• Twenty years. It has been twenty years since I was changed. And yet, even after all that time, it was amazing how the simple act of hunting could still bring out a new-blood’s excitement in me. After all, I am but a simple vampire.

    ~*~

    The Silent Nights

    ~*~


    Sunday, October 28th; 2007
    11:53 p.m.

    “What a great night for a hunt!” I thought aloud as I let the rain beat down on me for a moment. It was a little before midnight, a few minutes before the second-rate sports bars across the metroplex closed and the dark places truly designed for the party goers and the club hoppers really started to boom even on Sunday nights. If I had not been out like this, I would’ve felt like I had stepped directly into the backdrop of a good Neil Gaiman book because currently it was a very dark and stormy night. A ridiculous rain had been pouring down on the entire Dallas/Fort Worth area for the last nine hours today and now the storm drains were full and the streets covered in a good three inches of rainwater. I loved it all; if there was one thing that really made up for the lack of snow during winter in Texas it was the way that the heavens over the Lone Star State could just dump an outright deluge on everyone and everything all around me. It was just perfect!

    The city had been rather quiet tonight, all things considered. I had been out here for nearly an hour now crossing the rooftops and going past all of the dark places in the hopes that I could catch at least one good criminal tonight. After all, it had been a good seven months since the last time I had actually had a fresh meal and I was finally tired of holding off and going through my supply from the blood bank. My ears listened intently for any and every single signal they could as I waited for someone to slip up tonight. That was all it would take then they were mine. I just needed one to –

    “Well well well, what do we have here; a cute little girl out alone at this time of night? Good thing you came down this street, I can keep you safe from all the bad people out there.” Ah good old-fashioned human scum, it always proved so reliable. I couldn’t help but smile a little bit as I raced across the roofs a few streets to where I heard the drawling, menacing voice.

    I dropped to the roof of the five-story building next to the street where my soon-to-be victim and the victim of his own were having their little exchange. About a block back down the street in the opposite direction sat a cozy little bar named Ricardo’s that usually closed by midnight but always shut its doors a little early on Sundays until the next weekend when business would pick back up.

    There was a little alley to my right, probably where the menacing man came from. His victim, clearly a young woman by the curves of her body, was standing with her back to my corner of the roof so I couldn’t see anything too discernable about her besides the colors clothes she was wearing, the bag she was holding, and her shoulder-length layered black hair. However, the man was easy to see. With my eyes, I could make out every detail about his thin brown tattooed face but only one of those details really mattered to me, where the carotid artery was most easily visible on his right side. The man didn’t have a weapon on him that I could see – not that would stop me – but they were too close to the edge of the street for me to do anything without someone possibly seeing. However, if this situation went the way it usually did for the two humans down on the ground, I wouldn’t have to wait long at all until something happened in my favor.

    The girl still hadn’t replied but just stared at him questioningly. In front of her, my prey was starting to grow more and more agitated by the second, his veins bulging with the sweetly thick crimson liquid that would be my next meal.

    “Well you gonna say somethin’ mama?” He probably would have spat those words but I could tell he was desperately trying to keep his cool long enough to savor his own dirty deed. Though I still couldn’t see her face I easily made out the girl’s delicate hands as she brought them up and moved through the air in front of her to sign a few words to the man. A broad smile made its way on to her soon-to-be-attacker’s face as he started to understand how he had been given the perfect victim tonight. And honestly, I felt the exact same way towards him. He didn’t know how much more perfectly easy he had made this for me tonight: he had given me motive and reason thanks to his actions and he had taken the worry that I would have to silence his victim as well so now all I had to do was keep him quiet while I fed.

    “I see, you can’t talk, can you? Don’t worry; I’ll do all the talkin’ for you.” He said, his broad smile taking on a far more sinister demeanor. Ironically, as he probably thought his crooked grin looked scary, I wondered what kind of emotion my own smile would evoke in him. ‘I shouldn’t be enjoying it this much but it’s just too good a night to care.’

    With the way he was talking I knew it wouldn’t be too much longer until he made his move and I made mine. Meanwhile the signing girl had tensed up after the last sentence left his mouth; her body had become rigid but beneath her skin her pulse had begun to scream with the rapid beating of her heart. I couldn’t smell her from this far away, the rain was making it nearly impossible to pick up anyone’s scent tonight from further than a few feet away but I figured she was probably running a cold high on fear and adrenalin by now. The girl was finally starting to understand exactly how much danger she was in.

