Warnings: Language, Mature Sexual Subject Matter, Threats of Violence, possible War on Christmas connotations.

Don’t even.

I’m not in the mood.

People who know me know I’m not a braggart. I don’t beat my chest, bare my fangs, and tear up a throat just to show off. That’s not my style.

I’m descended from Alexander the Great (I’m actually his nephew if you must know). So I don’t need to do that shit, okay?

But I swear. I will shred you to pieces if you make fun of me in my Santa suit.

I was talked into this stupid game by my friend Charly. No, not the dumb ass who wrote my story. That idiot doesn’t even know his own name. I’m talking about my friend Charly, who, if you read my longer story (written by the idiot), you know I met while he was munching on some factory owner in Chicago during Prohibition.

I say munching because Charly’s a slob when he feeds. I leave two perfect little punctures and a pristine neck when I suck out the blood. Charly tears a neck up like his canines are designed to dig for elusive treasures.

Anyway, Charly talked me into wearing this Santa suit. And playing this inane game where we pick a home and we dive through the chimney like we’re Santa Claus.

“You first,” I say.

“No, no, it was my idea,” says Charly. “You gotta go first. Here’s a bag full of toys that Daphne scrounged up. Go on, man. Some little shit may even have left you a cookie and milk.”

“I fuckin’ hate milk,” I say as I snatch the thick, three-ply plastic sack.

What the hell. It’s not like there’s a lot else to do on Christmas Eve. I’ve been depressed since I lost an entire house of vampire influencers and streamers during the attack on Jerrold Mountain. Anything helps.

Those people meant the world to me. I guess you could say Raygun was my favorite. He wasn’t one of the vampires, but our romps in the bedroom were legendary. He’s gone, too.

“Up you go, asshole.” Charly’s smiling from one bulbous cheek to the other. The usual accumulation of perspiration is beading across his big, black, bald head.

“Shit,” I say.

I jump to the top of the roof. It’s a two-story flat, so I need a running start, but I make it. I stare at the snowy rooftops, taking them in, appreciating the flurries dancing in the wind as they drift downward.

I look at the chimney and yell down to Charly, “This thing isn’t big enough for me, you idiot!”

He yells back, “It’s a bit of a tight squeeze, but you’ll make it. Just make sure you toss the toys down first!”

So I do. The bag scuffs along the walls of the chimney as the toys fall. When they hit the bottom of the chimney, a dazzling, sparkling light erupts from underneath. I want to ask Charly what it is, but since he doesn’t see it, I don’t bother.

This is crazy. What the hell’s wrong with me? I may as well feed when I get inside to make all this worth my while. I sit on the edge of the chimney. A loose brick bounces down the gabled roof and nearly hits Charly in the head. “Serves you right!” I bellow downward.

Charly laughs, then motions for me to slide down. Still smiling.

It starts as the tight squeeze Charly said it would, but the chimney walls seem to expand as I slide down. They quickly expand to several times my size as I float to the bottom as if I’m pulled down by a weight underwater.

None of this happens without a touch of grief. None of my discourse with Charly or anyone else ever happens without it. It taints my every moment. I think of this as I slowly float to the bottom of the suddenly expansive chimney. Visions of Wurdulac attacks dance through my head as I descend.

When my feet gently touch the floor, I kick the bag to my side.

The living room is not as I expect. I anticipated a Christmas scene. Stockings at the fireplace, a glass of milk, and some cookies that Charly mentioned. Instead, I see a bank of monitors bolted to a long wall. They light up the room so much there’s no need for any other lighting.

A woman walks into the room draped in nothing but a long purple-feathered shawl that falls to her knees. I want to peer behind her to see if her butt is exposed but she’s standing in front of me wearing a long thin smile on her chestnut face. Dozens of beads pierce her ears. A long hoop ring is fastened to the bottom of her nose.

It’s Princess Time Slut. I can’t believe it. “But you were taken out by the Wurdulac…” I try to say.

She puts a finger against my mouth. “Shhh,” she says. “Everyone’s here.” She nods to the wall with the monitors.

“I don’t understand,” I say, but when I look at the monitors, I immediately understand what she means when she says they are all there.

Because they are all there. Even Raygun, who is still wearing his overalls over the Free Willy T-shirt he was wearing the last time I saw him. I choke up a little when I see him smiling with those big fat teeth that are so huge you could project a slideshow onto them.

Blacktard is on one monitor in her luscious black leotard. She’s hovering over a kitchen counter with a glimmering huge knife. She smiles at me as she chops an onion. “Hi, Jade,” she says.

AngryJoe is on another monitor sitting at a podcast mic in front of an upside-down American flag. He lifts a fist toward me and nods his head.

Lovelace and Ice Game Z are on separate monitors too. Ice Game Z smiles broadly as he says in his infectious Nigerian accent, “Here for you, Jade Mourning.” Lovelace, always the OnlyFans lady, unbuttons her shirt and smiles seductively.

They’re all here. All the vampire influencers and gamers who perished on that awful day. Why? How?

“How are you here?” I ask Princess Time Slut.

“Ah, ah, not here for that. Or, if you want, ask them.” She nods again at the monitors.

“Merry Christmas, Jade Mourning!” all twelve of the influencers say at once.

“But you guys don’t believe in Christmas,” I respond.

“But you do!” they say in unison.

When they sing their unique lyrical adaptation of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in perfect a cappella harmony, a tear pushes out of the bottom of my eye.

I’ve lived for two thousand years. This is the best gift I’ve ever received.

Thanks for reading! This story is based on characters from my novel, Psalm of Vampires (under my real name, not my pen name). You can check out excerpts here:

This short story began as a prompt for a Medium publication called Dominium Tenebrarum — The Underworld.

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I had dismissed Moreland’s concerns out of hand but that didn’t change the likelihood that things could get messy.

The internet noise from my violin act was growing almost in direct proportion to the social media trendlines of the ice cream parlor killing, which was now a bigger story than the Piedmont Park murder. This meant that a heavy volume of internet noise centered around me. No wonder Moreland was pissed.

Daphne forwarded about ten thousand Instagram posts the next day from various people praising the violin solo. Moreland forwarded about ten thousand and one posts relaying what the Atlanta Police Department was saying about the two killings.

Things seemed manageable until a third killing popped up early afternoon that same day, this one also in Piedmont Park, and this one also in broad daylight.

I texted Moreland as soon as I saw a news item about the third killing, deciding I’d get in front of it by attaching the text, “Don’t even start” to a news post I forwarded to her.

She replied with a spiteful curse, and we were off to the races again.

The cops stopped hiding their concerns. The Atlanta P.D. Facebook post was blunt:

“We want the community to stay calm, but we also want everyone to be careful. Do not go to any park alone. When we say don’t go to the park alone, we don’t mean bring your dog for protection. We mean be sure you go with another person. Bring pepper spray and be careful.”

Another police department post stated that the first Piedmont death had been caused by a knife wound to the neck. This little detail had been left out of earlier reports, which had only mentioned a knife attack. The second Piedmont death was also a knife wound. Specifically, the carotid artery was severed. The cops were now saying that was also the cause of death of the man in the ice cream shop.

I called Charly. “Have you seen the news?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “Our man couldn’t have done this new one. He’s dead.”

“The police are saying our ice cream shop friend died the same way. Basically, a clean slice of the carotid.”

“Really. I didn’t hear that. What do you think?”

“I think I saw a messy scene from the bloodiest ice cream party in history. I have no idea what game the police might be playing. Oh. And by the way? Moreland is pissed.”

“Moreland is always pissed.”

“She stopped by yesterday while I was trying to sleep. Called you ‘that Charly guy.’”

“Ouch.”

I laughed at that. “I dunno. I told her it would all blow over, but this new killing adds a delta I’m not crazy about.”

“It’s too soon for a copycat killer,” said Charly, sounding worried.

“Right. Can’t be a copycat. The cops only released the news that the first murder was a neck wound today. After the second murder.”

“Shit.”

“I know, right?”

At that instant, I got a message from one of the influencers downstairs: “The police are here. Asking for you.”

I was cozy in my bed. I had been surfing and streaming a little from the bed all afternoon. I sure as hell didn’t want to have a chat with Atlanta’s finest. I texted, “Tell them I’ll be right down,” anyway.

“It just got better, Charly,” I said into the phone.

“How so?”

“Cops are here.”

“Why?”

I laughed. “Why do you think? The influencers are making too much noise?”

“Do you want me to come over?”

“Sure, let’s make it easy for them,” I said. Charly laughed. “If they give me too much trouble, I’ll just add to their carotid artery severance count.” Charly was silent. “Kidding. I’ll call you later.”

“Be safe,” said Charly.

“Tell that to the cops,” I replied. Charly sighed as I tapped off the call.

I tried to think about how I could be my most flamboyant self. I didn’t want the police for one moment to think they were dealing with someone they would consider normal. I ran to the wardrobe room across the hall and found a long, pink feathered shawl and some slacks with pink and black polka dots. I didn’t need a shirt because I was able to wrap the shawl around my upper body. I grabbed a mandolin from the music room.

As I descended the stairs, I strummed an oldie, “Mandolin Wind.” There were some influencers at the bottom of the stairs sipping juicy-looking booze drinks. “Dude,” one of them said. “The mandolin, too? Whoa! Hey, guys, listen to that.” I smiled as I found the last steps. One of the women approached me and pushed open my shawl enough to expose a pectoral muscle and rub it as I neared the door to greet the police, who were inside glaring with a pair of stern looks.

The police were wearing suits: A young Black man and an older white guy with a bald head and a small tuft of white hair under his chin. He was burly with a heavily pockmarked face, like a middle-aged TV wrestler who had successfully endured fighting his way through his middle years. His dark gray suit jacket was too snug. It barely fit.

The Black guy was thin but looked to be in shape, too, and was almost twice as tall as the white guy. His suit coat was too baggy. I wanted to ask them to switch suit coats for the betterment of humanity.

I set the mandolin on a nearby table and ushered the two cops out of the foyer into the well-appointed living room before they had a chance to introduce themselves. The Black guy was carrying a satchel and nearly swung it into a blue and white Qing dynasty vase as he entered the room.

“What can I do for you on this fine afternoon?” I asked. I made sure they found comfortable seats on a couch across from the home’s Érard grand piano. I sat on a velvet Victorian parlor chair next to them.

“You’ve heard about the knife attacks recently?” asked the white guy.

“Yes, of course.” I looked into the foyer, where people were cavorting. “They have, too. You wouldn’t know it, huh?”

“What is this place?” asked the Black guy accusingly.

I pulled out my phone and pulled up an Instagram home page of Fang HQ and handed it to him. “This,” I said.

He shook his head while he looked at it and turned his palm up in the universal language that says, “What the hell?”

“Anyway,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

The Black guy rolled his eyes as he handed my phone back to me.

“I’m Detective Garrison,” said the guy who looked like a wrestler. “And this is Detective Owens. We’re investigating one of the murders. You were identified as being at the scene of the crime just before it happened.”

I leaned in toward the nearest officer, Garrison, and said, “Do tell.”

“One of the kids at the ice cream shop,” said Owens. “ID’d you. Said you were there moments before the vic got his throat sliced. Possibly assaulted a police officer.”

I wanted to correct him by saying the victim’s throat wasn’t sliced, but then I remembered that it actually was. Sort of.

“It’s Halloween,” I said. “People masquerade as me all the time. Go to a costume party this weekend. You’ll see.”

