Najma al-Dabu lay on her bed at Karnstein Manor in her human form, stark naked. She was trying to sleep, but it wasn't coming easy in a vampire clan's manor. Every little creak made Najma flinch. She shook her head in embarrassment. It was foolishness for a seasoned warrior to be to frightened to sleep, as if she were a little cub. Then again, it wasn't the average werehyena who had to deal with having vampires for hosts. Few werebeasts would sleep with both eyes closed in the company of their traditional enemies.
Najma glanced at her mate Qamar, who was sitting in a chair in human form reading a book. She obviously couldn't sleep either. Najma moved her gaze from Qamar to Kathy. The werecat had been so tired that she hadn't even made it back to her room before falling asleep. While tagging along with the others, she'd just planted herself on Najma and Qamar's couch and gone out like a light. Kathy was sprawled out in an undignified position in human form on the couch, wearing nothing but an oversized T-shirt for pajamas. She lazily scratched her hairy pussy as she snored. Kathy was probably just as nervous as the others, but right now she was FAR too tired to show it.
Najma nearly jumped a foot in the air as the door suddenly opened. Mercifully, it was just her sister Isra and Isra's mate Basma. Both were just as human and naked as Najma and Qamar were right now. "Having a rough night?" Isra smiled understandingly. "The sound of Basma's teeth chattering's been keeping me awake."
"You're nervous, too!" Basma huffed as she shut the door behind her and her mate. "You were so antsy earlier that you couldn't even get any wood going for sex."
"At least I ate your pussy!" Isra protested.
"I'm just glad you're here," Najma smiled. "Safety in numbers."
The door then swung open again. Kibibi and Asanti stood there in their human forms, dragging a giggling Asha behind them. Kibibi and Asanti's nightclothes consisted solely of a green pair of boxers and a purple pair respectively, while Asha was fully nude. "Could all of you help me keep an eye on this overgrown brat?!" Kibibi growled, sounding no less fearsome as a human girl than as a werehyena. "She keeps trying to loot the manor!"
"Can I help it if the vampires' stuff is all seriously cool?" Asha smirked, running a coffee-colored hand through her wild mop of bright red hair. "See?" She opened her backpack and held up a golden chalice studded with selenites.
"Asha!" Asanti chided. "That isn't yours!"
"Yeah, it belongs to the magicky vampire!" Kibibi added. "The one called Liesel. You want her to hex you?!"
"She doesn't really seem the type," Asanti remarked.
"How can we know with vampires?" asked Qamar, looking up from her book. "I've always been told they're a tricky lot."
"Either way, you're giving all of these stolen things back, Asha," Asanti said firmly. "And then we should all try to get what little sleep we still have left."
Najma laughed mirthlessly. "In a vampire nest? Surely you jest!"
"We really should," Asanti said. "Especially you al-Dabu werehyenas. Selena texted me about transforming the coach of Stokerville High's girls basketball team and her wife tomorrow, and neither of them feel good about having sex with jailbait during their first change. You four are the only available adults in the pack."
"Still!" Najma scoffed. "We're surrounded by undead drinkers of blood! You do know that vampires often employ ghouls, right? I'm honestly kinda glad there's a monster hunter staying here. That's a bit of protection, at least."
"Are you serious?!" Kibibi barked. "Your own pack was genocided by fucking monster hunters!"
"Asanti told me this one doesn't have much beef with werehyenas," Najma contended. "She's mostly spoiling to kill succubi right now. Something about her sister getting hurt."
"Well, don't expect her to side with us over the leeches!" Kibibi spat. "That deal with her sister is that one of the von Karnsteins had to turn her sister into a vamp to save her life."
Any further conversation was silenced when the door swung open again to reveal a very short vampiress with bushy dark brown hair and some faded freckles on her ivory nose. She wore a rumpled white button-up shirt, sweater vest, and knee-length tartan skirt. The overall effect resembled a school uniform.
"Greetings, guests," the nerdy-looking vampire said with a curtsy. "I am Whisper von Karnstein. I serve as Clan von Karnstein's archivist, historian, and librarian. Have any of you encountered anything resembling occult tools such as a chalice? Our seer appears to have misplaced some of her personal effects."
"Oh, that was me!" Asha grinned. "They looked all cool and shiny, so I brought them back to our room. I guess Liesel can have them back if she needs them." She handed the contents of her backpack over to Whisper.
"You appear to be more courageous than the others," Whisper smiled gratefully at Asha. "The other new arrivals at the manor try to avoid us."
"You calling me a damn coward, bitch?!" Kibibi growled at the tiny vampire. "Forgive me for feeling weird sleeping in the territory of a natural predator of werebeasts! I know your clan is supposed to be all nicey-nice, but it's a big fucking adjustment, okay?!"
