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    Radiant Shadows: Beginnings (Parts 1-3)
    Radiant Shadows: Beginnings (Parts 1-3)
    Radiant Shadows: Beginnings (Parts 1-3)
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    Radiant Shadows: Beginnings (Parts 1-3)

    By Sarah Baethge

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Say there is an official organization to control how vampires and humans interact.
    What would happen to violators of its 'laws'?
    How would the breaking of its rules be fixed?

    What could even be the motivation for members of this alliance?

    If you could magically change yourself to fight vampires, would you?
    If you were forced into becoming a vampire, could you live with your own bloodlust?
    And if you actually admired vampires, how would you deal with them attacking your friends?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSarah Baethge
    Release dateJul 7, 2018
    ISBN9780463931110
    Radiant Shadows: Beginnings (Parts 1-3)
    Author

    Sarah Baethge

    I live in Temple, Texas where I write.

    Read more from Sarah Baethge

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      Book preview

      Radiant Shadows - Sarah Baethge

      Radiant Shadows

      Beginnings (parts 1-3)

      by Sarah Baethge

      Ⓒ Sarah Baethge 2018

      Distributed by Smashwords

      ISBN: 978-0463931110

      part 1 - The Making of an Anti-Vampire

      part 2 - That Elusive Endowment of Inequity

      part 3 - So It Wasn’t Just an Ordinary Day

      (part 1) The Making of an Anti-Vampire

      Believe me; I never imagined the eventual result I was left with. And you have this coming from a guy who had long ago simply decided that the risk of becoming a vampire was just an unmentioned, yet rather obvious, chance I had taken when signing the contract for my job.

      I worked as something of a diplomat within the HVA (Human-Vampire Alliance). This is the organization that exists to tend the fragile threads of agreement both sides want, in order to prevent some type of all-out supernatural war between our two societies. If you ask why this is necessary, then I’m sure you can’t understand exactly how many thousands of vampires actually exist.

      And don’t try to come at me with some type of stupid argument like- ‘but vampires need people! Without us they couldn’t even continue to exist!’

      –oh sure, like no vampire has ever thought of breeding and keeping a supply of people in a tiny dark little basement full of cages reminiscent of some sort of inhumane egg producing facility. ‘Twould make things a bit easier at their end of the equation, something like that.

      Childish happy ideas about keeping them content with animal blood are really something of a fairy-tale too. Understand please; some sort of iron or hemoglobin doesn’t nourish a vampire’s body like it would yours. A dead body has no need of nourishment.

      When the life in a body ends, that living energy normally produced in the brain simply drains out through the jugular because it can no longer cling directly to the body that produced it; in the moments just after death, this force has been knocked loose enough that it can be stolen by a vampire who moves to take this force quickly. Sure, some vampires develop a taste for the blood itself, yet the chemicals within this fluid have very little use to their dead organs.

      When a vampire takes someone’s blood, what they are ‘feeding’ on is human life . By ‘life’ I mean that energy or spirit of self existing within, throughout a living person that their healthy body will continue to replenish within itself until death. You might scoff were I to call this force ‘magic’, but if properly controlled, it can have effects that I have trouble describing any other way.

      Having no way to make this living ‘spirit’ energy for themselves, those vampires who do not take another’s ‘life’-force can just sit back and wait to watch as their own body begins to rot away without it. I’m not saying that animals don’t have this energy, most likely they do; it’s just that this force is quite complex and has a slightly different physical structure for every individual that can produce it, much like the blood that is normally taken with it. And like that blood, pumping yourself full of what came from a deer or a moose probably wouldn’t work all that well.

      Robbing a blood-bank couldn’t really provide it either; a little plastic bag full of blood is really quite inert.

      Ultimately, vampires and living-humans, physiologically , are all the same creature. We actually rely on them because of how they must rely upon us.

      You see, vampires are more adept at handling and using this life-giving ‘magical’ power I’ve described that is so integral to everyone’s survival (even though for some reason most humans seem to be completely unaware of it) and so, they can more easily use this energy willingly as a seemingly otherworldly force for everyday supernatural situations than a human could. These aren’t unusual occurrences, but are actually so real and so dangerous, the HVA hires diplomats like myself to work out terms and agreements of behavior between the living and the non-, that keep both sides happy. The best example of this that I can think of off the top of my head is the vampire preference that most of humanity is kept unaware of their darker brothers’ very existence.

      This is mainly done to prevent self-praising human vigilantes from attempting to hunt and kill vampires to extinction for the supposed ‘good of all humanity’ Actually, my living co-workers and I will hold the threat of publicly disclosing this secret about our coexistence as a roadblock against the formation of groups containing angry vampires ready for a field-day of unprovoked human kills.

      Aside from diplomats like me, my human colleagues, and our vampire counterparts, the HVA has 2 more divisions:

      1. Human hunters who are out to get vampires who break the rules,

      2. And vampire stalkers who work to strike down any human, self-appointed vampire-slayers.

      To keep relations civil, vampires will try to have no part in decisions passed against criminal vampires by the humans as long as humans don’t stand in the way of their fair and justified human killings (when such a thing becomes necessary).

      This had always worked fine until the day came when I was called by a vampire council who weren’t arguing against human actions; instead, they wanted to help incite a more efficient than human-based judgment after one of their own.

      Who exactly they were after here was the vampire Randy Martin. He wasn’t just turned yesterday and rebelling against the new set of vampire-laws that he now suddenly found himself subject to.

      Believe me; we get plenty of that , and the vampires have their own ways to quickly just deal with it. Generally it’s something less than total destruction (forgive my wording here, but having already called all vampires to be dead, I’m not sure that death could really sound like all that much of a true threat), a period of forced starvation or something similar to that is usually the normal sentence that these ‘criminal’ vampires end up getting as a punishment.

      Although, to call him old doesn’t really fit the profile either, I know more than a couple vampires with turn-dates of earlier than 100 years ago. Randy’s was only like 50, at most 75 years before today. He wasn’t exactly ancient , but he certainly wasn’t new either. He just had the years of experience and the learned magical control that would easily enable him to avoid capture.

      Assuredly he’d been around long enough that he was aware of the havoc that his actions would probably cause; he had to know better than to just jump up and start feeding off of people who had done nothing to deserve it while, at the same time, leaving their blood-drained bodies in very open places for unwary innocents to find. It was bizarre enough to get local living, non-HVA police to jokingly refer to these crimes as ‘vampire murders’.

      Now of course, my law abiding vampire friends felt quite threatened by this and didn’t find the nickname to be funny, at all. I suppose it’s similar to how you might feel towards wanted criminals if you knew that they had a good chance of angering the closest mad cult into storming out to your place of residence on some type of murderous, fire-spewing rampage of revenge.

      They wanted Randy taken out for his misbehavior as quickly as possible; permanently stopping the threat of any more deadly actions that might come from him. Their rize against his attacks was meant as nothing more than a simple precaution, just so that they could return to their own carefully built and well looked after anonymity.

      Vampire leaders wanted to put an end to Randy’s reign of terror even if it had to come by their own direct guiding of the oft’ hated and distrusted human hunters’ hands. They certainly didn’t want to just sit around idly watching as this much loathed rival group of law enforcement between the two peoples fumbled around ineffectively; not if Randy’s random actions could possibly have innocent vampires blamed and outed for his misdeeds that they were desperately trying to stop.

      You see, a good part of what I negotiate comes down to acquiring vampire help to stand against human criminals when it might be convenient to simply have them ‘disappear’. I won’t try to pretend that a good number of confessions from especially nasty

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