The Truth

“Dad,” Liam whispered into the silence. “You’ve gotta start talking. Please.”

Liam’s father inhaled. He stared at his son for a moment, then sighed. “Well, you never believed me before, so I didn’t feel the need to keep pressing the issue-”

“Well, I believe you now!” Liam cried. “I was attacked by a vampire, dad! One of them killed MOM!”

His father shushed him immediately. “Liam, hush! Do you want to get admitted to the psych ward!?”

“What I want is answers,” Liam snarled. “Actually, what I deserve is some answers. You better start talking, Dad.”

“I know you didn’t just threaten me,” His father snarled.

“Whatever gets you talking to me,” Liam shrugged. The cables from the bed shrugged with him. “The love of my life is in the ICU, and from where I’m standing, you’re the only one at fault.”

“Do not blame me for the actions of some ancient supernatural creature,” Liam’s father growled.

“He knew you by name,” Liam snarled.

He remembered the creature calling his father “Watcher.” He remembered some mumbo jumbo about some kind of protection spell. He remembered a lot, and he deserved an answer for every single thing he reached for. It was only fair.

His father recoiled as he remembered, too, the events of the day before. He licked his lips and rubbed his hands together, obviously unsure of what to do or say. He didn't make a movement to say anything, which just made Liam angrier. His teeth bared as he glared at his father.

“DAD!”

“Look, I’ve never seen this man before in my life!” His dad cried. “Honest! I don’t know how he knew my name!”

“The legends must be true then,” Liam shook his head. “That’s the only way that him knowing your name makes any kind of sense. Come on, Dad. Think about it.”

“Yes, but how would he even know that I was a Walker?”

“Who else in this town would know anything about a protection spell?!” Liam demanded.

His father swallowed. He tilted his head to the left, then sighed. “So, you caught onto that, huh?”

“Of course I caught on to that,” Liam rolled his eyes. “I caught on to every single thing that happened that damned day. I don’t want to remember any of this, but I can’t get any of the actions out of my head! I mean, Hell, Dad, what even is a protection spell? How did you know how to do it? How did I, a human, knock the crap out of him? Most of all, how is he even real!?”

Liam’s dad held up his hands, almost as if asking for surrender. “Woah there, kiddo. Calm down, okay?”

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” Liam seethed.

“I’m sorry, you’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. What I meant was that you need to slow down with the questions. I will answer them to the best of my abilities, I promise.”

Liam nodded. “Okay...Okay, I can deal with that.”

“As far as the protection spells go...well, that’s going to be a long conversation. But, just promise me you’ll listen to all of this. It may be long, but it explains a lot.”

Liam crossed his arms. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to be, Dad.”

“Okay, rule number one: If I’m helping you out, you had better drop the sass. Understood?”

Liam rolled his eyes but nodded. “Fine.”

“Okay...so, I’ll begin.” His father leaned forward and adjusted his shirt. Liam watched as he began to get comfortable. Liam smirked, realizing that yes, this very well may be a long story.

“Okay. So, this town has always had a thing for...vampires.” His father whispered the word as if it was a curse. Maybe here, it was.

“Many small towns had some serious issues with supernatural creatures. In one town, there were legends of werewolves. In another, sirens. But our town had physical proof of our monsters. Two fang bites to the neck and bodies completely drained of blood. It was...well, we all knew what that meant. ‘We’ meaning the ancestors, not me. I wasn’t even a thought in my great grandfather’s ballsack at this point

Liam cringed. “Ew, Dad.”

His dad chuckled. “I guess there could have been better ways for me to phrase that.”

“Anyway,” His father began again. “Back then, the vampires owned the night. No one knew what to do, so they were simply praying to God that the vampires wouldn’t choose them. They were hopelessly at the mercy of whoever the vampires chose for the night. Well, obviously, the village elders didn’t like that at all. So, they began to try things. Garlic. Holy Water. Iron. Anything and everything to kill these vampires. Whatever sure fire ways worked, they wrote down. Word spread. People flooded from other towns, and our little town became a huge town. According to our legends, we met with people of other towns dealing with other monsters to create something called the “Codex.”

Liam rolled his eyes. “Creative.”

“I figure they had something more serious to think about than the name of some old book, Liam,” Liam’s father shook his head. “Come on, kiddo. Think about it.”

Liam pouted. He hated when his father was right.

“Well, everything went in that book. How to kill vampires, werewolves, the fae, sirens, shapeshifters, skinwalkers, Wendigo’s, demons, you name it. If we had encountered it, it would have been in the book. We had the original copy, and they wrote copies of what we had written through the night. We gathered some pretty cool information.”

“Like what?” Liam asked, intrigued.

