Bad Blood

We searched for months to learn that time was to blame for many broken hearts. I found Mathew, an adult with family and children, begging me to go away and make him forget. ‘I was so young back then, I made a mistake.’, I watched him close the door to me and our love as if he was ashamed of the past and terrified of losing his carefully normalized life. Elizabeth found Mary in Paris, where she came after her girlfriend’s sudden disappearance. Mary found another girl and didn’t believe Elizabeth that she was no longer a vampire. Maybe she doubted it in the first place, it could be the figment of her imagination, including the clown and hallucinations. Including our past and years of memories which to some could be the result of mental disease. Bob, Rob and Kit’s girlfriends found other partners and now they ran a brothel of their own. They liked their job and they didn’t bother to go back to blood-sucking boyfriends who messed with their independence and killed off their customers. Nick learned that his beloved teacher changed schools and it took him some time to find her and have his heart broken by learning that she got married and was pregnant with a baby. Even Gina took matters in her own hands, moved to Australia and found another partner after failing to hear from Phillip for years. Amelie learned that Lubov died from some heart problems. She probably exhausted her organ too much while helping Amelie to carry the bodies of Russian mafia members. Or Lubov died of a broken heart when she lost her caretaker’s job. We never learned the truth.

We truly lost them and our hopes of winning them back were shattered. That was a part of the deal. There was something heartbreaking in our transformation. We closed some chapters forever. After two hundred years, we came back to square one. The difference was that we woke up at different times.

We live now. I am permanently on drugs, but there is nothing special in that. A big percentage of you are. From time to time, I hear about another celebrity who took their lives due to depression. I wait in line for my medications with dozens of people and we share the same understanding. We know the pain of getting up every day and surviving the worst times. I learned humility in the fact that I am human. I know that cutting my veins, hanging myself or taking a variety of drugs at the same time would have its consequences. There would be no getting back, no extra life like in a computer game. It would be the end. So whenever I need help, I ask for it. I ignore strangely sounding names of psychiatrists, I never tell that I was a vampire and that I was transformed back. I’m cautious. But I accept help.

You might think that gaining finality and knowing that we are going to die (sooner or later, Amelie is literally counting days) made us miserable. Quite the reverse. We will die just like you will die. There’s equality in all this unfair world. We are all born into it and we will leave it regardless of times, status, religion, and sex. Nothing is more certain. We are no longer above you and we will share your fate. We have deaths on our conscience. We are willing to accept our departure to the unknown.

Did losing the people we loved hurt us? Yes, immensely. It was excruciating. Both the awareness of no longer being loved and having someone to love and care about and the fact that we couldn’t do anything about it. We couldn’t turn back time.

But these years that we spent here taught us something else. Every wound heals. Losing one love means that somewhere there is a potential for being loved again by someone else. There’s hope in the loss as one heartache means that you need to build the heart cells for something stronger.

Phillip still believes in work, progress, and development. Humanity strives for improvement and the possibilities are infinite. Robots, 3D printed replaceable organs, bones, veins, and limbs. He wants to witness all of it and he wants to be a part of the process. Maybe somewhere there is another headstrong nurse or he will eventually take matters into his own hands. Now he is only a doctor and a workaholic. He can skip the vampire part.

Elizabeth is an active member of the LGBT community and advocates everything from the equality of women to same-sex marriage. I bet that she wants to get married. She understood me at last. She understood that you can be with someone for a lifetime. However long or short this life can be. With a man or with a woman. Love has no boundaries. I’m sure that the clown is with her from time to time, but we wait for better drugs and more effective treatment. She has better and worse days. We are getting used to living with it. She, on the other hand, is learning to accept it.

Nick understood something at last. He saw sense in being educated. He also started growing up (just a few centimeters, but he believes that one day he will be an adult). He also gave up porn. I think he looks for something different in a relationship. And if he wants to have a girlfriend his own age he shouldn’t boast about his degenerative formative years. That teacher of his made miracles. I still appreciate her for everything she did for our little rascal.

Amelie remembers less and less. She mostly recalls what happened in the eighteenth century and astonishes our guests with facts and dates. We tell that she read a lot in the past. We don’t mention that she saw it with her own eyes. That would raise some eyebrows.

Rob, Bob, and Kit actually do something good in this ambulance job. Over the years, they learned about the human body enough to effectively save it on the way to the hospital. They don’t need blood. They have their lunch boxes and sandwiches. So they assumed that they can actually do some good to the people they transport. They call it karma. They killed thousands, they can easily save as many. Some things, however, didn’t change and they found their new partners in a brothel. This time, they don’t mind sharing. And they believe that women also can work and bring money home. Kit along with his jealousy started treating his diabetes. He changed his diet, takes with himself glucose and monitors his insulin injections by a modern tracking system.

I let Mathew go. It was painful, but no one said that you cannot have four husbands. And maybe this time it will be a husband for my lifetime and I will die sooner than him.

