I awake with a gasp and then hunger shoves its sharp claws into the cavity of my chest, buckling me with pain. Deep breaths do nothing to abate and I stretch my arms to grasp at the darkness but they scrape against cold hard cement. And then I remember. My nails cracked against the cover of my coffin. My eyes are blinking but there’s nothing but darkness. 

    “Right…where is the…” Voice hoarse as my fingers grope in search of the lever that cracks the case open. Mist floods into my eternal bed of slumber, and I breathe in the steam before sitting up and stretching for the first time in what must be…one hundred years?

    The tome is still sitting in the middle of our debaucherous circle- A blossoming flower of coffins spreading outwards. Our coven is fifteen thousand strong and it warms me to see the same oil wicked candles dripping wax onto the tables littered amongst us from our ritual, like not much time has passed. Our cave is deep in the heart of the mountains and the walls weep alkaline, coating the dark stones in an obsidian sheen. But I don’t remember it being so hot down here, I don’t remember much before being forced to sleep.

     One by one the beds around me click and shudder open, beckoning the age of the vampire into the realm of the living and that familiar spike of hunger amplifies. Before I remember who else is down here with me.

    “Rasmine,” A weak voice calls for me amidst the groans of my people, and I crane my neck in search of Angel. A frail hand pistons into the air from her dark coffin, painted blood red in the peeling paint we’d stolen from the elders when we were kids, and I jump to go to her. My legs are shaky, a newborn’s fawn’s shuddering under its own weight, but I catch my balance.

    Angel’s hair used to be a vivid red, curly and luscious, but now everything about her has lost its sheen. Her dark brown skin is gray and shriveled, and I reach into the bowels of her tomb to usher her into the light. Her fingers are brittle in mine, hazel eyes deadened and milky, canines yellowed and too sharp to be healthy.

    “How long were we asleep?” I breathe. All around us, our coven wakes slowly, groans of weariness piercing the night followed by the crack of cement and the wet slap of feet against stone. 

    “Rasmine,” Angel’s grip tightens in mine with renewed strength and she yanks me closer, “He’s down here with us, isn’t he?”

    The dam breaks and memories flood.

    When our coven first decided to rest for a century, there was a faction of us who hadn’t wanted to leave the modernizing world. Angel and I were amongst those who wanted to age normally, naturally, and relish in the culture that arose with the ages. But women weren’t allowed to dictate our place in the world of the Vampire. And so Kazim, our leader, bent us to his will. He’d violated me. And then shoved me into a box to sleep for a hundred years. 

    My knees buckle. Somewhere in this growing pool of vampires, Kazim is awakening from a century old slumber weakened and septic. And rage tightens my spine. 

    “Yes, he’s down here.”

    Angel nods, and wordless we make our way to the open tome and flickering candle light. I pass my fingers through the flames, feeling my resolve harden, feeling his phantom fingers tighten around my throat as his other hand rooted around in my underwear. Rasmine, he’d breathed over my pitiful cries, Rasmine.

    Selina, a young vampire before our slumber but a woman now, joined us at the tome, eyes grim and all seeing. 

    “Kazim?”

    I nodded to her and she gripped my shoulder once, before scanning the room. 

    “His coffin is over there. Elevated, the bastard. He’s yet to awaken.”

    Angel’s pupils slit like a snake, “Perfect.”

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    I wrapped cold fingers around the candelabra and snapped it over my knee, pitching our corner of the tomb in darkness. 

    “To the new world.”

    In the mayhem, it was easy winding our way to his coffin and cracking the seal. It was easy fishing around in his dark and fisting his collar in my hand as I held the candelabra’s sharp angle at my side. His eyes were slow to open, disoriented, but I wanted him to know. I wanted him to feel the ice of the metal as it slid into his skin and speared his twisted heart. He’d hurt me while I was vulnerable but we’d decided before we slept that none of these vampires would ever hurt us again.

    “R-Rasmine?” His voice was disjointed, his milky eyes searching for me, tracing my features in the candlelight. My name on his lips made bile creep up my throat. I should have been weaker. I should have been as weak as he was. But rage did things to the blood. Rage made the insane. He was three times my size, the oldest of us, King of the Vampire- but I reveled as the control he’d wielded over our species slipped through his fingers and fell at my feet. 

    “I don’t fight fair, you fool.” I rammed the spear into his heart. Thrusting with all my might and twisting his nerves around it. He screamed, plumes of decrepit dust billowing around the sucking wound. I reared back and stabbed again, emotionless. He turned his body at the last second and I caught the side of his rib cage, breaking bones, piercing lungs. I reared back and Angel held him down- my sister in this.

    “Take your time,” She cackled and I tightened my grip in the blood and the gore and plunged the metal deep, so deep it burst through the other end of his body. He coughed his blood into my face and I laughed, licking it from my lips and staring him in the eye as his lifeblood leaked onto my fingers. The rest of the coven stirred, his blood calling to them, but Seline stood behind me, warning them with her eyes. 

    “I pray you're reborn so I’m granted this pleasure anew,” I whispered to him, before the light faded from his eyes. When he finally died, it was theatric- a screech from hell and a pillar of fire before his withered bones blew away in a phantom wind. 

    Angel wiped the sweat from her eyes and stood, satisfied, but my eyes stayed rooted on where his body had just lain. I wanted to do it again and again and again until the feel of his fingers burned from my mind as his body had done before my eyes. 

    “Rasmine, the tome.”

    I nodded because yes, there was still more to do. So much more. The great book sitting atop the table at the center of our circle was a book of spells passed down from the Aisle of the Elves, and Selina, being part elf and part Vampire, was one of the only Vampires strong enough to wield it. Kazim had assumed I’d go silently. He’d assumed that I would take his abuse quietly because he was powerful and I wasn’t supposed to be. But I was a patient vindictive bitch and if I wasn’t powerful I knew others who could make me so.

    In the madness of Kazim’s death and the stirring of the rest of the coven, no one thought to intercept us as we made our way back to the tome. Selina picked it up and the ink bled into her fingertips, blackening her nails and pitching her irises black. We were still so weak, so hungry, but I was hungriest for vengeance. 

    Her chanting started low and grew into a growl as her arcane words slipped spells between our bones. They’d used this book to force our slumber and it’d worked for a century. Kazim’s plan was for us to emerge stronger together as a unified species and coven. And we would. But only the women.     

    Men who had started to peel themselves from their darkness froze, ichor leeching from their faces and eyes rolling back into their sockets. They slammed back into their death, slumber stealing over them while Angel wound between their coffins, carving out their hearts. I flicked the blood off the stake in my hand and went to work. It was a long night indeed but it was worth it. 

    Welcome to the dawn of the Vampire.