Back just over one hundred and twenty years ago, I had a brother. He was young and dashing with girls at his beck and call. Brad was like my parents in most ways. The Elders overlooked his blood binges on the servants because they were easily replaced. But when he drank from his girlfriend, Lily Bloodlight, until she was completely drained. He was high from her blood because it was rich with both A and B as well as the rest of the vitamins and iron. He lay in a drunken pile when her parents found her.
He was imprisoned for overdrinking. He had to stay in prison for many years for his crime. It was not unheard of in the community to overdrink for many of the Elders drank more than they should have and were quite large.
His friends rebelled and began to shake up the parents of the village by drinking from animals. They were soon quit for they were warned that they would soon be in jail like Brad was. After a few years, Brad died from lack of blood. Our parents found out that Lily’s parents, Judge Bloodlight and his wife were drinking more and more of the prisons blood supply.
This started a feud between the two families. Bloodlight side felt that a life for a life was fair. Of course since Brad was the first born male, our parents felt that it should be overlooked.
Meanwhile, the rest of us younger teens were slowly being starved for we were getting less and less wanders to drink from. The Elder of the eight founding families were over eating and not giving the children enough to survive on. They told us that being thin was the most sought after trendy fad.
We did not care what the outside world cared about, we wanted to be able to have blood. We made a pact together not to over drink and never drink until the victim was dead unless it was a punishment for some crime.
We were able to get away with drinking animal blood until some animal characteristics began to show up. It was then that we got into trouble. I won’t get into details but it ended up with another uproar about eating habits. However, we did not back down. Judge Bloodlight had made up a new law that said that any vampire drinking from an animal was a traitor to The Sanctuary Village and to Vampires in general. We did not know this for the adults kept it from us.
One night when all the adults were to have a grand event, a group of vampires that the Elders picked out found us drinking from beef cattle. We were allowed to finish out feeling which made us feeling lethargic. We were lured into wagons and taken to a long jail with individual cells and it was underground is all that I remember. The cell was long enough to have a twin bed, toilet, sink and a shelf in the door where we got our meager glasses of blood. Sometimes the guards gave us dribble glasses as a trick.
We were interrogated, bullied, beaten, made fun of and anything else that they could think of. We were teased with glasses of blood and not always given any. A few were given chicken blood which made the one who did drink it act chicken and ended up backing out of the pact.
We were constantly lectured which was considered counseling. Some were privately lectured to but some were not given that treatment. We were not allowed to talk to each other and only when told to………”