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It was beautiful with Mother, the walls were glass…but with Father, I was quickly pushed inside a wrought iron cage with only him holding the keys to my release.

There was only one way to survive, and my mother gave me the best hint of all.

Vesper

“I’m a seer, you know?” a drunk male witch said to the obviously very uninterested female witch at the bar.

She gave him a polite smile and took a sip of her pink swirling liquid before trying to turn back to her friend.

“And you know what I saw?” he asked, desperately trying to steal her attention. “Us. Meeting. It’s destiny, don’t you thin?—”

“Richard, don’t you dare make me kick you out again,” an older witch said from behind the bar. “Destiny.” She let out a huff. “Don’t start with that shit again.”

I couldn’t help the smirk that spread across my lips.

I hated the seers’ obsession with destiny as much as the next person. They believed it to be an undeniable truth and bound to happen no matter what a person did to try to change it.

But they didn’t realize how binding their words could be.

Mydestinywas solidified in a coastal town in Northern California.

It was a quiet place. The people were nice, the forest that surrounded the town was densely populated and perfect for any creatures that like to stalk their prey in the darkness of the shadows.

It was where I stayed for the majority of my life. Where I worked tirelessly to prepare for something far greater than myself.

A day will come when the singular Castle bloodline comes to maturity, and a child born with poison for blood will usher forth an end to their rule.

I was that child, and that day was coming. Faster than I ever imagined.

But it didn’t scare me—at least not anymore. Father had beat it into me for years, making sure the prophecy and the importance of it were branded onto my skin. Sometime between the “training” and taking countless vampire lives, the fear turned to anger.

It festered inside me. Rotting and turning my insides black with every job I took.

How many lives did I take in preparation for this? A hundred? Two hundred?

I had lost count as I tried to erase their faces from my memories.

It only made the anger that much stronger. Instead of jading me, it only made me resent my family and the secretive organization they worked for.

The anger was what had brought me to the city. The main line of the prophecy never said that I was going to die, but the seer had mentioned the bloodbath that would ensue, something a mere human like myself would probably not survive.

And my parents just accepted that as my fate and trained me as such. It was I who decided to go against what destiny proclaimed of me. Going against my father’s wishes.

But I needed to do it. I had let my life be controlled by destiny for so long that I had become complacent. For years, I had been ready to give all of myself to the suicide mission. I was too muchof a coward to shake it off completely, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t at least try to prepare myself a bit better.

The bar I was told to meet at was one I had visited many times over, but it was no place for a human. Even if they let me in, the cautious stares and the potent smell of magic in the air were a reminder of how out of place I was.

It was old, probably more than a hundred years old, and placed in the basement of a laundromat they used as a front. The walls were cracked, and the speakers they played the music out of were fuzzy, but they kept it up well, and I have never seen a fight break out in this place. They respected it. Respected the history and magic weaved into the walls.

Something the humans could never do.

The part of the city where the bar was located belonged to the witches, though the many humans who stumbled upon it wouldn’t know it. The storefronts and various businesses all looked normal, but somehow every time a human came through the area without a purpose, they would suddenly find themselves turned around and spat back out on the other side.

So, from the moment I stepped into this bar, they knew not only that I knew what this place was but also that I had probably been invited.

“Don’t mind them, darling,” an older witch said as she placed a pint of beer in front of me.

Martha, my mind supplied. She was always here when I was and had never given me even so much as a dirty look.