Men changed. Now there are stay at home fathers, some of them help at home, they allow women to have their careers, at times resigning from their own. They have open minds. Not all of them, but I see that they noticed our efforts. Over two hundred years ago, my father threw me into an institution. I was worthless. I didn’t play my part well. As a daughter, a mother, a wife. Now I’m happily on my own, juggling life, career, illness and the fact of being a human. I have a family. We are not related by blood but by thousands of memories. We never lost touch. You can meet us at times, in the library, in the hospital, in the street. Ask us about any detail in history and we will tell you. We were blessed by a few lifetimes and we personally witnessed everything which you could see in the form of some archival footage on TV or on the internet.

We also started growing old. I noticed my first gray hair emerging from my red locks. I noticed the first wrinkles around my eyes and mouth. I accept it. I saw the most astonishing beauties turn into fragile elderly ladies, the most vital princesses turn into mother queens. If you saw Amelie’s picture from the times she was in her twenties, you’d be astonished. She was a catch! She would never have expected to end up as an effective killing machine cooperating with prisons. She would never have thought that she could live for so long.

We had nothing when we were transformed and we have very little now. We learned that money come and go. From rags to riches has the same application as the other way round. Billion dollar businesses also go bankrupt and disappear from the surface of the Earth. We heard that Christoper started a small seaside business in Madagascar and it flourishes. Of course, experience pays off. Even if instead of big fishes, he manages uneducated local fishermen.

There is very little that is certain in life. But this is the charm of it all. You wouldn’t walk if you didn’t fall a couple of times. You would get bored if the winding ways of fate didn’t surprise you with their plans. You wouldn’t appreciate health if you weren’t sick, and you wouldn’t recognize happiness without experiencing misery and pain.

We wouldn’t understand being human if we hadn’t been vampires and we wouldn’t enjoy now if we didn’t know the past. We also wouldn’t value the power of love if we hadn’t lost it. Yes, something happened during these years. We were changed.

Chapter 10 June

9:53 AM

I admit it was my mistake. I trusted the wrong person. I was too confident in the charm we used for decades to persuade those around us. Two hundred years of experience wasn’t enough to misjudge the character. I gave us to him like dinner on a plate: ready to be consumed. I’m not sure how he organized everything, but during months of visits, medicine prescriptions, confidential conversations I told him too much and he used all this against us.

I remember when I walked out of my library on another ordinary day, tired after arranging volumes and analyzing library history of my next victims, and I saw him. He was waiting in front of a van. I sensed that there was something strange about him being there, but I didn’t run away. I never saw him outside of his office. I walked down the stairs. A few other men appeared along with doctor Davidov and they approached me. They grabbed my arms. I felt the pain of the needle stabbed into my skin and the warmth of a numbing substance dissolving in my veins. Everything went blank.

They knew where we lived. They came most unexpectedly, waited in front of the hospital for Phillip and Elizabeth to finish their shifts. For Amelie, they came straight to our flat just before Lubov turned up to carry out her duties. They took Nick just after he ended his classes and waited for Bob, Rob, and Kit to complete their shifts and emerge from the ambulance. Doctor Davidov was in charge of it all. He arranged people who arrived in trucks and took all of us to a remote psychiatric hospital.

They put us in straight jackets, injected sedatives and imprisoned us in a high-security modern asylum surrounded by gates with bars, metal doors, and numerous guards. Us, the vampires. They left our humans intact.

I don’t remember much from that period apart from the hundreds of painful experiments. They wanted to learn as much as possible about our vampirism, they checked our blood, veins, digestive system, teeth, brains. They didn’t care about any anesthesia. They stabbed us with needles until we lost consciousness, they caused us pain and damaged our bodies and nervous systems despite our screams and pleas to stop. They were merciless. I watched doctor Davidov sign another agreement for further medical tests. I made the worst mistake I could. I gave us all to a traitor.

We cried from pain, loneliness, returning symptoms of our diseases. We were desperate. Me, Phillip, Elizabeth, Amelie, Nick, Rob, Bob, and Kit. Each in a separate room with no contact with one another and no chance of escape.

Days turned into months, months into years. They couldn’t kill us but they watched us starve due to the lack of blood. They analyzed with open interest and enthusiasm our slow disintegration and hibernation. They took pleasure from seeing us die a slow death without end.

Everybody who knew us had to forget about us as time made a lot of wounds heal and memories fade. I didn’t understand it back then but we lost everybody we knew and loved. We were taken away from them and our hearts were broken. We could just as well have died at that time, it would have made no difference. We were in such a state of pain, both physical and emotional that we didn’t feel any more hits. We reached our bottom.

