To put it simply… pretty much everything I had ever wanted to do with my life had already happened, and I was only 21 years old. Own a new Fortune 500 tech start-up? Check. Hot women literally throwing themselves at my feet for a moment of my time? Check again. A badass apartment in Battersea Power Station with a whole sub-basement level for a ton of top-of-the-range cars? You better believe that’s three checks in a row. The name’s Richard Parker, but most people just call me Parker these days, and I’m the proud CEO and founder of PK Industries, the hottest new tech start-up on the block, producing some of the best and most technologically advanced phones the world has ever seen. Sure, Apple and Samsung used to lead the way in cell phone design and manufacturing, but the market was stale and old, and when I cracked Augmented Reality holo-displays? Well, it was all over. We weren’t topping out their market value’s just yet, but with phones flying off the shelves in every single p

I woke slowly at first and then all at once. My head thrummed with the headache of a colossal hangover and my memories of the night before were hazy and jumbled. I remembered partying in the club, I remembered drinking an absolute crap load of alcohol, and then… nothing. I stretched out in bed and winced as my eyes opened to a shaft of light peeking through the curtains. I glanced over to my right, my hand had found a warm patch of bed that wasn’t where I was sleeping, and that was when I noticed it for the first time. There was an indent in the bed from where someone else had been sleeping, and if I were a betting man I’d wager it was definitely in the shape of a woman. I let a lazy smile dance over my lips, last night seemed to have been a very good one indeed. If the noises of showering from my en suite bathroom were anything to go by then the woman was still around and was using my shower to clean off after what was probably a very fun night of debauchery. I sat up with a

When I had been a kid I’d always preferred science over fantasy. My favourite movie? Star Wars. Favourite TV show? Doctor Who. Favourite book series? Well okay, that had been Harry Potter, but in my defence, I’m pretty sure that was every kid's favourite book series when they had been growing up at my age. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that vampires were always something that I thought was ridiculous. Blood-sucking creatures that couldn’t be seen in a mirror, hated sunlight and garlic, but could only be killed by a wooden stick through where their hearts should be? Absolutely absurd, none of it made any sense. Now, all of a sudden, it was my reality. “I’m sorry, walk me through it again?” I said. I was sitting on the end of my bed, fresh off of a panic attack, with the vampire woman standing fully nude in front of me. She’d explained the concept of the Immateria twice already, but for some reason, it just wasn’t sticking in my brain. “This is the final time,”

I hadn’t noticed it on the night, mainly because my brain had been preoccupied with the fear of bleeding out on the pavement and the pain of a knife between my shoulder blades, but the woman who had saved me was actually the picture of grace and beauty. From the way she waltzed down the stairs in my apartment to the way she held herself in the lift as we descended from the top floor all the way down to the sub-basement parking garage she just looked… flawlessly graceful. No mortal could ever hope to even come close. I didn’t even know her name yet. “I’m sorry, I can’t believe I haven’t asked this yet, but what’s your name?” I asked, leaning against the bannister at the side of the lift. She gave me a small smile, it was perhaps the first truly positive emotion I’d seen her direct towards me. “Sophia Linse,” she said, “I’ve held many names over the millennia, though, and have moved constantly throughout the world so as not to be discovered by mortals.” I nodded, that made sense.

“Now remember,” Sophia said as we walked across the Canary Wharf complex, “You’re going to have to try very hard to keep your cool. If it looks for a moment like you’re not going to be able to do that I will kill not just you but everyone in your office, and then the Immateria Council will go to great lengths to keep that slaughter under wraps.” I nodded in response, the statement had spooked me a little too much to be able to respond verbally. The Canary Wharf towers loomed above me, monoliths of the London skyline that had stood since the 90s, though they hadn’t always been as successful as they were in the modern day. Our offices were in One Canada Square, the premiere space for offices in all of London. At 800 feet tall it was the third tallest building in the UK, and we were situated right at the peak. It was the lobby of the building that had initially attracted me to the idea of having our offices there and walking through it with Sophia brought all of those thoughts back.