Discovering the Pale Vampire
This article is a part of Spooktober 2023 and is still a work in progress. Written for the Pale prompt.Darien O'Connell was too pale. Penny Goodwyn had noted how pale he was from the very first day she met him, when the FBI Agent Arthur North had introduced him as a consultant. Even after learning that he was a born and bred Irishman like her maternal grandmother, it didn't make sense. There were days that he looked even paler. Bloodless. It had bothered her for weeks. And then she happened to step out the back door of the police station to see him crouched over the lifeless body of a stray dog, wiping blood from his mouth. His skin ever so slightly less pale that it had been until he had looked up to see her and gone white as a sheet. "Pen," he had breathed and she had debated running. Yet...she didn't fear him. Not him and not what he might do to her because she was more than certain that he wasn't the killer who had been stalking the Bigby Fork streets. Darien hadn't been anywhere near the town when the killings had started, so he certainly couldn't have done it. Instead, she had slowly moved towards him, never taking her eyes off of him. He looked like he wanted to run but didn't, staring at her with a desperate look in his green eyes. "I always knew something was off," she said softly. "You were always too pale." Darien blinked and then laughed before replying, "Perils of being a dead man, I suppose."
Timeframe: 1954
Location: Bigby Fork, Mississippi
Event: Police station secretary Penny Goodwyn has suspected there was something off about FBI consultant Darien O'Connell for some time since meeting him.
Consquences: Penny Goodwyn discovers the truth about Darien O'Connell.
The third child of the vampire Ebio, he lost his memory of who he had been when he was turned in the 1660s and became little more than a killer driven by intense bloodlust. By the 1780s, he regained his memory and has since struggled to control the aftermath of his years of bloodthirsty killing and figure out a place to belong. Taking a myriad number of jobs since then, he's spent his long life trying to make up for who he was for more than a century, including taking up the position as a consultant to the FBI that led him to moving to the town of Bigby Fork.
There are two sides to Penny Goodwyn's life and both revolve around Darien O'Connell: before she knew him and after. Before, she was just a young woman from a small Mississippi town working as a secretary. After, she knew about things that didn't seem possible and loved deeply for the first time in her life. In the end, however, the love wasn't enough. Though she married John Pittman and had a son David with him, she has continued to maintain her friendship with Darien O'Connell throughout the long years.
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