Prologue

EVERYTHING is dark and dreary. Cyrille can’t see anything as she continues on her long path to an unknown place.

“Where the hell am I?” she asked herself, her body gasping for breath in fear as she kept making efforts to see in the darkness of space.

As her body filled with fear due to the darkness, she kept on walking until she stumbled upon a tiny stray of light. At the time, she felt at ease because the stray light she saw helped make her step faster and faster, and the light she saw grew larger and brighter. She was able to reach the source of the light after a few seconds of walking, and there she saw a beautiful man lying on the altar.

“What the hell is going on?” she found herself wondering, taken aback.

She looked around to see what was going on, but there was nothing that deeply involved the man who was lying peacefully on the altar.

“Why is he here?” she started to get more curious, and as she took a few inches closer to the man, a cold breeze blew, giving her goosebumps. “How can he possibly sleep here? It’s very bloody cold in here,” she said, rubbing her skin to heat up herself.

She fixed her eyes for a moment on the sleeping man. “Is he already dead?” She called into question herself. To determine whether or not the man was still alive, she placed her finger near his nose to see if he was barely breathing, and to her complete surprise, she felt a faint air coming out of his nose.

“Thank God, he’s still alive. But why is he here? Has he been kidnapped and locked up here?”

Cyrille’s mind raced as she wondered aloud why a man would be lying on a cold altar in such a dark place. Something piqued her curiosity as her thoughts continued to race.

“What is he wearing? He was dressed in a black cape, a white long-sleeve, and a red bow around his neck. He looks a lot like the classic Dracula movies I’ve been watching,” she said, staring straight at the man.

While she was constantly looking at the man, an odd feeling rushed back into her mind.

“How come his face looks familiar to me? Is he somewhere I’ve seen him before?” She started asking herself, mystified.

She did her best to remember where she saw the man, but after a few brief seconds of long thought, she couldn’t vaguely remember when or where she saw the man in front of her. She gave him another look and couldn’t take her eyes off him.

“How come he looks so damn attractive even when he’s sleeping peacefully?” She wondered aloud incredulously.

She kept staring at the man and suddenly noticed the family crest on its bow, where she encountered a familiar symbol, she had only seen in classic vampire movies.

“Why is this sort of scenario giving me a vampire movie vibe?”

And she was about to check herself the ankh circa out of morbid curiosity, but when she touched it, something pricked her finger and caused it to bleed.

“What in the world was that?” she exclaimed as she backed away her hand and sucked it to prevent any further bleeding. But she didn’t notice when a tiny drop of her blood fell right onto the man’s lips and an ominous aura filled the room.

A cold breeze blew across her small body, giving her goosebumps.

She looked closely around to see if there was anything else there besides herself, but there wasn’t.

“I should get out of here,” she told herself as the constant fear in her body kept growing.

When she is about to leave that gloomy and pitch-black place, a cold grasp briefly touches her skin, filling her with even more fear and paranoia.

“You can’t just leave me…,” said the man.

Cyrille’s skin became numb as a result of the cold air that kept breezing in there, giving her more goosebumps.

“What in the world is going on? What exactly is it now? What is this male voice I’m hearing?” she questioned herself in her thoughts, constantly fighting the fear that was gobbling up her at the time.

“You can’t leave me...”

She heard the man’s voice again, but this time it came from behind her, making her heart pound harder and louder than usual, and her breathing ridiculously heavy. Despite her fear, she attempted to overcome it by turning around to see who was speaking—or if she was having an auditory hallucination.

When she turned around, she saw the man who had been lying on the altar a short time before now sitting at the altar and staring straight at her.

“Who are you?” She asked and was completely baffled.

“You can’t just abandon me now that you’ve fed me with your blood...”

“Ha? What do you mean? What exactly are you on about?” she kept asking, unable to even clearly understand what the man was saying or what was going on at the time.

“Selena,” the man said, still looking into her eyes, longing and full of sadness.

He held Cyrille’s hand gently. “Selena... my love,” he said, making Cyrille even more flabbergasted.

“What are you talking about? I’m not Selena, nor am I your lover. So, stop what you’re doing right now and let me go,” Cyrille said.

“No, my love, I will never let you go again,” he said as he lifted his hand and gently brushed Cyrille’s face.

Cyrille desperately wanted to shove his hand away, but she couldn’t move even an inch.

“What the—why am I unable to move?”

The man moves even closer and closer to Cyrille’s face, which is only a few inches away; one wrong move and their lips will touch. “You’re all mine. You’ve been mine since the beginning. My love, you can never leave me again. You are always mine.”

Cyrille desperately wanted to resist, but she couldn’t. She can’t move or speak, no matter how hard she tries so hard, as if she’s trapped in a strange and bizarre magic spell that only the one who intentionally created it—the man in front of him—can easily break the spell. Her mind was so filled with thoughts and fear that she couldn’t think clearly about how she was going to get away with that mysterious man and scary place.

“Please, someone help me,” she begged and pleaded in her mind.

“Selena, my love...” the man called her again and started brushing his nose against her face, making her heart pound hard as she felt it was about to blow up if she didn’t find a way to escape from that man.

“Please, help me...”

The man kept brushing his nose against Cyrille’s face until he sniffed at her neck.

“Even after all these years, your smell is still the same,” the man said as he lifted his head and looked into Cyrille’s eyes. “You never fail to make me more addicted to you,” he added, the sweetest smile on his face.

But Cyrille was taken aback when the man’s fangs protruded from his mouth, as if in a vampire film, and she became even more terrified.

“Now, let me taste you once more, my love...”

Cyrille awoke sweating profusely, trying to catch her breath. She can’t believe what she’s been dreaming about. She enjoys everything about vampires, but that was the only time she was scared.

“Wait, what was that? Why did I have such a random dream?” She kept asking herself, unable to believe what had happened to her. She felt as if she were in a bureaucratic nightmare that she would never be able to escape, no matter how way too obsessed she is with vampires.

But then she laughed and smacked her forehead in utter disbelief. “I’ve been watching too many vampire movies, which is why I’m having these strange dreams,” she explained as she continued to laugh nonsense. “I should limit my watching vampire movies.”

Even though she had already thoroughly convinced herself that it was the result of watching too many vampire movies, a part of her told her that it wasn’t just a dream, wild imagination, or her subconscious. It’s not something she should let go of so easily.