Helsinki, 1.

They killed my father when I was seven. They dug up his coffin, pierced his heart with a wooden stake, beheaded him and shoved his head full of garlic. It was daytime, so there was nothing he could do to fight them. He was weak like that. As a vampire he was not even a year older than I was, and boys that age, they are careless in their defiance. People had seen him in the darkness of the night, had heard his voice and felt his touch. He took joy in scaring people. I learned from his mistakes.

They made my mother and sister watch. Natasha cried for three days and nights after that. Mother didn’t, she had seen it coming. And she wouldn’t let them have the pleasure of seeing her tears. She also knew that father would be avenged. After all, she used to say, she had me.

My name, back then, was Anastasia. I was born eleven months after my father died for the first time. My father, Ivan, was not the smartest man out there. Lucky for me, I took after my mother. She was always the smart one. Just look at my name. Anastasia. It means flower, and people always used to call me ‘little flower’ when I was a child.

But it also means resurrection. My dead father was born again in me. And I, in turn, was born as a dhampir. That, for the uneducated ones out there, is a half-vampire, half-human. The offspring of a vampire and its mortal spouse. It can happen. It’s not common, but it has been known to happen.

Dhampirs are traditionally vampire hunters. Vampires are, during the night time, quite possibly the most powerful humanoid creatures you’ll come across. They have several gifts: they can turn to animals, to mist, disappear from view. They are very fast, and quite strong. They can really only be killed during the day, when they are helpless in their coffins. Most are, after all, so sensitive to the daystar that they will wither and burn if exposed to it.

As I was saying, dhampirs hunt vampires. As children of the night walkers, we can see vampires, recognize them from a group of humans easily. We are stronger than normal humans, we have inherited a lot of our inhuman parent’s traits. Weaknesses as well, of course. We hunt vampires, destroy them, and get paid a lot of money for it. One can make a pretty decent living as a vampire hunter.

Or, at least, one could. In the golden days of superstition, magic, vampires, werewolves. Before electricity, factories, cars, airplanes and computers. Back in those days, you could travel the world with very little besides your shoes. These days you need passports, money, tickets, visas. I’m not trying to glorify the old days; they were pretty shitty, mostly. No plumbing. No warmth. Little food. But life was easier back then. It was certainly easier to hunt vampires, as they were all considered monsters. They stayed in hiding, coming out only to eat.

But in these god-forsaken times, they’ve infiltrated the modern world. There are not many, and they’re not open about it, but vampires, they are everywhere. They run your companies. They sing your songs. They write your bestsellers. I am not naming any names, but you can trust me, they are there. I can tell.

As I said, my mother was a smart one. ”Stasya,” she used to say, ”Stasya, learn everything you can. Everything. The world may change itself crazy around you, my child, but with information, you’ll always know where to go and how to get there. In information, you’ll always have a friend.”

Those days the main way of passing things on was telling them. Speaking. Books existed, of course; I am not quite that old. But living in a small hut in a cold forest in Russia, there were not many books there. We would have used them for kindling anyway.

I still remember that piece of advice, as you can see. How else do you think a daughter of a hermit of a forest witch and a woodcutter vampire would have made it this far? My days of hunting vampires are long gone. I would probably go to jail these days if I killed one, so I had to come up with other means to support myself.

My childhood wasn’t too different from anyone else’s back then. My mother was a hermit witch, my father a vampire, and my sister a witch-in-training. A perfectly normal childhood, won’t you agree? But I played with pine-cone animals and stick dolls like other children, ran around in the forest half naked during the summer, skinny-dipped in the lake and river. I got cold in the winter, just like everyone else.

Mother was able to convince people in the nearby village that I was a normal child, that father had sired me just before his death. She didn’t go to the village often, and people didn’t come to see her too much either, so no one questioned it until father was caught. But since I looked and acted like a normal child, they believed I was just that. No one really dared to question the witch’s word. Not even when they were brave enough to force her to watch as they killed him, for good. She told Natasha later on that some of the men had wanted to kill her as well, but others had objected. She was a good witch after all.

Well, she had been.

It took seven men to kill my father. The man who had carried me on his shoulders under the moon, taught me the constellations, how to listen to the wind, to track animals, to play, sing and climb trees.

It took one seven-year old to kill them all.

Mother was a good woman, at heart, but she could be cruel. She could be vengeful. And when it came to her family, her world, she didn’t hesitate.

At the age of seven I was fast enough, strong enough to kill them. One by one. They all died. Cursed, people said. Cursed by the vampire, and his witch whore. Mother and Natasha were far away by then, and I was tracking them to our new home.

It was supposed to be a secret between mother and I. Natasha was not to be told. She always had the kindest heart. She would have made a truly good witch, in all meanings of the word. But she found out what I had done that night, what mother and I had planned. And it killed her inside. Losing father had been hard enough, but to find out what I had done, it was too much. She never talked to me again, and left soon after. Later on I learned that she had wandered all the way to Moscow, where she had married a poor baker, and died while giving birth to her third child.

Mother was never the same either, but she stayed by my side, telling me things, teaching me everything she knew of the world. She called me her little legacy, little flower of the moon, as her name was Alyona, the moon. Father’s little Stasya, his resurrection. I would go on after they were long gone, and she wanted to prepare me for it as best as she could.

Spending my childhood in a small hut in a forest, and my youth in a small village, could not possibly have prepared me for what the 20^th century brought upon the world, but with mother’s teachings and the curiosity she’d instilled in me, I managed to survive through all the way to the new millennium. I traveled far and wide across the world, mostly in Europe, though, easily my favourite continent. In my life I’ve met people that have had great impressions on me, people who did so to a lesser degree, and people who I could easily have lived without. I’ve had lovers, friends, enemies, rivals, in both humans and vampire-kin. I’ve not made much of a mark on the world; I’m rather an observer than a doer after all. But I’ve been around, had adventures like you couldn’t imagine.

Adventures like the one that was just about to start.