“We aren’t going to make it much farther than this,” I sputtered out between painful breaths. “I really...I really don’t think I can keep running.” My lungs were aflame and blood was flowing swiftly from the wound in my forearm, causing my vision to blur.

“No. You can’t think like that, you can’t talk like that!” Frank hoisted me off my feet and softly yet firmly to the side, the snow crunching softly beneath my weight. He glanced over his shoulder quickly, letting his black hair fall back into his eyes as he looked down at my wound before ripping a strip of his shirt sleeve off to wrap it around my arm.

“Frank. We are literally in the middle of the road. This isn’t safe,” I muttered.

“Nowhere is safe, Alice.”

---

An icy breeze wafted in through the parlor window, blowing my hair out of my steamy face.
It was just my father and me in the house. Drake Blanche was an esteemed physician who was on call twenty-four seven. And that left me, his daughter, alone for most of the day. It was wintertime, and I would have given anything to be out in town, in the forest, anywhere really...but I was still weakened from a fever. My father had done everything he could to remedy it, but it clung steadfast to my body.

This winter breeze found me in my undergarments sitting on the edge of the outdoor parlor, in a chair before the door to the back estate. I didn’t care about appearance; if somebody found me in this state, they were most likely trying too hard any matter. My fan laid motionless across my thighs as I slumped in the chair, trying to catch my breath. It was Sunday. I would have rather been in church or at the market in the square, buying flowers to fill the house with an aroma I wouldn’t have been able to cherish anyway.

From the depths of my daydream, a frenzied sound finally found its way to my ears. I had sent the nurse home for the day; she was only getting on my nerves with her fretting and I was only frustrating her with my dismay. It was better like this for both of us.

Except when there was someone pounding at the front door and I was in no way decent.
I slowly made my way to the coat hook in the parlor where I had hung my day robe. It was going to have to suffice, as there was no time for me to get completely dressed. I cinched the ribbon around my waist, checking to be sure I was decent enough. Peeling the hair from my face, I walked up the entryway stairs and braced myself to haul open the oak front door. I had managed to get it halfway when the person on the other side reached in to help.

“I’m so sorry miss, are you alright?” The front door had swung wide open and I was faced with an equally rosy faced man. His black hair hung in feathery tufts around his face, red from exhaustion as well. Golden eyes peered down at me from between locks of hair, an unspoken query pooling inside them.

“Yes. Yes. Hello. I’m sorry for my appearance, good God,” I muttered, suddenly very self conscious of my appearance.

“Not a bother. Pardon my rudeness, but I’m looking for Francis. I was told he might be here?” The man asked, his breath short.

“Not a bother,” a small smile formed on my lips before I realized this man was in a hurry. “He’s an apprentice of my father’s, who is currently at his office across from the church in the square. If he would be anywhere, that is where.”

“Forgive me. I’m Gerard of the Way family. Francis is a close friend of mine. You are Drake Blanche’s daughter?” He extended his hand towards mine. I took a step away from him instinctively.

“I am Alice Blanche, yes, but I’m afraid I can’t shake your hand as I’m quite ill, in case my appearance wasn’t enough to display that,” I punctuated with a small sigh.

“My sympathies. I wish for your speedy recovery, and I hope we meet again,” Gerard said, nodding quickly in my direction before spinning around on the stone step, placing the top hat under his arm atop his disheveled head. My heart jumped quietly in my chest. I hope we meet again.

---

“Large soy latte up for Anna,” I announced to the store. A young lady walked up to the counter, taking her drink from my hands. The other drink I had called for minutes ago was still sitting there, slowly losing its steam. I picked it up, turning it around until I found the name.

“Black coffee for ‘G’, anyone?” I looked around the tables, but nobody was paying any mind. Looks like it was staying there, lonely. Jake had finished cleaning the back cabinets; some container of chocolate sauce had overheated and combusted in there during the day shift. Now, only the night owls were up. And for us, that meant a skeleton crew of two people. He cooked and made the drinks, I handled the front and took care of the bookstore.

Why the owners wouldn’t hire more people, I would never know.

I decided to do a round through the shelves and pick up any stray books, see if I could find this coffee’s owner. I left Jake at the counter and meandered through, finding pieces of trash stuck in between shelves and displays, books crammed into the wrong sections. The usual. The store was filled with all regulars, so I was searching for anybody out of the ordinary for this coffee.

Maybe this is him .

He was sitting on one of our leather armchairs, curled up in the corner, with his head resting on his arms. This guy had dozed off. I walked up to him to make sure he was breathing and not dead. He passed the test.

“Hey. Hey. Are you alive?” I poked him lightly, trying to stir him. I just got a grunt of dismay in return. “Are you G?” That woke him up. His eyes flew open as he realized he had fallen asleep in a public space. They raked up and down me and around the store until he realized where he was.

“Shit,” he mumbled. “Fuck. Sorry. Can I help you?” He was squinting. Poor guy must have been out pretty hard.

