From Darker Shores

Prologue

"The days which change your life never come with calling cards."

Every soul begins as a fresh canvas, and from the moment of our birth we are determined to fill it with colour.

We sketch a lifetime's collection of experience onto the surface of our souls, like an artist does with pen and ink on paper.

In infancy we are capable of little more than childish scribble, hardly recognisable as anything at all. Small lines and shapes of simple need. The desire for food, sleep or a parents comforting arms.

As we grow these designs grow with us, in both complexity and scope.

By childhood we sketch with reckless abandon, all bright colours and broad strokes. We draw a dozen sketches of ourselves a day, forgotten and discarded from one fancy to the next.

I will be a firefighter. I will go to the moon. I will only eat chocolate ice cream for the rest of my life.

But day by day, stroke by stroke, we start to create something more permanent. We begin to sketch a true picture of what we want our lives to be. We learn the subtle art of shade and texture. We bring form and detail to once broad brush strokes.

That dream job. That perfect house. That loving partner. The things we cannot even put into words. The desire for fulfilment, connection, purpose.

The deepest lines are always the ones made then, with the strength and confidence of youth. When we still believe that all our drawings will look exactly as we plan them to. That wanting something enough will make it so.

But the best made plans are often the most fragile.

Designs may fade with time like old photographs. Never quite discarded or forgotten, but kept in a box, gathering dust and brought out to be remembered over once in a while.

Sometimes the images change. We might change it ourselves, out of fear or love, necessity or grief.

A drawing can transform beneath our fingers, so slowly and imperceptibly that we hardly notice until we take a step back.

Sometimes we like the result, an unplanned masterpiece. Sometimes we don't.

Sometimes there's nothing for it but to paint it white and start again afresh.

And sometimes a single stroke of the brush can ruin a lifetime's work, so badly it can never be repaired. A person's whole world, whole future, altered in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

The Department of Acquisitions was a place which specialised in this type of vandalism. They took the brush out of people's hands and changed the design to fit their own.

Although midnight had since come and gone, its headquarters still buzzed with activity.

Around the walls, security camera feeds flickered on monitors, displaying street corners, grocery stores and motorways from across the globe.

Men and women hurried through the control room carrying files, passing on instructions, conferring with one another in quiet murmurs. Still more sat at desks, tapping at keyboards and screens as displays flashed statistics, flight schedules and air-traffic maps.

Everyone knew their place and their function. It was the busy, organised efficiency of a long-established routine.

On the far wall, dominating everything, a fifty-foot screen displayed a map of the world, dotted with various coloured lights. Photographs lined both sides of the map, faces taken from passport photos and drivers' licences.

"Target four-three-two acquired," a woman sitting at a monitor called across the room. Her hand went to the headset she wore and listened to whoever was speaking for a second. "Minimal resistance, sedation required. Transportation cleared for colony airspace entry. ETA zero four-hundred."

In Western Australia a single yellow light converged with two red ones before swiftly turning green. No one batted an eyelid, even as the picture of a kind-eyed man with glasses disappeared from the side of the map.

From the viewing gallery high above, a man watched the room.

To look at him, one might have said he was not built for this administrative work. Strongly made with broad back and shoulders he looked out of place.

Yet this was his domain. His control here was absolute.

Slowly, he scanned the room below with black eyes. Not simply dark or brown, but as black and impenetrable as the sea at night, with no definition between iris or pupil.

No human had ever had eyes like that.

No one from the room looked up at this man, no one brave enough to risk meeting his gaze. He had that effect on people, even here amongst those who thought nothing of the destruction they wrought on other people's lives. 

Behind him a group of men and women hunched over a large meeting room table, perusing files.

Countless files had passed across this table in the last ten months, just as countless faces had crossed the giant screen. Hundreds of files, each for a single individual, laid out on the table for inspection.

Most of them, now filed away safely elsewhere or in the hands of assimilation teams, had been tagged with coloured markers, verifying the subject's status.

Acquired. Received. Categorised. Assimilated.

The three dozen files which now lay on the table bore none of these labels.

These were the last collection.

Turning away from the flurry of activity below, the black-eyed man approached the table. Reaching down he picked up a file, as if at random and flicked it open.

The picture of a girl stared out at him. An attractive picture, by all accounts, taken a year ago for a new college ID. She smiled, vivid blue eyes happy and full of life, dark hair spilling down in loose curls over her shoulders.

The black-eyed man looked at the picture for a long moment. Then he turned it over and began reading the data and intelligence collected in the file behind it.

Family history, education, medical reports, dental records. It was all there. Sheets of statistics and observations detailing daily routines, frequented establishments, known friends and contacts.

The black-eyed man turned back to the railing. "What is the status of seven-six-one?" he asked, speaking to the room below, still perusing the file.

"Acquisition in progress, Sir," a man at the far end of the room replied, typing away at his screen. "Acquisition team nine are in place and standing by. Planned contact to be made within the next forty-eight hours."

The man said nothing, his black eyes going back to the picture in the file.

If he had thoughts, opinions, emotions, none of them showed on his face.

They never did.

Slowly he closed Victoria Beaumont's file and left the room without a backwards glance.

Author's Note: Thank you so much for reading 'The Vampire's Slave' and welcome! This has been my brainchild for many years and this story means a lot to me.

If you've liked it please consider giving it a vote, and maybe even leaving a comment. I'd love to hear from you on what you liked or didn't like.

Many thanks,

Em