I take a step back. His eyes sharpen, like an eagle’s. “...No, we haven’t.” His voice is slick, professional, yet somehow curious. He takes a step closer, looming over me, but I can’t move anymore. I can feel his gaze move from my face onto my hood and I can almost see the question forming in his head. I can do nothing but stare in silent dread as he reaches up one gloved hand—is this the one that touched her face?—and flicks off the hood.

He blinks at me. All pretence of seriousness dissolves as his lips crook upwards into a barely contained smile. “Pff-,” he says before catching himself and pressing his gloved hand against his mouth, eyes widening in surprise and horror.

The world is going blurry again and my face feels hot so I whirl on my feet, ready to just run for it, but a hand falls on my shoulder—it’s soft, gentle—and I stop. “Hey, hey, calm down, I didn’t mean to-…” I glance back at him. He shakes his head in a self-derogatory fashion. When he looks back up again, his eyes are firm but sympathetic. “I’m sorry. You must have your reasons. I shouldn’t have laughed, and… I shouldn’t have forced you. That’s on me. You just… happened to look like someone I thought I recognised.”

I turn back around to face him fully, bringing up my hands to wring the strap of my backpack. I look down at my feet, at dad’s old sneakers. I ask, “Are you… looking for someone?”

He nods. “Yeah,” he says. ”Someone dangerous.” A flash of uncertainty passes over his face. “Someone who might not know that they’re dangerous.”

“...What do you mean?”

The man purses his lips and hunches down until we’re at eye level, not that I look him in the eyes. Cocking his head, he looks behind me, up the alley, and then over his shoulder. There isn’t anybody around. “Since I did something bad to you, I’ll tell you, but only if you don’t tell anyone else. Capiche?” Considering that I don’t have anyone to tell it to, I give him an affirmative nod. “Alright, alright.” A dramatic pause. “I’m looking for a vampire.”

The way he says it makes it sound like it’s the most breathtaking secret in the world, but I react like a pretty normal person: sheer confusion. A little pity.

“Don’t look at me like that!” he hisses, so I turn away, trying to prove very clearly that I’m not looking (so please don’t hit me). “Oh, come on, don’t be like…” He holds out a hand, but at seeing me wince he draws it back. He sighs. “Sure. Don’t believe me. I don’t mind, of course. Not the first time someone didn’t believe me despite clear evidence, Linda.” He growls that last part like it’s a four-letter word. I don’t say anything in turn. For some reason, my fear and respect of this man is slowly diminishing.

He looks around again. “Say, kid…”

“Luis,” I say softly.

“...Luis, do you happen to know somewhere we can talk? Like, maybe an abandoned building, or an abandoned park, or an abandoned silo… Anything abandoned, really.”

I squint at him. “...Stranger danger?”

He freezes. Then, going straight from thawing to fire, his hands go up, making large erratic movements alongside his words, “Hey, come on, you know that’s not-, it’s because I need to talk about vampires without anyone hearing! Normal people can’t find out about them, it’s part of the code.” He must’ve noticed the look on my face because he stops gesturing wildly for a second. “Not, uh, you, though. I’ve got a debt to repay, and…” He scratches his neck. “Well, I’m kinda new to this city, so I do need someone to show me around…” He gives me a meaningful look.

In the back of my head, I see a fork in the road, one short, one long, one leading down an alley and another down a suburban street. I grip the cord of my backpack tighter, feeling my knuckles turn white. Looking down at my shoes doesn’t give me any answer either. “I…” I close my mouth again. Breathe, Luis. Breathe in the air. In, out. In, out.

Braving myself, I look up to his face, meeting his eyes. From behind the glasses, they look yellow, like that of a bird of prey. Even though looking at them is making my skin crawl I keep myself steady. “Sure,” I breathe. “I can… show you.”

He smiles all the way up to his eyes and stands up. “Great! Show the way, kid.”

I wonder if I should show him the way to the police station. That would be pretty funny, but it would also make my decision to get to the bottom of this kind of pointless. Making a small arc, I walk around him and lead him out of the alley through the way I came from, back towards the school. Not that that’s where we’re going. At this hour, the school is sure to be filled with people doing sports and hanging out and doing whatever it is that they do after school.

