The vampire came the next Wednesday. He rapped on Thea’s window in the dead of night, and because he was beautiful and pale, with eyes as deep and black as the pond behind her old house, she let him in, despite the fact that when she was little, Thea’s mother told her to beware of strange men. Or perhaps it wasn’t “despite the fact.” Perhaps it was because her mother was dead, her voice some misremembered sound she couldn’t grab onto anymore.
Perhaps it was because the worst had already happened.
She knew he was a vampire because he looked like one. His carved cheekbones sat high on his face, and his veins ran purple and blue beneath his alabaster skin. He was dressed like a proper gentleman, with tailored black pants and a skinny black tie that tucked into his double-breasted vest. He said nothing as he came into the room. He simply walked to the right-hand corner, where Thea’s pink-checkered chair sat piled high with a week’s worth of dirty laundry, clothes she hadn’t bothered to toss into a hamper. Then he crept up the wall the way vampires do and swung down from the ceiling, drawing his black cape around him to protect himself from the sunlight. It was almost dawn, after all.
“What do you want?” Thea asked.
The vampire’s silence tingled down her spine.
At the office the next morning, Megan, who worked at the desk beside Thea’s, asked what was new. When Thea told her of the vampire, she nodded, a tight grin creeping across her face, caving in the hollows of her cheeks.
“Mine showed up nine years ago,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Her skeletal fingers tapped against her keyboard, fingernails clicking the F and the J. Thea had never noticed before how much smaller she looked, the way her clothes hung off her like they belonged to someone else. “He only takes a little every night now.”
“Has he ever told you what he wants?” Thea asked.
“They all want different things.”
After that, Megan threw herself into work and did not speak about anything else for the rest of the day. Maybe it was best not to talk about it with other people.
She ate lunch alone in the breakroom as usual. Brad Sellers from IT management came down to pour himself a fifth cup of coffee. He tried his best to avert his eyes, remembering the seminar from last week about harassment, but eventually, he surrendered, either to nerves or his baser instincts. Thea’s skin prickled as his eyes raked down her body.
“You’re wearing purple today.” He wanted her to think he’d simply noticed something new. “You never wear purple.”
The yogurt was tart on Thea’s tongue as she took her last bite, sour enough to burn down her throat. “You ever seen a vampire?” She wasn’t sure she was asking because she wanted to know or because she knew it would chase him away.
“Funny,” Brad said. He said vampires were stories meant to scare little children before disappearing through the door frame, heading back down the hall.
Cold snaked through her ribs when he murmured “Hey, boss man,” indicating Matthew was on his way to the breakroom. Feeling fled to her edges, then burst into the stifling air, leaving her numb, a collection of needle pricks. Her chair scraped the tile as she stood, snapping her Tupperware closed and shoving it back into her lunchbox.
Matthew appeared in the doorway, running back legs spread wide, swallowing the space. He was one of those men who used to be fit until he started drinking beer, with a smile people forgot as soon as he left a room and beady eyes that sat too high on his doughy face. He was as far from strange as a person could be, with his starched shirts and his weekly golf game and his love of small talk, not the kind of man that would have worried her mother.
But then, perhaps her mother had simply meant men she didn’t know.
Thea had always thought of herself as a modern woman warrior, donning blazers like armor and watching horror movies alone in her apartment and running the park in the early hours of the morning when it was still dark, bear mace in hand, afraid of nothing.
She hoped he couldn’t see her knees trembling beneath the hem of her skirt.
“I’m going,” she said.
“Thea.” He wore the same brown loafers, kept them rooted to the plastic line dividing the hallway carpet from the tile. “Our signals got crossed.”
“Get out of my way.” She gripped the strap of the lunchbox hard enough to rub the skin on her palm raw.
“Would you just—”
“Get out of my way.”
He scoffed, and like she’d trained a weapon on his chest, he threw his hands in the air and backed away, retreating right down the hallway. She cut left, hugging the lunchbox to her chest as she bolted down the hall, blood thundering in her ears, breaths stuttering out of her chest as she made toward the stairwell. She peeled off her heels and ran all the way to the parking lot, forgetting about the project left open on her computer and the Post-its plastered around the edges of her keyboard.
The gym was quiet at 12:30 on a Wednesday, the pool practically empty save for an old woman swimming laps in the far left lane. Thea slipped into the water and kicked off the wall, falling into the stroke, drowning out thoughts of her mother and monsters, of vampires and brown loafers, until she was nothing but breath and muscle.
On her tenth lap, she stopped to rest, and when the old woman waved at her from across the pool, Thea waved back.
“Just us today.” The woman’s voice echoed in the space. Thea nodded, and as she watched the woman, blue goggles on top of her head, tired eyes blinking at her, she wanted to ask, so she did.
“Just the one,” the woman replied. “He climbed in through the window a few days after we lost our first boy. My husband, Dale, never believed me, said he couldn’t see a damn thing. Eventually, I stopped talking about it. Used to be he’d come in and almost drain me dry. But now that Dale’s gone and we’ve learned to exist together, he only takes what he needs. Leaves me alone the rest of the time.”
“And he never told you why he came?”
“You know,” the old woman said, “I never thought to ask.”
#
She drew the bedroom curtains closed, blocking out the sun and cloaking the room in shadow. The vampire peeked its head out of its cloak, pale fingers curled around the black silk.
“Do not feed on me.” Thea breathed through the panic trilling in her chest, forced it down into her stomach. She imagined her mother’s kitchen the way she had last Wednesday, heard the pan crackling as she fried fresh squash, grabbing hold of the memory until she smelled the grease. The vampire didn’t move.
“I’m in control, you hear me?” she said. “You want to survive, you need me, right?”
The vampire blinked its red-rimmed eyes but did not move.
“Can you give me what I want?”
The vampire locked eyes with her, and she could feel him sifting through her mind, his thoughts mixing with her own, curling around moments with her mother, blazing through fearless morning runs and margaritas with her friends on Friday nights and dancing at the club with her hair down around her shoulders. Hands on her hips. A familiar voice in her ear. One kiss that found her pinned in a corner, hot coals burning her throat so she couldn’t scream.
Her want deepened as she tasted iron on her tongue, as the vampire unlatched himself from the wall and strode towards her. She met him halfway, twining her arms around him, telling him yes, she wanted this, the power, the ability, knowing what she was giving up, aching for what she would gain. She craned her head back, felt the pinch at her neck, the tingling numbness as her blood left her body.
Her heart slowed, and for a moment, she enjoyed it, this place of not being, feeling her old life tangle around the new as the vampire brought his lips to her ear.
“Are you sure?”
The smile cracked across her face as she felt the hunger take her over, a vicious, living thing.
“Yes.”
#
It was pitch black by the time Matthew left the office, but then, he’d always preferred the dark. The bite in the air pricked the hairs on his arms as he strutted toward the black Camaro, lights flashing as he hit the button on his keys.
There were no footsteps to warn him. There was only a gust of air and a gentle hand on his shoulder.
When the receptionist found him the next day, throat opened, skin pale, eyes staring at the sky, she didn’t scream. She simply slipped her phone out of her pocket and dialed 911. Then, she stared into his marble eyes, eyed the blood drying on his starched collar, and she wondered.
What would happen, if she dared to ask.