Rise Of The Vampire King

“Vampires are real,” Julien Hallow spoke those three words with quiet conviction into the video camera.

“And tonight, we’re going to prove it to you.”

His best friend, Christopher Thurn, zoomed in with the camera to record a tight shot of Julien’s face for this intro to their web series, Existence. Julien had seen himself so many times in their videos that he could almost picture how he looked right at that moment: dark hair closely cropped to his head, deep blue eyes that looked almost purple in certain lights, and a day’s worth of stubble on cheekbones so sharp that they could have cut glass.

In truth, he was almost a carbon copy of his father, except that he had his mother’s eyes. Tonight, he also looked more intense than usual. His lean, muscular body thrummed with barely concealed energy.

“For those of you who are just finding our web series for the first time, my name is Julien Hallow,” Julien felt the weight of the Hallow name as he said it out loud. His parents had made it famous. He feared to make it infamous with the claims he’d be making tonight “You might remember my parents, Jack and Joanna Hallow, from their old television show, Believe. Or you might have read one of their many best-selling books on myths and monsters.” He paused for a long moment and then said, “You might also know that they died sixteen years ago tonight.”

Even speaking about their deaths–though he had done so many times to the police, to the media, to anyone who would listen, and few had–still hurt. His parents hadn’t just died, they’d been murdered. No matter what the official reports said, Julien knew the truth. The fact that he and Christopher had discovered the location of the city of pale stone–the city that had gotten his parents killed–sixteen years exactly to the day they had died felt like fate.

For a moment, Julien remembered the flashing of red and blue lights streaming through the Thurn’s front bay windows when the police had come to give him the news. He’d been having a sleepover with Christopher that night. There had been popcorn and corny 1950s monster movies to be followed by video games. But the police had been a different kind of excitement.

It had never occurred to Julien when he’d seen the two solemn figures walking up the front path to Christopher’s house all those years ago that they could be there about his parents. His parents had been immortal in his mind. They could not die! Nothing could happen to them! They’d survived adventures in the deepest jungles and on the highest mountains! They had

not even been leaving town that night. How could anything bad possibly happen to them in boring Raven’s Cross after all?

But after the police had spoken to Christopher’s parents, Julien had seen the expressions on their faces. Tears ran down Elizabeth’s cheeks. Grief filled Henry’s eyes. They were as white as chalk with streaks of blue and red as the police cruiser’s lights spun. Something terrible had happened.

The police knew it. The Thurns knew it. And then Julien did, too.

His parents were not coming home.

Ever again.

A lump now formed in Julien’s throat as he remembered knowing that simple fact. It threatened to silence him and end the video before it had hardly begun, but he swallowed it down and went on, “But what you don’t know, what’s never been revealed before, is that my parents died because they had proof of the existence of vampires.”

Christopher’s jaw tightened as Julien said this. This was a point of contention between them, a point that Christopher had lost. Christopher’s logical mind only wanted him to say what they knew for certain. Anything else brought the veracity of the rest of their claims into question. Yet the facts that they did have led Julien, at least, to one simple conclusion: his parents had been murdered to keep the existence of vampires a secret.

Officially, Julien’s parents had died in a car accident. It had been a dark and rainy night. The roads had been slick as ice. His father had allegedly lost control of his car. His parents’ vehicle had then veered off the road, smashed through the guardrail and sailed off the side of a cliff where it had landed five hundred feet below, crumpling like an accordion, before bursting into flames. His parents’ bodies had been incinerated. There had not been enough left of them to determine what had killed them. Were they killed by the crash? Or, as Julien contended, before then?

Unofficially, the story was much different. The timing of their deaths had never sat right with Julien. What were the odds that his parents would die just before they revealed to the world their proof that vampires existed?

The state of their bodies, too, raised doubts. Again, they had been too damaged to determine the cause of death, but what was left of them had “accidentally” been cremated further afterwards, despite their express desires to be buried together in the Hallow family plot. So even if new technology could have come into existence that could have revealed something about their deaths, it wouldn’t have mattered. They were ashes now.

And then there was the fact that all of their research materials on what they had last been investigating had been stolen right after their deaths. Nothing was left for anyone to know what they had been so excited about or willing to risk so much for.

Except for the journals hidden in the attic...

And it was one of these journals with the soft, worn brown covers that he held up to the camera as an exhibit. These journals had told him the truth. The insane truth.

“Two years ago, I found my parents’ journals hidden away where none of the thieves who took the rest of their research could find.” Julien swallowed deeply. “In these journals, my mother revealed what they had been looking for just before they were killed. More than looking for. What they had found.”

He opened the journal with hands that trembled both with anticipation and anger. His parents had been stolen from him and he would never forgive those who had done this.

He read, “All throughout the years we’ve heard rumors of them. The crazed whispering about beautiful people with silver eyes and a taste for blood. Disjointed words that painted pictures of shadowy figures flitting through darkened alleyways. The heartbroken statements from family

members of people who have simply vanished. Some were found dead, drained of blood. Others were discovered, but they were changed. They had those same silver eyes and empty smiles. They were vampires.”

Julien swallowed again before he continued reading from the journal, “But then we heard things that had nothing to do with the established mythology of vampires. Things so wild that they almost seemed more true. We heard that they have successfully stayed hidden from humans, because they do not live on our Earth, but in another place, a place connected to our world through magical gates. This place is called the Ever Dark.”

Julien paused in his reading so that their audience could let his words sink in. Forget stinking graves or rotting coffins, Vampires lived in a whole other world with great cities of pale stone. He paged through the journal until he found the next entry he wanted to read.

He licked his lips and continued to read his mother’s shocking words, “We found the symbol to unlock the way into one of their cities today. Jack is convinced that these passages are somehow controlled Einstein-Rosen Bridges, but I don’t know how wormholes could safely be created on Earth, let alone directed to a single city on another planet. But no matter what they are or how they work, the gate took us to another world. We found it! We found the Ever Dark, the world of vampires, and we cannot wait to share our discovery with humanity.”

Julien closed the journal. His hands were still shaking. He lost focus on the camera for a moment, overwhelmed by the fact that this was what had signed his parents’ death warrants. This desire to share with humanity that they were not alone. That vampires existed right alongside everyone. His parents had not feared these beings. They had been awed. But they should have been careful. They should have been more afraid.

“They never got to share this discovery, because right after my mother wrote this she and my father were killed. It was no accident. It was no coincidence.” He lifted his head to once more look into the camera’s lens.

“They were stopped from revealing this great discovery.”

But I won’t be, Julien thought.

“We’re here to carry on my parents’ work. I keep saying ‘we’, but, for our newcomers, I haven’t yet introduced you to the Scully to my Mulder, who is the wielder of the camera and a highly logical mind, Christopher Thurn.” Julien flashed a genuine smile as Christopher turned the camera towards the mirror that was on the right hand wall so that the audience could see him in the reflection. “He’s the one that keeps me on the straight and narrow.”

Julien’s best friend was almost his exact opposite in looks. Light to his dark. Christopher was blonde with piercing blue eyes and a pink mouth that looked like he was continually pouting, though Christian had never pouted in his life. He had creamy, pale gold skin that immediately burned when he stepped out in sunlight. His features were masculine yet delicate. He would have been loved by ancient Greek sculptors.

“Personally,” Christopher said in a crisp voice. “I like to think of myself as the Spock to Julien’s Kirk. Scully was