How Not to Vampire - Season 2

7. The Indefinite Nature of Thirst

Protip for Vampires #117: vampires and ulterior motives go hand in hand.

I blinked.

The ancient vampire fell, a marionette with its strings cut, no longer a real boy. I could have easily reached out to stop him from falling, but my hands were coated with the still warm blood of the man who had murdered me twice. Sebastien's blood.

I found myself resisting the urge to lick the blood from my hands and realized in that moment as saliva spurted into my mouth, how goddamn thirsty I was.

Oh, and did I mention that the old man was falling? He folded at the knees, his body collapsing like a reverse jack-in-the-box, and I didn't even try to catch him because a) he had just glammered the ever-loving-fuck out of me, and my mind was still reeling from the invasion, so fuck that guy; and b) even unconscious, he terrified the shit out of me. So, he went down, and I watched him, glad in the moment that I was no longer being glammered.

Ibrahaim. His name was Ibrahaim.

I could still feel him in my head--

"I didn't do it!" I yelled and stepped away from the body, raising my hands in the air. Hands that proclaimed my guilt due to how they were covered in blood, and should definitely not be up in the air because did I mention they were covered in blood?

Fuck.

I expected to be tackled by security at any second, perhaps even tased or shot just for added fun. After all the crime was evident: Ibrahaim the-crusty-6000-year-old-vampire had fallen, and there was a black man (me) standing over him. This would not end well.

Except... nobody tackled me.

A fire-alarm whoop-whoop-whooped throughout the confines of the club in a very insistent way that hurt... just in a very distant, should-be-happening-to-somebody-else type of way. It was the type of whoop that made you want to stab yourself in the ears with an icepick if you were somehow forced to listen to it for more than twenty seconds. Whoever had designed this particular alarm had really wanted everyone to know that the place was on fire, oh and by the way: fuck your ears.

I glanced around then and realized that all of the vampires in the club were either covering their ears, or in the case of Harry and Lady Vera, inserting ear-plugs for maximum protection.

You might be wondering why the sprinklers hadn't gone off, and my answer is simple: you've been watching too many movies. I saw this random video on YouTube that explained how most modern fire suppression systems only trigger the sprinklers in the area immediately affected by the fire. They don't set off every sprinkler in the building like we've all seen in the movies, no matter how dramatic it might look. I know this, so now you also know this. You're welcome.

"Vampire down?" I ventured, and looked back at the fallen body of Ibrahaim in front of me, a crumpled heap of naked old-man flesh that should have been dead thousands years ago, but had somehow endured the ages, the mind fractured in time. I blinked at the thought, the fractured memory or whatever the fuck that had been.

Any further self-reflection was interrupted as the two lab techs rushed over in a panic. Claude, still somehow maintaining his disguise as a highly-trained tech, glanced at me for a second to make sure that I was okay. I nodded and shrugged, remembering not to let on that Claude and I knew each other outside of a brief encounter in Lady Vera's House of the Dead. Claude glanced at the collapsed body of Sebastien only a few feet away and then turned his full attention on the fallen old man. If Claude had asked, I would have told him that no, I was not okay and that I was kinda freaking the fuck out at the weird thoughts in my head.