Lily Read online

  Lily

  T.M. Linville

  Copyright 2018

  T.M. Linville

  ISBN 978-1-7337088-0-7

  Cover by Lee Copeland

  leecopeland.com

  To Kim.

  For putting up with me, for always believing in me and for being my best friend.

  I love you more than you can imagine.

  Introduction

  The vampire species was declining. Over the centuries, the blood of the Elders was getting weaker. The Elders, the original vampires with the purest blood, have always been responsible for continuing the vampire line. There were originally ten vampire Elders, vampires that have been alive for over 4,000 years. These vampires created other vampires at their discretion. For centuries, any vampire could create another but it was highly frowned upon by the Elders as they were responsible for keeping the numbers in check.

  Only two Elders remained. But their blood had gotten too weak to change humans to vampires without killing them. The process to change a human is excruciatingly painful. If the process didn’t happen quickly enough, the human would succumb to the pain. In the past five hundred years, the existing elder’s blood has been able to change fewer and fewer humans into vampires.

  In the beginning, the blood was strong and could change a human in only a day or two. Although the process did require a strong human, the change was relatively quick and the human would survive the change. Back then, the vampire’s numbers soared. And it continued to soar for another thirty five hundred years and the vampires flourished. But there hadn’t been a successful change in decades.

  A vampire scientist had created a human/vampire hybrid, Lily, using a mix of various blood, including that of an Elder. A hundred and twenty years later, the humans created a test tube baby, LaShay, using a changing human’s blood. Together, their blood could save the vampire species. But would the two find each other? Would the vampires learn the secret to their blood in time? Would their blood be the saving grace of the vampires or its downfall?

  The Birth of Lily

  Circa 1925, in what is now Ashland City, Tennessee

  It was just after dusk and torches illuminated the mouth of a small cave. Four vampire trackers, two guardian wolves and Vincent, the leader, stared into the blackness before them. The stench of rotting flesh had brought them to this place and by the odor, it was not only a human that had been killed within the confines. They heard the rustle of movement within and the wolves leaped forward.

  “Don’t hurt it!” Vincent yelled after them.

  Vincent walked in front of the trackers, wanting to guarantee that the creature they had come for was not hurt. He knew that the task at hand was new to everyone involved, for they were seeking a newborn vampire.

  This vampire was born from the womb of a human, but not a normal human. This human was over one hundred and twenty years old and had given birth to dozens of offspring. But none like this. This offspring was the result of an experiment with vampire blood and human eggs, and for reasons still unknown, this child had survived to birth. The scientist, Jack McGregor, had been working on a vampire/human hybrid for decades. He had finally succeeded.

  The human’s name was Mary Honeycutt and she was one of the oldest feeders the coven had created. As vampires, they needed human blood to survive and over centuries, had worked to perfect the immortal human by giving them the right amount of vampire blood. Too much and they would begin to change and too little they began to age. Humans have very short life expectancies and Mary was the first to live past one hundred years but looked like she was in her twenties. It was a pity that she had to die, as Vincent knew she could not have survived the birth of a child with fangs and claws. Mary had only been pregnant for twelve weeks when she disappeared from the security of the coven five days before. Looking as if she was carrying triplets into the tenth month, she would’ve given birth any day. She disappeared in the middle of the night and wasn’t missed until it was way too late to help her. She took a horse that no one would miss and since she was pregnant, her feeding duties had been postponed. No one even knew she was gone.

  The horse that Mary had taken to escape lay on the ground before them, not twenty feet into the cave. It was drained of blood and some of its flesh was left hanging in places and completely missing in others. Apparently the newborn was hungry. As they rounded a small bend in the cave Vincent stopped at Mary’s broken and bloody body. She had surly not survived the birth. Her body was bent and broken and it appeared to be half eaten. The child had, as he had feared, clawed its way out of the womb and fed on the only thing it knew.

  There was a small hole in the ground with charred wood in a pile less than three feet from the remains. Mary had obviously been here more than a day. Hides and various clothing were strewn across the dirt floor of the cave. A wooden bowl and cup lay next to the fire pit. Echoes of dripping water could be heard in the distance. Vincent listened closer as the sound echoed off the dips and crevices in the rock.

  He saw motion from the corner of his eye. He looked beneath a low overhang and he froze then turned his body slowly to his right. Crouched on all fours was what looked to be a five-year-old child. A female. But this was no ordinary child. This was a vampire in its purest form. A form never before seen in his four thousand years. She was the product of centuries of testing, trial and error and countless attempts to create a true human/vampire hybrid.

  She was pale white. Ice blue eyes peered from beneath thin brows. Her tiny teeth were bared and her sharp, pointed canines clearly visible. Her hair was blond and matted with blood and dirt. Pearly white claws protruded from under her fingernails and toenails. Her nose wrinkled and the near silence of the cave was replaced by a guttural growl then she darted around Vincent and out into the forest. The wolves and trackers followed.

  “Do not hurt her!” Vincent yelled again as he followed.

  As he exited the cave, he noticed three white lilies growing among the brush and thick weeds.

