The Lady of the Valley

TLotV Chapter 2

2.

Mystic Valley nested between three respectably sized mountains in the northeastern edge of Kentucky. It was in a coal and lumber country. The town had given itself a facelift some time in the Fifties, changing its name from Alloy to Mystic Valley. The next town over, on the other side of the mountain, was named Mystic Creek. On the other side sat Wedding Falls, also renamed in the Fifties to try to attract tourists.

The area badly wanted to be Gatlinburg but never quite managed. It succeeded enough to still exist as the largest town between Huntington, Kentucky and Charleston, South Carolina. But that didn't mean much when one stacked it up against Louisville, Lexington, or even Bowling Green and Ashland.

The university made the town big enough to draw students who wanted modern conveniences like a decent number of cell towers and a few Starbucks, but small enough that it wasn't too much of a shock to people who considered themselves pathological small towners.

Derek had chosen Mystic Valley for many of the same reasons. It didn't appear in the news much, especially for bad reasons. It sheltered a few hundred thousand people, so there was variety, but it was definitely not a major city. He was tired of major cities, and especially all the damn vampires.

Being a vampire himself didn't make vampire drama fun or entertaining. Rather it all seemed tedious.He was tired of who he was as a vampire, who all the other vampires either thought, or tried to convince him to be. He had a cyclic past he wanted to break free of, and that didn't happen with a reputation which preceded you.

He needed a new start, in a place that could actually be different, so he could actually be different. Which meant without a heavy population of the undead.

The college thing, well, it seemed to be a time period when lots of humans 'discovered themselves'. Having never had been through an experience like college, maybe it could work for him too. He was born for the first time in 1863. That made him neither an old vampire, nor a new one. So choosing a time when humans faced a great deal of self development seemed apropos. High school was too creepy. And again, he was getting away from drama. But college seemed the right blend of new, confident, stupid, and naive.

Maybe Humaning 101 was a good place to start.

He had a spelled charm to let him walk in sunlight, and another to let him shift back and forth from crow form without un and redressing. But he still thought early afternoon classes might have been a mistake. Either the sunlight or the sheer crowd sizes were weighing on him.

Some traits, like the sunlight, could be augmented with magic. Others, like hyper aware senses, couldn't really. He was a predator, and a nocturnal one at that. His preternatural brain took in and processed sensory stimuli differently than an average human's. On a bad day he looked like a tweeker, but not because he was lost in a drug haze. Instead he could smell a room full of people individually, hear conversations through walls and doors, and sometimes feel the warmth and atmosphere changes of creatures approaching him. Suppressing any of that made his primal vampire brain panic real bad and jump into fight or flight mode. And he was a lot more fight. So crowds took literally more processing power than quiet spaces.

By the time he was done with two more classes it was only four p.m., but he desperately needed a break. Every building on campus had an official name and an actual name. He still only knew a few of them. The SAC was the Student Activities Center, where he headed to get out of the crowd, and the sun. Behind the dark, tinted windows sat a wall of smells; baking bread, fried chicken, bacon, steamed vegetables, on top of the lingering scents of hundreds of humans.

He walked past the tiny food court, and the college radio booth, dark and walled in glass and shelves of CDs, turned the corner and smelled blood.