    “Why don’t you come with me, mama? I’ll get you outta the rain.” His mouth should have come with a forked tongue and fangs; it would have fit him a little better. She merely shook her head, her pulse shooting up even more. “No? Too bad.”

    My dead heart would have been racing if it could have as I watched him, my body tensing as I prepared to strike. Five stories below my soon-to-be-victim grabbed the girl and yanked her hard into the alley behind him. She tripped because of the rain-slicked asphalt and slid through a puddle as he slammed her up against the brick wall of the building across the alley from mine. In one fluid motion, his right hand moved to pin her to the brick by her throat while his left reached for her clothes.

    ‘Now.’ I moved like a flash of black-clad lightning from the rooftop. It didn’t take more than a second before I hit the ground; I moved so perfectly noiselessly and lithely it would have put the angel of death himself to shame. The b*****d didn’t even register the motion behind him or my shadow on the wall in front of him before I had already pulled the young girl from the wall and put her down on the ground next to me as soft as I could, tapping her on her forehead to knock her unconscious so she wouldn’t witness this. It wasn’t until I wheeled him around and pressed him up against the brick himself did he even realize he wasn’t alone with her anymore. He didn’t even have a chance to move or make a sound as placed my ice-cold right hand over his mouth to prevent him from screaming.

    Only one and two-tenths of a second had passed since I left the rooftop and it was already time for it to come to an end.

    Truth be told, I always hated this part. It was kind of funny but I had never been able to block out the fact that I was inflicting pain upon anyone else and that just made this experience a little… bittersweet. My sister had always said it just wasn’t in my nature to hurt people and she had always been right about me; it was why I usually stuck to the blood bank supply. So in that split second that he had to try and understand that he was about to become my nighttime meal, I desperately tried to avoid his terrified gaze and just leaned in close to whisper right in his ear. Truth be told, I wasn’t even taking his life because of his crime but simply because I was a normal, thirsty vampire; the fact that he had been assaulting that young woman just helped my conscience a little more when I thought about it.

    “I’m sorry for this…”The fresh, warm crimson life in his veins called to me as I pressed my lips against his neck and my teeth into his flesh.

    For a split second everything faded as that wonderfully warm liquid slid past my tongue. My cold gray eyes rolled back into my skull; every part of my body gave in to the thirst that had been slowly eating away at me for the last three weeks that I had denied it. Everything around me died away as I let the burning elixir slide down my throat and satiate the aching dryness that had been consuming my vacant thoughts. The girl I had saved disappeared; the low hum of the city that had remained so blissfully unaware of my presence vanished; even the cold rain beating upon me through my dark gray hooded sweatshirt departed from my mind as I took his life into my body. It felt like an eternity was passing by as I slowly took his essence into me but my mind kept whispering to me throughout the whole process that I had only been drinking for seven seconds now. Eight seconds now. Nine… His blood was my perfect physical nourishment.

    And just like a grain of dust blown away by the tiniest breeze, I was done. I didn’t have to check on him as I let him slide down the wall to know he was dead. All that remained of him now was an empty shell with an oval-shaped scar on his neck where my teeth tore into him and a tiny little bit of his energy that now coursed through my veins as a part of me. There was a little of his own blood left in his body but I was satiated so I would leave him be.

    As I let the sensation of utter relief wash over me, I breathed deeply, not because I actually needed the air but because I wanted to taste the fantastically crisp rain-soaked night air as it rushed past my tongue. For a moment, the sensation of finally alleviating the never-ending thirst that had plagued me for nearly a month now rushed to my head and sent a wave of peace echoing through my body. My body arched back as I let the ripples of that calm stretch out my weary immortal muscles and put me in heaven. I had needed this, not to go through another cold bag of sustenance that had come from the local blood-bank and took up room in my fridge but to actually have live blood for the first time in three months because it was what my body truly wanted. I had desired the delicious savor of fresh, warm blood; that perfect 98.6 degree concoction of proteins and water that had sustained me for the last two decades. That did not really surprise me though; it was my body’s nature now.

