The Vampire Sword (Vampire Sorceress Book 1)

by T. L. Cerepaka

  Still, I hated seeing Dad so sad, so I reached out to him and said, “Dad, please don’t look so afraid. You’re scaring me.”

  But Dad suddenly stood up and backed away just before I could touch him. Surprised, I lowered my hand and looked at Dad, who was now looking at me as if I was a snake about to bite him.

  “Don’t touch me,” said Dad, his words trembling. “I know what happens when Newborns touch a person. I’m not going to force you to go through that.”

  I smiled nervously. “Dad, what are you talking about? I’m twenty-four-years-old. That hardly makes me a ‘Newborn,’ don’t you think?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Dad. He put his head in his hands, a look of pure agony on his face. “Oh, it’s worse than I feared. Why, God? Why did you decide to put me through this? What have I done to deserve such a terrible fate?”

  “Dad, you haven’t done anything wrong,” I said, sitting up in my bed. “You—”

  My words were interrupted when the door to the room opened and someone I hadn’t expected to see stepped inside. It was the stranger who had saved me in the church earlier, the tall, dark, and handsome man. He looked exactly the same as he did before, but somehow he looked even more handsome to me, why, I wasn’t sure.

  “What is the matter?” said the man, his voice as deep and sexy as ever. “I heard people talking. Is Tara okay?”

  Dad whirled around and pointed an accusing finger at the man. “It’s your fault, you damn vamp.”

  The man raised a quizzical eyebrow. “My fault? What do you mean, Richard? Saving your daughter’s life?”

  Dad shook his head. “That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know. Tara’s awake, but she’s not herself anymore. She’s changed, Lucius.”

  The man—who was apparently named Lucius—suddenly frowned seriously. “Wait, you don’t mean—”

  “Yes, I do,” said Dad, nodding. “Tara is … Tara has become … she’s a vampire, Lucius. And she’s already thirsting for blood.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I sat there in silence, staring at Dad in confusion. “Did you say I’m a … vampire? Like the bloodsucking kind? The ones in the movies and books? Like Dracula?”

  Dad turned around to face me. Tears were flowing freely from his eyes now, tears that frightened me far more than anything he had said so far. “Not like the kind you see in the movies. The real kind. The evil kind. The kind that serve the Darkness and, by extension, Satan himself.”

  I gulped. “But, Dad, I don’t serve Satan. I don’t even like him. I’m a Christian and I serve the Lord. Besides, vampires don’t even really exist. They’re fictional.”

  “That vampire who attacked you in the church certainly wasn’t fictional,” said Lucius dryly. “If he was, I don’t know how he would have bitten your neck and left you bleeding half to death like that.”

  My hand jumped to my neck. “Wait, that guy was an actual vampire? You’ve got to be joking.”

  “Lucius is right,” said Dad. He walked over to the desk and sank into the chair, a look of pure despair on his face. “The man who attacked you in front of the whole congregation was a vampire. An honest-to-God vampire.” Dad glared at Lucius. “And it’s all Lucius’s fault.”

  Lucius rolled his eyes. “Richard, you know I’m not responsible for that vampire’s presence. I was only tracking him down on orders from the Council. It was just bad luck that he happened to choose to attack your daughter.”

  “I thought I’d never see your hideous face again, you vamp,” said Dad, not even bothering to hide the hate in his voice. “But now you show up on the same day that my daughter is converted. Do you want me to kill you or something?”

  Dad’s harsh words and even harsher tone stunned me. While Dad had always been a stern man you didn’t want to mess with, this was the first time in his life I had ever heard such intense hatred in his voice. It made me wonder who this Lucius guy was and how Dad even knew him. I even felt a little bit jealous. Why had Dad kept such a good-looking guy from me when he knew for a fact that I was looking for a husband? Did Lucius already have a girlfriend or wife or something?

  “I’m not any happier to see you again, either, Richard,” said Lucius, folding his arms in front of his chest. “But fate is a fickle thing and sometimes on destiny’s trail you run into the same people again. Getting angry about it is unproductive.”

  Dad looked at Lucius suspiciously, but then he slowly nodded and said, “You’re right. I shouldn’t have been so quick to anger. You’re still a Pure, right?”

  “Right,” said Lucius, nodding. “I have no interest in harming any humans. If I did, I wouldn’t have helped you get Tara to your house without anyone seeing, nor would I have helped heal her wounds.”

  “You healed my wounds?” I said, rubbing my neck. “How? Are you a doctor?”

  Lucius looked at me and my heart skipped a beat at just how handsome he looked. “No, but I’m curious as to why you would think such a thing. Aren’t you aware of what I am? Didn’t your father tell you?”

  “Tell me?” I said. “Tell me what?”

  Lucius looked at Dad again, a questioning look on his chiseled features. “Richard, didn’t you tell your daughter about vampires? About magic? About your past?”

  Dad gulped, but did not look away from Lucius. “I didn’t think she needed to know about it. I didn’t want her to go through what I did.”

  “You seemed to enjoy it back when you were younger,” Lucius said.

  “I’ve changed my mind since then,” Dad replied with more than a hint of annoyance. “Meanwhile, you clearly haven’t changed at all in twenty-four years, have you?”

