Love stared at her cousin and smirked. "We are still basically immortal."
Calixto scoffed and shook his head. He thought Love had changed but it appeared that she didn't really. She was still his younger cousin who liked being in trouble. This must be the reason why she was into these social media that was so popular in this new world. She could play around, hiding right in the open.
"Your father allows you to do it?" He asked not hiding his curiosity and disbelief.
In the past, she would always get in trouble with all her mischief and it seemed a couple of hundred years after didn't change anything with her.
"Allow is something that can be…" She tilted her head to the side, her long lashes blinking slowly as the corner of her lips curved into a devious smirk, "taken into so much consideration."
Calixto shook his head in surrender. "I knew it. So, what's the plan now?"
"No one in the family knows that I'm meeting you. The mansion is in an uproar when the helpers start whispering about your return with a young woman that comes from the Sangria Flora's."
"I didn't want my awakening to be a source of entertainment to those old vampires."
"Too late. Your father made sure that most of the oldies know about it." She gazed at Calixto and folded her arms over her breast. "It's going to be a little difficult for me as well. You know how my father is so rigid with new things." She rolled her eyes when she remembered how her father would always be the last one to try anything new in the past. He was always doubtful of things that he didn't understand.
In this new world, she made sure that she was not sharing a sleeping area with her parents. They still lived in an old mansion in Maine while she decided to live in a more liveable and progressive city of NY.
She chuckled inwardly thinking that any of their houses being called the sleeping area was her father's idea. Any houses were nothing but a place to shield them when the sun rose and their cursed body was required to go into a deep slumber after being awake at night.
Calixto inhaled deeply and put on his unreadable mask. He met Marietta, now known in this new world as Love Stocker, a supermodel that was quite famous on social media because of her extravagant lifestyle because she was the only one he could trust from all their greedy family members.
And Marietta or Love, whatever she wanted to call herself, was the only one who knew about his obsession with Fleur and his desire to step out of his father's shadow. She was the only one that knew that he tried to build his own nest in anticipation of the future.
He was thinking far ahead but he didn't expect that his father would somehow find out his plan and put him to sleep which lasted for five hundred years. And he was as cruel as ever, he used the woman he loved to 'kill' him. He wasn't sure if the presence of Iris—a direct descendant of Fleur—was also his father's idea of putting him in his place.
"How many of us survived?" He suddenly asked Love. He had been curious about his family and how many of them reached and experienced this new world. When he was in his father's mansion, he didn't sense and see anyone that he knew. All he saw there were his father's slaves.
"Not many since your mother had them killed," she said in a cold voice. "From the line of the original cousins; your grandfather, my grandfather, Granny Mariotte, Granpa Claudius, and Grandpa Reginald were spared but their wives and children were burned into ashes. Now Grandpa Claudius and Granny Mariotte were in slumber just like your mother."
"Were they also punished?"
"No. They don't want to experience this new world so they are sleeping this one out." She chuckled. "Imagine that the punishment that your father made for you becomes something that the old generation finds useful."
He knitted his forehead and tilted his head to the side. He realized how much he had missed with the years that he had slept.
"I could understand my father not wanting to miss anything out but how about your father?"
"Our family suffered the greatest loss from your mother's insanity. My father had no time to sleep if he wanted to keep the family bigger."
"Bigger?"
"Yes, because of what happened and how other vampires crawled all over the place, they realized that power isn't everything. You need the number to enforce power."
Calixto nodded. He still was not gasping everything but he was having a vague idea of what had happened to the Stocker family throughout the years. What he didn't expect was his mother had a huge part in all of it. His father has three wives and his mother was the first but the youngest wife in human age. She was his father's trophy wife because he had her when they were still human, thus, she was his favorite. The year he was born was the year that his mother was turned into immortality.
"Why are there so many of our kind right now? Were the Witch covenants able to replicate the magical powder?"
"No. It wasn't just your father who pioneered things. It appeared that our cursed blood could turn a human into our kind if done properly. There is no need to use the magical powder that would curse you into years of suffering before turning into a vampire."
"We could turn humans into our kind?" He asked in bewilderment. "What have we done?"
Love laughed. "We are no longer seen as cursed. We are now the curse. The most sought curse because the humans of this new world all seek immortality, more fervent than our great-great-grandfather desires to keep their bloodline alive till the end of time."