The Time of the Blood Oaths (Book 2)
Vampires are people, too. They are not undead. They were ordinary people who got vampire blood in their body, and from that moment on, they continued to live without aging. That is, if they continued to drink the blood of a non-vampire of their species. Starvation in vampires shows as ordinary aging, that eventually would lead to a vampire dying of old age. Their body rejects non-blood food, as well as blood from an organism not of their species. Vampires who used to be humans, can only be nourished by human blood.
Being able to turn into a bat, not having a reflection in the mirror, an aversion to religious symbols and garlic—are all folktales. Decapitation, burning alive, and sharp physical trauma to the heart whether from a wooden stake or not—these would kill vampires, because they would kill anybody. The one thing that was true about vulnerabilities specific to vampires, was that their bodies were overly sensitive to sunlight.
Vampire civilizations developed alongside ordinary humans. They tended to be fewer in number, with respected and experienced elder vampires encouraging would-be blood-binders (vampires who turn humans into vampires) to have high standards of whom they turn. The eldest vampires, who sustained their ambitions through the centuries or even through millennia, were able to develop a sort of self-perpetuating culture and central government that could negotiate with other central governments. Younger vampires could ally and educate themselves to the elders, or stay away and live quiet and solitary lives, or form covens and families that rival one another—but anything that would compromise the sustainable vision of the elders would be corrected with gradually stronger suggestions that might end in the offending vampire's death.
Then, something changed. Vampires began to discover that they could expose themselves to sunlight without harm for a period of time, that seemed to be random occurrences… and then the vampires figured it out.
Some non-vampire humans have a compound in their blood that, if ingested, allowed the vampire who fed off them to survive— even enjoy —exposure to natural light. These non-vampire humans came to be known, colloquially, among vampires, as Quenchers. It became forbidden among vampires to turn Quenchers into vampires, because blood from vampires is not nourishing for vampires to drink, and vampires who had been Quenchers no longer had this immunity to sunlight, let alone the ability to carry it over. It became particularly discouraged to drink Quenchers dry, when it would be of a great advantage to vampire kind for these Quenchers to pass on this trait of their blood onto their children and have more Quenchers in the world.
The vampires bided their time and continued to conspire. When there were enough vampires to cooperate, and enough recorded Quenchers to sustain them, they took over human civilization. They collected Quenchers, imprisoning them and turning them into livestock, and drank most other humans dry. Then, the vampires took the place of human beings. Industries continued to run—farms were no longer needed, so that industry was abandoned— and the vampires hailed the Time of the Cold Sun.
This is the story of the rise of this golden age.
Anthea and Lucas are an ordinary human couple until a horrifying incident at a convenience store leads to a series of events that makes Anthea a “victim” of what people call “blood lust plague”. When Anthea is shot during a convenience store robbery she is given a blood transfusion that contains vampire blood which nobody could detect until long after Anthea was made into vampire. She is not the only one put into this situation. A “blood lust plague” has spread throughout the world. Now Anthea cannot go out in the sun, she cannot eat ordinary food and she has a great hunger for human blood—meaning her fiancée Lucas might not be entirely safe with her. Friends and close family members begin to shun Anthea, either looking down on Anthea as a pitiful being or shunning her as a dangerous person. As vampirism spreads throughout the world, people's attitudes towards this condition begin to change.
The puppet masters of this rash of vampirism are the vampire elders, as Lily soon finds out, who orchestrate mass “infection” of vampirism in ordinary, non-vampiric people. This is intended to gather more numbers of vampires, without the identity conflicts that might turn against the elders themselves. After there are enough vampires to overwhelm the population of non-vampires, the secret of the Quenchers would be released. Already at an advantage by strength of numbers, the new vampires would establish a new order that keeps the needs of the vampires met—even at the cost of non-vampires who handled the vampire outbreak badly.
Lily, still grieving for some close friends of hers who had been introduced to the underworld of the vampires and took it badly, hopes to help Anthea and Lucas navigate this changing world. However, she is unable to counsel them through their own relationship. The couple has many changing dynamics stemming from practical personal needs to how they can relate as a couple to their friends and family, to cultural attitudes and how strangers would treat them.
Lucas has shown to love Anthea through sickness and healthy personal identity, although the growing sense of “vampire supremacy” begins to trouble him. Anthea must juggle her own identity as a disordered invalid with her growing admiration for the advantages of being a vampire, as well as how Lucas has been suffering.
While Lily is a vampire herself, she has been suffering from the vampire elder's supremacy and their plans to take over the world. As much as Lily wishes she can do better by Anthea and Lucas, they have done well enough by each other without Lily's direct interference. When Lily finds a cure for vampirism, Anthea and Lucas decline to use it, or any more knowledge of it, and decide to continue living an ordinary life—whatever that may now mean.