  I looked at Lucius in surprise. “Wait, you knew my dad twenty-four years ago? Just how old are you, anyway? You look barely older than me.”

  Lucius sighed and scratched at his scar, which seemed to be a habit of his. I thought it was kind of cute. “And here I thought that you had explained it all to her already. Given what she’s gone through, I think we have no choice but to tell her about it.”

  “For once, I agree with you,” said Dad. “I wish to hell you were wrong, but at this point, I can’t hide it any longer.”

  “Can’t hide what any longer?” I said. I licked my lips, mostly because I was still thirsty, though whether for blood or something else, I didn’t know. “And what about the church? How long have I been knocked out?”

  “A few hours,” said Dad. “After that vampire attacked you, Lucius and I moved you out of the church to the parsonage. As for the rest of the congregation, everyone is safe and escaped the church during the fight, though the police showed up and asked a few questions.”

  “Did they get the body of the guy who attacked me?” I said. I didn’t use the word ‘vampire’ because I still didn’t quite believe it myself, even though I was starting to have the sneaking suspicion that vampires were real after all.

  “Nope,” said Dad, shaking his head. “It turned into dust, which is what happens to the bodies of vampires after they die. Even the dust disintegrated. I convinced the police that the guy escaped through the back and that he’s still on the loose somewhere in the town, so I imagine the police will be distracted looking for him for quite a while.”

  “But won’t the congregation get suspicious when they find out that I didn’t go to the hospital?” I said. “Everyone saw what happened to me.”

  “Everyone only saw what they think they saw,” said Dad. “Don’t worry. I’m going to send a message out to the church email list tonight and post on social media that your wounds weren’t as serious as they appeared and that you’re going to be just fine. Still, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to go to church—this church, at least—ever again.”

  I frowned. “Why? Because I’m a ‘vampire,’ as you put it?”

  “Yes,” said Dad bluntly, without a hint of irony. “It would be too dangerous to put you in a room with so many humans, even if your blood lust isn’t very strong at the moment. Even ju
st sitting here in this room with me is dangerous, because I have no idea if you will lose control and try to suck my blood.”

  I was about to object to that, but then caught myself and remembered how I was thinking about sucking out Dad’s blood from his neck earlier. I was still thinking about it even now, which horrified me and made me wonder if there was more truth to what Dad said than I thought.

  “In fact, it would be better if you didn’t go anywhere for a while,” said Dad. “Not even back to your apartment in town. It would be too dangerous.”

  “I’m not so sure, Richard,” said Lucius. “Tara seems unusually aware for a Newborn. Most Newborns usually lose their sanity just a few hours after they are first bitten, sometimes even within the first few minutes. Perhaps the attacker didn’t get a chance to finish the transformation process?”

  “I still don’t know what you guys are talking about,” I said. “Also, I’m still not even fully convinced that vampires are real.”

  Lucius smirked. “Interesting you’d say that, given how you’re talking to one now.”

  My eyes widened. “Wait, you’re a vampire? For real?”

  “Of course,” said Lucius. He bowed. “Lucius Red, at your service.”

  “He’s okay, Tara,” said Dad, though he sounded reluctant when he said that. “He’s a Pure, which means he’s a vampire who doesn’t drink human blood and actually tries to help us rather than harm us.”

  “So not like that guy who bit me,” I said, though I still spoke skeptically. “Right?”

  “Right,” said Lucius, standing upright again. “That one was a Bloodseeker, likely just graduated from Newborn status. They’re usually the least rational vampires, having given themselves up to their blood lust in exchange for pure animal strength. They can, however, still be killed like any other vampire, as you saw when you blew his brains out.”

  I gulped. “You mean I actually killed another living creature?”

  “Vampires aren’t living creatures, Tara,” said Dad, shaking his head. “They’re undead. They aren’t even human, at least not anymore.”

  I pulled my blanket up to my chin. “Does that mean I’m not human anymore? And if I’m not human, am I even still saved?”

  Dad bit his lower lip again, looking like he was mentally kicking himself for saying that to me, while Lucius said, “Perhaps we should start from the beginning. You clearly don’t understand all this talk of vampires and magic. And given how you are still rational, it is possible that you may not be a vampire at all, but something else.”

  “Yes, let’s start from the beginning,” I said, nodding. “But if you’re going to say ‘In the beginning, God created vampires,’ then I’m not going to listen.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that,” said Dad. He smiled. “But that’s a good way to start a joke, isn’t it, Lucius?”

  “I don’t get the reference,” said Lucius with a shrug.

  “You don’t get the—?” I shook my head. “That alone tells me that you’re not human, though I still don’t know exactly what you are.”

  “I already told you,” said Lucius. “I’m a vampire. Did you forget already? Newborn vampires usually have memory problems when they are first created, but you must be suffering from an especially severe case of it, because everything I tell you seems to go in one ear and out the other.”

  “That’s what I used to tell her when she was a kid,” said Dad with a chuckle. “Never listened to a word I said.”

  I looked at Dad in annoyance, but then looked at Lucius again and said, “Just tell me what’s going on, okay? I still have no idea what has happened to me or what you guys are talking about. Let’s start with vampires and how they’re allegedly ‘real.’”

