A Tale Of Twilight: The Dawn Of Dark Ages

THE DEVIL'S BALL

The black sedan sliced through the oppressive darkness of the sleeping city, its high-beam headlamps cutting twin swathes of sterile white light through the gloom. The roads, once bustling with mortal life, were now deserted, surrendered to the creatures of the night. Inside the car, the silence was a thick, suffocating blanket.

The driver, a vampire from a lesser clan whose name Yvonne had never bothered to learn, sat rigidly at the wheel, his eyes unblinking, fixed on the empty road ahead. In the back, Yvonne stared out the tinted window, her own reflection a pale, beautiful ghost superimposed over the passing ruins of the human world. Her thoughts were a turbulent sea of resentment and reluctant memory.

Beside her, Matt was a study in contained energy. He held his phone, but his focus wasn't on the screen. His long, deft fingers moved restlessly, his nails, filed to a subtle, dangerous point, making a faint, rhythmic scritch-scritch sound against the glass. It was a tiny noise, but in the tomblike quiet of the car, it was as jarring as a heartbeat. Each scratch was a minute rebellion against the stifling atmosphere, a small testament to the human nerve stretched taut beside the preternatural stillness.

The driver’s voice, gravelly and devoid of inflection, finally shattered the stillness. "Ma'am. We are here."

The words hung in the air, a tentative, fragile bridge thrown across a chasm of mutual hostility. Almost against their will, Matt and Yvonne turned their heads toward each other. For a single, charged moment, their eyes met, hers flashing with icy annoyance, his holding a depth of wary observation. The unspoken agreement was instantaneous and mutual: the truce of silence would hold until the wheels stopped turning.

Yvonne’s gaze flickered from Matt’s unreadable face back to the driver as the car glided to a perfect, silent halt before a non-descript, industrial building. She slumped back into the plush leather with a sigh of profound boredom. With a fluidity that was both courteous and deeply protocol-driven, Matt exited the car. He moved around the rear of the vehicle, a shadow among shadows, and opened her door.

She breezed past him as if he were part of the car’s mechanics, a tool to be used and ignored. The sedan purred away to some hidden garage, leaving them alone on the curb. In an instant, Matt was at her side, then, with practiced deference, slowed his pace to fall precisely one inch behind her right shoulder—the perfect position for a guardian.

They entered not a grand hall, but a cavernous, somber space that had been converted into a ballroom. The effect was deliberately oppressive. The room was a pit of darkness, a void where the only light came from a single, grotesquely ornate chandelier hanging dead center. Its bulbs were dimmed to a sickly, blood-orange glow, casting more shadow than illumination and leaving the faces of the attendees half-hidden, their eyes gleaming from the dark like those of predators caught in dying embers.

This was the creme de la creme of vampire society. Matt’s senses, honed to a preternatural sharpness, immediately cataloged the dozens of watchful gazes that slid over Yvonne before settling on him. He felt the weight of their curiosity, their disdain, their hunger. He was a fresh scent in a stale room, a spark of warm, living energy in a crypt. But he also felt the familiar, reassuring cloak of his father’s invention—the strange, solar-powered balm that rendered him a ghost, masking his human scent into nothingness. To them, he was an anomaly, a silent, scentless statue following in the Ventrue princess’s wake. A puzzle, but not yet a threat.

They made a beeline for the bar, a long slab of black obsidian manned by a bartender with dead eyes.

"Hey... yer... Yvonne!" a voice screeched, cutting through the low hum of conversation.

Sara descended upon them like a chaotic, colorful bird. She was the closest thing Yvonne had to a best friend, a relationship built on mutual boredom and a shared taste for drama. Her gown was a garish, dirty green, the tulle skirt flayed and torn artfully a few inches above her knees. Her face was round and pleasantly pudgy, the plumpness of a vampire who’d never had to hunt for her supper, her veins rich with curated, bottled blood.

She looked Matt up and down with unabashed intrigue before latching onto Yvonne’s arm, her movements unsteady. "Hey... spill the beans! I have never seen you with anyone other than Arnold. So what's up with you and this newbie? Arnold is gonna be mad, you know that, right?" she slurred, half-staggering as they navigated toward the bar.

"Nah. He's nobody," Yvonne said, her voice dripping with disdain. She refused to even glance in Matt's direction. "And trust me, you'd hate him if you got to know him."

Sara’s attention, however, was fully captured by the silent, imposing figure. Matt’s own focus was elsewhere; his eyes scanned the room, not with fear, but with a hyper-vigilant analysis, searching the shadows for a threat he could feel but not yet identify.

"Oh, come on! Don't give me that! Spill it now!" Sara insisted, her breath a sweet, cloying mix of expensive champagne and type O-negative.

Yvonne sighed, seeing she wouldn’t be rid of the inquiry. "Well, if you must know, he's my bodyguard." She delivered the line with a withering finality, a verbal dagger meant to pierce his armor. "You see now why I said he's a bloody nobody?"

