Chapter 1: Byron

You can call me Byron, comedian extraordinaire. Back in my rebellious early 200s, I tried to convince people to call me Barry. Yeah, two hundreds, not twenties. I’m a vampire, see. I’ll be three hundred a week from tomorrow, but I feel like I’m not where I should be at my age, you know? Living (okay, unliving—vampire, remember) with my older sister in a dusty old estate wasn’t where I thought I’d be at this point in my unlife.

I’m a Blackwell. Says so right on the mailbox shaped like a miniature hearse in our front yard—well, it did before it got hit by an actual hearse. Forgotten Hollow, am I right? Ha ha ha…

Well, maybe that’s not so funny if you don’t actually live in Forgotten Hollow. Unlive. I’m trying to work on my jokes, see, but my sister says I’m hopeless. She says everything’s hopeless, though—she’s got that typical gloomy, vampire heiress personality. That might just because she’s single and almost four hund—ow ow ow, I take it back, and not because I felt the piercing fury of a thousand tiny bat fangs just by thinking about her. She says she put some kinda vampire mind-spell on me the other day after I said something to embarrass her (this happens a lot), but I’m not sure if it’s real or just in my head.

She claims she’s only single on account of the “Blackwell family curse” anyhow. I’m still kind of fuzzy on the specifics, but I still catch her browsing human dating sites on the phone she thinks I don’t know about. Modern technology isn’t vampire-friendly, she says—we’re not supposed to be connected to the rest of the world. Food is food and that’s that. Maybe she’s just trying to guess at those shirtless male mortals’ blood types, but she really likes to zoom in on their—ow ow ow.

Where are our parents, you ask? Huh, that’s a good question—and one my sister’d be better able to answer. Victims of the Blackwell family curse, she’d say. But everybody’s got parents at one point or another—even vampires. I like to think they ran off to sail the world and escape the depressing shadows of Forgotten Hollow, but they’d probably burn to a crisp in the process. The whole vampire thing, remember.

Well, I don’t know about my sister, but I’m not sticking around this place forever. I just need to hit it big, you know? (Got to be able to afford the rent in San Myshuno somehow.) And when all those living, breathing mortals out there get a load of my jokes, how can I not be instantly famous and adored? Who knows, maybe someday I’ll meet somebody with a nice, sunny personality, too—I don’t want to end up four hundred and alone like my s—ow ow ow…

I’d settle for a living, breathing audience in general—no offense to my current assortment of toy robots, stuffed animals, and action figures. Guess now is as good a time to try as any, huh? After all, I’ve got all of eternity…!