“Well, okay,” His father sat up. “Killing a vampire is almost always accompanied by a wooden stake to the heart. Garlic lining your home sends them away, repelled by the smell. Holy Water also burns them. Iron didn’t do much, but that was all we had for vampires. Iron burned fairies, silver hurt werewolves, fire killed Wendigos, salt blocked out demons, wax stopped sirens...you know some of this already, I’m sure.”

Liam nodded. Sure, TV covered most of this stuff, but he was still almost positive that it was TV. This was just weird. There was no way that Dracula was real, that these creatures of the night that he had heard about in fairytales were real. Surely this was some kind of cruel trick. There was no way….

“So, we began to drive the vampires out of our town,” Liam’s father explained, “Slowly but surely, with the tried and true methods that we had written in the codex. However, as things in life often do, stuff began to go wrong.”

Liam readjusted himself so that he was more comfortable and the IV in his hand wasn’t poking him.

“Some of the humans on the hunter’s council were wanting to try and see what would happen if there was a vampire hunter who was actually a vampire. The idea was too crazy to some, and to others, it was a great idea. It was a long debate, according to history, with people on both sides. Apparently, your great grandfather sided on the side of the vampire.”

Liam’s eyes narrowed.

“He believed that if we could meet the needs of vampires in another way, satiate their thirst in other ways, that they would work with us. It was a charming idea, sure, and many people believed it could be done, but it was still a bit crazy. There were arguments all over the place, and some folks just genuinely thought your grandfather was just nuts.”

“He decided that he would prove them wrong. He had two sons to his name, and he petitioned each one to see which would help with his endeavor. The younger son was more eager to please his father, so he decided to help with the experiments. According to your great grandfather’s journal, he let his son wander alone in the woods at night. See, they didn’t have any vampire venom on hand back then, so they couldn’t just inject him and be done with it. They would actually have to get bit back then for the venom to take effect.”

Venom? Liam sat straight up. Lily was bit. If the bites infect venom, then Lily could be infected. He needed to go to her…

He stilled. What would he even do if she was a vampire? Go in there and get attacked, probably. He had no idea how to fight vampires, nor did he even want to fight the love of his life. He was terrified of living life without her, vampire or not. So he was stuck listening to his father’s story now.

Hopefully he’ll get to the point soon, Liam thought glumly to himself.

“Well, the younger son was bit, but not just by any vampire. He was bitten by one of the oldest vampires in existence, and the venom was...well, powerful. The older vampire was making an army to take back the hunters, and your great grandfathers’ plan backfired on him tremendously. Now the vampires had a young and bloodthirsty hunter in their ranks. The younger son could tell the vampires all we had learned so that they knew what to look out for.”

“Nice,” Liam groaned. “Our ancestor was a traitor. Great news.”

“One of our ancestors was a traitor, but it wasn’t by choice,” Liam’s father kept his voice even. “Venom is strong, Liam. It’s incredibly hard to fight it off. Someone has to have incredible will to fight off the effects, and that’s considering the fact that they’ll even want to. We’re imagining that the youngest son really didn’t want to fight off the venom.”

“Why? Does venom feel good or something?” Liam asked.

His father sighed. “According to what we could get out of the younger son before he fled was that the venom was almost euphoric. It made him feel like he was indestructible, like he could do whatever the hell he wanted without consequences. We think the venom is almost synonymous with cocaine or meth. That’s why we imagine the younger son did what he did. We were trying to take him away from that...euphoria...and he wanted to stop us.”

Liam sighed. He hated to hear that someone in his bloodline was lacking the will to do anything, but that was really the least of his current problems. He needed his father to get on with the story so he could figure out what happened next and do what he could to try to help Lily. He stared at his father, trying to coax him along.

“So what happened after the son told the vampires how to fight you?”

“Well, the vampires obviously became harder to fight,” Liam’s father sighed. “They knew our tricks. They started coming in from the roofs instead of the doors so we couldn’t trap them with garlic. They put on some kinds of armor to prevent the wooden steaks from coming through their hearts. They avoided churches, but there really wasn’t much else that they could defend against holy water. The texts say that we were giving out holy water to the citizens to carry on themselves like good luck charms.”

“Eventually, we found that we could outthink them. We had to be more specific with the traps, we had to be more vicious when fighting hand to hand, and layer garlic in the entire homes we built. However, that still wasn’t enough sometimes. We needed to resort to the help of the witches.”

Liam’s eyes widened. “Witches?”

His father nodded. “Yes, there were witches in every town at the time of vampires. We paid them to help us with protection spells, and they taught us a few extra ways to keep the vampires at bay.”

