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The Snake Behind Me Hisses
I. “Sooner or later, the thirst always wins” Drake - Blade Trinity.
She likes watching bad vampire movies. She loves watching good vampire movies. She likes curling up with Eli, on the usually beat up old sofa of wherever they have laired up, and reading trashy horror adventures or erotic literary affairs, where the anti-heroes sleep away the day and drink blood and fuck all night.
She likes the romanticized, almost fetishist, ideas that humans have about vampires. Since to the greater population, vampires are nothing more than a stylized myth, they are free to be as descriptive and perverted in their fantasies as they wish. She knows that the story mongers would be bitterly disappointed to know that there is no magical ingredient in human blood, there is no elixir of life, they are not dying without it.
The harsh truth is, she and her kind do need blood to survive, human blood just tastes really good.
Trouble with humans is, they’re like cocaine laced cookies, you can never eat just one.
Eli considers her pastime to be nothing more than a slow torture. She sees it as a reminder as to why she and hers still had their heads when some of their more flamboyant and blood thirsty brethren didn’t.
::
II. “Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs.” Spike – Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
It was never going to be an easy transition; it could never just happen over night. There was no quick switch that could be flipped and that would be it, no more human blood. It took them a while to find an alternate source that could sustain them all for a start. Smaller animals, rabbits and the like, were good but they needed so many of them to feed the whole pack that they quickly had to move on to find more. Rodents didn’t carry nearly enough blood, but large rats were gratefully devoured during times of extreme drought.
They tasted like warmed over hell though.
The first time she tried to pierce a cow hide she damn near broke her back fangs. Though that was mainly from the awkward angle she came at it while trying to keep away from its legs. Where human skin is soft and supple and almost painfully delicate, sucking on cattle is basically like chewing on leather. Tough, stringy and they were a bitch to get under control. They weren’t just going to stand there and let you eat them alive. Conrad’s shattered rib cage was testament to that.
And everything had to be eaten alive. Unsurprisingly dead cow's blood had the same effect as dead man's blood.
They were just outside of Montana when Karen slipped. She didn’t just slip up; she screwed herself and the pack by not killing her victim. Hunters found the man, so near death, just not near enough. The next day Karen’s head was planted on a stick and posted outside their nest.
The pack barely made it out of there in one, or several pieces.
::
III. “I don’t want to die.”
“Then you should never have been born.” Sita – Christopher Pike’s The Last Vampire Chronicles.
The longer she lives, the more she fears death. The years wear on, but still living in hiding is preferable to dying. But soon, their sloppy attempts at survival became the finely honed art of blending in, and eventually they were able to live for years in one place before needing to move on.
Still, no matter what they did, hunters found them.
They didn’t find out about Maria’s murder for a few days, until it made the papers. Maria was never the type to just run off, not since her mate had been killed a few years back, but it didn’t sink home until they saw it in print.
Then Christina was killed.
Then the hunters showed up. Different hunters, not the one or ones who had killed Maria or Christina, she was sure it was the same hunter to murder both. The same one that had been tracking them for months.
She had wanted to leave then. Pick up and get the hell out of dodge, they had already been discovered and it would be long before the newcomers found them as well.
But she let herself be swayed by a sincere, stoic smile and the promise that in might be ok, the new hunters didn’t know jack about them.
They found out about Conrad when the hunters went to the bar to gloat and toast their victory. Ding dong the wicked vampire was dead. She wasn’t a stranger to regret, and that familiarity just made it all that much worse.
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IV. “Howdy, I’m going to separate your head from your shoulders, I hope you don’t mind none.” Severen – Near Dark.
The hunter tried to squirm away from her. But there was a limit to how far he could go and all he succeeded in doing was offering her his neck. And wasn’t that just temptation on a smoothly tanned plate. The boy tried on a half decent bravado, but his voice was thick with fear, and for one terrifying moment she wondered how that fear would taste. She leaned in closer, her eyes half focused on the vein that pulsed invitingly in the boys’ throat, she considered the fact that she could pull away aging something of a personal victory. Years of abstinence hadn’t made the want go away like she had hoped they would.
She could feel Eli’s eyes on her, silently watching her back them all into a corner. Deep down she knew she was running a fools errand, but she felt that she needed to try. It seemed that she had chosen the right hunter to explain herself to; at least this one appeared to be listening, or maybe he was just placating her in order to get out of here with his jugular in tact.
“We should just kill him.” Eli hissed to her before he moved to take the hunter away again.
“No,” she said. “That’s not who we are, not anymore.” Now if only she could get her voice to stop shaking when she said that, it might be easier for her to believe.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Lenore.”
“Yeah, me too.”
::
V. “Don’t be afraid, I’m going to give you the choice I never had.” Lestat – Interview with the vampire, the movie.
Eli patched up the hunter’s – Sam’s - wounded arm. It wasn’t that bad or that deep, but neither of them could concentrate on what Sam was telling them - or even that Sam was trying to help them. All they could see was his blood as it dripped from the cut.
Eli looked like he would prefer to cut off his own head than touch the boy, and for a while the image of Eli trying to apply a bandage while still trying to keep an arms length away was comical. At least until her half hearted laughter dissolved into a coughing fit that reminded her why she couldn’t attend to him herself. She was having a hard enough time just holding her head up. When he was done, Eli pushed the hunter away and scooped her up gently; she laid her head on his chest and closed her eyes just like she did when Sam held her this way, but Eli felt…safer? She didn’t know.
“We’ll be ok now,” she said as Eli carried her to their car. Sam didn’t look convinced.
“Where will you go?”
“You really expect me to tell you?”
“No.”
“Smart boy.”
“Take care, Lenore.”
“You too, Sam. You too.”
FIN