We seek shadows not to fear them, but to see what we become inside them.
🩸🌹🩸
She would never forget the way the moon looked that night.
Not just red, no, that would've been too simple.
It bled. Slow and deliberate, like a wound torn open across the sky. It hung there, over the city rooftops, swollen and watching, casting everything in a quiet, feverish glow.
Amalia Dervaux was twenty-six, and she was already tired. Tired of soft smiles and empty dates, of good intentions and forgettable nights. The world had become beige, polite and predictable. And somewhere deep in her chest, where want curled into something hungrier, she had started to ache for something more.
She hadn't told anyone where she was going that night. She didn't need to. It wasn't rebellion, it was instinct. Some part of her had already made the decision long before she slipped on her black dress, before she painted her lips the color of bruised roses and left her apartment without a word.
Just a scent of perfume. A hint of fire.
The club wasn't marked with a sign. Of course it wasn't. You didn't find Le Sang Noir by accident.
It was carved into a quiet street in the old part of town, velvet-lined and stone-laced, tucked between a shuttered bookstore and a closed florist. She stepped inside without hesitation.
The air was warm and red, like a mouth about to close. Music pulsed low, slow jazz crawling through shadows like it had nothing left to lose. The people inside weren't loud. They didn't need to be. Their glances said everything.
She realized, at first, that she wasn't like them, that they knew what she was.
In this city, vampires no longer lurked in the shadows, hidden and whispered about like bedtime stories for frightened children. They were real, tangible and they walked among humans openly, a truth no longer masked by superstition or denial. The world had adjusted, forced to accept their existence not as monsters, but as something darker, something more refined.
They lived their lives under the heavy velvet curtain of night, mingling in the streets and clubs, sitting across polished tables, their pale skin glowing softly under artificial lights, their eyes sharp and distant, reflecting centuries of knowledge and hunger. Their beauty was unnatural: too perfect, too cold, too precise and it drew attention like moths to flame, yet they never burned. They moved with a grace that mocked time itself, bodies lithe and statuesque, a living contradiction of motion and stillness.
There were rules, unspoken and ironclad. Laws that kept this delicate balance between worlds from shattering into chaos. Agreements between vampire covens and human governments, delicate threads woven to preserve peace and order. Above it all stood the Supreme Guide, a figure draped in mystery and power, whose will stretched across continents, ruling the vampire kind with a quiet, merciless authority. The name was spoken in reverent whispers, a ghost on every tongue but a shadow rarely seen.
Let's dispel the childish myths right away. Vampires don't combust like kindling under sunlight. The idea of fragile immortals reduced to ashes by a few rays is a story told to thrill and scare, not to explain.
Vampires never walked under the sun. Not because it would harm them, the sun was powerless against their immortal flesh. No, their absence in daylight was a matter of instinct, of nature. Like nocturnal creatures, they belonged to the night. They thrived in darkness and faded with the first light, retreating to shadows and secret sanctuaries until the world fell into night again.
They live in the twilight, moving with the moonlight's rhythm, their lives entwined with the night's slow, intoxicating pulse. Their bodies glow softly under neon lights, their senses sharpened in the dark, every glance and movement laced with a dangerous elegance that humans could never hope to match. To them, day is nothing but a long rest, a necessary pause in an endless dance with the night.
Amalia had never glimpsed this world beyond the surface, only felt its edges, like a secret brush of cold fingers against her skin. She had never met a vampire, not truly, not close enough to taste the danger behind the beauty.
Not until tonight.