  “Certainly,” said Lucius. “The faster we start, the faster we can get to figuring out just what happened to you and a possible way to fix it.”

  Dad raised a hand. “Let me start. Tara will be more likely to believe me than you, but you can chime in with any details I forget to mention.”

  Lucius nodded. “Very well, Richard. I’ll offer clarifications whenever I can.”

  Dad then looked at me and said, “Now, let’s start with the fact that I used to hunt vampires for a living.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “What?” I said in confusion. “You hunted … vampires? For a living?”

  Dad nodded. He took his glasses off his eyes and wiped them with his shirt. “Yes. Before I became a pastor, I hunted vampires for five years. I was so well-known for hunting vampires that I became known as the Hunter. In fact, that’s how Lucius and I first met. We were hunting the same vamp and ended up having to work together to stop her. That was about twenty-four years ago, back when you were just a teeny tiny baby.”

  I looked at Lucius again. “So Lucius is older than me, but he doesn’t look it.”

  “Vampires don’t age the same way that humans do,” said Lucius. “Usually, we’re stuck looking like whatever age we were when we were first transformed. I’m actually over three hundred years old.”

  I gaped. “No way. You don’t look or sound three hundred years old.”

  “I’ve learned to change with the times,” said Lucius. “It would be hard to fit into modern society if I still spoke with sixteenth century slang, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah … yeah, I guess it would,” I said. “Although the fact that you’re apparently a vampire is a bit more incongruent with modern society than speaking in centuries old slang.”

  “Can we get back to the topic at hand?” said Dad. “You wanted to know about vampires and magic, which I’m trying to explain to you.”

  I looked back at Dad again, but I couldn’t get my mind off the revelation that Lucius was over three centuries old. It reminded me of how, in the book of Genesis, some people lived for centuries longer than ordinary people, but we weren’t in the Bible and Lucius certainly was no Methuselah. Either Lucius was pulling my leg or he really was that old. And if he was that old, I wondered how that would affect my chances with him.

  “So, vampires,” I said, trying not to show how freaked out I was by all of this. “How long have they been around?”

  “Since the dawn of time, more or less,” said Dad, leaning back in his chair and draping his arms over the back of the chair. “They came into existence when an evil spirit known as the Darkness corrupted some early humans, giving them amazing power in exchange for their souls.”

  “The Darkness?” I said. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “It also goes by the name of Satan,” said Dad. “At least, I think it’s Satan. It’s either that or it works for him, but either way, it’s evil and is the reason vamps exist in the first place.”

  “Richard is correct,” said Lucius. “Though I disagree with him about the Darkness being Satan, it is the creator of the vampire race. Not that all vampires worship it, however. I certainly don’t, being a Pure and all.”

  “Right,” said Dad, though the way he looked at Lucius told me that he wasn’t entirely convinced of that. “Anyway, vampires have existed all throughout human history and in every culture and country on the planet. Their exact forms and powers have changed from culture to culture and there are a lot of variations, but one thing they’ve all had in common is the desire to kill or convert humans. They see us as food at best and enemies at worst that need to be outright exterminated or converted to their cause.”

  I put a hand over my mouth. “If vampires have been around for so long and hate us so much, how come no one knows about them?”

  “For one, there aren’t a whole lot of vamps,” Dad said. “Last I heard, there are about a million of them worldwide, scattered all across the globe, and could be wiped out by humanity if everyone knew about them. And secondly, vampires tend to prefer to work in the shadows. Vamps usually don’t operate in the day because the light can kill the weakest of them and outright cripple the strongest. And thirdly, vamps have been opposed by a group of humans known as sorcerers.”

  “S
orcerers?” I said. “Who are they?”

  “Me,” said Dad. “I mean, I’m one. Sorcerers are humans who can use magic. We’ve extremely similar to normal humans—similar enough that we can blend into wider human society and marry and reproduce with normal humans with no trouble—but we’re stronger, faster, and capable of using magic. While sorcerers deal with more threats than just vamps, vamps have been our biggest enemy and we’ve been theirs for pretty much the entirety of human existence. And, like vamps, sorcerers exist all over the world, though there are less of us than there are vampires.”

  “Magic,” I repeated. I frowned. “Do you mean like Harry Potter? Wave a wand, say a few pseudo-Latin phrases, and shoot magical energy bolts?”

  Dad snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. Sorcerers do pass magic onto their children via blood, of course, but it’s very different from Harry Potter. For one, we don’t need wands to channel our magic, though I’ve known some sorcerers who have used them. Generally, we prefer a wide range of weapons, from swords to staffs to guns and everything in between.”

  “Is that why you were carrying a gun in church?” I said. “Because it helps to channel your magic?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Dad, shaking his head. “My gun had silver bullets in it, which is how they were able to kill that Bloodseeker. Silver is one of the many weaknesses that vampires have. Normal bullets can only slow down or injure vamps, but silver bullets can actually kill them.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, if you’re a ‘sorcerer,’ then how come I’ve never seen you use magic? How do I know you’re still not pulling my leg?”