Author's Note: Welcome to The Blood Flame 2.0! We hope you find it more enjoyable to read than our alternate version. Please, if you see a mistake comment. If you like it, vote. If you want to yell at Caesarion, please do so. Have fun...

Beautiful new cover done by Lifebytheseashore. She's wonderful.

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The lights had been out for a while now, the room covered in a vast blanket of darkness. Knotrium sighed, realizing that if the fleeting wings of sleep hadn't graced her by now, that they probably wouldn't tonight. Something just wasn't right. Soundlessly, she pealed back the bedclothes and gave one final stroke to the purple hair of the boy next to her. She watched him for a second or two, gazing enviously at his closed eyes and soft breaths. In many ways he was still a child. She reached out and brushed against his mind, feeling a delicate peace, stretched too thinly. It was better than nothing.

She stood, bare feet hitting the carpet lightly. There was a lamp next to her bed, she flicked it on. If Edmund woke in the dark there was no saying how long it would take him to recover. Even after years he didn't speak.

The hall, when she reached it, didn't carry the light of her room. Knotrium rubbed her fingers together, and her hand flared to life. Bioluminescence was a hard gift to come by, especially when accompanied by a blood type that didn't destroy the protiens.

The bathroom was to the left. Knotrium shut the door as quietly as she could; the other boys slept in the basement, but this was Edmund's first nightmareless sleep in weeks. She wanted to let him keep it.

She always kept the bathroom softly lit, harsh white lights made her skin seem not just pale but practically translucent, an unattractive occurence. Everything was bathed in amber, even the sink where she headed and turned on. Lowering her mouth to the sink, Knotrium stole a quick drink before she spat it out. Water wasn't what she wanted right now. She huffed to herself. That would mean going downstairs where to the fridge.

Knotrium weighted her options. Stay here and read with an empty stomach and a beating pulse right next to her ear, or go downstairs and read there while feeding herself and be a responsible for once. She chuckled to herself. One would think that after more than two thousand years of existance she'd have things figured out, like a fridge installed in her room, but nope.

The carpeting on the stairs made them easy to walk down quiety. She could still hear Edmund's breaths, slow and easy. Good. That meant he was still asleep. The stairs opened into a kitchen. Navigating the barstool style chairs that surrounged the central island, Knotrium reached the fridges and pulled hers open. Through the light from her glowing pinky, the words KNOTRIUM'S FOOD ONLY: DO NOT STORE OTHER ITEMS HERE painted in block letters were clear as day. Again, she snorted. Caesarion was so insistant about it, saying that he didn't like his blood to be positioned anywhere near his food, thank you very much. It wasn't like he ate food out of the comunal fridge though anyway, Knotrium was fairly sure that his diet consisted almost entirely of various fast food and carrots.

She opened her fridge and scoured the contents. Each bag was marked with her own spidery hand writing, Edmund (O+), Gavriil (A-), Caesarion (A+), Kukipici (O-), Meallán (B+), Sergio (AB+). Knotrium paused for a second and selected a packet, then dumped it into one of the mugs specifically specified as "KNOTRIUM BLOOD MUG". She put it in the microwave, then grabbed a packet of precut carrots becuase why not. Caesarion would be mad that she ate them later, but what was life without pissing him off?

While the blood warmed, humming to herself to blot out the sounds of various heartbeats bellow her, Knotrium nabbed a blanket off one of the couches in the adjacent room and wrapped herself in it. Whatever modern day idiot had come up with the fact that vampires had no body heat was spot on. Half the time Knotrium felt like she could freeze water just by putting her hand in it.

She was just removing her mug from the microwave when someone behind her asked, "Can I join you?"

Knotrium nearly upended the cup on herself. "Jesus Christ, Gavriil! You scared me!"

"Sorry," He said, going to the pantry and pulling out a jar of peanut butter. "Is that mine?"

She looked down at the cup that was miraculously still placed in her hand. "This? Oh, no, it's Kay's. I don't like drinking anything with antigens or a positive RH factor at night. Too heavy. Couldn't sleep?"

Gavriil offered her a small smile. "When can I ever?"

After what he'd been through, that wasn't much of a suprise. It was too bad people didn't offer therapy for thralls. Most of them needed it, but it wasn't like you could just walk into a human doctors office and claim you'd been alive for over fifty years and still looked like a teenager becuase you were immortally bonded to a vampire. They'd probably prescribe a trip to an asylum and some pretty strong hallucination meds. It was a miracle she managed to trick the local pharmacy into believing her faked prescriptions for his antidepressants.

"This house is a psychiatrist's dream. You, me, Edmund, Caesarion, they'd make a boat load of money off us. Granted, they'd probably lock me up for saying I'm a vampire." Knotrium agreed, playing the moment off as a joke. She swirled a carrot in the mug and brought it to her mouth. "You don't mind me doing this do you? Caesarion says that I ruin whatever random food I happen to be eating."

Gavriil shook his head. He crained his neck to look at the cover of her book. "Lermontov?"

"Brushing up on my 19th century russian," She answered in the same language she was reading.

"You don't need to brush up on anything. You're grammar's better than both mine and Alexei's combined, and russian was our first language." He responded, also speaking russian.

Knotrium laughed and reached over to unplug her phone from the wall. The creepy feeling that had haunted her all evening hadn't left. She thumbed through the open tabs until she found a dictionary. "Can't keep this many languages going without-"

A sound invaded her ears from upstairs. Edmund was awake, his breaths hard and feverish. Fear. His mental images filled with dark.

"Knotrium what's wr-"

She placed a finger over her lips, shushing Gavriil. Slowly, she reached out and flicked the lights. Nothing. The power was out. Maybe it was nothing. A transformer could be down. But as she and Gavriil looked out the window they saw no rain or snow. All noise stopped. They looked at eachother. Then an alarm, ringing through the house from Knotrium's phone blared.

"They're here." She breathed. "They've found us. Go alert the others."

Gavriil stood there, frozen.

"Go!" She shrieked, "Go or we die!"