Ever since the incident in Italy, being around Nicole had been a hell of a lot harder. Even our sleep schedules no longer aligned—I had always been a morning person, but now she was up at all hours of the night, often working on the evidence board in her kitchen, which wasn’t the most convenient when I was sleeping over in her guest bedroom.

Looking at her was… difficult. Even just hearing her footsteps in another room caused me to get a little wet down there in a way I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. That had never used to happen… shit, it barely ever even happened with people I was actually consciously attracted to. My relationship with Nicole had always been one of mentor and protégé… ooogh, I couldn’t get the thought of Naomi calling us “mistress and apprentice” out of my mind. I wasn’t sleeping soundly at night with one vampire in Nicole’s house, let alone two.

Dominating Naomi was working out well, though. It turned out I had a lot of frustrations to take out on it. Ugh, “it”... it had been so much easier to accept that vampires were truly less than sapient before Nicole had been turned. And it did indeed seem like Naomi cared for nothing more than blood, sex, and obedience. But knowing that Naomi was trans like me, transitioned only after being turned, even, changed something about the dynamic… it didn’t feel so great to dehumanize it, even knowing the horrible things it had done to Valerie Hawthorne and those other thralls it had named. Despite its evil deeds, it sure did seem like a person, someone I could relate to and befriend in another life, a life where it wasn’t trying its hardest to bring me under its control.

On the other hand, Nicole herself was handling her new instincts OK, at least around me. She had always told me that we dehumanized them because they dehumanized us, treating us as nothing more than prey. That was her justification for still wanting to be called “she” herself. And I hardly felt like dehumanizing her… that would just widen the gulf that had already formed between us.

Since it had happened, it was up to me to make sure that Nicole didn’t succumb to uncontrollable bloodlust. That was working OK, so far. She was still clearly the same woman I had known since I met her on my college campus, two years ago. She had the same interests, the same sense of justice, the same anger, the same smile that she had always had. Just, now… well, I didn’t ask her what she was doing at night. I knew she wasn’t keeping any thralls, which was a huge relief, but she was keeping herself sated somehow. She wasn’t keen on talking about how, and I wasn’t keen on asking. Not the healthiest of relationships, mind you, but at least she wasn’t hurting anyone where I could see it. It made me feel like a horrible person, but I supposed she had no choice…

Just after she was turned, we had set a hard boundary that Nicole would stay away from my blood. It was the only way we could maintain anything resembling an equal relationship. There had been some scary near-misses, but thankfully, as of two months and sixteen days after her turning, I still wasn’t Nicole’s thrall. I just hoped it would stay that way, even if I felt myself longing for it as I lay awake at night, my thoughts turned against me in a way that Nicole didn’t seem to be able to fully prevent. And the rest of the time I was thinking about betraying Nicole to serve Naomi, letting that monster out of its cage so it could go right back to festering in its hotel.

Nicole lived in an old, large house located in the hills of northern New Hampshire which she had inherited from her grandmother a few years before I met her, so there was lots of room to spare even as I slept. On the other hand, this house was in a pretty remote location, so I could hear a lot of things as I settled down for bed after brushing my teeth. The rustling of the wind outside, creaks as the house settled, the sound of footsteps, coming toward my room…

I heard Nicole knock on my door. She had been up for about an hour, but we hadn’t talked yet. I didn’t have the energy to initiate a conversation.

“Hey, Caroline,” she said. “Can I come and talk to you?” She was being excessively cautious with this sort of thing as of late, which I appreciated. Though I wondered if in this case she was finding this necessary… I had been staying in this room quite a lot lately, after all. Maybe this was my residence now, from her perspective. It was hard for both of us to understand where the line was drawn.

“Come on in,” I said, a bit strained. And as she stepped through, “did you need me to say that?” I flinched away from her. It seemed like I noticed an additional way in which she was a very pretty woman every time I saw her, lately. She had gotten much more pale since being turned. Her hair hadn’t seemed to grow at all even though she had taken an interest in growing it long again; it seemed that that took a long time for her now. Whenever she opened her mouth, I saw those sharp, horribly beautiful fangs of hers… and she had such lovely thighs beneath her leggings… ugh! I didn’t like thinking of her this way! It got in the way of what I needed to be focusing on now, if nothing else…

Nicole stepped into the doorway, coming no closer. “I did need it, yeah.” It took me a moment to remember what I had even asked, I was so distracted. Felt hard to focus on anything around her. Psyching myself up to sexually dominate Naomi was the only consistent way I had found around this feeling, but doing that with Nicole would just be weird and make things worse. I didn’t want to end up fucking either of them, but Naomi had a cage as a buffer between me and its amazing body… .

“I’m, uh, happy you feel at home,” she said awkwardly, holding the back of her head. It was so strange to see a vampire this awkward. Even as it slowly starved, Naomi was at least trying to put on airs, trying to get the better of me even as it succumbed to submission. I appreciated that Nicole was being straightforward with me, of course, but it made the whole thing even more surreal. I never knew how I should feel at any moment, or what thoughts were my own.

“What’s up?” I asked, shaking my head and trying to ground myself, the same as I did with Naomi. Dealing with these two back-to-back each day was a hell of an experience, but unfortunately, there was no one I trusted more than Nicole. We had been through a lot together.

“I’m not putting it off any longer,” Nicole said. “It’s time to introduce myself to that bloodsucker in the garage.”

I first met Nicole in my junior year of college. It was a cold, soggy Friday evening in the middle of February, and I wanted nothing more than to return to my residence hall and get some rest after an exhausting chemistry lecture. But when I saw this 30-year-old woman skulking around behind my building wearing a necklace of garlic, I felt obligated to ask what she was doing.

“Hunting a vampire lurking on this campus,” she said, looking at me dead serious.

