The Origin of the Vampire, Part 1

So, it was finally done. They had caught him.

Billy couldn't see her anymore. It was part of the punishment, wasn't it? At least, Simon was still out there somewhere….alive. At the thought of Simon, his mind wandered back to the prison.

The new Council of Travelers had finally had their way. They'd locked him up, at least and not put him in some torture chamber. What did the council plan to do with him, anyway? The elders seemed to understand that for the universe to remain stable, Billy had to keep traveling. There was no arguing now that he was special when it came to traveling or better than them, at least. It didn't matter. It hadn't saved him in the end.

The room was big enough to fit a desk in but closed-in, as to seem uncomfortable and scary. The walls were close to him. They had provided an uncomfortable brown wooden chair. Billy was in a black and white prisoner's suit. The shirt didn't have sleeves but the pants were baggy enough to be pleasant. He sat slouched with his head down. Was it over, then?

Billy looked to his side where a small black door announced the exit. It was close but Billy turned back to the desk and stared at it. By this time, his hair had grown over his lips. It covered his face and went around his ears and it was a deep shade of red. This happened to travelers over time, not that Mark had explained it at all to him. Having long hair was something that Billy definitely had not predicted.

Aside to him was a bucket. It had been put there to scare him. It was how they had finally caught him. The magic bucket took away the traveling talent and his ability to sense it. Could he even really travel again? Billy would try and travel but the magic would be drained into the bucket. Then, his talent would seem fainter, as though it were being taken away forever. The harder he tried, the more drained he felt. Finally, Billy just gave up. He had no choice. The trick was that they could make the bucket target a specific traveler, that was what made it scary. What if they did it to Mark? What would happen to all those worlds that needed a person like Mark, a person who made good things happened, that fought against the evil in these so-called other worlds?

Again, the aging man with the lab-coat came in. He had a gray ruler this time. A day ago, Billy had been whipped for refusing to answer their questions. They often threatened not to feed him but they frowned at how Billy got away with it. He wasn't, after all, getting much thinner. He was thin, it was true. A lot of his bulkier mass had been turned into muscle but he still had a belly. No matter where he went, he couldn't escape the reminder that he had been a bully. You couldn't be a bully without power, that was for sure.

"Now," the man said, "We know about traveling during the day. Did you think James would never return to us? He might be a rebel but he's loyal. It's something that you never learned how to be. We are, after all, the ones who created traveling. What do you think you know that we don't?"

Billy smiled inwardly. They couldn't see his face anyway because so much curly red hair covered it. They knew nothing about traveling. They still thought Billy needed to open portals or to wave a hand. In other words, they were years behind Billy's talent. It was exactly why they hadn't done away with him.

"Quieter today than usual. Didn't like the whip, I see. There's an interesting purpose in rulers that others do not see. They can be used to stab, some would say. You ever been stabbed, Billy? Most reports say that you're an escape-artist. I bet you had a lot of fun traveling to different worlds."

Billy smiled again, trying to forget about those places where he'd been after he had left Keya. He tried hard to get her soft lips out of his head. How long had it been, anyway? Two or three years? Maybe, he should have stayed in Teenage World. There was a world where men and women below or above the age of fifteen didn't exist. They just didn't grow older and they didn't have children but somehow there seemed to be more of them day by day. Billy never understood that world or how it had come to be. He understood fairy tales about storks but he had always figured they were, to say the least, fake. In this world, the Vampire Academy was like a base of operations for these fifteen-year-old boys and girls. It was like a campsite with official rules and training.

The base was really just four twelve-story buildings painted red and white like stripes, that made a square. The square created by surrounding buildings was called The Meeting Place, which they thought was a brilliant name. Who they were made by is a mystery. The boys and girls followed a creator's religion. They didn't care who came before but they had hope that someday the creators would come back and that, on that day, they would begin to age. Immortality wasn't appealing to them.

When they saw Billy approach, them being thin at the waist, and him not anything like that, they revered him. The girls considered him attractive but the boys were, oddly, not even a little jealous. And, some of those girls had actually been kissing these boys not minutes before. They wore blue togas, which was weird. Even the girls wore togas, although they didn't exactly cover as much as they should and the cloth was see-through. Billy found himself averting his eyes often and wondering about Keya too much. It's probably best that he had left. Their skin was an oddity, too. They were brown to a dark point but pretty. They almost shone like bronze but a little darker. Billy couldn't quite put a color to them but on the girl's cheeks he often saw sprinkles or small stars.

At night, they set up campfires and held sticks up to them with marshmallows. They didn't tell stories, though. Instead, the girls did a long-ish dance moving in alluring figure eights across the fire, as if copying it, while the boys stared and cheered them on. Then, there was a delegation that was taken very seriously. Boys with black top-hats, six or seven of them, it was never clear how they were chosen to Billy but during this delegation, they decided which girl had danced the best and she would receive a gift. The gifts varied which was what made the whole thing interesting. One time, a girl got the keys to a car. Another time, a girl got a conch. Inside of it was a black-pearl necklace already bound by golden strings. It reminded Billy of why he had to leave. The council was greedy, so they sought riches from any dimension.

Billy had long ago figured out that if he stayed in any one dimension too long, the council could follow him to it. Fortunately, they hadn't figured that trick out until after Billy left Keya or they would have raided his home world for information on his whereabouts.

