Moon's Rite

Part 1: Katty

I idly tapped my pencil against my notebook, listening to the professor wrap up his lecture. His content was dry, but I was absorbing it anyways, easily putting plenty of life experience stories to his teaching to help myself remember it all. Once I passed this class and finished up some field work, I would be able to go into business for myself with a psychology degree.

The career had been chosen because of my husband for the most part. Well, one of them. He had been really messed up when I had met him and we had bungled our way through helping him learn to cope with the world again. Eight years of abuse certainly hadn't been healed overnight, and my lack of experience in the psychology field had me feeling just as lost as he had most of the time. But a surplus of love, patience, and luck had yielded a mostly functional individual who could pass as normal.

Not that our lives were often normal.

Firstly, we were in a polyamorous relationship. My two husbands and I, as well as our daughter, were perfectly happy and functional as a family. We just weren't typical. But, my husband Jason's sexual appetite wasn't typical. He could wear both of us out on a regular basis. My husband Max had been heavily abused in every way, shape and form before he had met us, which was uncommon at the very least. And another thing that wasn't typical, our species.

Which was the second deviation from normalcy. We were Vampires. I myself was, in fact, the crown princess of the entire Vampire line, tracing lineage back to Dracula himself. My Royal status seemed to be more trouble than it was worth sometimes, and I hadn't even inherited the full extent of my birthright yet. Both my parents were still alive, so they still held a certain amount of the power, but I could certainly throw my genetic weight around if the situation called for it.

Thirdly. My life was never a leisurely walk down the rosy path. No, I typically found myself fighting thorny, tangled vines as I tried to find the stupid path. I had more than my fair share of bad luck and circumstances. It seemed I was always finding trouble and going head-first into it, only to scrap my way back out later.

Honestly, I had been waiting for something to be dropped into my lap. Five years of peace and prosperity was the average. It had been about seven years since my last scrape with life threatening danger. I was overdue for trouble.

The professor finally dismissed the class and I got my things together. I was in no rush. The night class had most students rushing home to bed or perhaps off to a party. As a Vampire, the night was still quite young for me, but I wasn't really one for partying.

I pulled on my leather vest with a fur collar and packed up my bag at a leisurely pace, feeling no desire to fight the crowd for the door. Once the flow had thinned some, I got to my feet and exited the lecture hall. The Autumn night was brisk, though I wasn't particularly affected by it. Part of being undead.

Still, I put on a show of pulling my vest a little closer around myself as I breathed out a soft breath of steam. Then I was turning for the parking lot to retrieve my car and go home. My boots thudded softly on the pavement, marking my passage and giving my brain a tempo to work with. A song slipped into my head and hummed past my lips as I walked.

The wind rustled through the trees and rushed past me. I slid my fingers through my blonde hair, wishing I had brought a hat as I hit a few tangles. Something caught my attention and I froze, fingers still buried in my hair and eyes carefully scanning the campus around me. I couldn't see anything.

I slowly looked over my shoulder, still on alert. I just couldn't find what it was that had put me on edge in the first place. The campus was mostly deserted by night fall. The psychology course was the only class on this side of the campus and most of the students who had been in class with me had already disappeared into the night and about their business. Fleeting shadows was all I could see. Even with my dark-vision straining.