Author's Note: For those who are concerned with timeline, this case occurs a few years after Mick St. John killed Coraline in a fire. Maybe 1995.

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"Are you ready?"

Questions like that are normally posed to women by men who are about to have some serious sexual time together. Something I often imagined, but for my condition just cannot seem to find the proper outlet. At that moment when I noted to myself that a man, and to top it off, a friend of mine and a mentor, was the one who said it, I came to a realisation that I pathetically and desperately needed to hit the sack with a willing woman –

"Mick!"

That effectively tore me away from very vivid imaginings of – anyway, there I was, sitting in a considerably plush chair. A rather modern take on a study table rested between me and the door. I rather missed my traditional office table. It was not massive, not angular and definitely had no metal at all. But after a lopsided fight between a much harangued ex-husband and me, the wooden table lost two of its legs and had to be sacrificed to the wood chipper.

My eyes scanned the gleaming glass surface. Upon it littered the usual suspects found on any office desks, except for one. A tall wineglass filled with blood. My eyes affixed themselves upon them and my fingers flew greedily toward it, taking the stem and was about to drain it down when a polite 'ahem' stopped me.

"Shouldn't you be saying something like – I don't know, a toast – before you drink up your blood?" Josef said with one hand holding up his wineglass. "I did not know you're that thirsty."

"Shut up," I said cordially to him. "And yeah, I do have something to say. Let's wish that the first case does not come from you." I clanked my wineglass with his and drained the blood. Resisting the urge to lick the glass clean, I put it away.

"That's something I can't promise," Josef smiled. "How does the new office feel like?"

I looked around. The window behind me was a nice touch. It was built in such a way that I would be able to enjoy the view, but it also shielded me from the sun. "Do I really need this much of space? It really feels a bit too airy."

"Hey, be thankful. You don't get a loft with a very reasonable price tag every decade. You're lucky the housing is in the gutters this year."

For Josef, a reasonable price tag means his spare change. The man is capitalism incarnate. Money means everything to him, from his mansion to the shoes that he wears. He is money-smart, I give him that. Everything has a price tag, even the blood we live upon. While I buy mine from dealers in blood banks all over Los Angeles, he strolls to any woman he fancies and makes an offer she cannot refuse. Often, in terms of a small apartment and a steady monthly cash flow combined with a watertight contract that bans them from communicating to anyone. Not even the tabloids.

"Don't you need a secretary for your files?" he asked further. "You have quite a collection of case files over there."

"No!" The decline came perhaps a bit too quickly. Josef turned to me with a brow raised. "I mean, no, thank you. I manage myself pretty well."

"The last time you said that, this –"Josef spread his hands around "- happened."

All right, I had to admit. There was another story behind this relocation.

My small office was broken into by the aforementioned ex-husband from hell. He thought I was the cause of their divorce while, in truth, his wife actually wanted me to check upon him. A woman's intuition is rarely wrong, so when I happened upon him cheating and showed the wife the incriminating photos, she gave him the divorce papers.

Come to think of it, I am the cause of their divorce.

The husband simply saw it from the only angle he was familiar with: he thought I was the new beau who got his wife so hot, tricked her into divorcing him and demanding a high alimony. So he went over to my office one afternoon, thought I was not there, and proceeded to try starting a fire. Vampires, even when sleeping, still retain their sharp noses. It was for the mortal, and unlucky or lucky for me, depending on perspectives.

If you think lucky, then that was how my office got relocated and redesigned. Josef thought 'the old one was too gumshoe, too noir. It is high time to start a clean slate'.

Up yours, too, Josef.

Josef stared at me again, as if he knew what I was thinking. He does, really. That doesn't frighten me anymore. I used to be frightened when anyone did that to me. Now I prefer to be an open book to him. I don't hide things from him. Well, maybe certain things.

"How are you after – well, Coraline?" Josef wondered as he sipped his glass of blood.

What did I tell you? Should I or should I not?

"Well," I began reluctantly, "I still feel guilty. What she did was unforgivable, though. But we had not been seeing each other eye to eye from the beginning."

Josef pulled a chair and sat facing me across the study. "Tell me. I heard you first applied for divorce."

Let's not forget one restraining order and a bunch of other stuff that kept her away from me for at most a week. "We kind of – uh, fell apart."

"You mean the relationship fell apart."

It was everything. Everything fell apart so fast I had no idea what to catch first; my sanity, my humanity or the love of my (un)life who tore a hole in my psyche and left a big gaping hunger that would remain for the rest of my existence. So yes, I was the first who applied for divorce from her, to make it legal. So human, don't you think?

I chose to catch my humanity first. I chose to be selfish. Was Coraline not selfish, too? She turned me into a vampire without my consent, without me knowing who she was really, selfishly. I arrived into the shadowed world of vampire like a hungry child, scared and orphaned, and I can still recall the way her eyes looked down upon me when I first tasted blood. She was happy to see me draining the blood and life of an innocent soul. I was her favourite little monster she had hoped to teach the darker side of being a vampire.

"There never was a relationship," I replied after a quiet spell. "Only co-dependence."

Josef sneered. "Relationship is co-dependence. The only difference is the way they are played out."

"She relished on my human reactions to satisfy her sick mind games. I depended on her to learn the ways of a vampire. Do you realise, Josef, the things that she did just to satisfy that wicked, twisted sense of curiosity of hers? She killed a man just to see how her family would react. She pushed a nun to her death from a bell tower simply to learn how a rumour spreads. Heck, she kidnapped a girl, thinking I would go back to her and rear a family."

"Sounds like a great experimenter," Josef commented lightly.

That earned him a black stare from me, which he simply looked away with nonchalance.

"But I can see," Josef went on, "and so as you have always said, you are not a fan of ignorant brutality and unconscious manipulation. That is why you started this institution." He chuckled dryly. "You do realise that this somewhat mirrors fiction."

"What fiction?" I asked warily. Being compared to some fiction is like comparing vampires to Bram Stoker, who, actually, got none of them correct.

"Sherlock Holmes, the great detective who fights against the Napoleon of criminals, professor Moriarty who, by sitting in his lecture halls, controls the flow of crimes simultaneously, like a spider in the middle of its web. Tugging the strings here and there and everything falls into place."

I had to smile, even when the imagery of Coraline as an omniscient, terrible spider brought a darker sense of dread into my head. But the spider was already gone, thankfully. "And you are my Watson."

Josef stood up, mortified. "I am not as slow as Watson! Neither am I as unfit. Oh, look at the time, the Hong Kong Exchange is opening soon. Hey, call me when you need something else."

"Are all these for free?" I had to ask. Josef never do anything for free. There had to be a hidden agenda somewhere in that tangled mind of his.

"Are you kidding? I have a cookie jar investment in your little institution. I can bother you anytime with some little problems that I cannot contact the cops for." He cocked his head to a side once more, a sly smile playing on his lips. "And incidentally, most of my problems need immortal intervention. I have a tab in my account with your name on it. Nothing is free, remember?"

I should have guessed. At least he is always honest in manipulating me.

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p/s: this gets better, I swear. just trying to polish it up a bit more...