Lily wishes Anthea and Lucas good luck, and Anthea and Lucas wish Lily well in kind.
CHAPTERS
Chapter one: Lucas proposes to Anthea at a romantic dinner. Anthea accepts his proposal and shows it to her parents and friends, who remark that Anthea and Lucas both might be too young. But others remark that Anthea and Lucas have always been so average that nothing can go wrong. There is nothing to fight. There is no way to grow (and that's a good thing.)
Chapter two: While Lucas is staying out late one night for work, Anthea goes down to the convenience store in their college town to buy some powdered ice tea and fruit juice. A robber pulls a gun on the cashier and demands money from the cash register. Anthea tries to hide but draws attention to herself. While the robber is distracted searching for Anthea, the cashier calls the police. When Anthea surprises the robber, the panicked robber shoots her and then flees. An ambulance takes Anthea to the hospital.
Chapter three: At the hospital, Anthea gets a blood transfusion. The blood is vampire blood. Instead of recovering, she begins to turn into a vampire. Nobody notices anything, yet, because Anthea always disliked sunlight and was more of a night owl. Lucas and Anthea's family presume that Anthea's trauma interfered with her appetite. The trauma seems to have caused Anthea some insomnia, which Lucas comforts her through until Anthea feels disturbed that she wants to bite her fiancée until he bleeds.
Chapter four: Troubled, Anthea returns to the convenience store, where the cashier recognizes Anthea and introduces herself as Lily. Lily recognizes that Anthea has turned into a vampire, which Anthea denies and runs out on.
Chapter five: Lily goes to confront the local vampire elders, who tell Lily that the time is approaching that she could no longer blackmail the vampire elders for her safety. When their new government rises, then they will judge Lily's suitability as a model vampire citizen by how well she helps their cause in recruiting. Lily points out that turning other people into vampires without their consent does not guarantee that they will embrace the vampire identity, as what happened with her protégée, Tydus. The vampire elders point out that Lily was too open with Tydus (even though Tydus intellectually knew everything about what to expect, and he grew weary of the actual experience of it). The elders are relying on human nature to make vampires more tribal, and seek pride when they are shunned and oppressed. The new vampires must not know that the vampire government is centralized and has been well-run for many millennia. Meanwhile, at the apartment that she shares with Lucas, Anthea keeps up with the news reports of some “blood lust plague” spreading. In some countries they quarantine the vampires outside to combust. Anthea fears that she has it. Lucas puts Anthea at ease by promising to love her through sickness and health, although when Lucas calls own parents, they tell Lucas that he wouldn't know what it was like to care for a chronically ill spouse. Lucas becomes offended and demands to know if his parents would advise him to leave Anthea specifically because she has an illness. His parents remain ambivalent, saying that is entirely Lucas' decision.
Chapter six: When Anthea's hunger pains become too great for Lucas to bear witnessing, he makes arrangements to order blood from the blood bank for Anthea to eat. This is easy because many blood banks must shut down because they cannot detect the substance in the blood that causes it to make other people into vampires. While Lucas is away, Anthea once against visits Lily, who isn't there. Lily comes in through the door, not as a cashier, but a customer. Lily says hello to the cashier, and tells Anthea that Anthea should not expect to have a long serious conversation with Lily if Lily had indeed been scheduled to work that day. When Lily and Anthea return to Lucas' place, Lily meets Lucas and remarks that Lucas—having gotten Anthea some blood— is a good fiancée. Lily taste-tests the blood for vampire blood versus human blood and explains that she can do this because she is a vampire. Vampire blood is not nourishing to other vampires. Lily has been a vampire for more than a century, which Lucas disbelieves and accuses Lily of turning Anthea. Lily argues with Lucas, saying that she saved Anthea's life and had nothing to do with Anthea turning into a vampire. Lucas says that it's in the blood and there's also an urban legend some say is true that strangers with syringes inject passers-by with vampire blood. Why not the classic vampire way of biting people? Lily explains that biting someone to drink their blood does not turn them into vampires, and besides, the elders want to make it seem spontaneous rather than something that they orchestrated. At that, Lily realizes that she has said too much. When Lucas ignores the things he doesn't understand and asks Lily if there is a cure, because Anthea could be in danger of being trapped by other people who would expose Anthea to sunlight on purpose. Lily replies that there is indeed a cure“of sorts.” She is thinking of the Quenchers and her own good friend Ruby.
