When a vampire is made, the human is drained of all vital blood. Normally, this is just over twenty percent of the total blood volume—enough to keep them alive, perhaps listening and even seeing, depending on the individual's prior health. Then, the human must imbibe about three to five percent of the vampire's blood. Again, the ratio depends on the person; every snowflake is unique.
The blood of a vampire is so potent; it has the supernatural ability to repair and restore. The recipient should remain on bed rest for at least thirty-six to forty-eight hours, or the change will not hold, and the body could die. Even if they are revived with human donor blood, they will most likely still change over the next week. When we change someone, we adhere strictly to this process to reduce suffering. In the early days, the agony was so intense that only fifteen to twenty percent would survive the transformation. This is why many movie vampires are young; we had to use youth for the higher survival rate.
The Potency of Fluids
With that said, ALL the fluid from a vampire is potent, and each secreion possesses unique properties:
Saliva: Can induce sleep in high doses.
Tears: Act like a stimulant, causing the body to retain an abnormally high level of oxygen and releasing adrenaline. Pulmonary Fluid: Can numb like Novocaine or be used as a focused poison.
Semen: A very powerful narcotic, though never fatal. On a human body, it has the same effect as speedballing—a mix of heroin and cocaine—pushing past standard tolerance levels. The narcotic speeds and numbs, while the sedative relaxes and may induce sleep. The more you take, the more you crave, and the less you feel like you are on anything at all.
Secretions from a female vampire are very similar but not nearly as strong. I won't even get into what urine does.
After Sera and I spent the night together, I placed her into one of our cars and had Johnny, the funny black gentleman who works the club door with Chad, take her to her mother's house. He was instructed to put her in a safe, quiet spot to sleep off the night she had with me at the club and at home.
She should wake up believing that what we did was little more than a dream. This way, she can continue living her life, but she will forever have an unconscious pull to this club and to me. Like a sleeper agent living with Kyle. There is a better-than-average chance that our night together will have satisfied what she was missing, and she will be content for a few years at least.
In the early part of the evening, it was brought to my attention that a very aggressive coven of witches was making noise from a suburb on the north side of the city. One of our familiars reported that they have been traveling to other towns, raising up bodies to act as slaves, and harvesting pieces for spells and potions.
This is something we cannot allow. When bodies start to go missing, the first place authorities check is the underground communities—which means my club. The second is Satanists. Next, they jump to vampires nesting in the area. Again, that means my club. Eventually, someone is going to show up at my door looking too closely, and I do not like the attention. It's tolerable when it's just local cowboys, but when law enforcement or government agencies get involved, things get messy. I've had to move before because of things like this. I have a spot now that I truly like, and I will fight for it. What I fight for, my girls will fight for. I love them to death, but when they get emotionally involved with a personal issue, they truly unleash chaos. What do they say?
A woman scorned, and so on and so forth.
I told Chad to let everyone know the B-squad would run the club tonight. Chad will drive, and I will be taking Jade along for this one. She possesses perfect foresight, able to see physical attacks and weaknesses I can't always perceive. The three of us climbed into the "whip" and began the two-hour drive to Elmcrest—a yuppie, Betamax paradise.
If you make mid-to-high six figures and want to marry a woman you can submit to, this is the place to be. Nothing but women with overinflated senses of accomplishment and low-T men talking about how many women they pretend they had in college. Even when I was human, people like this made me sick: making more money than they need, helping only themselves, and spending most of their money on additions, repairs, and other things they should be able to do themselves. You've got people making ten dollars an hour, slaving away for eighty hours a week, while these people put in their forty hours—working maybe ten of those—and pulling in $800K a year.
Jade was born for this type of conflict. Taking out suburban white women who brag about how much they hate themselves, yet feel the need to access the dark arts for an edge. Her freckles had vanished beneath the red flush of her rage, and we had only just pulled into town.
I brushed my hand softly against her cheek and said, "Easy, my love, save that energy for when we find these people. Can't have you blowing your load in the can; I don't want to see you wasted when we find them." She looked at me with aggression; but once our eyes met emotionally, she began to breathe deeper and slower. She gave me a half-grin and blinked slowly, showing me she had ceded to my emotional stability.
"How far we gotta go into this place to find 'em, Daddy?" she asked.
