Picking out a dress was often a chore. Her father gave her so many, though very few in the reds and blacks that she preferred. All of the pinks, blues and whites were made worse by the fact that the rest of the family actually did tend to wear black. The country's ruling family was the House of Blackheart and, having been her father's cousin, her step-mother was born into it as much as anyone else. The servants wore greys and blacks, as well, which generally left Laurel as the odd one out. She always had her eyes, of course, those gorgeous rubies that shone with an unnatural light. In the end, she chose her long-sleeved white Empire line and ordered Emily to do her hair and makeup.

  She had to use her mother's vanity because her father didn't permit her to have mirrors in her bedroom. She hated the smell of her mother's old room and the fact that it looked just as it had the day she was born, minus the bloodstains. Emily never bothered to thank her for remaining perfectly still. Of course, that would've required her to say anything at all.

  'Leave,' she said, with heat, once it was done, and she crossed over to her birthing bed. Once she'd heard Emily scurry off, she permitted herself to touch the pillow. It had become something of a ritual for her and she lingered for as long as she could stand to, which was not very long at all. When she descended, walking past the rows of portraits, she noticed immediately that her mother's had finally been taken down, replaced with some worthless nobody. She had the claws to scratch it to pieces and the urge to do so. Instead, she continued her graceful descent, without skipping a beat. Her step-mother had been watching her from the bottom of the stairs, hoping to catch her misbehaving, and Laurel refused to let her win. 'Good morning, my lady,' she said, with a wide smile and chirpy tone of voice.

  'I am thinking of having your mother's old room remodelled,' she said, not showing any sign that she'd been stumped. 'What do you think of that?' There was some venom in her tone, likely undetectable to a neutral observer.

  'Whatever my lady thinks is best, although,' she waited for a smile to creep across Charlotte's face, 'Emily makes me up in there, so I shall have to find somewhere else.'

  The evil woman rolled her eyes, 'of course,' she said and sauntered off. Laurel went in the opposite direction, towards the parlour, though she changed her mind once she heard Nathan's voice. There were so many rooms that were strictly forbidden to her so, in the end, she went to her father's study. It was technically also off-limits to her but not in the sense that she might burn to ash because someone had opened a window. Also, the chance of being caught was practically nil because the room was never in use. Her grandfather, now reigning as King William II, had apparently loved it and used it well. Many of his possessions, accounts and journals, from his time as crown prince, could be found here, but her father had not taken after him and concerned himself almost exclusively with warring and hunting. Or, as her uncle had once drunkenly joked, 'rutting and whoring.' That was a pleasant memory, as she recalled in perfect detail how ugly Charlotte's face had become upon hearing it.

  Though she could see in the dark, she still preferred candlelight and lit the candelabrum as soon as she sat down. She wondered why her grandfather had chosen to set up his study in a windowless room, or if he'd even been the one to make that decision. Her favourite explanation was that it prevented thievery and espionage. The palace had been built long before the Nightmare War, when its occupants would've had rival kingdoms to worry about, so it seemed plausible. She sifted through the drawers in search of something she hadn't read before but came up empty. She didn't have to search the bookshelves, by contrast, since she was able to perfectly recall all of the titles and their exact positions. One in particular had always stood out to her and she went to retrieve it.

  The spine was inviting, black leather with the title in big red capital letters: Vampires. She'd been told a lot about vampires over the years but she was generally not allowed to read books on the subject. This was a tome of considerable size, however, and she dearly hoped that it would be able to answer all of her lingering questions. A girl her age would likely have struggled to carry such a thing back to the desk but for her it was no trouble and she placed it down, gently, without making a sound. The first page gave the date of publication as 1305, which made it around eighty years old. The author was a man whose name held no significance to her, Ivan Blackwood, and he claimed to be a dream hunter. As much as she was fascinated by them, her father had once cautioned her that they were often liars.

  This man's prose was quite convincing, however, as she read through a description of his first encounter with a vampire. He'd dreamt of one when he was fifteen years old. She took the form of a glamorous young woman, with black hair and shining red eyes. The creature had almost bitten him but the hound at the foot of his bed had attacked her, alerting his father and the rest of the house and she'd been slain. With a wooden stake driven through her heart, she'd become inert and been carried out into the courtyard, where her body had burned to ash at dawn. From that moment on, he'd been obsessed with studying them and, eventually, with hunting them.

