One
“Vampires are not dead.”
I smiled as I read the first line of Vivian Drake’s most recent article in Vampire, the #1 best-selling magazine that catered to vampire enthusiasts (hence the name). I couldn’t help it—because I am Vivian Drake.
Oh, that’s not my real name. Nor is it even the name I was given at birth. But “Vivian Drake” seemed just the right kind of name for a fantasy novelist who wrote about vampires, and I had needed an alias. It wouldn’t do at all for certain people to find out that the woman who was spilling the secrets of vampire kind through supposedly fictional stories was one of their own.
Yeah, not only are vampires not dead, but they’re very much real. See, I’m one of them—sort of. I’m actually what vampires (and numerous human mythologies) refer to as a dhampyr, or vampire-human hybrid. I had a vampire father and a human mother.
“They are very much alive,” my article went on. “Sure, the process by which a person becomes a vampire can make them look like they are dead, which is why many people are buried and later rise from their graves. But the truth is they’re just being transformed. You see, no human being has ever been made a vampire after death—the transformation requires a living victim. Like certain species of bats, vampires produce a substance called draculin (named for Count Dracula, of course) in their saliva, which is injected into a victim through being bitten. However, unlike the draculin in bat saliva, which is an anti-coagulant, the draculin produced by vampires is a mutagen. When passed directly into the bloodstream, draculin first paralyzes the person and then begins to alter the human genome at the molecular level…and then voila! A vampire.
“So ladies, no worries about kissing your vampire boyfriends!”
The article I’d written went on to say that the mutation from human being to “undead” vampire was really quite painful, and it was highly recommended that one not choose to become a vampire. After all, the only thing a vampire can digest is blood, and the thirst for it is constant. Even hybrids like myself require blood in order to survive, though certainly not as much as a bitten vampire. We’re also capable of eating normal human food, but there’s no escaping the vampire side of our nature…so it’s not a lifestyle change one should want to undertake, no matter what benefits went along with it.
I detailed exactly what one could expect when becoming a vampire, and also tore apart the myth that dhampyr were hideously ugly monsters with no skeletons, no shadows, and no souls. That was a common belief in the Balkans and Serbia, or had been at one time, because how could a thing that was not living, whose soul had been damned, conceive a child with a living, breathing, not-damned human? Logic said that the dead could not conceive with the living; it was a truth that had eventually led vampire scientists to determine (with the help of advanced medical technology) that they were, in fact, not dead at all. Eighteenth century peasants simply could not comprehend the science behind what made a hybrid, so they allowed themselves to believe such children were beastly creatures that only roamed at night. So not true—the beastly part, anyway—because I’ve been pursued relentlessly by dozens of men in my 230-plus years, both mortal and immortal alike. Guess that means I’m pretty.
Of course, this miraculous discovery didn’t mean that my sire’s people were ready to embrace their human brethren as equals. Just because you’re as alive as your food doesn’t mean you stop thinking of it as food—most humans knew that a cow was alive, but it didn’t stop them from eating steak. Plus, it was believed that humanity just wasn’t ready to accept the truth that not only were vampires real, but they were also living beings who had simply been changed from human to superhuman like the mutants in their comic books.
I closed the article with another truth, that there was a third kind of immortal: the dhunphyr. They were created when a human woman was bitten while pregnant. If the woman wasn’t killed during the attack and the vampire’s draculin didn’t cause her to miscarry, the child was born gifted with immunity from illness, accelerated healing from injury, and an extended lifespan. They were also blessedly free of the unending thirst for blood. No one knew exactly how long dhunphyr lived, however, as they were so very rare—most pregnant women who were bitten were killed, and if they weren’t, they miscarried during the change. Only those bitten after the seventh month, when the human fetus was considered viable, had a chance of giving birth to their children…a remote chance, but a chance nonetheless. Many vampire females desperate for children had tried to gain a child to raise through this method, but due to the high mortality rate of the mothers and infants, the practice was eventually outlawed.
Couldn’t have the mortal population getting suspicious when their young, pregnant mothers were dropping like flies under a swatter, after all.
