Reyna: Vampire Queen

Prologue

Reyna gasped as she awoke in a fright. She had no idea where or who she was. She had no memories except her name. Reyna. She was in a sitting position, with something hard pressed against her back. She soon realized that it was an irregularly shaped stone wall. As she groggily opened her eyes, her hearing picked up a high-pitched whistling sound. She couldn't make out where it was coming from, as her vision was blurry and not adjusting very well. Reaching up to rub her eyes, her hand bumped against a familiar object placed on the bridge of her nose. A pair of glasses.

Reyna fumbled for a moment, struggling with the glasses, finally tearing them free from her face and hurling them into the darkness. As soon as the glasses left her eyes, her vision instantly cleared. She could see perfectly, even as she could tell that it was completely dark in the cave. She looked down at herself. As far as she could tell, she was wearing a short skirt, and a button-up t-shirt. She wore flipflops on her feet without socks. Wait, the cave? Looking around, she saw that she was indeed inside a cave. In the distance, she could still hear a faint, high-pitched whistling sound, no doubt coming from wherever the cave entrance was.

Reyna slowly got to her feet, using the cave wall as a support. Her head began to spin, and she almost blacked out. Leaning against the wall, she took a look at the ground where she had been sitting. There was blood, and corpses. She counted about five dead bodies, and where she had been sitting, there was a good amount of blood as well, indicating she must have been attacked by something. As quickly as she could without nauseating herself, she checked her body for any wounds, stripping down to bare skin. She saw nothing. Not even a scratch. Getting dressed, she looked again at the corpses and blood.

"What happened?" She muttered, still in a semi-daze. "Why can't I remember anything?"

She closed her eyes for a moment, to calm the dizzy sensation her head was causing, and her senses seemed to increase by a thousand. She could smell better, she could hear better, and she could even taste better. She opened her eyes quickly, in shock. She couldn't understand anything. What was happening to her? She took a few breaths to calm herself and closed her eyes again to concentrate.

Slowly, Reyna allowed her senses to increase until she had a mental image of her surroundings. Concentrating harder, she found she was able to cast her senses outward to explore the cave without leaving her spot. Doing so, she explored down one corridor that turned out to be a dead end. Failing that, she went down another corridor that ended in a pit seemingly filled with all manners of poisons and traps. Cursing under her breath, she threw her senses down a third corridor that twisted this way and that for what seemed like hours. Eventually, she came to what she was looking for. The mouth of the cave.

Reyna smiled and made a mental note of where the mouth of the cave was hidden, then she turned back to inspect the bodies. There had to be some clue as to what had happened to her. She would take anything at this point. The first body she looked at was an older male with short brown hair and a full beard. His face stirred something inside her, but the memory refused to surface. He was wearing some sort of lab coat. Reyna bent down and went through his pockets. She found some lint, a couple coins in spare change, and a crumpled piece of paper. She unfolded the paper and saw it was a letter.

"Dr. Baxter," it read. "We have seen your thesis paper on vampires and would like to help you with your research. The board has authorized us to award you a grant to help if you can prove that you can capture a real vampire. Do this, and then the experimenting and further research can commence. Fail to capture a vampire though and we'll have to close the book on your research, and you will be forced to admit that vampires are just a myth. Sincerely, Dr. Lawson."

Searching the corpse further yielded a name badge he wore around his neck that read "Dr. Baxter".

Well, no help there, she thought bitterly and moved to the second body. She sighed and reached down to search his pockets. In his inner lab coat pocket, she pulled out a letter still in its envelope. She pulled it out, unfolding it and began to read.