Sometimes when I sleep, I feel weird for several hours after I wake up. I thought I heard a buzzing in the room behind me. Sort of like what you might expect a mechanical fly to sound like. I thought I was just feeling weird and hearing things.

“So,” said Garrison. “You’re saying you weren’t there?”

“I don’t even like ice cream. Well, I do. But my body doesn’t.” I took off my shawl. “Does this look like an ice cream aficionado’s body?” I looked at Owens when I said this. The buzzing continued.

Owens wasn’t impressed. “If we never busted a guy because he says he doesn’t like a certain kinda food, we’d never bust anybody. Why the hell are you so blue? Do you dye your skin or something?”

Garrison gave him a cross look but didn’t say anything.

I draped my shawl around my chest and looked behind me for the buzzing sound.

“Are you okay?” asked Garrison.

The buzzing stopped. “I’m fine,” I said.

I wanted to sass back at Owens by saying, “You guys never bust anybody anyway,” but I held my tongue and instead started thinking about who I should find as an alibi.

Charly was an obvious no. I thought about Daphne. No, she’d be terrified at just about every aspect of this. Surprisingly, I decided on Moreland. But she’d resist talking to the police because her skin was so damned red. Plus, she glowed when she was angry. It was a conundrum, but I had plenty of friends. I’d figure something out.

“Do you have anyone who can corroborate your statement?” asked Garrison.

Instead of answering, I said, “You know, Garrison is the perfect name for a detective. If I was making a police procedural movie or TV show, my main detective would be named that.”

“Please answer the question, Mr. Mourning,” Owens commanded.

“You can call me Jade,” I said to him, winking.

“A name, please,” said Owens. “Unless you’d like to go to the station and talk things over there.”

This was becoming a problem. Fuck it, I thought. “Moreland. Contact my friend Moreland.”

They asked for her contact details, which I reluctantly provided. Garrison stood up, then Owens. “Thank you for your time,” said Garrison as I stood up. He strode past me. Owens followed him and made a point of bumping his shoulder against me as he walked past. I gave him a good sniff.

After they left, a streamer named Raygun approached me and held his hand out. There was a tiny something in his palm. I couldn’t tell what it was. “Meet Wallace,” he said as if making introductions.

I strained my neck to peer closer into his palm. The thing in his palm looked like a large bee. “Hi Wallace,” I said. Raygun had been in my bed a couple of weeks ago, so I remembered him fondly.

“Wallace recorded everything,” Raygun said. “Livestreamed the interview. Didn’t you, Wallace?” Wallace flew out of Raygun’s hand and buzzed around the foyer, crashed into a wall, recovered, then flew out the open door. I closed the door, grumbling about letting real bugs in. “Hope you’re cool with that,” Raygun said, a little late.

A lot of people might have cared. But this is life as a streamer. If you don’t like someone recording what you’re doing, you’re in the wrong business. I didn’t care, so I clapped Raygun’s shoulder and said, “Sure,” and started to make my way back up the stairs.

“Wallace is modeled after Megachile pluto,” said Raygun with a loud voice over the rest of the influencers milling about and partying.

I was on the second step of the stairs. I turned around to look at Raygun. “And Megachile pluto is?” I asked. The party seemed to be expanding, spilling outdoors and into the room where I had been questioned. The front door opened again, revealing a couple of giggling girls wearing bikinis stumbling in.

Raygun beamed. “Biggest bee in the world. It’s also known as Wallace’s giant bee. I know, I’m sooo clever. Anyway, Wallace, he’s a little smaller. The real deal is about the size of your thumb. I can’t believe those dumb cops didn’t notice him though.”

“Really,” I said. “Where are these bees found?”

“Indonesia. The last one was supposed to have died back in the eighties. But they saved the species when they found a few flying around a few years ago.”

Like us, I thought, thinking of my kind. But people wouldn’t be trying to save us. I laughed at that. “That’s pretty awesome. You should post some info about that and add it to the livestream recording.”

“Dude, great idea.”

I smiled, turned around, and started climbing again.

I only made it about halfway up the stairs when Moreland called. Moreland never calls. She just shows up like she did the previous night. I acted like nothing had changed when I answered. “’Sup?”

“You know all the times I’ve told you that your belief in God is bullshit?”

“Umm, yeah?”

“I was wrong. There is a god, and he put you on this earth to torture me.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“In fact,” she continued. “I believe that is the entire reason for God’s existence, too. And no, I will not be your alibi, and thanks for asking first.” She ended the call. Apparently, she had seen Wallace’s camerawork.

I contemplated this as I reached the top of the stairs. Why, I wondered, did she think I would have asked her first? I would have been much better off if she had been surprised by the police with their questions. She works best during impromptu moments. She’s an extremely capable liar, and she would have wanted to keep our little worldwide family of vampires as far away from police inquiries as possible.

She would have eventually stumbled her way to an alibi for me. Now, I’d have to find a way to convince her that it was in her best interests to do so. Luckily, there are worse things in the world than having sex with Moreland.

By the time I reached my bedroom, another development occurred. A small crowd was gathering at the Atlanta P.D. headquarters, according to links I was receiving, protesting what they called “Streamer Harassment.” The reason I knew about it was that Moreland was the one forwarding the links, accompanied by a middle finger emoji in each case.

The good news for me was that at least I didn’t need to worry about what might happen if things barreled out of control. The ice cream shop feeding had developed a life of its own and was springing babies out of its young womb.

What I wanted at that moment more than anything was a dose of Daphne. She was the spirit world’s answer to chaos and malcontent. For reasons completely beyond my understanding, I was unable to bring myself to call her. I sat on the crunchy leather chair Moreland had sat in the previous night and sighed.

This hadn’t happened to me in a long time. Nervous about contacting a woman? And Daphne, of all people? She was so sweet that the worst thing I could imagine her saying to me was, “Love ‘ya!” after declining to see me. In other words, nothing to be afraid of. But I was frozen anyway.

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The only solution I could think of was to call my friend Longtooth in London. He had inherited his clan’s name when his father was killed by vampire hunters shortly after he was born.

He came from a breed of vampires who had exceedingly long incisors, which resembled those of a sabretooth tiger much more than my considerably more modest canines. The paternal head of the clan always passed his name on to his son if he died, which didn’t happen often. Because, you know. Vampires.

The extreme visibility of their long, arching front teeth made it exceedingly difficult for them to interact with humans, which was fine with Longtooth, who was wildly antagonistic toward humanity. He was born in the Middle Ages, so he was still young. He lived with a small coven near Brixton Market in London, where they usually fed on people who lingered too long after the market stalls were shut down for the evening. Despite Longtooth’s disdain for humans, the victims rarely died.

He was the perfect person to talk me out of whatever was going on with Daphne. I needed the voice of the ultimate anti-human.

His solution was simple. Ask Moreland to turn her.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You know Moreland can’t do that.” I reminded him that Moreland had never produced proof of her claims regarding her abilities. “Moreland is full of more shit than the entire London sewer system. Besides, Moreland is rarely inclined to do me favors.”

“Well, then quench that desire of yours,” he said in a Cockney accent. “Feed on the human wench till she goes limp. Hell, you should do it as part of your act. Your viewers will think it’s a beautiful love story, and since nobody believes in vampires in this era, they’ll just create a half billion silly posts about it on their foul internet.”

“Hell, no,” I said.

“She’s going to die very soon, anyway. If her lifespan was on a vampire calendar, you wouldn’t be able to mark it off for want of space. It would be a tiny sliver and…”

“… I get it, and no.” I should have known better.

“Good God, please don’t tell me you’re in love with a feeding tube. Look. What’s the very best possible outcome for such a depraved romance?”

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This was about the time I remembered that during the last decade or so, a conversation with Longtooth was nearly impossible without him quoting a movie — made by humans, I would often remind him.

“You will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality,” he said on cue, quoting Elrond’s speech to Arwen regarding her lover Aragorn’s drift into old age while Arwen retained her youth. Longtooth had always insisted that the elves in the Lord of the Ring movies represented vampires, even if that wasn’t the case in the books.

“The right thing for both of you is for her to sacrifice herself to your longings,” Longtooth continued. “Your true longings are not for the trite sexual dalliances you two engage in once in a while. Or that ghastly thing called human love.

“None of that can satisfy you. It is biologically impossible for it to. Your true longing is to feel the force of her life course through your veins as you draw every milliliter of her blood out of her body while she scratches and slams her fists against your back, her body twisting in that delightful mix of terror and thrill. You know this, Atticus. Deep inside, you do. That is why humans are on this earth. Why have so many of us forgotten that simple truth?”

The simple truth that I hadn’t discussed with anyone, especially Longtooth, was that I wanted to procreate. Daphne was not a fit. Vampires could only impregnate humans in silly movies. I needed to find someone of my kind. To say that the number of fish in the sea was tiny would be an understatement. Our race was nearly extinct.

Only a few thousand survivors were left, and we all mostly knew each other, even if we didn’t necessarily like each other. The bond of extinction forced us into an unwritten law that dictated that there should be no violence against one another. But there were no potential mates for me.

I recognized, as I was listening to Longtooth’s sermon, that the impossibility of procreation with a human was the reason I didn’t enjoy having these feelings for Daphne. Longtooth was correct that there was no future for us. He just had the reasons wrong.

I’ll admit that when Longtooth described her potential submission in detail, it thrilled me. I began to curse myself for confiding in him. Longtooth was the kind of vampire who would do it for me if I wasn’t willing to do it myself, so I immediately realized that I had just put Daphne in danger.

After we finished talking, my concern grew because I realized that the buzzing crowd in the background behind Longtooth’s phone voice didn’t have English accents. They sounded American. I wondered where he was.

I called Daphne. “Jade!” she said happily.

“Hi, sweetie,” I said. “What are you up to?”

“Getting ready for a rave. I’m wearing a real dope skirt.” She snapped a selfie and sent it to me. It was a ruffled black skirt decorated with little plastic skulls.

“Are you trying to turn me on?” I laughed.

“It’s Halloween almost, gotta do the mood. And ya, maybe also that. Do I need to work to turn you on or does it just happen?”

“I haven’t thought about it. What’s the right answer?”

“You know what the right answer is.”

“Your rave. Where is it?”

“The Gringo Palace.”

“Never heard of it.”

“You’re not supposed to, I think. It’s a warehouse near the airport. You won’t find it on Google Maps,” she giggled.

“Why do they call it The Gringo Palace?”

“It’s owned by a gringo? I dunno, Jade,” she laughed. “I bet you were a most inquisitive boy.”

“It was so long ago I can’t really remember,” I deadpanned. She couldn’t understand how true that was. My photographic memory was a little tattered from events two thousand years old.

“I hope I age half as well as you, old man,” she said sarcastically since she thought I was close to her age. You won’t, I thought sadly.

“So why you calling, old timer?” Another thing about her: Sometimes her voice sounded like a song that had slipped through time purposed only to touch parts of me that had long ago forgotten about such moments.

“I dunno,” I said, thinking that this is how human teenagers must feel. “Do I need a reason?” I came so close to saying that I wanted to just hear her voice that I wanted to slap myself in the face as hard as I could.

“Hell no,” she replied happily. “Betty says hi,” she said, snapping a pic of her friend, who was dressed as Betty Boop.

“That is not a scary costume,” I said.

“Either is mine, even though I have skulls on my skirt. I hope you’re doing something fun tonight.”