I sighed, closing my copy of the October issue of Vampire and laying it on the coffee table. I checked my doors and windows to make sure they were locked, turned off the downstairs lights, and called to my two Chihuahuas, Moe and Cissy, who followed me up the stairs to my bedroom. After changing into a nightgown and brushing my teeth, I shooed them onto their bed, bent and scratched each one behind the ears, then turned the light off and climbed into my own bed.
As a hybrid I can sleep at night if I want to, and I most certainly dream. So I wasn’t really surprised to find myself soon dreaming of the same man I had been dreaming of since I was a child. Certainly I didn’t mind dreaming of the wickedly handsome man with short brown hair, warm brown eyes and a tall, muscular body—a body that in my dreams he certainly knew how to please me with. But the dreams always left me feeling a little bittersweet when I awoke, for I had been dreaming of him for more than two hundred years and still had not found him.
When I was about ten, I got the courage up to confide in a female companion of Diarmid’s about my dreams, and it was through her that I learned all vampires pair-bonded; that the man of whom I dreamed was my destined bondmate. A psychic I had once consulted after disowning Diarmid had said that the man held the missing piece of my soul—he would complete me. It was frustrating, though, to ache for the real thing and not know where the hell he was, or when I would finally meet him. Until then, all I had were dreams that scintillated and enticed and always left me wanting more.
*****
The following day was a busy one. I run a small farm where I breed Thoroughbred horses, as well as raise cows, pigs, and chickens. Most of the vampires I knew found this as unbelievable as my abhorrence of killing humans, because more often than not, such animals shied away from our kind—they can sense the predatory nature of vampires, and as such instinctively want to run away from the danger. But being half human helped me a great deal in that respect, in that while they knew I was dangerous, I still smelled human. It seemed to confuse them as to whether they should trust me or not, though I’m fairly certain my calm, gentle nature had won them over.
The farm was also how I obtained most of my own blood supply. I’d taken some veterinary training when I first set up this farm back in 1846, and I kept up with the advances in the field so that I could take care of my own animals. Being trained in veterinary medicine meant I could tap an animal’s vein (only the cows and pigs, as the chickens I used for their eggs and my horses had never been a food source) without having to bite it when I needed blood, and I had a supply stocked in the deep freezer in my house. Of course, there were also times when I needed to feel the thrill of the hunt, so I occasionally went into the woods that bordered my land and hunted game there. Usually it was just deer or rabbits, sometimes the occasional fox or wolf, or any variety of forest creatures with a decent blood supply. If I wanted a real challenge, I went to the places where predatory animals such as bears and mountain lions dwelled.
Running a farm single-handedly, even if one is preternaturally fast and strong, can get tiresome. So when a car pulled up in my driveway and I sensed the presence of an immortal (one of the few benefits of being a dhampyr is that I can “feel” the presence of other supernatural beings, such as vampires and shapeshifters), I was rather annoyed, as I was not exactly in the mood to receive company. I had horse hooves to trim and stalls to muck out still.
My annoyance ratcheted up a level when the uninvited guest got out of the car and my dogs started barking in their pen—it was Evangeline, my “sister.” She’d been turned into a vampire by my sire the same year I’d bought my farmland, and though I associated with Diarmid as little as I could get away with, he still favored me because I was his child by blood. Vangie didn’t like that. She’d always wanted to be his favorite, and could not understand why he didn’t simply disown me as I had disowned him.
She was covered head to toe and wore a scarf and a pair of large, dark sunglasses. This made no sense to me as it wasn’t cold outside, and it’s not as if vampires actually burst into flames and turned into piles of ash when exposed to sunlight. That was all a bunch of hooey perpetuated by religious orders centuries ago when humans began to notice that certain people only went outside at night—because only the damned would avoid the sun, which was metaphorically “the light of God.” Nowadays it was the basis of the reason “pretenders” could only work after nightfall. Most vampires who made their living among humans claimed to suffer from solar urticaria, a genuine illness in which exposure to UV radiation and even visible light (notably sunlight) caused severe, painful hives on exposed and sometimes even unexposed skin. Though I’d read that persons suffering from SU lead difficult, isolated lives due to their inability to go outside during the day, it was a convenient excuse to have handy when your neighbors took note of your unusual habits.