The first time I saw her was the first time I lived. 500 years of silence, and then, everything was vibrant.
Porcelain skin gleamed under the throbbing lights of the club, a beautiful testament to the fruits of the modern age. Her neck... Oh, how my eyes lingered as I took in her long and slender neck. How fire crawled through me as I took in her smell. The smell of innocence, the smell of beauty.
In a club full of the degenerate, the depraved, and the downtrodden; there she stood, a black dress clinging to her milk-white skin, almost ethereal in her presence. She was a dark angel, an oasis in the mundaneness of life that I had come to experience in the drudgery of the bowels of Chicago.
I watched her dance. The simple sway of her hips, abundant flesh, perfect skin. She was skinny then, made all the more obvious the black she wore and the dark hair that came down to her back. Jittery movements showed her lack of comfort, even in a club like the one we were in, she was nervous and tender.
And that wasn't the last time I'd watched her. Night after night, I came back, hoping to see her. During my wait, I learned her routine and familiarized myself just by watching her. When you watch someone long enough, you learned little things about them. I learned the intricacies of her smile; perfect teeth, pearly, rarely shared but lighting up the room around them when they were. I began to be able to pick her voice up from the sound of the crowd, light and innocent, cheery, a sound I'd never come to forget.
Week after week, I continued my watching.
As time went by, I grew tired of watching. I followed her home, one night, and the next week when she visited the club, I found her. I learned her name, rifling through what she had left. Marianne. Or Mari, as I learned, laying on her bed perusing the account she had so stupidly forgotten to password protect. I found little, save for an old account in which she barely used to keep up with family. A mother, no siblings, and a father missing. A perfect target.
I found her collection of music; haunting and gloomy. I read through her writings, morbid or romantic, poetry sprinkled with morose. And on her laptop, I found something startling. An obsession with vampires... With the macabre.
I left and returned to my schedule of watching and waiting until I could watch and wait no longer.
It was a Friday. The club that night was busy, packed with so many dark clad people that I did not even look out of place in the black trench coat I wore, standing in the corner of the club, right beneath a throbbing light that irritated my sensibilities.
She smelled of lavender. An ever so sweet scent, mixing with the sweetness of her blood. I smelled her in a crowd of a hundred people.
That night, I was hungry. An unbearable hunger, gnawing and ravenous, pushing me to action. I'd feasted on a woman two weeks ago and now my stomach gnawed, wanting more satisfying blood. That happened often, my lack of satisfaction. Humans in this day and age were so loose and corrupt. Their blood always showed it. But not her.
Unlike the nights before, I made myself known to her. Crooning from the corner, I called, "Marianne." Alert, she turned to face me. Dark eyes danced to my own, widening in surprise. I savored that moment, the first moment she ever looked at me, tensing up like a doe about to bolt. I found heaven in her glance, euphoria in her look, and eden in her expression. I was there, and then I was gone.