    I don’t really know how long I stood there in the shadow of the alleyway under the torrent of rain after I fed. It felt like I had been rooted to the same place for hours but it could have been only a few seconds for all I knew; the world always faded around me on nights like this. Whenever I finally came back to reality though, I finally heard them: the shallow gasps for breath coming from right behind me. I knew without even turning around my night had just become royally screwed. If she hadn’t been knocked out when I put her down, the she would have just watched me…

    I spun around; the sight of her sent a cold shiver down my spine in all the right ways. She looked young, maybe nineteen or twenty, like I had for two decades now. I had glazed over her features as I focused on my victim, barely having thought about anything else besides how I was going to take him down like any good hunter would have. Now I saw every detail of her in crystal clarity. Every facet of her flawless face seemed to shine with the innocence of her age. From the light creamy vanilla shade of her skin to the almost pitch black hair that fell down to her shoulders in light waves; from the small but luscious lips to the soft nose and especially the striking shade of jade that illuminated her eyes even in the darkness of this rain-soaked evening. Now that I was up close, I could even smell her scent over the heady aroma of the rain. It was floral and fragrant; a heady and fragrant perfume of a fresh flowering lilac that coursed through her body with every beat of her pulse. Every inch of her perfectly heart-shaped face felt familiar to me, like part of a memory that had faded through time. Yet even more than that, what sent shivers down my spine was the way that she stared up at me with those silent jade eyes.

    She didn’t look at me in fear; not in horror or shock or revulsion but with pure innocent awe, with amazement, with… with wonder.

    (I)


    I ran. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, faster and faster and faster I ran. I wouldn’t stop until I could feel my long-dead muscles ache and my lifeless heart begin to beat battery acid into my cold veins. I stayed along the side of Interstate 35, staying far enough off the road that no one would see me if they just happened to be going fast enough to possibly catch up to me. Somewhere back there – somewhere in the dark streets and alleys of Fort Worth – the girl with the hauntingly familiar face and blameless bottle green irises was still looking up at me after watching me kill her attacker for his blood. Her eyes still burned holes in the back of my head, like two tiny jade vampire-seeking missiles that wouldn’t stop pursuing me until I was long gone from where I had left her. I had to get back to my apartment and escape those eyes and heaven help anyone who tried to stop me tonight.

    How could I have been so stupid?! I had always been careful on the nights that I actually hunted for my provision, never taking any more chances than necessary to keep my secret just that: a secret. And now, after twenty years of living in relative anonymity since the day I had been created, I had just revealed myself to someone whose mere face had sent me running like a scared little schoolboy! What the hell was wrong with me?!

    ‘Gotta keep moving. Damn it all, Noah; keep moving!’ My brain screamed at me as I tore away from the interstate and down one of the cracked old streets that led to my home in the middle of Keller. Thanks to what I was, I could keep going like I was indefinitely without ever tiring because my body would never tire out but that didn’t mean my mind wouldn’t. I desperately needed to get home to keep my mind sane for the rest of the night or I knew I would probably go back and hunt for the girl. The problem with that was that she hadn’t done anything wrong, just looked me in such an… amazed and cheery way that it made me feel way too weird, way too normal.

    I continued on, past the suburban neighborhoods of cookie cutter homes in this northern part of the metroplex, past the tiny strip mall shopping centers that seemed to pop up every few miles down the roads, past the railroad tracks that carried freight from Fort Worth up to the north like Denton and much, much further beyond. Luckily, it was late enough tonight I could move across the roofs of the various homes and businesses that lay between me and my apartment without much concern that they would hear me. Most people usually couldn’t even hear me when they were awake as I used their houses like springboards but the knowledge that they were sound asleep as I nearly flew across the streetlamps and cul-de-sacs of suburbia like the grim reaper on a speedball high was comforting in a way. It meant I wouldn’t be spotted by them and it allowed me to get home faster than usual.

    Plus, it was just plain fun.

    As I neared the final street I had to cross before I reached my apartment complex, pure instinct took over and I went back to the ground, jumping from the roof of a gray two-story and landing on the sidewalk far away from the nearest streetlight.

    Pulling my hood up and lowering my face, I walked as normally as I could down the short stretch of sidewalk and crossed the small two-lane road to the complex I lived in. The place I currently resided in was rather new, a small group of duplexes and two-bedroom apartments that had been built last year to accommodate the growing number of single-parent families that had begun to move to Keller en masse. I didn’t know if it was the fact it had a cheaper tax rate than its sister city Southlake or if it just seemed like a great place to raise a family but this city seemed to attract more unwed or divorced moms and dads than any other place I had lived before. However, the times had been changing as usual so maybe that was just a side effect.

