Night falls.

When the sun sets, Margolo will do what she does best. She will take to the streets, ambling aimlessly until she finds some hapless soul who has the misfortune to be carrying a notebook. She will take them, as hungry for the paper as she is for the blood. Once she has had her fill, she will take the notebook, any other paper that may be on the person's body, any stray pens, and flee. She leaves any money on the person, unless they are actually dead when she finishes with them. Margolo doesn't need money. Margolo needs paper.

For the rest of the night, Margolo will retreat to her hole, carrying her precious stash of paper and ink. She will stay there until the first rays of sun blink sleepily over the horizon. Then she will rest.

Margolo does not participate in the nightly flings anymore. She does not deign to speak to the three pathetic specimens that call themselves her coven. She refuses to think of them, to think that they might be the only ones left for her. She does not attend the parties, does not relish in the dark rooms, pulsing lights, loud music, plethora of scents. She does not appreciate the silent dark thrill of weaving through an amoeba of warm, dancing bodies, knowing that in this bright, hot, decadent life she is cold death. Margolo is writing.

The boys mock her, cajole her, threaten her, beg with her. She will not be moved. She now thinks of them, not as terrors of the night, not as masters of dark secrets, but as a group of pathetic Lost Boys without a captain. They desperately need a mother, but Margolo is no Wendy, no kind, motherly person. She cannot give them what they want from her, nor what they need. Besides, she is busy.

Margolo writes, long after the city falls into dull dormancy. She writes an autobiographical tale, of a teenage girl, on the cusp of womanhood, who at the turn of the nineteenth century is seduced away from her home and future by three beautiful young men who, in promising her life, youth, beauty, joy have also wished her death.

But this is where the story veers into escapist fantasy, a warm place for Margolo to draw her cold self to. The girl falls in love with the sweet softness of a boy who turns out to be completely human. And, in falling for him she gains back her humanity and a second chance at a life once lost. And all the while, the girl writes, writes on anything that comes to hand, the autobiography of a vampire, part memory, part fiction, all true.

Tonight, sooty rain drips from Margolo's lank hair as she feeds. She tucks the notebook beneath her oversized sweater to keep it from the worst of the rain. Once back in her hole, however, the rain does not bother her, becoming mere background chatter like that of the boys, growing restless in the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps it would be soothing, if Margolo listened to it. But she does not. Margolo is writing, absorbed in the sound of conversations long past and conversations that never really occurred, whispered in the scratching of an unfinessed ballpoint pen against 12½" lined paper.