//Author's note: Maybe this isn't the best thing I've ever written, but it was quite diverting. Anyway, consider this a first draft. Acamar, for those who are interested, is the name of a star, which I thought made a nice name. "Resurgam" means "I will arise". Please R&R//

Acamar ran from the taunts of the crowd. He stumbled as a rock hit his leg, and ran faster. He ran down a narrow alleyway and jumped down the entrance to the sewers just before the mob rounded the corner in search of him. He leaned against the wall and gasped for breath, relieved to have escaped again.

Quietly he walked along the fetid sewers to his home. Acamar lived alone, sleeping wherever was convenient, but there were many others who lived underneath the city. This was the home of the freaks, the outcast, the deformed, the mad chatterers in corners - all whom the society above abhorred, and also...the otherkin, mankind's depraved shadows, the vampires and werewolves and human mages. Returned once more to the secrecy they had previously been forced to. Not quite the same, for the Kin had had a brief time in the sun, and mortals were aware of their existence. It had started with the leader Xavier, who chose to end the long centuries of hiding and reveal the existence of otherkin to the world.

At first, all had been easy, humans accepted them with grace and interest, excited to see old fairytale creatures come alive. None were shunned, and vampires took pains to feed only on the blood of animals. Humans even showed their ever-present entrepreneurial skills and offered human blood, freely given, as an expensive luxury. Everything in the garden was lovely. Vampires and men lived and worked together, and vampires for the first time in their long history did not need to fear the vampire hunters. Werewolves enjoyed protection and all was peaceful.

But in every garden there comes a fall. It lasted a bare ten years, and then it all came crashing down, and now things were worse than ever they had been before. Vampire traits told against them, and human hatred brought down the rest of the Kin beside them. Humans began to fear for their jobs, their livelihoods. Knowing that vampires could live forever, companies began to prefer to employ vampires to humans, for they would never need to replace them. Then some humans began to agitate, saying that vampires were just biding their time, that one day they would have control over humans, and start to use them as slave to be fed upon. Public discontent began to rise, and a group against vampires was formed. The church too weighed in, declaring vampires and their Kin to be of Satan, a group who should be imprisoned or exterminated, and fear drove many to the church in those days. Vampires tried to fight back, but there was little they could do when the tide of public opinion turned against them. Their skills were few, unsuited for this sort of opposition, for centuries of fighting with fang and stealth does not suit one for political machinations. Soon there were demonstrations in the streets and vigilante vampire hunters. One black day the government was overthrown by the People's Resistance Party, blood ran in the streets in this violent overthrow. The new government repealed laws protecting the otherkin, denying them the vote, work, money, until all their protection under the law had disappeared. There were bad effects for humans too, for their new government was authoritarian, and the edges of human society found themselves ranged with vampires against the darkness of this new rule. Most humans never noticed, for their fear of the Kin was used to keep them compliant to their new rulers, and they never noticed that they had brought about the very situation of control that they had wished to avoid by targeting vampires.

Ever adept at survival, the Kin moved underground, rarely surfacing. Humans sometimes came to try to kill them, but under the streets they were safe, and strong. Few were ever killed there. The world above became ever more authoritarian, as new fears were raised every day and human behaviour was regulated, but inside their tunnels and sewers the Kin and their human allies felt safe, for a time at least. Most of the Kin would have preferred to stay in the sewers and subway tunnels forever, but the vampires needed to feed. They chose a group of young, strong vampires, Acamar among them to be their Hunters, to find food for all the community. There were few animals left in the city, and those there were were highly guarded by government vampire hunters, so they had turned once again to humans. Where they could they stole blood from hospitals, but sometimes a human had to be caught and dragged below ground. They were turned, of course, but their fear made them poor and weak vampires, a sad substitute for the losses vampires suffered. Everyone lived on too little food, for they could not catch too many mortals for fear of provoking the Party to kill them en masse.

On the whole, Acamar liked being a Hunter, for he was a solitary person. Most times he could fool human into thinking he was one of them, and feel a sense of peace. For all his love of the hunt, Acamar wished for life in places other than sewers, places that did not smell and were clean, for a life without omnipresent fear and danger, but it was denied him.

Every day was much the same, Acamar went out into the world and scouted out unguarded blood, rarely seeing the other Hunters for they had divided the city between them. Sometimes a Hunter did not come back, and they lived with that fear over their heads.

On that day, in late March, Acamar anticipated nothing different. He dressed, as normal, in rather boring brown clothes, so as to fit in with the austerity of the world above, and carried no weapons. No humans save servants of the state were permitted to carry a gun or a knife for as is the way of revolutions, the "People's Party" were frightened of the people reacting to them with the same violence they had dealt to the previous regime. Acamar relied on his fangs and immense physical strength to help him out of danger - but five Hunters had already died that year.

So it was that with some apprehension Acamar went out into the street. He walked confidently, as though he was just an ordinary human out for a walk. No one stopped him. He headed towards the city hospital, hoping to find blood unguarded there. Slipping on a white coat from a locker room Acamar wandered through the corridors of the hospital until he found the blood bank. But there were five burly men there, armed with stakes, and Acamar realised he could not steal the blood, at least not on this occasion. This was quite a blow as capturing a human was both difficult and dangerous. Acamar wandered the streets looking for a likely victim. The trouble was that the weak were the easiest to capture, but provided the least food, so every hunt Acamar had to weigh up how much danger he could afford to place himself in.

Acamar decided to sit in the old cemetery for a while. It gave a good view of the hurrying people going by, and was quiet and peaceful. Acamar enjoyed reading the inscriptions on the headstones of mortals, and remembering the delicious irony of the words on his own tombstone, "Resurgam". Even the vague consciousness of people whispering behind his back would not stop him relaxing and enjoying this fine spring day...

Something hit, hard on the back of his head, and all went silent...

TBC