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.