Vices

Chapter One

 Rain was my favorite thing to watch in the afternoons- especially because it was one of the only constants in my life. Everything else became boring after a while; almost trivial. When someone lived for almost 2,000 years, little moments that used to bring them joy tended to fade away. But now, watching the rain made me feel better. I never knew which drop was going to land where, and sometimes I would turn it into a guessing game. Would the drop land on the leaf, or would it land on the rock two inches away from the leaf?

I laughed a little bit at myself as I watched another drop fall, landing on the sidewalk outside. I had spent 2,000 years on this earth, and it all seemed to come down to watching the rain when I was trying to think. With a frustrated sigh, I closed the screen of my laptop and sipped at the coffee in front of me, then looked back out of the window.

In moments like this, I wanted to run away from the world, or at least the world that I knew. For a vampire who had been around for 2,000 years, or 2,453 to be exact, I had seen a few things. While the humans around me were all worried about how much money was in their bank accounts, or when their next day off was going to be, I was trying to stay out of a war that started 183 years ago. With vampires killing each other any chance they got, putting their chips in to get as much power as they could, and dragging just about anyone into their war, laying low had become one of the most difficult things out there.

"But mommy, I wanted a cookie!" A little child's voice broke through my thoughts and my head tilted to the side slightly as I listened to the response of the mother.

"Not today, next time honey." She responded as she picked up her drink from the order station and held onto her child's hand. I watched as the two of them left, sighing deeply again at the normalness of their lives; it must be nice to be able to do that. Even when I was a human, my life had been far from normal.

Being a vampire was so complicated. I was jealous of those who could lead simple lives; lives that involved having disagreements with a child about a cookie.

For the last 2,453 years, nothing about my physical appearance had changed. I still had the same messy, black, curly, tumbleweed hair that always got in my way. My wide shaped green eyes still looked and saw more than they wanted to see, which was more than a lifetime of sadness and grief. My jawline and cheekbones were sharp, an angle that was probably impossible for a human to have. That was one thing about being a vampire; almost everything about us was designed to look perfect to humans, in every sense of the word. We were the optimal beauty that everyone aspired to be; that's how being a predator worked. Draw your prey in and don't let them go. I had curves in what some would say was all of the right places, and it was the one thing I didn't mind taking pride in.

But you start to miss the simple things in life after a while. Eventually, you start to carry a huge weight on your shoulders; one that has come from watching too many people come and go with age, or disease.

Trying not to shake my head at myself and my depressing thoughts, I slipped my laptop into my bag, unable to do any more work on it. "You headin' out Elizabeth?"

"Yeah, sorry William, my head is just somewhere else today." I gave him a small curt wave before picking my bag up off of the ground and slinging it over my shoulder with ease. I plunged my hand deep into my jacket pocket and slid a few bills into the tip jar, not bothering to count how many.

He shrugged as I slid the coffee cup across the cashier's table to him. "Can't force yourself to stay if you want to get going. I guess I can't be too mad, even though you are taking away my eye candy for the day." William joked, his perfectly white teeth showing from behind his smile.

William was probably one of the only vampires out in the world that I trusted. He ran a little café and bookstore off of a side street in the city, one of my favorite places in the world to be on a rainy day. And, that café also happened to be a common spot for vampires to stop by and get a drink. It made dinner a lot easier, as the alternative was chasing down a deer in the middle of the woods, or finding some homeless guy on the side of the street whose blood probably tasted like heroin. While William knew a lot about my past, he didn't know everything, and the thing that I liked about him the most was the fact that he didn't push it. He didn't ask me to tell him everything about myself, and I didn't ask him. It was a mutual understanding between the two of us that other vampires never seemed to understand. But I had to admit, his looks definitely helped my liking of him.