Blood: The fledgling

       The sun had just set, and as the light dimmed, the tension in the air grew. The

town's people hurried home or scurried for shelter, trying to hide from the nightly

onslaught of the undead. The homeless and destitute, among them entire families

with children, made easy targets and they could only pray that they would see the

next sunrise. They huddled together in small communities, relying in numbers to

protect each other, trying their best not to be the next body that would appear in

the streets come the morning.

       Among the populace walked the young vampires; too young to have acquired

the deathly pallor of the elders, they blended easily with the general population.

One such fledgling wandered around the dark alleys, too nervous to venture among

these small communities. Fledglings, as a rule, were too weak to deal with but very

small groups, often no more than three or four depending on their age. Thus,

people shunned anyone they hadn't seen during the day, and were likely to attack

any stranger walking around at night.

       Perfectly aware of this, he hugged the shadows, looking for easy targets: the

drunk, the drug addict, and the demented. He had turned a mere two years before,

and he knew he was too weak to risk going after healthy bodies. Though he was

stronger than the average person, he preferred to be overly cautious. Caution had

allowed him to survive this far without a master or a guild. His master had been a

vampire too arrogant for his own good, and had met his death at the hands of a

Hunter.

       Thus the fledgling had found himself all alone; the guilds, large communities of

vampires that offered the fledglings protection not only from hunters but from other

vampires, were fiercely territorial, and were more likely to kill a stranger than to

accept them in their midst. Unless one was introduced by a member, the hope of

being accepted was rather grim.

His master had died before he could introduce him to his own guild, and so he

had been left alone to fend for himself. Very few fledglings in his situations survived

long enough to become full vampires; that he had already survived this long was a

testament to his survival skills. Tonight, in his wanderings, he had found himself in

front of an abandoned warehouse. With his preternatural senses he could tell there

was one lone human inside, probably seeking refuge from the cold of the night. The

hunt always got him excited: his senses grew sharper, his mouth watering at the

prospect of tasting warm blood. So he stealthily let himself into the warehouse, not

making a sound that could alert his victim.