And then, they raided us again. I’m sure that this time the doors were securely locked and there were guards at the gates. But that didn’t stop them. They came and unleashed the massacre. They drained every member of the medical team, every doctor (including doctor Davidov) and every nurse. Then, they opened the gates to our rooms and spreading the smell of freshly cut flowers, transformed us. We died, I’m sure. But when we woke up again, we woke up in the same state of livelihood that we had been in over two hundred years ago back in our old asylum.

This time, we didn’t bother to clean the bodies. We left the place as soon as possible and walked miles to the nearest petrol station. We had no documents, no money, no proper clothes. And we were hungry for food. It was extraordinary to consume food for the first time in centuries. To taste the flavors and smell different aromas. To feel our stomachs full of a different kind of satisfaction. We were weaker. We couldn’t walk as far as we could as vampires. We also had no intention of killing anybody. That proved to be a closed chapter and past necessity.

We came back to our flat, but the owner rented it to somebody else when we gave no sign of living and we failed to pay for it in time. He gave us boxes with the things that were abandoned, including our documents, and we were left to ourselves. For some time, we returned to our old asylum and we squatted it, having no better place to live. We slept on mattresses placed in our old beds, surrounded by burnt walls and metal rubbish. But we needed food and we needed to earn money. Using our qualifications and shady excuses for our long absence, we managed to get back our old jobs. For Phillip, it was the easiest to accomplish because his reputation surpassed any time that he could be away. We returned to a very simple life. We rented a small flat in which we squeezed for some time. This time no one wanted to move out. Days were different. Nights gave us a lot of time to think instead of hunting. Our slow coming back to normal left us with emptiness we couldn’t define.

And then we knew exactly what we were supposed to do. We knew that the only way to move on was to find all the people we loved.

Chapter 9 May

2:01 AM

Sometimes you can be with someone for years and fail to build a lasting relationship. The configuration of similarities and preferences prolongs the mutual fascination but it’s not enough to picture a lifetime together. And then you meet the right person with whom everything clicks. You can get married on the day you meet. You are a perfect match, two halves of the same fruit, a part of the pair of destined soulmates.

Phillip didn’t believe in any of the above. He believed in relationships formed with a purpose of procreation, saving on taxes, paying off a mortgage and having someone to have sex with as a part of the deal. He believed in work. Improvement. Movement. He had seen it throughout his life: the progress of medicine, the industrial revolution, advancements in technology, improvement in work conditions, fewer deaths, longer lifespan. He saw it and he believed in it with all his heart.

He also saw a number of betrayals, men losing their heads over the wrong kind of women (or just like our Christopher for love falling into financial ruin). He saw me mourning my husbands along with the thousands of widows, crying over lost partners who either were shot during one of the military conflicts, disappeared somewhere on the way during relocations, died due to incurable diseases or left for younger or more beautiful women. He also saw men abandoned for richer and more handsome men, family members, best friends or even their own fathers and sons. He knew how it went with love. It was a lottery in which not everyone was about to win.

But Phillip focused on the wrong side of the coin. He was so used to his loneliness that he didn’t see a woman who simply ignored his habits and prejudices. She didn’t even take into account his two hundred years of observation and life wisdom. She took one look at Phillip and decided in her mind that he was a man for her. And whatever she decided on usually came true while Phillip’s opposition wasn’t even considered as an option.

She was one of the nurses who worked in Phillip’s operational team. She prepared the tools, cleaned them, wiped the sweat from Phillip’s busy forehead and spent hours at the operating table amazed at his skills. She observed him carefully. She noticed the disappearing stains of blood, she was astonished at his craft and paid attention to every unusual habit that he had. She also noticed the lack of signs of him ever getting older and she simply added pieces to the puzzle. That revelation, however unexpected, didn’t discourage her at all.

Her name was Gina. She was a short-haired blond active woman who learned to take things into her own hands since she was a little girl (including making her parents sell the house and move to the other end of the country when she was four). Probably this attitude made her take a kitchen knife, cut a hole in Phillip’s car’s wheel and cause a flat tire. When Phillip noticed the malfunction, Gina gently drove by in her own car and offered to give him a ride home, which he accepted, not suspecting anything unusual.

‘Would you like to eat something?’, she offered, having in mind that it was a busy day of bloody surgeries and Phillip had consumed quite a lot that day.

‘No, thank you. But if you want to eat something, you can...’

‘I’m starving!’, she announced and decided for both of them to go to a restaurant in the city center.

Gina enjoyed her dinner. Phillip watched her eat. They knew each other for a couple of years but it was the first time Phillip looked at her without the nurse’s uniform and noticed that she was a woman. Gina made sure that on that day she was wearing a tight red dress which highlighted her voluptuous figure.

‘Shall we go to your place? We could watch a film together.’

‘My place is... messy.’ Phillip wanted to make an excuse, remembering that a lot of body parts from his dissecting experiments were lying everywhere ranging from the floor to the kitchen sink and bathtub.

‘Mine it is.’

It was a strange experience for Phillip to lose all the control. He felt like watching a film in which he played the main part and there was no remote control to switch the channel or turn down the volume.

