The Death of a Vampire

4.News of an Engagement

This wasn't our normal conversational standard by any means.

I stared at Nana, wondering if she had lost her mind, or whether this was some kind of collective insanity. There was no straightforward explanation. Nana looked just as normal as she had always done. Actually, she looked so ordinary that no one would have believed the amount of strange knowledge she had tucked away in her head.

Jonathan, however, was far from being normal-looking. Sure, he had the outward appearance of a rather good-looking young man, but those eyes.... it wasn't normal for any human being to have red rings in their eyes like that. They looked like the kind of contact lenses you would buy for a Halloween party. Also, something about his posture, not to mention his uncanny ability to stand completely still, was not completely... human.

"A demon, you say?" I looked Nana straight in the eye to make sure she wasn't playing with me. She seemed serious enough.

"A demon, yes," she said calmly, "though what the term really means is open to debate."

"I suppose you also have a logical explanation for the bite marks and this ring?" I pointed my left ring finger towards Nana.

"You suppose right," Nana said, "and so would you, if you consider what Jonathan has just said a bit more carefully. The explanation itself is logical, but it's not necessarily what you would call normal."

What Jonathan had just said? I felt my scalp begin to tingle when I understood what Nana meant. I took the few steps necessary to reach the mirror on the wall next to the coat rack and stretched my neck to see better.

The bite marks were not close, next to each other as they would have been if a mosquito had made a second attempt after being disturbed. There was a little distance between them. They were round, and there was still some swelling, but the bleeding had stopped. I touched my canine teeth with my fingers, estimating the distance. Yes, if I had fangs, and used them for biting, the distance between the bite marks would probably be about the same as the marks on my skin.

"Right. So, what you are saying is that an actual living vampire bit me? You can't be serious!" I breathed.

Even before they'd answered, my mind threw up a new thought. If I'd been bitten by a vampire... it was all rubbish, of course, I had never believed in the existence of vampires... but going by all the stories I had ever heard about them, everything I had ever read about them or seen on TV, they all stated in no uncertain terms what the outcome was of surviving the bite of a vampire.

"If this is true, does it mean that I would... will become a vampire as well?" My voice must have shot up an octave. I couldn't help it.

"Yes, that's the expected outcome," Jonathan replied, as if we were having a normal conversation.

"What?" I almost screamed.

"Calm down," Nana hurried to grab my arm – I probably looked like I was going to jump out of the window. "Luckily for you, we have encountered incidents like this before. We've been bitten before as well, and we have been developing a cure for centuries."

"You'd better start telling me what this is all about right now, before I lose my mind!" I am sure my voice was shaking with anger.

"Well, we'll all be better sitting down for this."

Nana's finger pointed towards my couch. It felt like a good idea. My knees were wobbling. I stumbled across to the couch without feeling my legs and sat down.

"Okay, explain. And this had better be good."

"The fact of the matter is that our family has never been quite ordinary. We have been wandering around Europe for centuries, for the simple reason that we were hunted."