The Prophesied Luna (completed)

Abomination

Unknown POV

            “Father, I can’t just take off! Where am I even supposed to go? And what about you and Lovis?” My desperate pleas were met with the sombre but resolute look on my Father’s face and I knew that there was no way that I could convince him to let me stay. 

            “Is there no room for discussion at all? Maybe we could speak with Lord Nyi?” My brother tried to persuade my father as he squeezed my hand reassuringly, but his words had the exact opposite effect on our father. 

            He laughed bitterly before standing and walking over to the bookshelf in the study where our family photos were displayed proudly. His fingers brushed carefully over the largest photo on the bookshelf, the one that was taken after my younger sister was born, right before our human mother passed. It was our only complete family portrait. “Do you really think that we could negotiate with Lord Nyi? Or any of the royal vampires, as they call themselves, just because they were the sons of Lae, the First Witch’s daughter and the sons of Lae the Second, the favorite daughter of the First Witch and her heiress? They don’t care about us! If they did, why would they have sent an entire unit of our elite troops to their deaths?” 

            My father’s words sent a chill down my spine as I thought of the unit that we sent off to the West Coast last week. I wasn’t a combat soldier like my father, but I worked in supplies and logistics together with my brother, and we had helped to gear up the unit before they left. It wasn’t the first time that troops were sent out on Lady Lae’s missions but it was the first time that we had sent out an entire unit of elite troops and not one soldier had returned. The mission was kept top secret and only vampires with living family members from our unit were permitted to take part. The safety of our family members guaranteed our silence but my family was an anomaly. My father held the rank of Colonel in the First Witch Daughter’s Army and he was responsible for missions on the West Coast. Even though very little information was shared with anyone below the rank of General (only royal vampires could become Generals), my father had to map out our outposts on the West Coast for the Generals so that they could decide on a staging post from where our troops could launch the attack. Not wanting to endanger us, my father hadn’t shared any information with us but on the day that we learned the entire unit had fallen and we had to do the paperwork to record the total loss of equipments that was assigned to them, my brother and I came home to see our father drowning his sorrows alone in his study. He neither acknowledged us nor said anything to us but we knew that he wasn’t drunk. Instead, he just stared into the lonely night outside, muttering dejectedly over and over so quietly that even with our enhanced hearing, we could barely hear him. “We killed them all. We knew and sent them to their deaths.”

            I tried my best to stay calm and think rationally. I needed to find a good reason to convince my father that I should stay, a reason that he couldn’t turn down. “If I leave, what’s going to happen to you and Lovis, Father? I’m not naive enough to think that they would believe that you had nothing to do with my disappearance and who is to say that they wouldn’t be able to hunt me down? I won’t let you and Lovis sacrifice yourselves for me, Father, not like how you gave up our sister so that the rest of us could be safe.” My voice quivered painfully as I said those last few words and I cast my eyes down, afraid to make eye contact with anyone even as I heard the sharp intake of breath from my brother. Shame burned my cheeks for stooping so low in the name of protecting my family. I knew that Father didn’t have a choice, it was my sister or our entire family, simply because my sister didn’t carry the vampire gene. Since we were closely related to the witches in the First Witch’s Daughters coven, it was only possible for vampires to take humans as mates, or to put it more accurately in the words of my brother, kidnapped human breeders. Werewolves and normal witches were obviously out of the question given our century old feud. The only problem with taking human mates was that the vampire gene had a tendency to not pass on to a female child and for some reasons, it was impossible to turn these female human children into vampires using magic in the same way that witches turned their sons into vampires. 

            For this sole reason, Lady Lae and her mother before her had ordered all human born children of their vampire descendents to be killed. All who didn’t contribute to their cause and were only a burden on our coven didn’t deserve to live. This was the principle that the coven operated on since the beginning of time and I knew that our family was already counted amongst the lucky ones. My human mother was kidnapped during one of the Expansion Missions, which was just a nice name for abducting humans, both male and female, for breeding purposes with our witch cousins or male vampires. Female vampires could become pregnant, but not one female vampire has been able to give birth to anything but a stillborn, so at some point, Lady Lae stopped procuring humans for us.  Father was still a young vampire at that time and training to become a medic. He had seen my mother at the Supply Market for vampires where abducted humans were kept until they were either picked by the royal vampires or assigned to a vampire without an assigned mate. The fate of these humans were similar. They were used for pleasure and breeding until they could no longer fulfill either function and that’d be the day their death warrant was signed. There were a few rare exceptions like my parents. Father felt drawn to my mother even though there was no such thing as fated mates or the mate bond for vampires. We were not children of the Moon Goddess, we were abominations created by witches. As a young recruit, Father knew that it was beyond his means to save my mother and help her to leave, so he did the next best thing that he could. He signed on for active combat duty so that he could choose his own mate instead of having one assigned to him. 

