The next morning everything felt different. Some of the tension had been eased, those thoughts that had been eating me up about the arrival of everyone from the Academy, the worries had lessened now. Seeing Kyle really took me back and made me feel like less of an outsider than I actually was.

I wanted to see him again, to listen to his stories about their time in Rabat, or Marseille, or Amsterdam. It was the closest thing I was going to get to actually being there, experiencing it like everyone who was my age.

My confinement to our little town meant that i had never met any other magical creatures besides us. All I knew were the mighty beasts that leaped out of the pages of old memoirs, storybooks, tales from my mom and dad and Luca when he came over to tutor me. My punishment had made me more of a prisoner than anyone was willing to admit and that was something that really bothered me.

I too wanted to see the world, I dreamed of having the fresh scent of saltwater bursting into my nostrils as I ran towards the waves on the beach, my toes intertwining with the sand. I wanted to run down the streets of Amsterdam, find a small coffee shop that I would make my own little safe haven, to fall in love in Paris, meet someone in Rio, get whisked away to some foreign paradise and never come back to captivity.

I had a whole future ahead of me, but it seemed like I was the only one who believed it. It seemed like I was the butt of some never ending inside joke that everyone got besides me. Even my parents were quiet about it. My existence at 62. Albion Crescent seemed like more of a trap than a life for me.

Everyone’s lives went on as normal as they could. My dad worked in the city while my mom ran her little flower shop that she occasionally supervised. I was home most of the time with Luca or her.

Luca was a 25 year old Obsidian vampire, he was freakishly tall and slim and he always wore skimpy shorts that really accentuated his really long caramel legs. He didn’t look as menacing as a vampire is usually portrayed in movies and TV, rather he was a pretty chill guy in baggy shirts who just whistled a lot and said less than you wanted him to but gave you more blank stares than you needed.

He was more of a prison guard than a tutor, he was mostly there to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid, make another mistake, otherwise the schoolwork of it all was quite easy for someone like me. I enjoyed his stories though, about the time he worked at a beach resort in Barcelona.

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He’d always break into story about it, telling me a different part of it each time he did. About the beautiful places, the amazing beach always lively and packed with people to meet, the beautiful girls and how he used to win their hearts, impress them with his mysterious strength and quirky made up personality. Somehow we never got to the end, to why he left such a nice place to come back here, to this boring life, but I had a feeling it wasn’t good.

He told me about the other vampires he’d met, the witches and how vain most of them were, the one dragon in his life he’d met. He never got into much detail though, it always seemed like he was scared of getting in trouble, just like a prison guard.

One of the less tame stories he had told me was about the Käerca or soul gobbler. It devoured the essence of other supernatural creatures, fed on their power. Legend had it that it looked for the most potent and most vicious creatures and pounced on them because their souls tasted the best, it’s origins were unknown and as it was the only one of its kind in existence, it stayed hidden until it needed to feed.

‘Sounds more like us,’ I had said.

‘What do you mean?’ He asked.

‘Very powerful, stays in the shadows, feeds on power. Don’t you see it, sounds like your soul gobbler is something made up.’

‘Ha, I’ve never looked at it that way, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t made up,’ Luca replied.

‘Why are you so sure?’

‘Because my grandma, she saw it once,’ he said.

‘Of course she did.’

I rolled my eyes.

We did most of the tutoring work in my dad’s study but always resorted to the patio when he wanted to be more comfortable and make things less serious and preachy. The dingy study gave more of a library vibe, with the smell of old books and sometimes that type of atmosphere was suffocating.

Luca had probably read all of the books in there at this point, but I only cared about the more recent works while he mostly read the old memoirs and biographical text from our descendants which were hard to decipher because of the mix of English and various dead languages that I didn’t care to learn because it wasnt a requirement. He somehow soldiered through while I’d start to hear my ears ring as soon as I tried to pronounce the name of an old river that didn’t exist anymore or someone's name that sounded more like a warlock's spell.

Outside it felt much more free and interactive. I didn’t feel too imprisoned there and sometimes we would just put the books away and sit there enjoying the cool air as the day wasted away, with a pitcher of orange juice while Luca made his mimosas.

‘Maybe I’m the soul gobbler,’ I said.

‘What?’

He had his head titled back like someone who was plopped up in a beach chair enjoying the afternoon.

‘I mean, an outcast who just goes around dipping his fangs in innocent people, needing to be restrained for upsetting the peace, resorting to violence, sounds about right to m—’

‘Don’t talk about yourself like that. Why would you find that funny?’ he snapped.

I didn’t understand why he’d suddenly gotten so serious out of nowhere. All this time I thought we were just having a casual conversation like we always did once in a while. But that was the thing about Luca, he had a very unpredictable personality. He’d be laughing one minute, then the next, you wouldn’t recognize who he was.