Taint (Formerly Claimed) Dark Midnight 1

Chapter 1

Preface

Humans could be so naïve when it came to the truth of the world—the horrors they only thought existed in nightmares.  They had absolutely no clue.

The Boogeyman was real. 

He munched on bloody limbs right across the table from Dracula, while the Wolfman picked splinters of bone from his teeth. 

Sort of.  

Only in this world, there were hundreds of ‘Boogeymen’ and thousands of ‘Draculas’ and twice as many ‘Wolfmen’ running around. 

All of them fighting and bleeding and dying for just a little bit of power. 

Eliot figured that you couldn't blame the mortals for writing it off as make-believe; who would want to believe it?

He hadn't.  He had fought back against the truth—tried to ignore it, push it away to the depths of his mind.  Deny it. 

Until it was too late.  

He could still remember what it had felt like—finally believing that all the monsters and fairytales he'd been told his whole life didn’t exist really were real.

Earth shattering. 

Most mortals could barely get past the idea that their planet was just one of many in an unfathomable universe.  How were they supposed to understand that they weren't even the dominant creatures at the top of the food chain?  

That the darkness hid a world more terrifying than they could ever imagine?

After all, they only had their ‘police’ to protect them from whatever lurked in the shadows…

Ha!

He nearly laughed out loud at that—as if a car or a gun could protect someone from something like him. 

           Though, to be fair, the humans had no idea just what waited outside the boundaries of their houses at night. If they had even the slightest inkling, Eliot figured they might have appreciated things like instinct and fear a little more.

It was almost funny the more he thought about it.  For creatures that had survived centuries purely on instinct, mortal seemed to despise the feeling. 

Ignorance was bliss, after all. 

When that little warning voice of instinct cropped up at the back of their minds as they walked down a brightly lit street in the middle of the day, who could blame them for ignoring it? 

For writing it off the unease as just the product of an overactive imagination?

After all what kinds of bad things could possibly happen in broad daylight?

The mortal girl two paces ahead of him should have listened to her little voice. 

She should have given in to the whispers at the back of her mind that warned of danger as she walked along the sidewalk with a pink backpack. 

Pink, Eliot thought darkly. 

It was his favorite color actually, right next to red.

Black was a close second.  Black like…his soul, if he wanted to be morbid about it.

But pink would always be his favorite.