    I made it in the gates of the small neighborhood without any delay as I moved quickly toward number eighty-seven twenty, my own personal sanctuary. It was nestled in the back corner of the complex, giving me an easy escape out of the place if I ever ended up needing one. Tonight though, I didn’t. I just wanted to get inside and be one hundred percent sure I was free of that girl. So I didn’t even bother with the locked front door; I just went right in through the side window I had left unlocked, finally home.

    (I)


    Monday, October 29th; 2007
    6:03 a.m.

    The five and a half hours I had had since I got home had done exactly what I needed it to and cooled my nerves back to their usual deadened normalcy. Though the girl had seen me, it was hard to know if she would actually do anything about it. If she did report what she saw to the cops, well I could run faster than they could chase me so there really wasn’t anything for me to worry about. Still though, her warm jade stare had sent cold shivers down to my very core with how easily it had accepted me. Her eyes made me feel like I was commonplace, a sight she had seen a hundred thousand times and welcomed without hesitation even considering the horrid act she had seen me commit. It had scared me but luckily I was away from her so I had had time to think and listen to the steady rain as it beat down outside as heavily as ever. All I had needed was a few hours alone.

    I didn’t sleep. That didn’t really surprise me; I hadn’t slept a single second since the middle of 1987 but that was just another facet of my abnormal physiology. As the hours bled on toward early morning, my mind cleared and my fears calmed. I had taken that time to think about just how I wanted to approach this little situation and still hadn’t come up with anything useful. Either she would go to the cops and say what she had seen or she would be smart enough to leave well enough alone. However, one way or another I didn’t think I would ever see her again. So instead, now that I was calm enough to act normally I simply picked up the phone. There was someone I had to tell my story to.

    I dialed quickly, quickly tapping in the number of a man known simply as Tesh. In terms of how long I had known him, he was my third longest acquaintance; but in terms of how long he had lived, well that was another story.

    The other line rang only one before it clicked over as he picked it up.

    “Noah. Perfect time for a call; I was just thinking about you, my friend.” Tesh’s calm voice was deep and had an accented ring of refinement in it that had been slowly developing and perfecting since before the Fifth Century B.C.

    Tesh was – according to the few tales of his own past that he had told me – nearly twenty-four hundred years old. He was originally Persian; having been born somewhere in what is now Iran back during the reign of Artaxerxes II. According to him, a vampire had come into his village around the time he was thirty and had done away with nearly person within its walls. Men, women, and children all were besieged by this vile creature. However, from what Tesh had told me a few of them that had been soldiers in the Persian army took up their swords and by some miraculous turn of events actually slew the beast and then burned his remains because they thought that he was simply possessed of a demon. From what he had told me, he was part of that small contingent of men that had gotten really lucky but in the process got some of the vampire’s blood splattered on him and unwittingly swallowed some, starting the change into what he had truly been born to be. Since then he had lived a thousand different lives under a thousand different names as he left his own trail of bloodless corpses through the ages. His latest was the guise of a history teacher out in Utah by the name of Seth Jensen. And honestly, the irony of that profession and his age made me laugh.

    “How have you been, Tesh?” Compared to the icily lavish tenor of his choral voice mine sounded sadly flat and cheap to me, like a can of off-brand soda that had been left open for a few days compared to a three hundred-dollar bottle of Dom Perignon.

    “Simply perfect, my youngblood. I just ended a meal three hours earlier this evening; she was a young tourist that had decided to wander Park City a little too late past her bedtime.” It was only a few minutes after four in the morning there.

    Truth be told, Tesh’s attitude toward our natural source of sustenance generally disgusted me. Whereas I actually made an effort to leave the majority of the human populace alone by mainly drinking what my friends in the various fields of medicine provided for me through blood banks, he relished in tasting only live blood. I at least limited myself to one victim every six months to a year, usually around Halloween like tonight’s – that was mainly out of comicality’s sake more than anything – and I always went after people that I caught in the midst of committing some evil or another. He however flat out refused to ‘lower himself’ to something so demeaning as drinking crimson life that had already been taken from a human’s body and then put in a plastic bag. I could only attribute our differences in thought to the fact that I had been one of the living only a short period of time ago while centuries had passed for him so I still empathized with the live members of society while he had had plenty of time to distance himself and rise above them. Maybe I too would be like that one day. ‘Not likely but maybe.’ “A pity she had to go… She was a sandy blonde and a perfect beauty. Such a lovely young dove but she just tasted too good. But alas, I could not stop myself from indulging a little too much.”

