Vampire Kisses: The Monsters Within Us (Ch 1)
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Synopsis: Seventeen-year-old Raven Madison has always felt out of place in her quiet suburban town, like something restless and half-buried
Synopsis: Seventeen-year-old Raven Madison has always felt out of place in her quiet suburban town, like something restless and half-buried lives beneath her skin. Drawn to darkness, horror stories, and dreams filled with vampires and doomed romance, Raven spends most of her time trying to survive the crushing boredom of high school—and the constant attention of Trevor Mitchell.
Arrogant, beautiful, and infuriatingly popular, Trevor is the town’s golden boy: soccer star, rich kid, and the one person who seems determined to get under Raven’s skin no matter how hard she pushes him away. Their rivalry borders on obsession, charged with the kind of tension Raven refuses to examine too closely.
But as her eighteenth birthday approaches, strange things begin happening around town. Raven’s dreams grow darker. Shadows seem to follow her home. And when a mysterious goth boy arrives in town, Raven begins to wonder if the underworld she’s always fantasized about has finally come looking for her.
Pairing: Raven Madison x Trevor Mitchell
As children, we believe growing up happens all at once.
Like climbing out of a grave with lightning splitting the sky behind you.
But really, it happens slowly. Quietly. In small, almost invisible deaths.
A door closed too hard downstairs.
A secret kept for the first time.
The moment you realize adults are just children wearing better disguises.
By the time you notice yourself changing, the old version of you is already buried.
I think that’s why I was always drawn to dark things. Not because I was unhappy. Not because I wanted attention. Darkness simply felt more truthful than all the bright, artificial things people used to comfort themselves. Cemeteries didn’t pretend forever existed. Storms didn’t apologize for destroying things. Even ghosts, in stories at least, were honest about wanting something.
The town I grew up in liked pretending it was untouched by anything ugly. White fences. trimmed hedges. church bells on Sunday mornings. But underneath it, something always felt rotten to me. Like there were tunnels running beneath our lives that nobody wanted to acknowledge. Everyone sensed them. Nobody spoke about them.
Maybe that sounds dramatic.
But if you had known us back then—before everything changed—you would understand what I mean.
Some people are born with one foot already in the underworld.
And sometimes they recognize each other immediately.
Even as a child, I carried the strange feeling that I had arrived in the world slightly wrong, like a shadow cast at the wrong angle. While everyone else seemed content standing in the sunlight, I felt more like the distant rumble before a storm—something restless moving beneath the surface, waiting for the sky to finally split open.
My parents were never supposed to become parents. At least, not in the way people usually mean it. They belonged more naturally to half-finished road trips, loud music spilling from open windows, and the kind of reckless freedom that only exists when you’re young enough to believe consequences happen to other people.
And somehow, two people who had spent most of their lives drifting tried to anchor themselves long enough to raise a child.
Sarah and Paul Madison settled into something resembling adulthood after I was born—or maybe it’s more accurate to say they became slightly less untethered. The flower-painted Volkswagen van they’d been living out of disappeared, traded for a small apartment with actual walls and a lease agreement.
The apartment itself still looked like the inside of a psychedelic fever dream. Blacklight flower posters glowed from the walls at night, and orange lava lamps pulsed in the corners like molten planets. I could spend hours staring into them, hypnotized by the slow movement inside, convinced the glowing wax was alive.
Those years felt warm and endless. The three of us stayed up too late watching old horror films and reruns of Dark Shadows, Barnabas Collins flickering across the grainy black-and-white television the bank had given my parents for opening an account. We ate Twinkies at midnight and played Chutes and Ladders on the carpet while Dracula movies hummed in the background.
At night I would lie beside my mother, resting my hand on her swollen stomach, listening to the strange gurgling noises coming from inside her body. The sounds reminded me of the lava lamps. I assumed she was carrying some kind of glowing creature made of liquid plastic and light.
Then my brother was born, and everything changed.
The glowing creature turned out to be a screaming infant named Billy.
Suddenly the apartment no longer belonged to me. My mother went to sleep early. The television stayed dark. My father wandered through the apartment half-awake, changing diapers in the middle of the night while Billy cried with relentless determination. The world that had once felt magical and conspiratorial now revolved around exhaustion, bottles, and laundry.
I remember sitting alone in the blue light of the television while Dracula played softly in the background, feeling abandoned in a way I couldn’t yet explain. The monsters on TV became more dependable company than anyone in my own family.
