shot me a closed mouth grin.
I would have to destroy both of them now, but I couldn’t with all the newly formed vampires and zombies staggering around each corner, who obeyed them.
“So you fashion yourself to be a king. You would be nothing if I hadn’t gotten rid of our mother and father. You would be in the states watching over Zoey. That’s where I made my mistake. I wanted her too. But not for the same reason as you.” One side of Aare’s mouth tilted to the right as he laughed and pushed the young woman to the floor and stood over her, and defiantly facing me
“Have you forgotten about me, Sebastian? I’m your queen and Aare and I have more power together. It is my wish that everything remain as it is. If you want to keep seeing that young woman of yours, then you should at least respect our needs. They have to be met one way or the other. Or you may not see her again. I promise you.”
I turned and walked away. I felt ill because I hadn’t had any fresh blood and I didn’t want any. I needed to feed, but after seeing Zoey, I didn’t have the stomach to feed on humans again. I would find food in the nearby forest.
As I ambled away headed for the door, I turned slightly to see Samantha and Aare whispering. Two young vampires opened the door. I looked up at them. They didn’t recognize me as king. Clearly they took their orders from Aare and especially from Samantha. They appeared to be there to protect her from me or Aare. I wasn’t sure. The two iron doors slammed behind me with a boom, and I slipped off into the corridors so no one would see me.
I felt my legs weakening because the journey was too long traveling back and forth to the states without food.
Knowing I shouldn’t have taken the chance to locate Zoey, I did against my judgement. I had to watch out for her. Besides I was jealous of Ryan to the point that I couldn’t function. And that’s not at all good for a vampire.
There were so many things that I had to be weary of now that I’m back in this hellish castle. I glanced behind me and at every open door to see if I was being followed because all of the beings around here were loyal to Aare or Samantha.
They didn’t fear me for obvious reasons. I no longer fed on the blood of humans and they knew instinctively from the gossip passed around by Aare that I wasn’t to be feared.
If I didn’t feed on human blood, I couldn’t maintain the strength I needed to fight my enemies. I stumbled into two guards and they turned and laughed at me. My own guards in my own castle and they knew what everyone around here knew, that as long as Aare and Samantha were alive, they didn’t have to fear me. I wasn’t strong physical the way I needed to be. Everyone knew it including me.
Ducking into Zoey’s room as a child, I found the space behind the wall and pushed at it and it opened up, and there I lay until the evening as the sun set when I would wake and feed in the nearby forest.
There was no way I would risk letting Samantha get near me ever again. And that’s why I came to the conclusion that I had to find her sister and have her help me to be rid of Samantha once and for all because there wasn’t any love lost between any of us for Samantha.
I would take care of Aare in my own time.
Just like Aare and me had a healthy hatred for each other, her sister hated her more.
When I woke I departed early and I would be back before Samantha and Aare missed me. I traveled through the corridors of the castle as I had done when Zoey was a child and I had discovered this wonderful maze when I too was a child. From one room to the other I would I move about. I knew everything that went on in the castle. All the secrets and lies.
I knew my mother and father’s thoughts before they slept each dawn. I knew how my mother loved Zoey and wanted to keep her human. And my father said it wasn’t practical. It would be too dangerous for her to have a human as an adult strolling around the castle.
“She would fall prey to one of the vampires, so it’s better for one of us to change her,” my father had said. My mother didn’t want to hear of it but my father was persuasive.
“She will ask questions when she becomes older,” he had said to my mother. “She’s fifteen and will have to be changed,” my father demanded. It was then I decided to take her with me but when Zoey started to ask questions of me, I had to send her back to her parents. She deserved to live a life without the memories of the castle and me and I tried to wipe out her thoughts. But I didn’t know that would be temporary.
I heard the conversation between my father and Aare when he wanted to take another queen at the insistence of Aare.
“You are king and you have a right to have who you want by your side. Mother is behaving like a human. She doesn’t want me to change Zoey,” Aare said to him. “You should have someone younger than mother who thinks the way you do, father.”
Aare must have convinced father to destroy mother and in that way Aare was able to seal father’s fate when he turning him against mother. I had gone to see to Zoey and stayed away for six long years.