The night greets me with fog. Thick and low, it rolls between the buildings like something alive. I walk faster. Not because I'm afraid, but because I hate how the city hides in mist. It feels like being blindfolded, still dangerous, even for me.
My fingers twitch with the urge to find something old, something dead, and drink it back into stillness.
But the thirst is quiet.
Too quiet.
The boy is following me.
I let him. He thinks he's clever, shadowing my steps like a pup tracking a wolf. He's new to the thirst, driven by it, shaped by it, but not yet mastered. That's the most volatile kind.
I lead him into the ruins.
Most people don't even know they're here, tucked behind centuries of stone and misdirection. But beneath the city, beneath the bones of it, the old world still waits. Cracked walls. Archways that lead to nowhere. A chapel swallowed by ivy and time.
I stop in the center of what used to be the nave.
"Why are you here?" I ask the silence.
He steps out. Doesn't try to hide anymore.
"She smelled… ripe," he says. His accent's muddled, streetborn, likely turned without consent. "I was only going to talk."
I look at him. Really look. He's barely out of boyhood. Long coat. Dirty nails. Eyes bright with the ache of it.
"'Ripe' isn't a word we use," I say, low and cold.
He shrugs. "You stopped me."
"I did."
"Why?"
I step forward. One pace. Then another.
He tenses. "She yours?"
"No."
Another step. Now he can see it in my face, something older than time, colder than death.
"But she's not yours either."
The boy bares his teeth. "You can't keep all the blood for yourself."
"I don't keep it." My voice sharpens. "I control it."
He lunges.
Too fast for a human. Too slow for me.
I catch him mid-motion, a blur in the fog, and drive him into the crumbling stone. Dust rains down like old bones. He snarls, fangs bared, arms flailing to strike me. He's strong, but not focused. Hunger makes him sloppy.
I press my palm to his chest.
"Who made you?"
He spits blood onto the stone. "You think I know?"
That's the problem. They're making them loose now. Untethered. No sires, no teachings, no anchor. Just bite and run. Turn and abandon.
It wasn't always like this.
There was a time when turning someone meant something. When the act carried weight. Not just hunger. Not just survival. There were rules, ancient, sacred, whispered down the bloodline like prayers. You didn't turn someone on impulse. You watched. You chose. You tested their will, their mind, their soul. Because immortality doesn't just stretch life, it bends it. And not everyone survives that bend intact.
Back then, a sire was more than a creator. They were a mentor. A guardian. A moral tether in the slow descent from man to monster. You learned restraint. You learned respect. You learned how to carry the thirst like a burden, not a weapon.
The old ways taught us that damnation didn't have to mean evil.
It meant change, permanence, yes. It meant loss. Of warmth. Of humanity. But it didn't have to mean cruelty. We weren't supposed to be wolves loosed on the world. We were supposed to be watchers. Stewards. Shadows cast by fading gods.
There were ceremonies. Vows. Entire centuries passed where a turning required consensus from the local bloodhold, elders who measured not just power but character. Vampires weren't born from chaos back then. They were sculpted from grief, devotion, or necessity. And once turned, you were never left to rot in alleyways and crawl through instinct.
You were taught.
I remember my own turning like a fever dream. The taste of it. The pain. The sense that the world had cracked open, and me with it. But there was someone waiting on the other side. A woman with eyes like winter and hands like stone. She gave me a name before I remembered my own. She told me what I was, what I would feel, and what I must never do. She stayed. For decades, she stayed.
I hated her at times. Loved her, too. Feared her more than anything. But she was my tether. And I learned to walk beside the hunger instead of letting it carry me away.
But that was before the bloodlines broke. Before the old ones fell silent. Before vampires began turning others like rabbits birthing in the dark, mindless, directionless, multiplying out of desperation or boredom.
Now, most of them don't know what they are. They don't know what they owe. Not to the world, not to their sires, not even to themselves.
So they bite and run. Turn and abandon.
And the cities pay for it.
"You're going to burn out," I tell him.
He growls again.
"I could kill you. Easily."
"Then do it."
I consider it.
But something about his eyes, bright, scared, too young to understand what he's become, stops me.
"Go. Leave the city. Head north. Stay away from the girl. Stay away from anyone breathing."
He looks confused.
"You're… letting me go?"
"No," I say. "I'm giving you one chance. There's a difference."
He hesitates, then runs. Not fast. Not clean. But he runs.