Not long after Billy arrived, my parents delivered me to another unfamiliar institution they insisted would be “good for me.” Kindergarten.
The building smelled like glue sticks, paste, and disinfectant. The walls were covered in carefully arranged handprints and construction paper rainbows—aggressively cheerful decorations that seemed painfully sterile compared to the glowing chaos of our apartment. The children looked equally artificial, dressed in stiff little outfits with polished shoes and neatly combed hair, like they’d stepped out of a department store catalog.
“They’ll be your friends,” my mother promised gently while I clung to her leg.
Then she walked away carrying Billy on her hip, leaving me standing beside Mrs. Peevish, a thick-waisted woman with sensible shoes and the permanent expression of someone already exhausted by children. I watched my mother disappear through the doorway, taking with her the only world that had ever made sense to me.
The school day felt endless. We glued paper onto more paper. We painted things we were told to paint. The other children ran around shrieking with effortless social ease while I drifted through the edges of the room telling ghost stories to a horrified teacher’s aide and painting Barbie coloring sheets with black lips.
By the time my mother picked me up, I was almost relieved to see Billy.
That night she found me sitting inches away from the television, transfixed by Christopher Lee in Horror of Dracula.
“Raven,” she said, startled, “why are you still awake? You have school tomorrow.”
The cherry pie in my hand slipped onto the floor.
“Tomorrow?” I asked. “I thought school was just for today.”
She laughed softly, not understanding the horror settling over me.
“You have to go every day.”
The words hit me with the weight of a prison sentence.
That night Billy’s crying had competition. I buried my face in my pillow and wept with operatic despair, convinced my life had ended before it had properly begun.
The next morning sunlight poured through my bedroom window like an accusation. I woke with swollen eyes and a pounding headache, already dreading the day ahead.
Things continued changing after that. The blacklight posters disappeared beneath tasteful wallpaper. The lava lamps vanished. The old black-and-white television was replaced with a large color set that somehow felt less magical. Our apartment slowly transformed into something ordinary.
At school, while the other children sang songs from Mary Poppins, I quietly whistled the theme from The Exorcist.
By the middle of kindergarten I had become fixated on vampires. Not the romantic kind—this was long before vampires became beautiful. Mine were monstrous, elegant, immortal creatures who existed outside the tedious rules of ordinary life. Becoming one seemed vastly preferable to becoming an adult.
Trevor Mitchell became central to this fantasy. He was blond, smug, and already carried himself with the confidence of someone raised to believe the world belonged to him. His father owned half the town, which made teachers strangely forgiving of his behavior. Trevor had a habit of biting other children hard enough to leave bruises and crescent-shaped marks in their skin. Most of the class feared him. I didn’t.
One afternoon on the playground I decided I was finally going to force fate’s hand. Standing beside the basketball court, I grabbed Trevor’s arm and pinched him as hard as I could. His face immediately flushed crimson with rage.
His eyes narrowed, trembling with fury, before he lunged forward and sank his teeth into my hand.
Pain shot through me—but beneath it came exhilaration.
Mrs. Peevish dragged Trevor to the wall for punishment while I wandered the playground in triumph, staring at the bite mark swelling across my skin. Surely this was how it began. Infection. Transformation. Rebirth.
“That Raven is such an odd child,” I overheard Mrs. Peevish mutter to another teacher.
I ignored her. She didn’t understand what was happening.
I climbed onto the swing set, gripping the chains with my injured hand. If I was becoming something supernatural, then surely I should be able to fly. I pumped my legs harder and harder until the swing rose nearly level with the fence. For one glorious second I imagined myself soaring over the playground, over the rooftops, over the entire miserable town.
Then the rusted swing jerked violently sideways.
Instead of flight, I crashed face-first into the mud.
The pain wasn’t what upset me. What devastated me was the realization that I remained stubbornly, humiliatingly human.
Mrs. Peevish sat me against the wall with an ice pack pressed to my swollen hand while Trevor was released back onto the playground. He passed by grinning smugly and blew me a mocking kiss.
I responded by calling him a name I’d learned from The Godfather.
That earned me another trip inside during recess. It became a familiar routine throughout my childhood: everyone else played outside while I sat indoors under fluorescent lights, punished less for misbehaving than for refusing to become like everyone else.
Synopsis: Seventeen-year-old Raven Madison has always felt out of place in her quiet suburban town, like something restless and half-buried
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