Mariette Cadiuex

LIKES: wine. fruit. spiders. puzzles. silk. snow. peonies.

DISLIKES: most other vampires. summer time. fire. cramped spaces. being told no. injustice.

HABITS: clenches her jaw when she's mad. hums the nursery rhyme frère jacques whenever she is idly doing something. stirs her coffee three times counter-clockwise every morning.

SUN/MOON/RISING: capricorn sun. aries moon. taurus rising.

BEST TRAITS: resourceful. witty. dependable. ambitious. observant.

WORST TRAITS: hot headed. aloof. inflexible. stubborn. cynical.

PET PEEVES: slow drivers. messy people. being interrupted.

Mariette is unsure of her own age, or even of exactly what year she was born, but when truly pressed for it she usually guesstimates sometime in the 1700's, tucked somewhere away in a village straight out of a fairytale in the hills of France.

The family estate sat on a field of wildflowers, on a hilltop overlooking the village below. She remembers her childhood being the color gold, from the light of the sun warming her skin as she laid in the fields until her aunt Josephine called her back inside. The history of the estate was fuzzy in her mind, a story she often struggles to try and dig back up after doing so much to forget it. At some point, her ancestors had settled in the village until starvation nearly wiped them out; it was at the benevolence of a vampire lord posed aristocrat that they even survived the coming winter. However, they made a deal with the devil that year - in exchange for the riches and power they craved to survive, they would allow the vampire lord, Jean-Pierre, to convert any male born in that village into a vampire if he so chose to.

And so, that was how they went on.

Mariette's father, Henri, had watched as both his older brothers were chosen to be changed by Lord Jean-Pierre, but he was left behind as a human to inherit the estate and bear more sons to fulfill the promise. On their first attempt, Henri and his wife Anne bore twins - Mariette, and her brother Romain. Where Mariette's childhood was filled with nursery rhymes and running through the fields with her two young aunts, Romain was constantly with his mother and father with rigorous training and studies - he was told he must be chosen. After the twins, any attempt Anne made to become pregnant resulted in failure, and the pressure was riding on their shoulders - until the twins were ten, and Anne finally found herself with child once more.

Around this time, Mariette also found out a little family secret - her mother, unbeknownst to everyone except her aunts, and now Mariette, was a witch; and even greater, that same power pulsed through Mariette's own blood. She began to practice witchcraft with her aunts, who had revealed the secret to her in confidence, and was steadily finding she had far more promise than they originally anticipated. Realizing this, her aunts made her promise to keep her practicing a secret from her mother, who ignored her existence more often than not anyway. Her mother gave birth to another boy - baby Louis - and Mariette had become all but a ghost around the estate.

Unfortunately, disaster struck only three years later. It was the night of the twins thirteenth birthday, and a full blood moon hung above the estate. Lord Jean-Pierre had made an appearance for the first time in nearly two decades, and the estate threw an extravagant feast in his honor. After all, it would be the night in which he would assess Romain. Somewhere along in the night, Mariette got it in her head that she needed to show her mother her skills, show her how far she had come, and then maybe her family would consider her as special and powerful as Romain. To this day, she is still unsure as to why she decided to do it during the dinner right before the ceremony, but she did - in front of Lord Jean-Pierre, in front of her mother, and her father, and both of her horrified and guilt-ridden aunts, Mariette rose to full height and called on the body of the lamb across their dinner table to twitch and rise once more with a false life.

It happened too fast for her to remember for certain who grabbed her first - it seemed her mother and her aunts had all lunged for her at once, all for far different reasons, but it had been the cold hands of Lord Jean-Pierre who had her by the throat first. A witch - he had no idea the Cadieux family had begun breeding witches - was something he had been dying to get his hands on. There was the sound of yelling, a flash, a cold sensation, and then darkness.

When Mariette finally stirred away, her body was out in the snow soaked in buckets of blood, and her once deep black hair had gone pure white from the shock and trauma. The estate crackled with the fire that ate at the wood, and behind her the village faired the same. She lay in the snow for five days, watching the mansion crumble away to nothing, before she was able to go through the rubble. Her mother and her Aunt Josephine were missing, as was her twin brother and Lord Jean-Pierre, but she found the bodies of the remaining household, including all of their servants, her father, and her baby brother Louis. The young girl survived by feasting on the dead bodies of those in her estate, as well as those left behind in the massacred village, but it took until the spring for her aunt to swing back around and find her alive.

Together, the two were able to rebuild the estate and imbue it with magic. From that point, the spirits of the deceased, including her little brother Louis, began to show up in the halls, and soon became a stable living at the estate. It was from them that the two learned Mariette and Romain were both turned by Lord Jean-Pierre, but Mariette had a violent transformation and had flown into a rage, slaughtering all in the estate and causing the fire in turn, before moving down to the village and slaughtering them as well. Still feeling horrible pain and rage from the loss of her twin, and upon learning she was the cause of so much death, Mariette performed a ritual during the next full blood moon and shrouded the estate in the sands of time, placing herself and her aunt into deep slumbers.

When they woke, the estate had reappeared in Penrose. It was there that Mariette began to age up along civilization there, spending most of her time at the mysterious Scarlet Estate that only appeared during full moons, as well as visiting her only childhood friend Maddox, who helped her learn to blend into society and act more modern. Since then, she has aged up into a young woman appearing in her mid twenties, and lives primarily in a penthouse suite in Highview. Her aunt continues to live at the Scarlet Estate, which appears only on full moons and is known to be surrounded in charm and mystery. The two are silently working to find Lord Jean-Pierre and, hopefully, Romain.