I couldn’t tell her the truth about why I was planning to relax in the evening. Daphne paid so little attention to the news that General Sherman could have come to Atlanta through a time portal and burned the place to the ground again and she wouldn’t hear about it.

“Well, I think, believe it or not, I’m just gonna chill. Maybe stream a little.”

“It has to be a scream stream,” she said.

Don’t worry, it already is, I thought. “Hey, thanks for all the violin promos you slammed against the Insta crowd,” I said.

“You’re welcome, boo. I did TikTok, too. Hey, people liked my drumming, too. I was so happy. I was so focused on making you famous that I forgot about me, but people noticed.”

“Of course they did. Your drumming was sick.”

“People want us to do it more. Some are saying, why not do a full show?”

“Yeah, I saw that. We know one song together,” I said through a laugh.

“We’re good together, though, right? I mean, I dunno. If you don’t want to it’s cool.”

“I do. We will. Let’s at least jam together. If we feel like we can get a show out of it, then we will. Cool?”

“Can’t wait. I feel like I should ask you if you want to rave with us but it’s girls’ night out.”

“You’re sweet for just saying that much. Will they let you stream or snap pics while you’re there?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe not. They’re very secretive.” She whispered that last part.

“Ah, don’t worry about it. People should be allowed to have fun without recording every second of it.”

“Yeah, but you know the saying — if there’s no video it didn’t happen.”

“That would be the idea of no pictures on the part of your mysterious warehouse.”

“See? That’s why I hang out with you. You’re just so damn smart.” I knew she was joking around, but it still gave me a chill. I was now trying to figure out when this started. Not our friendship, but the turn I was feeling. And that was it, wasn’t it? I was the one who was getting turned. Such irony. Maybe Longtooth was right. Maybe I needed to put this matter to bed. But the very idea of it made me a little sick.

“Well, gramps, when should we get together again?” She loved sticking to themes once she found one.

“Text me after you recover from your rave?”

“Ya, that works.”

“Oh, and hey, be careful out there.”

“Why?” she laughed, and then she disappeared from my phone, sending me a short video of her waving and blowing me a kiss.

I got off the big leather chair in my bedroom and walked down the hallway, which I called Ando Hall, named after the Japanese architect whose firm designed the house. The bright white hallway, lined with framed anime art, curved slightly away from my bedroom toward three other rooms. The hallway ended at one of those rooms, which was the studio where I did my livestreaming.

The heart of my streaming studio consisted of a massive white desk curving around my chair. Six large monitors that were always on, day or night, relaying other peoples’ streams, or maybe a live concert, were positioned by telescoping round poles attached to the desk’s edges. This was not the kind of desk you moved around the room.

The walls of the room were decorated with movie posters, anime, a charcoal drawing of the face of Jesus laughing, and an authentic Dali painting. I scanned all six monitors to see if there was anything worth paying attention to.

One of the middle monitors was usually tuned to a Twitch account named Ice Game Z, who kept his livestream going twenty-four a day, even if he was asleep. You’d be surprised how many people watched him sleep, maybe because they thought he might wake up and tell a joke. The streaming comments never stopped, whether he was gaming, traveling, or sleeping.

Ice Game Z streamed from hundreds of locations, but his studio was right here, downstairs, at Fang HQ. He could easily afford his own home, but he didn’t want to buy one because he traveled so much that he didn’t see the point of his own pad. “My crib is the world,” he’d say whenever the topic came up.

He was mostly a Fortnite player, but during the last year or so he hardly gamed at all and spent most of his time streaming funky travel videos, sort of like Anthony Bourdain with darker skin, a Nigerian accent, and a weird, extreme hatred for brownies. He was also funnier than all the comedians I’d seen over the years combined.

His stream showed him setting up shop outdoors on the edge of a lake. He usually traveled alone but people frequently congregated to his location, so he rarely remained alone for long.

His shaking camera showed a few sideways angles of scrambled views of grass, then the lake, then the sky, then, finally, as he stabilized the camera onto its tripod, the lake again. He unfolded a portable camping chair, then disappeared from the camera’s view.

The camera turned again as he repositioned the tripod until it faced a small cluster of trees. Sometimes the camera caught only his body as he manipulated the tripod. Then he appeared in the camera’s view with the camping chair and sat down, grinning broadly.

Ice Game Z always wore a Rasta peak visor hat that nearly covered his eyes. The visor and the top half of the hat’s peak were black, the rest yellow. It was his trademark. He wore loose-fitting drawstring brown trousers and a white T-shirt. I turned on the sound of his stream.

“Here I am,” he said in his Nigerian accent. “As you see, I am at Piedmont Park, and I am very alone here.” He looked around, then made a fake scared look on his face as he covered his open mouth with one hand.

“Oh no!” he laughed. “Behind me is the big bad forest.” It was just an isolated copse of trees. “And on the other side, the lake. The lighting is better this way though.” He laughed again. “So I show you the trees.

“We are told by the authorities that it is not safe to be here alone. But you see, I will not transfer ownership of this fine public domain to thugs and murderers. I will not cede our lands to them. I shall remain here until I say it is time for me to leave. I may stay here all night. I may leave in an hour. I shall decide. A man with a knife shall not decide whether I stay or whether I shall go. This is my home and this is your home.

“You may join me if you wish. We shall make a crowd. But then I will not be alone. And you see, I wish to be alone so I may make my point about being alone here.” He laughed boisterously. He was a gregarious man who sometimes laughed after almost every sentence. Especially when he was nervous.

I needed to pee, so I stood up. Even though he couldn’t see me, I used one hand to salute Ice for his bravery, assuming he’d be joined soon by about a hundred of his fans. Then I headed for the bathroom.

When I got out of the bathroom, I got a text from Longtooth. “Hope everything ok,” he wrote. “Appreciate you confiding in an old friend. Hope I wasn’t too harsh. Ttyl.” Longtooth wasn’t an apologist. I wondered if someone had stolen his phone. Then, of course, I realized that not many people can steal a phone from a sabretooth vampire.

I sat down on Ando Hall’s curvy white bench that people frequently bumped into at night because it was the same color as the wall. I sent a text thanking Longtooth. I considered asking if he was well but instead shrugged off his mood as a rare moment of grace.

Since it was getting close to dinner time, I ordered some food. I was missing Daphne. I wanted to call or text her, but instead, I sat on my right hand and closed my eyes in frustration. She was out with her friends, anyway.

The muffled laughter and occasional screams of delight were getting louder downstairs as hip-hop music started to blare from the speakers.

My plans for the night, to chill and be alone, were so out of the norm that I felt discombobulated. At a bare minimum, I usually live-streamed at night or gamed with people. But I had decided earlier in the day to remain free of society and maintain a solitary existence throughout the entire evening. This wasn’t going to be easy. I was unsettled and antsy. I was bored.

Downstairs began to sound like a major party. I was so not in the mood for that. The influencers downstairs started blowing my phone up, probably wanting me to join them.

One after another sent me a message as I sat feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t even know the cause. Daphne? Boredom? I had no idea. I ignored the messages and scrolled through my music library thinking maybe I should just lie down in the bedroom after dinner and listen to some music.

I settled on an old favorite, Beethoven’s Fifth, but I skipped the beginning because I hated it, and started in at the third movement because I loved the crescendo that started about four minutes in. I set the music app to start playing at the third movement and headed back to the studio to check on my crazy Nigerian friend and see if anything else interesting was happening in the streaming world.

When I sat down to look at his stream, his camera was still focused on the tree cluster, but his chair was empty and flipped over. His visor hat was upside down, off to one side. The emojis on the streaming comments looked like a rolling set of alarms.

The scrolling comments on the left side of the screen were short: “OMG” and “Ice!!!” One said, “Get help!” Another said “911.” None of them said anything about what they had witnessed.

I looked at my phone. One of the messages, instead of saying “Get down here,” like an earlier one that I had interpreted as a plea to party, said, “Get down here NOW! Help!”

Instead, I called the sender, a woman named Veronica. She answered, “Were you watching? Did you see?” She was hysterical.

“See what?” I knew she was referring to Ice, but when people are excited, they interrupt you when you’re trying to say something, so I let her take the lead.

“Ice. I mean, somebody took him, or something. I dunno. We don’t know. Nobody knows what’s going on. But…” she started sniffling. I heard her draw a breath. “You didn’t see?”

I reported my previous couple of minutes to her.

“Oh my God. That’s. He was…so he was sitting in his chair, you know? We had him on the video screen down here but the sound was off because we had music going, you know?

“And he was just talking and somebody made a joke that his mouth seemed like it was perfectly in sync with the rapper. Like it was really cute and an accident. And then a bunch of us looked to check it out, and then, and somebody, goddammit I don’t know, it’s like these two gloved hands snatched his head and just dragged him off camera.

“His whole body went flying backward like some giant from a movie pulled him off his chair. We could see his feet disappear after his chair got knocked over. It’s just all so fucked up.”

I was watching his now quiet stream; quiet from a video cam standpoint, but still visually loud from a screaming emoji standpoint. While I was listening to Veronica finish her story and ask what we should do, a white T-shirt was presented by two gloved hands to the camera with a huge smiley face painted in what, I knew, was blood. The blue-gloved hands made the shirt with its bloody smiley face dance silently in front of the camera. Then the video went dark, and the music downstairs came to a sudden stop.

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There had been a brazen murder in Piedmont Park. A local woman walking her dogs was killed in the middle of the day. So were her three dogs. The police were useless. “We have no clues,” went their lament. Charly visited the taped-off crime scene and sniffed out the killer in seconds.

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While the sun was setting, we found the killer in the attic of a three-story apartment building that had six nice units and one dilapidated attic apartment. How do I know they were nice units? We checked out each one. When you’ve lived for as long as I have, there isn’t a dwelling you can’t easily break into.

We checked out the cretin’s attic apartment when he went for a walk. I hoped he wasn’t out looking for another woman to kill. “Serial killers seem to have gaps between kills,” said Charly when I expressed that concern.

After we checked out the attic, we were able to confirm that it was the attic man who had killed the woman. We could smell traces of her blood. Not much, but enough.

We ran like hell chasing the killer’s scent. One woman who saw us barreling down the sidewalk on Highland while pushing her baby carriage stopped and watched us. She’ll probably never try to tell the story.

What would she say? “So, I saw these two guys running really fast. Like faster than anyone I’ve ever seen.” That’s a no-response type of story. We were gone before she could have whipped her phone out to record us.

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We found him at an ice cream shop full of kids. They must have all been coming back from a soccer game because they wore blue uniforms with shorts and yellow sports shoes of some kind. He looked like he was trying to talk to one of the girls, maybe even buy her something, but one of the adults pulled her away. The killer gave the adult a dirty look, then turned toward the counter to order. We decided to make a scene.

Two gawky teenage boys were running the counter. I went in through the front door, and Charly went in through the back. Charly found the electrical box and switched off the lights.

One of the things I haven’t mentioned is that vampires can yowl in almost any octave. With enough decibels to rattle the store windows, I screamed in a thick, muffled baritone, “GET OUT!”

The kids scrambled through the door and piled onto the sidewalk outside, screeching for their lives. Charly and I knew that the killer wouldn’t run out with them. We didn’t know why; we just knew he wouldn’t. Charly hid his face with one hand and gently escorted the teenage counter clerks outside through the back with his other hand while I kept my eyes on the killer.

