Wandering Moonlight: Writing Prompts & Short Stories

Lesser Evils Part Two

*****Don't make deals with demons, ya'll*****

4– THE MONSTER

I knew my father was still alive. He had to be, because if he wasn't the last year of my life was pointless. My travels, the vampires I had killed all on my own, even though many people laughed at me and called me a child— all of it would be in vain.

But even my endless, boundless hope was beginning to fade. Because for what reason would the vampires need to keep a human alive for so long?

And then I heard of the Farm— the blood farm the vampires had set up for strong humans, where they kept them as pets and fed from them regularly. Some said the pets were even tied to beds with IV's. I was sick at the thought, but if my father was there, at least he was still alive.

I gathered supplies for my trip to the Farm in Northcrest— one of the few remaining human strongholds nestled in the Rocky Mountains of what my father had said was once a state called Colorado long before I was born, when vampires were myth and humans were at the top of the food chain.

My father had some strange stories he liked to tell me about when he was a kid like me.

When I finished in the general store, trading for as much as I could with the meat I had hunted, and the vampire blood I had accumulated over the last few months (doctors use it for healing), I made my way out towards the southern gate that led down the mountain.

But that was when the world came crashing down around me, although it would take days for me to fully grasp how much my world had changed in just a few minutes.

My first sight of her sent shivers down my spine and I could feel my breaths quicken and the little hairs on my body standing on end.

Run, my body tried to tell me. Run!

I ignored the warning in my mind, but kept an eye on the woman, inching around her as she made her slow, studious way through the town center. There were only a few people in the center at that time of day— most were on the other end of the town in the fields— but I could see with one glance around that I wasn't the only person who had a strange reaction to the woman. A few women grabbed their playing children and dragged them into their homes, the blacksmith gripped the sword he was working on and stared the woman down, his knuckles turning as white as his terror-pale face, and a few boys around my age ran in the direction of the fields and barn— I assume maybe to gather assistance.

Which was strange, because she looked perfectly normal.

... At least, at first glance.

On closer inspection, her blood red hair that hung in ropes down her back was just a bit too deeply red. Her pale skin was the color of the full moon on a starless night. And her eyes.

God, I had seen the red of vampire eyes, but her eyes were something different— pure black, but with a center of red that rivaled her hair in its fiery intensity.

Everything about her but her eyes was almost human, but just too extreme. Too pale. Too deeply colored. Her nails too long, too sharp, her teeth sticking out of her mouth like a predator, her ears seemingly twitching as she studied us.

But those eyes told a different story.

What kind of vampire was this? What kind of new evil had been unleashed here?

And why was she smiling at me as if she was genuinely glad to see me?

She mumbled something in a language I had never heard before, harsh and dragging, before a dozen or so men ran into the town center and confronted her.