Bad Blood: July 2019

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.