Isra awkwardly cleared her throat. "What Kibibi means to say is that we don't know a whole lot about vampires other than rumors. We're a bit off balance."
"I could teach you a bit," Whisper smiled.
"Ha!" Asha laughed. "I already know all about vampires! See?" She reached into her backpack and pulled out a book whose cover depicted a shirtless vampire with long platinum hair and a chiseled face embracing a swooning woman dressed in revealing eveningwear. "I bought this in town."
"Asha!" Asanti frowned. "You're too young for books like that! They aren't even accurate."
Whisper wrinkled her freckled nose at the romance novel. "Velvet Thirst? What a singularly preposterous title! How can thirst be described as velvet?" She opened the book and flipped through it. "Hmm, not only is the prose gratuitously florid, it gets nearly everything about vampires wrong. How in the name of Mother Night is Count Lothario flying without transforming himself first?! Yes, I believe you do need a bit of vampiric education from me."
"I think you may be onto something," Isra nodded. "We never really got to familiarize ourselves with vampires in Saudi Arabia. The closest we had as ghoul packs. You guys were just scary stories about far-off lands. Enlighten us."
"Let's start with the fundamental definition of a vampire," Whisper began. "Properly designated vampyra nosferatu, vampires are deceased human cadavers reanimated by the thaumic energies of night itself."
"Thaumic?" Basma asked.
"It means magical," Whisper explained. "Vampires are suffused with the essential nature of night. We are by nature dark, mysterious, mystical, romantic, erotic, sensual, passionate, regal, elegant, wise, and powerful. All vampires possess certain supernatural abilities. For instance, all vampires may utilize a hypnotic gaze which can bend others to the vampire's whim as long as the vampire is able to maintain concentration. Each individual vampire may also transform into a specific animal sacred to Mother Night, such as a bat, wolf, rat, owl, crow, raven, moth, spider, fly, cat, or fox. We also possess an unearthly song which allows us to command the creatures of the night as if they were trained circus ponies."
"Cool!" Asha grinned.
"Vampires also possess heightened strength and speed, as well as a swift and potent healing factor," Whisper added. "I may not look it, but I'm nearly as strong as Kibibi. Matriarch Carmilla is even stronger. Vampires also have the power to scale sheer surfaces with their fingertips like an insect."
"And this is why werebeasts are scared of you guy," Basma remarked.
"Of course, no lifeform lacks structural flaws," Whisper continued. "Without proper precautions, sunlight incinerates us. Stakes fashioned from the wood of tree species sacred to Father day are as lethal to us as swords. Even our healing factor is powerless against them. On a more humiliating note, we cannot bear the odor or flavor of garlic and flee from it. On a less flamboyant note, we still have basic needs just like humans. Like most creatures, vampires require rest, albeit less than the living. A single hour or so in a state of torpor is quite sufficient. Besides daily hibernation, we also require an external source of nutrition. Food, in other words. For us, this means the consumption of plasma and erythrocytes from a human host."
"We're not Greek werebeasts," Qamar laughed. "Say what?"
"Erythrocytes are red blood cells," Whisper explained. "The blood must be of human origin, but we do not require ALL of it to nourish ourselves."
"But I once read a book where the bite's always fatal, but the good vampires get around it by eating animals," Asha interrupted.
"A melodramatic fabrication of a human novelist," Whisper said, dismissing the notion with a wave of her hand. "I suspect the author wanted her hero to come off as tortured, lamenting about having to subsist on the foul taste of animal blood while the sweet scent of human veins threatens to tempt him to acts of murder. Nonsense. Pure nonsense. Back in the realm of reality, I should note that vampires have no blood of their own in their veins. Our venom flows in there. It sustains the magic which animates us, and it may be injected from our fangs for reproduction. Thankfully for humans, be they food or vampires in the making, our saliva functions as an anesthetic and a potent aphrodisiac. It's far easier to bite if your prey likes it."
"Gross," Kibibi frowned.
"Well, so much for anatomy," Whisper chuckled awkwardly. "Now for history. We have quite a rich origin myth. The truncated version goes something like this. Nephthys, or Nebet-Het if you like you're like me and insist on rendering our forerunners' names in authentic Archaic Egyptian, was the first of our kind. She was an Egyptian princess from the era of legend. She desired to escape her cruel husband, the usurper pharaoh Set, so her sister, the witch Isis (Aset in the language of her land), fashioned an enchanted coffin for her. Using this coffin, she transformed herself into a being of primordial Night and flew off to freedom in the form of a bat. In twenty years' time, she returned in the dead of night and offered her son Anubis (properly Anpu in his own tongue) the same freedom. They're believed by our kind to still be dwelling someplace secret in the Sahara Desert. All future vampires are of their lineage."