Matt continued to stride behind them, seemingly absent-minded, but his wandering gaze finally found what it was unconsciously seeking. A small, elegantly scripted placard hung on the far wall, almost hidden in the gloom. He had to squint to read the words: **HUMANS ARE ALLOWED AT THEIR OWN RISK.** A cold smile touched his lips. A risk for ordinary humans, perhaps. He would be forever grateful to his father, Stanley Garrett, the brilliant, eccentric scientist who saw the supernatural world as a series of fascinating engineering problems to be solved.

***

*The memory surfaced, crisp and clear. A laboratory smelling of ozone and strange herbs. His father, his eyes alight with the joy of discovery, holding up a small, unmarked aerosol can.*

*"With this, son," Stanley had said, his voice brimming with pride, "you won't need to be afraid of them anymore. They won't be able to sense you. You'll be a ghost."*

*At the time, the spray itself hadn't seemed particularly strange. It was the power source that marked his father's genius—or madness. It needed to be charged in direct sunlight.*

He was jolted back to the unsettling present by Sara’s squeaky voice directly in his ear. She was leaning far too close, her drunk eyes trying to decipher him. "Hey, Mister Handsome Bodyguard... Do not listen to her. She is like this most of the time. Always calling people nobodies." She placed a cold, familiar hand on his shoulder. "You are definitely somebody. So, what's your poison? Martini? Mojito? Manhattan? We have it all." Her smile was broad, but it didn't reach her eyes, which were sharp and assessing even through the alcohol.

Before Matt could form a polite refusal, Yvonne’s voice, laced with a wry, condescending amusement, cut in. "He doesn't drink... blood."

Matt’s head snapped toward her, his eyes widening a fraction. He hadn’t expected her to stoop to such a public, othering humiliation. He almost heard the words *What are you trying to do?* form on his tongue.

But Yvonne wasn't finished. She clarified, her voice now stripped of all emotion, flat and cold. "He won't be drinking. He's my bodyguard, and he needs to be sober."

Sara pouted. "Why, Yvonne? Why? Who needs a bodyguard anyway?"

"It's okay," Matt interjected, his voice calm and even, reclaiming control of the narrative. "I'm fine. And besides, I don't drink." The statement was simple, but it carried a finality that even drunk Sara couldn't ignore.

The rest of the night was a slow descent into a special kind of hell for Matt. He watched, sick to his stomach, as the party writhed on—a grotesque parody of high society fueled by something far darker than champagne. The whispered deals, the predatory glances, the casual, terrifying strength on display—it was a vision of the world his father had spent his life preparing him to navigate, and it was every bit as repulsive as he’d imagined.

As the darkest hour of the night began to fade, a faint, terrifying lightening of the sky visible through a high window, Matt knew it was time. The sun, his ancient ally, was coming to end this devil's masquerade.

"Madame," he said, his voice tight as he fought back a wave of nausea. "The sun will be up soon. We need to leave."

Yvonne, for once, didn't argue. Without a word, she picked up her discarded scarf, a sliver of silk the color of a fresh wound, and draped it over her shoulders. She turned and headed for the door, a queen exiting her court without a backward glance.

"You will sit in the front," she commanded as the sedan glided back to the curb. "I want to be left alone." She was trying to reassemble her bossy, wry persona, but the night’s excesses had left her subdued.

"I am sorry, ma'am, but I will not be sitting in the front," Matt stated, his tone leaving no room for argument. He was fully cognizant of the tirade this might provoke.

Astoundingly, it didn’t come. She merely gave a tired, dismissive wave of her hand and slid into the back seat, conceding with a silence more unnerving than any rant.

The ride home was a mirror of the first: a cocoon of heavy silence. Despite his bone-deep weariness, sleep was impossible. The nausea from the party was a live wire in his gut, and his every instinct was screaming, heightened by the lingering miasma of the ball.

Then, halfway back to the castle, the car jolted violently, as if it had hit a solid speed bump at high velocity.

Matt’s head snapped up. He twisted in his seat, looking back through the rear windshield at the perfectly smooth, empty road behind them. There was nothing there.

"Is anything the matter, driver?" Matt asked, his voice low and urgent as he leaned forward, his body tensing for a fight he knew was coming.

The driver glanced in the rearview mirror, a faint, unnerving smile playing on his lips. "Oh, it's nothing, sir. Everything is under my control."

Yvonne let out a derisive snort. "What? Are you scared of a little bump?"

"There were no bumps on the road, ma'am," Matt said, his eyes locked on the driver's in the mirror. "I was ensuring our safety."

"Well, I don't care! That's why I said you should sit in the—"

Her sentence was obliterated by a deafening, twin explosion.

BOOM. BOOM.

The two back tires blew out simultaneously, not from a puncture, but from a precise, violent act of sabotage. The car was instantly launched into a violent, uncontrollable forward tumble. The world became a screaming, shattering kaleidoscope of twisting metal and exploding glass. The sedan cartwheeled end over end with brutal, physics-driven fury.

On the sixth devastating revolution, momentum finally spent, the wreckage skidded to an abrupt and absolute halt.

Silence. Deep, ringing, and terrible.

The car rested upside down, a dead metal beetle. The entire front end, including the driver's and passenger's seats, was completely crushed into a unrecognizable mound of scrap.