Treasure: a Vampire Novella | The Empty World Sequence

Four - Treasure's Tale Part 1

It was the one called Orchid who turned me. And it was Orchid who broke my heart; twisted, wrenched, filled and broke my heart. But I shouldn't begin there. Is the beginning earlier? My childhood perhaps? Well...

He nearly raised me himself. I was not quite left on the doorstep of The Villa, no, my mother got off an airplane in Karachi proper with her six-year-old son and made her way to the famous Villa Shade.

You see it was long ago and things with the world were different, then, in the twenty-second century. Many different human governments ruled the world, each a piece or two. And things like information, ones and zeros, money...they ruled the governments.

The United Arabia had just formed less than a century before but at the time all this started for me, life I mean, Arabia meant nothing in particular. At least it meant nothing to my mother.

To any girl growing up in Scotland, Arabia was just this huge power that Britons expected to become worse than United America as soon as they got a strong technology base. Scottish girls lived in suburbia for the most part, secretly envying Americans, driving minicars, shopping at fairs, going to dance clubs, taking mild doses of potent drugs...and the like.

My mother was bored and she was lonely. Red hair, green eyes, these she gave to me, and just the slightest psy power which I later found I inherited. She could see visions sometimes. She could tell when she was being lied to.

There were men from London who visited many times because of these powers. They were always wanting something from her, and later I felt that she feared them and finally left Scotland because of people like them.

My Father... He is a mystery. I never learned his name. I don't know if he left us or if in leaving Scotland we left him. He met my mother in a graveyard, he was lurking, she was contemplating death: hers. He scared her, the emotion excited her and they founded a relationship on it.

Supposedly he was a wizard, a warlock, or a witch, something like that. He knew real magic which he taught my mother to use. I gather from things learned later that he was either part of the early Union of immortals or he knew very much about it. I remember him speaking of the Darkling, and him going out to meet people, he used the word darkling in place of darling, a word he might have used often. All his speech was curious, archaic.

When Mother and I arrived in Karachi, and it had been my father who gave the then secret locations of the havens to her, Mother found The Villa. By this time there was a village very near to the famous house and nearly everyone who lived in it did so because The Villa itself was no longer large enough to house everyone seeking its protection comfortably. We moved into The Village, as it was called, and Mother got herself a job in Karachi proper.

Now there was no living in a proper city for us then, even if we had wanted to. Mother practiced Black Magic and I had been raised from an infant to drink human blood on certain occasions including every full moon. I had my own deck of Tarot cards, and a crystal ball I stared into for hours trying to learn the concentration needed to see. No human family would accept us as neighbors so we moved into The Village, and were welcomed there.

The leader of those in The Haven was Orchid even then, he is very old now, though still beautiful and young in appearance. Some still used his true name then and I learned it. It was not forbidden to use it then as it is now. The different Nephillim and Darklings have their personal opinions on the charm of names used to do magic. I do not use my true name anymore.