Dear Diary,

I’m home. I’m… alive. But it has been a long, long night.

I have no idea where to start. How to start. Even as I write this, my grip threatens to break my pen without so much as asking, just as it did my laptop keyboard and my tape recorder. Even as I search for the words, I notice how easily I see what words I have written, how my attempt to bring light to my bedroom created only a bleary haze, how little I have seen of the sun since waking. And of course, even as I attempt to articulate what has been taken from me, my tongue remembers the flavor of what I have already taken.

We can start with a research note. The literature is ambiguous on whether thralls can be simply released by verbal command in the manner of fledglings; having stumbled across a human hiker on the way home, I can shed some light on this. Metaphorically speaking. Let me explain.

Now that I have become acquainted with this strange urge I have brought upon myself, I can say that it is at once more and less powerful than I’d hoped. It is not quite the voice of enthrallment, of being rendered as means-only, but it is a greater force than simple hunger, or lust, or thirst, or… anything, really. It feels like hunger, like thirst, like aches and pains, like nature’s call, and of course like lust, and yet in feeling like everything, it feels like nothing I have seen. It feels like a summation of my being… and yet in turn I find myself without hunger, without those minor grounding aches and itches, without other physiological need in general.

All that is to say, I wasn’t prepared for it. I spent the hours following my waking feeling like something of a shambling corpse, but assumed this was simply because I was… well, ‘undead’, so to speak. But no, all it took was a whiff of human blood in the wilderness for me to realize I had been somewhat mistaken. For me to realize what every drop of miasma within wanted, needed from me.

I’m beating around the bush; I assaulted her. Not sexually, as such, just… she had no chance to resist. I took her, and there was no space to consider any other outcome. I did expect something like that might happen, but actually doing it was another matter entirely. Feeling her will crumple before me. Instinctively shining submission into her eyes. Taking her, making her mine.

And then, following some… struggling, I remembered who the hell exactly I am. I became desperate to reverse what I had done, at least in the parts of my soul I wish to listen to at the moment. But Natalie couldn’t hear me, not yet.

That’s her name, by the way. Because she is a human person, with a life, and loved ones, and a home, one which only she knew the location of. She is a human person whose life and loved ones I possess no right to hijack, so no option remained but to wait for the post-enthrallment stupor I had inflicted to pass. Mary said I should simply take her to my home and ‘keep her’ instead, but… well, I suppose I was agitated, and the predatory urges assaulting my mind needed to go somewhere. Mary was easily convinced to wait with me instead.

That sounds sinister, because it was. I don't know how I feel about Mary right now.

The point is, I waited for her, watching over her, feeling a strange, protective, almost territorial satisfaction until she finally woke. Seeing the look on her face then, I… I suppose I struggle to judge new vampires, somewhat. I could see it in her eyes… She was mine, and it is difficult to articulate the sort of yearning that word triggers in me now. Had I been in Mary’s position, a mere twenty-some years old, it would’ve been far too simple to get swept up in it all. Especially if I was being tortured.

But I told her to cease being my thrall, instead. I did the right thing. And she… she acted scared of me. Terrified, even, enough to probably be an expression of something real. A remarkably convincing act… but only an act. I can say that with visceral certainty.

I tried a few other things, with mixed results. Asking her to not obey my commands quickly led to the sort of linguistic vaudeville routine that would’ve been right at home playing on my old radio set back in the day. I tried hypnotizing her into not being my thrall, which created a variation on the first attempt with more strained denial. I even tried biting her again, though in retrospect that was almost certainly an excuse.

In the end, I settled for erasing her memories of the whole event. That, at least, seems to have worked, though as luck would have it she happens to live in the same apartment building as me. I frankly do not wish to ponder the implications of this fact right now.

Mary expects me to renege, obviously, but Mary possesses no power here. She’s no idea where Natalie lives (or how close she really is) and she’s promised to keep away for now anyway. Of course, one could take my relief at this fact as a simple territorial instinct, but if there is one thing I have learned about vampirism in the past day, it is that one could take a lot of these feelings in a lot of different ways. There’s only so much use in this sort of speculation… and despite how some would characterize me, I believe it is worth being practical here.

The fact of the matter is that these instincts are here now, and they are real. So long as I am relatively full, I am finding myself… reasonably capable of handling them, but I will not be full forever. Less a matter of moral integrity, I think this is best conceptualized as a problem, one I wish to solve in the ways that I can.

In this vein, no pun intended, I believe Mary will be a valuable resource. Having experienced a sample of the torment her begetter once inflicted upon her, due to a severe delusional episode on her part (we all have our moments, I was hardly myself either), I have more confidence than ever that she is of a more stubborn sort than she allows herself to believe. Perhaps, with effort, we might one day solve that problem together.

In the meantime, though, I will need a holdover. I actually sampled some of my old blood when I returned home, and it tasted of absolutely nothing and did little to nourish me— a fascinating observation, but one which removes any buffer which I may have had. None of the other animals on the way home smelled like food, either, so that's another crack theory out the window. No, in the absence of an immediate ability to handle myself in crowds, the options right now are likely either hunting random people on the street (a blatantly unethical and dangerous practice which will almost certainly result in losing control and killing someone) or relying on Mary’s thralls (which is… a complicated proposition). Or, I could try to scrape acquaintance with Natalie, somehow, some way. That was the long-term plan, if not for her in particular.

Whatever I do, it must be quick. Mary was right about one thing: I need to be in a stable place before getting the rest of my memories. Not that she isn’t obviously getting off on keeping them from me as well, but I'm probably going to get off at least a little bit on forcing her to do it anyway, so fair's fair. Again, I can think through how unfathomably hot it is to overpower her, to overpower someone like her, another day.

I guess I'll… see if some of her thralls can help me out here—asking the thralls, not Mary, of course—and then I'll ask about my memories. We’ll see where the hell I can manage to be at once that’s happened. Hopefully it will continue to be more or less the same.

Sincerely,

Luminita