The killer stood staring at me with a half-pint tub of ice cream, holding one of those flat little wooden spoons ice cream shops give you. He was a big guy. Not afraid. He had a long bushy red beard and 137 freckles on his face. I counted them. I don’t know why I counted them. I was curious, I guess. It only took me a second or two as we stood staring at each other. “Hi, freckle face,” I smiled.

“Who the fuck are you?” he snarled.

“Doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is who you are.”

The kids outside were staring through the window by now. That wouldn’t do. I pulled down the shop’s sunshades.

“Oh yeah?” said the killer as I pulled the final shade over the door window. “And who the fuck am I, you twat?”

I spun around and smiled. “You’re dinner. Charly!” I yelled. “Dinner is served! Hurry, we have about a minute and a half before uninvited guests with guns let themselves in.”

Charly came rushing in. “So sorry. The counter help was being difficult.” I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that his mouth wasn’t covered with blood.

Charly glared at the killer, who threw his ice cream at Charly as if it was coffee or, God, I don’t know what he was thinking. He probably panicked because Charly suddenly filled a room that had seemed comparatively empty.

He tried to run between Charly and me because it was his only escape route, but I caught him and threw him over the counter. Charly used one arm to leverage his hurdle over the counter in a way no modern human could imagine, and I went around to the other side of the counter to meet him.

I opened the display case. “Do you mind?” I asked Charly.

“Go for it,” he said.

I took a tub of pistachio ice cream, turned it upside down, and pushed it into the top of the killer’s head, giving him a crown of sorts.

“Save some for me,” said Charly. He was talking about blood, not ice cream.

“Always,” I replied. I always went first because, as I said, Charly’s a slob.

I prayed briefly. The man screamed as my jaws fastened to his neck. I delighted to the way his delicious, oxygenated blood pulled from his arteries into my mouth, creating an almost uncontrollable desire within me. But we had so little time. I’d have to tamper my impulses.

I stopped, stood up, and waved my hand palm up toward the sunken body as an invitation to Charly. Charly dug in on the other side, tearing at the man’s neck like a lion finishing off a wildebeest.

Here’s the difference between Charly and me. I left Charly with a nice, pristine neck. If Charly had taken a bite on my side, he would have barely noticed I had been there. I leave two clean puncture marks that a surgeon would die for. My mouth and lips are always clean. I don’t even need a napkin when I’m finished. Charly, on the other hand, well, perhaps he just enjoys tearing up flesh more than I do. When Charly was done, his chin looked like it had been dipped in red paint, his scarlet grin dripping with bloody pleasure. The killer’s head was nearly severed from its neck.

“Time to go,” I said as a cop entered the shop with his gun drawn. I hadn’t heard any sirens. I had no time to think, but I realized later he had probably arrived by bicycle or motorcycle. Luckily, he was alone, so I jumped over the counter and wrapped my arm around his neck from behind before he could react. I pushed him so hard out the door that he rolled sideways for several feet. This gave us time to run out through the back.

That’s what I was thinking about as I drifted off into sleep. I fell asleep to a mixture of the cop standing there looking at me, Charly’s bloody grin, and the sound of my violin from a few hours before.

The sleep didn’t last long. I normally only sleep about an hour per night anyway. Sometimes, I’ll go for a week or more without sleep. I don’t think I was asleep for more than a few minutes when I was startled by a sound in my bedroom.

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There was a time when my bedroom would have been filled with artifacts from across the world. These days, there was a large round bed, enough for several people if the occasion warranted it, a large navy down-filled sofa, and an original Picasso painting called ‘Guernica’, which I obtained in the 1950s from the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid with the help of the world’s best art counterfeiter, who happened to be a vampire named Rafael. Rafael and I snuck his counterfeit of ‘Guernica’ into the Museo Reina Sofía, where it sits today. And I, of course, borrowed the real one. I may give it back eventually. A large chair upholstered with alligator leather sat across the bedroom against massive display windows.

That was it. The carpeting was plush, the walls were painted a reddish-brown ochre. I was able to control the ceiling’s recessed lighting with a remote I kept on a nightstand that curved along one part of the bed. There were two bedroom doors, but they shared the same space closing against each other, and a large bathroom to the right of the doors. There was a 120-inch video screen hooked up to streaming TV services, but it was hidden within the wall thanks to some carpentry and electronic wizardry.

My point in bringing up my boring bedroom décor is to emphasize that there weren’t many places for someone to hide. The couch and chairs were both pressed against the wall or windows. The bathroom had an extravagant alarm system because I didn’t want downstairs male influencers taking a piss in my bathroom. The security system of the home itself was world-class, but it didn’t much matter because the influencers living in the home were constantly partying. If someone walked up the stairs to my bedroom, the influencers would just assume it was a welcome guest. That was the Achilles heel, of course, of the home’s security system.

So, I shouldn’t have been startled when I was awoken by a sound, considering how easy it was to enter my room. I reached for the remote to turn on the lights, but it wasn’t on the nightstand. “What the hell?” I said out loud.

“Looking for this?” came a female voice from the doors. I didn’t need lighting to know who it was. Besides, Moreland glows faintly in the dark because she comes from the Obayifo line of vampires from Africa, an offshoot of the same subspecies as Charly.

I squeezed my eyes shut, hoping I was having a terrible nightmare, but as insurance, I said, “Go away.”

She didn’t. She launched into a diatribe like she often does. “What were you thinking?” she yelled in her high-pitched voice. She was wearing her usual translucent white robe and nothing underneath. I never figured out how she walked around in public like that. Or even if she did. She possessed methods for traveling that I didn’t.

Her hair was usually dyed dark black, just the way I like it, but naturally curly, not the silky straight stuff that I loved most. Now, it was a rose-colored red and straighter than usual.

Her almond-shaped blue eyes were glaring at me. Her normally subtle blue phosphorous glow was pulsating, so I knew she was pissed. Sometimes she faked being pissed because she liked to yell at me about things, but she has a tell that she can’t escape from, so I always know if she’s genuinely mad. She was mad.

“First you make a spectacle of yourself with this ridiculous streaming thing you do. Which is bad-stupid enough. But then you get all over the internet with this violin bullshit. And then, then, you do a bloody ass kill in broad daylight.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s all over the bloody news is what I’m talking about. The ice cream shop vampire murder is what they’re calling it already. What the hell is wrong with you? An ice cream shop? Full of kids?”

“Nobody believes in vampires. They’re just fun and games to these people. The Cullens and the two Bellas, Bela and Bella, and Lestat de Lioncourt. Besides, what makes you think I did that? Not exactly my M.O.”

She ignored me. “And then… You know, our people spend thousands of years mastering the art of stealth and discretion, and you blow it all up in two days. You’re a shit. Do you have any idea how good forensic technology is these days?”

“Good enough to catch vampires who can shape-shift their fingerprints?” I smiled. “Can you leave now?”

“You’re smarter than this. You know better, too.”

“Again, I ask you, why do you assume it’s me?”

“Oh ok. It’s one of the thousands of other vampires who live around here.”

“Well, we aren’t the only ones here.”

“Yeah, we pretty much are. In this city. There’s that guy you hang around with. Charly? And let’s see, umm, yeah. That’s it. And me when I am stupid enough to check up on you.” She was usually hiding in the woods in upper New York State.

“You’re not my mother. I don’t need nor want you checking up on me. In fact, I’d rather drink battery acid.”

“If I was your mother, I’d have aborted.”

I was still lying in bed. I crossed one leg over the other. “You’re being harsher than usual in your judgments of me, my vampish sex pistol.” She threw the remote at me so hard that it lodged into the wall behind me. I reached behind and pulled it out of the drywall. “Huh. You’d think it would have broken into a million pieces.” I examined it. “Craftsmanship in the twenty-first century? Who’d a thunk it?”

She sunk herself into the chair, which made the sound leather would make if it hadn’t been used for a few years, which it probably hadn’t.

“I guess you’re staying awhile?” I asked. I grabbed my phone from the nightstand.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I may as well see if we can order some food.”

“Good God, you’re such a sociopath.”

“You think?” I asked as I tapped. “Oh look, an Italian beef place serving until 5 am. Can you believe it?” Her angry glow-pulse was becoming a strobe light. “I’ll order two. We have champagne downstairs. Should I have someone fetch us some?”

“If I can find a way to kill you, yes. I only drink champagne to celebrate.”

I ordered the food, knowing her sandwich would not be eaten, but not caring. I put the phone back on the nightstand. “Look, I’ll admit, Charly got a little rambunctious. But the guy we fed on killed that woman in Piedmont Park.”

She shrugged. “So?”

“So that’s not cool.”

“Of course it isn’t, but we don’t interfere with human stupidity or depravity. Thousands of years have taught us to lay low. Again. I ask you. What the hell came over you? You’ve always been bound to this. This works for us, Atticus. This has always fuckin’ worked for us.” If her strobe-like glow wasn’t telling me how mad she was, her calling me by my real name did. She always called me by my “local” name, no matter the era.

I was being a smartass with her because I knew she was right. Charly and I broke a lot of unwritten rules. I wasn’t willing to admit that to her.

“So what are we gonna do?” she asked me.

“We?”

“This affects me, too.”

“Not really. We all just lay low, and it will blow over. We kicked the kids out before we fed. They didn’t see anything. The cops probably by now realize that the dead guy is the killer of the dead woman in Piedmont. The first thing they’ll ask is, who is this guy that got himself slaughtered in an ice cream shop? They’ll search his place, find enough clues he’s their man, and that will be that. His death will be a cold case for a hundred years, but they’ll celebrate finding out that the dead guy is their man, and they won’t give a flying shit. The dude was a fucknuckle anyway.”

“Glad you’ve thought this through,” she said sarcastically.

“Not really, but you know how things work.”

“What if this Charly guy is out of control? Have you thought about that?”

“He’s not,” I said confidently.

“All of us feel the lust for blood every time we feed,” she said. I had felt it in a big way in the ice cream shop. We always feel it to one degree or another, but the evening’s pull had been especially strong.

“It happens,” she said. “It takes over. There was Bjorn Petursson in Iceland in the 1500s. Practically took out the whole country. There was Genipperteinga in Germany around the same time. There was half of fuckin’ Serbia in the 1700s, for God’s sake. There’s the leader of Russia today. The fucking plague for God’s sake. Shall I go on?”

“Those vampires caused us a lot of grief, yeah, but Charly’s been with us for 10,000 years, and he’s been a slob his whole life. That’s his only crime. Let it go.”

Her glow began to ebb. As angry as she was, and as much as Moreland enjoyed ripping me a new one, she basically trusted my instincts. “Okay,” she said calmly. “Shit. What a mess.”

“The reason I hunt with him is that he likes to pick on jerks like I do. That’s it. We’ve gone on hunts for ninety years. I’ve seen him in action. He’s cool.”

Moreland shook her head. “We really need to fuck more, Jade. We get along better when we fuck.”

“You mean, you yell at me less when we fuck. Anyway, no,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t trust you. Not after Singapore.” I have probably brought up Singapore a hundred times.

“We have fucked since Singapore.”

“Not happily,” I said.

Moreland sighed and sat silently before announcing, “I’m gonna go.”

“You do that,” I said, turning over. I cringed inside at the stab of the wound I was delivering to her. It hurt me, too, but my cold reply was out, and I couldn’t take it back.

I loved Moreland. But I hated her just as much.

I had dismissed Moreland’s concerns out of hand but that didn’t change the likelihood that things could get messy.