“Are you ‘G’? Because if you are, your coffee is getting cold.” He rubbed his eyes and they finally flew up to meet mine. They were like shattered pyrite with a chocolate center. He had a red mark on his face from laying on his arm, but the rest of it was the palest white imaginable, held in stark contrast with his midnight hair.

“Yeah. It’s me.” He just kind of...stayed there.

“Do you want me to bring it to you or something?” I asked slowly. This was such a weird interaction. Why did I feel so awkward? I deal with crazy nocturnal people all the time, that’s what happens when you work graveyard.

“No. I got it. I’m sorry, I’m really out of it right now. I’ll grab it in a few. Thank you very much, Alice.” He waved me away with his hand. I looked down at my apron. I was wearing the right nametag.

“My name is Alex, actually,” I said, stretching my nametag to show him.

“Oh, sorry. Like I said. Mentally vacant. Sorry about that.” I felt uneasy, so I left him alone. Yes, I go by Alex. No, that’s not my real name. My real name is Alice. Which is probably a common mistake, especially when dealing with a woman. Very common.

It was just that nobody except a few people knew that was my real name.

I felt uneasy the rest of the night. The coffee disappeared, but I didn’t see G again for the rest of it, and I hadn’t ever seen him there before. I didn’t even remember taking his order.

“Oh yeah, no I took his order when you were doing something. I don’t remember where you were. Stop being so crazy,” Jake said to me while we were cleaning up. The cafe was vacant for a second, but people would start trickling in for the three AM insomniac hour.

“I don’t know, it was just weird. I’m probably just tired,” I lied. I knew I wasn’t. I wasn’t tired in the slightest, because I had slept all day. Only a few more hours and I would bundle up and go home and go back to bed.

I took my first break around half past two in the morning. I called Frank.

“Are you awake?” I asked when he picked up.

“What kind of fucking question is that to ask someone when they answer your call? Of course I’m awake. If I wasn’t awake before you called, I’m awake now because you fucking woke me up,” he fired off.

“Jesus, okay. Were you really asleep?” I was genuinely surprised. There was a short pause.
“No. I wasn’t.”

“That’s what I thought. How’s the night going over there? We have a lot of down time tonight and it’s killing me,” I groaned into the phone. Frank was the roommate, the second in command, the First Mate. And by that, I meant he fed my fish while I was at work and we shared the same apartment. Both equally as important.

“Absolutely nothing going on here either. I’m watching awful reruns of shows I forgot existed, wishing I could sleep.” Frank laughed bitterly.

“Same. Believe me. Same. There was weird people in the cafe tonight and it’s weirding me out. Like I swear one of them was using a fake name,” I said. My phone buzzed and I pulled it away from my ear to check it. “Break time’s over. I’ll see you when I get home.”

“Later. Stay away from the crazies,” Frank said before hanging up the phone.

It seemed like the rest of the night was going to be normal for Jake and me. It was rather slow. It was nearing the last half hour of our shift and we were restocking the entire store for the guys coming in after us. I was balancing the cash register when I heard someone clear the throat across the counter from me. I jumped, ramming my hip into the open cash drawer. “Jesus Christ.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out. I was just-I was here earlier and I meant to buy a book and I totally forgot about it, and now it’s not on the shelf and I just have no idea where it is.” The man in front of me looked like a baby bird that had just fallen out of its nest for the first time. His dark hair was matted in disarray on the top of his head and there were deep circles under his eyes, which were narrowed in the dim light of the cafe. This was G, the guy who I had found asleep in the corner earlier. Was he homeless?

“Uh, yeah. I can help you find it. What book was it?” I asked, closing the cash register and coming around the counter.

“So. I don’t actually remember the name. I just remember kind of where it was.” He stood there, pulling his jacket tighter around him. Now that I was closer to him, he didn’t smell as if he hadn’t showered for weeks. He smelled like a crisp bar of soap, actually, with something akin to spice.
“Okay. Do you wanna...show me where you found it last time?” I had to suppress a smile. He blushed deeply.

“Right. Sorry. I’m super tired.” He turned around and led me back to the corner where he had curled up earlier. “It was a history book on the turn of the nineteenth century. That’s really all I can remember.” I took a squat to scan the lower shelves, G lowering himself next to me too. I flinched, but not because of the proximity. Now that he was closer to me, I noticed a different smell, an oddly familiar one. And it made me hungry.

But not in a “I need to eat empty carbs and sugar” kind of way. In a “I haven’t actually sucked anybody’s blood in decades” kind of way.

---

“Alright, Alice. I’m going to need you to not muff this up.” Frank cinched the wrap around my arm, my blood quickly soaking through the white linen.

“I’ll try my best to not bleed, Francis.” He narrowed his eyes as he stood above me, but concern was apparent in his gaze. “I’m going to be fine.”

My heart hammered when he didn’t agree with me. He didn’t even look at me.