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  The second chapter covered the physiology of vampires and the distinction between the two main classes: the trueborn, who emerged from the nightmare world, and the accursed, ordinary mortals transformed by another vampire's infectious bite. It was all stuff she'd heard before, unfortunately, but there was a section at the end that gave her pause. Along with detailing various other peculiar circumstances, such as bats that carried the infection and stories of vampires who preyed of their own kind, it dedicated a few sentences to the infection's interaction with pregnancy.

  Whereas in most cases, it said, a mother's transformation into a vampire would destroy her unborn child, if she was far enough along and her sire took care to embrace her without excessive violence, her child would be transformed into a dhampir, said to possess the strengths of both nightmares and dreamers and the weaknesses of neither. Immune to silver and sunlight, inhumanly strong and supernaturally graceful, such creatures were highly prized by both vampires and hunters alike as the ultimate weapon in the continuation of the Nightmare War. The author claimed never to have met one himself but said that he'd been told of their existence by other hunters that he trusted not to lie or exaggerate. Until now, she'd felt ambivalent about the prospect of being a dhampir but the thought of being able to walk in the sun tantalised her. She dared not tempt fate, however, and, upon hearing voices outside, she snuffed out each candle and put the book back in its proper place.

  Before long, she was eating a slice of mushroom pie in her room and daydreaming about a sunlit walk through the gardens. When Emily came to take her plate away, she dropped Sarah off. The younger servant lingered awkwardly in the doorway for a while before nervously piping up, 'um, excuse me, my lady.'

  'What is it?' she asked, straining to keep her tone warm.

  'Your father has asked me to be your playmate from now on, my lady.'

  Laurel's brow furrowed at that, a rare involuntary reaction from her body, 'why? I assume that awful woman had something to do with it.'

  Sarah was appropriately scandalised and squeaked but eventually managed to answer her. 'The princess believes that it would be too dangerous to allow a dreamling so close to her children.'

  Laurel's face was now a mask of perfect composure, as much as she was boiling with rage just beneath the surface. 'Aren't you scared to be alone with me, then, if it's too dangerous for them?'

  The servant seemed on the verge of tears and she struggled to meet her gaze, 'yes, I am, my lady.'

  That made her feel bad and deflated her outrage somewhat. 'Sorry,' she said, 'that was cruel of me. There's really nothing to be afraid of and I am not a dreamling.'

  'As you say, my lady.'

  'Alright, then let's play. I'm too good at hide-and-seek so how about go-fish?'

  The two ended up playing for hours, mostly with playing cards, though Sarah became startled whenever she made a sudden movement. It was an enjoyable diversion from her reading plans, however, and she even managed to feel a little sad when the girl was collected. That night, she imagined herself as the ultimate weapon, hunting vampires night and day but something gnawed at her. If it was really true that her mother's sire took care not to harm her, what did that mean? Had she been created on purpose? Had her mother been targeted so that she, in all her half breed glory, could be born? They were troublesome thoughts and they followed her through the morning and into breakfast.

  'Father?' she called, from the small table they shared, during the one meal a day that he joined her for.

  'Yes, dear?' Julian was a tall man, with long blonde hair that almost rivalled her own and piercing green eyes.

  'Where did the creature that killed my mother come from?' It was a lie agreed upon that the vampire had killed her, when it transformed her into a monster, and not the staff, under his orders, when they'd dragged her into the sunlight.

  Her father chewed his food for a while before answering her. 'You've never asked that before.'

  'I always just as assumed that she dreamed it.'

  That seemed to sadden him. 'Understandable but no. Your mother was made of stronger stuff. There's a reason my father picked her out for me. Clarice Silversun was the envy of the world in her youth, beautiful and fierce and as sharp as anyone I've ever known. Her nightmares stayed right where they belonged.' She smiled at that, having always loved hearing such descriptions of her. 'No, the thing that came for her that night was a monster from the Nightmare War. Some even say he was born before it started, when dream creatures were rarities and often considered myths. He'd stalked your mother for most of her life and then, one night, when the moon was full and his powers were magnified, he slipped past our defences. The rest of the story you know well.'

  One tear slipped through her mask, and then another, and before she knew it she was crying heavily and her father had his arms wrapped tightly around her. 'Sorry,' she said, apologising for being the reason her mother had died, 'I'm so, so, sorry.' That foul monster had waited for her to grow to just the right size before infecting her mother, in hopes of creating a dhampir. And, she realised with horror, he may well have succeeded. Here Laurel was, a living testament to his success. Lost in grief, she tried to hold on tight to her father but he'd soon extricated himself. Life had to go on as normal, and she had to disappear into her ever shrinking world.