He Asked Me A Question, I Answered with Truth

By Ithaka O.

Previously published as 'He Asked Me a Question, I Answered with Truth' by Noct Moll.

 

Vampires: lustful, adventurous, cruel...
...not.

Meet Celeste: eternally jaded, hopelessly introspective, and more than anything else, lonely.

Celeste lived in solitude for well over a century—never a word about her true identity, never a hint about her bloodthirst to anyone.

A hundred freezing winters have come and gone. Flowers have bloomed and withered as many times.

Given the loneliness and the fatigue from hiding her true self, is it such a big surprise that she told the truth, for once, in response to an incredibly honest question?

But soon, the uncontrollable fallout from her simple, truthful answer unfolds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imaginarium Kim
• Release date: Jul 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637930939

Ithaka O.

https://ithakaonmymind.com/

Book preview

1

When I reached his office, I was surprised.

First of all, the door stood open. He hadn’t attempted to lock himself in for protection. Also, he sat behind his immense oak desk, looking tranquil and calm, facing the windows of his plush corner office instead of me. It was as if he’d noticed absolutely nothing that had taken place within this twenty-story building in the past ten minutes.

Of course, he couldn’t have smelled me coming. He couldn’t have perceived the reek of blood from the ruptured surface vessels of dozens of people, as well as from their deepest buried organs, recently torn out and forced to breathe the external air. I stood only a few feet away from him, and still, he probably couldn’t smell me. Neither could he detect the blood of his friends and coworkers on my leather clothes, black from top to bottom, from jacket to boots. Black and bleak, like tonight.

Unlike him, I’d smelled my way to this office. My entire body reacted to the crimson life force that his kind could gift mine. Particularly, the life force that was so familiar to me: his.

Lush, like the greenery under the brilliant sun after a refreshing shower—like our time together.

Fleeting, like the smoke from burned leaves—like my lost twenty years.

And bitter. Like his betrayal.

My heart pumped in a frenzy. My pupils were dilated. I could taste my own excitement.

But him? The opposite. This level of composure was unexpected, even from a human who, as a species, had dull senses. It was as if he’d gone deaf and hadn’t heard the screams, alarm bells, and the incessant phone calls that still shook the building with the maddening optimism of those outside—those who weren’t our target tonight. Someone’s got to be alive in there, they thought. Someone.

Henry, I said.

Celeste, he said, and lifted his left hand in a sort of wave without facing me. Are you Celeste, still?

Celeste, Emma, Sophia, Charlotte.

Madison, Victoria, Penelope, Zoe.

What did names matter? He could memorize the dozen names I’d used in my lifetime, and still he wouldn’t know me. And I could call his one name, Henry, however many times I wanted, and it wouldn’t be any different for me. I didn’t know him.

Sure, Celeste. Why not, I said. For tonight.

He chuckled softly. It was the sound of waves rippling in the center of the ocean. Hiding something.

His hand was wrinkled, as the hands of middle-aged men tended to be. I’d expected this type of deterioration. I knew of the force of time, from common sense, from years of living among his kind, and from seeing him on TV. Yet I cringed. These weren’t merely the wrinkles on the skin of some random passerby on the city streets. These were wrinkles right in front of me, tangible and real, on Henry.

My Henry.

Once upon a time.

This man wasn’t him anymore. I had to remind myself of that. Instead of jeans and a T-shirt, he wore black clothes that resembled a priest’s, though he was no priest. The golden watch the governor had gifted him last Christmas reflected the light beams from the helicopters outside. I could clearly see the silhouettes of those flying tanks, despite the strong backlight and the dancing white snowflakes. But there was no way Henry could distinguish their shapes. His eyes weren’t built for nocturnal performance. Night vision for humans was basically nonexistent. And piercing searchlights, when targeted at you, didn’t exactly help solve that problem.

The helicopters chop-chop-chopped from nearby—almost as infuriatingly as the unceasing phone calls from the adjacent offices. Why couldn’t these humans just accept that they’d lost? Why couldn’t they admit that, for once in their modern history, we’d won? They could’ve remained the victors. We’d had no desire to claim the throne as the dominant species on Earth. In fact, we’d liked that humans thought we were imaginary creatures. So, they were the ones who pushed us out of our hiding. The result was this. Their defeat.

They could try to rescue their Henry Ward, sure. The many framed photographs hanging on the wall proved that to them, he was worth the risk. In one, he shook hands with the president. In another, he raised his glass while one NBA MVP mirrored this act next to him. And many more photographs filled the walls. Photographs with politicians. Celebrities. Business luminaries. These were evidence of his social status. His glory. His power.