The internet noise from my violin act was growing almost in direct proportion to the social media trendlines of the ice cream parlor killing, which was now a bigger story than the Piedmont Park murder. This meant that a heavy volume of internet noise centered around me. No wonder Moreland was pissed.

Daphne forwarded about ten thousand Instagram posts the next day from various people praising the violin solo. Moreland forwarded about ten thousand and one posts relaying what the Atlanta Police Department was saying about the two killings.

Things seemed manageable until a third killing popped up early afternoon that same day, this one also in Piedmont Park, and this one also in broad daylight.

I texted Moreland as soon as I saw a news item about the third killing, deciding I’d get in front of it by attaching the text, “Don’t even start” to a news post I forwarded to her.

She replied with a spiteful curse, and we were off to the races again.

The cops stopped hiding their concerns. The Atlanta P.D. Facebook post was blunt:

“We want the community to stay calm, but we also want everyone to be careful. Do not go to any park alone. When we say don’t go to the park alone, we don’t mean bring your dog for protection. We mean be sure you go with another person. Bring pepper spray and be careful.”

Another police department post stated that the first Piedmont death had been caused by a knife wound to the neck. This little detail had been left out of earlier reports, which had only mentioned a knife attack. The second Piedmont death was also a knife wound. Specifically, the carotid artery was severed. The cops were now saying that was also the cause of death of the man in the ice cream shop.

I called Charly. “Have you seen the news?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “Our man couldn’t have done this new one. He’s dead.”

“The police are saying our ice cream shop friend died the same way. Basically, a clean slice of the carotid.”

“Really. I didn’t hear that. What do you think?”

“I think I saw a messy scene from the bloodiest ice cream party in history. I have no idea what game the police might be playing. Oh. And by the way? Moreland is pissed.”

“Moreland is always pissed.”

“She stopped by yesterday while I was trying to sleep. Called you ‘that Charly guy.’”

“Ouch.”

I laughed at that. “I dunno. I told her it would all blow over, but this new killing adds a delta I’m not crazy about.”

“It’s too soon for a copycat killer,” said Charly, sounding worried.

“Right. Can’t be a copycat. The cops only released the news that the first murder was a neck wound today. After the second murder.”

“Shit.”

“I know, right?”

At that instant, I got a message from one of the influencers downstairs: “The police are here. Asking for you.”

I was cozy in my bed. I had been surfing and streaming a little from the bed all afternoon. I sure as hell didn’t want to have a chat with Atlanta’s finest. I texted, “Tell them I’ll be right down,” anyway.

“It just got better, Charly,” I said into the phone.

“How so?”

“Cops are here.”

“Why?”

I laughed. “Why do you think? The influencers are making too much noise?”

“Do you want me to come over?”

“Sure, let’s make it easy for them,” I said. Charly laughed. “If they give me too much trouble, I’ll just add to their carotid artery severance count.” Charly was silent. “Kidding. I’ll call you later.”

“Be safe,” said Charly.

“Tell that to the cops,” I replied. Charly sighed as I tapped off the call.

I tried to think about how I could be my most flamboyant self. I didn’t want the police for one moment to think they were dealing with someone they would consider normal. I ran to the wardrobe room across the hall and found a long, pink feathered shawl and some slacks with pink and black polka dots. I didn’t need a shirt because I was able to wrap the shawl around my upper body. I grabbed a mandolin from the music room.

As I descended the stairs, I strummed an oldie, “Mandolin Wind.” There were some influencers at the bottom of the stairs sipping juicy-looking booze drinks. “Dude,” one of them said. “The mandolin, too? Whoa! Hey, guys, listen to that.” I smiled as I found the last steps. One of the women approached me and pushed open my shawl enough to expose a pectoral muscle and rub it as I neared the door to greet the police, who were inside glaring with a pair of stern looks.

The police were wearing suits: A young Black man and an older white guy with a bald head and a small tuft of white hair under his chin. He was burly with a heavily pockmarked face, like a middle-aged TV wrestler who had successfully endured fighting his way through his middle years. His dark gray suit jacket was too snug. It barely fit.

The Black guy was thin but looked to be in shape, too, and was almost twice as tall as the white guy. His suit coat was too baggy. I wanted to ask them to switch suit coats for the betterment of humanity.

I set the mandolin on a nearby table and ushered the two cops out of the foyer into the well-appointed living room before they had a chance to introduce themselves. The Black guy was carrying a satchel and nearly swung it into a blue and white Qing dynasty vase as he entered the room.

“What can I do for you on this fine afternoon?” I asked. I made sure they found comfortable seats on a couch across from the home’s Érard grand piano. I sat on a velvet Victorian parlor chair next to them.

“You’ve heard about the knife attacks recently?” asked the white guy.

“Yes, of course.” I looked into the foyer, where people were cavorting. “They have, too. You wouldn’t know it, huh?”

“What is this place?” asked the Black guy accusingly.

I pulled out my phone and pulled up an Instagram home page of Fang HQ and handed it to him. “This,” I said.

He shook his head while he looked at it and turned his palm up in the universal language that says, “What the hell?”

“Anyway,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

The Black guy rolled his eyes as he handed my phone back to me.

“I’m Detective Garrison,” said the guy who looked like a wrestler. “And this is Detective Owens. We’re investigating one of the murders. You were identified as being at the scene of the crime just before it happened.”

I leaned in toward the nearest officer, Garrison, and said, “Do tell.”

“One of the kids at the ice cream shop,” said Owens. “ID’d you. Said you were there moments before the vic got his throat sliced. Possibly assaulted a police officer.”

I wanted to correct him by saying the victim’s throat wasn’t sliced, but then I remembered that it actually was. Sort of.

“It’s Halloween,” I said. “People masquerade as me all the time. Go to a costume party this weekend. You’ll see.”

Sometimes when I sleep, I feel weird for several hours after I wake up. I thought I heard a buzzing in the room behind me. Sort of like what you might expect a mechanical fly to sound like. I thought I was just feeling weird and hearing things.

“So,” said Garrison. “You’re saying you weren’t there?”

“I don’t even like ice cream. Well, I do. But my body doesn’t.” I took off my shawl. “Does this look like an ice cream aficionado’s body?” I looked at Owens when I said this. The buzzing continued.

Owens wasn’t impressed. “If we never busted a guy because he says he doesn’t like a certain kinda food, we’d never bust anybody. Why the hell are you so blue? Do you dye your skin or something?”

Garrison gave him a cross look but didn’t say anything.

I draped my shawl around my chest and looked behind me for the buzzing sound.

“Are you okay?” asked Garrison.

The buzzing stopped. “I’m fine,” I said.

I wanted to sass back at Owens by saying, “You guys never bust anybody anyway,” but I held my tongue and instead started thinking about who I should find as an alibi.

Charly was an obvious no. I thought about Daphne. No, she’d be terrified at just about every aspect of this. Surprisingly, I decided on Moreland. But she’d resist talking to the police because her skin was so damned red. Plus, she glowed when she was angry. It was a conundrum, but I had plenty of friends. I’d figure something out.

“Do you have anyone who can corroborate your statement?” asked Garrison.

Instead of answering, I said, “You know, Garrison is the perfect name for a detective. If I was making a police procedural movie or TV show, my main detective would be named that.”

“Please answer the question, Mr. Mourning,” Owens commanded.

“You can call me Jade,” I said to him, winking.

“A name, please,” said Owens. “Unless you’d like to go to the station and talk things over there.”

This was becoming a problem. Fuck it, I thought. “Moreland. Contact my friend Moreland.”

They asked for her contact details, which I reluctantly provided. Garrison stood up, then Owens. “Thank you for your time,” said Garrison as I stood up. He strode past me. Owens followed him and made a point of bumping his shoulder against me as he walked past. I gave him a good sniff.

After they left, a streamer named Raygun approached me and held his hand out. There was a tiny something in his palm. I couldn’t tell what it was. “Meet Wallace,” he said as if making introductions.

I strained my neck to peer closer into his palm. The thing in his palm looked like a large bee. “Hi Wallace,” I said. Raygun had been in my bed a couple of weeks ago, so I remembered him fondly.

“Wallace recorded everything,” Raygun said. “Livestreamed the interview. Didn’t you, Wallace?” Wallace flew out of Raygun’s hand and buzzed around the foyer, crashed into a wall, recovered, then flew out the open door. I closed the door, grumbling about letting real bugs in. “Hope you’re cool with that,” Raygun said, a little late.

A lot of people might have cared. But this is life as a streamer. If you don’t like someone recording what you’re doing, you’re in the wrong business. I didn’t care, so I clapped Raygun’s shoulder and said, “Sure,” and started to make my way back up the stairs.

“Wallace is modeled after Megachile pluto,” said Raygun with a loud voice over the rest of the influencers milling about and partying.

I was on the second step of the stairs. I turned around to look at Raygun. “And Megachile pluto is?” I asked. The party seemed to be expanding, spilling outdoors and into the room where I had been questioned. The front door opened again, revealing a couple of giggling girls wearing bikinis stumbling in.

Raygun beamed. “Biggest bee in the world. It’s also known as Wallace’s giant bee. I know, I’m sooo clever. Anyway, Wallace, he’s a little smaller. The real deal is about the size of your thumb. I can’t believe those dumb cops didn’t notice him though.”

“Really,” I said. “Where are these bees found?”

“Indonesia. The last one was supposed to have died back in the eighties. But they saved the species when they found a few flying around a few years ago.”

Like us, I thought, thinking of my kind. But people wouldn’t be trying to save us. I laughed at that. “That’s pretty awesome. You should post some info about that and add it to the livestream recording.”

“Dude, great idea.”

I smiled, turned around, and started climbing again.

I only made it about halfway up the stairs when Moreland called. Moreland never calls. She just shows up like she did the previous night. I acted like nothing had changed when I answered. “’Sup?”

“You know all the times I’ve told you that your belief in God is bullshit?”

“Umm, yeah?”

“I was wrong. There is a god, and he put you on this earth to torture me.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“In fact,” she continued. “I believe that is the entire reason for God’s existence, too. And no, I will not be your alibi, and thanks for asking first.” She ended the call. Apparently, she had seen Wallace’s camerawork.

I contemplated this as I reached the top of the stairs. Why, I wondered, did she think I would have asked her first? I would have been much better off if she had been surprised by the police with their questions. She works best during impromptu moments. She’s an extremely capable liar, and she would have wanted to keep our little worldwide family of vampires as far away from police inquiries as possible.

She would have eventually stumbled her way to an alibi for me. Now, I’d have to find a way to convince her that it was in her best interests to do so. Luckily, there are worse things in the world than having sex with Moreland.

By the time I reached my bedroom, another development occurred. A small crowd was gathering at the Atlanta P.D. headquarters, according to links I was receiving, protesting what they called “Streamer Harassment.” The reason I knew about it was that Moreland was the one forwarding the links, accompanied by a middle finger emoji in each case.

The good news for me was that at least I didn’t need to worry about what might happen if things barreled out of control. The ice cream shop feeding had developed a life of its own and was springing babies out of its young womb.

What I wanted at that moment more than anything was a dose of Daphne. She was the spirit world’s answer to chaos and malcontent. For reasons completely beyond my understanding, I was unable to bring myself to call her. I sat on the crunchy leather chair Moreland had sat in the previous night and sighed.

This hadn’t happened to me in a long time. Nervous about contacting a woman? And Daphne, of all people? She was so sweet that the worst thing I could imagine her saying to me was, “Love ‘ya!” after declining to see me. In other words, nothing to be afraid of. But I was frozen anyway.

