This relentless nosebleed marks my end.

I admit to having misled Bram but that was payback for his audacious invasion of my citadel. Younger, brazen, and foolhardy then, I thought it a great deal more entertaining to amplify his trepidations than to leave him with the desiccated disappointment of mistaken assumptions. He’d already surmised, quite adeptly, some among his peers—indistinguishable in nightly crowds—were in some indefinable way parasitic.

I remember the sting of its annunciation—parasitic—a whetted sword slashing my viscera, a degradation of my most cherished belief I and others of my ilk were superior, inured to the ascendant folly of the uninitiated. Only supreme effort stayed my desire to immediately attack him, this little man of no remarkable feature save a finely groomed goatee and the ingenuity to surprise me, emerging from the dancing shadows of torchlight illuminating my chamber. My reprisal for his insult, to terrorize his imagination, was far more enduring than any physical backlash I could initiate and decided not to feast on him.

He had questions, and I mendacity, spinning yarns about being undead—a term I delighted in and made up on the spot—about the pretense of garlic’s protection, of the sun’s ability to set those like me aflame by our venture into it, and my coup de gras, about immortality. His brown eyes greyed, color draining from his cheeks, and I thought to cut him then—one scent of his blood, he could no more hide from me than Cain from God—but decided his bravado had earned him reprieve. How was I to know he was an author?

Having read his work, amused at his assertion a wooden stake through vampiric hearts could wipe the scourge of my kind from the world of decency he fancied himself a part of, I laughed. I suppose my success in his words, the notion of my kind roaming the Earth and victimizing the unsuspecting forever being more than he could accept. And so he drove a metaphoric stake between the reality of our conversation and his need to not live in hangdog panic.

He gained notoriety for his work, but I, delightedly, have been forever enshrined in more dark fantasies than I’d ever dreamt possible, a chimera which measure seems destined never to fade. In essence, Bram assured my immortality. The shock of it would kill him if he weren’t already and long-ago dead.

But, nearing my end, I shall now dispel a part of the fiction woven that night, revealing we do, in fact, after a time, decease. It is an ignoble end, the price we pay for having lived as parasites for untold years, falling prey to the very blood we consume for sustenance, the physical material left over once it’s extirpated, expulsing it from every orifice our bodies contain in a matter of agonizing hours. I shall become nothing more than a residuum of flesh submerged in a pool of grey, debilitated blood. And yet, I live on.