Carefully sprinkled among them, however, were the photographs of charity. One, where he knelt to beam amidst a dozen hairless children with cancer. Another, where he lured a street dog from its hiding place to rescue it. To top it off, one where he’d taken off his helmet and wiped off the sweat from his face while the sun blazed on a construction site, a sign clearly reading: New Life for the Homeless.

Because of their strategic placements, the photographs of his victories and the photographs of his philanthropy reflected the beams from the helicopters in equal amounts. Henry’s world was fair, oh so honorable. He, the master of fakery, knew exactly what he had to show to make his target fall irresistibly in love with him. In a way, I appreciated the craft behind this carefully calculated setting. I guess a master recognizes another master. Though, in so many ways, Henry was a grander master than I’d ever been.

But I had other advantages. Well before the infatuated world of humans could take the first step of rescuing him from this building, I could cut his throat with the smooth swipe of my pinky nail. Not that I wouldn’t cut his throat anyway, with or without action on their part. But unlike my former self, these days I liked to get all the information before acting.

What else could the humans do, besides trying to rescue him? They could try to eliminate me. How were they going to accomplish that without risking Henry’s life? They weren’t. There was no way. Did they want to risk Henry, their savior, their prophet, their crusader of morals? No. Otherwise, someone in those choppers would’ve jumped through the windows already.

Then there was the third option: negotiation.

I glanced at the old-fashioned landline phone that stood on the desk, wondering why it didn’t ring like the rest of them. The governor, and maybe even the president, was probably preparing for political demands from my group. No beings, human or otherwise, would be stupid enough to ambush the Malcreature Eradication Headquarters just because. More importantly, no beings with a lineage as long as the humans’ killed almost all occupants of said building just for fun.

I didn’t want to be interrupted, Henry Ward said, still not turning around to face me. He tipped his head toward the edge of the desk.

There, the phone line, cut in the middle, dangled gently.

He’d read my mind. So, he still had that sixth sense. He knew what I was, therefore knew what I thought, without prejudice. He didn’t need to use his limited sensory organs. And logic, as recommended by the larger society, didn’t hinder his judgment.

I say recommended because frequently, what people call logic is actually just common sense. Most people who think they’re logical don’t use their brains at all as they go through their lives. They have set rules, set expectations, and live in set environments that rarely change even as their elements pretend to be developing (or even evolving) at an incredible speed, especially in these modern days. So, logic is just this: a recommended guideline that people think they follow as a result of their brain activity, when, really, it’s more like muscle memory. A habit.

Henry agreed with me in this regard. Used to, at least. He used to laugh at the idea of logic in most people. We were stuck up like that, back then. Back when we were together. He’d been one of the few people in my life who’d accepted the painful limits of the human brain. It streamlines to process the flood of information that bombards it every second. Simplification leads to omission. Inevitably. That’s why habits are, mostly, so helpful. So is common sense, or at least, the idea of common sense. Keeps you calm; keeps you thinking you’re prepared. And thusly the space for logic diminishes, in so many tragic cases, with each additional year experienced on this Earth. Yet most people (and their overprotective parents) aren’t willing to let the sixth sense manifest. They force that all too feeble logic to take the reins. By the time a person is ten or twelve, the sixth sense has been so battered that it doesn’t dare rear its head.

But Henry still had it now, and he still had it when we met. And I guess no amount of intuition can prepare a vampire brain for a total anomaly: a human with an instinct as good as her own.

2

That was why we were drawn to each other as young college students. Him, actually young. Me, looking as young as him, but having been dead in my soul for a long, long time.

He had the ability to not look away when faced with an inexplicable sense of danger, and not just in that foolishly sexual way in which most immature male specimen of his kind acted. When he introduced himself in the quad one autumn day twenty years ago, just after freshman orientation week, he damn well knew he wasn’t merely attracted to me because he could sense my being different in a seductive way. He knew right then: I was of a different kind.

We began dating, because in the beginning I thought, Heck, why not? I must entertain myself somehow. I was no newbie in dating humans. It’s a skill someone like me must learn. This, because, believe it or not, people are more suspicious of singles than of couples. It’s a sad testament to the lack of independent decision-making. Instead of looking at the person, people quickly catch clues:

Male/female? Check.

Married/single? Check.

Tall/short? Fat/skinny? Skin color? Check, check, check.

