Excerpt: Bloodstone Chronicles

Vampires -- keepers and kin of shadows and darkness, avatars of man's deepest fear -- that of being unmade, being divorced from life, the light, all that is good, and pure, and warm -- what are they? Foul, soulless creatures of evil; or maligned, misunderstood denizens of Night? Both of these? Neither of these? The truth, as the truth of mankind's ultimate nature, lies in the margins of light and shadow, in those netherland meridian spaces where even matter and energy are discovered to be one and the same. If it were possible to discern the most basic nature of light and shadow, would it be so strange to find they are reflections of one another? Perhaps they are partially sensed echoes of an even more basic power. Dig deep enough and perhaps mankind and vampirekind are the same under it all, at their most basic level.

There are some who believe vampires are the next advanced evolutionary step of mankind. After all, vampires are stronger, faster, more agile; and possess astonishing depths of sensory ability that far surpass the pale human versions of the same power. Vampires are more resistant to diseases, immune to aging, and, by and large, hold a beauty that beguiles even those humans that fear them so much.

There are others who believe that vampires are an evolutionary dead-end as the next stage of human life. Whereas humans since time immemorial have dwelt and thrived in the light; children of the sun that invests their brief single lives with an enduring vitality that weaves their individual efforts into an impressively durable whole; vampires are destroyed by that same life-giving sun. Only the strongest, most desperate, or most despairing of vampires dares to step into Sol's full glare. Running water is an as yet unexplained source of weakness to vampires as well. A simple, common herb, once found more or less everywhere that humans dwell, is so foul to vampire senses that the merest whiff of its odor is enough to weaken them toward revulsion and retching. And, perhaps strangest of all, the figure which has been all but eradicated in some of the vampire stronghold realms, that of two crossed lines, assaults them in a way that has never been understood.

Dhampirs, the children of vampires and humans, those who can walk with some degree of safety in the light of the human's day, yet, able to hold their own within the unforgiving world of the vampire's night -- dhampirs might perhaps be the next evolutionary step of humankind that does not dovetail into a dead-end as full vampires do.

Perhaps.

Or, perhaps not.