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The only solution I could think of was to call my friend Longtooth in London. He had inherited his clan’s name when his father was killed by vampire hunters shortly after he was born.

He came from a breed of vampires who had exceedingly long incisors, which resembled those of a sabretooth tiger much more than my considerably more modest canines. The paternal head of the clan always passed his name on to his son if he died, which didn’t happen often. Because, you know. Vampires.

The extreme visibility of their long, arching front teeth made it exceedingly difficult for them to interact with humans, which was fine with Longtooth, who was wildly antagonistic toward humanity. He was born in the Middle Ages, so he was still young. He lived with a small coven near Brixton Market in London, where they usually fed on people who lingered too long after the market stalls were shut down for the evening. Despite Longtooth’s disdain for humans, the victims rarely died.

He was the perfect person to talk me out of whatever was going on with Daphne. I needed the voice of the ultimate anti-human.

His solution was simple. Ask Moreland to turn her.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You know Moreland can’t do that.” I reminded him that Moreland had never produced proof of her claims regarding her abilities. “Moreland is full of more shit than the entire London sewer system. Besides, Moreland is rarely inclined to do me favors.”

“Well, then quench that desire of yours,” he said in a Cockney accent. “Feed on the human wench till she goes limp. Hell, you should do it as part of your act. Your viewers will think it’s a beautiful love story, and since nobody believes in vampires in this era, they’ll just create a half billion silly posts about it on their foul internet.”

“Hell, no,” I said.

“She’s going to die very soon, anyway. If her lifespan was on a vampire calendar, you wouldn’t be able to mark it off for want of space. It would be a tiny sliver and…”

“… I get it, and no.” I should have known better.

“Good God, please don’t tell me you’re in love with a feeding tube. Look. What’s the very best possible outcome for such a depraved romance?”

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This was about the time I remembered that during the last decade or so, a conversation with Longtooth was nearly impossible without him quoting a movie — made by humans, I would often remind him.

“You will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality,” he said on cue, quoting Elrond’s speech to Arwen regarding her lover Aragorn’s drift into old age while Arwen retained her youth. Longtooth had always insisted that the elves in the Lord of the Ring movies represented vampires, even if that wasn’t the case in the books.

“The right thing for both of you is for her to sacrifice herself to your longings,” Longtooth continued. “Your true longings are not for the trite sexual dalliances you two engage in once in a while. Or that ghastly thing called human love.

“None of that can satisfy you. It is biologically impossible for it to. Your true longing is to feel the force of her life course through your veins as you draw every milliliter of her blood out of her body while she scratches and slams her fists against your back, her body twisting in that delightful mix of terror and thrill. You know this, Atticus. Deep inside, you do. That is why humans are on this earth. Why have so many of us forgotten that simple truth?”

The simple truth that I hadn’t discussed with anyone, especially Longtooth, was that I wanted to procreate. Daphne was not a fit. Vampires could only impregnate humans in silly movies. I needed to find someone of my kind. To say that the number of fish in the sea was tiny would be an understatement. Our race was nearly extinct.

Only a few thousand survivors were left, and we all mostly knew each other, even if we didn’t necessarily like each other. The bond of extinction forced us into an unwritten law that dictated that there should be no violence against one another. But there were no potential mates for me.

I recognized, as I was listening to Longtooth’s sermon, that the impossibility of procreation with a human was the reason I didn’t enjoy having these feelings for Daphne. Longtooth was correct that there was no future for us. He just had the reasons wrong.

I’ll admit that when Longtooth described her potential submission in detail, it thrilled me. I began to curse myself for confiding in him. Longtooth was the kind of vampire who would do it for me if I wasn’t willing to do it myself, so I immediately realized that I had just put Daphne in danger.

After we finished talking, my concern grew because I realized that the buzzing crowd in the background behind Longtooth’s phone voice didn’t have English accents. They sounded American. I wondered where he was.

I called Daphne. “Jade!” she said happily.

“Hi, sweetie,” I said. “What are you up to?”

“Getting ready for a rave. I’m wearing a real dope skirt.” She snapped a selfie and sent it to me. It was a ruffled black skirt decorated with little plastic skulls.

“Are you trying to turn me on?” I laughed.

“It’s Halloween almost, gotta do the mood. And ya, maybe also that. Do I need to work to turn you on or does it just happen?”

“I haven’t thought about it. What’s the right answer?”

“You know what the right answer is.”

“Your rave. Where is it?”

“The Gringo Palace.”

“Never heard of it.”

“You’re not supposed to, I think. It’s a warehouse near the airport. You won’t find it on Google Maps,” she giggled.

“Why do they call it The Gringo Palace?”

“It’s owned by a gringo? I dunno, Jade,” she laughed. “I bet you were a most inquisitive boy.”

“It was so long ago I can’t really remember,” I deadpanned. She couldn’t understand how true that was. My photographic memory was a little tattered from events two thousand years old.

“I hope I age half as well as you, old man,” she said sarcastically since she thought I was close to her age. You won’t, I thought sadly.

“So why you calling, old timer?” Another thing about her: Sometimes her voice sounded like a song that had slipped through time purposed only to touch parts of me that had long ago forgotten about such moments.

“I dunno,” I said, thinking that this is how human teenagers must feel. “Do I need a reason?” I came so close to saying that I wanted to just hear her voice that I wanted to slap myself in the face as hard as I could.

“Hell no,” she replied happily. “Betty says hi,” she said, snapping a pic of her friend, who was dressed as Betty Boop.

“That is not a scary costume,” I said.

“Either is mine, even though I have skulls on my skirt. I hope you’re doing something fun tonight.”

I couldn’t tell her the truth about why I was planning to relax in the evening. Daphne paid so little attention to the news that General Sherman could have come to Atlanta through a time portal and burned the place to the ground again and she wouldn’t hear about it.

“Well, I think, believe it or not, I’m just gonna chill. Maybe stream a little.”

“It has to be a scream stream,” she said.

Don’t worry, it already is, I thought. “Hey, thanks for all the violin promos you slammed against the Insta crowd,” I said.

“You’re welcome, boo. I did TikTok, too. Hey, people liked my drumming, too. I was so happy. I was so focused on making you famous that I forgot about me, but people noticed.”

“Of course they did. Your drumming was sick.”

“People want us to do it more. Some are saying, why not do a full show?”

“Yeah, I saw that. We know one song together,” I said through a laugh.

“We’re good together, though, right? I mean, I dunno. If you don’t want to it’s cool.”

“I do. We will. Let’s at least jam together. If we feel like we can get a show out of it, then we will. Cool?”

“Can’t wait. I feel like I should ask you if you want to rave with us but it’s girls’ night out.”

“You’re sweet for just saying that much. Will they let you stream or snap pics while you’re there?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe not. They’re very secretive.” She whispered that last part.

“Ah, don’t worry about it. People should be allowed to have fun without recording every second of it.”

“Yeah, but you know the saying — if there’s no video it didn’t happen.”

“That would be the idea of no pictures on the part of your mysterious warehouse.”

“See? That’s why I hang out with you. You’re just so damn smart.” I knew she was joking around, but it still gave me a chill. I was now trying to figure out when this started. Not our friendship, but the turn I was feeling. And that was it, wasn’t it? I was the one who was getting turned. Such irony. Maybe Longtooth was right. Maybe I needed to put this matter to bed. But the very idea of it made me a little sick.

“Well, gramps, when should we get together again?” She loved sticking to themes once she found one.

“Text me after you recover from your rave?”

“Ya, that works.”

“Oh, and hey, be careful out there.”

“Why?” she laughed, and then she disappeared from my phone, sending me a short video of her waving and blowing me a kiss.

I got off the big leather chair in my bedroom and walked down the hallway, which I called Ando Hall, named after the Japanese architect whose firm designed the house. The bright white hallway, lined with framed anime art, curved slightly away from my bedroom toward three other rooms. The hallway ended at one of those rooms, which was the studio where I did my livestreaming.

The heart of my streaming studio consisted of a massive white desk curving around my chair. Six large monitors that were always on, day or night, relaying other peoples’ streams, or maybe a live concert, were positioned by telescoping round poles attached to the desk’s edges. This was not the kind of desk you moved around the room.

The walls of the room were decorated with movie posters, anime, a charcoal drawing of the face of Jesus laughing, and an authentic Dali painting. I scanned all six monitors to see if there was anything worth paying attention to.

One of the middle monitors was usually tuned to a Twitch account named Ice Game Z, who kept his livestream going twenty-four a day, even if he was asleep. You’d be surprised how many people watched him sleep, maybe because they thought he might wake up and tell a joke. The streaming comments never stopped, whether he was gaming, traveling, or sleeping.

Ice Game Z streamed from hundreds of locations, but his studio was right here, downstairs, at Fang HQ. He could easily afford his own home, but he didn’t want to buy one because he traveled so much that he didn’t see the point of his own pad. “My crib is the world,” he’d say whenever the topic came up.

He was mostly a Fortnite player, but during the last year or so he hardly gamed at all and spent most of his time streaming funky travel videos, sort of like Anthony Bourdain with darker skin, a Nigerian accent, and a weird, extreme hatred for brownies. He was also funnier than all the comedians I’d seen over the years combined.

His stream showed him setting up shop outdoors on the edge of a lake. He usually traveled alone but people frequently congregated to his location, so he rarely remained alone for long.

His shaking camera showed a few sideways angles of scrambled views of grass, then the lake, then the sky, then, finally, as he stabilized the camera onto its tripod, the lake again. He unfolded a portable camping chair, then disappeared from the camera’s view.

The camera turned again as he repositioned the tripod until it faced a small cluster of trees. Sometimes the camera caught only his body as he manipulated the tripod. Then he appeared in the camera’s view with the camping chair and sat down, grinning broadly.

Ice Game Z always wore a Rasta peak visor hat that nearly covered his eyes. The visor and the top half of the hat’s peak were black, the rest yellow. It was his trademark. He wore loose-fitting drawstring brown trousers and a white T-shirt. I turned on the sound of his stream.

“Here I am,” he said in his Nigerian accent. “As you see, I am at Piedmont Park, and I am very alone here.” He looked around, then made a fake scared look on his face as he covered his open mouth with one hand.

“Oh no!” he laughed. “Behind me is the big bad forest.” It was just an isolated copse of trees. “And on the other side, the lake. The lighting is better this way though.” He laughed again. “So I show you the trees.

“We are told by the authorities that it is not safe to be here alone. But you see, I will not transfer ownership of this fine public domain to thugs and murderers. I will not cede our lands to them. I shall remain here until I say it is time for me to leave. I may stay here all night. I may leave in an hour. I shall decide. A man with a knife shall not decide whether I stay or whether I shall go. This is my home and this is your home.

“You may join me if you wish. We shall make a crowd. But then I will not be alone. And you see, I wish to be alone so I may make my point about being alone here.” He laughed boisterously. He was a gregarious man who sometimes laughed after almost every sentence. Especially when he was nervous.

I needed to pee, so I stood up. Even though he couldn’t see me, I used one hand to salute Ice for his bravery, assuming he’d be joined soon by about a hundred of his fans. Then I headed for the bathroom.

When I got out of the bathroom, I got a text from Longtooth. “Hope everything ok,” he wrote. “Appreciate you confiding in an old friend. Hope I wasn’t too harsh. Ttyl.” Longtooth wasn’t an apologist. I wondered if someone had stolen his phone. Then, of course, I realized that not many people can steal a phone from a sabretooth vampire.

