In my past life, I was a vampire

Chapter Four: Destiny

The afternoon bell rang to mark the end of the last class at Oak Springs High. Students poured out of the teaching building like a flock of released sheep. The hallways echoed with backpacks slung over shoulders, laughter and playful scuffles. Some hurried to claim spots on the ball field; others clustered in small groups, debating which movie they would watch over the weekend. Only one classroom remained quiet — the easternmost room on the third floor, its doorplate reading “Botany.” Its windowsill was lined with pothos, monstera, and a pot of wild oats beginning to form seed heads.

The room’s owner stood by the podium, tucking a dissecting microscope into a cabinet. He wore a neatly pressed pale blue shirt, sleeves rolled tidily to the midpoint of his forearms, revealing skin so fair it almost glinted in the afternoon sunlight. No one thought this strange, for everyone in town knew Mr. Elias, who had moved here from the north two years prior, was the sort of man who “simply never tanned.” Students secretly called him the Vampire Teacher — not out of fear, quite the opposite. Elias was the kindest teacher on campus, and his botany lectures were endlessly fascinating. Girls lingered after class to pester him with questions, while boys loved bringing him garlic cloves and plastic fangs every Halloween, just to watch him smile helplessly. He only smiled, never grew cross, and never offered an explanation.

“Mr. Elias, aren’t you leaving yet?” A chestnut-brown head poked around the doorway. It was Maggie, the ninth-grader tasked with erasing the chalkboard. She wiped the board clean and brushed chalk dust from her palms, studying him curiously. “It’s Friday. Didn’t you say you were heading to Austin for that… specimen exhibit?”

“A botanical specimen exhibit,” Elias turned around, his voice gentle. “Though I’ve changed my plans for now. Tomorrow will do just as well. Maggie, the clivia potting mix your mother asked me to pick up is at the gatehouse. Remind her to collect it.”

“Thank you, sir!” Maggie replied cheerfully, slinging her backpack over one shoulder and darting toward the door. Halfway out, she glanced back and said earnestly, “If you ever get tired of teaching, you could come grow flowers on our family ranch. Mom would pay you top wages, I’m sure.”

Elias laughed at her words. “Give her my thanks. But I suspect I still have quite a few years of teaching ahead of me.”

“Well, don’t go aging too fast,” Maggie winked. “You look even younger than you did last year!”

A ripple of laughter drifted down the hallway, then footsteps faded away. Left alone in the empty classroom, Elias’s smile slowly faded. He stared at the faint blue veins on the back of his hand. Sunlight slanted through the window and fell upon his skin, casting no shadow at all.

Young. For five hundred years, he had heard people tell him he looked young. Only he knew what a weary heart dwelled inside this body, frozen forever at the age of twenty-four. For nearly two hundred years, that heart had waited for something that might never return.

He locked the classroom door, walked down the deserted corridor, and was about to exit through the side door when someone leaned out from the staff office behind him. “Elias, hold on a moment.”

It was Miss Jennings, his biology colleague who shared the office with him. She held a stack of exam papers and tilted her chin toward him. “Are you coming to the botanical garden’s autumn fair tomorrow? Word has it they shipped in a rare collection of South American orchids from Austin. Aren’t orchids your favorite?”

Elias paused mid-step and turned, offering a polite smile. “I had planned to go to Austin for the specimen exhibit, but rare orchids make the trip even more worthwhile.”

“I knew you’d be interested.” Miss Jennings hugged the papers tighter to her chest and lowered her voice. “Hey, seriously, you’ve got to back me up at the parent-teacher conference next month. That boy Jason in my class failed biology again on the last exam. His mother swears it’s the teacher’s poor instruction — can you believe how unfair that is?”

“The pea seeds he planted in my class sprouted,” Elias said. “The day they broke through the soil, his eyes lit up with joy. He just hasn’t found what he truly loves to learn yet.”

Miss Jennings blinked, then smiled. “You always have such a… comforting way of putting things. Alright, off you go. See you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow.”

He left the school and strolled slowly down the lonely dirt road outside town. Endless ranchland stretched on either side of him. The evening wind carried the scent of grass and cow dung. Oak Springs was an ordinary little town tucked into Texas Hill Country, where people rose with the sun and rested at dusk. No vampire hunters roamed here, no werewolves lurked, none of the relentless shadows that had chased him across half the world. He had chosen to settle here precisely because it was quiet, because it felt like ordinary human life.

