HALFBLOOD DANCER

17. CRAVING

My mouth drops open, my eyes widening. I've been so absorbed in the story that I didn't see where it was all heading. I wipe the surging tears off with the tip of my fingers, my gaze held by a set of intense blue eyes. I can see right into them, a deep ocean of emotions.

"That means you're half human..." I observe pensively, hearing the astonishment in my own voice. "It explains a lot. I see now what you meant when you said this story would help me understand," I tell Sandro. "But...I thought Descendants couldn't have children."

"They couldn't. The only explanation Dragomir has been able to formulate is that the females were probably the only ones rendered infertile. Or perhaps he was the only one able to reproduce for being a direct descendant of Dracula. He doesn't know, and he has no way to confirm any theory, since they're all gone."

"Wow...I can't believe he had a baby." My hand gestures toward Sandro. "And he didn't even know he could..." 

"Imagine his surprise. No vampire had been born for centuries. He had always thought he was the last of his bloodline and the last of his kind."

"Are your brother and sister his children, too?"

"No. Giacomo and Bibi are the children my mother had with her husband."

"Oh...I thought you said they were like you."

"Only in some ways. They're Tyros, the only ones Dragomir has ever turned."

"Did he ever have any more children?"

Sandro shakes his head. "Just me."

"So, you're the only vampire there is that's also human," I reflect aloud. "And the only one immune to the sun...besides Dragomir, of course."

"Well, not exactly," Sandro tells me. "Some time ago, Dragomir discovered a technique that allows him to make other vampires immune to the sun," he begins to explain. "If he drains their blood more than sixty percent and then provides them with a considerable amount of his own blood, he activates a transformation that allows them to walk out in the sunlight after the first twenty-four hours. They're still enfeebled by the sun, and their eyes are extremely sensitive to sunlight. But it's no longer fatal to them."

"That's incredible...wow. Talk about evolution."

"The entire process it's a notable ritual and a substantial sacrifice for him, even if it only weakens him for a few hours. He has only done it for ten of his most devoted warriors, and of course, for my brother and sister."

"If you don't mind me asking...why did he turn them?"

"My mother made him save them before she died," Sandro says, with a hint of sadness, and I stare at him—blue sky diving into deep blue oceans.

The emotions I find in his eyes are a reflection of my own. I know what it's like to lose a mother. I know the agony that fills your life when you lose the one person you know loves you unconditionally, the one person who gives you and shows you the truest of all true loves.

To feel the bliss of a mother's love and then the loss of that love is like waking up from a wonderful dream and realizing that your life is nothing but a miserable nightmare, a nightmare that will never end. I lost my mother when I was still a young child, and I will never be able to fill the hole she left in my heart. 

"Save them from what?" I ask him.

"It was during the fourth cholera pandemic, which had spread throughout Europe—"

"The fourth cholera outbreak?" I interrupt him, remembering a world-history class I had about fatal epidemics during the nineteenth century. "But that was in the mid-1800s," I venture, thinking that if his mother died during that period, he must've been born sometime in the early 1800s, or even the late 1700s. Then I suddenly recall, as I stare into his eyes, when he was telling me about the time Dragomir was searching for Rosa. He did say in a time where mere electricity was still awakening boundless curiosity in great scientists.