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Darren's POV

The night's expectation had been fulfilled and as I stood outside of the nightclub, I felt the damp early morning breeze glide past me, removing all lingering scents.

I took a long whiff of the air with the sun above me, picking up various scents of people who had been around the club for the past week. I walked to my car and pulled out the keys from the back pocket of my jeans.

As I unlocked the doors, I noticed a young lady dressed in a plain black knee-length gown, walking up to me with a package in her right hand. Her black six-inch heels clicked on the concrete as she neared me. I got into the driver's seat, thrusting my key into the ignition and watched as she walked straight towards my black Lamborghini.

"Buna dimineata donmule. I have a little token for you from management."

"Oh. What's in the bag, dear?"

I reached out as she passed the bag into my hands. As I held it open with both hands, I saw a bottle of Dom Perignon 2008 and a new gold VIP card.

I looked up at the lady and as she smiled in response, I noticed that she had a gold tooth in her lower half that reflected the sunlight into my eyes. I turned away, as all humans would do, and told her thanks for the gift and kind gesture. I started the car and with my windows all closed, I drove off.

I felt and heard the hum of my engine as I sped through the roads without a care in the world. I was immortal and I had so much time on my hands. And even after living over a thousand years, I still knew that there's a whole lot that I haven't experienced.

I turned on the radio and tuned in to one of those music stations and heard Joyner Lucas' "Lotto" stream through my speakers. I let it play and sped through the city to my two-floored cottage home about a mile away from Hoia forest. I drove into the little garage on the side while the housekeeper walked from the garden to welcome me.

I was born here and all my necessary rituals were performed in Pioana Rotundat. It was the only home I ever knew. I had lived in other parts of the world but in the end, I came back home. Travelling around the world all my life, I needed a tether to hold me down; and this place in Romania was just that.

I walked into the cottage and the servants all greeted me. I walked to the bedroom on the top floor and locked the door behind me.

Looking through the window, I watched the housekeeper's daughter gather the servants and give them a little scolding. The job of taking care of this cottage home and my main mansion had been passed down in the Oxblood family through the ages.

The first was a mere boy when my father found him wandering near the mansion on the night of a full moon. The werewolf hounds, what we call werewolves that are purely driven by hunger, that were guarding the mansion had gone to hunt. My father found Moses Oxblood moments before his head was bitten off by a hound. He saved him and brought him home.

Although I was just six years old with him being ten years older, he always called me Master Darren. My father taught me a lot of human life lessons and I learnt humility.

So when my father died, I let him live in the house as a brother. He had sworn an oath with my father that his family and generations would forever be keepers of the King family. And it has been that way till this day.

But only one family member at a time could know the truth behind the cottage home. All servants that cleaned the mansion were brainwashed with a special incarnation so they forgot everything they saw the moment they left the mansion.

In the bedroom, I kept watching the housekeeper's daughter. She walked through the garden as she instructed different servants. She seemed very promising as the next housekeeper, with all her brothers abroad and her being the only daughter.

I had taken a liking to her since she was young and remembered her snuggling up to me all those years as she slept in my lap. I remember wiping myself out of her memory with a kiss so she would never have to remember those moments or wonder how I've lived so long. Even the servants were changed every ten years because of this sole reason. It was one of the downsides of being immortal without ageing.

As I turned away from the window, I picked up a long piece of scarlet chalk that was placed on my bedside table. This was the only reason that I had a chance to contact the Witch clans.

The portal to my mansion could only be drawn with this chalk and only with someone who contained a touch of my blood. Naturally, the Oxblood family had a trace of it passed down through the generations.

I knelt in front of the bed with the chalk held like a pen as I began to draw runes on the hard wooden floor. It mainly consisted of a six-pointed star with two pointed ends at the top and bottom and one at the left and right, with a perfect circle drawn in the centre.

And in the spaces of the star's pointed end, some inscriptions were written in the ancient witches' language while the circle contained markings from angel and vampire lore. The whole room was the portal and as it activated, I returned the chalk to its place on the bedside table.

This bedroom was connected to my private study in the mansion so I had easy access to it. And I had only one attendant here: a female vampire from a dead clan.

Her clan had declined to become Reapers: vampires solely driven by blood lust and their desire for human flesh. In exchange for their sanity, they gained unimaginable power and a weakness that we had managed to blot out: they became susceptible to sunlight.

Buna dimineata donmule - Good morning sir