He stopped before an abandoned barn. Leaning against its weathered wooden wall, he pulled an old leather wallet from his shirt pocket. There was no money inside, only a neatly folded sheet of paper worn thin at the edges. He unfolded it. Faded ink sketched a flower: five petals, a slender stem, lined with several sharp thorns. The drawing was clumsy, done by his own hand centuries ago. He had redrawn it over and over from memory until the paper frayed, yet he could never capture the true glow of the flower when it bloomed.

Moonlight Blue. Or so the old legend of the Palmer family called it, by its far more ancient name. Elias stared at the flower sketched on the paper, sinking into a long silence. In five hundred years he had seen countless exotic plants, yet this one never left his thoughts.

That story belonged to a time long past.

Back then, he had not been known as Mr. Elias; he had not even borne the name Elias. He was born into an ancient bloodline of Nightkin from the Old World, a family whose lineage stretched back to medieval nobles who worshipped darkness. They dwelled in a castle perched on a cliff, with vast forests spreading below it, and beyond the woods lay poor, devout villages unchanged for centuries. The clan elders upheld ancient laws: never hunt local villagers, never reveal their true nature, never leave traces that might lead hunters to their gates. These rules sounded merciful, yet they were cold at heart. Their purpose was never to protect humans, but to protect the Nightkin themselves.

Elias grew up inside that castle. Nightkin children aged slowly. A hundred years meant three generations of human lives, yet for him it was merely the transition from a boy to a young man. On his hundredth birthday, the clan held a grand coming-of-age ceremony. For the first time in centuries, scattered kin returned to the castle, and the bells in the tower rang all night long.

Yet young Elias had always been an outlier. While other clan members talked endlessly at midnight feasts about the taste of prey, about fresh blood spilled in some village, he preferred hiding in the neglected garden behind the castle, watching wildflowers bloom quietly under moonlight. He could not bear to harm any living thing — not even the villagers whom the elders dismissed as mere food. Once he asked the elders why they must survive on human blood. The elder stared at him coldly for a long while and replied, “Because we are Nightkin. A Nightkin with a soft heart does not live long.” Those words pierced him like a thorn, lodged deep in the young man’s chest for years.

Shortly after his coming-of-age ceremony, disaster descended.

The Toxon werewolf clan ruled a territory hundreds of miles away, bound by generations of hatred against his bloodline. No one could recall what had sparked the feud — some said it was a dispute over land, some blamed a murder centuries before, others thought it was the eternal, unresolvable strife between hunter and prey. That late autumn, the entire Toxon pack launched a full assault on the vampire castle.

The battle erupted at midnight. Elias remembered clearly: there was no moon, and the sky was black as thick ink. He gripped his ancestral sword and stood on the castle walls, watching werewolves surge across the drawbridge like a tide. Their eyes glowed green in the darkness, and their low growls shook the windowpanes. It was his first taste of war’s cruelty. His cousin, who had taught him swordplay only the day before, had his throat torn out by a giant wolf and fell into a pool of blood without a final word. His childhood sister huddled trembling in their mother’s arms. Their mother shielded her with her body, but when dawn came and the werewolves retreated, she would never rise again.

Elias could not remember how long he fought. He killed many werewolves and suffered terrible wounds. One arm was ripped open, a gash in his chest exposed bone, and blood poured endlessly from his body. He barely recalled enduring that night — only the bitter cold, the hot blood, the spot where his cousin had fallen, the place where his sister’s cries had cut off, and the sound of the family portrait curling in the castle hall fire, like a sigh. At daybreak, he crawled over the castle wall and collapsed into the grass beside the moat, barely escaping the last straggling werewolves. The fire burned from midnight until dawn. When the last wolf’s howl faded into the woods, the castle lay in ruins.

He survived. But his family was gone, almost to the last.

Elias dared not stop. He knew the Toxon pack would return at first light to finish the survivors. Dragging his broken body, he stumbled into the thick forest behind the castle. His wounds bled freely, and the scent of blood would draw his pursuers. He ran deeper into the woods, past fallen trunks and icy streams, until his vision blurred. Then his foot caught on a root, and he crashed heavily to the ground.

He lay upon the damp earth, unable to rise. Consciousness slipped away little by little. He could feel blood spreading beneath him, soaking his shirt. This must be the end, he thought. He had lived a hundred years, barely glimpsed the world, and now he would die here.

