Race Name: Shades
Description:They are the Primal ancestors of Vampires. They stalked the night in times of old, when man was living in caves, formless and malicious. They hunted mankind, as ultimate predators, instilling in them a genetic fear of the dark, for it means death. Those were the shades of the past, little more than animals driven by desires of the flesh at that point. They have now grown and changed into a race of magical shape-shifters, users of shadow and blood magic. 
They have one 'true' form, but it takes certain conditions to be discovered(the difficulty of reaching said conditions varies from shade to shade), but that form is not bound by any convention, only to show what the person is in their soul. Because of this, Shades often take to look like attractive men and women of their target race, as to more easily attract prey. While they do not need to drink blood to live, they do need it to supply their magical power. It also acts as a sort of drug to them, drawing them into their more animalistic roots as well as boosting their power. This boost only come, however, when they feast on a living being. Most Shades live off of cold blood they replicate with magic, only feeding on living when their is great need.
The reason for this is because A) it's seen as savage to feed on the living, B)It can cause a Shade to revert to their animalistic state if they do it to much, and C)The bite of a Shade has a very adverse affect on other species, as the poison they secrete when they do acts like a highly addictive drug or aphrodrisiac, making the victim crave to seek out the Shade. This wears off soon afterwards if it's only one bite, but if the person gets bitten multiple times, the addiction becomes stronger and stronger, until they go mad.
Shade society is oligarchical, with the different factions split into families, each family represented by a color(Coppernicus is Copper, Argentum is silver, Etc.). The color of your family represents your lot in life, as families with Metallic colors are the upper class, chromatic colors are middle to lower class, any mixture of the metallic and chromatic is below chromatic, and any Shade crossed withy another species is seen as filth. Half breed are always represented by their red eyes, thus no family ever takes the color red, less the be associated with them.
The lifespan of a shade is around 200-900 years depending on the family they come from, and they don't physically age like people, since they have no definte form.