“So, Luis,” he says, breaking the small silence that had formed, “any hints at where we’re going?” I look back at him semi-cryptically and he gives a short flash of teeth. “It isn’t a police station, is it?”

“No,” I say sharply, trying to hide my previous thoughts. “Not that. Somewhere… abandoned.” Like he asked for.

“Abandoned, right.” He whistles. The sun is standing pretty high, otherwise I might have been more scared. I think the time is maybe 16, or closer to 17. I should get home soon so I don’t repeat yesterday’s fiasco, but I think this is a tad more important than dinner. Maybe it’s stupid of me, but so far, he hasn’t really given me much reason to disbelieve him. He says he was hunting a vampire, and if vampires have long tongues, then he’s right about that.

…Still, that doesn’t mean I trust him. As far as I can tell, with his original target dead, he’s changed his sights, now searching for…

Well, um, me. I guess.

That’s what it seems to be, at least. I mean, with what I heard him say last night, and then what he said just now, that seems to be an obvious conclusion. There’s a very real chance that he already knows that it’s me and that he just wants to bring me to an abandoned location to do, uh, something. I’m not sure.

That’s why I’m not just bringing him to any old abandoned building.

We stop. Right now, we aren’t quite on the outskirts of the city, but it’s certainly close to it, with lots of industrial buildings and smoke-belching chimneys looming in the distance. Out here, the smell of the sugar plant is more noxious than ever.

“What is this place?” he asks with seemingly genuine confusion.

“It was never really named,” I mumble. “My dad worked on it for a few years, but then the company went bankrupt and they just left it here as it was.” Indeed, in front of us, standing three storeys tall, was the skeleton of what was supposed to be a mall. It was going to rejuvenate the area, but then malls went out of fashion or something and the short-term loans caught up with the company. A whole controversy sprung up when it turned out they were using illegal immigrants for black labour, threatening them with being deported if they didn’t want to work or something. I’m not sure, but every now and then dad will complain about how shitty the whole situation was.

“I see…” he says, nodding. “Not a bad choice.”

Indeed. After all, whereas he doesn’t know the building at all, I’ve been here hundreds of times ever since it was abandoned. I know it like my own bedroom, including where rusty sharp objects are kept. There are even a few tools left over from the sudden departure. We’re on my home turf.

“Right,” he says, waving a hand towards the skeleton of a building. “Show the way.”

Unsure if it’s the right choice, I bring him to a part of the second floor where you can sit down on a few crates. The crates themselves are filled with nails, which might make for a good distraction if you throw them. Either way, I take a seat. The man, following my example, sits down opposite me. Before he can say anything, I ask, “Who are you?”

He almost chuckles, but when he notices how serious I am he shuts up again, eyes sharpening behind his glasses. “My name is Vernon Hellbound.”

“...Hellbound?” I make a face. “That’s kind of…”

“You never told me your last name,” Vernon states, leaning forward.

I pick up a rusty nail from the floor and twiddle in it my hand. “Freighthold.”

“Freighthold.” He leans back. “Luis Freighthold, you have no reason to say anything about my name.” A leering grin. “What, were you conceived at the Boston tea party?”

“No,” I say. Before I say something hasty, I rethink my words, considering how he’s been to me. “Sorry.”

“Glad to know you’re at least a little polite, kid.”

“Are you a vampire hunter?” I ask. His mouth falls open. “Do you hunt vampires? Is that why-,”

He holds up one hand, stopping me from asking any more questions. Then, carefully, he returns his jaw to its place in a way I think is meant to be joking. Or maybe it gives him a few more seconds to think. “I don’t hunt vampires, per se. Vampire hunting as a profession went out of fashion God-knows-how-long ago.” Before I can ask the obvious question, he answers it. “I’m more of a private investigator.”

I drop the nail and it clinks to the floor. “...Private investigator? Like, of vampires? Or…”

“It seems to me that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between humans and vampires, and it’s not like I fault you for it or anything. It’s been a while since I actually talked to anyone not in the know, so I guess I assumed things,” he explains. “To put it briefly, there is none. The reason for that is simply that the differences between humans and vampires are pretty, how do you say it, minute?”

