Let's just jump into chapter three! Very little dialogue in this chapter. Aaaaand we're half way through the story now... Enjoy!

I didn't want to kill David and I wasn't going to and I think he knew that. Still, I couldn't just let him have his way. I left Max's house that night determined that I would never look back.

Unfortunately, never looking back is easier said than done.

I returned to Oregon where I had been staying with my grandparents and I tried to carry on with life like I had for the past two years. I tried to push David and Santa Carla out of my mind but that was literally impossible.

My sleep was plagued by dreams of David as it had been since Max first turned me. This was because, I would later find out, I was an all-seer. As a halfling, I had no control over the powers so everything came to me in flashes, mostly in the form of dreams. The dreams would often be things that had already occurred and it took me a really long time to realize that they were real.

In the meantime, I watched almost daily as David went about his existence. He spent his time moving back and forth between Max's house and the cavern as though he couldn't decide which place to call home. He spent a lot of time on the streets preying on the unsuspecting but he seemed dissatisfied with every kill that my dreams showed me. He seemed discontent.

And that was how David had always been. He was never someone who could be alone for long periods of time. As a human, David had been the type of person to thrive in the company of others even if it was only one person, as long as it was someone. But he had no one now and life as a vampire certainly felt more lonely than life as a human, even if you did have someone. That I could personally attest to.

I felt bad for him, guilty even. I had to stop feeling that way. David had made his own bed and now he had to lie in it.

I did everything in my power to avoid my concern for him and that meant just going about my life as usual. Technically speaking, I was twenty-one years old and so I had gotten a job as a bartender. It was the only job I could do at night that didn't require any schooling on my part. I had begun to accept that I would probably be living out the rest of my existence as a halfling, never aging until I just died of natural causes or however it was supposed to work. One night, however, everything changed.

It was two in the morning and the patrons of the bar were flooding out the doors. I was left with my boss, totaling the alcohol sales and splitting up the tips. It was a nightly routine and it usually only took us an hour every time. Afterward, my boss usually offered to give me a ride home and I would accept it because anything was better than being out on the streets at three in the morning. That particular night, however, I had to decline. My stash of blood had gotten low and I was in desperate need of more. I knew I would have to stock back up.

I had a deal with a homeless man that lived in the park near my grandparent's house. He would bleed himself a little bit every day and store it away for me. It wasn't the freshest or cleanest option but I did what I had to do to get by.

The park was only a short walk from the bar so I took to the streets and made my way in a hurry to the bench where the man always slept. He wasn't there when I arrived though and I realized that I was going to have to seek out another alternative. I was so hungry. Starving.

I started in disappointment and frustration back toward home but I didn't make it far. I was grabbed from behind by a man probably twice my size and he held a knife to my throat.

"Don't struggle, girl." He rasped out against my face, the smell of booze thick on his breath. He pulled me closer against him and started to drag me toward the bushes.

I was terrified. I knew what he wanted from me almost instantly. I recognized his voice. He was a usual at the bar; a real pig of a man that would always try to ask me out on dates and then get really irate when I turned him down. He was going to rape me. Well, he was going to try, anyway, but there was no way I was going to let it happen.

As soon as he had me behind the bushes, he threw me to the ground and began to unbuckle his belt. That was the first time in my life that I was grateful for vampirism. Being a halfling, I was stronger than ordinary humans and this man was no exception. While he fumbled drunkenly with his belt, I swept his legs out from under him and he fell to the ground. I tried to scurry to my feet, determined that I would get out of the situation without anyone getting hurt but he had other plans.

He grabbed my ankles and yanked me back, kneeling over me with the knife poised at my throat again but my hands were around his wrist, wrestling for control over the knife. I could feel the bones in his wrist cracking under my grip and he was grunting in pain but he didn't relent. Still, I was stronger than him and I was able to force him backward, wrenching the knife from his hand as I did so. Now brandishing the knife, I swung it widely in his direction to ward him off.

He continued after me, trying to get the knife back. I swung again and this time I slashed him across the palm of his hand. Blood began to pour profusely from the wound I'd created and in that moment I lost myself. The scent reached my nostrils and it took all I had to take a step back from him. "Please, I don't want to hurt you."

But he took a step forward, ignoring my warning. He reached for me and I saw the blood trickling down his elbow and it was over in an instant.

I had to commend David. When I thought back on the moment he told me was a vampire, I realized it must have taken him a lot of restraint when I grabbed a kitchen knife and sliced my hand open, urging him to drink just to prove his words were true and he didn't. And even later that night, when he needed to use my blood to make it seem like he had bitten me to turn me, he never lost himself being that close to my blood.

I was not as strong. I thought I could be but I couldn't.

There was very little left recognizable of my assailant when I was finished. His flesh had been stripped from his bones and his face was a mangled mess. To be honest, I don't remember most of the feeding. I blacked out and instinct took over. A small part of me felt bad for chastising David as much as I had. As I stood over the corpse of my attacker heaving for breath and trying to wipe away the blood I was covered in, I realized how easy it was to slip up. Vampirism just came by instinct. It was, more or less, unavoidable.

After that night I tried to go back to the way I had been living but it was a lot harder. I was a full fledged vampire now and there was no coming back from that.

I relied more heavily on blood than I had previously and it was hard to get enough. I found myself draining the blood from raw meat my grandparents bought and bribing even more homeless people to drain themselves of blood with the promise of food and as much alcohol as they wanted. I was willing to do anything to keep myself sustained. Anything but kill.

As time wore on, I trained myself to be content with the bare minimum and life as a full vampire became the new normal. It was still something I resented and I wished with every fiber of my being that I could just reverse it but I knew I couldn't.

In addition to immortality, I was discovering that I had a slew of interesting abilities. I had mastered flying like David and although that was likely something every vampire could do, to me it felt like I was special. I rarely did it, though. I always feared someone would see me or that I might lose control. I also learned how to use hypnosis. It was another power that most vampires were capable of but it was also something that made me feel superior to the rest of the world and I liked to use it often. Lastly, I had the powers of an all-seer. I didn't know the term for it at the time but I soon learned that if I concentrated hard enough, I could see what David was doing at any given moment.

I told myself I didn't care what David was up to. I tried to convince myself that Santa Carla was a part of my life that was over and done with but no matter how much I tried to deny it, I cared. I found myself in my room most nights after work laying in bed and staring at the ceiling but it wasn't the ceiling I was seeing. I was seeing David go about each night in the exact same routine and I knew how he hated for things to be routine.

It was sad watching him. I knew he was lonely but I never realized how lonely until I began watching him through my mind's eye. A whole year had passed since David had turned me and he had spent it all alone. He lived alone, he hunted alone and he slept alone. Everything he did, he did it alone.

But then one night he wasn't alone.

That was when things truly began to change and I knew I couldn't just stay in Florence and ignore the inevitable any longer. I was going to have to go back.

David had apparently grown very tired of being by himself. Honestly, I couldn't blame him. I felt alone just watching him be alone and I had been expecting him to find someone for a while. The person he found, however, was not at all what I was expecting.

I thought that David would be scouring Santa Carla for the perfect replacements for those that he had lost. A new Marko, Paul and Dwayne. Or even a woman... just anyone to keep from being by himself. But he never seemed to be actively searching. He more or less just stumbled upon someone. And had it been someone else, I would have been more than happy to let him have his new comrade but the person he chose; I couldn't stand for it.

David had found a child.