Chapter 2

Waking up this time feels a lot better, and I actually feel energetic and ready to move around. I open my eyes to bright unfamiliar surroundings, feeling refreshed as if I had been sleeping for the past few days –which I had no doubts that I was.

The bed I was in was spread with a silk black sheet; the four-poster bed taking up majority of the space of the small room. It was a simple yet so cozy room, with simple designs snaking along the walls. The drawers sat quietly at the corner of the room, as if simply waiting to be opened and visited. There was no mirror, no dresser table –which was my tell-tale sign that this room didn’t belong to a woman, or anyone relatively female. A few drawers sat together, next to a bookshelf abandoned at the other corner of the room. Books, thin and thick were arranged neatly upon those shelves, but none of them lost their beauty even if the amount of notes, marks and dog-ears I saw on them. Some were bursting with extra notes squished between the pages, while others were filled with so many dog-ears that I wondered if it was intentional or not.

Why did the books take my attention to most –I don’t know it either. I must have been a bookworm of some sort in my past self.

There was a door facing the foot of the bed, and another off to the right, a few steps away from the abused-looking bookshelf. I had an idea that one led to the bathroom, and another led outside into the rest of the house, but wasn’t sure which led to which.

I was still trying to make a guess, arguing with my own mental voice, at which door lead to which place when he walked in.

The first impression I had on him was that he was most definitely the dark, handsome and mysterious man that his voice suited. He wore black all over –till I was almost confirmed on that fact that he was pulling off the brooding, withdrawn and scared-to-love man. It might be intentional; it might be not. I wasn’t sure what else of his character I could draw from his appearance, but I most definitely gobbled up the sight of him with my eyes.

He had the clearest pair of blue eyes that I had ever seen. Okay, maybe I have seen clearer blue eyes somewhere, but even if I did, I don’t remember them. His blue eyes, however, was so clear that I thought I was looking into a deep blue ocean, and I saw exactly the depth and end of it. His nose was pronounced in an inconspicuous way, and I wasn’t even sure what to think of it. It grabbed attention, but yet it was so subtle in showing off its beauty. His cheekbones… Oh god, his cheekbones were so defined they looked like they’d been chipped in. His lips were full, and…. Oh wow, his body was so totally turning me on.

That body of his was to die for. I was pretty sure you could make a washing board out of that rock hard abs of his, and I was saying that watching him clothed. I could only image what holy sight it would be if he were to get undressed… I tried my best to not let my eyes roam south, but they caught their target quickly, and I tried not to let my blush show. He was real well-defined, both upstairs and downstairs.

I bit my bottom lip and averted eyes away from him quickly, trying to tame my blush. God-damned my raging hormones!

“You’re awake.” He stated obviously, but I forgave him for his surprise instead of giving him a duh-look. I like to think that I acted pretty calm as he brought that god-like body walking towards me, but I knew I lost eye contact from him furiously as I tried my best not to chew him up and spit him out again with my eyes. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” I replied, surprised that my voice came out right but still unfamiliar. Had I been knocked up really so badly that everything about myself was so foreign? Come to think of it… what did I look like? God, am I some old lady? Or maybe I am just a little girl?

I looked down quickly at myself, glad that I saw some substantial-sized pair of breast. I looked at my hands and fingers, glad that they were slender and thin. They didn’t hold the wrinkles of an old lady, and the breast meant that I was fully a woman, not a girl. Still, I guessed my hormones weren’t done raging, since my heart did a second leap when I turned back to see him already so close beside me.

He sat down on the bed beside me, leaning in and extending a hand carefully. He looked like he was approaching a scared deer which was ready to run off at any second.

Frankly? I felt like one. Because no matter how hot he looked, and how chewable he looked, I was still wary of where I was, who I am, and who the hell he is.

Still, I allow him a sliver of doubt and his hand touched my cheek softly. Something in those blue eyes softened, and the gentlest of smile draws across his face, as if touching me was something he longed to do in many many years.

“No fever. Good.” He remarked, mostly to himself as he let his hand drop. I sat leaning against the headboard, trying to think of the first question to ask him. There were so many things I had to ask –mainly if I was really amnesiac. I get the idea that he isn’t exactly a doctor, but he seem like he knows me, which probably isn’t a very good sign because I don’t know him.

“Do you remember me? Who I am?” He interrupts my planning of questions to ask with two of his, and I snap my eyes to his. I tried to give him that ‘I-don’t-know’ look, but I think I failed and gave him the ‘I’m-so-innocent-and-I-need-help’ look instead, because his expression softens even more, as if he were dealing with a volatile bomb.

