Path of the Vampire forum

“Mircea... Mircea... wake up, my love... you have to see this...”

The woman’s soft voice held an urgent note, something not often heard in those quieter, easier nights of travel and re-connection. It had been well over a year since they’d returned to Harper Rock for anything or anyone - a much-needed respite from the trivialities and mundanities, not to mention sheer conflict, of a life thrust back upon them in a world that had changed too much to recognize. The years since they’d resurrected had been full of upheaval, heartache, too many new faces all at once, and too little time to adjust. It had been a perfect storm, just waiting to break over the heads of the pair of nomads, and they had made a so-called executive decision to vacate the suffocating City in time to save their sanity.

Habren often looked back upon those earlier nights with a mixture of awe and horror. Those old ones, they’d been reckless. They should have been more discerning, as a group, over who they made, but as evidenced by that first meeting among the Elders, they were still in an open state of shock and conflict. Numbers seemed to only way to cure the discomfort and vulnerability and they’d all delved into the rapid-fire siring that had populated the small City with too many new undead to count. If the reports from their Canadian home were anything to go by, those numbers had only increased and now...

Now this.

As she dropped her mobile upon their bed and instead lifted the remote control, that suffocating feeling returned. Every news channel had the same trending story: Humankind had learned of the existence of their Immortal counterparts.

They had suffered such a revelation once before, and it was an event Habren was not willing to repeat for anything or anyone. She would not lose Mircea again, or their amassed progeny that now stood at the brink of a disaster they had disdained to know. Habren remembered well those nights that her childer had spurned her, had spurned Mircea, and their knowledge of the past. Of what could happen when mortals learned truths that terrified them. Her eyes slipped closed for a moment, her thumb and forefinger pinching the bridge of her nose, as she waited for Mircea to fully rouse from the slumber they’d only slipped into hours before. Without looking at the time, she was certain it was barely noon... but this was something even her bear of a husband would have to wake for.

They could no longer ignore their responsibilities to their own, could no longer ignore the new reality growing all around them. Time would be of the essence and Habren's mind was already racing.

Mircea grunted and pressed his face more firmly against the pillow. He could feel the sunlight beating against the closed shutters and knew it couldn’t have been more than a few hours since he had first drifted to sleep. The long Venetian summer days offered ample time to rest and it seemed unfair somehow to be woken so soon, but as sleep reluctantly gave ground to consciousness, he registered at last the note of urgency in Habren’s voice and turned back towards the light with a groan.

As he stirred, snippets of conversation came and went from the hotel room’s television, broken sentences in a dozen different languages over-lapped one another, but within them all a single theme seemed to keep repeating itself over and over:

Vampires.

As he sat, rubbing the last of the sleep from his eyes, he looked around the room. It had been hundreds of years since they had last slept in it, but somehow it still felt the same to him, however the furniture and decor had changed.

“What is happening, love?” He asked, his voice thick and slow as he moved beside her to better see what was happening. There was a woman with a Canadian accent reporting, supposedly on a recent official announcement made by the government from a small town called… Mircea shook his head firmly, sure that he had misheard what she had said, but as that report ended and the channel changed again, there was the fence with its guard towers and gates, keeping the Harper Rock quarantine in place and, just visible over the crowd when the camera panned, rose the spire of the church that had become the Necropolis.

The word echoed from his mind to the voice of the reporter,male this time, as he termed Harper Rock a living necropolis - a city of the walking dead. Vampires were real, he said, and they had first been discovered hiding in plain sight in a small town in Canada that had seen a hitherto inexplicable rise in violent crime, missing persons and homicide. Now it all made sense, he said: They had been murdered by demons of the night.

Mircea glanced at the image in the corner of the screen: Fox News, it proclaimed, and suddenly he understood why his sleep had been so cut short. They had been discovered again and, if all of the reporting was the same as this one, it was only a matter of time before fear took over and somebody decided it would be best to raize Harper Rock to the ground - for the greater good.

“We must do something,” he decided, to himself as much as to Habren. They could not watch and flee and hide. Not when there was so much at stake. Not when they knew what would happen if they did exactly that.

The sleep-washed voice gave solid words to the multitude in her brain, inching through and breaking past the whirlwind that threatened to shut her down. Instinctively, she connected to the Grigori Crownet, then to search each of them, her childer who remained alive at that moment. A sigh of relief went through her that those she knew to remain topside were so far safe. As she ran through each of them, then moved on to grandchilder and great-grandchilder, then to Mircea’s others, her fingers found his and stole around them before she managed to speak once more.

The activity in her brain remained, working in the background, as she turned her attention back to the news. More reports, images of Harper Rock, all sorts of speculation and ... propaganda. Habren felt a tremble work its way down her spine as the whir of her mind continued like a dull thudding, a distant war drum behind the rest of the clutter. But that word... propaganda... it stuck in her head.

“Yes... we must do something... but... we have so much more to lose this time. Whatever we do, it must be significant. We cannot run for the New World again in a vain hope...”

Propaganda... Her gaze turned back toward the television, its high-definition picture blaring the latest breaking news about the ‘vampire threat.’

“The news media! Love, what if we were to use them?”

The dark haired witch slid from bed, taking a robe with her and wrapping it around a slender, youthful frame. “We can gather up some of our kind... mayhaps come forward. Explain our ways and some of our code, how we handle violators.... it might go some way toward assuaging the mortals. But...” She paced the floor of a room they’d known so many times, no matter how it had changed over the years, her fingers rubbing her chin as she considered all of it and how it might work... or not work. After all, it could horribly backfire on them. It could do nothing at all... or make things worse, depending.

