Red Strings (Vampy Dialogues Series 02)

I'd like to present a small fiction writing exercise I did, read and enjoy;


I tried to breathe as the pain shot through me, which was a stupid thing to do really. Every particle of my being was torn apart and remade. I was the clay and the vampire blood was the sculptor. I went through spasm after spasm until finally everything stopped and for a few brief moments I felt at peace. Then the hunger struck me. The only thing I could think about was warm hot blood rushing past my lips. As I tried to focus and get up my senses all exploded. I could hear people talking downstairs - idle polite conversation - I could see the bumps and indentations of the paint on the ceiling above me. A faint smell of cigarettes came from an empty ashtray that sat on one of the end tables near the window. There was a girl somewhere outside the door of my room. She was there in the hallway waiting for something. I couldn’t make out what. I could practically taste her blood pulsing in her veins. I could hear her beating heart. My fangs lengthened and I swung my legs out of the hard uncomfortable hotel room bed.
Then my sire chose to speak, "Exhilarating isn't it?" True mortal consciousness rushed back to me and a thousand questions slipped through my head. I wanted to hate him but I don't think that it's really possible to hate one's sire. He was suddenly standing right in front of me with his hands in his pockets, shoulders slack and that same lazy smile plastered on his face. Damien wore jeans with a red shirt that depicted various distorted images of eyes, lips, teeth, noses; a collage of the human face. I started wondering about silly stuff like whether Damien was his real name and what kind of vampire wore jeans but my mind was in too much chaos to put any of these ponderings into words. His smile widened and he cocked his head to the side. "You're wondering why, aren't you?" Yes, I was wondering why deep in the back of my mind but I was still more focused on the meal that waited just outside my door. It was so hard to focus. The pattern on the wallpaper suddenly caught my eye dizzying me with its pastel twists and turns and someone had turned on music downstairs. The heavy rock kind that went through each cell of your body no matter what volume you played it at. I started humming the tune as I got up, ignoring Damien, and walked straight into the hallway.
As I came closer to her I realized that her name was Eva. She sat Indian-style in the narrow hallway, her head facing the direction of the stairs. She was about seventeen with hair done up in a sloppy sort of bun at the back of her head. The girl wore a white sundress and smelled of peaches. In the dark hallway she looked glowingly angelic, it gave me pause for a moment, perhaps the human inside me decided that her life, her simple innocence, was something that should be spared, treasured even but the blood lust was getting stronger and I needed to feed.
The closer I got to her the clearer her mind became. She was waiting for her boyfriend, she was going to beg him to take her back, and she’d do anything. A sudden swell of pity and envy came over me. She believed she loved him and she was surrendering her pride for this love while I could barely utter the word in casual conversation.
Her neck was bare, open and inviting. In seconds I was upon her; on my knees, my hand over her mouth and my teeth in her neck. My whole being came alive as I drank and I felt a certain light headedness as the flow got sparser and slower. I stopped. She was dead. Somehow I didn't want to drink anymore.
"You should dispose of the body, ya know." He said matter of factly like he was warning me to check over my test before turning it in. It almost made me angry but I realized that this must be normal for him. How many people must he kill within a week? How many people am I going to have to kill just to survive? They were just after thoughts like thinking what outfit you were going to wear tomorrow. I was too calm. I should have been freaking out, screaming, crying, anything but I was calculating; mentally writing down all the questions that I had and occasionally getting distracted by my new senses.
I didn't want to dispose of the body. She looked more beautiful in her death, so still and peaceful, all anxiety gone from her body. I wanted her boyfriend to find the body, I wanted to see his reaction, I wanted to know why she fell in love with him. Everything seemed so much more beautiful; poetic and entrancing. I wondered who her parents were. Just as the thought flashed across my mind a mental picture of a professional looking woman with a navy blue suit and sleek burgundy framed glasses standing beside a cheerful and almost mischievous looking fellow possessing incredible ice blue eyes popped into my head. The picture was old and unclear; she hadn't seen her parents in a while. Were they dead? I couldn't tell.
Damien sighed and blew a dark strand of unruly hair from his face. "You know when you change someone their main focus is suppose to be their sire. A.K.A me. But somehow I get the feeling that you're not listening." For the first time I looked at him, really looked at him. His eyes were flecked with orange set in gray. It was the most amazing thing! I just wanted to stare into those eyes until all the depth in them was gone. His black hair was messy and shone red. How old in all actuality was he? In retrospect he seemed alarmingly modern, ahead of this time even. It bugged me, so I asked.
"Well finally you're taking an interest in me." He smiled brilliantly. "I am exactly two-thousand eight hundred and eighty something years old. I go by decades" he explained.
"What's your real name?"
"For the life of me I can't remember....." He said while stretching. "I know it's written down somewhere and I recall I never really like it in the first place. My favorite color is red though, and I like swings."
When I first met him he immediately struck me as laidback and I was attracted to his blasé nature but now he seemed like a buffoon. "You don't look old." It was apparently infectious.
"Well eternity would really suck if you came out looking like Bram's Dracula after a couple hundred years. As far as I know we don't age but sometimes we literally die of boredom." He played with a little plastic cow keychain that he pulled out of his pocket. Damien was one of those people that had trouble sitting still for more than a couple of minutes. "My last blood spawn, whose name was Keiko by the way, had this enormous collection of dolls that she made clothes for and painted and all. After a while it kinda creeped me out but I bet in this day and age she could've been a great fashion designer. My point is that she had something to occupy herself with for at least two hundred years, ya know? It probably increased her life span by millennia."
"You're saying that I should go get some dolls?" I deadpanned.
"Well...no, maybe...... Look my point is, is that after you get bored with this world you start to dawdle and be unproductive and then eventually go insane. And when vampires go insane they lose their sense of logic so you might wake up one day and go sunbathing, ya know what I mean?"