Drayton's Profile at Vampire Rave.

Assistant Coven Master of Sete Diabolica (coven)

Updating...

The severed head rolled under the pew with a wet thump, coming to rest against the priest’s polished shoe. The man didn’t scream—just stared down at it, blinking, as if waiting for the punchline to a joke he hadn’t heard yet.
"You were late with the tithe," said the woman in the doorway, flicking blood from her nails. Her dress, the color of a freshly scabbed wound, clung to her hips where the fabric had split during the chase. The church smelled of incense and iron now, a combination that made her nostrils flare.

The priest's mouth moved silently, forming words that wouldn’t come. His gaze darted between the head at his feet and the woman in red—no, not a woman, not anymore, if she ever had been. The thing in the doorway smiled, revealing teeth that tapered to points like shards of broken glass.

Behind the altar, a rustle of heavy fabric. Sister Agatha emerged from the sacristy, her wimple slightly askew from hurried prayer. She froze mid-step, her hand flying to the wooden crucifix at her throat. The vampire’s head snapped toward her with the precision of a predator catching new scent. "Ah," she purred. "Dessert."

Real vampires love Vampire Rave.

:A vampire murders a parishioner in a church, tossing the victim's severed head at the priest's feet. She taunts the terrified priest about his overdue tithe before noticing Sister Agatha emerging from the sacristy, whom she immediately identifies as her next target.
Sister Agatha’s scream barely had time to echo before the vampire’s fingers clamped around her throat, silencing her with a squeeze that crushed cartilage. The priest scrambled backward, overturning the chalice—consecrated wine splashed across the altar like cheap stage blood. The vampire dragged the nun by her wimple, the starched fabric tearing as easily as skin beneath a blade.

The kitchen was all butcher-block and copper pans, the scent of yesterday’s bread mixing with the coppery reek of fresh terror. The vampire slammed Sister Agatha onto the central table hard enough to crack the wood. A cleaver hung from a hook above the sink; the nun’s fingers scrabbled for it, but the vampire caught her wrist and twisted until the bone snapped with a sound like stepping on dry twigs.
The vampire's fingers slid beneath Sister Agatha's wimple, peeling it away like the rind of a fruit. The fabric tore with a wet sound—somewhere between cloth ripping and flesh parting—revealing the pulsing vein along her throat. The nun's breath came in ragged bursts, her lips moving in silent prayer even as her body spasmed against the splintered table.

The vampire brutally assaults Sister Agatha, dragging her into the kitchen and breaking her wrist when she tries to grab a cleaver. She pins the nun to a butcher-block table, ripping away her wimple to expose her throat as the terrified woman silently prays.
"Still calling on your god?" The vampire leaned down, her tongue tracing the curve of the nun's jaw. "How quaint." With a flick of her wrist, she tore the front of Sister Agatha's habit open, buttons pinging against copper pans. The nun's chest rose and fell rapidly, her skin flushed pink with panic. The vampire inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring at the scent of adrenaline-rich blood rushing just beneath the surface.

The copper pans rattled on their hooks as the door to the rectory kitchen burst inward, hinges screaming like slaughtered pigs. The vampire froze mid-bite, Sister Agatha’s blood still dripping from her fangs. Every candle flame in the room bent toward the doorway as if bowing—except they weren’t candles anymore, were they? The nun realized through fading vision that the flickering lights were pairs of eyes, dozens of them, clustered in the shadows beyond the threshold.
"Drayton comes," whispered one of the watching vampires, voice rasping like a coffin lid dragged over gravel. The words sent a visible shudder through the blood-smeared creature atop Sister Agatha.

The watching eyes blinked out one by one—extinguished like candles snuffed between wet fingers—until only the scent of damp earth and old blood lingered where they’d stood. The vampire atop Sister Agatha lifted her head slowly, lips still glistening with stolen life. Her fingers uncurled from the nun’s torn habit as if releasing a caught bird, though the nun’s chest had long since stilled.