“Here?” I asked, incredulous. “They’re solitary predators, right? What would they be doing on a densely-populated campus like this?” I suppose I just didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to think I could walk around my own college at night without worry, especially at a women’s college…

“It’s true that they generally prefer staying in the shadows, but that’s really more of a learned behavior,” she said. “And this one’s recently turned. Only a single victim or so. Your school was trying to keep it under wraps, trying to pass it off as a drug overdose but… I pay close attention.” Oh fuck, that’s how Polly Robertson had died. I had barely gotten over the news of this yesterday… all students had been emailed about it. It was a tragedy.

“You pay close attention to my school?” I asked.

“To vampires across New England. My name’s Nicole Perreira, good to meet you. Keep your eyes peeled and stay on guard and stay inside during the night, alright? And uh, hold onto this.” She retrieved a steak knife with a gleaming silver blade and handed it to me with care. It looked pretty expensive—not the kind of utensils the average college student usually kept on hand.

“I’m Caroline… thanks,” I said. “Is this actual silver?”

“It’d have to be,” she explained. “It’s one of the only things their kind fears. If you have to walk across campus at night, keep yourself armed, alright?”

“Okay,” I said, not really believing it. Not here, where I lived. “So, are you a grad student, or what?”

“Nah, I finished my master’s in music theory half a decade ago,” she said. “My activities go way beyond this school. Stay safe, kid.”

She walked away, and I put the knife into my bag and forgot about it. Just some kook from out of town, making light of Polly’s death. There would never be a predator like that here.

Just a day later, I was walking across the north lawn of campus, heading out at 9 PM for a late night at the cafeteria with some of my friends, when I spotted a girl I had been in a group project with for my first-year stats lecture. She had blonde hair tied up in a ponytail and wore round metallic glasses, dressed in a black blouse and blue skirt that looked pretty cold for this weather. I was only meaning to wave hello to her as I tended to do when we would cross paths, but as I came closer, I noticed that she was looking awfully pale…

My former classmate Melanie turned her head toward me, smiling at me with a fanged mouth. Fuck. There was no way this could be real… I had left the bag with Nicole’s knife in it at my apartment. I didn’t have time to yell for help before she lurched toward me.

“Heyyyy, Caroline,” the creature that had once been Melanie said, wrapping one very cold hand around my back, her voice causing my heart to sing in a way that was altogether unexpected and unnerving. “Look me in the eyes.”

I didn’t have the will to refuse, so I obeyed. What a wonderful feeling of helplessness it was… watching myself in blissful horror as my mind came wakefully asleep, totally trapped in the creature’s gaze.

“You’re looking so pretty tonight, you know that? And you smell so delicious,” she said, looking over me with hungry delight. I smiled dreamily at the compliment, overcome with how lovely she was. I had always thought that Melanie had been kind of cute, but I never thought of her this way, with a desperation to be fucked by her, to be fed out of and drained dry by her, to obey even the most self-destructive command in her name without a care in the world.

“Thank… you,” I droned out. I needed that. I needed more of that. Her hands were on my shoulders then, holding me in an iron grip that I had no will to resist anyways. Not if she wanted her hands there… not if she wanted them anywhere. I would let her have her way with me however she chose, barely thinking a single thought.

“You’re soooo cute like this,” she said, scratching me under the chin as I moaned. Shrouded by tall trees, there was no one around to see or hear us. And if they did see us, they’d probably just think we were girlfriends or something… they wouldn’t think to try and save me. That thought, hazy and distant beyond the fog of trance, made me giggle with happiness… I would do whatever she wanted.

“Now, follow me back behind this building, won’t you?” she said. “I, uh, can barely hold myself back from fucking you right here.”

“Yes…” I said, only hearing the sound of her irresistible voice. I followed what had been Melanie behind the performing arts center, a secluded area that almost no one visited at this time of night. I could do nothing to resist, could desire to do nothing, as she pulled down my sweatshirt to expose my neck, the cold air blowing against it in a sense-memory I retained for years to come, long after I had come back to consciousness.

“You’re going to be so yummy, I can tell,” she said, staring directly into my eyes again with her bright gray eyes, boring into my soul, asserting her control over me. “I’m going to do my best to keep you alive, OK? Out of the hospital, even… it’s a learning experience.” She giggled with something resembling nervousness as she felt around my neck, moaning as she opened her mouth, her long, sharp fangs closing in on my throat…

I felt the pavement beneath me as I hit the ground hard, scraping my arm a bit even beyond my sweatshirt’s sleeves… the shock was enough to almost wake me from trance, giving me enough awareness to discern the figure of Nicole, shoving me to aside as she stood face to face with the creature, brandishing a wooden stake. The creature hissed at her, demanding that she look her in the eyes, but she only looked at its torso as what had been Melanie took the stake to her heart, screaming as she stumbled backward and fell to the ground, dead.

Nicole panted as I watched her, still barely able to think or move. My heart was beating as fast as it ever had in a mix of fear and excitement, even as I was unable to fully take in the moment. She bent down toward me, grabbed my shoulders to lift me up into a sitting position, and squatted in front of me.

“Hey,” she said. “Wake up, Caroline. That thing can’t threaten you any more.”

I blinked, seeing the world more clearly. “Nicole… you… you were there at the last moment.” It was all I could think to say.

She let out a series of heavy breaths, looking me over. “I’m sorry I had to let it get this far. I needed for it to be distracted, or we both would have been in bigger trouble. I am correct that you weren’t hurt, yes?”

“Uh… I don’t think so. The last few minutes were a complete blur. She had me hypnotized, didn’t she…?”

Her expression darkened. “It seems so. Certainly if it looked you in the eyes.”

“I-it?” I said, frightened. “She’s—”

“It is not your friend. Not your classmate, not a human being, no matter how you frame it. Whatever that girl was to you, she was gone before you saw that thing tonight. Where there once was a person like you or me, only a mindless predator remained. It won’t hurt you ever again, though. You’re safe now. You’re yourself.”

“W-why?” I asked. I was so used to seeing Melanie on campus! It had been a long time since we had talked and she was due to graduate next year, but now she was just gone, after trying to drink my blood against my will? That was—

“Because another bloodsucker took her humanity away. I’m sorry for your loss.”

