Prologue

December, 2002.

It all started on a beautiful day,  when the sun was at its best,  the weather was so calm and the sky was so blue and clear like a blank canvas. I woke up that morning feeling so ecstatic.

"What could go wrong today?" I had asked my little sister that morning as we walked side by side to the local bookstore.

Wrong question.

I didn't know that everything could go wrong.

We were in the bookstore when the demons attacked,  they devoured everyone within sight,  drinking their blood like one would drink a glass of milk. When they felt satisfied,  they bound the rest and took them away.

I hid at the back room, under a huge mahogany table, as soon as I saw danger. I had searched for my sister before I went away to hide but I didn't see her. I hoped she had left me at the store and ran home like she always did.

But I was wrong again.

When everything had died down, I came out stealthily from the backroom, almost tripping over the litters of dead bodies, and ran home.

When I arrived home,  my little sister was there with a bandage around her arm. Mama said she fell when she was running home,  I believed. But the venom reached her heart faster than the speed of light.

^^^^

A few weeks after...

The whole town was in disarray. Everyone was gradually growing fangs and craving blood. If you don't belong to this colony of blood suckers, then you are forced into hiding because if you are caught or seen, it's over for you.

The vampires have their haven  hidden somewhere, a place where they call the Vampires District. It  was believed that their maker,  the man who started the vampire reign, is hidden there and once you kill him, the humans are cured. But how can you kill someone you can't see?

My family had to move out of town to a small ranch to stay with an Uncle and his wife.

It wasn't our intention to move, but things went south so fast.

It was in our little hiding place down in our basement where we've been hiding for weeks,  gradually running out of food and supplies that my sister attacked.

No one knew how it happened, one second she was fine and the next, she attacked my mum almost sinking her teeth in her neck. After my father wacked her on the head with his stick,  we sneaked outside and dumped her in one of the bushes, she was already a threat and she was only ten.

Each time I remember Cherry,  my little sister, I vowed within me that I must put an end to this horror, even if it's the last thing I do

This was the main reason we had to move,  Papa thought it was something in the air that turned my sister, according to him,  we had to move away from the bad air. But I knew better.

It was on a cold, dark night that we snuck through the bushes, to the place that changed our lives forever.

It was there I learnt that sometimes,  ignorance is bliss.

❤ Mabel