I feel my brows crinkle. “Minute? They’re-, they’re vampires, aren’t they?”

He shrugs in a maybe-so-maybe-not way. “They are. A lot of people think of us as two separate species, but in my profession, vampires are pretty much just humans with a few unusual wants and needs.”

“But don’t they drink blood?” I hear myself ask. “Isn’t that a crime?”

“Yes, some vampires drink blood. Others eat flesh and some steal hearts in the literal sense. No two vampires are entirely alike, but all of them share a few core traits. One of these is their humanity.” I open my mouth but he hushes me again. “Yeah, I know, but it’s true. A lot of vampires have their core views shifted by their vampirism, but most of them are just like normal people, with their morals and opinions. A lot are invested in politics, and I know at least one vampire that is a politician. Well, uh, I don’t know him, but I know he exists.”

“Who?” I ask in pure bewilderment. Not that I actually know all that many politicians.

He shakes his head. “Sorry, kid. Can’t trust you with that kind of knowledge yet.”

“But you said you’d tell me things!”

“I will, but this is a trade, you know? I tell you things, you help me. I can’t give away my whole hand right off the bat, can I?”

I huff and cross my arms. “Guess not.” I give him a curious look. “How come you know who he is? Shouldn’t vampires be, I dunno, secretive?”

“They are,” he begins, “and also not. It’s an ongoing issue of sorts, but there is an effort being made to track down vampires. And, no, before you ask, it’s not to kill them. Killing vampires is immoral and any efforts to ostracise them from society with pitchforks and torches has historically just forced the vampires into becoming more, well, feral. Whenever they feed in such a state, they usually have to kill their victim, usually in the feeding process but also as a means of ridding themselves of witnesses. It’s simply unsustainable. So, yes, interestingly enough, our best bet is to keep vampires in society.”

While I sit and stare in confusion and wonder, he continues ranting, “It’s kind of obvious when you think about it, but I guess these kinds of things need to be put on paper before people start realising it’s true.” He huffs politically. “If you ask me, the guys up top should just come out about this whole vampire thing already. Did you know that there are thousands of vampires out there in the world? Can you imagine how many of those became a vampire without even knowing that there are vampires to begin with? Sure, the lobbyists make good points about how society would descend into chaos if people found out there were bloodsucking monsters out there, but if we look at the individual person…”

He must have noticed me staring because he suddenly turns quiet.

“Um,” he says. Giving a small, awkward smile, he looks away. “Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to get so heated about politics, I just…”

“It’s alright,” I say, dazed. “It was interesting to hear, I think?...” Even though I still have no idea what he just told me, the existence of vampire politics does make me feel slightly sick. I’m trying to think of how many books I’ve read where everyone knows that vampires exist and I don’t think there are too many, but I haven’t read all vampire books. I look up at him, trying to form my incoherent interior ramblings into a question that doesn’t tip him off to my apparent vampirism. “So, um, if you met one of these fresh vampires, what do you think they should learn?...”

He looks at me and I avert my gaze. Okay, that might have been a bit too clunky, but he hasn’t shot me, and if I am to trust his words, I don’t think he’d kill me even if he found out I was a vampire. Probably.

“Well, for one,” he pushes his fingers into his temple, massaging in a circular fashion, “maybe I’d tell them to… Okay, I’m not sure. There’s a lot, and most of it depends on the kind of vampire they are. Some vampires don’t need to drink a lot of blood, others need to kill people or steal from hospitals. I’d love to say that this kind of vampire can seek help, but with the current political climate, going to the authorities to seek help might just get you incarcerated under some bogus charges. Anything to get you off the streets.”

I shift where I sit, making the crate behind my back move and the nails inside rustle metallically. He pauses briefly before continuing, looking more and more uncertain as he goes.

“There’s a lot I’d like to tell them but most of it can be condensed into don’t trust anyone.”

I gulp. My chest feels cold. “No one?”

