Vampire Val sat bolt upright in his coffin. "I knew it," he said. "It's still light out. Damn daylight savings time. It's so damned difficult to adjust."
Reaching into his pocket, he took out a sheet of emery paper and carefully sharpened his fangs, watching in a pocket mirror as he did so. He was very careful with the tips. Too much polishing would blunt the teeth and they would become useless for biting. He prided himself on the points he put in his fangs, sharp as needles.
Slowly and stiffly, he emerged from the coffin. He was young for a vampire, only 209 years old, and of those only 178 had been spent as a vampire, but he was as stiff as the old ones, the oldsters who got their first bite back during the Roman Empire.
"You need a wife, Val," he said to himself. This was something he told himself an average of three times a week. "You need someone to take care of you."
The problem was, of course, that there was no nubile female vampire to wed. They were all too old or already taken. "Of course, I could turn someone into a vampire..." he said to himself, and shuddered at the prospect. "She would scream and batter me with her fists all the time I was sucking her dry, and then what? She might be an awful shrew and I'd be stuck with her for eternity. No thanks."
He left the crypt as soon as darkness had fallen. He dressed in ordinary clothes, a sweater and faded denims, and kept his mouth shut to hide the fangs. He avoided the crowds and headed out into the lonely streets at the edge of town. He waited there for his victim to find him.
Inevitably, the victim did. A big man stepped out of the shadows, moonlight glittering on a knife in his hand. "You," he said in a big voice, "give me all your money." That was the last thing he said before he began to scream. He didn't scream for a long time.
Val was just lowering his unconscious body to the ground when he heard the other voice. "What are you doing?" it said, soft and feminine. He looked up at her.
She was all he had ever wanted, tall and lithe and beautiful as the evening star in her midnight blue dress. She smiled sadly at him and his heart skipped a beat as he saw the glitter of starlight on her long canines. "Yes," she said. "I'm one too."
Val stood up. "If you are," he said, keeping his voice steady with an effort, "why do you ask what I am doing?"
"Why do you prey on them?" She poked the mugger's body with an elegant toe. "I hope you only took a sip. We don't need someone like him in our world."
