Predators' Appetite — a Vampiric POV

Sensitive content warning: invasion of mental privacy, obsession, stalking, psychological manipulation/coercion, sexual contact, predatory relationship dynamics, blood-drinking/implied violence. Told from the perpetrator’s perspective.

Supplementary Testimony: The Predatory Mind

Black seal. Restricted circulation. Bellwotha, Council of Elders, Ref. SO-28-V

Source: First-person testimony attributed to a corporeal vampire.

Status: Authenticity disputed. Psychological observations retained for research purposes.

Recorded testimony of Severin Valle, believed to be at least seven centuries old.

You wish to know what a vampire thinks.

Does the hunger make us mad? Do we lose ourselves in the bloodlust and become animals, ruled by a primitive appetite that extinguishes thought?

How neatly labelled that would be for you.

An animal kills because it is hungry. A vampire may kill for hunger, yes, but hunger is only one of our appetites.

And age does not make us kinder. It makes us more familiar with our own nature, giving our strategies a well-worn efficiency.

I remember the year I first met Elspeth, and I remember the weather: a soft, warm rain that held the day’s heat close to the ground. The churchyard smelt of wet stone and turned earth. Somewhere among the yews, a gravedigger had cut his hand, and the iron tang of blood threaded the air. But it was her I noticed. Soap, and rainwater caught in her hair, and beneath the damp cotton of her blouse, a warmth rising from her skin... I could have followed it through the churchyard with my eyes closed.

Her feet moved on the soaked ground, and she turned her head toward the evening shadow where I stood.

She could not have seen me, only sensed me.

I was not hungry. I had fed the previous evening, and the memory of warm blood still lingered pleasantly at the back of my throat. Yet something in her expression arrested me. She was not beautiful in any conventional sense. Her nose had been broken at some point and had healed slightly crooked, giving her face a defiant quality. A pale scar interrupted one eyebrow, disappearing into the dark hair she had twisted into a careless knot at the nape of her neck.

But she was watchful.

You must understand that wanting is not the same as hunger. Hunger diminishes when satisfied. Wanting can thrive when indulged.

I followed her home, allowing the evening crowd to pass between us. Her footsteps were relaxed on the pavement. When she entered the grocer's, I lost her beneath the smells of bruised apples, damp newspaper and doughy bread.

I disliked the sensation more than I expected. I stood closer to the shop and listened. A woman laughed behind the door. Someone dropped a coin. Then came the familiar rhythm of Elspeth's steps as she approached the counter.

By the time she reached home, I had decided I wanted her.

I returned the following evening, and the next.

I learned that she read beside the window when it rained, that she disliked being touched unexpectedly, and that she sometimes remained at her kitchen table to think and daydream, long after she finished eating.

I learned the small, tender architecture of her life.

Do you think this is love?

Humans have a remarkable talent for giving their worst impulses noble names.

I called it fixation. Then affection. Eventually, I called it necessity, because by then I had begun to resent the hours in which I could not see her.

When she was absent from her usual places, I became restless.

There is a point at which observation becomes possession, when a predator has begun to organise his existence around another person’s presence. I had reached that point long before Elspeth knew I existed.

Glamouring is often misunderstood by those who have never encountered it.

Your stories describe it as beauty, as a supernatural charm, as the power to make a human fall helplessly in love. These descriptions are convenient, but imprecise.

Beauty is a poor disguise. It attracts attention, and attention invites examination.

The more useful glamour changes the meaning of what a person sees.

A threatening stranger becomes an unfortunate man who has lost his way. An inexplicable feeling of dread becomes tiredness. A warning becomes an overreaction. The mind encounters something it cannot reconcile with its expectations and, rather than accept the possibility of danger, reaches for the most comfortable explanation.

Whether this is a supernatural alteration of perception, a manipulation of emotion, or something else entirely, I have never found the distinction important.

I call it a hunter's courtesy.

I first approached Elspeth in a bookshop.

I had chosen my appearance carefully: not handsome enough to be remarkable, not young enough to appear foolish, not old enough to invite suspicion. My clothes were ordinary. My voice was calm. I carried a book I had no intention of reading.

She was reaching for a novel just beyond her grasp. A faint floral scent clung to her. I waited until she noticed me.

She glanced at my face, then at the book in my hand. I watched the little calculations behind her grey-green eyes. Stranger. Man alone. No apparent threat.

I let the glamour settle.

Her shoulders loosened. The slight tension around her mouth disappeared. Her attention, which had been measuring the distance between us, returned to the bookcase.

I had become a creature she could explain.

“Looking for something particular?” I asked.

She smiled politely. That smile was the first thing I stole from her. I had caused it. I had entered her awareness and altered it, and she had rewarded me with a gesture she believed was entirely her own.

