Introduction
There are just a few things to know about British vampires
There aren't very many of us, less than 100 at a guess.
We are very fragmented, living alone or in mated pairs almost exclusively.
We are very, very, very secretive.
We are pathologically territorial.
The mechanisms of ethical feeding in the UK, and indeed most of modern Europe, is much more complicated than it is in the United States. This small island has been continually inhabited for over 10,000 years. Once upon a time wolves, bears, wild boar, lynx and massive red deer roamed the ancient dark forests but there haven't been any real forests here for nearly 500 years. The eurasian lynx disappeared first, probably as early as 400AD and bears were close behind. Wolves hung on until 1740 but thousands of years of hunting now means that pretty much the closest thing to a carnivorous predator anywhere east of Russia is the humble red fox.
The largest land mammal in the British Isles is the modern red deer, these are a lot smaller than their ancient ancestors and unfortunately live almost exclusively in the national parks of Scotland where their numbers are monitored. Fallow deer and roe deer are much more common but are so tiny they barely constitute a mouthful, it would be like living totally from tiny chunks of wafer, urgh. With this in mind one could argue that it is the humans who need to be depopulated – could we all not do with fewer chavs, neds and benefit scroungers? I can almost hear the roar of support from the Daily Mail readers.
There have never been very many vampires here, they have always been more common on the mainland and to the east in what are now called the countries of Eastern Europe, Romania obviously but also all those counties you never hear about unless it's the Eurovision Song Contest, like Belarus, Estonia, Moldova, Ukraine, Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. There are still wild places there in the east, wild places and unrest. Vampires like war, it's a good cover. Millions of people displaced, disappearing. Perfect. You can feed and feed and no-one has time to get nosy, they just blame it on the most recent dictator and his penchant for extermination.
Unfortunately there hasn't been much in the way of sustained warfare in England since the 12th century. Makes it bloody awkward to feed. It would be nice not to have to be so damn careful all the time, which brings us to the subject of this little story: me.
My name is Sophie and this is the story about how I became a monster and then how I un-became a monster. I guess we should start with the basics, I am 19, or 26, or 45 depending on how you want to look at it. I was a perfectly normal, middle-class human girl for the first 19 years, for the next 10 I was a psychopathic murdering machine, and for the past 16 years I have been trying not be that psychopathic murdering machine.