The vampire prepares to feed on Sister Agatha, mocking her faith, but is interrupted when other vampires announce the arrival of someone named Drayton. The intruders' presence terrifies her, causing her to abandon the dying nun as their eyes glow ominously before vanishing.
Drayton’s footsteps made no sound on the flagstones, yet every copper pan trembled on its hook. He stood in the doorway, his frock coat the black of a starless midnight, his cravat stiff with dried blood from collarbone to jaw. The kitchen’s single remaining candle guttered in his presence, casting his hollowed cheeks into sharp relief. His gaze traveled from the ruined table to the nun’s splayed limbs, her habit ripped open to reveal the purpling bite marks along her ribs.

Drayton’s nostrils flared as he inhaled the scent of spilled sacramental wine mingling with Sister Agatha’s cooling blood. His upper lip curled back, exposing fangs that gleamed like polished bone in the candlelight. "You rut like starving dogs," he said, his voice a blade wrapped in silk. The words slithered through the kitchen, freezing the other vampires where they lurked in the shadows.
The vampire still straddling the nun’s corpse stiffened. A drop of blood trembled at the corner of her mouth before falling onto Sister Agatha’s parted lips. "She was only food," she said, but her fingers twitched toward the ruined bodice of her dress—a nervous gesture Drayton noted with icy precision.

Drayton's fingers twitched at his sides, the tendons standing out like wires beneath his pallid skin. The candlelight caught the glint of his signet ring—a coiled serpent devouring its own tail—as he stepped forward, his polished boots avoiding the puddles of wine and blood with practiced ease. "You disgrace the gift," he murmured, though the words carried the weight of a cathedral bell. The vampire atop the nun's corpse flinched as if struck.

Her lips parted to protest, but Drayton moved faster than the dying candle's flicker. His hand closed around her throat, lifting her clear of the shattered table with a crack of splintering wood. The nun's body slumped to the floor, limbs splayed in a grotesque parody of supplication. Drayton's grip tightened until the other vampire's carotid pulsed visibly beneath his thumb. "We are not jackals," he hissed. "Not yet."

Drayton's grip tightened until the bones in her throat creaked like old floorboards. His pupils dilated, swallowing the candlelight until only blackness remained—a void that promised endless falling. "You rut in consecrated wine like a sow in its own filth," he whispered, each word pressing against her skin like the tip of a stiletto. Her legs kicked uselessly, toes skimming the pooled blood on the flagstones.
With a dismissive flick of his wrist, he tossed her aside. She crashed into the butcher block with enough force to split the oak, sending cleavers clattering to the floor. Before the first blade stopped spinning, Drayton's hands closed around Sister Agatha's lifeless head. The rip of vertebrae separating was obscenely loud, a sound like wet rope snapping under tension. He rolled the severed head across the bloody tiles—it came to rest against the other vampire's thigh, the nun's dead lips still parted in that unfinished prayer.

"You are nothing," Drayton murmured, watching as the vampire scrambled backward over shattered crockery and her own pooling blood. "A wineskin with legs. A bag of spoiled meat waiting to be drained." He stepped forward, crushing the nun's severed fingers beneath his bootheel with a sound like kindling snapping.
The vampire pressed herself against the ruined butcher block, her torn bodice gaping to reveal bite marks still weeping slow, syrupy blood—her own this time, from where Drayton's grip had split the skin. She licked her lips, tasting failure. "Master, I—"

Drayton’s boot came down on her wrist before she could finish, pinning her hand to the blood-slicked tiles with the casual cruelty of a man crushing a spider. "You soil the name of Sete Diabolica," he said, his voice so quiet it seemed to come from inside her skull. "Did you think yourself equal to the covenant? That your hunger made you worthy?" He twisted his heel, grinding bone against stone until her fingers spasmed open like a dying spider’s legs.
The vampire gasped—a wet, broken sound—as Drayton crouched over her, his coat spreading around them like wings of midnight. His breath smelled of grave soil and parchment, centuries of knowledge rotting behind his teeth. "You are a footnote," he whispered. "A smear of ink on a page I will burn tomorrow." His thumb traced the arch of her cheekbone, then dug in until cartilage gave way beneath the pressure. Blood welled thick and slow, the way it did from a corpse already cooling.

The candle flames bent sideways as if caught in a sudden gale, though the air in the kitchen remained thick and stagnant with the scent of blood. Then came the sound—a dry rustling like centuries-old parchment being unfolded—and every hair on Drayton’s neck stood erect. He froze with his thumb still buried in the lesser vampire’s cheekbone, his head tilting toward the doorway like a wolf catching scent of wildfire.