            Initially, my mother was deathly afraid of my father and everything within our base camp. Well, who wouldn’t be? Father gave her as much time and space as she wanted, and even put his reputation at stake when my mother wasn’t pregnant after a year. He managed to get one of his trusted friends who trained to become a medic with him to certify him as having fertility issues and was unlikely to father children, in order to prevent the coven from discarding my mother like a useless piece of trash. Over time, my mother came to terms that there was no way out and this was going to be the rest of her life. Despite the few interactions they had, with Father often away on combat missions, my mother got to know Father better over time and against all odds, they fell in love. It was a great relief for them when the witch healers said that their first baby was a boy, my brother Lovis, since male babies almost always carried the vampire gene. When they had me, my mother sank into depression as she worried daily about my fate. The euphoria that fell upon our family after my birth, when it became clear that I was one of the few female babies lucky enough to carry the vampire gene, didn't last long. When I was seven, my mother became pregnant again with a female baby but this time, the odds were not in our favor. The witch healers took away my sister in the night, hours after she was born, to be discarded like trash and Father did nothing to stop them. The loss of our sister was the last straw for my mother and very soon, she died from postpartum complications and a broken heart. In a way, death was a relief for her, a release from the tragedy that her life was but for me, it was the end of my childhood and my innocence. I understood from that day on that our lives didn’t belong to us, that despite the appearances, we were all just abominations that belonged to Lady Lae and her coven. Our usefulness kept us alive and loyal soldiers were rewarded while the useless and disobedient ones were punished. 

            “I can’t give you up like I gave your sister up, Laila. I was a fool then, to think that if I fell in line, they’d leave us alone but I realize now that I can’t sit back anymore and let them walk all over us because they’d never stop until they’ve milked us dry of our value. I’ve lost your mother and your sister, I can’t allow them to take the both of you from me even if it costs me everything that I have. Don’t worry about Lovis. I have plans to send both of you away but Laila, you need to leave right away before it’s too late. The command to gather all female vampires was a direct order from Lady Lae herself and Lord Nyi has never failed his mother, if not, why would he be her favorite son?” Father’s eyes glistened with tears but his voice remained firm and unyielding. I wish I could say the same for myself but my heart was a wreck and I couldn’t hold back my sobs as I realized how much my words must have hurt my father. Yet, he had thought everything through for us, wanting nothing more but to protect us, even at the cost of his own life. 

            “Surely there has to be another way, Father,” Lovis said desperately. “We could all leave together! We could go somewhere where there are no werewolves and no witches. We could live amongst humans, we could..”

            “There’s no place for us in this world, my son. We’re neither human nor children of the Moon Goddess. Do you think the humans don’t know that we’re behind the abductions? The werewolves began working with a group of powerful humans many centuries ago and they know about us and our deeds. Do you think they could forgive us? And the witches who’re not First Witch’s Daughters loyalists? We’re the evidence that witches could be dangerous.” Father interrupted my brother before he could finish his sentence and deep in our hearts, I think all of us knew without a doubt that regardless how big the world was, there was no place for us. 

            “And where am I supposed to go, Father? If there is no place for us in this world, where am I supposed to go? I’ve never left our base camp in my life!” I asked, hoping that my father would change his mind and allow me to stay. Regardless of what Lady Lae had planned for us, I was afraid but I was also ready to fight for my life. I wanted to live but not at the expense of my father’s life. 

            “There is someone that I know on the West Coast who could hide the both of you, an old acquaintance from my days as a young soldier. I saved her life during one of my missions. She was severely injured and unable to continue fighting. I couldn’t bring myself to kill a defenseless person so I let her go and lied that she had managed to get away. Before she left, she told me her name and that in return for letting her go, she owed me a favor. I’ve made arrangements for you to leave with the transport unit that’s bringing supplies to one of our outposts on the West Coast tonight. Once you’re out there, leave your scent around the forest and don’t let the rest of the unit notice what you’re doing. Your scent should lure werewolves who are in the vicinity and they’d surely attack. I need you to use the distraction provided by the werewolf attack to flee north to Sacramento and look for this homeotherapy center called Center for Natural Health. Tell them that I sent you and give this to them. You will leave tonight and Lovis, you’ll leave with the next transport in a week’s time.” Father pressed a necklace with a clear glass pendant into the palm of my hand after he had given me the last instructions. Inside the clear glass pendant was a dried four-leaf clover and camellia flower but I couldn’t see anything that was special about it. It was only then that I realized that staying was never an option and Father had already planned an escape route for us many years ago. Without arguing, I fastened the necklace onto my neck, hoping that it’d lead me to safety and to a better life with my whole family, even as I suppressed my fear of leaving everything that I knew for the first time in my life.

            “I’ll come back for you, Father, I promise. We will leave this wretched place together and we will find a new home.”