I wanted to see what else I could make her give me.

We spoke for perhaps ten minutes. She told me about a book she had been searching for and complained about the weather. When I remarked that the library permitted ten books at a time, and that in all my years I had never tried to carry ten, she laughed. She touched my sleeve, and I held perfectly still, as though the slightest movement might frighten away the bird that had settled there.

I liked her laugh. I suppressed the instinct to hold her face between my hands.

When she left, I stayed among the shelves, breathing in her scent, until the bookseller asked whether I needed assistance. I looked at him. For one unguarded moment I considered how little effort it would take to make him forget the conversation we had shared. I could have made him remember nothing at all.

I smiled and thanked him for his time.

Humans imagine that monsters spend their nights thinking monstrous thoughts.

Some do. I have known vampires who fantasised about destruction with the enthusiasm a child showed for a new toy. They were dangerous, but rarely interesting. Simple appetites are easily exhausted.

The more dangerous creature is the one who can wait.

I stayed away from Elspeth for three weeks. I did not allow her to become accustomed to my face.

I told myself this was restraint. In truth, I was testing my hunger, and I found that I could leave her alone, that I could pass a night without knowing whether she was reading or sleeping or watching rain run down her window. I could do all of it. I simply did not wish to.

I began to imagine her missing me. I had spent centuries studying the human mind, and the thought that I might occupy hers, without permission, pleased me more than any intellectual discovery I had made.

I wanted to become a thought she could not put down. Because I wanted evidence that I had entered her world.

That was the hunger beneath the appetite, and it was far more difficult to satisfy.

When we met again, she was less cautious. She was faintly pleased to see me, and for a moment the centuries fell away, and I felt the sharp, unreasonable satisfaction of one who has found an exciting game.

I glamoured her again, though I did not need to. She had already decided I was harmless.

I wanted to know whether I could make her feel safe — when she should not.

Then I wanted to know what would happen when I stood before her as I truly was, and let her mind struggle to reconcile the creature in front of her with the man she believed she knew. I wanted to watch recognition become terror.

Would she run?

Would I allow her to?

These were not pleasant thoughts, and I did not mistake them for kindness. But I did not experience them as an invading madness either. They were mine.

That is what your scholars fail to understand when they speak of monstrosity as a disease that overtakes an innocent mind. I was capable of gentleness. I was capable of admiring Elspeth’s courage and of being genuinely pleased when she succeeded at something. I was also capable of wanting to frighten her simply so that she would see me.

Both existed in me without contradiction. I could care whether she suffered and still be unwilling to surrender what I wanted from her.

At first, she allowed me to sit beside her. I learned the faint rustle of her clothing when she shifted in her chair, the particular cadence of her breathing.

Then she began letting me touch her... how easily a hand at her waist could become fingers tracing the inside of her thigh, her femoral pulse.

She invited me in within the month. And so it began that I would stand in the dark of her room, watching her dream, listening for my own name. I knew when she slipped into deeper sleep.

Did I drink her blood? You know the answer to that.

Feeding brought me closer to her.

My vast and patient hunger is for her: her warmth, the sound of her pulse like an animal running in the dark, always just ahead of me. I wanted to be the reason she bolted the door and the reason she opened it.

I wanted the memories she guarded, that her mind had spent years refusing to revisit. I wanted the thoughts she abandoned halfway through, the things she would never admit to another living soul.

To know what she was like when nobody was watching.

That last desire was the most dangerous. The wish to alter another person's inner world has no natural conclusion. Every discovery creates another question, and a vampire who comes to believe another mind is his private territory can spend an eternity exploring it and still insist he has barely begun.

I had seen it destroy others of my kind.

I continued regardless.

There is one final matter concerning glamour that the Elders consistently misunderstand.

They assume that the glamour is the deception. It is not. The glamour is merely the invitation to believe what one already wishes to believe.

A person who longs for safety may see a protector. A person who longs to be understood may see a confidant. A person who has spent a lifetime being overlooked may see someone who notices every detail.

The vampire does not need to invent the desire. He needs only to discover it.

And if he is patient enough, he may become the answer to a question the victim has been asking for years.

This is why the oldest among us can be so difficult to recognise. We have had time to learn what people are unable to stop wanting.

I was once asked whether I regretted what I had done to Elspeth. That is documented in a separate file.

So I will leave you with some truths:

When a vampire tells you that he understands you, do not assume that understanding is an act of kindness.

When he looks at you as though you are the only person in the world he can see, remember that he is a creature of compulsion. Once he has picked up a scent, the world narrows to a corridor with only one door at the end.

Vampiric attention to detail can be a form of worship, of sorts, but turned monstrous. We notice the smallest cracks in a person's defences long before they realise they have left themselves exposed.

I have never claimed to be a good creature.

Severin Valle