“We should be coming up on the safe house soon. Just a tiny bit farther, Alice, I promise.” Frank helped me back up to my feet, rushes of heat coursing through my body. The pain in my head was threatening to drive me mad. It had to have been from the blood loss, that was the only thing I was able to think of. “We’ll get you stitched up when we get there.”

I soon lost the feeling that we were hurrying because we were being followed, but rather that we were in a hurry because I was about to die. “Please, how much farther?” My words were coming out slowly, feeling thick on my tongue.

“We made it. Just make it to that cottage, do you see it? You see it?” The edge in Frank’s voice was making my intestines crawl with worry. The time it took to cross the thirty feet from the snowy path to the front door felt like an entire year. Frank let go of my waist and raised his hand to knock on the door, but it yielded before he could touch it.

“I was waiting. I didn’t want to go outside, though. Come in, quick.” At this point, I was just going where hands guided me. I found myself sitting on a wooden bench draped in thick, silvery animal furs. There was no fire in the fireplace, but a faint aroma of allspice drifted in the space around me. I could see my breath. I was just focusing on my head and whether it was attached to my body still or not.

“She doesn’t look good, does she,” someone said. It was a man, but it didn’t sound like Frank.
“She lost a lot of blood. This was the only place I could bring her. Is there any thing you can do?” That was Frank speaking. The bench I was on was directly across from the front window. It was snowing. I was cold, but I was hot. I was breathing, but it felt like the air was gone from my lungs. Did I exist?

“I’ll light a fire. See how much of it I can stitch up.”

“So you can handle it?” Frank asked. I heard a dark chuckle.

“If not, I’ll die trying.”

---

There was a reason I was so nocturnal. Why Frank and I were always joking about waking each other up with phone calls, because neither of us ever really slept. If either of us got close, it was me. I absolutely gave up feeding on people. For lack of a better word, I was ‘vegan’. I was a vegan vampire. And I had done perfectly for the past fifty seven years. It was an attempt to keep the self loathing at bay. It took one hundred years for me to kick the habit, but once I did...honestly, the only upside was me not trying to find a way to end it all anymore.

I had a minuscule fraction of the power I once had. It took raw, nearly still bleeding meat for me to not devolve into complete insanity. I had to sleep during the day, but it never sank into a deep sleep. It was like being hungover and riddled with the flu without any cleansing benefits of actually sleeping. I couldn’t read people anymore. Not that I could have read minds before-I could just read their body behavior, their behavioral nuances, changes in heart rate and body temperature and micro expressions. All of that basically equated to being able to read minds.
I was powerless. All I could do was work graveyard at a coffee shop and try to avoid attempting to end it all on my days off. Luckily I had Frankie. Frankie wasn’t vegan. Frankie had his ways of getting...food. I was just lucky I had somehow found him in the same town. The only other vampire I had ever found on accident.

I was jerked suddenly back into the present when G made a strangled throat clearing noise.
“God, I’m sorry. I totally spaced for a while.” My throat was burning and my mouth was sore. It was everything I could do in my power to not just get up and fucking walk away, walk home, give up, and never come back.

“Yeah, I understand. The book was on this shelf. It was red.” I scanned the shelves quickly, eager to end this conversation, even though I could have basked in the weirdly calming and mouth watering scent this guy was giving off. Like eggnog.

I found it, trying to hold my breath, and dropped it quickly in his hands. “There you go. Is there anything else I can help you with?” I stood up, smoothing my jeans out and trying to avoid eye contact. He had the prettiest golden eyes. Kill me.

“I guess that’s it. I could lie and say I needed another book, but that would just be an excuse to keep talking to you,” he gazed up at me, his dark eyelashes curling against his cheeks.

“Hah. That’s okay. I’ll be around for another half hour. So get all your books that you need before I leave,” I smiled, backing away into a stray chair and almost eating shit. I stood up, kicked the chair back into place, and decided to walk right way forward.

---

“Francis. There isn’t much time. I think we just need to make her as comfortable as possible.”
“Alice, dear, are you too warm?” Frank cooed. I heard it as though I were at the bottom of a bottle and he was talking through the cork. Sweat dripped down my forehead. Frank wrenched open the back door, snow swirling in through the frame. I saw someone standing behind Frank, dark against the muted glow of the setting sun, and I just wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to hear something. Why.

I reached out for him, but instead Frank came forward. His eyes were red as if he had been crying, but I wasn’t sure anymore. My eyes were tricking me with the fever.

“Who is that?” I rasped out, my throat begging for water. Frank seemed to realize I wasn’t talking about him.

“That’s our friend. He helped us get you safe. He stitched up your wounds. This is his cottage,” Frank said, his words sounding awkwardly thrown together.

A few moments passed, and I was falling asleep, for which I was glad. I wanted to finally rest after our journey. After getting attacked by that animal and then being chased through the forest, all I wanted was to sleep.

“Should I?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Do you want me to?”
“I don’t know.”

Notes