Charlotte

There are silver springs and dust bunnies over my head, and I’m laying with my face up towards somebody’s bed. I’ve been pining for her return for ages, and finally I can see the door crack open. Light spills out on the hardwood floor, and she takes dainty steps forwards. The door shuts with a soft bom, and her long claws click clack more on the ground than my ears appreciate.

Then she’s on the sheets, and curled up asleep before I know it. She’s going out like a sparkler, and it’s gonna end fast. I slink out from under the frame, and I peer into the darkness, letting my eyes adjust and switch. Soon the fuzziness fades and I’m met with a plain clear sight, almost as if there’s a flashlight shone on everything in the room. My fangs are enlarging, pushing out from deep in my gums and snout, sharp and now peeking out from under my lips. I pull them back, and my canines glimmer dangerously. She’s not looking.

Ashes and old wrappers are littered about on the floor, and I’m careful not to trod on them as I rise up to my full height, instead of shrunken down like before. This way, I seem to encompass the whole room with my wings, and I have to crane my neck down at a spiraling angle to reach the soft veins in her neck.

I close my eyes before I go in for the bite. As soon as my silver teeth, my drug, slips beneath her skin, she goes under: into a deep slumber from which she won’t awaken from for a long time. No, she’s not dead. She’s just knocked out cold. And that’s how I like them, while I guzzle down their greasy red.

It’s filling me up all to the brim. I’ll burst if I’m touched, let alone shoved off of her at this point. I can feel myself hungering though the sheer amount of blood that’s pouring from waterfalls into the lake that is my belly is of a dangerous quantity to both her and I.

Drop by drop, what powered her throughout her many days enters my belly, like a fog of memories. Warm and wet. My mouth is writhing in a paralyzing fit of ecstasy, and it isn’t much longer before my vision clouds over and I can taste her life.

The first one, it just happened last night. She’s standing there, and there’s a yawning cave stretching before her. Stalactites spiral out like teeth, and there are dragons hanging from the rocks. She’s yelling, and her voice echoes but is devoured by the wide sky above her before it ever reaches the ears of the long-dead souls.

It seems that she recognizes this one. It rushes closer, and his skin is purple and blossoming. There’s a square hole punched immediately below his left eye, and I recall from the larger picture that all the others have it too.

They’re paler white than I’ve ever seen before, and that’s a surprise, considering my victims are usually milky. I can hear a hiss at the corner of my own mind, and I jump away from my victim, hitting my head on the ceiling with too loud of a bump. She doesn’t budge, because she’s too deep in sleep, but I can see some lights clicking on across the way. Panicking, I shrink down and hide once more, and it’s only when my eyes are met with solid black that it hits me.

Victims. My heart beats far too fast, and I clutch my chest for fear that it will cause my very death. After all that blood, I’m usually content and resting… But… There’s another vampire out there, but they aren’t just drinking. They’re branding their victims and framing them as suicides.

I’m shaking.

What the hell do I do now?