"Still playing with your food, darling?" The voice was a serrated purr, vowels dripping like wax from a melting candle. Shadows pooled in the doorway, thickening until they took shape—first the curve of a hip sheathed in black velvet, then the glint of rings on fingers too pale to be mortal. Diabolique stepped into the candlelight, her gown whispering against the flagstones like a burial shroud dragged across marble. The ruby at her throat pulsed as if filled with living blood.

Diabolique's fingers closed around the lesser vampire's throat with the languid grace of a lover's caress—right before her nails sank in like hot wires through wax. The vampire's scream choked off as Diabolique's rings ignited, molten gold running down her wrist in glowing rivulets that set the bodice of the pinned creature's dress ablaze. The fire spread with unnatural speed, consuming fabric and flesh alike in a blue-white conflagration that gave off no heat, only the stench of burning hair and something older, fouler—the reek of a soul being unmade.

The flames licked upward in perfect stillness, not even disturbing the loose strands of Diabolique's hair as she watched her handiwork with a lover's half-lidded gaze. The vampire writhed soundlessly now, her mouth stretched wide in a scream that couldn't escape the inferno devouring her from the inside out. Her skin blackened and split like overripe fruit left too long in the sun, revealing glimpses of bone that charred to ash before they could fully emerge.

Diabolique's smile curled like smoke rising from burning parchment, her lips parting just enough to show the glint of fangs still wet with Sister Agatha’s blood. Drayton didn’t blink—didn’t even seem to breathe—as she stepped backward into the swirling shadows, her velvet gown dissolving at the edges like ink in water. The ruby at her throat flared once, twice, then shattered into a hundred droplets of liquid light that hung suspended in the air like a constellation of bloodied stars.

Each droplet pulsed, elongated, grew wings—and then the kitchen was alive with the thunder of a hundred bats erupting outward in perfect formation. Their leathery wings cast jagged shadows across the walls, the sound of their passage like a dozen silk banners being torn simultaneously. Drayton remained motionless as they streamed past him, though the wind of their passing stirred the stiffened lace at his cuffs. One bat—larger than the rest, its eyes reflecting the dying candlelight like chips of polished onyx—brushed its wing against his cheek in a caress that left a thin trail of blood welling up in its wake.

Drayton's tongue flicked out, catching the single drop of blood trailing down his cheek where the bat's wing had grazed him—salt and iron blooming across his tongue like a remembered sin. The taste was gone too soon. It always was.

The rectory kitchen stood empty now save for the charred outline where the lesser vampire had thrashed her last, her ashes still warm enough to send lazy spirals twisting toward the smoke-blackened rafters. Drayton's fingers twitched at his sides. The hunger yawned inside him, vast as the catacombs beneath Paris where he'd first learned what it meant to truly starve. He turned his palm upward, studying the lines that hadn't changed in three centuries—not since the night he'd pressed this same hand against a dying man's throat and drunk as the pulse stuttered beneath his fingers like a failing clock.

The hunger moved through Drayton like a second skeleton, its hollow fingers pressing against the underside of his skin. Centuries had taught him the shape of it—how it gnawed at the marrow of his self-control, how it whispered promises in the voice of every pulse he'd ever stolen. He stared at the smear of ashes on the flagstones and wondered, not for the first time, why damnation tasted so much like communion wine.

Diabolique's laughter curled through the rafters like smoke, though she'd dissolved into the night minutes ago. Drayton's jaw tightened. The mockery in that sound was older than the charred bones at his feet—older than the crucifix hanging askew above the ruined altar. He could still smell Sister Agatha's blood on the air, metallic and faintly sweet where it had splashed across the sacramental bread. The scent coiled in his sinuses, tightening his throat with the phantom memory of swallowing.

The words curled through the rafters like smoke from a dying fire, their source hidden somewhere in the cathedral's decaying ribs. Drayton tilted his head, listening to the way the voice clung to the stone—not spoken, but *remembered*, the way a blade remembers the whetstone long after the steel has cooled. His shadow stretched across the nave, elongated by the guttering candlelight until it touched the base of the altar where the nun's blood had dried black.

