Sebastion Cole - a different kind of master

I'd originally intended to write something else in here before posting the next excerpt but I've been kind of lagging in that area lately. I promise to pick it up in the near future. May has unfortunately become a month full of as much uncertainty as April was and I suppose I've been using that as an excuse to stem the creative flow as it were. But I'll soon set things right.
In the meantime, here's Cole in New York.

All this is what had attracted the Red Band Society to Sebastian. They came to know almost everything about him because that was the kind of thing they’d been doing since the formation of the club. The thirteen members had always made everything that went on in New York their business. Every vampire drone in the city was there because the Red Band Society wanted him or her to be there. They all served a purpose. The club’s vast wealth didn’t come directly from drones. Like the Masters, drones didn’t usually have jobs so the money mostly came from humans in their service. It was decided that Sebastian however, would not work out as human slave because of his arrogant and aggressive nature. The Red Bands deduced that if they tried to threaten him as they did many other wealthy people, he would try to resist them which would force them to kill him. And they did not want him dead. He controlled some very tempting assets in the city. But drones immediately inherited the programming that it was best to serve the Masters. So it was agreed (after being put to a vote, as they always did for important matters) that one of the members would bite him and turn him into a drone. Then, he would be brought before the rest of the club and told how things would work from then on. Bernard was chosen to perform the task of turning Cole.

But Bernard never came back. Instead, the evening following Bernard’s task, the Red Band Society found Sebastian Cole waiting for them in their board room, sitting in Bernard’s chair. He was a vampire, as they’d wanted, but he was no drone. He calmly explained to the shocked members that after being bitten by Bernard, but before being fully turned, he had killed the Master Vampire. He’d still been human when he managed to snuff Bernard out. Later, when the change was complete, Sebastian found that he now possessed all of Bernard’s knowledge. Naturally, included in this knowledge was the knowledge of the differences between Master vampires and drones. And Sebastian knew he was definitely a Master.

The Red Bands immediately put him to the test to prove his claims and he passed every one. Sebastian calmly and patiently (and with visible amusement) waited in the boardroom while several of the members rushed to the second floor to the archives, where all their vampire literature, material written by both vampires and humans over several centuries, was stored. Hours were spent trying to find any mention of the phenomenon that had occurred. None was found.

And so a new entry was made. It appeared that if a human bitten by a Master somehow managed to kill the Master before turning into a drone, said human would turn instead into a full Master vampire, apparently inheriting the abilities of the slain Master. None of the Red Bands were particularly pleased by this discovery but in the end they reasoned they simply had to accept Sebastian as a member. They’d respected him when he was a human and knew he would be an extremely dangerous foe as a Master vampire. Fortunately, Sebastian was completely satisfied with becoming a vampire as it gave him even more power than he’d enjoyed as a human and since he was a Master, none of the Red Bands would have any power over him as they’d originally planned.

But this did not mean the other members didn’t resent him. They all did. They often enjoyed reminding him that, while he possessed all of the abilities of a Master and all of Bernard’s prior knowledge, he was still not a true Master. They were all born vampires who had been around for centuries and he had been a man born in 1964.

Sebastian never let on that this bothered him. He accepted their glares and snide remarks with good humour and often ignored them altogether. He’d been ambitious as a man and he was doubly ambitious as a vampire and he didn’t want to waste time squabbling with the other members over things that couldn’t be changed. Plus he knew that they knew he was a valuable asset to the club. As a drone they would have simply controlled him but as their equal, he could offer his own ideas and insights and these were more often than not quite useful. As the only former human, he had an understanding of the human psyche that none of them had, despite all their centuries of life. Three of them had been around since the late fifteen hundreds but Sebastian was always teaching them things. Truth be told, the entire situation amused him to no end.