Snippet #2414777

Gray...that was it. Like the color. Gray Morlock. Yet he wore black...the irony put a small smile back on Al's face as he walked, which helped make the older blood vampire seem less intimidating. Albert wouldn't say he had been scared. Nervous, yes. Intimidated, definitely. Worried, certainly. But not scared. Although some might mistake his nervousness to be a look of fearfulness, vampires were not something he was scared of. Not other vampires, anyways.

Come to think of it, as Al returned to the inn, he remembered an incident with the Morlock family not too long ago. One of them...was it Gray's father? No, no the uncle. The two did look very similar, but anyways. It was the uncle, who had been murdered, supposedly by a Spirit Vampire. That had caused quite a riot.

Briefly, he wondered if the Morlock's were going to try and lay claim to the crown as well. His mother wouldn't hear of it, he knew. 'Buying their way to the throne' she would call it. No respect for tradition and all that. Bloodlines. He supposed he'd find out soon enough. Pulling the door open, he nodded politely to the innkeepers before stepping nimbly up the stairs to the upper levels, where he and his mother were roomed.

His mother was less than amused with the arrangements, but didn't complain. Albert didn't mind at all. It was charming. Much more humble than the majestic, refurbished (and abandoned) Gothic cathedral they lived in back home. The expansive catacombs had been redone to not only be more hospitable, but to be more grand, with a dark air to it. Al preferred to romp around on the upper levels of the cathedral, staring at the stained glass windows and bidding the pigeons in the bell-tower good morning. The thing Al missed most, though, had to be the large organ. It had only been a few days since he played, but a few days too many.

He knocked on his mother's door, but upon hearing no answer, figured she was either out or sleeping already (a bit early for her, with the sun barely coming out). Resigned, he returned to his own room, covering the windows with one layer of curtains before pulling off his many layers and returning to the book he had brought with him, a dark sense of foreboding pitting in his stomach as he thought of the Morlocks, his mother and her cousin, and the poor King and Queen. Al knew he wasn't supposed to feel sympathy for the King of the Spirit Vampires, but dead was dead all the same, and deserved his sympathy. He had seen the King but once (not even met, but glanced briefly) when he was very young.

Come to think of it, wasn't there a daughter? He remembered when he was around 8, there was a big commotion when she was born. Three years later he had heard that the mother had been killed, and the daughter severely traumatized. He wasn't sure what had happened to her after that. His mother never brought her up again and Al didn't ask. She was a spirit vampire, after all, and whether she was alive to claim the throne next or dead to let the spirit's fight it out was of less concern than who was up next for the bloods.

Shrugging the thoughts from his mind, Al returned to his book, grateful for a distraction that spoke to him of simpler, gentler times.