The gravity of it all was sinking in.

“Thank you… for saving my life,” I said. “I don’t know how I can repay you…”

“Nothing to repay,” Nicole insisted, reaching for my hand and helping me to my feet. “It’s my pleasure to rid the world of another bloodsucker.”

As frightening and distressing as this whole thing was, I couldn’t help but feel starstruck. Here was a vampire hunter, clearly very skilled and experienced, saving my life and wanting nothing in return… the emotions of it all were really getting to me. She put it all on the line, doing something important beyond this campus. Most people didn’t do that. The majority of my class would go on to work at some tech startup and help make the world worse. I had an opportunity here to choose a different path, even as I struggled to look away from the corpse lying on the ground a few feet away from me.

“...Will you teach me how you do what you do, then?”

One strange thing I had learned under Nicole’s tutelage was that vampires didn’t have much of a scent. Maybe ironic, since they were always telling humans how good they smelled. The garage where we were keeping Naomi only smelled like old tires and grease, with none of the smell of sweat or body odor that I’d expect from someone who had been kept in one place for the last four days.

Naomi perked up as I entered. It had been well-conditioned… by now, when I came in, it expected that it might be feeding time. Its movements were much slower and meeker than they had been when we had first brought it in, due to a combination of starvation and learning that I wouldn’t feed it if it didn’t act submissive. It was honestly really hot having power over a bloodsucker for once… it felt good. And as this had been my first time dealing with one of them alone, or at least the first time I had done so voluntarily, it was nice to have a technique like that to fall back on.

“Mistress… may I have some blood?” it asked in a meek voice, pursing its lips and playing up its weakness. I never knew whether that was an attempt to disarm me, or just it becoming more acquainted with acting submissive. It seemed to be very unused to that, which made sense when it had the power to bend humans to its will. It would be easy to come to rely on that power.

I said nothing, looking away from the pathetic creature in the cage as Nicole walked in behind me. Having her call in on the phone with Naomi in the room was hard enough, but she needed me here now in order to feel capable of this. I was just going to try and tune them out… I didn’t suspect I’d have much luck, though.

“Ahh, Nicole, I presume?” Naomi said, resuming a modicum of its former domineering demeanor. “Or should I call you hunter_419?” It sneered at her for a moment, but then I watched its eyes widen as it looked Nicole up and down, noticing her pale skin, her fangs, perhaps her lack of a reflection on the silver cage’s ceiling…

“Wait a moment,” it snarled. “You’re a vampire. Explains why I couldn’t smell you, I suppose.” It looked down at the mats beneath it, probably shedding whatever was left of its ambition to enthrall her. It didn’t work that way between vampires.

“Happy you noticed,” Nicole said sarcastically. “I was letting my apprentice handle you so she could get in some one-on-one experience with a bloodsucker like you, learn to handle you when she doesn’t have me to lean on. But I’ll be honest… being around you is hard for me. I knew I’d have some… territorial instincts. You and I don’t live so far from each other. There’s something in me that makes you feel like my competition, as ridiculous as it is…”

“Your apprentice, huh?” Naomi snorted. “You know you can just call her your thrall. I see what’s going on here now, I think.”

I squirmed, sitting on a box and trying to hide myself in the corner of the room. I was terrified of being left in a dangerous position here. More than any other worry of mine, I wanted to handle Naomi alone to stop it from convincing Nicole that I was no better than food to her. It felt like she was so close to her breaking point sometimes.

Nicole gritted her teeth and shook her head. “Caroline is not my thrall.”

“Call her whatever you like—”

“No,” I said, mustering everything I had to cut in. “I’m literally not her thrall. She hasn’t enthralled me. She hasn’t drunk my blood.”

“Oh, so you get to be a ‘she’, is that it?” Naomi said, practically ignoring me as it stared daggers as Nicole. Would it not take me seriously any more now that it had met Nicole? I’d need to be sure that that wasn’t the case. “What makes you so special?”

Nicole began to speak, but I spoke over her, not intending to lose my footing. “Unlike you, Nicole has managed to retain her humanity. She still sees value in people beyond their blood.”

Naomi chuckled before sighing sadly. “Lilith, this is such a crock of shit. Imprisoned and sentenced to death by a fellow trans girl and a fellow vampire.” Its self-pitying words were making me feel sad, too, against my will, and I tried to fight it off.

“Oh, you think you’re so different from me, don’t you, Nicole?” Naomi said, reaching toward the silver cage bars instinctively, but pulling itself back before it burned itself. It seemed to have regained some of its former strength with my mentor’s arrival. “But judging by the photo of you I was shown, you weren’t turned all too long ago. Only a matter of time before you realize how wonderful it is to have a girl kneeling at your feet, serving at your beck and call.”

“I’m not…” Nicole looked away from Naomi, obviously fazed by the comment. “I’m not interested in that.”

“Really… well, you must have been getting blood somehow,” Naomi said. “Still in our blood bank-raiding phase, are we? Humans will catch onto that very quickly, you know. My, you must not have been turned very long ago at all.”

Nicole’s fists were balled, her whole body shaking. I was kind of afraid of what her next words would be.

“I’m not so stupid that I’d be stealing from a blood bank. Do you know how many of your kind I’ve killed? If I did something ridiculous like that, I probably would have already gotten a stake in my heart.”

“Where are you getting blood, Nicole?” I said, my eyes widened. I had been hoping for something like the blood bank scenario, frankly. If someone hunted her over it maybe she could at least say truthfully that she was doing her best. I wanted to take initiative here, be the one to ask before Naomi got the last word.

Naomi sat back in its cage, giving us both a sadistic, fanged grin.

“I… you told me not to tell you,” Nicole said, looking at me with what I assumed were doe-eyes, though I avoided her gaze as I had to to retain full consciousness.

“It’s probably gonna goad you into saying it one way or another,” I said, not sure myself if I was being truthful. “Might as well get it out now.”