The ruler slammed on the table. It was loud and it zipped in the air in an arc, so as to make the effect last longer. After, it made a ringing noise like a pitchfork. Billy simply stared down at the desk.

"Listen! Focus, young man. Don't think that just because the elders have spared you the delights of The Pit, that I can't make your life in here a living hell. You will tell me what I want to know. In the end, yes, they always talk."

"Why don't you just tell me what you want, huh?" Billy said to the man. It was clear that the man in the lab coat was ordered to come here to torture him. What bothered Billy was that he always spoke down to Billy but never said anything useful.

"I came here to get the truth out of you. You know what truth we want, what the council seeks. The information regarding a certain amount of gold. We saw a lot of traveling in a very picturesque world. It was made of palaces. Yet…traveler after traveler keeps getting deterred by some effect. All the keeps are empty. Where does all the king's gold go, huh, Billy? Can you answer that little question for me?"

Billy smiled thinking about the question. It was true that he'd found a world of palaces during his travels. Since he knew what such a world would mean to the greedy men of the council, he had implemented a trick to make sure the King's of each palace kept their treasures safe ( From travelers, at least). To Billy, they were the worst of thieves. Travelers were ghosts, never seen, never felt, invisible, one moment there, the next gone, without a trace. What detective could find a person in a world, if he no longer inhabited it? Ah, but what he had done in the world of palaces was a thing of beauty.

At the time when he created it, he called it Dimensional Retroactivity. He was so advanced during those days at creating voids that he could make them do as he wished. He had figured out how to keep a void open perpetually without the need of a traveler's magic. This was done with the help of a golden ring, which he'd thrown into some ocean not long ago to keep out of reach from the council. The golden ring was a gift from the Teenage World girls. They had all agreed that he could not leave their world without some gift, so he was stuck there for two more blissful days watching their short-cut togas and their sensual dances, while the girls delegated about his gift. Despite them being so young, they knew about traveling but had decided that it was not something they could participate in, although one or two boys in the campsite showed signs of having a part of the talent. Billy was good at recognizing other travelers by then, having escaped the council's goons so often.

They gave him a black box. Inside it, wrapped in a light-blue bow was the golden ring, which they called The Animus, which was used, according to them, to make things created become tangible. Since voids often disappeared after being created, Billy figured that the ring, would keep them open perpetually, since tangible voids were infinite. This idea expanded to using voids as containers. What Billy had done was make a see-through void real within two identical worlds. The physical nature of one world hid the gold in the other world, so that at any time keeps looked empty but were really full of gold. The perpetual voids were the trick. They were keeping people's eyes from seeing the real truth, which was that behind these voids were mountains and mountains of gold and jewels.

It was something that he was very proud of and that he now saw as being the one thing he would never reveal to those in the council. Not that it worked much now with the ring gone. His trick, at least, would work for the world of palaces forever. It didn't matter. Three months after that, he'd been caught by the council. James was the one that brought him in but without lackeys. According to James, who didn't look too happy at the time, the two young boys…around Billy's age when they were sent to a closed dimension…could not escape like James had. James had figured out what the lion was trying to teach them, while the other boys were perpetually lost, distracted by the tiger. "If I could go back," James said to Billy, "I would explain to them to ignore the tiger, since whatever it does is just a distraction to keep you away from doing what the lion is instructing you to do. Anyone with the talent should know how to do what we know now, Billy and what your friend did to us was not something I approve of. Of course, I helped you before but what you did to me, then, let's just say, I hold a mean grudge."

James was a tall black man with a suit and tie the first time Billy saw him. Now he wore a suit like before but it was gray and there was a red mark of authority on his shoulder. Apparently, he'd been promoted. It was funny to see how he had changed for the worse. Power corrupts, Billy thought.

Billy said nothing to James at that time.

"It doesn't go anywhere," Billy said, truthfully about the lost gold.

This time the ruler hit him on the wrist. Billy moved his hand from the table. "Nah-ah-ah," said the man, "Hands back on the table."

Shakily, Billy obeyed. He had learned not to disobey the man. The worst part of the bucket trick was that they could make him drain his power into it. It got a hold of its target somehow. He couldn't kick it or touch it. Some weird magic protected the stupid thing. It was funny that a tiny corroded bucket could do such a thing. It was full of a glowing blue water that blinded him if he stared at it. It made him look away often but Billy kept his head down most of the time now, anyway. He had been locked up too long, nearly a year. Was that good for the universe? Billy couldn't really tell time, anyway, not like he used to. There were no watches in a traveler's mind. Billy didn't sleep much, always thinking of a way to escape but not recently.

He had his meals stolen for him by some sympathetic maid that cleaned up after him in the jail cell. How the council had convinced women to help inmates was another matter entirely. But Billy had seen weirder things. She brought him warm bread and cooked meat some nights but lately he had not seen her. Had she been caught? His stomach growled in complaint. He hadn't eaten too well in the past week.

Also, his last moment of disobedience had ended with him going to bed hungry. Not that the bread and water that was given to him was any better. In the morning, he got a piece of dried meat. It tasted coppery and rather salty but he ate it hungrily

The ruler hit his other wrist.

"Now," the man said, lifting the ruler, "Tell me again what happened after you left the world with the star."