Never Alone

By: Ferretti

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I would have said at one point that she was cute. I might have even called her beautiful. But now – now I just call her food. She’s walking home from a party, stupidly cutting through the park. I don’t know her name, I don’t want to. As a rule I never find out their names. I’m maybe ten feet away and I can tell she’s getting edgy. She pauses, looking back over her shoulder but I blend. I learned from my maker well.

Just on the edge of the street lamp I sense motion. In a second one of the shadows’ peels away from the others, moving so fast that it blurs, taking the girl with him.

“Shit.” I pick up the pace, moving as fast as the other vampire had. In two seconds I happened upon Alejandro, my maker, as he attempted to bite the struggling girl. He looked awful. His face was gaunt and his skin sickly white. I sneered with disgust before running into him, knocking him off of my meal.

Despite his advanced years, well over six centuries, and the lack of food he was still strong from desperation. Alejandro is one of the oldest vampires still alive in the world. By mutual agreement, we vampires leave each other alone since there aren’t enough to warrant actual turf wars. We also don’t kill our victims. The old-timers, like Alejandro do. It brings too much attention for a dead body to show up drained of blood.

Our numbers were thinned once already, we don’t relish the idea of complete extinction. Finally I overwhelmed Alejandro. After turning me he had never really been a match. Our strengths, brought about by our turnings, are different in the extent that I had never wanted to be a vampire. Alejandro had toyed with the idea and then found out it hurt.

“Leave.” I hissed, my forearm pressed against his larynx. His eyes were widened in pain and he was gone the minute I moved my arm. Alejandro is the reason for many things in my life. The reason I’m a vampire, the reason I have no permanent address, as permanent as any vampire can really have, the reason I don’t try to get close to anyone.

“Th-thank you.” I had almost forgotten about the girl. I turned to look and she was still sitting where Alejandro had knocked her. Her skirt was riding up her thigh, her shirt was torn and the sleeve on her trench coat had been ripped. Her perfectly placed hair was in disarray and I could see two scratches on her neck.

I sighed, moving to stand before heading over to her. Vampirism is contracted through the sharing of blood but there are some people, extremely rarely, who only have to get bitten. For those rare people everyone in our “community” had a special serum that stopped the mutation of cells that resulted from being turned.

“Come on.” I started walking away. It was a second before I realized she wasn’t following. “I have something you need to put on those scratches on your neck. If you’d rather become a monster like him…” That motivated her into scrambling up out of the bushes.

Alejandro isn’t really a monster. He’s old and very stuck in his ways. Alejandro’s a threat to himself, to us as a whole and to whomever he deems weak enough to be prey. She hurried behind me, wiping the dirt and leaves from her jacket and pulling them out of her hair. I focused ahead, making sure that I didn’t walk so fast I’d lose her but also staying in front of her so I wouldn’t have to think about… everything.

“What- what was that?” I wondered when the questions were going to start. Unfortunately for her I wasn’t about to answer when I was just going to erase her memory as soon as she left my apartment. I had to make sure that I didn’t start calling her something, getting attached was not a plausible answer.

I could feel the sudden tension as she realized I wasn’t going to answer. She was mad but she was still following, that’s good enough for now.

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A/N: School assignment that I felt like posting. It’s been a while since I’ve been on FictionPress but it’s about time I came back. FYI this story does switch perspectives between this character (you learn the name later) and the girl he's just rescued. Enjoy!