"Huh, interesting," Najma smiled. "Werebeast packs have legendary origins, too. Our storytellers keep those myths alive."
"Lore is important to vampires," Whisper responded. "We are gatherers of ancient secrets and practitioners of esoteric arts. I suppose that brings us to vampire society. Vampires are intensely prosocial. We congregate into large families known as clans. A clan is invariably led by an unquestioned leader called a patriarch or matriarch. The patriarch/matriarch is assisted by the seer, a wise oracle who divines the will of Mother Night and performs whatever other magics we need. A clan that gets excessively vast may develop branches called septs which move out to claim new territory for the clan. A sept is led by an exarch. An exarch functions as a patriarch/matriarch for day-to-day functions and defers to the patriarch/matriarch of the greater clan on issues of gravity. Each clan inhabits at least one hive, also called a nest. When a new sept is formed, it founds an additional hive in its new territory. No sept controls more than one hive. Carmilla's sister Walpurga was once the exarch of another Sept of their mother's clan, but she joined us when most septs of our ancestral clan were destroyed by a combination of 'monster' hunters and our old rivals, Clan von Wisborg. Ours is the sole surviving sept of our clan."
"My sympathies," Isra said, finding herself empathizing with Carmilla and Walpurga. Losing your people was a terrible thing, whether you were a vampire or a werehyena.
"All vampires in a clan are a tight-knit family," Whisper went on, "albeit, not a conventional one. It is an intimacy that excites the carnal side of our instincts, and vampires are prone to bacchanalian orgies involving the entire sept or even clan. Paradoxically, vampires are also romantic idealists who possess a potent urge to seek a favorite partner whom they favor above all others, someone who can be loved for eternity."
"I knew it!" Asha cheered. "I knew vampires were romantic!"
"And I imagine that we're far better at it than Count Lothario of Velvet Thirst fame," Whisper remarked dryly. "Anyway, all vampires in a clan are equal, aside from the seers, the exarchs, and the patriarchs and matriarchs. A patriarch/matriarch wields tremendous social power, but they also are far from lacking in magical power. Mother Night places tremendous metaphysical significance on these lynchpins of our clans, and they tend to develop additional powers beyond those typical of a vampire. Sometimes they don't even realize they are utilizing their powers. For example, the presence of a hive of vampires tends to shape the local population (human or otherwise) over the generations to match the sexual proclivities of the clan's patriarch/matriarch. For example, Matriarch Carmilla is attracted exclusively to females, so the female population of Stokerville is chiefly homosexual with a substantial minority of bisexuals. Heterosexual and asexual women are relatively rare here. The male population, being irrelevant to Matriarch Carmilla, is unaffected. Conversely, Lord Ruthven, the patriarch of Clan Ruthven up in Byron Heights, is heterosexual. Consequentially, female homosexuality is nearly unheard of in Byron Heights."
"Sounds creepy!" Kibibi scoffed. "You won't catch werebeasts brainwashing who towns into being our ideal fuckbuddies!"
"It's not a conscious decision on Matriarch Carmilla's part," Whisper retorted. "I don't deny that malevolent vampire clans exist, of course. Clan Báthory, Clan de Rais, and especially Clan Tepes have all more than earned their sinister reputations. And Matriarch Carmilla can certainly vouch for the sociopathic nature of Clan von Wisborg before monster hunters shattered it. Some other clans, such as Clan Ruthven or Clan Rasputin, are morally grey in character. Clans like the von Karnsteins strive to be perfectly ethical at all times. Clan Pointe du Lac's another good one. They have septs in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Quebec, Louisiana, Haiti, and French Guiana."
"What makes some clans go bad?" asked Asanti.
"Night asks few commands of us, and most of them are unrelated to human morality," Whisper responds. "Mother Night does not discriminate. As worshipers of her lover Lady Moon, you must be aware of the amoral side of darkness and nature. Father Day created morality to bring order to Chaos, while Mother Night accepted Chaos as it is. Clan von Karnstein and Clan Tepes are equally valid servants of Mother Night."
Asha yawned. "Okay, this is kinda getting long, boring, and nerdy. I think I'm ready to go to bed now."
"Ah," Whisper nodded, the blue venom flooding her cheeks as she blushed. "I... I'll just restore Liesel's magical instruments to her person. If you'd ever like to hear about the initiation rites of vampire fledglings or the significance of our renaming upon transformation, just let me know. I have an entire library full of knowledge to share. Well, goodbye." With that, the nerdy vampire took her leave and scampered off tp perform her errands.
Kathy began to stir. "What'd I miss, girls?" she asked as she yawned and stretched.
Asanti smiled wryly. "Vampire 101 with Professor Whisper."