Vasilis.
"And how, pray tell, did you come up with this morbid conclusion?" Roman drawled with an eye roll as he sipped on his whiskey elegantly.
An oxymoronic wave of hatred and admiration surged within me as I watched him.
I hated him for ruining my life. For taking away my chance at finally making peace with death, and leaving behind this cruel world that had never been kind to me.
I hated him for making me immortal. For damning me to this fate worse than living as a mortal. But I could not ignore the fact that I also admired him in some ways.
He was one of the few—even amongst immortals—who had learned to grab life by the horns and steer the winds as he pleased. He was the perfect immortal; The true creature of doom. And he could bend the very roots of earth itself to his will if he so pleased.
I'd never met anyone who embodied their Vampirism so perfectly. It was almost as if his predatory form was his one and only true form. It was hard sometimes, to believe that he had once been human.
He wanted me to be like him, and that was where we clashed.
I was nothing like him and I could never be. I didn't even wish to be.
Even before I'd died and been reborn, I'd found everything about life to be despicable. I was one of those who were not made for this earth. Those who seemed to have been dropped here by accident.
I'd never felt welcome in life.
And I still did not. Even as an immortal.
I could not make life dance to my tunes as Roman did. I could not walk the earth as if I were the master of it like he did. I could not trample upon innocent souls like they were nothing but meat and blood bags to be fed upon.
I was not made to be human. But I was not made to be a vampire either.
I still had trouble finding what exactly it was I was truly made for.
"Did Charlotte not tell you?" Jesse asked with a frown, looking back and forth between Roman and Charlotte who had grabbed a glass, and was pouring herself some whiskey from Roman's stash.
Roman snorted. "No. No she didn't. Incase you hadn't noticed, we were in the midst of something that involved a lot more moaning than talking,"
Aiko groaned and face-palmed, and Charlotte simply rolled her eyes as she walked over to plop down on a chair next to Roman.
"You were the one who suddenly started stripping," she poked a long, accusing finger in Roman's bare chest, glaring at him as he chuckled.
"I was trying to get changed, darling, and then you jumped me. I mean, not that I'm complaining or anything." Roman winked, and Charlotte groaned, unable to resist a smile as she looked away from him before downing her glass of whiskey in one go.
"You both are so fucking gross." Rishi deadpanned, looking like he would rather be at the bottom of a coal mine than here.
Same, to be honest.
"Please, put on a shirt, Roman. So we can get to business without me thinking of clawing your abs every other minute." Charlotte let out a sigh as she dropped her now empty glass on a side table next to her and Aiko looked like she would pass out any moment soon.
"Please go put on a shirt, Roman!" Jesse added quickly. "You're both so sex crazed, you should be locked up far away from each other!"
"It's a wonder, how it's been over a hundred years, and yet you're both still so remarkably sexually attracted to each other as if you only just met yesterday." Sophia chimed in, in her eternally bored voice, speaking for the first time since I'd come in, and Rishi snorted beside her, chiming in an opinion I didn't hear as my mind began to wander.
I had frozen over immediately Aiko said that thing about Jade being...
No. Impossible. It couldn't be true.
My heart began to hammer as a cold, gripping fear seized it at the thought that it could very likely be true.
She could be the one the prophecy speaks of.
I mean, we didn't really have anything to go on other than the fact that we couldn't read her mind, and that compulsion didn't work on her. Apparently, Charlotte had tried.
The thought filled me with a weird feeling of anger I could not rationalize.
But vampires' most prominent ability was compulsion, on mortals. Compulsion on other Vampires was usually difficult and vastly required years of training, thereby making it an ability limited to a select few of the most elite vampires. But on mortals, compulsion was like a stone sinking into a river.
Effortless.
Although, there were a few, very rare cases of strong-minded humans resisting compulsion. But even then, their resistance had not been total.
They had only been confused, doing what they'd been compelled to do but with great difficulty, as their minds fought against their bodies.
Jade had completely resisted. Infact, according to a fuming Charlotte, her compulsion hadn't had an effect on her at all. Not even the tiniest pull.
Weirdly, that made me happy. But the happiness was short-lived because the only other plausible explanation for that was the prophecy. And that made me very, very scared.
Which again, was weird, because why did I care if she was the one the prophecy spoke of?
The one claimed to be nature's greatest weapon against the abhorrent, sacrilegious race of vampires, who defied and eroded every last law of nature.
The one sent to be the end of vampirism. The one thing every last vampire on earth would come to fear.
The one thing they would all want to kill.