The Original Sin

Entry 1

Maria sat in a white van, alone, looking through the information in the file she'd been given one last time. There wasn't much there, to her surprise. The name of the coven: Mircalla. A picture of the house: large and white.

There wasn't anything about the vampires who lived there. Not their names. Not how many there were. Nothing. She had no clue what she was walking into.

The only other information the file held was a list of information she was supposed to try and gather from the vampires. Whether they were biting any humans. If they knew the locations of any bite clubs.

Ever since the sixties, biting humans had been illegal. As soon as vampirism was legalized, and infected individuals were no longer executed, biting had been outlawed to limit spread of the disease, but it was common knowledge that it was still happening underground, just like drugs, and prostitution.

Ever since a vaccine had been released, fifteen years ago, some more liberal people had been lobbying to legalize, or at least decriminalize the act.

But Maria had been raised better than that. She knew no risk was better than a slim risk, and that there was a reason for the laws that were in place.

Eventually the van came to a stop at the edge of a neighborhood of old houses, and pulled up on the curb.

"This is the stop." The driver said. Maria didn't know her. She'd never even seen her before. "God bless."

"God bless." Maria responded, before leaving the file behind and hopping out of the van.

---

It took an hour of wandering the neighborhood, but Maria eventually found it.

The great white household stood intimidatingly in front of her, the wrought iron fence pointing to the sky like a row of black needles. In the dark, she could see that a few of the windows glowed orange with light. She counted them. Twelve. Twelve in all. Everyone was awake. Of course they would be. They were nocturnal.

One of her hands cautiously fell to the gate. If she opened it, would it set off some kind of an alarm? She couldn't be sure. Probably not, she tried to reassure himself. Vampires were pretty old fashioned, and they didn't like to get the law involved in their affairs.

She. pushed it open. The creaking seemed so loud. She paused and looked to the windows, but he didn't see a silhouette against any of them. With a nervous breath, she made her way up the stone path, up to the porch, and to the large wooden door.

She sat her bag down, and studied the door. Cautiously, she brought up her fist, ready to knock as soon as her courage finally kicked in. Before she could do it, the door swung open. She stumbled back in fear, just barely catching herself on one of the rails of the porch.

"Hey Switchblade, I told you there was someone out here!"

Maria blinked up at the woman in the doorway. She was tall and thin, and dressed in dark clothing. It was hard to make out the details of her face, but her hair was shoulder length and messy, and looked like it was bleached almost white.