He nods, making his glasses fall a little on his face. He pushes them back up without blinking. “I’ve worked with all kinds of people, you know. My last and-or-current client is-slash-was a vampire, you know. Wanted me to find some girl vampire. Told me she was his daughter or something who went on the run after becoming a vampire. Not a new story, I go after runaways all the time. You could even say that’s my modus operandi.” Something on my face clues him into my thoughts and he explains, “The reason I’m telling you this is that last night that same daughter decided that instead of returning to her supposed father, she’d rather die. I’ve seen a lot, but that one was new.”

An old question tugs at my brain. “How did she, uh, die?” I try to hide the trembling in my hand by picking up and gripping a rusty nail hard.

He blinks in surprise and quickly says, “There can only ever be one.” After a second of tense, weird silence between us, he elaborates, “There is only one Hannya. Only one Aswang. Only one Tagalog, Alukah, Izcaci… You get it.”

For once, a small jolt of electrical excitement courses through me as the realisation finally, actually, really sinks in. I’m a vampire. I’m a vampire. I can-,

Hang on. What can I actually do? I look down at my hand, dusty with rust. I can grow long hair and drop all my teeth. But-, but that can’t be it, can it? Vampires are supernatural beings of the night! They can turn into bats and drink blood and hypnotise and all that kind of stuff. Even weaker vampires in fiction have enhanced strength and an extended lifetime.

Different kinds of vampires… I’ve never been much invested in researching different ones, but I do know that the kind of primitive folklore vampires we used to have were a bit, ah, odd. But that could have changed. I believe one of the vampires he mentioned, the Hannya, I think, is more of a demon than a vampire. But if he said most vampires are pretty alike, then the real Hannya might be different from the folklore version. Less of a demon and more of a demonic vampire. That leaves me with one very important question.

“So, um,” I ask, trying to hide my excitement, “what kind of vampire was that daughter?”

He looks at me as though he didn’t expect me to ask the question at all. His mouth opens and I lean forward in anticipation. “I actually have no idea.”

“...Huh?”

He shrugs. “The client gave me a list, but in the end, she was just a mixed-breed.”

My jaw falls open a little and I try to correct but only find myself rubbing my chin in whirling confusion. “Mixed… breed?”

“Yeah,” he says. “There can only be one pure vampire, and technically the same stays true for mixed-breeds, but they’re more-or-less watered-down copies. I don’t know all that much about them, but same as with purebloods, only one specific mixed-breed can exist one time. That was how she died. By passing on her affliction.” He looks out the broken window at the setting sun.

I just stare at him. I genuinely can’t bring myself to say anything, so after a few seconds of awkward staring, he apparently decides that enough is enough and stands up with a sigh. “Alright then. I think we’d best call it quits there, no?”

“Uh… sure,” I say hesitantly. He looks at me expectantly and after a few seconds I realise what he wants me to do, so I get to my feet as well.

“Do you know where the Lark Garden is?”

I blink at him. “Yeah, uh, it’s just a few blocks down the road, and then a right and it should be right there.”

He nods thoughtfully. “Right. Thanks.” Unprompted, he continues talking, “Technically speaking, my contract with that client has ended since she died, but he said he wanted me to find whoever she left behind. Not sure why. I almost want to refuse him, but, heh, I can’t really afford to. Besides, some people get really irked if you say no in this business. I can name at least two clients who tried to off me after I told them I either couldn’t find who they were looking for or that they maybe shouldn’t be found.” He smiles, oddly enough. “But I can tell you more about that some other day. For now, I’d best get going. The sun is almost down.”

I follow his eyes and look out through the broken window. “Yeah, I guess.”

He reaches a hand towards me to maybe pat me on the shoulder but I draw back and he stops. His hand returns to his side and he smiles self-derogatorily. “Right, sorry.” He pokes both hands into his pockets. “I’ll be in that alley tomorrow again, same time. I might be a little late, but that depends on how late tonight gets.” Under his breath, I hear him mutter, “And if I get drained…”

He draws one hand out of his pocket and does an OK sign. “Well, see you there, Luis!”

