Condemned Fates - Part II

The Journals

Sunday 17 November 1991

41 Degree Fahrenheit

Goals for the day:

n/a

Events of the Night

Tonight will not be recorded as the previous entries, nor any following entries. To be honest, I wish to never detail the events of this night. I wish I could pull the events from my memory, erase them all. I wish to earth mother that I never chose the path I took when my life was taken ten years ago. However, there may be a day where I am no longer able to recall who I was and where I came from. I need to understand and to know my history, my actions, my relations, and the marks I have made on this earth. There will come a day where there will be no one alive who will remember me. So I must remember. I must keep a record.

At around 1900 this evening, I caught the scent of a large amount of blood coming from a facility of about 700 yards from my living quarters. I followed it to ensure that there was no vampire activity and as I got closer. I was able to confirm that there was. When I accessed the underground basement located at premises (a bookstore), the husband and wife - co-owners of the establishment lay dead - and a feral vampire who only recently turned fed on them The vampire in question I recognised to be… Jasper Tran… father to May Tran… my …dad...

Although against protocol, I attempted to communicate with my… the feral vampire. It was not able to respond with anything intelligible…. Despite my out cries.

Although I didn't look at the target when pulling the trigger, I can confirm that the feral vampire has now been disposed of. And the crime scene has been wiped.

The sun will rise shortly. But for some reason, I don't feel the normal exhaustion and pull towards concealment. I will attempt to see the sun rise, and if it burns me to ash, so be it.

Zach's clammy hands kept sticking to the pages of the black leather bound books as he continued to read, trying to soak up every word, every pause, every sentence. He sat on the old wooden floor, in a poorly lit apartment, his back pushed up against the wall, with the old white wall paint crumbling off it and leaving white flakes on his black leather jacket. The floor he considered was a lot better than the creaky old desk chair. He had combed through the many pages of all of May's journals. He ran his fingers over this entry. The page was bumpy, and the writing smudged as she must have been in tears writing it. There were a few similar to it, similarly when she needed to take a life of a 'feral' vampire. But this one was special as it was the last entry she wrote 'night'. He looked at the book laid out next to his. The night she had killed his father. Although less emotional than this one, it contained more details, and there were still spots of the page where tears had hit and then smudged the written words.

Since the fight on the cruise liner in Florida, Zach had become obsessed with trying to locate her. He had even hired divers to dive underneath where the cruise liner had docked where she jumped into the water below. There was nothing. Every airport, dock, and hospital in Florida was now under surveillance by a team he had hired. But nothing. The second week, he returned to New York. Thought that she may have gotten back to the city under his nose somehow. He had stalked every street with a fine tooth comb, tied up and interrogated any vampire he got his hands on. Watching them slowly turn to ash inch by inch as the sun rose. With the promise that if they provided any information on her, he would untie them. They never did. His basement was now a complete ash pit, an issue that the cleaners would have to deal with, not that they would reject or question him about it. They were paid far too much for that. By week three he had pressured the tec companies to hand over any and all IP addresses linked to her accounts across all her applications and found a large amount to be coming from a certain location in the city. He went through every apartment in the old cramped building and had come up again empty-handed. It wasn't till he was about to leave when he saw a door on the third level that wasn't connected to anything. He put on a high vis vest and found a ladder to make his way up there when he was stopped by a kid.

"Hey, mister!" The young boy looked to be only 11 years old wearing a shirt that was way too big for him approached him.

"You aren't going to bother spider lady are you?"

"Spider lady?"

"Yeah, the lady who lives up there, she can climb the wall like a spider. She has a nice smile, though, and Gran says she's been around for a long, long time. "

"Don't scare her away, mister. She keeps the shadows away."

"The shadows?" He questioned the kid.

"Yeah, you know when it gets to like 2 a.m., and your heart starts to beat really really fast, like you need to run somewhere, and then you see like shadows on the walls. It happened when me and my friends camped over at school. My friends say it happens to them now and then too. But it never happens here, and my Gran says it's because of the spider lady. She also stops the rats from coming."

