WHAT DARKNESS KEEPS
A novella of blood, bondage, and the lies that bind. The first installment of the origin story of the vampires from the web series “Don’t Date Him Girl”.
In 1800s Louisiana, a pale stranger named de Vries arrives by night with an offer no planter can refuse: for a fee, he will turn a handful of enslaved men and women into vampires, night-workers who never tire, never sicken, and never need feeding beyond a little blood. He teaches the plantation’s master six rules to keep his new property leashed, collects his payment before dawn, and sails off to sell the same offer up and down the coast.
He never once imagines that those he made would test his rules for themselves.
Adaeze, called Patience in the overseer’s ledger, and by no name she chose for herself, spends the better part of two decades doing exactly that: one quiet act of disobedience at a time, in the dark, at the risk of the stake and the sun, she and five others discover which of de Vries’s laws are truth and which were never anything but a story sold to greedy men. What they find at the bottom of that reckoning, will cost them more than any of them expected, and buy them something no Dutchman ever meant to give away.
