Read Online Monsters Within by Victoria Knight - Free Book Online Page A

you.”
    “This is serious,” he said. “What do you want from me?”
    She thought about this for a moment, slowly blotting away the blood on her arm. The knife sat beside here on the couch and Saul’s eyes saw the thin rivulet of blood along its blade.
    After roughly ten seconds, she looked up to him. There was fear still apparent on her face, but it was fading. “I want to know how you ended up here. I want to know how a vampire ended up in Red Creek. I want to know your history.”
    Saul let out a nervous chuckle. He stood at the kitchen table, keeping a good distance away from the spilled blood, even the red stains on the paper towels she held.
    “And that’s it?” he asked. “I tell you my history and you’ll forget about the video and the things you have seen?”
    “Hell no I won’ t forget . But I’ll keep it between us.”
    Saul thought about this for a moment. He looked down to this peculiar young woman and she returned his gaze just as intently. Even when she knew what he was, she didn’t seem to be truly afraid of him. He had no idea how to react to that.
    He walked across the den and into the kitchen. There, he took out a bottle of red wine and two glasses. He poured the wine and took the now-filled cups back into the den. He handed one to Nikki. He then sat down on the other end of the couch and gave her a queer look.
    “You’re strange,” he told her.
    “So I’ve been told. But I have a feeling you’re a bit stranger.”
    “Fair enough,” Saul said. And then he began to tell her his story, starting with a particularly nasty period in Europe.
     

2
    The details of his family’s history were rather boring as far as vampire history went. Still, he told that part of his story as well as he could. He would catch himself getting distracted from time to time, impressed with how calm Nikki seemed. He could smell slight twinges of fear coming off of her, but it was nothing compared to what he was used to while in the presence of humans who knew what he really was. He wondered what sort of demons this girl had in her past to make her so relaxed in this situation.
    “We lived in Romania for about two hundred years, living our lives the way you’d expect. It’s not at all like the movies make us out to be, though. W e di d kill people and we even purposefully turned some, but it was usually criminals.”
    “What do you mean b y turne d ?” Nikki asked.
    “Sometimes, rather than kill a human, we decide to turn them. We simply bite them, infecting them. They then become vampires, too.”
    “Does that automatically make them a part of your family?”
    “No,” Saul said. “But they will forever be loyal to whichever family turned them. It doesn’t matter anyway because several hundred years ago, it was decided that there could be no more vampire families. That meant that we could no longer turn humans. Turning humans means that they have a chance to go on, live forever, and have families of their own. Around 1500 or so, it was decided among the larger clans that we were starting to have something of a population problem. Of course, if our numbers got too big, we’d become common knowledge to mortals.”
    “How many families were there?”
    “There were thirty families, the Bentons included. But there were also rogue vampires that never really settled down. In total, it was estimated that there were nearly nine thousand vampires living worldwide. And like I said, that was in the early 1500s. It was also suggested that we scatter—that we break up. There were too many of us clustered together. Romania, parts of Russia, and South America had huge populations. So when the families scattered, the Bentons ended up in the land that would later be called the United States.”
    “So who was it that made all of these decisions?” Nikki asked. She was sipping on her wine and reclining back on the opposite end of the couch as if she were having a normal conversation with one of her friends. It