As her whole body clenched up, Nicole said, “I go into more populated areas to look for blood…I’ll lurk in back alleys, parking garages, that sort of thing. I try to vary it up, never going the same place twice. I’ll wait around until a pretty woman comes by…someone who smells really good. I put them in trance, do what I need to do, and then I, uh, well. I erase their memories of the incident, no matter how much my instincts tell me I should keep them around to serve me. I let them go. And I hope against hope that we’ll never cross paths again.”

“What?” I asked, sighing with as much relief as I could stand to feel given that my mentor was drinking people’s blood against their will. “That’s not so bad, I mean, it’s probably close to the best that you could—“

“But it doesn’t always end that way, Naomi Rennt,” she continued, staring daggers at the red-haired vampire in the cage in a way that I couldn’t dare imitate. “There have been a few times when I couldn’t control myself. And they bled out in the alley. I’m not even capable of giving humans mercy when they need it most, so don’t expect any mercy yourself, just because we suffer from the same curse!” She lunged at the bars in a feral rage like I had rarely seen her, falling back and landing on the ground with her hands burned as Naomi reeled, then began laughing.

My knees seemed to give out as I took in the gravity of this, the fact that Nicole had truly succumbed to those depraved instincts of hers, instincts she had to fulfill somehow for sustenance, surely… but she was apparently just killing humans without a second thought, if accidentally, with no attempt made to even inform their loved ones or any other common courtesy like that. Like so many of the undead, killing the living had become utterly commonplace for her. I hated that for my mentir… and I worried that I might eventually be next, regardless of the boundaries we had established.

“That’s really bad, Nicole,” I said with my face in my hands.

“Killing humans?” Naomi said, standing up to its full height, well over six feet tall. “That doesn’t mean you’re hot shit. Quite the opposite, really. Do you know how many humans I’ve accidentally killed in the last century and a half, since my begetter died? It’s zero! I can hold myself back quite easily…and the nice thing about having thralls is that you get attached, because they’re sweet and cute and full of love for you. So it becomes easier to hold yourself back! And you learn a bit of self-control.

“So don’t worry, Caroline,” it continued with a smarmy look on its face. “She’ll get better if you give her a decade or two. Maybe eventually, she’ll realize that she doesn’t need to sleep in her coffin… I bet you go to rest in yours every night, don’t you, Nicole? In your own basement, perhaps?” It let out a spiteful, mocking laugh, like it had seen this a hundred times before. Perhaps it had, with over two centuries of stagnation behind it.

“I don’t sleep in a coffin, dipshit,” Nicole said. Naomi raised its eyebrow, maybe a bit surprised. “I’d need three hands to count how many of your kind I’ve killed. I’ve seen you sleep in beds before. There are doubters in my community, but I know your kind, inside and out.”

“Our kind,” Naomi insisted.

“You and I aren’t the same,” Nicole said, and I tried hard to keep believing that. At least she really didn’t seem to be enthralling anyone, but that was a small comfort. “But what I do have in common with you is a great help… it helps me stand up to your kind. You can’t physically overpower me, you can’t hypnotize me, you can’t enthrall me… Every weakness I had as a human is gone now. And I have more first-hand knowledge than ever of all your weaknesses.” It was true that Nicole could physically overpower it… Naomi was a lot less muscular than my mentor, and I was pretty sure that meant something even to the undead. That gave me a degree of comfort, though the ease with which Nicole could overpower me on a whim always kept me on edge.

“And our instincts, our needs, are something else we have in common,” Naomi said. “That’s something I’m better at handling than you. Let me out of here and I’ll show you how to treat humans with care. I’ll help you find the self-control you need to never kill a human again. We can practice with Caroline there, show you how to—”

“No!” I shouted, cutting off the parasite in the cage, on the edge of a panic attack. I wanted to help Nicole feel OK here, but if this was where the conversation was going, I didn’t want to stick around. But how would they talk about me, what would they agree to do to me, if I wasn’t here… the thought made me sick.

“I’m your Mistress, don’t you remember?” I continued. “You addressed me properly when I came in here. Take that seriously, sweetie, or you’re not getting any blood from me tonight.”

Naomi only grinned at Nicole, barely paying me any mind, then said, “I think you could be convinced, with your mentor’s help.” And I saw my mentor eyeing me in a way that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. Bringing her here was starting to feel like a decision I would regret.

As Nicole and I got to know each other, the gravity of what Melanie had almost done to me began to sink in. Never before had I perceived vampiric enthrallment as a clear and present danger to my life and happiness, just as some kind of fairy tale bad ending, something to fear in theory but not to treat as a reality, like being eaten by a wolf or something. Now, after seeing Melanie so corrupted against her will, after falling under her spell so immediately, after feeling her cold, deathless breath on my neck as she approached…

I just wanted to put a stake through the heart of whoever did this to her. Whoever had—as Nicole put it—ended her life and cursed her with undeath. And my new mentor was going to show me how it was done. No more was she a conspiracy theorist in my eyes—instead, she was pretty much the only person I felt I could truly trust. Even as my college friends listened to me about what had happened and expressed their sympathies, I had the impression that they would never really understand. They had never been put into trance by a bloodsucker, brought that close to death or worse.

Nicole and I spent the next few weeks looking through phone books and call histories, everything we could get ahold of from Melanie’s personal effects and online footprint, to figure out how she had been turned. Our research brought results: the most likely suspect seemed to be Jennifer Ferns, a bank manager-turned vampire from the south of Vermont who we intuited had probably turned Melanie while she was opening an account at the very bank branch that Jennifer had worked at.

According to Nicole, it seemed that many vampires tended to try and continue their previous lives to try and offset the horrors of their undead bloodlust setting in. Melanie had been no exception herself… it seemed that vampirism truly was a cycle of abuse and misery without end until someone like Nicole came along to ensure that the lineage ended then and there. As she explained to me, death would bring release and freedom to such a wretched creature. This is part of why she did what she did, she told me, though she was reluctant to go into the reasoning for her earliest hunts. Clearly, one’s first vampire hunt was often a pretty upsetting experience.

