beautiful standing there casually. He was six foot
tall, his body every bit toned. Black hair hung below his chin the sharp edges highlighting a strong jaw line, perfect lips. His hair swept across his forehead covering the whole left side of his face concealing those eyes, the colour sharp enough to pierce her soul.
He wore polished black shoes and black trousers. The top few buttons of his white shirt were undone showing the tanned skin on his chest. The long sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to just above his elbows. Every feature was perfect. He had looked like this at the exact moment of his death, more than a millennium ago.
Scarlet's breath caught in her chest as she saw him, not because of his charming good looks but because, for the first time in more than a year, she was face to face with the monster that had murdered her parents.
"Damien!" Scarlet shouted. "Stop this now. It has gone on for long enough."
She knew he wasn't going to back down but at least she had tried to end the fighting with words before resorting to violence. Damien began to grin which made her heart leap around in her chest.
"Now I know you've got more to say to me than that. Don't you want to know the reason?"
"For what? Why you let us get here or why you murdered my parents?" Damien's smile grew and Scarlet's anger did the same.
"They fit together." All three people in front of Damien looked confused.
"How?" they asked.
"Long ago, before I became a vampire I, like you, was weak." His smile faded and he looked as if he was lost in thought, the memory painful.
"I lived with my parents and my brother. I lead a normal life for so long and when my parents died in a fire, I was devastated."
Scarlet found it hard to believe he had ever felt any kind of emotion, but the knowledge that he was human once and had a more devastating past than most was difficult for her to swallow.
"I was only fifteen, just as you were, and for two years my brother and I lived on our own struggling to survive. On my seventeen birthday, a girl promised me she could make me forget my past apart from my brother, how could I refuse an offer as good as this? I wanted to rid myself of my tragic past and this was my way to do so.
She made me what I am. As I changed I should have forgotten everything, but the fiery images still stuck in my mind. I didn't forget and my memory of that day became clearer and clearer. It is like I'm reliving that day over and over."
Scarlet saw pain flash across his face, only for a second but it was there. Scarlet remembered the dream of her parents and how vivid it had become but before she could say anything about it, Damien continued.
"I hated every second I existed but I thought I could get through it if my brother was with me, I needed to hold onto whatever family I had left, but he refused. He refused to become a vampire and after he died the only part of me that was still human died with him. All that was left was the hunger, the overwhelming thirst for blood. The burning spreading through my body getting hotter and hotter the longer I was without blood. I needed it, not just to live, but to ease the pain of my past and to fill my body with something more than the agony of grief.
The moment my fangs sank into the neck of my victim was the only moment in my life I forgot my own problems and tasted the sweet substance that was the reason for someone else's. I killed everybody in my village but the pain was still there, I then made my way around the globe killing until there was nothing left I wanted but blood and power."
"What does this have to do with me exactly?" Scarlet was sick of him talking and wanted him to get to his point. She also couldn't stand the fact she had started to feel sorry for him.
"Patience, my dear, this all makes sense." He talked as if they were friends who had just come to visit him.
"After a while the, as you would say, good creatures that no one had believed in at the time, decided letting me roam around was putting them in danger. They imprisoned me and all the creatures I had following me underground." He laughed a little. "They didn't want to kill us, how they regretted that decision, when a witch and a vampire that had escaped their grasp found an ancient ritual and freed me. I had my revenge on my captures and the reason I became a vampire, your family."
"What?" Scarlet didn't understand how any of this was their fault?
Damien lost his cool, she watched as his jaw pulsed with anger."It was your ancestors that started the fire that killed my parents!" he shouted, his stormy, grey eyes darkening with his anger. "Your ancestors that gave me these!" He moved the hair covering his face. She gasped as she caught sight of the scars that were etched into the side of his face, like ivy climbs a wall.
"No," Scarlet said in disbelief.
"Yes." Damien stopped her before she could continue speaking. "It is your family's fault the world has become like this and now you are the only one left." His sly smile returned. "But not for much longer.