Shadowkissed (A Hemlock Grove fan fiction)

pay attention to the dreams

They found her in an abandoned ship just off the coast of Alicante, almost six hundred years before Christopher Columbus landed in America.

"She's as good as dead," the leader had said as his lieutenant held her mangled body in his arms. She'd been naked, raped and left for dead by the ship's first pirates, though her consciousness wouldn't comprehend that until later. "Leave her."

The lieutenant, a young man with a secret darker than any of his shipmates could ever imagine, was more sympathetic, too much humanity still left in him even after the change, but he knew the rules: die by one's own hand, that's the best way to do it, perhaps the only way if you want to survive in this world. So he came back for her in the night and took her in. Raised her up as his own, fed and clothed and nursed her back to health. He warded off the terrible nightmares of her times on the ship, brought her up in the Roman Catholic way, taught her Spanish and Russian and Latin as though she were some sort of educated royal. Like she was his own daughter. He taught her of the lineage she was born into and what she was destined to be. And when the time came, she was ready. She came into her own like she had been raised to do it—because in a strange way, she had.

Ivana can hardly remember those days now, what it had once been like to be so fragile and weak, so human. Memories from the early stages of her Upirism were the first to go, and very few things here in the modern world ever remind her of the sensation of being human again. It's been so long since she's even thought of her surrogate father's name, let alone accepted the fact that he's dead now, that all of the people from her past are dead. That's the problem with living forever: not everyone else does, even the ones who are supposed to.

There is much she still remembers from later centuries: the beautiful clothing of the 1500s and handsome, ill-tempered King Francis I of France; the 1800s, of which she spent almost seventy years in England where women were subjected to even worse conditions than those before Spanish colonization; the 1900s, almost all of which was spent dawdling around America. Most of all, she remembers the lives she's taken because of what she is, though she has long since lost the remorse for it. She knows many Upirs who have kept a written track over the years of every person they've ever killed, every body they've ever drank from, but Ivana doesn't need to do that. She sees their faces every night before she goes to sleep. Sometimes, some of them even stay to pay her a visit in the ever-present nightmares.

The newspaper headline glares up at her from the stand on Penrose Avenue: HEMLOCK GROVE'S VERY OWN ROMAN GODFREY AMASSES ENTIRE EMPIRE OVERNIGHT. The boy staring back at her wears a cool gaze, dark chips of green ice for eyes and a cunning smile that could get any girl into trouble, pale face, sharp jaw. Ivana knows an Upir when she sees one, and Roman Godfrey is a walking, talking poster child for their kind. It's amazing he's made it this long without being hunted down by the Order or some other fucked-up regime who thinks they're doing the world a favor by killing Upirs. She just doesn't believe this one could be so cruel. If the stories are true, he ripped his own mother's tongue off and sold her into the Black Market, wrote his murdering sister off, and shacked up with his cousin to produce the abomination that has everyone in her world in a frenzy.

A hand reaches forward and plucks the paper off the stand. Christo, one of Ivana's oldest friends in the Coven, examines it with narrowed blue eyes. "What a fuck ass," he mutters.

"Fuck ass?" Ivana hides a smile. Out of their group, Christo has always been the one she could most see herself getting along with in the long term—it's always hard for their kind to stay with something for a long period of time, though Ivana thinks their commonalities could be beneficial. They have the same dark sense of humor, the same hatred for everything living in the world. They even came into their own around the same period, both in Spain to boot. "Roman Godfrey is a scared kid, that's all. He's got no guidance from anyone of his kind, he'll be easy to bring into our world. It's the baby we've got to worry about."