The Very Thing She Hated

Part I: Legacy of Ashes

Vivian Larios was sixteen when she first smelled the smoke of her father’s pyre. It carried with it cedar, sage, and iron, the old hunter’s way of ensuring the body could never be raised, never be defiled, never walk among the cursed he had hunted. The fire burned her eyes and lungs, but nothing seared her as much as the sight of him—strong hands folded over a chest scarred from years of war against the undead, now still, silenced, gone.

They told her he died a hero. They told her his last act was driving a stake through the chest of a fledgling before another vampire slashed him open. Vivian barely listened. Their words were ashes on her tongue.

Her father had been the last tether to something steady. Her mother had died when she was nine, mauled in an ambush. Her father never remarried. The hunt was his bride. The Order was his family. And Vivian—Vivian was the daughter who followed him into the bloodstained dark.

Grief calcified into hatred. Hatred crystallized into purpose. She trained with the same blades he once wielded, memorized the same incantations he once muttered, learned the same vulnerabilities of the same creatures who had orphaned her.

She became a hunter by blood and by choice. The Larios name, once just another in the Order’s scrolls, grew into a whispered thing.

Vivian did not simply kill vampires. She annihilated them.

And she relished it.

Part II: The Elder’s Curse

It was supposed to be routine.

A coven on the outskirts of Marseille, whispers of an Elder among them. Most hunters balked at the thought. An Elder was no fledgling, no reckless predator. An Elder was centuries of cunning, centuries of power condensed into flesh that moved like shadow.

But Vivian had never balked.

She went alone.

The manor was skeletal, windows long shattered, ivy choking its stones like veins. Inside, rot and candle smoke mingled. She stalked its halls, stake in hand, blade at her belt, cross at her throat.

The fledglings came first, drawn by arrogance, thinking her just another mortal with holy trinkets. They fell quick: one decapitated, another burned to ash, a third pinned to a cracked wall with her blade through its sternum.

Then silence.

And then he came.

The Elder stepped from the shadows like a dream curdled into nightmare. His face was ageless, his eyes fathomless pools of hunger. “Daughter of Larios,” he said in a voice like silk dragged across a coffin lid. “Your father bled beautifully when I found him. I thought perhaps you would come.”

Hatred surged so strong it blinded her. She lunged, every ounce of training and grief and fury funneled into her strikes. She was fast. She was merciless. But he was faster.

He toyed with her at first, letting her strikes graze him, watching her with amusement. Then, with a single twist, he snapped her stake in half. With another, he flung her across the hall. Her back struck stone, and pain bloomed white.

Still, she rose. Still, she fought.

She even drew his blood—thick, black, oozing ichor—when her blade kissed his cheek. For a moment, triumph flared.

Then his hand was at her throat.

“You carry such bitterness,” he murmured, tilting her chin as if studying her. “Such hate. How delicious it will be, to make you what you despise.”

His fangs sank deep.

The last thing Vivian heard before the dark swallowed her was her own scream curdling into silence.

Part III: Daughter of Twilight

Death was not what she expected.

It was not reunion, not peace, not her father’s voice calling her home. It was fire in her veins, acid in her marrow, hunger so vast it hollowed her from the inside.

She woke on the manor’s floor, surrounded by ash. The fledglings she had slain lay in ruin. The Elder was gone. He had left her as a gift—or a curse.

Her throat burned with thirst. Every sound sharpened until the beating of a bat’s wings outside clawed her eardrums. Every scent thickened until she could count the distinct drops of blood in a mouse beneath the floorboards.

Vivian crawled to her knees, gagging, retching. Her own heartbeat was gone.

“No,” she rasped. “No. Not this.”

But the hunger was merciless. By dawn, she had slaughtered the mouse, then a stray dog, then—God forgive her—a vagrant who wandered too close to the manor. His blood was ecstasy and poison at once. She wept even as she fed.

When she stumbled back into the Order’s outpost days later, her hood pulled low, she thought maybe, just maybe, they would help her.

But hunters know their own.

The scent clung to her. The stillness of her chest betrayed her. The eyes of her comrades—once allies, once brothers and sisters in arms—widened with horror.

“Vivian,” whispered Elias, the commander. “What have you done?”

She fell to her knees. “Please. Kill me. I failed. I—”

They raised their weapons.

Vivian fled.

Part IV: The Hunter Turned Hunted

Years passed.

Vivian became a ghost story among hunters, the cautionary tale told around firelit tables. The hunter’s daughter, consumed by her own hatred, who rose as the very monster she swore to destroy.

But unlike most tales, hers did not end in a clean beheading or a purifying fire.

Vivian lived.

She lived, and she hunted still.

Not humans—never humans, not after that first horror—but vampires. She carved through covens, staked and burned and decapitated with the same fury as before. Only now, she did it with their strength. Their speed. Their curse.

To vampires, she was a traitor, an abomination.

To hunters, she was worse: a reminder that even the best of them could fall.

Vivian knew both sides despised her. She bore it like a crown of thorns.

Bitter. Unforgiving. Relentless.

She wore her father’s cross still, though it burned her throat when it touched her skin. She polished his blades, though her own hands were stained.

She whispered to his memory: I will never be what they are. I will never surrender. I will hunt until the end of my days, even if those days stretch into centuries.

And yet—sometimes, in the quiet between kills—she wondered.

What was she now?

A hunter still? A vampire by curse? A daughter without a father, a soldier without a side?

Perhaps she was nothing.

Perhaps she was only bitterness carved into flesh, cursed to walk a night that never ends.

Part V: Ashes of the Heart

One evening, decades after her turning, Vivian found herself in a small Spanish village, where whispers of disappearances wound through the tavern. She followed the trail, expecting another coven.

Instead, she found a boy—barely twelve—trapped in the claws of a fledgling.

The old Vivian, the hunter, would have killed the creature without hesitation. The new Vivian, the vampire, did the same. But when the boy looked up at her, terror flashing in his young eyes, she froze.

Because in his face she saw herself. Sixteen. Ash-stained. Watching fire consume her father.

The boy bolted. She let him.

And in the silence, Vivian realized something that hollowed her deeper than hunger ever could:

She would never be remembered as a hero.

Not as her father was. Not as she once dreamed.

Her story would be one of fear, bitterness, and shadow.

She had become the thing she hated.

And she hated herself for still wanting to live.

Part VI: Eternal Bitter Dawn

Vivian Larios walks the night still.

In some towns, they whisper of a pale woman who destroys entire covens singlehandedly. In others, they warn of a blood-drinker who strikes at hunters as fiercely as she does vampires.

Neither is wholly true. Neither wholly false.

She is both. She is neither.

A daughter, a hunter, a vampire.

Bitter. Relentless. Damned.

She wears her father’s cross though it burns, clings to his memory though it slips further away with every passing year.

Some nights, she dreams of fire again. The pyre. The smell of cedar, sage, and iron. And she wonders if perhaps she should build her own, end her curse, return to ash as her father did.

But when the hunger stirs, when the scent of vampire blood fills her nostrils, she remembers her vow.

And she hunts again.