The Sorrows of Midnight

Chapter One

                                                                                 Chapter ONE

The woods were quiet, all the animals silent and watchful. That should have been warning enough to know something wasn't right. Everything had a heavy, almost mourning feel to it as if crying for the people that had been killed not far from where I stood, hidden in the frozen and deathly silent woods.

It always felt like this when someone died as if the earth itself was trying to tell everyone what had happened. It's just most humans didn't see or feel the earth crying, trying to show them what had happened right in front of them.

Sometimes I couldn't help but wonder what it was like to be so blind, walking around without knowing that we hid in the shadows, waiting for them-the humans-to come too close. Most of the humans never had a reason to question the little white lies told by the high-up government officials.
The governments knew about us, they even helped cover up some of the more . . . Brutal murders. The kind that could never see the front page without bringing about a world wide panic. And because of that, the governments make sure that it's buried with the rest of their lies.

I don't blame them though, the humans were better off believing we are just things of fiction, movies and nightmares. But the truth is, we are real. And way worse than any of those things could even began to guess at.

I wasn't usually this gloomy. The feel of the woods must be getting to me, despite my shields. Then again, I was kind of gloomy before I got here.
   Having to put one of my hunters in the ground makes me that way. If I had just taken that case when it had hit my desk, Marshall would be going home to his family right now instead of being six feet under the ground. At least I didn't lose both Marshall and his hunting partner; who was in one of our hospitals but he was alive. And I'll take that over the alternative any day.

This was the reason I sent my hunters out in pairs. Oliver was able to tell me where and who killed Marshall. And I was after his head. Nobody killed my hunters and lived longer than a day afterward. Not that vampires were 'living' creatures anyway. They were just corpses that could move and talk. But even so, that corpse was about to be dead-dead as in there won't be any more walking or talking for him.

I went still, my whole body tensing up as I heard what I had been waiting for, footsteps but they were too loud and clumsy to be vampires. No, these were human footsteps.

But how many? I strained my ears, trying to get a rough estimate on how many humans were walking toward me. Thirteen or fourteen, maybe. The footsteps were oddly synchronized. And with how loud the human footsteps are, there was no way in hell I was going to be able to hear the vampires soft, catlike ones.

Because vampires definitely had to involved for this many humans to be walking down the road in pitch blackness with a foot of snow on the ground, without talking at all. It was the no talking part that gave it away. Humans always talk, it gave them some kind of comfort.

But, it could be witches too. They could keep the humans from talking, especially if it was a coven of witches. But for some reason, I knew deep within me that it wasn't the witches. Maybe I was picking up more than I realized.

But it didn't add up. What did the vampires need with this many humans? Oliver had told me that this was just a pair of vampires. It would take them weeks, if not months to drink all of these humans dry. This didn't make any since.

I pulled in a silent breath, narrowing my eyes as the flickering colors of the human's auras cut through the darkness between us. And two vampires in front of the humans, leading them. No matter how human the vampires appeared, their auras told it all. They were monsters, just like the rest of us. But their auras held bits of who ever they had fed from. That's why they needed blood, because they technically died when they were made into vampires, and they couldn't have their own aura. Only living things have auras, so they had to figure out a way to get one; and what better way then to take it from blind humans? The human's wouldn't know what had happened, they'd just wake up with a headache and think they drank too much.