I sat down on Ando Hall’s curvy white bench that people frequently bumped into at night because it was the same color as the wall. I sent a text thanking Longtooth. I considered asking if he was well but instead shrugged off his mood as a rare moment of grace.

Since it was getting close to dinner time, I ordered some food. I was missing Daphne. I wanted to call or text her, but instead, I sat on my right hand and closed my eyes in frustration. She was out with her friends, anyway.

The muffled laughter and occasional screams of delight were getting louder downstairs as hip-hop music started to blare from the speakers.

My plans for the night, to chill and be alone, were so out of the norm that I felt discombobulated. At a bare minimum, I usually live-streamed at night or gamed with people. But I had decided earlier in the day to remain free of society and maintain a solitary existence throughout the entire evening. This wasn’t going to be easy. I was unsettled and antsy. I was bored.

Downstairs began to sound like a major party. I was so not in the mood for that. The influencers downstairs started blowing my phone up, probably wanting me to join them.

One after another sent me a message as I sat feeling sorry for myself. I didn’t even know the cause. Daphne? Boredom? I had no idea. I ignored the messages and scrolled through my music library thinking maybe I should just lie down in the bedroom after dinner and listen to some music.

I settled on an old favorite, Beethoven’s Fifth, but I skipped the beginning because I hated it, and started in at the third movement because I loved the crescendo that started about four minutes in. I set the music app to start playing at the third movement and headed back to the studio to check on my crazy Nigerian friend and see if anything else interesting was happening in the streaming world.

When I sat down to look at his stream, his camera was still focused on the tree cluster, but his chair was empty and flipped over. His visor hat was upside down, off to one side. The emojis on the streaming comments looked like a rolling set of alarms.

The scrolling comments on the left side of the screen were short: “OMG” and “Ice!!!” One said, “Get help!” Another said “911.” None of them said anything about what they had witnessed.

I looked at my phone. One of the messages, instead of saying “Get down here,” like an earlier one that I had interpreted as a plea to party, said, “Get down here NOW! Help!”

Instead, I called the sender, a woman named Veronica. She answered, “Were you watching? Did you see?” She was hysterical.

“See what?” I knew she was referring to Ice, but when people are excited, they interrupt you when you’re trying to say something, so I let her take the lead.

“Ice. I mean, somebody took him, or something. I dunno. We don’t know. Nobody knows what’s going on. But…” she started sniffling. I heard her draw a breath. “You didn’t see?”

I reported my previous couple of minutes to her.

“Oh my God. That’s. He was…so he was sitting in his chair, you know? We had him on the video screen down here but the sound was off because we had music going, you know?

“And he was just talking and somebody made a joke that his mouth seemed like it was perfectly in sync with the rapper. Like it was really cute and an accident. And then a bunch of us looked to check it out, and then, and somebody, goddammit I don’t know, it’s like these two gloved hands snatched his head and just dragged him off camera.

“His whole body went flying backward like some giant from a movie pulled him off his chair. We could see his feet disappear after his chair got knocked over. It’s just all so fucked up.”

I was watching his now quiet stream; quiet from a video cam standpoint, but still visually loud from a screaming emoji standpoint. While I was listening to Veronica finish her story and ask what we should do, a white T-shirt was presented by two gloved hands to the camera with a huge smiley face painted in what, I knew, was blood. The blue-gloved hands made the shirt with its bloody smiley face dance silently in front of the camera. Then the video went dark, and the music downstairs came to a sudden stop.

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Previous chapters can be found here:

You can read Chapter Three (the last excerpt) here:

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I expect Psalm of Vampires will be my only self-published novel, so it’s a bit of an experiment for me. I wrote it under my real name, rather than my pseudonym.

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Chapter 1: White Violin

My nose was drawn to her like a human child chasing the scent from a candy store. With the stadium’s video screens focused on me, I set the violin down. Daphne, wearing the kind of white shorts you might see on a K-pop fashionista, held the drum mallets in the air as she stood poised to strike her massive dagu drum again. Silky threads of black hair, darker than the skies of an age long lost to me, clung to her sweaty face. Silence from the crowd. I stood up, then glanced at her menacingly.

The crowd was so quiet you would have heard my shoes clamber across the stage floor if I had been wearing any. But I wasn’t wearing shoes, just my favorite Pokémon socks. I walked behind Daphne, feeding off her scent. I moved locks of her long straight hair to one side while my teammates bowed and smiled in unison. She dropped her mallets to the floor as if they were on fire.

Daphne gave me this cute, “Don’t you dare look,” at which point I opened my mouth wide and lunged toward her newly exposed neck with a set of fangs that could have punctured rhino skin. The crowd, sensing what would happen next, issued a collective gasp. A few random cheers and hollers littered the stale air.

My gaping mouth was the closing act of all my streams. A trademark of sorts. Now it was the closing act of my League of Legends team’s championship victory in a stadium full of obsessive gaming enthusiasts. The crowd shrieked in unison as my mouth, desperately craving her blood, made its final approach.

The stadium’s delighted screams drew me toward her almost as much as the blood coursing through her veins. Daphne, who was much closer to my height than most women, twirled around and pushed my chest away. The crowd loved it as I staggered back a bit, then approached her again. She dragged my shoulders down before planting her lips against mine. We kissed to thunderous ovation, our tongues stroking and embracing and clawing and pushing like wild little animals just out of their cages.

I felt her hot breath in my ear saying through a giggle, “Your breath smells like you licked a toilet.”

I wanted to tell her that my breath is usually bad after I feed, which might have made her laugh but was a little too close to the truth. My last blood feeding had been the previous night, though. Sometimes the halitosis lingers, I thought, thinking about how delicious Daphne’s blood would taste in my mouth, which always hungered for her in a million ways.

I’d learned long ago how to contain my blood lust for her. She was more beloved to me than she could know.

When we joined hands to face the crowd, the place exploded in a flurry of confetti made from torn stadium tickets, flyers, event programs, and anything else people could get their hands on. We roamed the stage so that we could face everyone in the crowd. We bowed as strobe lights plastered the air. I could still taste her. I was desperate for more.

A few were booing. I recorded their scents for future reference. The smattering of boos was drowned out by a set of new tracks of dance music. The corner of my eye spotted emojis streaming vertically along the large video display hanging over the center of the stadium. I reminded myself to look at replays on Twitch.

Not many among my millions of followers knew I was a master violinist. There were other instruments I had mastered long ago. Few knew I could play piano. Or cello. Or the twelve-string guitar. Or the flute or oboe. I love music, don’t you? I have an advantage over humans, though. I’ve had more than two thousand years to learn how to play my favorite instruments.

Oh. I’m sorry. I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Jade Mourning. League of Legends tournament winner, musician, streamer, nephew of Alexander the Great, vampire. I gave myself this name several centuries after the events that caused me to consider it: the death of my wife and child, and the harrowing grief that followed.

Like everyone else, Daphne thought the vampire act was just cosplay theater. We live in a society where anybody can kind of look however they want, right? Nobody thinks about it. I’m a vampire, but it doesn’t matter. I can live among you without anybody thinking anything of my presence.

Ignore the myths surrounding vampires — the cold, white skin, for example. In many ways, we’re just like you. I can sit in the sun on the beach reading “Twilight.” I can even see my reflection in the mirror.

Back in the days when I was a rogue English gentleman, I explained away my dark blue skin by saying I was the victim of a madman’s experiment gone awry. It was supposed to be a joke, but people believed it. The sympathy I received from that tale was surprising. The fact that I lived in a manor and owned a king’s fortune didn’t hurt the narrative. When you’re rich, you can tell people you had hot sex with the pope, and they’ll believe you. Of course, it’s easier to tell the tale when it’s true.

I could have shed my skin and changed its color, but there’s a certain pride many vampires have in how we look. Vampires are by nature very tall and blue. Or bluish. But not my friend Moreland, who has deep red skin, but that’s because she sheds her naturally blue skin for the red. It’s like cosplay for vampires, I guess.

Daphne and I left the stage toward the gamer meeting rooms. “I really don’t want to hang around these people,” I said. The noise of the crowd became muffled while we walked.

“Me neither,” she replied.

“Want to get some sushi?”

“Oh, Jade, I’m sorry. I’m not feeling great. Rain check?”

“How about we go to my place, and I nurse you back to health?”

She smiled at that, one side of her lips twisting up at a higher angle than the other side in the way that always drove me crazy. In moments like this, I wondered if I was more than just liking her. I feel things, too, you know? My heart thumps just like yours. And sometimes, like right then, Daphne made my heart thump. “I know what your idea of nursing me back to health is, Romeo. Not tonight.” She stood up on her toes and kissed my cheek.

We had a routine. When she stood on her toes like that, I bent down, trying to guess where she’d land her kiss.

“Okay, well, feel better. At least tell me what’s wrong.” I knew she wasn’t just blowing me off.

“My stomach feels like I ate a vat of salmonella.”

My fingers scraped strands of her hair. This gave me an excuse to look into her dark brown eyes, which I sometimes told her were the very eyes of Korea. I wanted to gently bite her perfect pug nose. “Well, why didn’t you bail on the tournament, then?”

“Seriously? And miss doing your show? Besides, I had fun. I always have fun with you. Even when I feel like shit. I wasn’t gonna miss this, no way. ‘Sides, that Metallica song on your violin is amazing.”

I nodded. “Thanks. I couldn’t have done that violin thing without you. No doubt. That drum was dope.”

“And we did practice a lot. I hate wasting time,” she smiled.

“So do I,” I lied. I didn’t really mind wasting time. I had a lot of it. “Okay, well, get out of here. You taking a ride share?”

“I grabbed a scooter. I should be able to find another.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

“Thanks.” She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. Electricity. Yes, this was more than like. And it sure was more than blood lust. Why did I need to be with her to be reminded?

We left the stadium. To my chagrin, there were about fifty scooters in front of the stadium entrance. She looked up at me, saying, “This is me,” and giggled. “Can I snap you?”

I sighed. “One of these days I’m going to dye my hair another color.”

“Don’t. The purple works.” She took her phone out of a tiny white purse, snapped a pic, and showed me her “Purple Jade” Snapchat story. “People love this shit,” she said. “Especially with that purple lipstick and insanely long purple hair of yours. They think it’s such solid cosplay.” Then she looked like she fell into deep thought. “How the hell does that lipstick never seem to come off?”

I shrugged.

“One of these days I’m gonna kiss those lips until it does.” She tapped her phone to fire up a scooter, gave me another kiss on the cheek, and buzzed away.

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I pulled my phone out of my trousers and ordered a ride share. It was late, nearly midnight. Midtown Atlanta was buzzing. I rarely get tired, but I was spent. It felt like I needed to feed soon, but I can usually go a week without a blood feeding. Maybe Daphne had fueled the hunger. I couldn’t feed in these bright clothes, though. I’d need to go home and change into something darker.

The ride share took me to my estate in Buckhead. The word “estate” has bad connotations these days, but I don’t know what else to call it. It’s mine. I own it. It’s large. It has a lot of acreage. It’s an estate.

The neighbors weren’t happy with me when I tore down every other house on the block, which I also owned. So, yeah. My neighbors call my place an “estate,” too. But they say it disparagingly. Like I had built a halfway house for drug addicts in the middle of their toney upper-class neighborhood.