“Do you remember me?” He asks again, softly.

I really tried to remember him, but my mind was blank.

“Um… Aaron?” I made a guess. He looked like the ‘Aaron’ type, the dark and mysterious.

He smiled a little, shaking his head. “Try again.”

“Darren?”

He shook his head again.

“Darrius? Damon? Joel? Leon?” I guessed on random, throwing the first words I could think of out in the open, but his amusement only grew.

“None of those. Let me give you a hint. It starts with a K.”

“Kieran? Keith?”

He made a face, but I could tell that it was a friendly move.

“You are really bad with names, aren’t you?”

I frowned a little, also a friendly move.

“I guess… I don’t know. Tell me; what’s your name?”

“Kain. Kain Valent.”

I nod. He definitely fit a ‘Kain’ bill. Heck, it was better than the ‘Aaron’ dark and mysterious type.

“How about me? What’s my name?”

The smile faded away a little, almost as if that question reminded him of the painful reality, that I’d forgotten everything. I wasn’t sure if I should feel sad or not. Is my past something to be worth being sad about now that it’s gone?

“You want to guess?”

I groaned. “You want me to guess my own name?”

Despite his faded smile, he laughed at my whine.

“Seraphina. You are Seraphina Lucifer.”

“Seraphina…” I say my own name, hearing it in my own unfamiliar voice. “Man, I have a nice name!”

He laughs again, and I decide that I like that voice laughing. It definitely made him sound livelier than he was half-dead and morose and all.

“Do you call me Fina or something?” I ask with a raised brow. Maybe a nickname could trigger some fond memories?

He shakes his head, holding on adamantly to his gentle smile.

“No, but I have heard some of your friends call you that. I am not allowed to.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” He starts, but hesitates and cuts off his words, eye contact falling away. The smile falls away too, and he looks torn. “I should not flood you with information. You have obviously lost most of your memories, like the doctor said. We don’t know exactly how much you’ve forgotten for the moment, but it seems like a lot, considering you don’t know your own name. I don’t want to make everything come back in a tsunami.”

I nod. His reasoning sounds… well, reasonable. I wasn’t exactly up to having an explosion of memories. I don’t know if my memories are good, but I would like to have a break from the splitting headaches and such. Maybe the memories could come back in small trickles? Yeah, that’ll be nice.

My stomach fights for the following speech to our quiet conversation, and triumphs with a loud growl. I cover my stomach in surprise at the volume of its volcanic rumble, and even Kain’s eyes widen in surprise. I may have lost my memories, but that must have been the most embarrassing moment of my life…

A slow but still gentle smile draws across his face and his hand pets mine on my stomach just as gently. I get the impression that he could be a stone cold, hard and strict man but somehow the genteel is all I’m getting from him at the moment. Even his voice is soft, respectful and gentle; even his soft gesture. What is it about me that make him so different from the tone of voice when he speaks to others, say; the other older guy who announced my amnesia?

“I’ll go get something for that.” He says, but before I can say anything, he disappears. He literally disappears –like the poof! Kind of disappearing –and I freeze on instinct. I think my body is used to having people around me disappear spontaneously, but my brain isn’t working along with my body, because confusion clouds my mind immediately.

I don’t have to wait long for him to come back, and while he didn’t do the pop-and-appear thing again, he slid in through the slightly ajar door, standing next to the bed with such speed that I jolted.

“I’m sorry to have shocked you. I’ll keep myself under control better the next time.” He apologizes softly, but instead of repentance, I see more confusion and worry than anything clouding in his stark blue eyes.

“H-How did you do that?” I stuttered, unable to form perfect words. I get the feeling that seeing someone move with such a speed should be normal for me, but my brain doesn’t comprehend.

He extends the cup in his hand towards me, taking a seat by the bedside as he did so –in a deliberately slow movement as if he didn’t want to shock or scare me more than he had already done.

“It is natural to us all, Princess. You can do that too… if you remember how to.” He hesitates a little, as if unsure about what to say. I don’t push on that, accepting the cup instead. Is this his definition for something to cure the emptiness of my stomach? I stared at the inside of it, watching the thick red liquid swirl slowly.

“What is this?” I asked with the curiosity of a wide-eyed wonder child.