  “Lilies? Here?” he mumbled then smiled. “We shall call her... Let’s go find Lily.”

  They tracked her for nearly three hours and dawn was only an hour and a half away. She had apparently climbed a tree and was now eluding the wolves through the canopy of the forest. Smart, and she’s no more than five days old.

  She was growing very quickly and her intelligence with it. Her instincts were already very strong. All vampires have the natural instinct for survival, just like all living things, but with vampires, it’s the one instinct that they could not always control. Controlling the instinct to kill or be killed was the toughest thing new vampires had to learn. If they didn’t learn to control this quickly, they could become a risk to the coven and ultimately have to be put down. Covens obviously don’t like to, but the safely of the species depends on secrecy and indiscriminate killing is never tolerated by anyone, especially the Elders, the oldest and purest of the vampires.

  Vincent heard one of the wolves yelp and then heard a struggle in the brush ahead of him.

  “We have her, sir!”

  She was fighting against the deer hide tied around her and biting at anything that came close, including the coven leader. Her eyes were fixed on him and they had changed colors. The retinas were still pale blue but the sclera, the normally white part, had changed to a blood red and the claws on her fingertips had grown since he saw her in the cave. In fact, she seemed to have grown since he saw her in the cave.

  “Why are her eyes red?” Titian asked. “They weren’t earlier.”

  “I don’t know,” Vincent answered. “Maybe they change like yours when she’s upset or angry. She is part vampire.”

  Vince knelt down beside her and grabbed Lily’s lower jaw. He turned her face toward him. She struggled but he didn’t let go.

>   “Calm down, child,” he said softly. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  “Why not?” Arius asked. “She’ll kill every feeder we have if we take her back!”

  “We’re taking her back,” Vincent said, still looking into the blue and red eyes of this growling little girl. “Shhhh.” He said as softly and kindly as he could, never looking away from her eyes.

  He loosened his grip slightly on her jaw and she stopped struggling. He let her go completely but left his hand within biting range. She opened her mouth but she didn’t bite him, she only continued to stare back at him and growl.

  She growls, but she doesn’t bite, Vincent thought. Will she bite the person who caught her?

  “Who caught her?” he asked the trackers.

  “I did, sir,” Rader answered.

  “Come here,” Vince said to him.

  Lily began to growl louder when he approached.

  “Put another hide around her,” he said when he was in front of him.

  Rader started to walk around her to drape the hide over her head from behind.

  “No, from here,” Vince told him. “Where she can see you.”

  “But she’ll bite me!”

  Vince raised his hand slowly to her face and wiped a piece of dirt from her cheek and she didn’t bite him, but she never took her eyes off of him.

  “Put the hide around her,” he said again.

  Rader began to reach up and as soon as he was within reach, Lily took a chunk of flesh out of his arm. He raised his hand to backhand her and her growls grew deeper. Her lips were pulled back from her teeth and she snapped at him again. Vincent grabbed his arm before he could hit her.

  “She bit me, Vincent!” he said and tried to jerk his arm from his grasp.

  “You will not hit her,” the leader ordered.

  He lowered his arm and huffed his disapproval as he walked away. Vince slowly lifted his hand to Lily’s face once again. She stared into his eyes as he ran his hand slowly down her cheek. She didn’t even attempt to bite. He smiled as he picked her up.

  Vincent wrapped his arm around her and no sooner than he got her off the ground he jerked his hand away from her back to find that he had a row of puncture wounds across his palm. He turned her around to see what had stuck him.

  “Oh my!” he said, smiling. “She has spikes.”

  “Spikes? How can she have spine spikes? Only the elders have spikes.” Aiden snorted as he walked over to see Lily’s back. “Pft! She is a sideshow.”

  Vincent pulled Aiden’s arm closer to Lily intentionally so she could reach him. She took two swipes and left two sets of parallel gashes on his arm. Then Vincent pushed him away so he wouldn’t strike her.

  Arius laughed, “Aiden, and apparently her claws are sharper than yours,”

  Vincent lifted Lily’s hand to get a better look at the claws then turned her around again to see the spikes. He had never had a chance to examine spine spikes before. He had them himself, but seeing them was no easy task, and he had never met anyone else who had them. The spikes worked the same as their fangs and claws. Tendons, connected to the bottom of the crescent shaped spike, wrapped around the spine on both sides and then connected to specialized muscles in the back. The claws had tendons wrapped around the bones of the fingers and toes and then to muscles in the back of the hands and feet. They all worked independently of each other muscle group in the hands, feet and back. The muscles worked the same way any muscle works, and the claws automatically retracted when no pressure was applied. The top of the nail sheath was actually the fingernail, but under it was a hollow opening where the claw rested. They were retractable and like a cat’s claws, are sheathed when relaxed. The skin that covered the fingertip grew back as soon as the claw was retracted. The muscle and tendons worked together to pull on the bottom of the crescent and rotate the claw out of the sheath. The fangs were connected to tendons under the mid cheek and then to muscles further up around the temple. But the spikes, he had never been able to examine them like this.

