The Journals of a Vampire Scribe

Chapter 3: A Spicy Awakening

His legs are bowed when he walks, his feet similar to his hands – four-pronged – but twice as think and strong. What looked like black denim pants, I can see now in the light are actually some sort of thick, textured leather, as is his coat, stitched together crudely with no concern for design. The coat is nearly as long as him, the sleeves a foot short of his wrists. He's thin, but muscular, with tendons and fibers like humans' visibly twitching as he moves.

Studying his uncanny appearance, I find myself forgetting for a moment he's real...and he's getting closer...

My eyes lift to his as he keenly leans toward me, deliberately slow with his stare burrowing into my soul—

It's strange that I feel fear. It seems unreasonable, considering that fear stems from the instinct to survive, which I'm no longer burdened by. Troubled by, sure. Consciously I want to exist, to experience the world, to indulge in the stories of my dreams. But instinctive, mortal fear is not a part of a vampire's being. We no longer have any need for it past our mortal deaths.

But this creature... This beast... This demon monarch – as he claims to be – presents an otherworldly fear I didn't know existed. Looking into his eyes – now only inches from mine – I suddenly remember what it feels like to be alive. To be afraid of death. To be the groveling pinworm he sees me as.

Beady in comparison to his skull, these gleaming, onyx marbles seem the exact opposite of alive; devoid of life and empathy. And then another feeling foreign to undeads swells over me, one I haven't felt since the last moments of my prior life: a bone-chilling, deathly cold. The very same cold that consumed me just before I died, vision fading to blackness behind the indifferent stare of She Who Turned Me.

Back then, the night I died, when I awoke as a vampire she was already gone; premises vacated like a snobby girl-click at a lunch table when the new, transfer student sits down next to them.

But that's a song I'll have to sing another time. If there is another time... Because right now...I'm not sure if I'll make it away from this creature's gaze with my existence still...existent.

I like existent.

Existent means existing – which means time-portaling dreams, Scoobynatural reruns, and Des flashing that charming grin that makes me feel so at home. These are all pluses in my book. Even the occasional Fried Chicken & Mickeys turdtasrophe is better than the stifling chill of the End – the True Death, as Bill Compton would call it, all sultry and in a half-whisper.

When the clunk of glass meeting wood realigns my focus, he's straightening back up as best he can under the eight-foot ceiling, head tilted, seemingly grimacing at the thought of me.

Then in a blink, the lights flip back on and the beast is gone without even a puff of demon-black smoke swirling aesthetically through my apartment to appease the paying masses. No creepy whispers to see him back off to Hell or crackling of flickering, electrical outputs.

Just gone.

As if he was never even there.

Then a gasp, like a drowning child breaking through the surface of a frozen lake explodes so abruptly from her chest and quivering mouth that I jump from off the couch, trip over the table and land on my back, feet propped up over the furniture, toes pointing cluelessly at the stucco...

You see, just because we vampires no longer suffer from mortal fears doesn't mean we don't have the instinct to protect our organic components. We still, unfortunately, can feel pain (of a sort). So when something jumps out of a bush, or falls off of a ledge above us, or suddenly gapes a shrilling breath out of an otherwise tranquil silence... Yeah...we flinch.