EVO

Welcome back to the devil within. You're listening to Blood on the Bluegrass.

This is chapter one, the Vampire of Murray County.

There are parts of America where the night feels older than the daylight it replaces,

where the dark doesn't simply fall, it settles.

In western Kentucky, that darkness rolls over the fields like something with memory.

And Murray, Kentucky is one of those towns. A quiet, respectable, university-anchored community where the loudest thing on a Friday night

is the buzzing glow of the Walmart sign and the occasional teenage insistence that nothing ever happens here.

Kids and Murray grow up dreaming of anywhere else,

and adults pretend that they don't hear the restlessness.

It's a place that prizes normalcy,

but you don't have to scratch very deep to find a different story. Sometimes normalcy is just a paint job that you slap on a house that actually has cracks running straight through the foundation.

In the mid-1990s, one of those cracks widened into a chasm, and out of it stepped a boy who insisted that he wasn't a boy at all.

His name was Rod Farrell, though he preferred something more theatrical.

Vasego, a centuries old vampire from a lineage he described with the casual authority of someone

reciting their grandmother's cookie recipes.

Now look, he wasn't the first teenager to try on a darker identity, and he certainly wouldn't

be the last, but something about him cut deeper.

Even in a landscape full of adolescent bravado and role-playing masquerade games, Rod carried himself with seriousness

that made his fantasies feel less like inventions and more like declarations.

Rod didn't belong anywhere, and he knew it, and that's what made him dangerous.

He was the kind of teenager who clung to outsider status the way that some

...