Just as he was about to lose himself completely, a faint light appeared in the dark. It was pale, cold blue, like a lamp lit right before him. Elias strained to lift his eyelids. From the soil at his feet, a flower slowly unfurled: first its stem, then its leaves, then five petals glowing with faint blue luminescence, blooming silently in the dark forest. Moonlight broke through the clouds and fell upon it, and its blue halo shimmered as if alive.

A voice whispered beside his ear, soft yet crystal clear, as if speaking right against his skin: “Eat it. Eat it, and you will live.”

Some hidden strength stirred within Elias. He reached out, plucked the flower from the earth, and swallowed it whole with barely a chew. The moment it touched his tongue, cold, strangely sweet liquid slid down his throat like a small stream, flowing into his nearly cold heart.

After that, he knew nothing more.

Elias woke the next morning, blinded by harsh sunlight. He opened his eyes and found himself still in the forest, quiet save for birdsong. Instinctively, he raised a hand to block the sun — then froze. Sunlight. He could see it, feel its warmth on his skin. Nightkin were supposed to burn under daylight, yet now the sun wrapped him in gentle warmth, no burning agony at all.

He looked down and saw his body wrapped in delicate green vines that had sprouted from the soil beneath him. They coiled all over his frame, leaving only his face uncovered. The vines seemed alive, dotted with morning dew, their leaf tips trembling faintly. When Elias struggled to sit up, the vines retreated slowly, as if conscious, revealing his healed body. Those wounds that had nearly killed him were now scabbed over, reduced to faint pale scars.

He staggered to his feet, leaned against a tree trunk and gasped for breath, piecing together what had happened. He remembered the flower, the voice, swallowing it. The sun touched him and did not burn. His wounds were healed. Stranger still, something new dwelled inside him — a quiet sense of connection, as if he was woven into the whole forest. Those vines were the gift the flower had left behind. They masked his scent, concealed his presence, even blurred his aura. Werewolves from the Toxon pack could pass inches from him and see nothing more than an ordinary dead log tangled in vines.

In the days that followed, Elias often thought of that voice and that flower. He realized he had changed, deep within. The primal Nightkin instincts his clan had celebrated at his coming-of-age ceremony faded away. He grew repulsed by the smell of blood, repulsed by the way of life that demanded taking another’s life to sustain his own. It felt as though the flower had tugged his blood, his life, his endless long years, steering him toward a path entirely opposite to that of the Nightkin.

Standing before the castle ruins, he swore an oath: never again would he feed on human blood. Even if it meant enduring hunger, even if it meant suffering, even if his long life became harder, he would no longer be a monster sustained by human fear and blood. He kept that vow for centuries, until he almost forgot he had once truly been a Nightkin.

He left that land of grief. In the centuries that followed, he wandered across the Old World, then sailed across the ocean to the New World — that young, vast country known for freedom. He took countless names and worked countless jobs. Yet wherever he went, he searched for one thing: that flower. The miracle that had lit up the darkness and saved him at death’s door. He never forgot it, never stopped searching.

But year after year, century after century, he never saw that bloom again.

Elias carefully folded the sketched flower and slipped it back into his leather wallet. The sun had sunk to the edge of the ranchland, painting the sky in blazing orange sunset. His shadow stretched long across the ground. He stood there for a moment, ready to turn home, when his peripheral vision caught a small movement in the corner of the barn.

He stepped closer and knelt down. A thin weed had pushed up from the dirt, its blades trembling gently in the evening breeze. Elias stared at it, and the string that had been tight in his chest for two hundred years trembled, almost imperceptibly.

He could not explain why. He only knew that this autumn, the air in Oak Springs felt different from all the years before.

That night Elias returned to the small cottage he rented on the edge of town. He pulled a dusty old metal box from the bottom drawer of his desk. Inside lay the plant notebook he had carried for centuries. Faded words were written on its front page: May I see you once more, while I still draw breath. He laid the notebook open under the desk lamp, flipped to its final blank page, picked up his pen and wrote a new line solemnly: Oak Springs. October. I think I smell something.

He closed the notebook and stared at the rising moon outside his window. Memories pulled him back to that moonless night long ago, to the flower glowing faint blue in the dark.

The voice echoed again deep in his memory, soft and clear as the day it spoke: “Eat it. Eat it, and you will live.”

He did not know what the flower had been waiting for, after saving his life. But a premonition settled over him. This time, the answer he had waited five hundred years to find might be drawing near.