We tracked Jennifier Ferns down to her rural house—no, its house, Nicole liked to remind me. As she always said, it wasn’t the woman it had been any more… at best, it was something like a parasite copying the woman’s personality and pretending to be her through her memories… a monster pretending to be human in order to corrupt its body and seduce its prey. Not sapient, beyond what it needed to get its food. The vampire reanimated from Melanie’s corpse had recognized me, spoken to me, yes, but it wasn’t Melanie, not any more. She was dead. And so was Jennifer. That’s what Nicole told me day after day, as we planned to put a stake in the creature’s heart.

My dad had insisted that I learn to shoot a gun in high school. I wanted nothing to do with sport hunting like he had hoped I would, but my skills were going to come in handy for a different kind of hunting altogether.

Long-range shooting skills had limited application against the creatures of the night, Nicole had told me. No matter how direct, it was improbable that a shot from afar would ever be deadly. They’d always need to be finished off with a stake through the heart, after all—that or burning from sunlight was the only way to be sure, short of cutting their damn heads off or something, which was a bit beyond our capabilities. So, what, were you gonna sneak up to them while they were recovering from the shot? It seemed a bit unreliable at best, especially when they were so damn fast and silver bullets were so damn expensive. Hunters were accustomed to using nothing more than a pistol as a sidearm.

But now there were two of us, and Nicole thought we could really make some magic happen working together. She had some fucked up plans in mind for Jennifer Ferns… some stuff I wasn’t really all that comfortable with, but I’d trust her judgment.

And so I was positioned on a little hill a few hundred feet from the house, aiming a gun at the house of some civilian. Or former civilian, anyway. This was pretty much the first thing they told you not to do while learning gun safety. I wasn’t overwhelmingly happy about being in this position, but Nicole had done a good job of convincing me that this was going to be a good deed. We just made extra sure that I had memorized the face of the person I was supposed to shoot.

I had encouragement along the way, too… Nicole had me join a Clamor server that she helped run for local vampire hunters. There were a lot of kindred spirits there, working together to slay the undead for one reason or another, though none were as experienced or knowledgeable as my mentor herself. That made it feel even more like she was the one person I could trust, so I refrained from posting too much there. I didn’t really feel like I fit in with guys calling themselves stuff like “Jesus loves me” and “Stake_Sharpener86” anyway.

As I leaned over the ridge with rifle in hand, the spring breeze blew through my tied-up hair and brought a sort of calm that helped steady my aim. Nicole was down on the ground this evening, essentially carrying out a doorbell ditching. For such an elaborate planner, she sure was brazen. It was amazing that she had lasted this long—that was really a testament to her ability to think on her feet as well as execute a plan. For this to work, Nicole just had to get away fast enough, and we had to hope that the creature would answer the door itself, instead of some thrall we didn’t know about. Thralls were still human, still people, not beyond saving even though the aftermath of their experience would affect them for years to come. Above all else, their lives were sacred. We did this for them.

I watched as Nicole rang the doorbell and dashed behind a tree about thirty feet or so from the front door, lying in wait. The vampire would be able to smell her easily from that distance, so my fingers would have to be careful, but quick, once it emerged from its house.

After a minute or so, I saw the creature emerge, looking much like in the photo, a sort of skinny middle-aged lady of average height with light skin turned deathly pale. Only, looking through the scope, it was so much prettier than I had anticipated, so lovely-looking that it almost made me woozy. Fuck, Nicole had warned me about this, and I should have known it would be a problem after my experience with Melanie. I just hadn’t realized that this would still be an issue looking at a bloodsucker from 500 feet away through a rifle scope. That was so unfair. And it had clearly used such little effort, too—its short brown hair, tied back in a ponytail, was rather disheveled, and it was dressed in a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants. It looked like it had just gotten out of bed, which it probably had, considering that it was 9 PM, and the sun had gone down less than half an hour ago. Nicole usually recommended tracking down a vampire during the day if possible, but we needed Jennifer outside for Nicole to make the getaway, and that wasn’t gonna happen if the sun was up.

I tried to steel myself, looking at that pale pretty thing, that thing that wasn’t a person any more, that monster, but my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Sweat beads ran down my forehead as I looked at the creature through the scope, slowing walking across its own lawn toward Nicole’s hiding spot.

Fuck! I couldn’t let it get to her!

I took the shot. As the sound of gunfire rang in my ears, I realized that I had missed. The vampire was still standing, just peering around frantically, trying to figure out where the shot came from, I could only assume. Oh, god… I had another bullet, but was it too late? I loaded the bullet in as quickly as I could, hands still shaking, looked back in the scope…

Oh, god. It was looking right back at me. Well, not directly, thank fuck, but it was peering toward me, probably seeing the tip of my hunting rifle using its acute vision. But its eyes, its eyes… its blue eyes, sparkling, making me…

No, not making me do anything. That wasn’t direct eye contact. More likely than not, it didn’t even know it was looking at me quite yet. But it was looking in my direction. I shook the intense feeling of sleepiness and submissiveness off as best I could, seeing it standing there, confused, its expression contorting into fear and rage…

I took another shot, and the creature stumbled back, feeling for its forehead… falling to the ground where it stood. I had done it, and lingering at the edge of something resembling a trance, I dropped my gun, my heart beating out of my chest.

I looked over the ridge and saw Nicole come out from her hiding spot. Working quickly, she stabbed the creature in its side with a silver steak knife similar to the one she had given me. If the bullet held in place, it wouldn’t be needed, but this was insurance, something to slow it down while we carried out her reckless, but potentially fruitful plan.

She heaved the unconscious bloodsucker over her shoulder with both arms and, with a ton of effort, started carrying it back to her car, parked on the road a good distance away to avoid suspicion. I started to pack my rifle up and head back to my own car—we had traveled separately to avoid being seen together. As I did, though, I saw someone coming out of the house.

From my distant view, no longer having a rifle scope to rely on, it looked to be another middle-age woman on the chubby side, running out the front door. It seemed like she had an expression of horror on her face.