He found himself in Gina’s flat. He was sat in front of the TV to watch a film (Gina chose Die Hard with Bruce Willis to make him unaware of her intentions). After the last scene disappeared from the screen, Phillip was taken to Gina’s bedroom and undressed before her. The last thing he remembered was Gina’s naked tights around his waist and her jumping breasts squeezed into his face.

After a month of sleeping with Gina, Phillip decided to be honest with her and waited for the worst possible reaction.

‘I have to tell you something. I am...’

‘A doctor?’, she was playing with him.

‘Yes. And...’

‘A workaholic?’

‘Yes. And...’

‘A poor boyfriend? You forgot to buy me a birthday present last week.’

‘Well, yes. I want to tell you that above all this I am a vampire.’

‘Ah, this. I know. I noticed how you lick the blood from the operating table. Coming back to my present, I would like something romantic. Maybe a bracelet. Or flowers. You always appreciate a red rose.’

‘A red rose? But you can’t even eat it.’

‘Why would I eat it?’

‘I was thinking about something practical. I can buy you some medical tools. I could teach you a thing or two about cuts. I noticed that you are pretty accurate.’

Gina rolled her eyes and rolled over Phillip with her entire body.

‘Flowers and a bracelet. Thank you very much.’

Phillip was seduced. He didn’t search for love. It found him. He was the last one among us to form an emotional connection with a human being. Being so hard-working himself, he didn’t even have to raise a finger to find the woman of his life. He didn’t admit it but he was happy in Gina’s headstrong embraces. We were all happy in our complicated lifepaths and experiences, happy in our sins and frailty. And these were the last days of happiness we all were about to experience.

Chapter 8 April

9:46 AM

I remember the night I visited the asylum again. It remained a devastated ruin of our previous glory. There was nothing left except for metal chandeliers, bed frames, some door knobs and old medical equipment used in times we entered it for the first time. There was nothing which signified all these years. Nothing which would be a proof of these thousands of days we lived here and items we collected.

I remember myself walking along the black and burned corridor, then down the staircase. Suddenly, it struck me. I froze. In the dark, I saw a figure emerging from one room. I felt the time pause at its regular pace. My heart stopped. A black-coated creature paced before me in slow motion, making no sound. I smelled freshly-cut flowers. All these memories came back to me. I remembered that day. The day of my transformation.

I ran after it. I saw it disappear into the nearby forest. I needed to find it. Trees passed before my eyes, thorns wounded my legs and twigs bruised my face but I ran, no other thought occupied my mind, I had no other aim.

After hours, I reached the cemetery. It stood miles from our asylum but, as a vampire, I didn’t feel tired. The place consisted of old tombs stuck in cascades on the forest hill. I passed the graves. I watched the sculptures of angels, metal crosses, big family tombs, and lonely marble plates. I read the dates. The majority of them died in the nineteenth century. I found graves of my family members, whom I managed to forget. These were the times that would mean my departure. If I hadn’t been transformed, I would be lying somewhere among these people. My people. My times.

I saw the creature disappear into one family grave. I followed it. I walked inside. I felt the cold of the water embracing my feet. I decided to go further. I had the lighter in my pocket. I took a branch of wood, tore a piece of cloth from my T-shirt, sprinkled it with the perfume I had in my bag and lit it to make a torch. I was carrying it in front of me to see where I was about to go. I heard some whispers. I followed them, feeling the waters reach my waist. If I were a human, I would freeze to death. There was lifelessness inside. I was sure that all living forms disappeared in time, leaving nothing but bacteria.

The chamber of an enormous grave opened in front of me like gates to hell. They were there. Hundreds of them hung upside down like two-meter-long bats. They had no hair, their skin was of transparent color. They had pointed ears, flat noses, and black claws. Some of them opened their eyes and saw me. They became unmoved. They smelled me and they smelled one of their own. The smell of freshly cut flowers reached my nostrils with the intensity of washing detergent. I was in the cave of vampires.

I heard them talking to each other. I didn’t understand a word. They were speaking in some ancient language, which didn’t even sound like any of the languages I knew. They were hissing, moaning, and grunting.

‘What are you saying?’ I spoke, hearing my voice echoing in the cave.

They adjusted. They began speaking in my language.

‘We are older than time, Nina. We were here before Jesus Christ, Buddha, and Mahomet. We were here before the gods of Egipt, Greece, and Rome. We were here before you could write and form any civilization. We are older than you can imagine.’

I was looking at their mouths whispering the news for me too difficult to comprehend. They weren’t the legendary vampires I was always imagining or hoping to meet. They were gruesome. They were monsters hanging in the cave, waiting for the blood which didn’t allow them to disintegrate completely. I didn’t see them when they raided us two hundred years ago. I couldn’t have suspected that it was them who made us into who we were. They transformed us and killed everybody else.

Some of them climbed down from the walls and approached me to get a closer look. They weren’t afraid of the fire. They looked at me like a specimen in the zoo. They looked at me with their dark bottomless eyes, me: their long-forgotten child and creation.

‘We saved you, Nina, we saved you from the fate you were about to meet. We gave you eternal life. We gave you a drop of our time. These two hundred years are nothing for us. We were here from the beginning when the fate of humankind wasn’t yet that certain.’

There was something disgusting in them. In the way they spoke, licked their teeth with their tongues and exposed black mouths. They seemed to be possessed. No human behavior applied to them. Nothing in the way they moved or stared was similar to what I was used to seeing.

‘And what will be the future? What is the future for us?’

More of them descended the walls and surrounded me. They weren’t human. Their clothes were made thousands of years ago from different kinds of threads woven to last eras. Through the holes, I could see their bodies, devoid of any reproductive organs, melted into one transparent wrinkled sacks for bones, muscles, and black veins. They looked like Siamese cats except for their size and shape. They were only vacuums for blood. Nothing else.

‘You will turn into us. In time, you will forget how it is to be human. In time, you will forget about everything. Give yourself time.’

‘I don’t want to turn into you. I don’t want to become an organism feeding on blood and live in cages like a bat.’

‘Otherwise, you will die. This is the only way.’

‘Were it you who burnt the asylum?’

They hissed.

‘No, it was this other man, Christopher. The one who abandons you from time to time and returns with no wish to stay.’

‘Christopher?’, I was shocked, ‘Did he want to kill us?’

‘He knew he couldn’t kill you. You cannot be burned. He just wanted to destroy the asylum. We had a deal with him. He would destroy all proofs of your vampire lives and we would turn him back. He gave us all his money. He resigned from everything that was precious to him.’

‘Back into what?’

‘Back into a human. We have the power to transform and the power to turn this transformation backward. This is our gift. He did it all for a woman. He was overwhelmed by love. He went to some African village and fell in love with a black woman from the tribe. Poor as only the poorest can be. Imagine, two hundred years ago they would have been put to prison for any act of fondness. Two hundred years ago she could have been his slave. He amassed a fortune of billions. He could be considered the richest man in the world. And he left everything for a woman. His wealth, his status, and his eternity. He found us and begged us. We turned him into a human.’

I listened to it with a beating heart. Christopher was just like us. He was won by his human nature. He was taken over by feelings.

‘And what would it take for us to be turned into humans?’

‘For you?’

They whispered in their ancient incomprehensible language. Then they turned to me.

‘For you, it would be to lose the people you love. It’s the greatest sacrifice. For if you lose your beloved, you also lose a part of you.’

I couldn’t imagine losing Mathew. I couldn’t imagine allowing them to hurt any of the people we so deeply cared about.

I never forgot their faces, their bodies, and their teeth. Maybe our fate was to turn into monsters and end up in caves. To lose senses and memories of what it was like to be human. To turn into worms.

I cried that day from disillusionment. The senseless deaths we were contributing to for all these years, the thirst for blood. There was no higher aim to it, just the constant preservation of our digestive system. We were just a species which instinctively fed on other species like spiders on flies. With no chances of improvement. Ever since I took the life of my first victim, I tried to seek sense in it all. I tried to find the meaning. Now I knew that there was no meaning. It was their experiment and our pain. I felt like a child who stopped believing in Santa. I felt like a priest who stopped believing in God.

I bought a plane ticket. I traveled to Madagascar to find a small hut overlooking the ocean. Inside, there was nobody. I walked out to the beach. I saw him. In a white shirt and shorts, he was collecting shells spat by the waters under his feet. He waved to me. I waved back.

‘Hungry?’ he asked, looking me in the eyes.

‘No, I ate on the way here. One dying passenger and a sick boy in the hotel.’

He laughed. He laughed just like on the day we met.

‘Well, well, well.’ Christopher looked less pale and I noticed that he started growing older, ‘I already forgot this hunger. Now I’m only hungry for her.’

I saw her. She was a beauty. Her black skin shined in the sun. She was holding a little boy, both of them walking along the beach, collecting shells.

‘They told me about the fire. And your transformation.’

He smiled.

‘I’m sorry if I caused you pain. You see, Nina. I had access to the greatest possessions in the world, I was rich beyond my calculation. I could buy everything at any age we were blessed to see. I could buy any woman. I could kill any woman and drain her blood. I always thought it silly, Nina. Your life with men. You could have achieved so much, you could have had anyone you wanted. And you devoted lifetime for these men. I wasted my hundreds of years and billions in banknotes and coins. I did it even before I was a vampire. I was lonely and lost. I couldn’t stand the pressure that my father instilled in me when I was young. I lived for this pressure. I made companies grow and helped people get rich. I could go to Mars and come back, taking into account my resources and the fact that I wasn’t going to die.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I fell in love. It struck me harder than I thought it would. I got lost in my aims. I saw no sense. I stopped racing with myself.’

I was looking at her closely. She had this womanly charm very few had in their aura. She was a natural, curvy, African princess that would have stolen her prince even those two hundred years ago.

‘It’s not my son. He was with her when I met her. I try to be to him a better father than my father was to me.’

She approached us and kissed him on the cheeks.

‘He gave up so much for so little,’ she said in a low sensual voice, exposing her accent.

I knew that he gave up nothing for everything. These years with us and these years of money-making ventures were like a sack without a bottom. Never enough. Now he had a very small sack, but there was no need to fill the bottom. Christopher found his peace.

Chapter 7 March

6:05 AM

Apparently, jealousy has an ability to work on the same conditions as the infamous saying out of sight out of mind. When Bob, Rob, and Kit lived in the asylum, they didn’t really care what their women were doing with their time and they didn’t want to know. But once they started sharing with them their places of habitation, things changed. I’m not sure why they all chose prostitutes as their partners but, all coming from a criminal environment, they didn’t have much chance to meet someone decent in any place other than the brothel. Probably, they had been once clients themselves and somehow got accustomed to their favorite courtesans, tempted them with money, and won their love. But ladies valued their independence and they didn’t even think of giving up their jobs once they were in relationships with three vampire convicts released from prison and for centuries on the run. As a result, instances of disappearing clients started to be more and more frequent. Cases, when a too enthusiastic man was dragged from the bedroom during a paid entertainment and drained from the top of his head to the tips of his toes happened usually once a week. It was objectively difficult to combine in one household the work of a prostitute and the downfall of being a vampire. Accepting the fact that one earned by sex and the second lived by murder was also mutually demanding. Girls established rules: no blood draining in the house, no open vampirism in front of the clients, as gossip spread fast and it proved to be a deterrent in maintaining business relationships. All went well for a week, but one time Kit had an unexpected sugar drop due to his diabetes, stormed into his girlfriend’s bedroom, shoved a chocolate bar into her client’s throat and bit into him with his sharp claws. She didn’t have time to oppose, she ended up with a drained customer between her legs in an erected state of being, which left her traumatized for days. Girls tried to use chains of garlic, crucifixes, silver crosses and hung them all over their bedrooms (which surprised incoming customers) but when Bob felt an instant pang of jealousy seeing his woman penetrated by another (strangely attractive) man, crosses were still of no use and the said man was lost before he managed to breathe the last breath of his sexual ecstasy. Despite the garlic.

Double standards appeared in the household of Bob, Rob, and Kit. Their women had to give up their jobs and stay at home, resorting to simple tasks of kitchen management, cleaning, and preparing meals. Boys were forced to work twice as hard and drain twice as many in the ambulance to obtain bonuses from funeral houses as a supplement of their hospital salary. Like all couples, they were trying to make ends meet.

Apparently, completely different cooperation happened between Amelie and Lubov. Amelie, as we were told by Lubov, didn’t hunt in the wild. For years, she had been visiting the place of the transformation of Bob, Rob, and Kit, namely prison. She had a familiar security guard, who let her in the cell of a rapist, murderer or child molester. She, a petite, seemingly innocent, elderly lady born in the eighteenth century, approached the unsuspecting man and attacked him with a force of annihilator, leaving him drained in his cell, shortening his wait for the trial. Amelie was like death, almost a skeleton, but surely more effective as the one who saw her was certain to die in an instant.

Lubov used Amelie to solve her old conflicts and grudges. She found out addresses of her past Russian employers, who belonged to an organized criminal group, and one by one she visited them with Amelie. Amelie - hungry, Lubov - waiting outside to get rid of the bodies. What a sight it was to watch Lubov hold over her shoulders the body of a grown man, a strong, muscular Russian trained in the Kalashnikov murder and cutting throats, and with an impact throw him into a river, a swamp or a pit of concrete created at some construction work. A new breath of life entered into Amelie and she felt like a modern Robin Hood, getting rid of the evil of the world, purifying it in her own terms. At least to the extent she didn’t immediately forget.

Unfortunately, Nick was purifying the world from quite the opposite group of individuals. It often happened that a very studious, smart, and conscientious boy went missing, leaving the school with pleas of his parents to give any information about his current location. Jealousy again played the part as it was Nick who was supposed to be his blond teacher’s favorite, not anyone else. Occasionally, some very demanding teacher, who asked Nick one too many questions at the board, didn’t come back home from school, with his body impossible to find even months later. Frequently, a visiting dentist, who made an annual process of fluoridation, hurt by accident Nick’s sensitive teeth and was eventually drained during a simple procedure of stone removal. Staff at Nick’s school changed surprisingly quickly.

For a long time, I didn’t know what to do with Doctor Davidov. If he was supposed to be our family psychiatrist, he should be aware of our one quite distinct family trait. I didn’t want to scare him too much, but when I went to him to receive the prescriptions for my medications, I tried to be as honest with him as possible.

‘Doctor, do you remember when we joked about Elizabeth being a vampire?’

‘Yes, has anything changed? Is she now a werewolf?’

‘No, she’s still a vampire. In fact, we are all vampires. Our family was transformed over two hundred years ago. I thought you should know. We want to be completely honest with you. We know that it helps with the treatment.’

He looked at me over his documents, not sure what to say. I took the phone from my bag and showed him the recorded footage of Nick, Amelie, Elizabeth, and (I believe it was Bob), attacking a person in the street and sucking the blood. Mathew was walking everywhere with the camera with the intention of becoming a YouTube vlogger and he simply caught them on the act.

Doctor Davidov was looking at it all with wide eyes.

‘Is it some sort of a joke?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I smiled to him, showing my fangs.

He jumped, terrified.

‘Oh, don’t be afraid. We value our medics. Doctor Pavlovitch was with us for many many years. We just want you to know. Your blood is for us sanctity. As long as you make Elizabeth better, you are untouchable.’

I’m not sure if it sounded like a threat but I left Doctor Davidov with a sense of insecurity. I had to do this, I didn’t like keeping secrets for too long. In our condition, it proved more than impossible.

I started getting worried about Phillip. Men who stay too long in their solitude are like animals in a shelter. They become sad, neglected, they start talking to themselves and eating dinner in front of the mirror. Phillip turned his flat into a dissecting room where he experimented with face transplants, inter-species organ surgeries, and brain tumor extractions. Parts of bodies were lying on the floor and I had to kick a head with my leg to get to the armchair and sit.

‘You should visit us more often. You will get crazy in this place. Work is not everything in life. You need to have a distance to it all.’

‘I do have a distance. I cultivated it for two-hundred years. Everything else is just not interesting for me. And as long as I suck the blood out of these fellows, they might just as well be useful in my progress. It’s all for science. It’s all for humanity as such.’

I remembered times when half of the current diseases could kill you within a week. There were no medicines. Women died at labor as often as infants died a few days after the birth. Life was a roulette. It was survival without sweet sentimental moments of middle-age crisis and its pointlessness at late teens (when you’re misunderstood by parents and teachers and attacked by acne) and late twenties (when you desperately seek other halves for reproduction, taking into account the ticking of a biological clock). I sat there, with my foot on the head of a vampire victim and wondered what would the landlord of Phillip’s flat say about the conditions it was in after his stay there. Life wasn’t as hard as it had been centuries before. Even Phillip used a self-operating robot to clean from the floor blood and pieces of skin. We simply got spoilt.

Chapter 6 February

8:34 AM

Our lives changed. We spent time online far more often than we did conversing in our asylum’s living room, listening to the sounds of the piano, admiring the same paintings and playing fancy-dress parties according to the epoch we picked in the bowl of years. We didn’t dwell on the past so much. We tried to embrace the now. In the small space of our apartment, we noticed how easily irritated we became in our company, maybe we had spent too many years together and now was the time to move on? We just passed each other in the kitchen and hid in separate rooms to live our own lives and have our own secrets.

The first person to move out was Phillip. He announced that he could afford to rent a separate flat and we didn’t really need his company. He kept the offer of picking us to work in his car, but he visibly wanted to separate from the group. We didn’t force him to stay. He wanted to maintain his years of solitude and with our company, it was getting difficult. He promised to visit and he kept his promise as if the bond of our blood was stronger than any signed documents and orders that would force him to stay.

Around that time, I heard a doorbell and saw a girl waiting at the entrance of the flat. She had short hair, wore peculiar clothes (Mathew told me that she most definitely belonged to some youth subculture), and had her eyebrows pierced.

‘I came for Elle’

‘Elle?’

‘Elizabeth. We’re leaving.’

It struck me that I never personally knew any of the girls that visited Elizabeth in her asylum’s room. They disappeared after some time. They couldn’t stand the pressure of her disease, her vampirism, possibly even the fact that she had many virgins on her conscience and I don’t mean a simple seduction of those questioning their sexuality.

‘Leaving where?’

‘On a trip. We’re going to Paris.’

I was surprised. Elizabeth was never willing to travel. She usually divided her time between work and home. She rarely even hunted as she had blood in abundance in her place of work.

‘In her condition, you know she needs medications. I’m not sure if she should...’

‘I know that she is schizophrenic, I read about it. I know about her hallucinations.’

‘And you don’t care?’

‘I have epilepsy. This scares the hell out of people. I can have an attack if I see the sequence of bright colors. I don’t know anyone who is perfectly healthy. Everybody has something wrong with them or they will. This is life.’

I was surprised how normally she treated her condition.

‘I have depression,’, I announced all of a sudden, feeling some sort of a relief when I mentioned it.

