My new lover kneels beside me and strokes my hair. “Hush now. We must not show weakness. You are one of the elite now, and you must feed.”

“But must it be humans?” I cry.

“Think of them as rabbits. Now come, eat and discover true strength. Drink of his essence and live forever.”

I want to cling to my humanity, but I cannot fight the lure of the blood-and the promise of immortality. I throw myself on the human and I force myself to forget his face and his name. My teeth scratch the skin and a trickle of blood teases me.

“Bite him,” urges my dark lover as he lifts my skirts from behind. My thoughts are frenzied, but I do as I’m told. I bite down as my creator takes me with a forceful thrust. Warm, pulsing blood, fills my mouth, stroking my taste-buds with its sweetness. I devour my first human down to the last drop as my dark lover avails himself of my flesh. The shudders of my body as the life leaves my victim confuse me. They are too painful for an orgasm. My creator laughs at me as he pulls away from my body. I barely hear him as he explains I have ingested the spirit of the man I killed, a spirit that will forever be a part of me. The soul of the human fights me, a psychic battle that leaves me hoarse from screaming. My body aches from the thrashing. But in the end, I win.

The horror of death and its whiplash doesn’t stop the hunger though. Night after night, I hunt and kill. I cannot help myself, for my dark lover disappears. And alone with my insatiable lust for death, I go slightly mad.

And thus my time as the Blood Countess is begun.

Silence reigned when I stopped talking, the story of my creation not a flattering or pretty one. Unfortunately, too many tales of my atrocities, both real and imagined-and actually worse than recorded-were common knowledge. I left some details out, such as the fact we absorbed a person’s essence, their soul if you would, at their moments of death. Some things humans just didn’t need to know.