“Mistress! No!” she shrieked. Oh no. It would be a few days until the vampire would be killed, and I was not prepared to try and de-escalate the anger a thrall felt over losing her Mistress. I had never dealt with thralls personally, but the concept was pretty terrifying to me. Trying to talk anyone down from completely unshakeable near-religious devotion to a single person or monster seemed like a harrowing experience. All I could do now was get in my car and drive away from her as fast as possible, and trust that Nicole would be able to do the same. She was opening the trunk of her car to put the creature in then, so it looked like it wouldn’t be a huge problem.

While we both made it back to Nicole’s house with no problems, the images of the creature’s face and of the frightened thrall stayed at the forefront of my mind for the entire drive. Why did bloodsuckers get to be so alluring… they didn’t even need that shit when they could just physically overpower us anyway. And no matter how much I tried to suppress it, there was a tiny part of me in the back of my mind that kept wanting to submit myself to that creature and offer up my body and soul to it. I didn’t even know a single goddamn thing about what it had been like when it was a person and it could still make me feel like a goddamn simp. I hated that.

By the time I pulled into my mentor’s driveway, I could hear the sounds of shuffling around inside the garage. Installing the silver cage and retractable skylight in there had been a week-long project for the both of us, made of specialized parts custom-ordered from online sellers. A vampire interrogation had been a pipe dream of Nicole’s for a long time, apparently. She thought it would be a much more productive way to get a full list of the creature’s thralls and/or fledglings. It seemed like Jennifer had ignored Melanie altogether after turning it, after all, leaving it to its own devices, so there wouldn’t be much of a paper trail when Jennifer was dead. This was apparently quite a common problem, and so rooting out a vampire’s former allies became an aggravating and time-consuming part of the job if you wanted to be as thorough as Nicole did. And Nicole sure did want to be thorough.

I went inside, bringing my rifle bag in with me. This was turning out to be quite tiring work, and with Nicole’s plans in mind, it wasn’t gonna get any less tiring for the next few days. I eagerly awaited the point at which we could put a stake in Jennifer’s heart and know that Melanie had been avenged.

Nicole was sitting at her kitchen table when I got in, just outside the entrance to the garage through the laundry room. Her whole body was beaded with sweat, and she looked terribly distracted, with heavy bags under her eyes.

“Nice shooting out there,” she said, barely looking at me. “Relieved you landed that second shot. I was fuckin’ horrified for a second.”

“I’m so sorry, Nicole…”

“Don’t worry about it,” she insisted, looking up at me and granting me small relief. “I get it. Nerves get the best of you in the moment. I would’ve been ready with the stake if it got close. I’ve been in worse situations.”

I sighed, taking that in. This really was a horribly dangerous job. I don’t know how she put up with it for so long.

“Anyway, look,” she continued. “It’s lying in the cage now, locked up. I doubt it’ll even come close to waking up until we get that bullet out. Its brain is burning inside its skull at least as fast as it can regenerate. So I think you should be in there while I do it to watch each other’s backs. Bring a stake and some garlic.” Nicole always had a twitchy way about her while she was planning, like she could never sit still until the job was done.

“Shit, alright… I can do that,” I said, sighing deeply as I mentally prepared myself for a long night.

Removing the bullet didn’t turn to be out that much of a whole ordeal, though a certain tension lingered in the air as I sat in the garage watching Nicole. She was holding the creature’s head in place with one hand and the pliers with her other, slowly prying out the bullet. Even though I could still feel its unnatural allure weighing on my mind to a certain extent, it was also basically just a corpse while it was unconscious like this. It was able to preserve itself in a way that a regular corpse couldn’t, sure, but it didn’t breathe, its muscles didn’t move… it seemed dead dead, but I knew that it would be back up and speaking in less than a day from now. That was rather upsetting, but it was what had to happen.

And less than a day later, Nicole and I returned together for the first time, after getting a long and restful night of sleep. At her suggestion, we came and spoke to the creature in the middle of the day, the time it would most likely be wanting to get some sleep of its own, just to keep it on its toes. She’d do most of the talking, which I didn’t even remotely feel up to after what happened with Melanie, but we’d both be able to rely on each other to keep our heads together.

Nicole flipped the garage’s light switch on as we entered, causing the sleeping vampire in the cage to suddenly stir from its deathlike sleep. Seeing it come to something resembling life so quickly was rather eerie.

“W-what… who’s there?” the creature said groggily, pulling itself up into a sitting position. Nicole had taken all of its clothes off and stored them in an extra room upstairs—according to her, she wanted to take away anything it could possibly use against us and treat it like the animal it was. I tried to keep my eyes off of it, and away from its eyes in particular. Thankfully I didn’t have to do this alone.

Nicole took a deep breath and looked over at me, ignoring the creature.

“It’s scared,” she said. “It’s realizing it might have to face justice for what it’s done.”

“Justice?” the creature called Jennifer said, its voice a beautiful, sad song that I didn’t want to listen to. “You, um… oh, god, you shot me, didn’t you? Why would you do that?” It touched its pale forehead, marred by a bloodless wound that would take it a couple of days to heal, Nicole estimated. It was still clearly feeling pain from the shot.

I silently nodded, with a slight smile on my face.

“Why would you—”

Nicole cut it off, putting a hand up to its face from outside the cage’s bars. “It thinks it’s asking the questions here. But this is our interrogation. Isn’t that right?” She turned to me, nodding slowly.

“Hey. Hey there,” Jennifer said, changing its tone to a sweeter, less panicked one. Oh god, that was so easy and hard to listen to, I loved and hated it. I needed to keep listening to it in my head forever and stop immediately… why did it have to be like this? I covered my ears and closed my eyes and grunted, trying my best to stay level-headed. Nicole put a hand on my shoulder in a show of support—a warm, human hand that made me feel more like a person.

“Look into my eyes, alright, honey?” the creature continued. It seemed to be directed at Nicole, but hearing it made me want to open my eyes and stare as commanded as well. Nicole’s hand on my shoulder helped stop me from giving in.

