Who am I?

 Chapter 1

As the last bit of sunlight disappeared behind the mountains, I readied myself for a night of feeding. I carefully moved as quiet as a shadow from my hiding spot and slipped into the nearby forest. The intense smell of green moss, tree bark, and pollen hit my nose. I paused to shake off the intensity of the scent and attempted to focus my nose. I moved through the trees as swiftly and as quietly as I could and used my nose to sense my pray. I paused as a whiff of buck came to my nose. I smiled and turned my gaze in its direction. My pace increased and before the poor animal knew what hit him, I was on him. As I reveled in the pleasure of taking the blood of such a noble creature, a twinge of guilt hit me right in the gut. My kind do not normally feel guilt, but somehow I had gone against all odds and developed a way for myself to feel guilt. I believe it came from my studies of the human brain and human behavior during my college career. 

As I was about to drain all life from the creature, I stopped myself. I healed it’s injury created by me and hoped that the creature would survive. “I will check on you tomorrow.” I said quietly to the creature. I felt full and ready to take on the world. I walked to the other end of the forest and joined the others in their fun. They always gathered every night to speak of politics and other-worldly troubles. I did not always join them, because sometimes when I did join them, bad things would happen to me. You see, we all have powers, and some would use those powers to mess with their own kind. I would never do that, however that does not stop them from doing it to me. The last time I showed up to the get together, a visitor from another place made me see things and hear things and made me act like  a crazy person. I was told after the fact that I was to be knocked out and locked up if I didn’t settle down. This was not my fault and they never even caught the culprit. 

Now that my sister in blood is in charge, though, it feels safer. I have asked her over and over to give me some sort of title, any title, but she refuses, she doesn’t think I am important enough. I guess fixing the minds of my kind and others is not an important job in her mind. I am a psychologist, I work with people in 3 different worlds. The first being the human world, the second being the one that I live in, and the third being the world of the dead. Even as a mortal, I was able to see ghosts and talk to them. Everyone thought I was crazy, now I have people come to me to use my talents. It’s far better than when I was a child. I have a friend named Quinn. He is from that realm. He often helps me with a lot of the issues that come my way. He is also a confidant, and wonderful companion. I miss him when he is off doing things in his world. There are many things that I wish to accomplish, but no one seems to understand what I am capable of, therefore they are holding me back. As they hold me back, I continue to get bored and when I get bored I start creating projects for myself. For example, I have gathered my friends that are also like me and we have started a mural to hang at the gatherings. Every time we gather together with our brethren and find it boring, we start to paint and draw and color on our mural. It is turning out quite well. 

I’m sure at this point you are wondering who I am, I am Aurora Herring, a vampire psychologist who sees and hears ghosts. This is the life I was forced into by my sire, the one who made me. I have found it difficult to find my place in this world and the struggle continues. Some days are harder than others, and sometimes there is danger and sometimes there is not. I choose to feed on animals and try not to kill them, others kill humans every day. I would be contradicting myself as a psychologist if I fed on and killed humans. “Oh no!” I thought to myself, it’s happening again. I am starting to pace, I feel nervous, someone is messing with my head again. Are they going to lock me up? Are they going to knock me out? Within minutes I feel the world go dark…..

The First Time I Killed a Zombie

Have you ever heard of the prophecy found during the millennium about how there would be 3 days of dead right before the apocalypse? I had heard of it, but only as a ghost story, and those who did know of it, did not believe it would ever happen. When the lights first went out, I was planning out my future. There were things to look forward to, but then everything went dark. I screamed out loud, knowing that this was the end. The world was dark at 12:00pm, lunchtime. No one expected it. The prophecy stated that those that remained true to God would be taken up to heaven before the lights went out and those that did not would have to try and survive the three days of dead. Three days where undead creatures would walk the earth and try to take the remaining sinful souls left on earth. My sister and I felt alone, the rest of our family and a lot of our friends were already with God and we were left behind. Neither of us had much experience with weapons but we knew we would need something in order to get through the next 3 days. We found an axe and a sword. Heather took the axe as it felt more natural to her and I had had some experience with sword fighting, so I felt more natural holding the sword. The hordes of undead started to trickle down the streets, but we ran as fast as we could to find shelter and to hide. We made it to a small abandoned house on an old road before any of the undead creatures found us. We barricaded the doors and found enough food to last us 2 days. We weren’t sure how long the days of dead would really last so we had to be prepared for anything. We spent 2 days watching shadows of undead creatures go by the windows. We hid in the windowless pantry where the food was and ate out of the cans and bags as quietly as we could. On the morning of the third day, I went to the window and peaked outside. I did not see any undead creatures, but humans walking together in a long line down the road. I immediately ran back to the pantry to tell Heather that there must be good news, they must have a safe place to go. She agreed that we should try and follow them. We gathered up what little we had and tried to sneak out the front door. Just as the door creaked open we saw an undead creature making its way towards us and blocking our way from getting to the humans. I looked at Heather and she nodded and I lurched forward towards it. I could smell the rank smell of death that seeped from it. It tried to scratch at me and missed. Even though I knew I was being threatened, I felt guilty as if I should not be killing this creature because it was a human at one point, but it had to be done. I lifted my sword and quickly chopped off its head without another thought. The remainder of its grotesque body fell to the ground with a thud. My sister and I ran, silently, to join the group.