Liam remembered back to when the vampire had found them and was making conversation with his father. He called him out for using a protection spell...which must have been one of the things that he used to protect himself from the witches.

“How did you convince witches of all people?” Liam asked, leaning up in the bed. “I thought they had all gone extinct from the Witch Trials.”

Liam’s father leaned back and sighed. Liam knew all too well about the Witch Trials. Many innocent women burned at the stake for trying to help people using science. It scared off the good witches, or even the not so good witches, and they left Liam’s small town within the month. The Witch Trials continued on for years, though, murdering millions of women and even men based on hearsay.

It was not a happy time in the small town’s history. Not many looked back on it with pride. In fact, Liam’s father’s reaction was how many people acted when asked about the story. It wasn’t exactly one many people remembered with fondness, after all.

“It wasn’t without...difficulty,” Liam’s father whispered. He rubbed his hands together quietly. “We had to...burn the witch hunters on stakes to prove our loyalty to the witches. To show them that we truly just wanted their help and nothing more. It was...it was a dark day for the down. Many of the Witch Trial hunters were seasoned vampire hunters as well, thinking that they were doing right by hunting more monsters despite the truth…” Liam’s father shook his head. “I...I hate to even think about what those poor people went through.”

“And those poor innocent women burned at the stakes,” Liam reminded his father.

Burning some unjust, old, angry white men didn’t mean anything to Liam. They had hurt people, they deserved what they got. Lily didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve any of it. She was an angel in disguise, a woman with no evil in her body, and now she was burning at the invisible stake. Liam had to save her.

“Okay, so you convinced the witches,” Liam pressed. “Then what?”

“Well, then we got the necessary spells from them. They showed us protection, fire, water, and even some basic attack spells. The priests were put in charge of practicing conjuring water from the air in order to have it prepared in case they needed to make holy water. With the witches on our side, the odds were back in our favor.”

“Once the vampires were finally removed from our town, we received word from one of the scouts that they had found the vampire hideout. We decided then and there to attack when they were the most vulnerable, and that was obviously right then and there. We didn’t hesitate. We called an emergency meeting and called the council members together, going to attack.”

Liam’s father pressed his lips together.

“Your great grandfather knew his son was still in there. He refused to storm the vampire base with his son still in there, no matter if he had betrayed the humans or not. Dozens of councilmen were furious with him, after all. They knew most of the lives lost were on his conscious, anyway. If he hadn’t created his son to be what he was, none of this would have happened.”

Liam looked at the floor in embarrassment. He finally understood why his dad never wanted to recant their own family history. Liam didn’t even want to think about the bloodshed on his family name just because of what his grandfather had created. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but his father wasn’t done.

“He threw down his weapons and ignored the cries to battle. He proclaimed then and there that he would not help them storm the base, and then he left. It was that simple to him, supposedly. However, they went anyway. We still aren’t sure to this day whether your great grandfather thought that throwing his weapons down would make them change their minds or not, but regardless, it didn’t.”

Liam didn’t even want to ask the next part.

“Were they…” He swallowed. “Did they make it out okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” Liam’s dad shrugged. “Well, I lied. It totally depends one what you want to consider ‘okay’. Some came back without limbs, others were left to fend for themselves. They has severe PTSD, obviously, from seeing their brothers being ripped apart limb from limb. So no one was truly okay, if I’m being honest with you son. No one was.”

Liam swallowed the fear in his stomach. He couldn’t imagine going into a den of vampires, headfirst, knowing what he might meet on the other end was...death.

“Some of the councilmen were turned, and though your great grandfather still said he wanted nothing to do with vampire hunting and what not, he was charged with coming up with a cure for vampirism.”

Liam nearly bolted out of bed. “There’s a cure!?”

“Supposedly,” Liam’s father sighed. “Our ancestor went mad coming up with the ingredients, and he couldn’t finish it. A lot of folks thought he was struck mad by grief since his son was one of the vampires slaughtered in the cave. It’s a possibility, but...oh well.”

“Is that why we were never elected into office?” Liam pressed. “Because my great grandfather denounced hunting and turned his son?”

Liam’s father scowled. “How did you know about the elections?”

“It’s kind of common sense, dad,” Liam admitted. “Everyone who’s elected has a last name that bears some kind of serious weight. It makes sense that the founding fathers of this town and vampire hunters make it into the polls.”

Liam’s father sighed for what felt like the fiftieth time this evening. “Well, Liam, I have to admit, I don’t give you enough credit where it’s too.”

Before Liam could say anything else, there was a loud piercing scream through the hallway. Liam’s father jumped to his feet, running to slam the door, but it was too late. Liam could already see who was coming towards him at a staggering pace, covered head to toe in shining, red blood.

“Lily!?”