I told her, "Should be closer to the center of town. Just let Chad do the driving; he will signal us when we are getting close."
After a few more miles, Chad rapped his fingers on the dash and pointed out the window. We slowly pulled into a cemetery. Chad drove up to a giant mausoleum and shut the car off.
The three of us got out, and Chad walked ahead, acting as if he could hear something. After walking several rows of stones, we saw a group of middle-aged women in a circle. One particularly obstinate-looking woman was yelling at the sky—something about positions, maybe concerning her husband's job? I really hoped she was calling something out of season. At this moment, there was little else that would give me more pleasure than to watch her own mind collapse from within.
There are several avenues of this craft. The one most are educated on is the kindergarten witches—self-identified witches who play with yoga balls and mix Eastern philosophy with New Age crystal collecting and call it WICCA. Then there are the hippies who play in their herb garden and think if they think and feel a certain way, everything in their life will line up at attention just because they think it should.
As a philosophy for life, neither is inherently wrong in theory, but it's not truly witchcraft. REAL, honest witchcraft involves people—not just women—who are able to use the six elements of this realm (fire, air, water, earth, aether, and finally intent) and call upon the mental and physical archetypes that support our reality. They use this to manipulate or flat-out alter the normal and natural flow—like chopping down a massive tree to change the course of a river forever. It's a useful tool, but in the wrong hands, it can be destructive to themselves and everyone around them.
Because we, as vampires, are technically a kind of feedback loop in the creation of man, we exist here with man because we are not meant to be here. Put it this way: you want to make a natural magnet that has a positive charge. Once you make that magnet just the way you want it, the negative charge is generated, whether you want it to be made or not. When Cain killed Abel in the Christian Bible story, Cain was punished to walk the earth, not allowed to eat or drink. He got so desperate that he killed another human so he had something to drink and eat; that was the creation of the first of us. He is still around, I bet, sleeping somewhere nobody will ever find him. When people talk about the end of the world, the devil coming back to earth, I think it will be the first of us that returns to harvest humans. Some vampires think it will be like vampire spring break. I don't think it will be as simple as that.
By looking at them and knowing what I know about people like this, it's safe to assume they started out like the hippie sage garden witches, and someone in the group dug into demon summoning. And here we are today. Because we are vampires, we have a natural immunity to many spells. Most yuppie covens never reach a power strong enough to take out a vamp.
A Zombie, sure. A child with a slingshot and a fantastic aim could take out a zombie. All they are is an empty building with the electricity turned back on. If they ever figure out how to link minds with the dead, then we might have a problem. The running zombies you see in movies—like a man from Kenya training for the Boston Marathon—came from lore on mind-linked zombies. These zombies have more than motor skills; they possess the intent and motivation of the mind they are linked to. Still not very smart, but much more dangerous than bodies struggling for the next footfall to land on even ground.
The three of us stepped close enough to get the coven's attention, just as the vocal one seemed to be wrapping up her Christmas wish list. Out of left field, an older woman clutched something at her neck, and a charge of energy fired from her closed hand. The charge flew across the gap, striking Chad dead center, and he was sent a good forty feet from where he stood, smoldering like a snuffed-out campfire. It moved much faster than I was ready for. Someone in this group must have gotten upgrades sooner than the rest.
I moved with the speed of darkness to end the spell, but when I reached within five feet of the group, I was repelled by something unseen. Looking at the group, my residual energy had sent waves of shimmering purple all around them. They must have an active barrier shield.
Jade, not wanting to repeat my error, sprinted to the threshold of the barrier and slowly breached the line, grabbing the woman who had been speaking. The old lady attempted to send another surge to knock Jade away from the leader. Jade used the woman as a shield; both were knocked back several feet. The witch leader landed on her back. Jade, managing to hold her footing only inches from where the witch lay, snatched the now unconscious woman up by her clothing like a small dog being caught by a bird of prey.
We all found our feet and headed back to the car, parked a good three hundred yards away. We climbed in with the witch in tow. Chad left a calling card in the landscape as we were pulled deep into the seats, Chad feeding all five hundred horses that powered the engine, making our escape from this cemetery and this town.
For now, at least. This will not be the first or the last time we engage with that coven. I only hope that Kara and her idol hobby have yielded a little more fruit than I was expecting her to over the past few years.