  It was believed that only the original 10 vampires, The Elders, had spikes and they didn’t pass them on to anyone they created. They were the first of the species as they are known today and the first 10 that had completely lost the ability to reproduce naturally. The spikes had been a product of evolution, devised as a defense against attacks from predators in the trees. Tens of thousands of years ago, very nearly after homo vampirus had split from the homo sapiens species, a vampires only real threat came from up in the trees. A large tree dwelling cat, Panthera onca augusta, also known as the giant jaguar was their only threat. Now extinct, the cats lived during the Pleistocene Epoch and died out before the end of the last Ice Age. It is said that it only took four generations for the vampire’s spikes to become fully functional. But also in those four generations, a mutated gene was introduced to the DNA and had changed it. It stripped the species of the ability to reproduce but it also gave them immortality, a super-fast healing process and a vampire skin that can only be compared to Kevlar. Only a vampire or one of their wolves could physically harm another vampire.

  A parasite, some believe it was a mutated virus, attempted to reproduce itself completely inside its host. Homo vampirus, not yet susceptible to the sun, fought the parasite and was able to stop the internal attack, but not before the invader had changed the DNA code. The free flowing stem cells in their blood were the first part of the parasite’s attempt to replicate itself. In the process of using the stem cells to the vampire’s own benefit, it made them vulnerable to the sun and unable to have children by compromising the internal reproductive organs by shrinking them to make room for a small organ that reproduced and filtered the stem cells.

  Also shortly after the split of the Homo sapiens and Homo vampirus, humans lost their ability to see in the dark. Since they began to hunt in the daylight they no longer needed the ability. Vampires hunted humans at night while they slept and thus retained the night vision. Vampires remained nocturnal, making their sensitivity to the sun more profound since they slept while the humans hunted and vice versa. The two species rarely had contact with the other during daylight hours, and after tens of thousands of years, humans assumed that vampires had become extinct. They believed that it was a wild animal that would attack them while they slept. Since humans sustained the entire vampire population and because humans were scarce then, vampire numbers were low. Humans outnumbered vampires one thousand to one. The natural order of the food chain had been sustained through the centuries. Lily was only one of thousands of attempts to combine the species so the vampire bloodline would live on indefinitely. It was also an attempt to make vampires less susceptible to the sun and less dependent on human blood.

  But the blood of the vampires had weakened over time and in the past two hundred years only the blood of the Elders could change a human to a vampire. But the excruciating process was taking longer and longer to perform. In recent decades even the Elder blood was only able to change the strongest of humans. The others died during the transformation as the pain can be unbearable. So the hope was to create a hybrid whose blood would be stronger than the Elder’s and be able to once again create vampires with less risk of them dying. Lily was that hope but the trackers had no idea what she really was.

  Lily finally retracted the spikes and Vincent picked her up and cradled her in his arms. He draped a dark coat over her and began the trek back to the coven. After about ten minutes he took the hides off of her. She even retracted her claws, and to his surprise, she wrapped her arms around his neck and laid her head on his shoulder.

  Is she more human than we would have thought, Vincent wondered?

  She was sound asleep when they reached the main entrance to the coven.

  From the outside, the coven would have appeared as just another neighborhood. The houses and roads were no different than that of any other in the surrounding towns. The difference was that under this neighborhood there was a labyrinth of hallways and rooms, laboratories and li
braries. The property of the coven covered about seventy acres and most of it was reserved for farmland and grazing land. The labyrinth below covered nearly thirty of those acres.

  The entire coven lived here, including all of their human feeders and the feeder’s children. The vampires needed them to survive. The feeders were treated as if they were one of them. They could come and go as they wished, but there were always a lot of extras if they devoted themselves to the coven. They all knew that they could easily be replaced, but vampires too get attached to others. They had seen so many humans come and go in their time that they finally, as early as the 1700’s, began experimenting with vampire and human blood in order to extend the lives of the feeders. Mary was one of the most devoted feeders they had ever had. She truly loved being with the vampires and they loved her. She had agreed to help the vampires by carrying offspring to term if she were allowed to raise the children as her own even though they were not. Early on, she would get pregnant by another feeder and then raise the child. Then later, the offspring were the product of selective breeding and later, genetically engineered from eggs harvested from a number of others and implanted into a womb to carry to term. As a gift, Vincent had granted Mary three children that she called her own, Samantha, Robert and Sidney.

  She also had given birth to Eric and Erica but they were for Alexa, Vincent’s wife, from conception. She had always wanted a child, but as a vampire could not conceive so Vincent allowed her to adopt a baby to raise. She had only wanted one, but when they turned out to be twins, she was ecstatic. Alexa raised them both as her own from the moment they were born.

  Eric had always been arrogant and thought that since his parents were the King and Queen of the coven, that it made him the heir to the throne. He was poorly mistaken. He was careless and spiteful and was always rubbing someone the wrong way, usually Erica. Eric had always been bigger than Erica and he never let her forget it. Eric was six foot one and about one hundred and sixty pounds to Erica’s five foot eight and one hundred and thirty pounds.