So, in the beginning, Henry Ward was a tool. A convenient insurance option I adopted to keep myself inconspicuous. Lots of girls dated boys they’d met during orientation week.

Autumn passed and winter came. It took him some time to consciously figure out just how different I was. One can imagine the many logical hoops that a pre-med student has to jump through—despite, or perhaps because of his awareness of their limits—in order to accept that his first (and last) college girlfriend, in fact, was a vampire.

A creature of horror stories so unoriginal that it failed to trigger horror in half the population.

A nonexistent creature, at least according to the real world.

And if it were to exist in spite of reality, a dangerous one.

But once he did get over his logical/emotional barriers, he didn’t hesitate to ask.

Can you believe it? He asked.

Are you a vampire?

It’d been just before Christmas. Overnight, the snow had formed a web of ice on the outside of my dorm room window. I couldn’t see the bare branches of the many trees surrounding the building. But I could smell the plant remains and animal corpses buried under the thick white blanket of the season of rest. Although the door to the hallway stood open, that frozen web and the smell of rest, combined with the quietness of the deserted building, made me feel like we were the only ones who breathed in the whole world.

Most other students had left the school for the holidays. To family gatherings, good food, warmth, jolly songs, gift exchanges, and storytelling. They were going to share their early victories, early miseries. Their love stories, their heartbreak stories.

Not Henry. Not me.

With his back turned toward the window, he sat by my desk under a warm orange lamp. He’d placed the chair in such a way that he half faced me in my bed, and half faced his textbooks, which he’d been poring over for days. Something about different proteins. There was to be an exam after winter break, and he was eager to defend his title as the highest-graded student in the department.

Hemoglobin. Insulin. Keratin. Lots of names ending with -in. Give me another few centuries of life, and I still wouldn’t know what to do with all those names. I can barely remember my own retired ones.

Which was why I was reading a novel as part of an assignment. For decades I’d chosen the same exact major: English Literature. Storytelling was something that humans (which I used to be) had been doing for thousands of years, with or without conscious knowledge. The core of it didn’t change much, so that I didn’t have to study harder and harder every time I returned as a student.

Imagine trying to keep up with rocket science. First, you’d have to deal with the birth of the concept of a rocket, then follow its development, until, within only a few decades, a human ended up on the moon. That’s not even counting everything that came before someone imagined that humans could land on the moon. I mean, all the time people thought the Earth was flat? That’s a lot of change. A lot of different ideas to digest. What if you got the correct answer mixed up on the tests?

I imagined that the field of medicine was similar to rocket science. Simply too much to memorize, too much to learn every time a new theory sprung up. Remember, people used to be oblivious to the fact that they needed to wash hands. I can attest to that. I was born at a time when handwashing wasn’t the norm for doctors and nurses. Did you know there were conspiracy theories around handwashing? Some fools thought the government was trying to control them by making them wash their hands! Even more horrible: people also used to think smoking was healthy.

If you’re going to die in a hundred years, you can study a subject like that, thinking you’ll only have to change your frame of mind once, maximum twice or thrice in your lifetime. If you’re like me, who’ll live forever, studying such a subject becomes a lot less appealing. What’s the point of study if it can’t even last as long as a pebble in a brook?

Nothing like that with Literature. Read a book from two hundred years ago. Society has changed. Tastes have changed. But humans? Not so much. That’s why you can understand a nun who doesn’t know what the internet is. That’s why you can feel for a tenant farmer who doesn’t know what compound interest is. And you can even sympathize with anthropomorphized animals and aliens.

Literature. Eternal.

At the same time, despite this timeless quality, humans always manage to find some way to make it seem different. For example, they figure out a way to look down upon certain types of writing. (A female writer? A colored protagonist?) Then, decades later, suddenly the same abhorrent writing becomes cool. But you know what’s more amazing? That while they’re discovering how not so abhorrent an abhorrent piece of writing from the past is, they still try to define bad literature for the next generation to find not so bad. You’d think humans would learn from their mistakes. They don’t. Better for me, the eternal returning freshman.

And neither Henry nor I planned to go home that winter.

Henry, because small talk among the family friends bored him. His parents didn’t have many relatives they kept in touch with, he said, which was why they always hung around with the same group of friends who always talked about the same things. About what? I’d asked once. Nothing, he said. Absolutely nothing that’s meaningful in any shape or form, because for words to have meaning, they must be accompanied by action. They never act. They always talk. So there’s no meaning. I don’t want to be part of that lack of meaning.

