The Demon, The Witch and The Vampire

He snapped her neck in front of everybody.

This was not how I envisioned my evening going. Very quickly my future flashed before me; the immediate inconveniences I would face and where I would relocate after tonight.

But first things first.

My mistress was furious.

*

“Hey,” Misha called out. “You’re coming this evening, right?”

Another party my, my.

“Yeah. I’ll be a bit late though.”

“Nobody’s gonna show up before 8 anyway. And just to be sure, you’re bringing…" She trailed off.

“I’m bringing what? Remind me again what this is for?” I had genuinely forgotten.

“Oh!” Misha exclaimed in a high-pitched tone. She was not amused. “It’s a Halloween potluck, remember? You are gonna dress up, though, right?”

“Oh right! Yeah, don’t worry about it.”

Misha stood there looking at me dubiously, an odd smile on her face.

“Anything else, Misha?”

“No. Just let me know by 6 o'clock if you’re not gonna make it.” With that, she walked away.

Truthfully, I didn’t even want to attend the party, but my mistress always sang about the virtues of blending in, etc. So I had to attend these social gatherings from time to time.

During lunch, my "clique," as it were, continued to discuss what they were going to dress as.

I remembered my mistress telling me, “Humans invent such silly distractions and rituals to give some semblance of excitement in their dull and dreary lives. The more sedentary their lives become, the more these distractions rise in number and grandeur.”

It’s suffocating, but we have to partake sometimes.

“What’re you gonna be?” Anita suddenly asked me, bringing me out of my contemplations.

“Oh… uh, vampire, I guess.”

“Which type? Twilight, Dracula, True Blood?”

“I’ll just put on fangs and contact lenses maybe; I don’t know.”

“Oh come on!” interjected Danial. “You gotta put in a bit more effort than that. I’m gonna be covered in green paint for heaven’s sake!”

Everybody else at the table also joined in the protest.

I did not like Danial.

“Alright, alright. I’ll see what I can do.”

“You could be sexy vampire,” said Rita.

I playfully rolled my eyes and got back to work.

*

I no longer required blood to survive. I weaned myself off of it. It was my mistress’ idea.

In this new age of social media, constant surveillance and overpopulation, it would be impossible to hide ourselves if we went on the hunt too often. She predicted this hundreds of years ago.

“The humans will proliferate excessively and the world will suffer for it,” she had said. “We like to pretend we’re the dangerous ones. But really, what we do is nothing compared to the havoc they wreak every day.”

Blood does still smell delectable to me and occasionally I do allow myself a little taste. But my primary diet now consists of human-food. It became plausible with the invention of pilaf, and now there’s biriyani, pizza, milkshake, and whatnot. The mind feels boggled with the overabundance of options available these days. I’ve actually come to enjoy human-food now.

I couldn’t have done it if the humans were still having barley bread softened in wine.

My mistress and I are ancient creatures.

I decided to take up Rita’s advice of dressing up as a “sexy” vampire. It would be the easiest way to go about it.

The primary thing I seek in life is ease.

I wasn’t always like this, but being around for as long as I have, excitement begins to feel tedious.

I found in my wardrobe a midnight blue dress that could hardly hold in my bosoms and only covered half of my thighs. As for the vampire bit of my costume, I reverted to my natural state. I saw my skin turn chalk white (a hazard of not drinking blood very often), my eyes and lips blood red, and my hair jet black. My fangs were much smaller than what mainstream media portrayed as vampire fangs, but they’d have to do tonight.

“This works,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror. Yes, we do get reflected in the mirror.

The door bell rang at the same time the smell of chocolate wafted into my nostrils.

Just in time, I thought as I headed to the door to fetch the chocolate cake I’d ordered for the party. Of course I wasn’t going to go through the trouble of cooking for these humans!

The delivery lad gaped at my chest as I paid him. I had half a mind to pull him in and suck him dry (I realise how that sounds), but my mistress taught me never to kill in my own house; too much work in getting rid of the body.

*

“Oh my God!” Misha looked somewhat stunned as she opened the door.

“Season’s greetings, Misha.” I smiled as politely as I could.

“Well, at least you’ll give Anoushka some company,” she said while ushering me in.

“Whatever do you me—" I stopped midsentence as my eyes fell on Anoushka and I realized what Misha meant.

Anoushka had dressed as a scantily clad nurse, also displaying an ample amount of decolletage.

So much for blending-in.

There were only twenty-three people at the fete, primarily from work; a few were personal acquaintances of Misha. As the night progressed, the Black Widow Negronis, the Vampire’s Kisses, and the Zombie Cocktails started to take their toll. At some point, a small group of people got in a somewhat loud verbal argument; two others began to vehemently make-out on the couch. Misha had moved most of her furniture to make a sort of dance floor in her living room, and that’s where most other attendants were attempting to groove.

“Oh my God, look! Danial is really going at it,” Rita remarked.

Danial, quite possibly dressed or undressed as the Hulk, was one half of the couch-couple I mentioned earlier, the lady with him was unknown to me.

“Do we know who she is?” Anya asked.

“No, but do we really ca—" I stopped short as I felt a jolt in my spine.

Bloodlust.

