Let us prey.

It would seem that my best opportunity to write of my nocturnal activities is during those hours when I can do little else. To briefly recap, I had found the corpse I'd named Avarice. Now we move onto Lust.

She was an attractive woman, probably mid-20's, dressed, as all things, a Catholic schoolgirl. I have never truly understood that perverse fantasy, but this body seemed quite typical of such visions. The exceptionally short, plaid miniskirt, tight, white blouse, knee-high white socks. The poor woman's hair had even been pulled back into ponytails. I could not see her face, as a picture had been glued over it. The picture was of Shay and Tina, seated at school.

Whoever chose to decorate my property with bodies made a mistake. They seem to think that my girls are strictly around to sate some kind of sexual desire. Although they are certainly receiving satisfaction along those lines, I believe I've made my intentions pertaining to them quite clear.

Upset though I might have become, why didn't the killer eliminate my girls? He - and I use the masculine pronoun simply for its ease - was able to capture an image of them at school, so he knows who they are. He's probably followed them home from school. The defenses of my home are good, but not impossible to bypass, as was proven when he left the bodies on my property. The corpses were mortal, not vampyres, which shows a willingness to kill whomever is at hand. So, again...Why not kill Shay and Tina?

Unless he knows their true age and isn't willing to kill children?

Envy was the worst of all the bodies. It was a senior citizen, male, with numerous joints affected by severe arthritis. Various wrinkles and twisted joints had a tear painted next to them. A sign of depression that mortals must age. How deep did this envy go? The answer to that was given in the condition of the corpse. It was bent at the waist...in the wrong direction. The killer was so infuriated that he'd bent the poor old man's body backwards.

Your imagination is running wild, isn't it? There are plenty of ways to main a body in such a way. The application of machinery and a bit of physics, perhaps? Then again, when you consider who is keeping this journal, your mind may have leapt to the physical power of a vampyre. But as I said, we have reason to believe we have hunters in our midst; real hunters that can tap into mystic abilities. Despite its potential consequences, I believe the vampyre hunter used something call the Strength of Shadows.

The hunter whose power comes from sin can summon superhuman strength from shadows. That is, he absorbs the shadows themselves, converting what is immaterial into very real physical prowess. Since this ability is often used at night, when the shadows are actually fewer, (they blend with the natural darkness only too easily), it is incredibly draining.

I once confronted a hunter in the late 1940's in a warehouse, where there were shadows aplenty. For a vampyre to claim to have seen something terrifying is to say the limits of horror were reached and exceeded. The man's muscles swelled so much with power garnered from the shadows that his skin split, revealing muscle tissue that appeared to drip with blackened blood. This was meant to be his final act, as he believed he had me cornered. What he didn't know was of my excessive speed. Combined with my precognitive abilities, it turned into a waste of his time, energy, and very life. Strength, by itself, does not convey any degree of invulnerability. Without the protective covering of skin, which was torn in countless places, he managed to shred a few veins. He collapsed after he lost quite a bit of blood, and had soon gone the way of the dodo.

From what little I learned after that encounter, it is up to the hunter on how many shadows to absorb. Too many, as is what happened that night, could mean the end of the hunter's life, and certainly spells a lengthy recovery period if he survives.

Back to the corpses on the grounds of my home...There was a mad scramble to remove them. We needed information, but could not turn the bodies over to the police. Direct contact with the authorities makes it difficult to subtly pull strings. Luckily, we have our own specialists in forensics. There is a dark humor at having a vampyre that can run blood tests.

What we know so far:

1. All of the bodies were killed using a powerful neuro-paralytic toxin administered via dart gun. (Bruising around the impact holes indicates something struck them at high speed.) The poison was so potent that it operated faster than the nerve conduction velocity, meaning that they were dead before they even felt the dart.
2. The brazen killer left fingerprints on the photos of the girls. Of course, the prints matched nothing in any database into which we hacked.
3. The suit has been traced back to Jason Levy, land developer extraordinaire and vampyre, who was found dead shortly after we realized who owned the suit originally.
4. The old man meant to represent Envy was Samuel Medwedosko, reported missing from his assisted living facility on Sunday.

My tale continues, but I've decided to get some rest before sundown. Until my next entry, dear readers.

Things that go bump in the day.