In a way, I guess my house was a lot like a halfway house. It was full of social media influencers. I should add here that I didn’t invent the term “influencers.” It’s a word invented by the media that means nothing. We called ourselves Team Fang because of my long incisors. I loved all the residents, even those with a transient relationship with the house. I didn’t mind the transients, though. They provided a quick feeding option when I was desperate.

There were a bunch of them partying when I arrived at the estate. I was greeted with the usual fist bumps and come-hither looks as I glided up the long, tall, rounded stone staircase to my bedroom. I slipped out of my clothes and climbed into bed in my boxers, deciding to delay the hunt.

Hunting, after all, should be fun, and I was tired. The night before, for instance. That was fun. I had gone out with my friend Charly, a trombone player plying his craft at an old jazz club near Midtown. Charly’s immense girth sometimes made me wonder if he entered doors sideways to get through. His big, bluish-black, bald head was always so sweaty that he constantly looked like he had just come out of the shower. He had a blue hue to his skin like me, but not as obvious. Like Moreland, he too, shed his skin, but in his case, it was because he liked to blend in with his preferred crowd when he interacted with humans. Moreland didn’t have a preferred crowd of humans. She disliked them all.

His eyes, though. Dammit if they weren’t the coolest I’d ever seen. He had said that his clan came from central Africa and that he had tiger DNA in his blood. He had said this seriously as if I’d believe him. I guess he needed some explanation for his eyes’ bright yellow sclera and narrow, diamond-shaped black irises. He could have just said he was an offshoot of our species without getting into talk about tigers.

Charly and I originally met in Chicago during Prohibition. He was playing a club on the South Side while I was living in the forest preserves south of the city. I’ve lived my life in various levels of poverty and wealth. This was a poverty moment. I frequented the industrial suburb of Chicago Heights, looking for scumbags who did things like beat up their wives and kick their dogs. I had a careless attitude about my feeding habits in those days, probably because I was depressed about not finding a clean way to make a lot of money, and partly because I didn’t care what happened to scoundrels. So, I’d hunt down scumbags and come close to sucking them dry.

When we feed on humans, we can get carried away and take too much blood. Occasionally, we’ll leave a body dry, and it dies. But because the vampire body can only absorb so much fresh blood, instinct sort of dictates that we stop feeding before we cause too much damage. The more sinister among us will suck blood and spit it out if it’s too much to digest. Or they’ll bite through the carotid artery to let the blood flow just for the sport of killing. But most of us are more eager to preserve the symbiotic relationship with humans than we are to kill.

I stumbled into Charly during a hunt on one of those nights that looked like a black-and-white movie from those Prohibition days. It turned out we were looking for the same thing: people who deserved a little terror in their lives. My prey was the owner of a small factory that churned out thin rolls of steel. I had followed him home two nights before and winced as he slapped around his kids. I stalked him for a day and a half to make sure he wasn’t drinking somewhere. I hate feeding on boozers. Convinced that he wasn’t, I prepared to confront him in an industrial alley behind his small factory.

The factory workers were long gone. The economy wasn’t great, so the only night shift consisted of the factory owner doing some paperwork or bookkeeping. It was a cold, foggy, late autumn evening, the kind where everything is wet without rain. I crouched behind a large orange cylindrical drum marked with the word “corrosive” in huge black letters. A metal flap was banging in the wind somewhere, but other than that, the only sounds of the city were the occasional honks from a car and the bark of a distant dog.

I waited an hour. “Seriously?” I thought, wondering what he could be doing in his dinky factory as the night wore on. Finally, I had enough. I climbed some metal stairs to a back entrance that said, “Employees only.” I couldn’t imagine he had a way to enforce that provision, and because I was irritated, I tore the metal door off its hinges and threw it to the side. I guess I haven’t mentioned that I’m pretty strong compared to humans. Not like superman strong. But, yeah, strong enough to tear a metal door off its hinges.

The door made a loud, groaning sound of steel getting ripped apart, and an even louder sound as it crashed to the pavement below. So much for the element of surprise, I thought.

Once inside, all I saw at first was a dimly lit factory floor consisting of an unlit blast furnace and, against one wall, a freight container full of rolled steel wrapped in bunches by strips of metal. The container rested on rail tracks that were sunk into the concrete floor. The place was lit by a series of exposed light bulbs hanging from high above, most of which were out. This guy ran a spartan shop. I noticed a short platform with a metal railing on the other side of the floor. I ran to it, sniffing the air as I hurried to a short stairway that led to the top of the platform. I could smell blood in the air as if someone had poured it into a glass and was waving it under my nose.

I followed my nose up the stairs to the platform, which ended with a door on the right. I let myself in the same way I let myself into the factory entrance, throwing the door to the factory floor as I raced into the room.

That’s when I saw Charly. When I noticed him, I thought you could fit three or four people inside him. He was a hulking vamp, bent over a body that was bouncing its legs through a series of tremors. Charly held the man’s head and stared at me with blood dripping down his chin and a fierce look in his yellow and black eyes that seemed to be telling me to turn around and go home.

Instead, he spat through blood saying, “Hey man I don’t want no trouble.”

I bared my teeth at him, which we often do when we encounter one of our own. That usually results in either a fight or a, “Hey, what’s up?” type of response. You need to be prepared for both. Charly went with option number two.

“Really,” he said. “I don’t want no damn trouble.” Charley’s prey was convulsing. Charly had taken too much blood. The factory owner’s eyes were rolling to the back of his head, his mouth agape like it was designed to catch stuff falling from the ratty metal ceiling. Charly shoved the man’s head in my direction hard enough that I thought he’d tear it from its neck. “You want some?”

I shook my head. Not now I don’t, I thought. The bald factory owner, already a small man, looked like a tiny doll with Charly holding him, and a bit pudgy in his gray suit. One heavily worn dress shoe had fallen off, laying a few feet in front of him. Blood soaked the top of his suit coat and white dress shirt underneath. Charly, I determined at that moment, was a slob. I wouldn’t have predicted at that moment that I’d ever go hunting with him.

Charly stood up, dropping the man’s head to the ground like he was letting go of a basketball. The factory owner’s head made an unpleasant sound as it thudded to the dark concrete floor. “Name’s Richard Cory,” he said.

I stuck my hand out. “Jade.”

Charly laughed. “No, man, I mean, that man there’s name is Richard Cory. A dirtbag if there ever was one.” He bent down, tore off a clean part of Cory’s shirt, and wiped his blood-soaked mouth. After throwing the rag at Cory’s lifeless body, he extended his hand. I had dropped mine, so I reached out again to accept his hand. “My name is Charly. Pleased to meet you.”

I nodded. “A dirtbag, huh?”

Charly nodded. “Sixteen-hour shift just this last day to get those rolls of steel you see in there pumped out and onto the container.” He pointed in the direction of the factory floor. “One short lunch break. Half hour. Feeds them cans of beans. He doesn’t even let them bring in their own food. Boys as young as eleven working the shift. Then you know what he does? He goes home, beats on his kids. Well, not anymore. And look what I found here.”

Charly led me to a safe in the corner of Cory’s small office, which was furnished with only a metal desk and the safe in the corner. The safe’s door had been torn off. “Lookee there,” Charly said, pointing to the safe. Stacks of money were stuffed inside so firmly that it would have been a chore to pull any of it out.

“Now I need to know what kind of vamp you are,” said Charly, looking at the safe instead of me.

I shook my head. “You can have it,” I said. “And I’m not saying that because you’re five times larger than me.”

Charly smiled from one bulbous cheek to the other. It was the first time I noticed the perpetual sweat on his forehead. “Will you help me bring it to his suffering family?”

“Hell yeah,” I replied.

“Probably ill-gotten,” said Charly as he knelt to start pulling money out of the safe. “This man’s shop here is not exactly making profits like old Henry Ford.” He continued to pull stacks of money out of the safe and dump them onto the floor. “We could be putting his family in danger by delivering this to them though.”

“Looks like there’s enough there that they can move to whatever town they want to. What do you suppose he was into?”

“Booze? A speakeasy somewhere? Both?”

“Any idea what the local mob’s into around here?”

Charly stopped to look at me, adjusting from the knelt position to throw one foot in front so he could lean on one knee. “Booze. Like everyone else.” He thought for a moment. “Let’s just take half then. Make it look like a robbery. That’ll keep the family safe.”

“What about the bites? The cops will be alarmed.” Bites on dead people don’t heal.

“Let them be. There are no vampires these days, right? Everybody knows that.” He grinned widely. We didn’t need to worry about things like fingerprints.

After a long search, we found a burlap sack in a storage room. We packed the money into it and broke into the Cory family house the next day to make our delivery. Mom and the kids were out of the house. We left a note for the wife on their king bed: “We’re sorry we had to kill your husband. Take the money in the sack and go far away so that the criminals your husband was working with don’t find you or the stash. Good luck.”

And that’s how I met Charly.

We fed together regularly. We got along great, despite our different feeding habits, and despite my insistence on a quick prayer before each feeding. When he asked me why I prayed before a feeding, I told him, “In case I kill the poor bastard.”

Charly helped me get back on my feet financially and emotionally. I had been battling deep depression before I met him. After two thousand years, life can get old. I felt done. I even sliced off my finger once to look for signs of aging, but when the damn thing grew back in a few minutes, I knew I had thousands of years left in me. I didn’t know that Charly was ten thousand years old until much later. If I had known at that moment in my personal history, I would have found a way to off myself. Two thousand was long enough. Eight thousand more would have seemed like torture.

When I complained about living in the forest, Charly told me that if I didn’t like it, I could change my situation. He was right. Vampires can pretty much do anything we set our minds to. I chose the solitary existence of forest life because I was lonely and tired. I didn’t want to be around people. I wanted to kill them, to be honest. That scared me.

“You don’t play any music?” he asked me one day not long after he sucked the life out of Richard Cory.

“Yeah, I play.”

“What do you play?”

“Everything.”

“Sax?”

“Yeah.”

“We could use a sax player,” he said. “Pay’s not great, but the music will keep your spirit alive. And you never know who’ll stop in and jam with us. Gene Krupa came in the other night. Jammed with us for three hours.”

That changed everything. When I started playing with his band, none of them gave me funny looks for my purple hair or lips or the blue hue of my skin or the way I towered over everyone else. I could riff on the sax, and that was enough to make them happy.

When we jammed at the club, Charly drifted into the dialect of the people around him to the point where I could sometimes not understand what he was saying. Such is the life of the vampire. You must adopt local speech patterns. We stand out enough as it is. The way we look makes it mandatory that we live an urban life. Country folk will kill us just for the blue or red hue or funny teeth.

Refer a friend

One day recently, I asked Charly if he ever preyed on anyone that he thought was innocent. “There’s always been assholes,” he replied after he had revealed his age to me. “Even ten thousand years ago, there was always some jerk in the tribe who wanted to get something over on someone. So. No. I don’t think so. And now. Now it’s easy. So easy to find a deserving source of food. I ain’t like you. I like to rip and go, not worry about killin’. I’m like Dexter, man.”

“Dexter?”

“Yeah, Dexter.”

“Who’s Dexter?”

“You know, TV Dexter. Serial killer who kills shitty people?”

I laughed at that. I hadn’t heard of Dexter. But he sounded awesome.

During the ninety or so years I’ve known Charly, I’ve promised myself after every hunt together that I’d teach him some table manners. There are cleaner ways to feed, but Charly is sloppy. But how do you correct someone who’s lived for ten thousand years?

Thanks for reading!

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