I smelled him, a familiar scent. I turned to see him standing at the door, looking squarely at me.

What on earth?

“You,” he growled.

“Hi!” Suddenly there was Misha, standing before him, no idea whatsoever of the threat he posed. “Do I know you? Are you with someone here?” She asked him in that high-pitched voice she uses when she’s annoyed.

I held my breath as the worst of what I expected to happen, happened.

He grabbed her head and in one swift motion, he snapped her neck in front of everybody.

As her body fell to the floor with a thud, everybody turned to see what had unfolded. The screams were just about to escape their lips when I found myself snapping my fingers and putting them all to sleep.

RUN! I wanted to scream at him. You’ve made her very angry. RUN!

But I could no longer form the words in my mouth. I was no longer mine.

“You ruined my life!” screamed the boy, Arry. Mistress had saved his life, last I remembered.

SHE’S HERE. RUN YOU FOOLISH BOY!

“You were going to become roadkill when I found you. So please explain to me the reason for this ungrateful and frankly disgraceful conduct.” It was my mistress who spoke. Her grating voice always made my bones jitter.

Arry lunged at her, positively frothing at the mouth.

With a flick of her hand, she lifted the boy off the ground and cast him against the wall.

He struggled ever so desperately, but to no avail.

She was his mother. What chance did this newling have against her?

“We’ll try that again. Why are you here and why do you wish to harm me instead of being grateful to me forever and ever?”

“My Monica died because of you!” He screamed.

She stared at him for some time, then she began to cackle; a jarringly loud, gravelly laughter that reverberated across the room. If I was human, my heart would have failed just from the sound of it.

“The girlfriend I told you to break up with and stay away from because a novice vampire such as yourself would find it difficult to control his urges, that Monica?”

“I knew I loved her so I’d make it work!”

Even I felt supremely annoyed at his stupidity at this point, but then he was just a boy.

When we found him, about half a year ago, he was dying by the side of the road, hit by a car he was, his demolished bike crushing his legs, his skull cracked open. He was eighteen years old, a pretty face, all his life ahead of him. She always had a weakness for pretty boys.

“Do you want to live?” she asked him as she revealed her true form to him.

He was shivering but he gave her a decisive little nod and blinked his eyes once.

His fate was sealed.

He stayed with me for a month afterwards, wherein I trained him on how to adapt to his new body, abilities, and urges. It was during this month that I also warned him to stay away from his loved ones as much as possible, to not form romantic bonds with humans, and to absolutely end things with his beloved Monica.

“It will end badly. By ‘badly’ I mean you will kill her.”

“Can’t I turn my loved ones into vampires too?”

“You don’t have the ability.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

He told me he’ll travel the world when he left.

“So how did you end up taking her life? She cut herself and you couldn’t resist the scent?”

His chest heaved and his eyes brimmed with tears. “I tried turning her.”

“You are a stupid, stupid boy.” She cackled again.

You are being cruel mistress!

“It’s not fair!” He screamed. “Why can you do it? Why can’t I? You did this on purpose!”

“You naive child. Had you ever been curious enough to ask me how I came to be, who I am, I would have told you.

But all you cared about was yourself. How your newfound powers would serve you. I see that I should have considered you a hazard then, but most humans display such characteristics, so I ignored the obvious red flags.

You see, boy, I am not only your vampire mother, I am the mother of all vampires. I was born over ten millennia ago. My mother was a witch and she experimented her spells upon her firstborn, myself. One night, during one such experiment, she felt a presence in the room, a demon it was, and she attempted to seal this creature within me. A pet demon—how cute right?

Not so much.

Her spell worked and we became a strange hybrid creature. But the demon didn’t become her pet, it became mine and we thirsted for blood.

And that is the story of how my mother and the rest of my village met their creator. The river ran red that night, and many nights after that.

I am the demon. The demon is me. The beast is inside me. I am inside the beast. We are the progenitor of all vampires and we are the only ones who can create vampires.

And we can very well end them too."

I could see Arry was scared now.

No point prolonging his misery.

We swiftly walked over to him and shoved our hand inside his chest.

When my mistress decided that it was time to get rid of one of her vampire children, this was her most favoured move.

We felt his flesh and muscle tear, his bones snap against our plunging fist before we wrapped our fingers around his cold but beating heart. It was torn out before he could even yelp.

He was horrified at how profusely he began to bleed—the blood of his precious Monica. Blood began to flow from his mouth too, and his eyes bulged as he tried to make sense of what was happening to him.

He tried to speak, but all he could utter were gurgling noises.

His heart was slowing down against our palm, squirting out blood with each beat, drenching our arm. There was a final, almost imperceptible, squeak and then it gave out.

Arry, too, completely bled out within a few minutes and his body along with his heart disintegrated into dust. We opened a window.

Slowly, I could feel my mistress releasing control back to me, her ever-loyal pet.

You decide whether you wish to stay or leave.

“Can we kill Danial too while we’re at it?”

No.

I washed the blood from my hand and arms in the bathroom and went to lay down on the ground, away from the regurgitated pool of blood, waiting patiently for the others to wake up.

It would be far more convenient to feign innocence during police questioning than packing up and relocating.

Besides, I thought. I never liked Misha.