    “My condolences for your loss then, old friend. May the next one be even prettier.” I said with as much sympathy as I could pretend for the old vampire. He knew my thoughts on his eating habits but I was smart enough not to push the issue with him, especially not tonight. “Now, if you must know, I actually called to see what your thoughts are concerning something.”

    “What is it that digs into your mind this evening, Noah?” Tesh, in his own special way, put a fear into my lifeless heart that no man or creature thus far could match. The old leech’s demeanor had always seemed reminiscent of Bela Lugosi’s visualization of Dracula: he had the air of class and superiority of any king or aristocrat but with an underlying, simplistic evil about him that made me think of Kevin Spacey when he played John Doe in Seven.

    “Well earlier tonight, I went out hunting.” I started hesitantly.

    “Good boy.” I could almost picture him smiling his perfectly messed up smile on the other end of the phone, his darkly tanned Persian lips spreading over his stark white teeth as he unknowingly practiced horrifying little children. “Have yourself a good time?”

    “Well that’s the thing. You know what I am like when it comes to choosing my prey.”

    “Of course I do, my child.” His voice slowly took on a more fatherly tone that made me want to rip out his vocal chords and then set them ablaze. Tesh was responsible for what I was, responsible what I had been since three days after my twentieth birthday back in 1987, and thus he had always put little undertones of relationship – and of ownership – in his words whenever I spoke to him. I hated it when he thought of himself as my anything beside fellow vampire… and even that was a stretch in my book. “Though I must admit I still do not understand that need to seek out injustice before having your fill. You could have abandoned that years ago and had your pick from some truly decadent veins. It is like choosing a greasy hamburger over a perfectly seared Porterhouse.”

    I chuckled softly. It just seemed funny to me that he brought up food that he had never and would never even taste.

    “Maybe, my friend; maybe. However, I did not call you to critique my eating habits though I have a feeling you would have anyways.” A warm laugh escaped my lips before I let my voice become more serious as I began my tale. “Earlier tonight, the person I chose was a real piece of trash. When I came across him, he was going to attack a young girl.”

    “Hmm… I can see the logic behind your choice thus far. Please continue.”

    “From what I saw as I waited for my moment, the girl was probably a mute or deaf or both. When the man spoke, she did not say a word but instead only signed to him.”

    “Interesting…”

    “… That’s not the end of it though. Behind the man, behind my victim, was an unlit alley which he pulled her back into when he made his move to attack her. When he did, I made mine and took him right there in the alleyway after tapping the girl’s head hard enough it should have knocked her unconscious for at least a few hours.”

    “Noah, did you…?”

    “…Yes. She witnessed me, Tesh.”

    “And? Did you at least do away with her once you were done with your first?” He asked.

    I didn’t answer, giving him all the response he needed.

    To a normal human, it would have sounded like he was still talking in the same placid tone he had since the conversation began but anyone who could hear as clearly as our kind could have been able to detect the undertone of extreme agitation he was desperately trying to contain. I had known he would be furious; he – like many of the members of our species – believed in one virtue above all others: secrecy. It was what allowed us to stay what we were without upsetting the delicate balance of the rest of the world.

    “Noah, my child,” I winced as he spoke those two words. “Would you care to explain why you did not just follow common sense and take care of the problem before it had a chance to become one?”

    His voice was growing cold, authoritative, Kevin Spacey-esque.

    “… To tell you the truth, I don’t know. Maybe it was the fact that she was just an innocent young woman out there, maybe I just pitied her but I don’t know.” I replied as honestly as I could, letting my tone grow natural and collected to try and convince him I wasn’t making this up. “I didn’t even know she had seen me until after I was done having my fill but when I turned around and saw her sitting there in the rain water, it chilled me to the bone. Her eyes… she just disarmed whatever fight instinct I had right then.”

    “Wait, what was that you were about to say about her eyes?” He asked sharply.

    “Nothing, just something trivial I observed.” I answered abruptly in tepid voice. I didn’t trust him with information that sensitive; the way she had looked at me was something I alone would know. “Tesh, I know you probably don’t want to hear this but from what I could read of her reaction I don’t think I have to worry about her telling anyone.”

    “… Noah, for your sake more than anyone else’s, you had better be right.” The line went dead.

    I had not expected him to cut it off so quickly but I was glad he did. It meant that I didn’t have to listen or pretend to tolerate him anymore tonight. Besides, the night was slowly coming to an end as the sun would be soon and I could finally put this whole mess behind me in the new day. With a smile, I just put my phone back on the charger and went to shower up.