"You live in filth," Drayton murmured, his bootheel crushing a desiccated bat carcass into powder. The sound echoed oddly, swallowed by the velvet darkness pooling between the pews. Somewhere above, a single drop of moisture fell from the vaulted ceiling—plinking into the baptismal font with the precision of a metronome. Drayton's nostrils flared. Holy water. The scent burned his sinuses like ground glass.
The cathedral groaned around Drayton like a dying beast, its ancient stones exhaling the damp breath of forgotten prayers. His fingers curled around the crucifix dangling from the broken altar chain, the metal warping in his grip like warm wax. "Sanctuary," he whispered, though the word tasted like ash on his tongue. The shadows between the pews deepened, whispering secrets in voices only his kind could hear—voices that slithered up his spine with the intimacy of a lover's knife.

A droplet of holy water struck his cheek, searing through flesh with the precision of a branding iron. Drayton didn't flinch. The pain was an old friend, one of the few sensations left that could still make him feel alive. He pressed his palm to the weeping wound, watching absently as the blood mixed with holy water in his cupped hand—a blasphemous Eucharist swirling in his palm.
Drayton's fingers closed around the trembling vampire's throat, lifting her until her toes barely grazed the flagstones slick with Sister Agatha's blood. Her pulse fluttered against his palm like a moth trapped in a fist—fragile, frantic, already half-dead. He could taste her fear in the air, thick as the copper-scented steam rising from the nun's split-open ribs.

"Please," the vampire rasped, her split lips smearing crimson across his knuckles. "I only—"

The pale face of evil pounced—Drayton's emerald eyes flashed like poisoned glass catching sunlight, his pupils dilating until only a razor-thin ring of green remained. His midnight hair whipped across his face, strands lashing like black serpents as he moved with the lethal grace of a guillotine blade descending. The wind screamed in his ears—not air, but the collective gasp of every soul he'd ever drained, their voices woven into the fabric of his hunger.

The vampire in his grip barely had time to blink before Drayton's free hand plunged into her chest. Fingers breached flesh with the wet crunch of parting ribs, her sternum yielding like rotted wood. She arched, mouth stretching in a silent scream as his claws curled around the pulsing mass of her heart. It shuddered in his grasp, its rhythm faltering like a trapped bird battering itself against cage bars.

Real vampires love Vampire Rave.

Drayton's fangs punched through the vampire's throat with the wet pop of a cork drawn from a long-sealed bottle. Blood—thick as stolen communion wine—gushed over his tongue in a hot, coppery flood. The lesser vampire arched against him, her body convulsing as her stolen life force streamed into Drayton's waiting throat. Her pulse fluttered beneath his lips like a dying candle's last flicker, each weakening throb a symphony of finality.

The blood carried the acidic tang of fear, the cloying sweetness of desperation—flavors that made Drayton's nostrils flare even as he drank deeper. He could taste every pathetic moment of her existence: the first kill behind a Marseilles brothel, the fumbled attempts at glamour, the way she'd rutted in holy places like a beast in heat. His fingers tightened in her hair, dragging her head back to expose the ravaged artery, letting the crimson tide flow unimpeded down his chin.

Drayton drank until the vampire’s screams dissolved into wet, gurgling whimpers—until her thrashing limbs stilled, hanging limp as a marionette with severed strings. Her heart stuttered its last protest in his fist, a dying spasm that sent a final rivulet of blackened blood trickling between his fingers. He withdrew his hand from her ribcage with a sound like roots tearing from damp earth, her heart still clutched in his palm, its sluggish beat fading like a distant drum. The corpse slid from his grip, collapsing onto the flagstones with a meaty thud, her hollowed chest gaping like a broken reliquary.

Behind him, Diabolique watched from the shadows, her laughter curling through the ruined nave like smoke from a funeral pyre. "Always so dramatic, darling," she murmured, her velvet-gloved fingers trailing along the edge of a shattered pew. The wood blackened where she touched it, crumbling to ash in her wake. "But did you taste it? That last, desperate flicker of her soul? Like a candle drowning in its own wax."
Drayton’s lips curled around a smile that wasn’t quite human—too many teeth, too little warmth. “Dramatic?” His voice was a blade wrapped in velvet, the kind that slips between ribs before the victim feels the wound. “You taught me every flourish, Diabolique. Every drop of theater in my blood is your doing.”

