1Why is it that the moment you meet someone, they ask your name? As if some random collection of letters, based on the whims of your birth parents, could say anything worthwhile about the person you are now. After all, they named you before they got to know you! What if they named you 'Butch' and you ended up being a 98-pound-weakling? Or if they named you 'Daisy' and you ended up being a Butch?
I think the Indians had the right idea. They gave a child its child name only after they got to know it. Later they gave the child their adult name, one that reflected the person they'd become. That's how my parents raised me, except they gave me a new name every three years, starting when I was nine until I turned 21, where I got to choose my own.
No, I'm not telling you my name just yet. You know next to nothing about me except that I'm over twenty-one and have more that one parent with whom I have lived. But if you are to read and understand my story, I suppose you need to know some things about me.
If you haven't guessed already, I am female.
My body is fixed to remain exactly as it is until I die.
I will never die, at least by natural causes.
I'm a vampire of the new millennium.
You paused. I know that you paused and reread that last one.
Yes, I did say that I'm a vampire. And yes, we do exist – just not in the way you've been told all of your life. For example, crosses don't affect us. Remember Friar Mendel, the 'Father of Science'? It would not have taken long for him to die in the monastery had crosses been detrimental to us.
We don't wither away and die if caught out in the sun. Save for our eyes, in fact, we aren't affected by it at all. By the way, it was the vampire who invented sunglasses to protect herself from killer migraines.
The myth about mirrors? Well, we can make ourselves invisible for short periods of time, but this takes power and practice. Otherwise our mirror selves are just as solid as we are.
Garlic is not poisonous to us in any form, but as we are the natural predator of humans, our senses regarding our prey are super-sensitive. Suffice to say that if one did not like garlic as a human, they will not like it as a vampire. However, some of us, myself included, enjoy it. Those who eat garlic are safer than their counterparts mainly because the garlic/blood combination throws many vampires.
For those that mistake vampires for werewolves, silver bullets do not kill us. They certainly hurt though. After all, anything forced into your skin at a high speed will hurt! Wooden stakes are one of the only superstitions that holds true. If you think about it, any creature will die if you tear its hear apart with blunt force. A vampire body can survive bullets to the heart and brain, and even a stake to the brain, but a stake to the heart will destroy us.
Oh, and we're not dead. As far as I know – and I have done a lot of research on the topic, mind you – there is absolutely no way to bring the dead back to life. We are simply evolved anomalies of nature. When vampric blood mixes with human, it immediately starts attacking the cells, trying to change them. It's a sort of forced mutation.
Not all humans can survive this process. These days, the norm is to get a blood sample and test it. Of course, when they turned me they didn't have such methods…and I guess this is where I need to start my story.