Beyond The Walls (NOW ON AMAZON!!!)

Despair

The next three days stretched Hadley to her limits. It wasn't only that her escape plan required carefully fitting together several puzzle pieces of time and circumstance, it was also that Mrs. Smith insisted on inflicting on her every gory part of "The Craft" with Ruqwik. Digging through the vampire's insides came with constant commentary. To say it was difficult for Hadley to watch Ruqwik squirm and voicelessly scream in pain with every invasive procedure would be an understatement.

But Hadley had personally witnessed the worst of vampires in action in that cave months ago.

Vampires are evil beings.

They deserve no sympathy.

Humans are the true proprietors of the earth.

However, no matter how hard she wanted it to, the mantra didn't work anymore. Not when Hadley tried to apply it to Ruqwik. And she was haunted by the thought that, when it really came down to it, it might not work with any vampire. This realization was soul sucking, shaking every single one of Hadley's new views on everything.

"Did you know, Hadley, that humans made vampires in a laboratory," Mrs. Smith's said as she hacked out Ruqwik's left kidney.

This time Mrs. Smith wasn't bothering with the surgical precision she'd demonstrated with the spleen removal. Hadley gagged at the iron scent of Ruq's blood, her insides contorting and twisting painfully. She hoped that her morning sickness would get better over time, and was more than a little upset that, being a Medic, her trigger just had to be blood, guts, and surgical gore.

Sure that she wouldn't throw up, she pulled her focus back to Mrs. Smith.

"It was when genetic scientists first started designing babies, modifying them, like your pretty little Barn friend, downstairs," Mrs. Smith went on, completely ignoring Hadley discomfort, as always. "But these scientists of old didn't create cowardly, compliant bags of muscle and bone, like the sheeple that vampires breed for their Barns. No. These scientists mixed questionable, ethically dubious ingredients in their little witchy cauldrons and birthed two, very odd identical children. One of them had green eyes, the other blue. Both colours unnaturally bright. A lot like yours, come to think of it."

With that last statement, Mrs. Smith finally looked up, her head cocked and eyes narrow as she studied Hadley's face. She eventually shook her head, seemingly deciding against her trepidation for Hadley's blue eyes, and went back to hacking Ruqwik's insides.

Hadley stayed silent, her breath shaky and pulse racing.

"But you're human. No doubt about that. These children weren't. They wouldn't eat anything and within hours of being born, they needed blood transfusions because it was discovered that they weren't producing their own red blood cells. The transfusions helped and they grew up with them being administered regularly. After every transfusion, their eyes would change colour to blood red. The doctors didn't know what to make of them..."

Hadley didn't want to, but she hung on every word. Not even Aunt Zee had known where vampires came from. No Wildling did. How did Mrs. Smith? It didn't matter how. Hadley could have never imagined a more intriguing origin for vampires.

According to Mrs. Smith, the two laboratory grown children were the first vampires. They killed their caretakers when their fangs appeared, and it was decided they were to be killed after the incident, but they ended up being invincible to all humane methods of euthanasia. As they grew older in that secret laboratory underground, the scientists noticed the toddlers' sensitivity to UV radiation, which was being administered regularly for proper bone growth. That was when it was first posited by the scientists that they might have created "vampires" as they had existed in lore for millennia. This belief kept the children alive, under constant scrutiny and study.