"The Race of Men has grown weak."
A hissing of agreement rose from the assembled dignitaries of the seven vampiress clans. Bellara, Queen of the gathered, nodded approval at the vehemence of this loathing for the moderns and continued.
"Sisters, we subsist upon the life essence of these creatures. You will remember, a thousand years ago, when a single man could sustain a pack of our kind for weeks. And now what has become of them?" She pointed to a man chained to the wall, his jaw slack, a gurgle of a moan dropping over his lips, his manhood rubbed raw. "The blood is thin and, worse, what is most vital to our race, the seminal fluids, are but a trickle. A thimbleful and they are done! How are we to survive on such small offerings as these?"
Renewed hissing and snarling from the assembly. Bellara soaked it in, pacing the walls of the cave, her long black hair dropping over the shimmering violet cape that formed her only attire.
"Yes, you are angry," she continued. "But, are you prepared to act? Are you prepared to follow?"
The assembly breathed its willingness.
"Good. For today the one we have been waiting for was born, and soon, very soon, my sisters, we shall feed as we did in the glorious Dark Ages, and know our power once again!"
_______________________
Julian Hedgerow had a perfectly normal childhood, as far as he knew. He thoroughly believed that the rattling against his windowpane at night was the sound of a tree branch scraping the glass, that the cold silver eyes he thought he saw watching him were merely tricks of light and his own overactive imagination. When he went to the opera at night with his parents once, and a tall, slim woman in an expensive, tightly cut evening dress came up to him and said, "Oh, but you will be a delicious man someday," he took it to be one of those obscure things that adults say from time to time, and thought no more of it.
And so it continued until his thirteenth birthday when he was, for no apparent reason, summoned to his doctor's office and gravely shown a chair by a nurse who seemed unaccountably embarrassed at being present.
"Julian, my boy, how are things?" the doctor began, fidgeting in his chair and looking with perhaps too much fixedness at one of his executive desk toys.
"Oh, okay," Julian bit his lip and folded his hands in his lap, tossing his head to shake a strand of dark brown hair out of his eyes.