The Vampire Girl #Winterfest2020

1

Camilla had no idea how long it had been since she had last eaten. It must have been a few weeks, maybe even months ago. Her memory always got quite fuzzy when she went without food for such a long time.

But at least she was sure she had still been in America when she had had her last meal. She remembered it vividly: It had been a drunken Irishman whom she had met at a drinking establishment in New York City and lured into a dark back alley. She had only decided to feed off him when she had noticed his lewd behaviour towards the ladies present at said establishment. Of course, they hadn't been ladies to begin with, but they had told the Irishman to stop when he had insulted them, using expletives no member of the female sex should ever be forced to hear from a man.

He had probably thought she was with the ladies, perhaps one of their daughters, even though she was only thirteen years old and hadn't looked a day older since the year 1789, which probably made her the eldest thirteen-year-old in the world in 1913.

She could think of two possible reasons why he had followed her when she had left the tavern.

The first reason was her sheer beauty. She had often been told that her sparkling blue eyes were mesmerising and that she was the most beautiful girl in the world with her porcelain skin and long, blonde locks. As a matter of fact, she could have been as famous an actress as Mary Pickford if she had been able to act in front of a film camera. Unfortunately, the silent film cameras had not been able to capture the natural charisma she possessed in real life. In retrospect, it had been a bad idea from the start to try her hand at film acting a few years ago: Had she been successful, a few inevitable questions would have popped up after a few years, and those questions would have been far more uncomfortable than those regarding her parents' whereabouts. After a few years, audiences and film crews alike would have noticed, for example, that she didn't age. So it had been a good thing that she hadn't had more than a few cameo roles.

The Irishman hadn't recognised her from her films. He was more interested in the money the beautiful teenager seemed to have. His eyes had practically popped out of his skull when she had taken out a wad of bills at the tavern and paid her dinner with it.

It wasn't as if she needed to eat real food because she could survive without it. But she had been by herself for such a long time and loved to spend her evenings in America in the company of the many men and women who had come there from various countries, people who were still hopeful that their lives could change for the better and that everything would be all right.

So the second and most important reason why the man had followed her into a back alley was that he had wanted to rob her.

"A nice evening, isn't it?" he had asked and walked towards her, effectively blocking the only way that led out of the alley.

With her heightened senses, she had smelled his foul breath from afar. Naturally, it got worse the closer he got. She couldn't help herself and had screwed up her face.

When she hadn't responded, he had continued: "I saw you at the tavern, you know, and I thought by myself: A pretty thing like that must have a generous soul and pity with poor Willie and his misfortune! You do want to help Willie who doesn't have a cent left to feed his young ones, don't you?" He had been about a foot taller than she was and had surely known how to use his bodily strength to his advantage by positioning himself in front of her like a gorilla.

Her voice had been that of an experienced woman and not that of an innocent teenager, although it still sounded like that. "Yes, I think I can put you out of your misery." And like that, without showing the slightest trace of fear, she had walked towards him. There had been a calmness about her that had frightened him out of his wits because it had betrayed the fact that she had done this many times before and knew what she was doing. She didn't know how many people she had killed because she had lost count during Napoleon's retreat from Russia one hundred years before.

The man had found himself unable to move in time before she had grabbed him with a brutal force. Like so many of her victims before him, he had wanted to scream, but couldn't as she had already dug her teeth into his throat. His life had been over before he knew what had hit him - a vampire, or, to be exact, a vampire child.

It had taken her about ten minutes to feed and hide him in a corner of the alley. Then she had walked away from the crime scene as if nothing had happened. There had been no witnesses, and no piece of evidence, not even the faintest bloodstain in her clothes, connected the girl from the tavern to the dead man.

A few days later, she had seen a brief notice in the papers of a strange animal attack in Manhattan which had left one man dead. It was the same story that she had read so many times before: People still thought that vampires weren't a real threat to their lives and were actually walking among them. That is why she couldn't believe the stupidity of the vampires who had been running their mouths, telling their stories to journalists and writers like Bram Stoker and thereby risking the existence of the entire species. Why should they come out of hiding and reveal their true nature when they were looking like everyone else most of the time?

A few days after her last meal, she had seen a picture of her father in a German paper in America. Or at least she thought she had recognised him as the picture of a military parade in Berlin had been quite blurry. If he had really been one of the onlookers in the crowd, he hadn't changed much and still had this tiger-like, brooding look about him that spelled danger: Her father, Vicomte Jean-Jacques des Étoiles, had always looked at the world as if he was ready to attack anyone at any given time.

In spite of the fact that Jean-Jacques had last laid eyes on her in 1793, he was her last living relative. She sometimes longed for him like a soldier who had lost a limb in a war longed for his missing body part and felt incomplete without him. Why should she feel any differently about her family than a human girl, especially at this time of the year when everybody was getting ready to celebrate Christmas? For the past one hundred years, she had spent December 24 or 25 (depending on the country she had been in) outside in the cold, roaming through towns and villages. She had hidden behind windows and looked at families from all social classes who had celebrated Christmas together; and she had felt a pang in her heart because she had been alone in the world for such a long time and hadn't had anyone she could turn to if she needed comfort.

But now her train was about to arrive at its final destination, the Lehrter Train Station in Berlin. It didn't really matter that she couldn't remember when she had last eaten or how long it had been since she had boarded the ship from New York to Hamburg. She had made it back to Europe without drawing attention to herself. All she needed to do now was to find her father in the bustling modern metropolis, which looked so unlike the young, rather provincial town she had known a century before. And then, perhaps, she could truly be happy.