I stay a moment longer, alone in the stone skeleton of the chapel. Moonlight cuts through the empty arches like the memory of god. If there was one, He hasn't spoken to me in centuries.
I'm not sure He ever did.
By the time I return to my building, the sky is beginning to bruise with morning. I take the back way, up the iron stairs, past windows that flicker with television light and human warmth.
My home is on the top floor. Old brick. Quiet walls. Books stacked higher than furniture. I don't need a bed, I haven't slept in decades, but there's one, for appearances. I sit instead in the chair by the window, where I can watch the night die.
And I think about her.
Not just her scent, or her voice, or the way her eyes held mine like they knew something. I think about the space she occupies in my mind already, like she's always been there, only waiting for me to notice.
That's what worries me.
I've lived too long to believe in fate.
But something is happening. I can feel it. In the way the thirst has stilled. In the way the silence hums. In the way the city breathes, like it's waiting.
And in the way her name, still unknown, curls at the edge of my tongue like a promise not yet spoken.
I sit motionless as the sky lightens into ash, the city groaning toward another morning. A delivery truck rattles down the street below. Birds, oblivious to monsters, begin to sing. People will rise soon, coffee, routines, lives full of clocks and choices.
I had all of that, once. A lifetime ago. Before I traded my heartbeat for eternity. Before I learned what it meant to exist instead of live.
I remember when I was human.
Only in pieces now, faded edges, water-stained pages in a book left out in the rain. A sound here. A scent. The feel of summer on the skin. The weight of a heartbeat. But faces blur. Names slip through my fingers. I used to try to hold on to them. Now I let them go.
I like to believe I was a good person once. Or at least… better. I remember kindness, though I can't always remember who I gave it to. I remember loving someone. Or maybe many someones. There's a woman's laughter that still echoes in my mind sometimes, light, unburdened, real. I don't know who she was. Maybe she was a sister. A friend. A lover. Maybe she was all of them, spread across lifetimes.
There was a garden. I think it was mine. Rows of green things, wild and unkempt but loved. I remember dirt under my nails and the smell of crushed herbs, basil, maybe thyme. The memory is small but bright, like fire in a snowstorm. I go back to it sometimes when the thirst claws too hard. I remind myself that I once cultivated life.
But I don't know if any of that's true anymore. Time corrodes certainty.
That's the worst part. Not the hunger. Not the solitude. Not even the guilt.
It's the forgetting.
Not forgetting facts, those I can recall with ease. History. Bloodlines. Dates of battles no one else remembers. But the things that mattered, the things that made me human, those are the first to rot. Emotion fades like scent from a grave. Eventually, you stop missing it.
Eventually, you forget what warmth felt like.
And in its place… habit. Survival. A cold imitation of meaning.
Some nights, I wonder if I ever had a soul at all. Or if I just borrowed the light of others until it faded out. I still pretend. I hold doors open. I tip at cafés. I read poetry like it might still move me. But it's all shadows of something I can't reach anymore.
The truth is, I've done things I can't justify. Fed when I didn't need to. Killed when it wasn't clean. I've lost control. I've chosen not to stop. And the more I fall into that pattern, the harder it becomes to remember who I used to be… or why I ever wanted to stay different.
I've watched others fall further. I've seen the light go out of them entirely. Some lean into it. They like the power. The fear. They mistake their damnation for dominion. I pity them, in the rare moments I still feel pity.
But me, I've spent centuries trying to walk a line that no longer exists.
And now there's her.
The girl with the ink-stained hands and curious eyes. She doesn't know me. She shouldn't.
But when she looked at me, really looked, I saw something I hadn't seen in ages.
Recognition.
Not of my face, but of the soul I once wore like skin.
And I wonder if she's here to remind me what I was…
…or to show me what I'm becoming.
I rise as the first gold light breaches the rooftops. Sunlight won't kill me, another myth. But it does make me feel… wrong. Like I've worn my skin too long. So I draw the curtains, shutting out the day.
In the dark, I strip down to my bare feet and open the fridge. There's blood inside, glass bottles, sealed tight, taken from hospitals that never ask the right questions. It's old. Sterile. Thin.
It keeps me functional. It keeps me civilized.
I pour a glass and drink it cold.
It doesn't satisfy. It never does. But it's enough to stop the ache behind my ribs. Enough to keep the monster quiet.
For now.