Name: Anna Jane Renfield
Gender: Female
Age: 334
Apparent Age: 17
Place of Birth: Gloucester, England (September 16, 1675)
Species: Vampire
Coven: Nephim
Appearance:
Anna is pretty, but not in a flamboyant way. She has mildly wavy, mousy brown hair. It hangs several inches past her shoulders and is constantly falling in her eyes. She usually doesn't bother pulling it back. Her brown eyes are on the larger side, and they're usually cast down. Her skin is vampire-pale, although after she has fed it is passable for pale human skin. A few freckles adorn her soft cheekbones year-round. She had them when she was turned.
Anna is not very big, as she was turned before she reached full adulthood. She comes to a height of 5'3", and doesn't weigh much either. Her small and petite size allows her to blend in easily, one of the reasons she belongs with the Nephim.
Her fangs fit the description "small but mighty." They are tiny compared to other vampire fangs, but extremely sharp. She once cut her finger trying to get a piece of skin out of her gums. They are also retractable, which she is thankful for. It makes it easier for her to blend into human society.
She doesn't like to stand out much, so Anna dresses very plainly. A typical outfit would be jeans and a plain fitted t-shirt. The one item she always wears is her mother's necklace. It has drop of purple amethyst on a thin black string.
Personality:
Above all, Anna is very quiet. She has adjusted to her life as a vampire, as it has been over three-hundred years. However, it was a trial for her to be turned at a rather young age. She doesn't leave the Coven unless it's necessary, e.g. to feed or because it is demanded of her. She hardly ever gets cross with anyone, probably because she feels inferior. Her self-confidence has always been an issue, even before she was turned. When someone shows her a kindness or pays her a compliment, Anna usually replies with a quiet thank-you and a shy smile. She always seems to be a tiny bit more outgoing after she has fed.
Abilities:
Strength is not one of Anna's stronger suits. She is stronger than a human, obviously, but not strong as vampires go. However, she is quick. She posesses the Nephim ability of speed, and can move faster than many of her fellows. Anna flits from shadow to shadow without being seen, blending into the darkness. The immortal eye has a difficult time catching her. Anna can also use mesmerism. She has the ability to use command, but she rarely uses it. Mesmerism serves her purposes well enough. No human feels threatened by her, as she doesn't cut a very imposing figure.
Anna eats every five days for comfort's purposes, but she can go seven if it's necessary. By the eighth day she starts having fainting spells. She doesn't care for dead blood, but again, she can drink it if necessary.
Sunlight is one of Anna's worst enemies. Even when in the shadows outside during the day, she burns terribly. However, it's not much of a problem because Anna sleeps like a rock during the day. She is out from seven in the morning to eight in the evening, almost without a fault.
History:
I was born in Gloucester, England in 1675. I was the youngest of four children, and the only girl. My mother was one of the prettiest women in the town, which I suppose contributed the to self-confidence issues I've always had. She would never stoop so low as to say anything about it, but then that wouldn't have been proper back then. It wasn't decent to be vain, but my mother was, I could tell. I also knew that she was never pleased with my rather dull appearance. I suppose having three older brothers had something to do with it.
Papa was a quiet person, like me. He always tried to teach us the proper way to behave, and how best to please God. He observed strict adherence to the Bible, and wanted us to do the same. He was, as his friends used to say, a very good Puritan. In 1680, when I was five years old, he decided to move us to the New World. Several other families in our area had made the move already, and the first batch of letters back had nothing but good things to say about a small town named Salem. Papa thought that it would be the best for the family. And it was. I enjoyed my childhood in quiet Salem. It allowed me to blend in, be quiet, be good, and be admired for it. I was the proper type of girl in the strictest of Puritan societies, although they might have preferred I read a little less.
I was always quiet, being the type of little girl that preferred to say inside and read a book than the type to run and play with other children. I felt lucky, because not all girls in our society learned to read. Papa insisted, however, that his little girl be as well educated as his three sons.
I never had to worry about other children teasing me. Again, three older brother might have had something to do with it. They were sort of my protectors. Grant, the oldest, watched over us all. He could be a little demanding, sometimes, but aren't all first children that way? Jacob came next, and he and I were kindred spirits. Before I was old enough to read on my own, Jacob read to me. Edward was the brute strength of our ragtag lot, and my most valuable protector. I remember one time, so very long ago, when I was about nine or ten. A boy in Salem named Isaiah Thomas dared to poke fun at my diminutive size in front of Edward. The boy went home with a bloody nose. Papa found out and Edward was punished with a hard swat of the strap across his bottom. Fighting was not encouraged in Salem, and Edward was off to a bad start at twelve years old. But even so, my brother told me afterwords that he would do it again if need be.