Moonlight spilled through the cathedral’s shattered rose window, painting them both in fractured silver. Diabolique’s gown drank the light, swallowing it whole until the fabric seemed to ripple with its own darkness. She stepped forward, her heel crushing the vampire’s discarded heart with a wet pop. The sound echoed obscenely in the hollowed-out sanctum.

Diabolique's fingers brushed empty air where Drayton's throat had been—a whisper of velvet gloves against moonlight. The space between them erupted into a swirling vortex of leathery wings and needle-thin shrieks as Drayton dissolved into a hundred shrieking bats. Their formation sliced through the cathedral's stale air like a blade through cobwebs, each tiny body glistening with traces of Sister Agatha's blood still smeared across their furred muzzles.

The bats reformed with a sound like rustling grave clothes, Drayton's silhouette coalescing from their midst atop the cathedral's broken altar. His boots crushed the remnants of sacramental bread into dust beneath his heels, the faint scent of wheat and blood rising between them. Diabolique watched from the shadow of the crucifix, her fingers tracing the charred edges of her own bite marks on the wood—marks that hadn't been there a moment before.

"You always did enjoy ruining sacred things," she mused, licking a drop of congealed blood from her thumb. The ruby at her throat pulsed as she spoke, its dark glow illuminating the hollows of her collarbones like lamplight through thin skin.
The ruby's pulse slowed, syncing with Diabolique's breath—an illusion, since neither truly needed air. She pressed her palm flat against Drayton's chest where his heart hadn't beaten since the night Versailles burned. "You still cling to the sacrament," she whispered, her thumb scraping the dried blood crusted on his cravat. "As if swallowing their gods could fill you."

Drayton caught her wrist, their joined hands hovering over the ruined altar like a perverse benediction. Beneath them, Sister Agatha's blood had seeped into the sacramental bread, the wine-dark stains forming a mockery of the stigmata. "We are what they made us," he said, but the words tasted hollow.
Drayton's fingers tightened around Diabolique's wrist, his thumb pressing into the delicate tracery of veins beneath her alabaster skin—veins that hadn't carried blood since the Inquisition burned her first familiar at the stake. The cathedral groaned around them, its vaulted ribs creaking under the weight of centuries and sacrilege. Moonlight pooled in Diabolique's collarbones like liquid mercury, catching on the ruby's slow, hungry pulse.

"We seduce the night with pain and rapture," Diabolique murmured, her breath frosting the air between them in shapes that resembled writhing bodies. Her free hand traced the altar's defiled linen, fingers leaving charred outlines where they grazed the wine-soaked fabric. The scent of scorched Eucharist curled upward—incense and iron, damnation and devotion tangled together until even the shadows couldn't tell them apart.

The bats erupted from their embrace in a whirlwind of snapping wings and needle-sharp cries, their numbers precisely matched—one hundred from each vampire, swirling together until not even moonlight could separate whose shadow belonged to whom. The creatures spiraled upward through the cathedral's broken ribs, their collective mass momentarily blotting out the rose window's fractured glow. Below, the altar cloth fluttered in their wake, its wine-soaked folds collapsing into the shape of a spent lover.

Diabolique's bats led the ascent, their formation slicing through the cold air like a dagger through silk. One—larger than the rest, with wings that gleamed like oil on water—dipped low to drag its claws through the congealing puddle of Sister Agatha's blood. The scent bloomed anew in the night, a copper-edged invitation that made Drayton's swarm veer sharply left, their flight path suddenly jagged with hunger.

The bats dissolved into moonlight—not vanishing, but unraveling, their leathery wings becoming strands of liquid shadow that dripped upward into the cathedral’s broken vault. Drayton felt the last of his form disperse like smoke from a snuffed candle, his consciousness fracturing into a hundred scattered thoughts that hung suspended in the cold air. For a heartbeat, he existed everywhere and nowhere—the chill of the flagstones beneath phantom feet, the brush of Diabolique’s laughter against the nape of his nonexistent neck, the coppery aftertaste of Sister Agatha’s prayers still clotting his throat. Under the moonlight, And the night reassembled Them.

Real vampires love Vampire Rave.

The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory