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.