Prologue

She was my friend five minutes after we had first met. There was nothing I would ever do without being able to tell her about it. She was everything I ever lived for. And then, one night, she died. And so did I.

The only difference?

She wasn't the one who came back.

You see, she didn't commit suicide like me. There was a legend, I never believed it until it actually happened but it said that if a person commited suicide, they would become a vampire after their burial and their gravestone would crack down the middle, so that everyone knew it.

I only knew this because there was some crazy homeless man who lived next to the church who continued to try and convince people. It turns out he wasn't that crazy.

I became a vampire. To live forever when all I wanted to do was die.

I met others who were just like me; a girl who liked to call herself Alice who had jumped down a sewage hole over fifty years ago. She was mad. She thought she was Alice from Wonderland most of the time but, sometimes, her true self would come out. Her real name was Tarry and she knew she was mad. She was scared of her madness. But she could never control it.

Then there was James. He had died in the 1800's from hanging himself after his mother had died. His father had found him dead three days later and, when he had come back from the dead, his father was the first one to suffer his thirst.

And then there was Ly. She rarely spoke. The only time she did was when she wanted to make a snide comment about how ridiculous we were all being, trying to fit into the human world when we knew that we were above their power. She spent the days inside and the nights out. She was the worst of us all. The most bloodthirsty. She had no pity for the humans. We didn't know how she had died.

I suspected she had always been a vampire but James had told me that was impossible and, if it wasn't, he didn't even want to think about it.

But this story doesn't begin when I found them, it begins before. It begins with my journey. It begins with my first kill.