Bloodgifted Extras, or What To Do With the Rejected Extracts?

Every author has a collection of extras in their files. By that I mean, those paragraphs, pages and even whole chapters that contain additional information about a character or scene, or some backstory that had to be omitted from the final product—the published book readers get to enjoy. 
What do we do with these snippets? They're too good to throw away, yet they no longer fit into the current series as the story has moved on. 

Well, I decided to do the same as as they do in the movies—include it in the DVD. In my case—my blog! 

So, here's the first one: It's part of the backstory between Alec and the evil Maris, which I'd originally included in BLOODGIFTED, but was eventually edited out.

In this extract, Alec is speaking. Those who've read BLOODGIFTED will recognise the context.

Enjoy!

Maris. It was her style. She alone would disregard the law, as if being an Elder gave her the right to do so. No one else would dare.

It had been a long time since I’d thought of her. We met in Paris soon after the War. I was still struggling with my new nature, and meeting older and more experienced blood drinkers—who used their enhanced abilities for good—enabled me to finally accept what I had become. Yet not all the Brethren shared those same benign intentions—Maris being one of them.

Beautiful, intriguing and older then me by a couple of hundred years, I soon learnt the full extent of her malevolent nature. She had such contempt for humanity she thought nothing of indulging her thirst for blood in the cruellest of ways.

Naively, I thought perhaps my influence could temper her. I was warned.

She’d been a young woman when the revolution broke out in France in the late eighteenth century. Most of her aristocratic family had perished on the guillotine, but Maris had managed to escape with the help from a young man she met while on the run. He was a vampire. They became lovers and she begged him to turn her.

They later parted and for the next century she travelled throughout Europe occasionally indulging her foul habits, but never enough to throw suspicion on herself.

During our time together in Paris, I foolishly believed I could succeed in changing her. Yet she simply managed to hide her most unpleasant traits, preying on stray travellers, torturing them by taking small painful bites all over their bodies and laughing when they begged her to end it.

Later I discovered that children were also among her victims. One night I followed her. In the darkness of a moonless night, I caught her torturing a child.

It sickened me. Unfortunately I was too late the save the little girl, but I warned her—should I even detect her scent on a child I would behead her myself.

We parted that day. She left Europe to settle in America.