“It’ll be so easy. It’ll feel so—”

“You’re going to play for what you did to Melanie Dobbs,” I said, keeping my eyes closed but taking my hands off my ears. I needed to stay on the offensive here. Maybe anger could keep the feelings of submissiveness away…

“Melanie…” Jennifer said, its voice a bit shaky again. “Oh, the girl from the bank, right. I recall her. I could tell you all about her if you’ll just look into—”

“No!” I shouted. “Why did you do it to her? Why would you kill her and make her a monster like you? Did that feel good?”

“Caroline, we should hold on.” Nicole said to me in a low voice, stepping between me and the vampire as I opened my eyes, feeling myself burning with rage. Regardless of my mentor’s intended process here, I had to know. I just had to. “Let’s wait a sec, and build up to…”

“No, no, I need to know,” I said, looking right past her back at Jennifer with tears in my eyes. “Why did you do it? She was an innocent fucking girl. Math major, you know? Really cool girl. I wanted to know her better than I did. And you just had to fuckin’ rip away her humanity! Why?”

Jennifer fell silent for a moment, perhaps reflecting on my words to whatever extent that was possible for a monster like it.

“I wanted to know how it would feel,” it said, sounding kind of confused itself. “I had been turned about two months beforehand, and you always hear the stories… how vampires can turn humans into other vampires. How it was done to me by that rich weirdo at the golf club, who told me nothing more than that I shouldn’t remain loyal to her, even though it felt so natural to… I wanted to see for myself what it must’ve felt like for her. I wanted to know. And before that I never would have guessed that I could get sick of a certain person’s blood, in the moment. Overfull, even. How drinking someone completely dry would actually feel like a chore. I brought her back to her college dorm and everything…laid her down nice and flat on her own bed. And she made it. She came back. I did it. Now I know. And I probably won’t ever do it again.”

“It’s right. It won’t do it again,” Nicole said, continuing to ignore the creature in favor of me. “It won’t get the chance when it’s buried in the ground where it belongs.”

“God, she’s never coming back…” I said, lunging toward Nicole for a big hug. I had been holding these feelings in for way too long. I had hoped that maybe there was some grand narrative between Jennifer and Melanie that I didn’t understand, but that story just confirmed the inhumanity of it all. I wished I could take it all back, bring Melanie back to life. But instead it had to go this way, and Nicole’s red flannel would be soaked with tears thanks to that.

“I’m sorry,” Jennifer said, retaining a solemn tone. “I didn’t realize… I mean, what happened to Melanie?”

“You killed her,” Nicole said, speaking to the creature directly for the first time. “And I cleaned up your mess.”

“You… um, you did this to her?” it said, looking around its cage.

“Didn’t have the luxury,” Nicole replied, looking almost as dead as the vampire in the cage. “I put a stake through the monster’s heart where it stood.”

“So you killed her?” Jennifer said in shock, stepping back. “And you’re blaming me for that? I made certain she came back properly! I checked on her every day! I crossed my t’s and dotted my i’s!”

“You killed her,” I said, walking up and smacking my hands against the cage, staring the creature down. I wouldn’t let it have a monopoly on looking. “Don’t try and kid yourself. You know it deep down, you monster.”

The creature fell down onto its ass, a look of terror crossing its face. “What about my thralls? What will they do when I’m gone?”

“They’ll live,” Nicole said defiantly. “They still have that luxury.”

“They’ll… they’ll come after you! As I passed out, I heard Anna cry for help… she’ll be after me! She’ll come to save me!” The creature started laughing madly, another sound that I loved and hated to hear, and I was filled with more disgust than ever. But knowing what Nicole’s plan was… I tried to suppress that worry. I might have gone off script, but everything was still going according to plan.

“We’re counting on it,” I snickered, holding back any more tears for the time being. “We’ll be ready for her.”

Nicole and I went on to deliver justice to everyone involved.

My mentor hadn’t given any response since Naomi had encouraged her to turn against me, but the silence was deafening, and the air was tense.

“Nicole,” I said, shaking my head at her. “No, Nicole. I’ll give it blood when I’m good and ready.”

“I, uh…” Nicole giggled nervously, as Naomi grinned sadistically from within its cage. “Yeah, no, definitely…” She put her hand on her forehead, looking like she was nursing a headache. What did that feel like for her, I wondered? Did she even still have working pain receptors in the same way as I did? Thinking about her undead biology was a bit terrifying to me, how inhuman she had become.

“You don’t have to listen to her—it,” I said, gingerly reaching out for Nicole’s shoulder. “You’ve never been seduced by a vampire before, and now you’re immune to their charms. Don’t start listening to it now. You can tell how unreasonable it’s being better than I can, Nicole.”

I just hoped that that was really true, but took no solace in the fact that if she did listen to Naomi’s words, it wouldn’t really be Naomi seducing her at all. She’d be seducing herself, using Naomi’s self-serving mission of escape to justify giving into her desires that she was repressing for my sake. I hated thinking that… but how else could I take this? Vampires were immune to their own charisma, so if Nicole was falling for this even a little bit, that was because there was a part of her that wanted to violate my boundaries and take control of my body and mind. A part left over from after she had been turned, before I had reconciled with her…

And worse still, thinking that about her was getting me pretty wet.

“Um…” Nicole stammered, looking down at my hand on her shoulder. “Of course, yeah. No way.” She turned back to Naomi, seeming to regain some of the fire in her eyes, though I dared not look too closely.

“I won’t violate Caroline’s trust, you monster,” she said defiantly, stomping her foot on the ground. “I made a promise to her that I intend to keep. If she tells you that you’ll submit to her to get blood, you’ll submit to her. We’re partners. Equals. But you wouldn’t understand such an arrangement, would you?”

Naomi let go of some tension in its body, sitting down on the mat below it, and it sighed.

“Why do you think so little of me?” it asked. “You stand there on your high horses, acting like I’m an animal who can’t even understand the concept of working together toward a common goal. You both should know better. I’ve been undead for over two centuries. I know a thing or two about how the world works, how humans interact, better than either of you. So don’t act like I’m just a thoughtless monster closed off from the world. You know something about my thralls? They’re all human. I can keep up with culture as well as either of you.”