Chapter seven: Lily reports to the vampire elders that the conversion of Anthea is going well and Lucas would be a vampire ally because he had the ingenuity to go to a blood bank and get human blood for his fiancée. However, Lily also wants the names and locations of Quenchers. The vampire elders refuse her, saying that it is too soon. If Lily wanted a Quencher, then she should have handled Ruby Bernhardt better. Lily asks if they've seen the reports that non-vampires have found a way to quickly contain and extinguish the “plague” of vampirism. The elders have already lost many vampires to their cause and the time to reveal Quenchers was before this occurrence, not afterwards. The elders tell Lily that the execution of new vampires with no knowledge of the Quenchers could be turned to their advantage because it's now non-vampires who are the monsters. When vampires rise to supremacy they can say that they were only defending themselves. They ask Lily on whose side she is really on—because while the way this is developing has been serving the elders' plans very well, the elders only constructed the plan so because they have lived for long enough to understand human nature. The cruelty non-vampires visit on vampires is the non-vampires' own choice and the consequences would be just.
Chapter eight: Tension begins to mount between Anthea and Lucas. Anthea has discovered old photographs from the 1920's that show Lily looking young as ever. Lucas wants to believe that it's Lily's grandmother, that immortality is part of the vampire myth that is absolutely impossible. Anthea, however, believes what Lily had said, and is beginning to believe that vampirism wouldn't be too bad. Anthea definitely doesn't want people other people to be treated like livestock, but she doesn't believe that people who are vampires deserve to be treated the way that they have been treated. Anthea dreams of a more harmonious world where blood donors will also donate to vampires as well as others with disabilities such as anemia and the world will have a place for vampires— whom Lucas dismisses, saying that Anthea has a disorder and shouldn't glamorize it. The next time Lucas goes to a blood bank, and says that he has gone there for his fiancée's treatment of her blood lust plague, his request is declined and hecklers tell him not to enable his monster of a girlfriend.
Chapter nine: Anthea and Lucas begin to argue over the angle on which they would examine current events, of how non-vampires treat vampires, and how vampires are retaliating against non-vampires. Each demands from the other to stand by one another if they are indeed going to be married. Both passionately agree that they will.
Chapter ten: The effect of Quencher's blood becomes popularly known. Anthea has an opportunity to live normally until people realize that Quencher's blood is not a cure, but that vampires will be dependent upon Quenchers blood if they want to continue living during the daytime. Anthea claims that she has no problems now, but during the wedding, many of the guests—who used to be friends of Anthea— find it too bizarre that Anthea is unable to eat anything of the wedding feast in case the food makes her ill. Wedding guests gossip that Lucas can do so much better, that he must be so unhappy now and that he shouldn't have gone through with the wedding now that they have changed as people.
Chapter eleven: On their wedding night, Anthea proposes that Lucas drink her blood and become a vampire so that they can stay young forever. If it's the sunlight that Lucas fears, they will find Quenchers, and Lucas couldn't possibly prefer ordinary food to an eternity with Anthea who he's supposed to love so much. Lucas declines Anthea's offer and that it's a personal decision to remain immortal or not—as much as it might affect Anthea, it's his choice and Anthea should respect it—even though it wasn't Anthea's choice. When Anthea objects that she wants to have Lucas in her life without the risk of her neediness and hunger taking over and killing him, Lucas says that they'll just have to find compromises.
Chapter twelve: Lily visits them at their home in full sunlight. When Anthea answers the door, she asks if Lily is “on” Quencher's blood. Lily says no, that she has found a way to reverse vampirism. Anthea doesn't want it because nothing is wrong with her—and nothing was wrong with Lily. Lucas says that he will support Anthea's decision to remain a vampire, even donate his own blood to Anthea if these new paranormal politics get too strained and stressful. Lily tells them that they would do all right with each other, but warns that the world is changing in a way that would be difficult for both of them. Lucas and Anthea wish Lily well in Lily's own endeavors.
CHARACTERS
Lily Lanier
Age: 100+ (looks 20, but very likely grew up in the 1920's) Height 5'8”
Hair: straight, honey blonde Eyes: brown
Since the tragic death of two of Lily's vampire protégées, Tydus Ellis and Ruby Bernhardt, the morally ambiguous Lily had gone against their dying wishes and used the video of their combustion and her own identity as a vampire for protection against the vampire government. As long as they keep her safe and alone, she and her allies will not leak the information about the Cold Sun Project to non-vampires. Now that the Cold Sun Project is become an active reality rather than a plan, Lily's time has run out.
Anthea Cross
Age: 23 Height: 5'6” Hair: straight, red Eyes: blue
Anthea was just an ordinary woman who was beginning an ordinary new life. The vampire elder's conspiracy left her with something to make her very different from everybody else she knows, that is, the condition of vampirism in her own self. There is no cure, there is no turning back—and while Anthea doesn't particularly like it, when she thinks about it, it isn't as large a blow to the ordinariness of life that other people treat it as.
Lucas Westenra
Age: 23 Height: 5'8” Hair: straight, auburn Eyes: hazel
Lucas was Anthea's fiancée. They were college sweethearts.