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Years and years, hundreds of them, so many years that the forty-summers old man who’d been changed began to seem like a boy to me.
I’d always appear to be those forty years, but inside I was – I am – so much older, wiser. I’ve met more of my kind. But they’re all gone now. So are the sorcerers.
And I’m waiting.
Always waiting.
For her.
I laugh at the sky like a wild beast.
Back when I was still feeding – some more than two-hundred years ago – a sorcerer had given me an amulet that was rumored to be able to turn my kind back into mortal men. But the only way this could happen was if I found the woman I would claim, the mortal woman who would be mine, and mine alone. I’d know when I saw her. Deep in my primordial bones, I’d just fucking know.
But she never came.
Over the long years, after the war between the vampyrs and the sorcerers that left me the last magical being in this twisted world, as men rose from the dirt and built cities of metal, as their machines thundered across the skein of the world, I waited.
And she never came.
I’d searched far and wide for this woman who would finally make me feel something again, who would penetrate the gruff emptiness that had come to characterize my very being. I’d been a nobleman, a soldier in the Great War, a fisherman, diplomat, farmer, engineer, pilot, professor, and countless other professions, innumerable lives lived, and now I was a businessman, a wealthy, private man.
And I’d never found her.
Perhaps the amulet, buried in the far north in a frozen cave for protection, was a joke, the sorcerers’ final jest for the last vampyr, or vampire, as we came to be known later.
Vampire.
Our legend survived in books and later films and television shows, and it was quite amusing to me, in the beginning, to watch how the mortal species fawned over us.
Over me.
Because there is only me now.
I sigh and step back from the edge of the roof.
I’ll spend the night in my study, reading, as I spend so many nights. Or perhaps I will run a circuit in the gym. I could have my private jet take me anywhere in the world, but I’ve seen everything, lived everything. I’m not tired, because I cannot be tired. But I am bored, so achingly fucking bored.
I leap down the balcony and start walking toward the door that will lead into my building. The rain has stopped. It was just a shower. And now it’s passed.
I pause.
For the first time in hundreds of years, I feel the blood-lust trying to creep into my body. My fangs tingle and every muscle in me tenses as I stand there, head tilted, scenting something in the air.
No, not something, someone.
I can scent her, her, I can fucking scent her a mile or two away, her gorgeous sweet smell riding the wind and blooming in my chest like a promise.
The scent of the mortal race is ever-present in the city, surrounding me at all times, and I’ve long ago learned to ignore it lest I want to drive myself insane. But there’s something different about this woman. There’s a primal invitation in her scent, a sweet, welcoming tone. I can feel her blood rushing around her body, so vital and alive, and a deeper need inside of her.
I can smell her womb.
Could it be her?
I don’t have a choice. I have to follow the scent.
I take what I need to appear more human and run back to the edge of the roof and walk along the edge, the wind trying to knock me over every step of the way. I walk to the edge where I know the alleyway is below, the private alleyway I’ve had installed for this very purpose.
Nobody but me knows of its existence, otherwise I might risk some innocent mortal standing there when I leap down one-hundred floors and land in the devastated cement.
The air rushes past me as I fall, bent into a practiced crouch. I land and feel the reverberation pound through my knees and my body. Cement flies into the air and hits the walls all around me. I climb out of the stony hole and then brush my thumb against the hidden access pad, opening a corridor that leads to the city.
I move quickly, a chorus of blood rushing in my ears.
I need to calm down.
I can’t let the blood-lust take me.
It hasn’t taken me for two-hundred years when I decided that I’d never feed, that I’d forgo the pleasure and the captivity of blood. Others of my kind said it was impossible, before the war, when there were others left. But it’s not. It’s difficult, but it’s not impossible.
I burst onto the street and take in another breath of her.
