“Sure.” What was that? Am I sulking? I need to have my head checked.
“I am telling you the truth, whether you decide to believe it or not.” He leans forward and gently touches my arm, I shift back out of his reach.
“Don’t touch me.” The words leave my lips like tiny sparks of hatred.
“Please, Tegan, don’t make this any harder than it already is.”
“Will you let me leave?”
“I can’t, not yet. I need to explain things to you about our existence, about everything. If you are to be one of the few humans aware of us, then you need to know that we are not the killers portrayed in your stories. If I let you go now, when you’re like this, angry, hostile, then it won’t end well for either of us.”
“I can’t see anything ending well for me now. I just want a normal life, but fucked up things seem to keep happening to me.” My voice crackles with tears, and I know I’m drowning in my own self-pity, but I can’t seem to help it.
“I’m truly sorry my love. Will you let me explain things to you properly?” he asks, an ounce of hope in his words.
“Ethan, does it look like I have a choice?” I burst, gesturing towards the door that he locked just after he brought me here.
“Very well, I would prefer it if you calmed down, but I suppose things could be worse.” He stops a moment, as if trying to think of where to start. The silence drags on for a couple of heartbeats, and then he begins “As you have already deduced, I am a vampire, as is Lucas…”
“What about Delilah?” I interrupt, thinking of her otherworldly beauty.
“Delilah…” he says, “is neither one nor the other. She is a dhamphir, half human, half vampire. In fact, she is my half-sister, we share a father.”
“You a share a father? Does that mean you were born?” I ask, while visions of coffins and the undead swirl on the periphery of my brain.
“Yes I was born,” he replies. “We are not the dead things most myths say we are. We are just another species. Of course, it is not known how we evolved, for nobody can trace our origins that far back. It is thought that we evolved from humans, similar to how humans believe they evolved from apes. When you think about it that way, it isn’t so hard to believe that we exist.”
“I guess not.” I admit reluctantly, still wary of him, and not exactly liking the insinuation that humans are the equivalent of apes to a vampire.
“So, to survive,” he continues, “we must drink blood, human or animal, it doesn’t matter so much. However human blood provides a far better high and much more nutrients, more strength, and therefore the majority of us favour it. We do not need to kill to feed, you must understand this for it is vital. We have certain powers that allow us to hypnotise our prey, the human is brought under a trance and they do not remember that the feeding took place. They fall into a state of euphoria from the chemicals released in our saliva when we bite, similar to what you would feel by taking any class A drug.”
“Nice.” I say sarcastically. “Don’t you think that’s unfair, preying on someone and then in effect making them a heroin addict? Don’t they get withdrawal symptoms?”
“Not if it is only once, and we can tell if another vampire has already fed on a human. It’s instinctive.”
“How many of you are there exactly? I don’t get how you can exist and people haven’t discovered it yet.”
“In the grand scale of things there are very few of us, Tegan. We make up less than half a per cent of the world’s population. We normally live in cities because there are more people to feed from and it is also easier for us to blend into the crowd.”
I try to do the maths in my head. “That’s still about thirty-five million vampires in the world.”
He laughs at my estimation. “Did you just divide the percentage in your head?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“It’s cute. But really, the number is not so large when you consider that our kind are spread throughout the world. For instance, here in Tribane there are probably less than a thousand of us.”
“A thousand? That’s more than I’d like.” I interject, grudgingly.
“Tegan,” he breathes, his expression pained. “I don’t want you to hate me.”
“I don’t hate you,” I say feeling bad for being mean, even if he is a vampire. “I’m just having trouble getting my head around all of this.”
“That’s only to be expected. You can ask me whatever you want, I promise to answer truthfully.”
I think for a minute, trying to recall all of the things I know about vampires that may or may not be true. “Can you go out during the day?” I ask, beginning with the obvious.
“No, sunlight is extremely uncomfortable for us and our skin is highly sensitive to its rays. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t burst into flames or anything quite so dramatic, but we are nocturnal by nature.”