“But it must be secretive. We must keep safe. Outside of Harper Rock....” She lifted her gaze back to his, pleased he was, however reluctantly, awake now and listening. “They need to hear our story, love... all of our stories. I can think of no other way to clear some of the mistrust and fear.”

The panic was rising as her head spun with the memories of what had happened before, threatening to overtake her and swallow her whole, but for the continued reassurances that those they’d left behind were still alive and well. Reality was closing in, though, threatening her with the bitter promise of what would happen if they were to fail, or if the mortals were to rise up and take them out again. It had happened once before, it could happen again and the prospect of another few centuries without him could not be quelled.

If he agreed, or had a better idea... if they could get others to agree... it would have to be plotted with an almost impossible level of secrecy. She moved back to the bed, sitting close beside him, suddenly uncertain. Suddenly wishing to do no more than run off and hide themselves well.

“What say you?” she all but whispered, her outward shell neutral and calm, though the male before her would know it merely masked a tempest within.

There was no New World left to run to. There was no anywhere to run to. Not that going into hiding had worked the first time, but perhaps that was because they had waited until the humans were running there, too. It mattered little any longer what difference setting foot upon uncolonised lands would have made hundreds of years prior. What mattered was what they did in the coming nights now that the news had broken and belief was spreading again. There were no uncolonised lands to claim as their own any longer and there was so much more than themselves at stake that they couldn’t run, even had there been some safe place to go.

“The news media! Love, what if we were to use them?”

He watched in stillness, his head tilted slightly to one side and mulled over her thoughts as they spilled from mind to tongue in time with her pacing. He could almost see the fear snaking around her, seeking to enter and suffocate her even as she fought against it. Or perhaps, because he had known her so long and so well, he could see it - in her walk, in the way she clutched her robe to herself, in the fretting of fingers on flesh. A hundred small things showed the desperate need to breathe freely just as brightly as he knew the sun shone in the sky outside their window and yet he knew that if he had tried to list them all, he would be unable to name even half. It was simply her and she was not herself at all.

It would be so much faster than last time, he thought, if the humans decided that their kind was to be extinguished once again. No more would it be bands of hunters seeking out individual vampires; now that it was known that Harper Rock had become home for almost all of the world’s vampires, it would take just a single human to push a button and their entire world would burn. Those who escaped would be hunted just as they had been before, surely. The humans had weapons that those of the past could never have imagined in their wildest dreams.

So to, if he followed Habren’s thoughts, did the vampires.

Their story had never been told previously. The church had its iron grip upon most things in times gone by and news was slow to travel by word of mouth or printed page carried on horseback. Now, as he saw through the bright screen in front of him, a person could reach millions in less than a second. Television, the Internet and social media had turned an individual’s story into entertainment - or education - for billions, if they chose to listen.They could counter the accusations of being demons and mindless murders with the truth that they were, before all else, simply people. He was a man who had had, and then lost, a family. Habren was a young woman from Wales who hadn’t been ready or willing to accept a death sentence cutting her time on earth short. All of them had been human once and they hadn’t lost those past selves in the moment they died, they had simply transformed, grown, and become something else as well.

Mircea shifted on the bed as she sat back down, resting a little weight against her back before he spoke slowly. “I think it a fair plan, my love, if all can be brought together. Not all media can be like this one… Not all humans can think as he does, just as they did not before. We would need to find one - or more if it could be done - who is… Ah, sympathetic to our tale.” He paused to press his lips lightly against the top of her shoulder. “We must be allowed to be more than monsters in the night.”

Habren shook her head, half in agreement, half in disgust for what the newsman was saying now. Everything had changed in the blink of an eye and Habren, for the first time in ages, felt more vulnerable than she had the first time they’d set foot in Canada. Wide open spaces had never worried her before, but perhaps that was because civilization was never too terribly far away from them. This time, though, civilization was the source of the threat, and being away from their Crow-imposed home was a thought that had the fear tiptoeing down her spine.

Still, she leaned into him, let the touch of his lips on satin-covered skin warm her a little more, through the chill thoughts and the too-many worries that spun in her head. “So far, all are accounted for, from the last count,” she murmured quietly, her fingers stealing around his again. “But love, I think we need to head home. Quickly. My first instinct is still to come forward and speak to them before a camera, and I am glad you agree. But first we need to go back. If anyone has any sort of suspicion whatsoever about us, we are going to be in serious trouble.”

Habren sighed then. She wasn’t the least bit inclined to cut their travels short, but the prospect of being killed outside of Harper Rock had her understandably nervous. At least if something happened within the City limits, a large-scale killing or even a targeted hunt, they could all regroup and return through the veil en masse and fight back. So far no one knew that little extra bit of information, that they could return easily from the shadows, that she could fathom anyway. And so Habren resolved to see it more as a side-trip ‘home’ than ending their extended vacation of exploring the world. At least they would be relatively safe and could see to their blood while planning their next steps.

“Well, love… what do you think? Shall we return home for a spell?” An exit plan had always been part of their traveling, in the event they had to make a quick getaway, and she supposed now was the best time to use it. All the while she spoke and thought, a message was composed to the vampire Crownet… nothing she had seen so far indicated it was anymore compromised than it had been before their secrets were spilled.