“You should drink it first.” He replies gently, a soft hand on mine and guiding the brim of the cup to my lips. I tried not to think of how he could be poisoning me –before I realized that if he wanted to kill me, he would have done so long ago. I don’t know what to make of the liquid, but when it touched my lips, I found my body reacting to it, gulping it in and drinking it with earnest.

It was unnaturally sweet, and I wondered if he’d added extra sugar to it. Thick as it was, it was a beautiful concoction of sweet tasting liquid, added with a metallic pang that left a savory tingling on my tongue. I even licked the inside of the cup to clean it of the coating of liquid, the sweetness touching on the tip of my tongue.

The drink settled warmth in my stomach, and spread it all around, giving me the energy that seemed to amass to a thousand red-bulls all at once. I don’t know how my mind processes these tiny analogies, but it occurs, and I seem to know exactly what a red-bull is too.

“It tastes great. What is it?” I ask, handing him the now-empty cup and licking my lips.

He accepted the cup, but his expression is uneasy.

“Princess, what you had… was blood from a royal lycanthrope.”

My mind takes in three things at once, but none of them processing information that was good to me. The first part, the most mundane part and fueled by the girly side of me, told me that he had always been calling me Princess. What am I princess of?

The second part, the moral side of me, screamed and went ballistics at the information of me drinking blood. And I’d enjoyed it. I can’t recall why my mind was going so crazy at this information; what rule I’d broken, but it definitely wasn’t good.

The third part, the most rational side, told me calmly that it was the blood of a lycanthrope that I’d drunk. It meant that lycanthropes existed… and not just any lycanthrope, it was a royal lycan. What did it all mean? Am I going to go all furry sometime soon?

I answered mostly to the second, moral-driven voice of my mind, looking at Kain with widened eyes. “T-That was blood? And I-I’d enjoyed it?”

He shifts closer, a hand closing gently on my arm. “Don’t freak out, Princess. It is okay. You drink blood every day. This is not much different…”

“B-But why would I drink blood every day?” I whined quietly, sounding lost. Am I supposed to be a Christian or Catholic before I lost my memory? Why did drinking blood strike such a raw nerve in me? I don’t know how I knew it, but wasn’t drinking blood supposed to be immoral, disgusting and inhumane?

Oh my god.

I grabbed Kain’s hands in both of mine, staring at him with even wider eyes.

“I’m not human, am I? I’m a vampire!” I cried, and while he looked worried as hell, he nodded.

Funnily enough, I don’t freak out as much as I expect myself to. My body must have told my mind a little about itself, and I must have known, somewhere in the marrow of my bones that I was a vampire. It’s funny though. I can imagine my mouth telling my brain, “Shut up bitch. We’re a bloodsucking monster and I’m well equipped with the fangs, so deal with it.”

“Princess? This must have come to you as a shock, but yes. You are a vampire, a pure born-vampire. You have been vampire since you were born. Do not worry about anything. We will tell you everything you need to know. We will help you regain your memories.” Kain must have sensed my train of thoughts derailing and sliding and bouncing all in my skull, because he tugs gently at my hands to get my attention to his words, insistent eyes on me.

“’We’? Who else is with you?”

“A collection of vampires who were from your Kingdom before it fell. You will be introduced to them once you feel up to it.”

“My kingdom? It… fell? Why?”

Kain bit his bottom lip, as if unwilling to let up on that piece of precious information.

“Tell me, Kain. I have to know, don’t I?”

Kain looks away, and I feel his guilt.

“The King, your father, died. You crashed before you could speak the Word, and without a leader, your kingdom fell quickly under the hands of the Dragos.”

Frankly, my injured mine only comprehended the first sentence. What mattered was that my father… died.

“Princess?”

I must have spaced out again, because I jerked back to reality to see Kain looking worriedly at me.

“I guess you can’t exactly call me Princess now, since my… well, my kingdom is gone, and I’ve lost memories of myself.” I said bitterly. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked. It is better to be clueless, no?

“No, Princess. We didn’t mean for things to turn out like this. We must right a wrong. We must take your kingdom back, and fight off the Dragos. The kingdom is ours. The Luciferian Kingdom is yours.”

I was startled at his sudden exclamation –the first hard and insistent gesture I’d seen from him as compared to his soft and compassionate self that he’d been showing me all this while.

“I… I don’t know anything. How can I take back a kingdom when I can’t even find my own memories?” I tried to shake his hands from mine, but he clutched to them firmly. I lost the battle of his strength, and just let myself be captured in his grasp, my eye contact falling dejectedly to the bed sheets. Maybe it was better if I just slept through everything.