By instinct, I do the sign back at him. And just like that, he exits the building, leaving me to my devices. For a minute or so, I just stand there, staring at the doorway he left through, not entirely sure what I should do now. Well, I know what I should do. I should go home and make dinner. But I’m not hungry. And for some reason, the night feels awfully inviting. And why shouldn’t it be?

A smile cracks across my face.

I’m a vampire. Like Edward, like Shan, like Damon.

There’s a tremble in my body and I don’t feel the slightest need to suppress it. Vampires are real. They aren’t just book characters. They’re real, and I’m one of them. Vampire politics? Private detectives? That’s all beside the point. I know what I saw with her. She was a vampire—a mixed-breed. He never said mixed-breeds were weaker than purebloods, right? W-, well, he did say that they were ‘watered-down’, but that’s… It’s not like he knows all there is to know? He isn’t a vampire.

I am.

I’m grinning now, even bigger than before, pacing over the decrepit halls and the almost-cracked concrete foundation, kicking rusty nails and bolts and whatever else is down there. I don’t really care. Vampire. Vampire. Vampire! Every time I think of that word I just feel one notch giddier.

Maybe I can turn into a bat? Maybe I can make things float? Maybe I can run so fast I become a blur? Maybe I can tame spiders? Maybe I can do blood magic? Maybe I can merge with shadows? Maybe I can see in the dark? Maybe I can hypnotise humans with a word? Maybe I can reform from ashes? Maybe I can-,

The sun falls. The final streams of light are dragged out of the building, replaced by their blue-tinged friends, the moonlight. I look out just in time to see purple and pink clawing onto the final rims of light-blue day-sky as the darkness presses down on them with vengeance. A white mole takes centre stage in this newborn yet old sky and I think it’s mars, or maybe jupiter. Either way, I look at it as though it was nothing less than a far-off messiah.

There’s a tingle in my mouth. It doesn’t hurt, but all of a sudden I can’t feel a few of my teeth. Like they aren’t there at all. The mere thought sends so much panic coursing through me that I thrust my hand between my lips, gripping one of my canines with real power. It’s still there. But I can’t feel the touch of it. If I wiggle it back and forth, it doesn’t feel like anything at all. My lips twist into a frown, and spurred on by confusion, curiosity, I wiggle the tooth back and forth once more, twice, and then…

A crack.

I pull out my hand. Gripped between my fingers is a slightly bloody tooth, cracked off at the roots. I blink at it like it isn’t there. My tongue touches the gap it left, feeling the gums and the sharp bits of tooth still lodged inside. Something that might be called panic bubbles up inside the pit of my stomach but I have no time to act on it before my tongue touches yet another loose tooth. It doesn’t take much prodding for it to dislodge and I quickly spit it out onto my hand. I look at it, delirious.

My hand begins to tremble violently and the two teeth in my palm fall out between my fingers and clatter onto the floor. Soon, another tooth joins them, then another, and another.

Click, click, click.

I stare in wide-eyed horror as my mouth empties itself of teeth. “Aahh…” I say in toothless terror. My tongue is sloshing around my mouth, feeling for teeth but finding none. Nothing but a single empty gap containing the cracked-off feet of a tooth. I cut my tongue on it. It spurs something on in me and I fall to my knees and begin groping after the discarded, dusty teeth, pulling them close to me and collecting them in my hand, and once I have them all I almost bring myself to shovel them inside my own mouth before a thought strikes me.

How else would a vampire gain their sharp teeth?

That single, simple thought stops me in my tracks and makes me drop my teeth. They clatter to the floor like a handful of dice and a trembling smile lodges itself onto my lips. “Hau elshe?” I repeat.

I take a step towards the window. My head is itchy but I don’t touch it. Then another step. When I’m at the window, my hair is long again, reaching below my shoulders. I brush half of it behind my ear. The ends of it tickle my neck. I look up at the moon.

Strangely enough, even after standing there for ten minutes or so, no new teeth grow in my mouth. It remains toothless.

I look back at the sky outside. The remains of the day are gone now. It’s all dark blue.

…I really have become a vampire, haven’t I?