‘I know. You are pretty special,’ she lowered her voice ‘With this blood consumption as well.’

I smiled. I sensed that Elizabeth deserved to be accepted and loved for who she was.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Mary’

‘Nice to meet you, Mary. I hope that you will have a nice time in Paris.’

I was surprised to find out that there’s more to life than hiding, hunting, and trying to survive. I was surprised by its pleasures which reached beyond simple birth and death. Elizabeth thanks to Mary caught the bug of traveling. She disappeared for the weekend, spent all her earnings on budget plane tickets and brought us fridge magnets and little souvenirs from their escapades. I noticed early on how girls were looking at each other and I sensed that this change was caused by something Elizabeth hadn’t experienced before. She was in love. She blushed when Mary was around. She made sure the flat was clean when she was supposed to be visited and for the first time in her life, she wasn’t afraid of talking about her disease. Mary was the first girl in two hundred years time that stayed with us to watch TV and even helped with some flat chores or when we had problems with flat administration. I sensed that Elizabeth was lost like I was lost for my husbands. For the first time, she understood me and I started to understand her as I saw the desire in her eyes. The laughter they shared together signified this intimate laughter they shared alone when they only had each other, at night, in bed.

One day, girls decided to pack all Elizabeth’s things and move into the same flat, leaving me, Mathew, Nick, and Amelie alone.

Love made us grow apart. It was stronger than blood, it made us make decisions based on our egoistic desires and leave the sense of belonging we had been cultivating among us for years. I realized back then that all of us had the right to it, whether cherishing it in our memories, holding onto the new hopes or mourning those far from the reach of our possibilities. Even Nick for the very first time in his life had straight A’s on his school note, which had never happened before.

‘Why?’ I asked looking at this little hooligan, who set teachers on fire, was expelled for the worst crimes in the history of some prestigious schools and treated women like pieces of used chair.

‘She asked me to be a good boy.’

I loved this woman who could make miracles. She didn’t realize that she was looking at a child who had seen more evil than the generations of villains, who got used to gruesome crimes and low morale of humans, who would have grown up to be a rotten drunkard, but instead, remained a forever spoilt child. She made him fall in love with her and forced him to be better. He was better. He was better to the extent that he ironed his shirt every morning just to look representative during her classes.

I also fell vulnerable under the spell of love. I waited for Mathew to change. I gave him time to grow and mature. I made sure that he went to school and achieved everything at the top of his abilities. I didn’t make the first move. I waited until he kissed me, I didn’t force anything on him, but let his hands search my body in his own pace. He gained confidence and allowed himself for more.

I noticed how sex changed. How women started freely talking about their needs, how open they were about their fantasies, desires, and hopes. How easy it was to buy sex toys and how effortless was access to porn. I remembered the first tapes Nick brought with his school boys and copied them for hours on our old TV and video recorder. I remember him waiting way past midnight to find something on the cable TV to enjoy. Now it was enough to go to any pornographic website to see all positions, mixes of races, sexes, ages, and body types. Something even those shy avoiding brothels could experience for the first time as it was within the reach of literally everybody.

Together with Mathew, we were purchasing dildos resembling Avengers, Supermen and Light Swords from Star Wars, fake penises with skin so similar to the real ones I couldn’t tell the difference. Handcuffs, masturbation balls, massage oils were coming in discreet packages to our flat, not arousing anyone’s attention. I was stimulated as I had never been in my life, I experienced orgasms which shook my body as never before and there was no guilt, just pure fun. After centuries something changed. People accepted that women also liked sex and had their needs. Mathew was born into accepting it. I just benefited from the selfish embracing of the epoch. I experienced freedom for which I never fought. I had my own money, own place and very few to confess about my actions. But one thing didn’t change. I wanted and needed to be loved. And I was loved. I was given little gifts of budding feelings, surprising cute presents of attachment, I was sent links to love songs when I was at work and welcomed with romantic dinners when I returned after a tiring hunt after another suicidal man. I felt a different kind of love. Mathew didn’t blame me for my disease, didn’t have problems with my vampire nature and accepted me as a whole, something which I couldn’t expect from my previous husbands. I didn’t have to hide anything from him, I didn’t need to have secrets.

You could blame me for seducing a boy so young but you didn’t know what I knew. It was true love. We were meant to be together and our time was supposed to be prolonged by the fact that I met him when he was only fifteen. You will know, though, you will experience it at some point in your long and finite lives, how it feels to witness your loved one age, change, and die. You will have the pleasure of experiencing that with them, mutually looking at each others’ changing appearance and passing time. I will have the pain of watching my love perish away like a dying tree, while I will remain the same. I was simply blessed by a young body to love and a young soul to grow with my old soul and look forward to better days. I was simply given more time.

Chapter 12 August

Chapter 11 July

Chapter 10 June

Chapter 9 May

Chapter 8 April

Chapter 7 March

Chapter 6 February

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