“Kneel for me before you answer this,” I said. “But tell me. Why do you act like this, then? If you can see it. You can see that Nicole and I can just about make this work. If you put your mind to it… you could probably have an equal relationship with humans too. Why don’t you at least try?” I thought back to what I had asked Jennifer two years ago… why it had turned Melanie. Hearing its answer had given me all the justification I needed to stab it through the heart at the time. But now, and I wasn’t sure if it was just Nicole and Naomi’s charisma weighing on me together, now I was thinking that maybe there could be a certain rationality to this vampire’s actions. Even Naomi wasn’t necessarily pure evil, whether or not it deserved to die. It could be cruel for some reason other than cruelty’s sake… like a person. Like Nicole. Like Nicole was to vampires.

Naomi rolled its eyes and got down on its knees. It really liked to act like a brat… if I was domming it in a proper kinky relationship, I would spend time teasing it until it treated me with respect. But when it was due to die in a matter of days, it didn’t seem particularly worth it.

“You’re asking me why I’m a Mistress to my thralls?” Naomi asked, giving the best smug smile it probably could manage in its disheveled state. “It’s because I like it… Mistress. Just like you like dominating me, evidently. It’s hot to me. And their blood tastes better when they’re staring blankly, kneeling at my feet, and worshipping me as their Goddess. That’s why.

“I’m sure you’d like it too, Nicole,” it said, laughing without moving from its kneeling position. “Imagine how cute Caroline will be when you make her pray to you, begging to have your fangs in her neck?”

Fucking hell… I wanted to be angry. What a bullshit fucking response, framing its predatory habits as a normal kinky relationship, or equivalent to what I needed to do to stay sane in this goddamn garage, instead of stripping free will away from dozens of women for life. But with Nicole here listening intrigued, with the caged vampire’s hoarse but nonetheless beautiful and melodic voice sticking in my mind, I couldn’t afford to be angry. I was just paralyzed with fear.

“Oh, and besides all that,” Naomi continued. “You idealize equal partnerships, but when have they ever truly been equal? If I don’t intervene, the average woman will end up being married off to some guy named, mm, Brad Phillips, and she’ll end up being a miserable housewife in a suburban neighborhood who never gets to kiss a girl or make her own decisions ever again. They might worship me and provide me with sustenance, but my thralls live their lives largely free of constraints. Permanently free of the patriarchy. Can you say the same for most women?”

I was hyperventilating then. What a load of self-aggrandizing horse shit, absolutely delusional thinking. I was certain that Naomi had never considered anyone’s inner world but its own. But somehow, someway, even though I didn’t want to hear another word of this, listening to Naomi big itself up like it was the world’s most important queer activist despite being a vicious shut-in bloodsucker that only cared for itself, I couldn’t help but think that this was almost a coherent worldview? A terribly harmful one, of course, one in which the thralls got no choice in the matter and a very short end of the stick, but still… something that a person would come up with to cover their own ass. Something that a person could even truly believe, even if it was a bad justification.

Something that made Naomi look like a person.

Nicole looked lost in thought, maybe having similar feelings to me. After what Naomi had just said, that was bad, and I felt trapped and horrified again. There was no way out of here until I could get Nicole to leave, unless I wanted Naomi to be advising her on exactly which hypnotic triggers to give me once I was her thrall. I couldn’t trust them to be alone in the same room.

“Listen, I’m gonna go and take five,” Nicole said suddenly, straightening her back and turning away from Naomi. “I need a shower to wash off that bullshit we just got dumped on us. You, um… you know how to handle her, Caroline. It, sorry.”

“Right, uh, OK!” I said, trying my best to perk up as she turned to leave. At least I wouldn’t be dealing with two vampires at once any more, but dealing with Naomi with it in this depressive state didn’t sound like a treat. Fuckin’ hell, I really wanted this to be over. I had truly hoped that Nicole and I would be able to continue our partnership even in her undeath, but I wasn’t so sure any more. I didn’t have the same endurance as her to take on a dozen vampire hunts, anyway. This might have to be the last one.

Had Nicole been swayed by Naomi’s bullshit speech? I wasn’t so sure, but I was sure that I regretted asking. Every word that came out of Naomi’s mouth was a liability—especially when Nicole was listening. I couldn’t let her be influenced. Couldn’t let her see the monster in the cage as a person. Too fucking dangerous. I should have known better by now, after what had happened in Italy.

I thought back to that terrifying time in my life, the first moments after the end of Nicole’s life, and reminded myself that if I could get through to Nicole then, I could get through to her now. At least she looked at me like a person instead of food sometimes. At least she lived in her own house. At least she wasn’t fervently carrying out the will of a Renaissance-era Italian noblewoman.

I faced Naomi again. I could get through this.

“Such a good girl, kneeling for your Mistress. Do you want some blood?”

With Nicole gone, it didn’t seem so confident any more, and it could do nothing but nod meekly.

“Yes, Mistress,” it said, as I prepared to cut myself once again.

Despite Naomi proving so easy to predict and manipulate with simple carrot-and-stick tactics, it was seeming more and more like a real person, just like it had when I learned about its transition. It was right, I thought—it really wasn’t so different from Nicole. She wasn’t so different? I didn’t know. Maybe they were both just women forced into bad situations. Maybe Nicole was doomed to become more like her, more like it. Maybe I was kidding myself to think she could hold off her bloodlust any more than other vampires. Shit—she was doing an awful job of it already. Like all of them, she had only been human, after all.

Well, it shouldn’t have had to come to this, but I wasn’t going to give up now. Even if Naomi was a person in the same way I was, it didn’t justify any of the evil it had put into the world, the things it had taken from other people so carelessly. And—though I wanted to deny it to myself and say that it was only part of the job—she was right. It was right. Dominating women did feel good. And for now, it was the best way to ensure that justice would be served in the end.