“We will help you, Princess. You must have faith. Your memories will come back in due time, but you must have faith, as we have in you. We cannot fight a war with the Dragos if you have already given up.”

“But if the Dragos… or whatever you call it, managed to conquer my kingdom so quickly, then it must mean that they are powerful. What can I, a broken girl who doesn’t even realize what she drank was blood, much less that she is a vampire, do to them?”

“You are a royal, Princess. You are the heir to the Luciferian throne. The Dragos may have destroyed your kingdom, but without the Word, they cannot do anything to your people. Unless they see that their royalty is dead, unless they know that their crown princess have given up on them, they will not give up fighting against the Dragos; until the last of them falls.” Kain insists, but he forgets one very important thing.

“In case you don’t know, Kain, I’m not the Princess you want me to be! Sure, I still am her, but I’m not her! I don’t know anything! I’m sorry, but I don’t know what ‘Word’ you want me to say. Yes, I’m really regretful that I can’t help out my own kingdom, but I’m not some Princess Seraphina that you want me to be! You must have mistaken me for someone else!” I cried out, wrenching my hands away from him. Surprisingly, it takes little effort, and before I know it, he has disappeared from the bed.

I hear a crash to the side, and I turn with a gasp to see him lying in a mess of splinters and wood. He must have been thrown there with quite some force, but… how?

“Master Kain!” The door slams open, and a group of people runs into the room, each carrying different weaponry. A well-built guy with a cross-scar across his right eye is holding on to a crossbow wielded in a way that is probably meant to kill in one shot. Another woman in black cat suit and stilettos, with orange wavy hair all the way to her shoulders points her rifle at me. The third guy –the weirdest dressed with a funny high hat, a dirty cloak that had lots of holes, funny color-scheme of inner shirts and paired with extremely loose slacks that looked like they were ready to drop down anytime –pointed what looked like the sharp tip of a cane at me.

“Don’t shoot her!” Kain’s pained voice rings clear and strong in the sudden silence that follows the bang from the door. I look desperately between him and the ensemble of weird people, trying to make out something. How did Kain end up smashed on the drawers? How did the three of them know that he was in trouble? Who were they?

“She hurt you.” Scar-man with his crossbow spoke, the only one who took his eyes off me to assess Kain.

“She is an amnesiac Luciferian Princess, Gabriel. Go; and don’t bother us.” Kain’s voice was a stark difference from when he talked to me. This voice was a pissed off, no-nonsense, I’m-going-to-kill-you-if-you-don’t-obey-immediately tone, and a chill of it set in my spine.

“She might hurt you again, no matter how unintentional, Master.” The woman says, her eyes piercing on me. She had pretty green eyes.

“I can hurt you before you can think of it. Now go. I will not ask again.” Kain bossed with finality in his tone, and no one protested a second time. The first two dutifully lowered their weapons, spun and disappeared in a soft rush of air. The third, the funny-looking guy, grinned like a madman, tipped his high-hat in an exaggerated movement, bowed deeply like a clown, then disappeared without a word.

Kain used his speed and closed the door after them, leaving the room back how it was –save the broken drawer. He didn’t come closer to me now, though, and it finally struck me that it was me who threw him there. I had done it; when I wrenched my hand from his. I hadn’t meant to but…

“You are powerful, Princess. See what you can do to me, even without intention? Please, don’t give up on your kingdom, because the Luciferians haven’t given up on you. Don’t be afraid of what is coming up ahead, Princess. I will be here. I will protect you from all harm. Until you say the Word, I will be here to help you, guide you, stay by your side and always protect you.” His voice goes soft and gentle, and this time, the craziness of everything sinks in.

You know how sometimes shock causes your body and mind to get signals probably a minute or two delayed? Then when the adrenaline wears off, and everything suddenly becomes very real before your eyes?

That’s how it felt, times infinity.

It’s a wonder how I was still conscious.

All the same, I broke down crying like a little girl, and Kain appeared by my side, sitting on my bedside.

He hushed and cooed senseless words, holding me against his embrace. Whatever reservations he had about touching me before was gone as he claimed me into his upper body, shielding me from whatever dangers from outside, Dragos, or even just the people who called him ‘Master’.

He stroked my hair over and over again, and whispered things like ‘It’s alright’, ‘it’s going to be okay’, and ‘I’m going to be with you, don’t be afraid.’

I believed him. It is stupid of me to.

But I believed him anyway. Because he was the only one I could believe at the moment.