To Kill The One I Love

Julian Thorne

Julian Thorne

The first thing I remembered was fire

The scent of ash still clung to my mind. Even after thirty-nine years sealed in my coffin, I could still hear the screams.

Still see the flames crawling up stone walls like hell come alive. Still feel the moment my world—my coven, my family, my purpose—was reduced to nothing but cinders.

Had I been there that night, would I have burned with them? Could I have saved them?

I don’t know

But by the time I came back, it was too late. My family and coven were just a pile of bones. The only thing that clung to my nostrils was the scent of the hunter. The one who started the fire and killed my family

I had failed them.

So I did the only thing left for a prince with no kingdom.

I buried myself.

Literally.

Deep beneath the rubble of what once was our estate, I invoked the ancient rite—The Slumber of Sovereignty—a royal hibernation designed not just to preserve power… but to hold madness at bay

Thirty nine years passed. My name faded into myth. The world forgot.

But I did not.

I awoke few days back—because he came back.

The one who slaughtered my bloodline. The hunter. I felt it. His presence. His filth-tainted scent threading through the land of my dead. Like piss on a grave.

He had returned to Glen Valley.

And now… so had I.

The world I woke to wasn’t the one I left.

Cities no longer breathed fire from smokestacks or sang with the crackle of gramophones. No, this world buzzed—humming and glowing with strange, handheld devices that lit up people’s faces.

I was starving when I rose.

The kind of starvation that blurred thought and sharpened instinct.

I followed sound and scent to the closest gathering of warm bodies—a party. The lights, the pulsing music, the waves of youth… it was nauseating and intoxicating all at once.

I grabbed the first two humans I saw, compelled them to be quiet and fed. I couldn’t stop until I drained every single drop of blood in them

Still, it wasn’t enough. I was still burning with hunger

I moved into the living room to find more humans to distract and take out to feed on them but then she bumped into me

She was light in a world I had long since abandoned. Magnetic. Stunning. Not just physically—though God help me, she looked like she belonged on a canvas

Something about her pulled at me. Repelled the hunger. I could smell her blood, hear it pulse… and still I couldn’t touch her.

Golden brown skin. Wild curls.

She spilled her drink on me and then looked up—eyes wide, lips parted—and I forgot everything I came for.

The hunger stilled.

It wasn’t normal. My kind didn’t hesitate. Especially not when we were starving.

But she… she smelled different. I should’ve drained her. My instincts screamed for it

I couldn’t. Perhaps, it was the crowd. I led her outside, I could hear her blood flowing through her arteries on her neck.

She was so close, I was practically sniffing her neck, just one bite but I still couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead a foreign baffling urge came upon me.

I found myself wanting to kiss her instead.

To press her against the wall and taste her lips—not her blood.

That had never happened before. I’ve never felt attraction to a human. I had always believed that humans were feeble, insignificant beings. But she.. she was different

I had to run. I couldn’t control it. I had to feed before I snapped.

I fed again. This time, I left them alive. Barely. I wasn’t myself. I was slipping. She was still on my mind. That laugh. That voice.

I followed her scent, tracing it to her loud, foolish friend, Rhea. A simple compulsion, a whisper in her mind, and the girl offered up the name: Skylar. And the place: Dertley College. A human institution, a place I had no interest in until that very moment.

One more quick compulsion and Rhea would never would never remember our conversation, or my face.

I enrolled the next day. It wasn’t hard. A few compelled minds and I was an enrolled transfer student

Not because I needed an education. Not because I cared for books or human chatter.

I needed to know Skylar.

See her.

Understand what the hell she’d done to me.

The moment I stepped on campus, I could smell her. She didn’t notice me at first. But when she did—our eyes met—and everything inside me tightened.

She smiled.

And I… smiled back. I hadn’t done that in decades.

She wasn’t scared of me like most people would. She was intrigued by me. She called me charming and I found myself craving more compliments from her.

She was too busy talking and smiling at me to notice the car—a drunk student behind the wheel—swerving too fast down the hill toward the crosswalk

But I did.

Before logic could intervene, I moved.

Faster than thought. Faster than instinct.

I grabbed her waist and yanked her out of the street, twisting midair so I took the brunt of the impact as we crashed to the sidewalk.

She gasped beneath me. Her knee and shin bleeding. My arm had split open on impact

Her eyes widened when she saw the blood. But I was already healing. Skin stitching itself shut like a zipper. Muscle knitting beneath it.

She blinked, confused. She probably thought she might be going crazy.

I couldn’t stay and help, not with her blood scent hitting me like a drug.

She was bleeding. And I was still starving from my slumber. Her pulse was thundering, and it took everything in me not to sink my fangs into her and drink until the world melted away.

It would’ve been so easy.

A bite. A compulsion. She’d forget.

But…

I couldn’t.

So I left her there, trembling, confused, clutching her knee.

And I ran.

Back to the woods. Back to the shadows. I tore into a stray hiker and fed till he was barely conscious

The way she laughed, her voice and the compliment she gave me couldn’t stop replaying in my head. I caught myself smiling too many times

The sound of the front door opening dragged me out of my thoughts.

I looked to the door. The owner of the house was back.

I had compelled him to invite me into his house and gave him descriptions of the hunter and also compelled him to look for him

He dropped his keys, looked up at me

“I found him,” he said breathlessly, his hands shaking slightly. “The man you described. He lives in the neighborhood not too far ”

My chest tightened.

Skylar had temporarily made me forget my main aim.

Vengeance.

“Take me,” I said calmly, though every inch of me vibrated with the need to kill.

He didn’t ask questions. Just grabbed his jacket got into the car, driving there

“That’s the house,” he said, pointing to a modest two-story structure tucked beside a line of tall, withered trees.

I didn’t breathe.

Because I knew that scent. I knew it too well.

Garlic.

The hunter lived there.

Finally.

My lips parting with a grin I hadn’t worn in over fifty years. My fangs ached just beneath the surface.

But luck was on my side. The house next door was empty. For sale. Forgotten.

Not anymore.

I moved in the same night.

There would be no escape this time.

I would watch him. Learn him. Bleed him slowly—like he did my family. If he had any relatives, I would turn them into the thing he hated the most, vampires and then I would kill them all in his presence and made sure he watched

I would tear down everything he loved until his soul begged for death.

But in the morning, everything changed

I was standing at the window, watching him from the shadows of my new living room.

He was in the yard, watering plants.

And then she stepped out.

Skylar.

She laughed. Said something about breakfast. Called him—

“Dad.”

I didn’t move.

I couldn’t.

The hunter turned to answer her, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder like he’d done it her whole life.

And my world…split in two.

The girl I couldn’t hurt.

The girl I couldn’t stop thinking about was his daughter!

I gripped the window frame so hard the glass cracked.

My hands were trembling. Not from fear.

From rage.

From need.

Because for the first time in fifty-seven years… I didn’t know what I wanted more.

Her…

or his death.