Episode 54: Lost Little Girl

Written By Karl White

With Victor Monfret erased, the Great Vampire War didn’t shrink, it sharpened. Two titans remained, the last of the ancient blood, circling each other like storms destined to collide. Elizabeth, the Queen, moved with certainty, knowing she could outlast any head-on fight. Royce, proved elusive like smoke, an echo that refused to vanish. What had begun millennia ago had narrowed, to a reckoning between a maker and an Underling.

The war narrows - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

In the aftermath of California, Elizabeth’s soldiers swept across the map, tearing down every remnant of Victor’s Brood. There were no prisoners in this war. No mercy.

By 2003, only embers of Victor’s empire still smoldered. Scattered pockets of his Brood carefully slipped east, until they reached the old keep in South Carolina. The place where Victor had first built his stronghold in America. A handful of his original Underlings, those who survived because they’d been out in the field when Los Angeles fell, gathered there like specters returning to the bones of a kingdom. At first, they waited. 

But every survivor crawling in from L.A. carried the same truth, Victor was gone. And if the Queen learned where his blood had fled, she’d come for them next.

Their only course of action was the unholy alliance they hoped still existed with Royce. If they’d pledge their fealty, maybe they’d have a chance to defeat the common enemy.  

But finding Royce was a battle unto itself. His defenses were labyrinthine layers of decoys, psychic misdirection, and loyal Underlings trained to kill first and question never. When word reached him that “Victor’s lost Brood” sought an audience, Royce saw what it could be, a disguise for Elizabeth’s assassins.

But the vampires offered the only currency the wretched possess, usefulness. They knelt before him, not out of loyalty, but necessity. Royce “read” them. Their fear, genuine. Desperation, real.  

Royce, knowing Elizabeth’s focus is on him - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

ROYCE: You come to me with broken shields and empty hands...but you come with truth. And truth, in war, is rarer than blood.

Victor’s fall had emboldened Elizabeth. If Royce meant to face her, he needed bodies. This was not alliance. It was acquisition. He brought them into his fold in New Orleans. There he had gathered his forces, sinking beneath its skin, fortifying its veins and arteries. The war was narrowing, and Royce believed when the time was right, he’d draw Elizabeth into his web, using the city itself as the final trap.

Lost little girl - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

After the chaos in Texarkana, 11-year-old Flora Mae fled, her father’s blood still warm on her hands. She followed his escape plan as best she could. Retrieving the emergency stash of money he’d hidden, nearly a million dollars in cash. She disappeared into that long night. Alone. Untethered.

The plan hadn’t included what came next. Bernard’s contacts and stash houses were secrets he’d never shared. So she headed west, drifting by instinct, ending in San Diego. Bouncing between any rundown motel that didn’t ask questions about a child checking in alone. She chose a new name, Georgia, because being born in Atlanta was the only thing she knew about herself. It was a thin root to anchor a girl with no past.

As Georgia, she was an apparition. Living quietly and cheaply. By 1993 she settled in Monrovia, a quiet suburb on the far edge of Los Angeles. A place where a lost little girl could vanish.

She fortified her one-bedroom apartment like a bunker. Locks, bolted windows, makeshift alarms. She rarely stepped outside. Instead she spent her nights scanning newspapers and police blotters, tracking disappearances and unexplained assaults...on the lookout for any threats coming her way. For ten long years, her world was a vigil. Her heartbeat, a metronome of fear.

Living in fear - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

But dread can only hold a person together for so long. Loneliness breaks what terror cannot. In 2003, her neighbor Jamal, a single father juggling too much, knocked on her door in desperation...needing a last-minute babysitter. Against every instinct, Flora Mae said yes.

That small kindness became the first crack in her isolation. Jamal was gentle. Decent. Patient with her skittishness. Over time, Flora Mae told him pieces of the truth, just enough to explain the bars on her windows, and the years in hiding. No family, a murky past, she was an island. Moved after hearing the ache behind her story, Jamal played amateur detective. Surely there was a distant relative or someone out there searching for her.  

But when Flora Mae’s name resurfaced, it triggered alerts in Royce’s network. They’d been watching for her since the motel massacre. Within days, shadows moved in. Jamal was ambushed and killed. Flora Mae escaped with her life. By daybreak, she was on the run again.

The Nightwardens, those who once served as humanity’s hidden shield, had faded into legend. After the Civil War they splintered. Individual family-lines continued the fight in isolation. Bernard Watkins had been the last to carry the code openly. When he died in 1991, the world assumed the lineage of those who protected mankind, had died with him. 

No one knew his daughter escaped. No one knew she’d spent long years in hiding. But Royce had eventually discovered Elizabeth was the one feeding Bernard intel and that put a target on Flora Mae. So now that she was again in the open, she was hunted. Royce dispatched a strike team...

They caught up to her, late one night at a Denver bus station. She saw them moving, too fast, too silent, their eyes wrong. Flora Mae drew a gun, her hands shaking but her aim steady. The vampires charged. And then...the air changed.

Kharos appearing without his helm - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Thunder, lightning, a crack of pressure. A shimmer of light. Kharos, the monster killer, appeared without being summoned. A deviation from the universal rules -- he looked different, not the warrior in armor of light, but a man. Tall, grim, eyes of white... He still tore through the vampires with celestial fury before they could lay a hand on her. And just as suddenly as he arrived, he disappeared, leaving Flora Mae trembling on the station floor. Staring into the space where something godly had stood up for her, for the second time in her life.

Flora Mae fled...not looking back. Searching this time for answers. Tracing whatever part of her father’s footsteps she could. Quietly through Texas, Atlanta, Asheville, following names, old addresses, any scrap of his past. It had been over a decade, in some cases longer. Some remembered Bernard. Others didn’t. 

That path didn’t reveal much, other than her father was an enigma. What she did feel, was watched. Footsteps where there was no one. Shadows tailing. Flora Mae had the sneaking suspicion Royce’s hunters were again, closing in...

Late one night, barricaded inside a cheap motel in the Blue Ridge Mountains, an unexpected knock echoed through the door. She braced, gun drawn. But it wasn’t a vampire...

The world Flora Mae had left as a child was tiny. The car. The mission. Her father. That’s all she ever knew...so when a contingent of Nightwardens stepped into her motel room, everything she knew shifted on its axis.

They told her what she’d never been allowed to know, The Nightwardens hadn’t died out. They endured. Quietly. Independently. Hiding in the periphery of night to stay safe. Passing their code from parent to child. 

Though Bernard hunted alone, in the days before his death, he sent out a final message instructing others to find and protect Flora Mae, if he fell in the line of duty. Several teams of Nightwardens were dispatched, reaching Texarkana too late. They believed Flora Mae had been taken or was killed. And for years, they mourned her.

The family she never knew - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC

Finding out she was alive, they set out in search of her...There in the dim light of a roadside motel, surrounded by the descendants of an ancient brotherhood, Flora Mae found something she never had before...family.

With her, they'd prepare for the greatest hunt in their history. The war between Elizabeth and Royce was reaching its final pitch, and for the first time in generations, the Nightwardens, as a whole, were ready to enter the fray.

TO BE CONTINUED…