AN
I came back to myself right around the time the body in my arms became dead weight. This was... not according to plan. The madness that took me when Mariana died, I had thought it vanquished. But tonight, talking to this human who reminded me so much of my wife, it proved to have just bided its time. At some point during our dance, I had imagined myself back in the past, when she was still alive and I'd believed our happiness would last forever. She had known what I was, and although she had no wish to become like me, she had accepted all of me wholeheartedly. I loved her enough to accept her wishes, foolishly believing we would have at least a human lifetime together. When she died, much too young even by human standards, I let the grief consume me. It was not until I returned to our home, many years later, that I managed to pull the broken pieces of myself back together. Ever since I have tried to live as she would have wanted me to.
And now the madness had returned, and made me believe it was Mariana in my arms, and I could not bear the thought of losing her all over again. I bit her, this girl who was and was not Mariana, fully intending to make her like me. No thought for her family, or her own feelings on the matter – exactly what Mariana would not have wanted me to do.
Too late now, however. It was done; the turning of a new vampire, once started with the intent of the bite, was inevitable. Elizabeth Bell would wake up a vampire, there was no stopping it now. What she did next would be up to her.
All I could do at this point was to try and make her transition as comfortable as possible, teach her what I could. I did not envy her the hunger she would feel. I had gone through it, centuries ago, as every vampire must, but by now I was too old to be much bothered by it. The older the vampire, the less blood he needed to sustain himself, that was the way of it. The feeding I had done to turn Elizabeth would see me through a decade. The oldest of us, rumour had it, did not need to feed more than once a century. But a young one, well. She would be lucky to go a day without feeling the pangs, and there was only one way to sate them.
I laid the body on the couch and smoothed out her hair. Already she was paler than she had been, hardly breathing and her heart fluttering anxiously, as if it could feel her impending doom. Soon both functions would stop, she would die – and then she would wake up again.
There were things to be arranged before that happened. Time to act.