I confess, I did not stay around to watch the outcome. Perhaps, at the time, I believed I would protect her from harm; but in my infinite state, time passes by quickly when you are confined to a coffin for the better part of undeath. The sun rose and fell, then fell again; and I heard and saw no signs of the starlet. I passed by her house one evening and though I heard her pleading with someone, though I sensed no one else in the room with her, so I assumed she was handling it over the telephone. Perhaps it was mercy that stayed my hand. I still had not drank. I did not wish to bring her any more trouble, and I did not wish to harm her abuser, not really, not if it meant killing him. It was this hesitance, I soon learned, that would bring about my first real test as a vampire.
It was a cold grey night when it happened. It had been nine days since the telephone call, and I admit I had forgotten about my dalliance with the mortal. In that time I had fed off the blood of rats and the occasional bit of poultry I found in neighbouring yards close to my estate, where the rivers met with the frontier houses and offered wide acres for raising animals. All the speakeasys were open. Prohibition was in full effect. I could smell the alcohol on the blood of men and women for miles around, and I was drawn to it like a mosquito to a drop of blood. In truth, at this point I was practically feral; clad in the clothes of centuries past, relics I had recovered from my Master's house, I must've looked a sight as I passed through the gutters and the bylanes of the city. I leaned outside of a tavern for some several minutes, but the lights inside hurt my eyes. Candles have a nauseating effect on me. They remind me of my own immortality; how I appear to the humans; and eventually I gave up on trying to coax one of the mortals outside. Alcohol dulls their senses, making my thoughts harder to reach them. And as I was walking along the lane and back towards my dwelling to spend the rest of the dying evening inside my coffin, I heard it.
A three-tiered flash of lightning came from the studio to my left. It was accompanied in threes, as well. First by the sound of gunshots. Rap, rap, rap. Then by a long, thin, horrible scream. Then by a dull, muffled thud and the sound of a backdoor opening and someone escaping down a long set of corrugated stairs. I heard then a car door opening and tires squealing as the killer took flight. There was no ambiguity about it. Someone had been murdered, and I went up towards the studio through the second floor window without hesitation; and realised at once it was the same room I had been in several nights ago, only now the bed was covered in blood, and lying in the quilts was the small, terrified angel I had set upon all those nights ago. She reached out to me at once.
As I fell upon her, I realised at once the extent of her wounds, and that she would die. She was almost as cold as I was, gasping through broken lungs. She pinned her eyes to mine and sought words that did not come. I could guess them. The director had returned; I could read her thoughts. He had told her to submit, and she said she wouldn't. And that she did not blame me, it would've happened the same way no matter the cause. She had been meaning to escape... to drive somewhere very far away from Paris and stop her career in the films and perhaps return to the Americas. She smiled as she reached out and touched my cheek and held me, and her breath stilted and I felt her death arrive. I knew then she was in a terrible pain--and stricken with guilt--and morose with sorrow--I did the only thing I could've done when faced with a tragedy of my own making.
My lips sealed hers in death's loving kiss. She kissed me softly in return, already dying. Her nails caught my skin, clinging for dear life. And her lips were soft and wet, both with blood and with fear. I tasted her immediately. The copper of her blood. The thickness of it. The sweet voluptuousness of its eternal promise. And as I kissed, I started to go deeper. Further down and into her neck. And it was then she was resurrected. For a brief, fleeting moment her body throbbed against mine. Her arms fell limp to her sides and she shook in my arms. My abstinence ended. I drank human blood for the first time since becoming an immortal. Her eyes stared towards the ceiling as she gulped as I gulped. It was as if she was mirroring me, listening to the sound of me drinking her own blood. Her body curled in ecstasy; I saw her small feet in those nylons curl and begin to quiver badly as the toes curled too far back. Then a dying breath ripped through her as I crunched down on her jugular and took it all. I did it badly, looking back. She died then with one eye open, the other fallen, her lips curling to one side and her arm flopping drunkenly against the bed. And like a monster I fed upon her. I told myself I was some horrid beast who feeds off've the living to ensure his own hell. And I began to sob into her carcass--then slowly, I felt something. A kind of peace came over me. A warmth filled my stomach I had never felt before. And as I ripped my teeth from her skin and threw my head back, I felt powerful. I felt like I had the strength of three or maybe even four men coursing through my veins. And when I looked down at her, she was not so terrible as I had imagined. She looked entirely peaceful. Her little eyelashes cuddling her cheeks, her face forming a vague smile, her gentle hand wrapped in mine--peace from her abusive lover achieved. And I felt her energy coursing through me, and I began to believe it would live on. That the blood I had drawn was now a part of me and so was the memory of our meeting. Our brief triste, our terrible affair. I laid her down in the blood-soaked sheets and she curled like a petal through roses. The last touch of a blush touched her cheeks, and her throat was red with blood, and she was very much dead. Though I felt no pity for her. No sorrow. No guilt. Only love and a fleeting awareness of the fragility of the human race, and that all these lambs would die eventually, and that perhaps this is what my Master meant for me when he brought me back. To show little mercy nor pity towards these poor creatures, for their lives are such brief and squalid affairs, and that my kiss is a gift too precious to withhold. As I stood up and left her, her fingers fell from my arm and she seemed to be at peace.
I left, and for the first time since becoming a vampire, felt I belonged in my own skin. I went out into that night without fear or loathing, and killed indiscriminately until dawn. By the time I laid down in my coffin, the streets were red with blood. Seven victims had been claimed by the authorities, all of them with deep and mysterious wounds, some of them men, some of them women, rich and poor alike, but all of them guilty. Guilty of what? Guilty of sin. I had done what I should have done before. I had found men and women like the director; abusers, killers, thieves of essence; and like a dark harbinger I had lured them into alleyways and quiet shops that kept their blinds open after dark, and I had fed upon them until they told me their secrets and bared to me the private matters of their souls. I had found the director at home, in bed with his wife, and I killed her first; for she was a money launderer and a drug abuser and her blood tasted oily with the perfume of pharmaceuticals. Then I woke the director and had him show me the gun. And in a dispassionate voice he told me everything. I held his strings, listened to his words, then had him intimately caress the gun in his own mouth; and when he pulled the trigger, he told me he deserved it. That she had been a nice girl, a good girl, but too tempting, and too sweet. That he had promised her the world; and given her nothing instead. The gunshot rang out throughout the landing, but by the time he fell to his knees I was already gone.
I sent the director's inheritance to the starlet's parents in New England. I found the address in one of her vanity drawers when I returned to the studio just before dawn. They would arrange the funeral, I knew, and put her body to rest. Then I fled home and fell into my coffin and dragged the scraping tombstone back where it belonged to block out the light that was already spilling into the mausoleum; and I slept like I had not slept in years. In satisfaction, and bleak amusement, and dark pride.
I dreamt of the scarlet. She was laughing in my dreams.