I'm overdue to complete the tale of my embrace, but I must also confess that it was filler until something of interest came along. There's only so many times I can tell you of my action-packed life, in which I made several phone calls and received embarrassing amounts of money for doing so. If I were to obsessively post about my virgins, readers will begin thinking that my one and only concern are humans of a certain sexual status. My lack of posts, however, should be a clear indication that something is afoot in my world.

As with almost anything that becomes part of a story in my life, explanations are necessary. Vampyres, as I have hinted, have various mystic ties. The idea that science can explain parts of our existence is utterly ridiculous. Ultra-violet rays from the sun cause our flesh to burn? Nonsense! Science is completely helpless to explain how I live without a beating heart, or how my body doesn't decay without the other biological functions of the human body.

The vampyre's existence is, to even the most observant eye, loosely connected to magic. This applies to other creatures, such as werewolves. Yes, werewolves exist, though not as imagined by the cinema. With no offense intended to the Wiccan religion, there are also witches and warlocks, whose ties to magic are more direct and obvious.

These other mystic beings know of us, and we know of them, and all parties are seemingly content to leave the others alone. Occasionally, however, other groups steeped in mysticism appear that are not so complacent. To say that they appear is incorrect. It is that they reappear, and they like to let us know when they've gathered strength.

Vampyre hunters. They come in several varieties. They might be smart or stupid, real or imagined, weak or strong, small or large. In my decades of existence, I have met varying combinations of these qualities. The most amusing had to be an overweight, deranged vampyre hunter that also had the unfortunate condition of dwarfism. She was persistent, and almost literally underfoot after a week of pursuing me. I really didn't want to kill her, so I knocked her unconscious, nailed her into a padded coffin with an oxygen tank, and shipped her to Brazil. Thankfully, I never saw or heard from her again, although rumor reached me that there was a would-be vampyric midget terrorizing the streets of some Brazilian city or another.

The real deal is something with which to be reckoned. Their magic stems from religion itself, and they power comes from one of two places: absolute purity or souls tainted by some of the most gruesome acts. The former is incredibly and blessedly rare, as they carry the purity of the sun on their side. The former eventually learns to harness darkness itself, bending shadows to their will, using that darkness to their full advantage. Hunters tend to run independently, but from time to time, they unite, and that's where the vampyre community begins to have its problems.

Saturday night was when our troubles began, and we have been up to our necks in the mystery of what appears to be a cult of hunters. We are currently assuming that we are facing a cult of dark users, as their opening statements to various members of our community were less than enlightened.

Our opposition delivered the seven deadly sins to us. I was given the messages of avarice, lust, and envy...all in the form of corpses.

The first body to greet me was Avarice. He was clad in a $10,000 Brioni suit not properly fit to his body, meaning that the corpse and suit did not know one another in life. His mouth was stuffed with faux gemstones, such as amber, turquoise, and tiger's eye. What caught my critical eye was an extremely rare, flawless pink diamond, which would cost a small fortune unto itself. The corpse had no wallet, the fingerprints had been sliced off, and his teeth apparently pulled out systematically.

I could smell the other bodies nearby, but ignored them for a moment to check on the girls. After their adventures on Thursday, I asked that they not venture out at night, and gave them Cheryl's phone number in case of a daytime emergency. I instructed the girls, after a brief feed, to stay inside with the doors locked, and to not come out under any circumstances.

The last thing I needed was an investigative team of vampyres on my grounds, all but drooling at the idea that there was virgin blood nearby.

As I walked the property back to Avarice, I called Eddie, who always makes for good emergency muscle, and Molly, whom I deemed it important I inform. She would relate her own tails later that night.

Staring at Avarice, I tried to decipher the message he was meant to convey. Clearly, the suit and the diamond demonstrated that whoever had left this body behind had a source of money, and was more than willing to throw it away on a macabre message. Who would have such money? Aside from the wealthy who would not delve into a confrontation with vampyres, there are other vampyres that are a bit out of touch with how things are supposed to be done, and the Church. The Vatican has been known to sponsor such vigilantes, whether they are of pure or tainted origin. What matters to them is that the evil of vampyres be destroyed.

The gems in the mouth? Well, I think I figured out that rather swiftly. It is a combined message of, "I hope you choke," and that excessive wealth leads down the path to destruction.

Most disturbing about the body, and those as yet to be discovered, was that they were not vampyres. The responsible party had been willing to kill the innocent to get their message out. The man at my feet might well have been a patron in a bar that, after a few beers, had been lured into a trap, where he was murdered and dressed to play a specific role.

More on this at a later time. My phones are ringing, which means the information network may have news for me.