With this confirmation that it was her place, he returned later in the evening to enter the apartment and used a grappling hook and rope to make his way inside. He thought it would be better not to alarm the locals since they did seem to have a warm disposition towards her.

He wasn't underwhelmed with what he found in her hideout. To be honest, he didn't really know what he was expecting. But something more than nothing. Not even a bed, not like she needed it. Just rows and rows of black leather hard cover books filled of journal entries from the 40 years she had been a vampire. It took a while for him to go through it all and even more to get his head around everything. Werewolves, Sirens, but what really peaked his interest was the information regarding witches. The Oakes family was a family that was also blessed by the Earth Mother. Through the generations, for some reason or another, the magic in their blood line started to dwindle. Until there was barely any at all. The family tradition of keeping humanity safe from vampires still lived on, with their money and smarts, they turned more to technology to do the job and they were excellent at it. But to get magic back into the family line, his dad would insist that to be the best, if not the only option in regards to this information. The brunette woman in the cloak from the cruise, Elodie, May's entries called her. She could control the wind to her whim. She looked to be around his age, and now he had all the information to know where she should be residing. But with werewolves.. And not just any werewolf pack, but from what Zach had researched an extremely powerful werewolf pack. He didn't trust it. A witch should know better. Why would she be aligning herself with monsters. It didn't add up, he thought. The other girl , the red head, was very young. Looked only be 18. And from the note he located in one of the journals, her name was Ivy.

Gee May you left out all the important stuff. Like how ridiculously good looking, smart and just all-round the best vampire specimen you have seen in your life.

If you come across this by mistake… I have decided to take a holiday until you cool down.

However I know you aren't the one to go down memory lane unless there is a good reason. So if you are reading this, I dare say something not so great has happened to me, and I need to ask you a huge favour. But first.

You need to remember you are the greatest agent this world has ever seen. You do everything with such class and accuracy. But your compassion and perspective on the bigger picture is phenomenal. Never lose that. Even when times are tough. And if you have out lived me, which I definitely think you will. Don't be alone for too long. You need a partner to keep you balanced to stop you going after world domination.

In saying that the actual reason I'm writing this is I need a favour. You need to promise me you will watch out for Ivy Winston. She's a very young witch located in Alaska. She's was born into a coven of witches, and she is Elodie's sister. She's the winter witch from the prophecy I'm sure of it. I met her on the winter solstice at the coordinates below. Their coven has a ritual they need to complete each year on the winter solstice to ensure no monsters of the night can enter their town during the dark winter. I met her the year we lost Elodie, I heard of the rumours that there was a powerful coven of witches located in Alaska, and went to go check it out, hoping I could locate Elodie there. I've been back every year since.

Ivy's power have grown incredibly not only is she starting to discover her ability to manipulate snow and ice to her will, but she can shapeshift as well. Please, please, if anything happens to me, find Ivy and help her. The world needs her May.

- Adam

Zach eyed the red note, he found it on the entry about her first meeting with Adam.

Guilt started to swell in his chest as he took all these journal entries in. Is it possible I was so wrong about her? I wanted to tear her to shreds when I found out she killed my father. But it was a mercy killing, she did it to protect others - not because she wanted to, and knowing my father. He would have preferred to die then to become a vampire. It was even written in his will! She even cried about it afterwards. And she didn't kill me. She didn't even attempt it. Every move she ever made on me was a defensive or a distraction. Do these vampires really care about the fate of humanity? Despite being told the very opposite my entire life, I can't find anything she has done to support that, and I've combed through every inch of her life. I… I need to make it up to her, I need to help her in protecting Ivy. I need to. I owe that to her for taking the life of her… partner.

The thought of giving up and heading back home to the United Kingdom after all this made him sick. No, I'm going to find her. I need to find her.