I miss Edward. He died of scarlet fever two years later.
My life in Salem never changed much. Of course, after Edward died we all were a little bit different. However, the death of a child was not so uncommon then. Everyone learned to accept it and move on. It wasn't until many years later that I finally mourned his death. It wasn't until many years later that a shed real tears for him.
Well, when I say my life in Salem didn't change much, I mean until I was seventeen, of course. 1692 was a big year for everyone in Salem. That year the only topic anyone ever worried about was witches. Twenty-five people of the town were killed, including our next-door neighbor, Abigail Hobbs. I had always liked her... But anyway, what no one in Salem ever figured out was that the problem wasn't witches. It was vampires. The two little girls that placed the blame on the supposed witches had seen something in a dark alley, apparently. I know because I asked them, later. They saw someone eating someone else.
Do you remember Isaiah Thomas? The little boy my brother hit? Well, he was the one who turned me. It was a late night and my mother had asked me to throw a stinking bucket of rotten food behind the house. She couldn't bear to get her nose close to it. Oh, my precious, barely Puritan mother. She didn't know what she was doing to me. After I dumped the bucket, I heard someone whisper my name. Spooked, I turned in a circle, trying to find the voice. What I saw was Isaiah Thomas, the boy who had been sick and in bed for a year. He never went outside. That night, I found out why. He was a vampire, of course.
He looked at me, and I felt myself blushing. He was looking at me... almost hungrily. I wasn't aware of what he was, so I assumed that he was thinking impure thoughts. He let me assume away, and came closer. I was just about to shake my head of those sorts of terrible ideas when his slow walk towards me turned into one quick, fluid motion. His lips were at my neck, and his hand covered my mouth to muffle my scream. I had no idea what was happening, but I passed out as soon as his fangs pierced my skin. I woke up much, much later in his arms. We were inside of a small shack, the one behind the church. It was for storage, and no one went in unless it was time to change the altar cloths.
It wasn't time to change the cloths, thank goodness.
It took Isaiah awhile to convince me that what he was telling me was true: I really was a vampire, now. I wept, unthinkingly, into his arms. It hit me an hour later that he might not be the one I would want to comfort me. He was responsible for my new condition. Anyway, he convinced me that I could never go home. He had gotten sick of his own little game: pretending to be sick during the day, sneaking out to feed at night. His new plan included me. He wanted to run, together. I was terribly flattered, of course, but scared. Just pick up and leave my family? According to Isaiah, I wouldn't want to stay. I might kill them. He himself had almost fallen into that temptation more than once.
The next night we ran. It was probably the only spontaneous thing I've ever done. It was surprisingly easy for me to run. Isaiah was impressed with my speed, much as I grew fascinated with his strength in the years to come. Strange of me to run away with the vampire that had changed me. One usually hates that particular bloodsucker, don't they? Not me. Actually, I fell head over heels for him. We were happy, somehow. Most likely it was because we were free, as we had never been in Salem.
I got used to our random lifestyle. We never stayed in the same town for more than a year. A lot of years passed along with a lot of towns. 142 towns, to be exact. (I made sure every single one had a library that was open late.) We rode out the American Revolution in the west with the Indians. We preferred to stay away from war, as humans noticed things during wartime. In fact, we stayed in the west until America had gotten well on it's feet. Rejoining civilized American society took a bit of adjusting, but we never really joined it I guess anyhow. We just lived on it's coattails.
By 1834, I was tired. Tired of running, tired of not really knowing anyone besides Isaiah. By then I loved him with all my heart, because he took care of me. He made sure my transition from mortal to immortal was smooth. But he wasn't feeling my exhaustion, and kept us moving through the land.
In 1834 we tried something new. Isaiah and I settled for awhile back in Massachusetts. It had been long enough that no one would remember us, or so we thought. One night, as we were out hunting, we ran into another vampire. Yes, it had happened before. But this time, we both knew her. It was Ann Putnam, one of the little girls who started the witch trials with there terrible little acts. She looked no older than twenty-five. She recognized us, and the three of us got to talking. Actually, Isaiah and Ann did most of the talking. I just listened, as I was prone to do. We found out that she and Abigail had seen a vampire, which spiked their witch accusations.
Ann joined us, from then on. At first I didn't mind, but the perfect harmony that Isaiah and I had enjoyed slowly began to dissolve. In the following years, we continued running, which I did not enjoy. However, Isaiah and Ann didn't seem to take much notice. I felt him growing away from me and getting closer to Ann, and it was agony.