Me, I didn’t go home because I had no other home. Wherever I happened to exist at a particular moment was my home. My parents had long died, and even longer before that, I’d left them. No one wants to tell their parents they became a vampire. Better pretend to be dead. And just because I said better doesn’t mean that it was a walk in the park. I would’ve cried my eyes out if I were a human. Because I wasn’t, my eyes healed themselves. That’s why I still have eyes.

Anyway. Back to us. Just before Christmas. Alone together. In the dorm.

And him asking, Are you a vampire? out of the blue, while studying protein names.

He was looking straight at me, dead honest. I was clutching my novel. Even with the blanket covering my legs, even with my thick winter pajamas and vampire skin, I felt chilly.

Though his features were plain, the intent he put behind his facial muscles was what made him so dangerous. You can be blessed with all the beauty in the world and it would be useless unless there’s some life behind the smooth skin, the chiseled chin, the ocean-blue eyes. Henry had none of that. He had average skin, average chin, pleasant-to-behold but unremarkable gray-blue eyes. Yet as he looked at me, I was captivated. Oh, the life in those eyes. The purpose! The will!

I’d underestimated him. I’d thought he was like everyone else, like all my college boyfriends. (I won’t tell you how many, because the number will shock some of the more conservative-leaning readers… if anyone who self-identifies as such has made it up to this point.)

No one had asked me this question before. Prior to Henry, everyone who’d come to know that much about me had died. Upon finding out the truth about me, either they’d done something stupid (such as jumping into the path of a speeding car while running away from me) or I’d killed them. Either way, it hadn’t mattered. I’d wanted them dead. You see, the only reason those people had known what I was, was that I’d let them know, precisely so that I’d have a reason to kill. A justification. A being has the right to protect itself, right? And an outed vampire is a being in danger.

So, basically, if I liked you, you were never going to find out my deepest secret. If I liked you, I only showed you what I thought normal humans could handle. Then, one day, when too much time had passed to hide the fact that I didn’t age while you did, I disappeared. As simple as that. This was my way of protecting those I’m fond of. It wasn’t that difficult in a college setting. You said you got a job in another state and moved away. You lost contact, gradually. Easy.

Henry was the first human who noticed what I was without my intending for him to know. A century, I’d lived believing to be in control, and then this guy asks me that incredibly open question? I’d been a fool, wrong to think that only humans fell for the traps of habitual thinking. I didn’t know how to react.

And that was a first, me not knowing what to do. Which was why, before him, I’d been bored. All the time. Bored to death. (Ha-ha.) Bored from living for more than a century, mostly in hiding, and sometimes among crowds that looked my age but possessed the maturity level of those a quarter of my age. Bored by the pretense of constant change in human society, when, really, nothing ever changed. (Remember literature. Either with a capital L or a small l. Doesn’t matter. The very existence of a debate over capital L and small l proves my point. How eternally trivial!)

People were given birth to. They were grown. Then they were died; wiped from existence.

I put it that way because I always thought growing and dying should also be passive verbs, just like born. It isn’t as if people can choose between growing and not growing, dying and not dying. So, growth and death are like birth. See? They even all end with th. That can’t be a coincidence.

Anyway, at the time, around when Henry had asked me the fateful question, the thing I was bored with was myself. If I didn’t like most college kids, why did I keep enrolling in this and that school, just to prove that I still hated them after half a decade of taking a break from them? If I hated human society, why did I delude myself that any contact with it could function as an effective stimulant? Clearly, I wasn’t as intelligent as I should be, after having lived for so long. What a boring creature. And I couldn’t hope for an end to my boringness. I couldn’t hope for the reliably passive bodily functions of humans. I’d been born, but wasn’t being grown and didn’t face an automatic death. So, perhaps it was sheer lazy inertia that drove me to yet another school that autumn, when I met Henry. And driven by the same inertia, I let the relationship roll on.

To make matters worse, certain changes that had indeed occurred in the human civilization had been detrimental to that particular iteration of my college life. These children, who thought they were all grown up, hid nothing from the world. More social media, more personal publicity. These younglings uploaded pictures of what they ate for breakfast, believed that others would like them, and in fact saw their belief come true. People actually liked random pictures of pancakes and obviously staged candids! That was the changed world where I found myself in.

In all the previous iterations, I’d been able to hide my true identity like the rest of them. My pretense had been no worse than theirs. I’d hung pictures on my dorm room walls: family pictures, pictures of pets, pictures of past vacations. Of course, they weren’t really my family, my pets, and my vacations. But