Man, I am scared shitless. Seriously. Everybody is gunning for me and I don't think I can get away this time. I guess they lack a sense of humour in spite of my attempts at helping them gain one. So what if I accidentally caused a war? These things happen. At least, I think they do. Whatever. The name is Jeremy Saint-Pierre. A big and tall young Black man of Haitian descent living in the City of Boston, Massachusetts. I am a Vampire Prince and a lifelong member of what is arguably the most powerful Vampire Clan out there, the Red Cadre. And the others are coming after me. This here may be my last will and testament.
The life of an Immortal is never easy, but lately some people have been trying to cut my immortality short. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, let me explain. I am a Vampire. I was born one. The natural way. A would-be Vampire daddy meets a would-be Vampire mommy, they hook up and then here comes a Vampire brat. Forget the crap you read about in trashy Vampire anthologies. No human can become a Vampire. And no Vampire can become human. That is pure bullshit. Let me give you the rundown of how things play out in real Vampire society.
Vampires are real, folks. We look like normal people. We go to work. We pay taxes. We own property. We're Black, White, straight, gay, rich and poor. We're not supernatural creatures. We're just another species living among you. We look exactly like human beings because of evolution. My family is known as the Cadre. We came into being when an African Vampire named Baka was forcefully brought to the island of Haiti in the 1790s by foolish French colonists. The Vampire united the African slaves who were rebelling against the French colonists and helped them defeat them. Human history remembers him as Jean Jacques Dessalines, the first Emperor of the Republic of Haiti. He was my direct ancestor.
Anyhow, my father, Francois Saint-Pierre moved to the United States of America from our ancestral home, the Republic of Haiti, while in his youth. He studied at Harvard University and later joined the Massachusetts State Troopers. He's now a Lieutenant Colonel. Respected by both humans and Vampires. He met my mother Maria Sanchez, a Mexican immigrant, and they had little old me. A Half-Breed in every sense of the word. Half Black and half Hispanic. Half human and half Vampire. Half alive and half dead. The son of a Vampire Prince who fell in love with a mortal woman. And for most of my life, I've been hated by other Vampires. Mainly because they consider me to be a monstrous aberration. Something which shouldn't exist.
Let me explain, folks. I am just as strong and fast as any Vampire. Maybe a little stronger. However, I don't crave blood like most of our kind do. I eat and drink regular food. I require sleep, which they normally don't. Ordinary Vampires drink only blood because ordinary food and drink is toxic to them. Hell, they can only drink water. In order to drink alcohol, they have to mix it with blood. And have no heartbeat. That's because they're technically Undead. I'm still alive. My heart beats. I eat, drink, shit and sleep. I stopped aging past the age of twenty five. Yeah, they don't know what to make of me.
Personally, I got over my identity crisis a long time ago. I am simply me. There are around fifteen thousand Vampires living in the City of Boston. And they're a diverse bunch. Jamaican. Irish. Italian. Haitian. Cuban. Mexican. And just like the human populations that they live among, these ethnically diverse Vampires don't get along. My father is the Prince of the Clan. And he keeps them all in line. Lately, there's been a lot of strife. The Vampires are getting out of control. My father forbids them from feeding on humans. Not because he cares about humanity but because we don't need them finding out we exist and coming after us. As a species, Vampires number close to one million world-wide. However, we would never win a war against ordinary humanity.
As befitting a Prince of the Clan, I was raised to follow in my father's footsteps. And for most of my life, I was a good little soldier. I enrolled at the University of Massachusetts and majored in Criminal Justice. I wanted to go to the Police Academy just like my father before me. That was before I started hanging out with Wayne and his crew, the Howlers. Wayne is a tall, good-looking, young Black man I encountered at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. He seemed like a cool cat and we hung out. Like me, he was also a Vampire. And in his own way he was a Half-Breed. He told me his father was Black and his mother was White. A Pureblood Vampire who didn't mind hanging out with me, the infamous Half-Breed.
Wayne played baseball for Emerson College. He dated a tall and curvy, fiery Irish redhead named Mary O'Bannon. His best friend was this Japanese Vampire named Richard Yasimoto. There was this hot-looking Indian gal named Parvati with them. They were quite an interesting bunch. All of them the offspring of powerful Vampire families. And they wanted to hang out with me.
Well, I thought I had finally met some folks who liked me for me. What did I know at the time, I was young. Anyhow, I joined Wayne's Crew. For the most part, we just hung out and had fun. We went to clubs. We raced on the streets in convertibles and motorcycles. We prowled the night looking for adventure. We just did our thing like normal young people would. What I didn't know was that Wayne was none other than the son of the Vampire Lydia, my father's Immortal enemy.