When the Civil War started, things began to get more difficult for us. Everyone was so suspicious of everyone else that they began to notice things that went bump in the night. We decided that Canada would be safer ground. We did in Canada what we had been doing for close to two centuries in America. We ran around, free as birds. But it wasn't the same for me anymore. Why? Because I wasn't in a group of three vampires. I was alone. It was never official, the transition from Isaiah and me to Isaiah and Ann. But it was the truth. That's why, in 1875, I gave myself a present for my 200th birthday: I left without saying goodbye.
I had always wanted to go to Europe, but Isaiah had been against it for the simple reason that a ship could be a difficult place for a vampire to remain a secret. He had to feed almost nightly, so it was more of a problem for him than it was for me. Now that I was on my own... it was an easy decision. I hid in a crate on a ship bound for England. It was an easy fit for me. I went almost eight days without feeding, and I thought I was going to die. However, I wasn't granted that. As soon as my crate was left alone, I escaped, grateful that it was night. I fed and slept.
The first order of business in Europe was to visit my place of birth. I imagine Gloucester had changed quite a bit since I was five, although I didn't remember it too much. While I was there, I visited the local library (which thank goodness was open after dark), and looked up old family trees. I found my family, and it felt strange to see my name in such old ink. I was 200 years old... and everything finally started to catch up to me, without Isaiah there. I suddenly missed Salem, missed my strict Papa, my vain mother, my wonderful brothers. I mourned for Edward, shed tears that I hadn't possessed until then. And there, at the Gloucester library, I felt human again. My emotions were overwhelming. For the first time I understood how strange it was of me to run away and fall in love with the monster that had changed me into a vampire for his own happiness. I realized that's all I ever was to Isaiah: company. And when Ann came around, he didn't need me anymore.
And what did I do? I found someone else, someone I thought would love me the way Isaiah hadn't. Someone I thought cared. I think, along with my self-consciousness, I have dependency issues. His name was Joseph Coulder, and he had been a vampire for fifty years. I thought he loved me, too, but he was the same as Isaiah, in the end. He found someone else, and told me that I should move on. I didn't ask her name, if I knew her, if he'd ever loved me at all. I just left in a direction, not caring where I was going. I'd been in Gloucester for sixty-eight years, under wraps of course. I only came out at night, for obvious reasons, and didn't interact with anyone but vampires. No humans took notice of the fact that I didn't age.
It was 1943,and I realized at that point that I had been doing nothing, absolutely nothing, for the past two-and-a-half centuries. What was the point of living forever if all I was ever going to do was drink human blood, sleep all day, and hang on the whims of men that didn't truly love me. I made a pact to myself, then. I vowed that I would never again fall in love unless I was sure, unless I had tested the subject of my affections beyond belief. I was quiet in my resolve, but I had a feeling that on this I would not budge. I'd been wounded too deeply, twice in the same way.
A few years after leaving Gloucester, my resolution was tested. I met Isaiah again in France. It seemed that the invention of the airplane had solved his problem of not being able to travel to Europe. It was 1950, 75 years after I left him alone with Ann, and she was nowhere to be found. Isaiah was alone, and so was I. He claimed that he loved me still, claimed that Ann had been a mistake. I knew he was lying though. He was the type of man that never wanted to be alone, and he was just trying to find someone again. He didn't truly love me.
I refused him, and he left. My resolution held, and I passed my own test with flying colors.
I broadened my horizons, traveling by myself over not just Europe and America, but the entire world. I paid little attention to what was going on around me, I just spent fifty years seeing...well... everything. I saw the pyramids in Egypt, I saw the Colosseum, I saw the great statue of Buddha. But after fifty years my resolution began to crumble. I felt lonely, and felt like I needed someone. However, I didn't want to break my vow. I didn't want to give myself to someone only to have my patchwork heart broken in two for a third time.
A coven was obviously the answer. It was now 2007. The world had changed rapidly around me, and I had gone with the changes. I even owned a laptop computer. It made me giggle inside to think of me, born in 1675, owning a computer. It's ludicrous if you think about it. And it was through that computer that I learned of Demaitre.
I took a year to tie up lose ends behind me. I had, after all, made a few acquaintances in my 317 years as a vampire. I let everyone know that no longer would I run free and independent. I was going to join a coven in a city in Canada called Demaitre.
I've been in Demaitre for a year now, and with the Nephim for half that time. I feel at home here, and I feel like I belong. It's a new feeling, something I've never truly experienced before, but I think I may grow to like it.
