Then my vampire maker yanked it away, and I have been aching for it ever since.
The problem lies with the disposition of my kind. A lot of legends assume that we like to stick together. They speak of clans and nests and hives, where vampires gather to join forces in preparation for our nefarious deeds. They imply that we form a structured society, that we do meal trains, that we date and bang it out and have cute little vampiric children. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Most vampires are extremely territorial. They cannot stand close proximity with others, crave competition even when natural resources abound, and are more likely to murder each other than to extend a dinner invitation.
Vampires suck—no pun intended—and are condemned to an eternity of conflict and solitude. So, of course, a vampire is what gregarious, companionable young me was turned into. And because the abbess, the nunnery, and the fortnightly mandatory vows of fasting didn’t raise a quitter—nor did they manage to beat the stubbornness out of me—even thirteen centuries into my vampiric tenure, I have yet to accept my new circumstances.
That, I fear, will be my demise.
My latest bout of misfortune started a few months ago, when a new vampire moved into a house located just a little too close to my place.
Initially, I didn’t think too much of it. New York is huge, and I was by no means the only vampire living in the city. Manhattan, however, has been my personal hunting ground for the last decade or so, chiefly because of the abundance of my favorite kind of meal.
My motto is: If I have to suck someone dry every few weeks, why not make it a Goldman Sachs executive?
But all of a sudden, I was no longer alone in my seven-block radius. Which could only be interpreted as a challenge, and left me with two options: getting the hell out of the place that had been my home for the previous ten years or putting some effort into running the new vampire out of my territory.
Stubbornly, I decided to bring shame upon my species by doing neither.
I liked my cramped little apartment. How early the winter sun set in the city. The way the people walked fast until they blurred, unaware of the fragility of their short little lives, day after week after month. I enjoyed the four seasons, the museums and movie theaters, the scent of the eateries I would never step foot into. More recently, a few small raccoons seemed to have acquired me. They’d climb up the fire escape and stare into my window until I provided them with food, hiss at me while they consumed the fruits of my labor, and then unceremoniously scurry away, no doubt to some other idiot who’d also purchased a bodega rotisserie chicken just for the occasion.
The point is, I’d been having a fine time. I didn’t want to spend weeks planning an ambush on some asshole who was trying to pick a fight, but I also didn’t want to move. So I carved out a third option for myself: I would ignore the new guy and hope he’d do the same.
Naturally, he didn’t. Instead, after a few months of uneventful coexisting that lulled me into a false sense of security, he attacked me while I was taking a nighttime stroll in Central Park.
No biggie. I thought it was shitty of him not to give me some warning before resorting to violence—a courtesy horse head in my bed, a scribbled note pinned to my door with a bloody dagger. Still, this was obviously a baby vampire. A male of just a few hundred years. Fighting him off took very little effort.
I left him unconscious under the Obelisk and thought, Fuck this. I’m not dealing with the mood swings of an adolescent. I’m moving.
My first mistake was not restraining him.
My second, stopping by my apartment to collect a couple of things: the bronze comb Mother had bestowed upon me before I joined the convent; the small portrait of Donna Lucia, a human who correctly guessed that I was a vampire and still traveled all over Europe with me, painted by Botticelli in the 1400s; the cassette tape of songs I composed during my shoegaze era. That kind of stuff.
Teenage Dirtbag Vampire was there, waiting for me, and this time he managed to take me by surprise, knock me out, and drag me to an abandoned building, where he tied me to a chair bolted in front of an east-facing window. I regained consciousness a little before sunrise, just long enough to ponder whether in my almost fourteen hundred years I’d left a permanent mark on the world and whether anyone was going to notice my absence.
At the very least, I thought, the raccoons will. Once they’re hungry.
Sunlight began to filter through the glass, and all I could think about in my last few seconds was something that hadn’t crossed my mind for at least a decade.
As long as you don’t let anyone get to you before I do, Aethelthryth.
Ah, yes. Lazlo Enyedi. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be too heartbroken.
If it makes you feel better, I thought fondly at him, willing the universe to pass on the message, I would have preferred it to be you.
Apparently, I would have preferred it so much, my brain produced him out of thin air. Enyedi, the worst Hällsing slayer to ever set eyes on a vampire, was standing in front of me. One last mirage before the end.
“Hey,” I told him with a small, amused smile. “Couldn’t bear to let someone else butcher me, huh?”
“I know what’s mine,” he muttered in his usual clipped tone. He moved to free my tied wrists, and his hands felt so warm and assured and uncannily real on my flesh, I began to suspect that maybe . . .
“Hang on. Are you actually here?”
Just as a sunbeam reached the chair, he tore through my bindings and pushed me none too gently away from the light. That’s when Teenage Dirtbag, who clearly had been waiting for a pyrotechnic show from somewhere in the shade, decided that he wasn’t going to let a random slayer interfere with his kill. It led to a three-way scuffle during which I lost track of who was doing what, and then to a very cinematic sequence that ended with Lazlo throwing Teenage Dirtbag off the fire escape. I wish I could have watched him burn to death, but I was busy dealing with my own pickle—more precisely, the fact that before Lazlo had gotten to him, Teenage Dirtbag had managed to tackle me and break my legs, my hip bone, and my left shoulder, making it impossible for me to move. The fractures were going to heal quickly, but not fast enough for me to escape the rapidly approaching sunshine.
This is it, I thought. The end.
That’s when Enyedi sprinted to bodily push me out of the light, hit his head on a collapsing ceiling beam, and fell unconscious on top of me.
Which would be where we are at, right now.
Clearly, this slayer really wants me to die on his terms.
“Um,” I say as his limp weight flattens me. My tendons and bones are already reknitting together. I am a vampire. I have superstrength. Still, slithering across the sunny floor while covering myself with his body is a feat, and so is dragging the both of us to a windowless hallway.
So much so, my neurons must be too fatigued to work.
What the hell am I doing, pulling Lazlo with me? Propping him up against the drywall? Running my hand through his dark hair to assess the severity of his wounds? He’s a slayer. He only saved me so he could slaughter me himself. Now I’m stuck in an abandoned SoHo building with him, and I’ll have to spend the hours until sunset hunted by him.
Unless I kill him first.
The thought hits me along with a tinge of guilt, which I push down incredulously. Did the raccoons eat your prefrontal cortex, idiot? You have to kill him. Immediately.
Yes. I do. I have to behead him. The one thing slayers can’t heal from. But Dirtbag took my weapons, and I—
