Fanfic Friday

“The Demon with My Face”

(One of the first chapters I wrote about Alondra the Vampire Huntress. Any resemblances between any of the characters in this story and more famous pop culture characters should be obvious -- though my first draft of this chapter made the connection even more obvious than it is in this chapter. I hope you all enjoy it.)

Chapter One

There is a demon in the world. It wears my face. I know it is not me because I am not a demon. But it is the demon's face that other people see, not mine. And even when I myself look into the mirror, I never see my face. Only the demon's.

My name is Alondra Verano. I used to be normal.

It’s only when I grew older that I learned that I was different. That I was always different. That I always would be different.

I almost killed myself that day. Instead I took a bottle of sleeping pills from the local drug store and took them all in one gulp, only to find myself spitting them out fifteen minutes later.

My parents came home and found me lying by the downstairs toilet. They sent me to the modern-day equivalent of an exorcist and then they put me in a mental hospital. There the doctors continually told me that I never saw what I obviously saw and that I never heard what I always heard.

It was not until the day that a specialist came in to interview me that I finally learned the truth. That I was a Chosen One.

I kinda laughed at that point because both my parents were cradle Catholics and though there had been rumors of Sephardic ancestry in our family's distant past, few of the younger generation -- including myself -- ever took such rumors seriously.

Then the specialist stopped smiling and said that he did not mean that kind of Chosen One. No, I was of a different kind.

The man came from a distant city -- apparently a city located within my home state -- though his accent told me that he himself had come from someplace far further. Apparently there was others like me in this place. Two, in fact -- though in fact, there were only supposed to be one.

He wanted me to come with him and train with the other two. That it would not be good for me to be alone. I had a special gift but such a gift would be useless to me without training. At least that's what he said.

At that point, I would have agreed to anything to get out of that place.

And yet...

"Let me speak to my parents," I said. "And my sister. And the rest of the family."

The man from far away frowned. "That... would not be advisable. The more your family knows, the more they'll be in danger."

"Bullshit," I said, despite myself. "I want to at least talk to my mother."

"You mean the loving mother who committed you to this facility in the first place?" he asked.

"She had her reasons," I said, feeling somewhat strange because I was actually defending actions taken by my mom that I hated.

And yet something about the stranger made me want to fight back. Almost as if he knew something about me that he had no right to know. And yet it was something that I had to know as well. And if I didn't know it, I'd never be free -- no matter how many times I was released.

"Okay," he finally said. "You can see your mother."