Nothing is What it Seems

Nothing is What it Seems

Chapter One: The Truth About Cats and Dogs


I have never understood why humans lament the coming of winter. Vampires in general are quite enamored with the icy-stark beauty of it, and when the clouds cover the sun the mixed bloods can walk freely in the streets day or night. One can always tell a mixed blood by the modernism of their clothing, as said shops are only open during daylight hours to ward off customers stopping by after the sun has fallen. Humans are taking many precautions against us these days, but it is of no use to them; their natural urge defeats their righteousness in the end. This, of course, is beneficial; I have rarely come across starving kin in the low parts of human towns that they habit. Prostitutes, their clients, and the homeless see that we are well taken care of.

         It is commonly thought, since our skin is so chill, that we are accustomed to the cold, and are unaffected by it. I often thought this is be an intelligent assumption, a sit is generally true that when something’s temperature matches that of its environment, adaptation is inevitable.

         But they have not thought of how similar we are; their inane presumptions place us in the category of anything but human, and thus we are acknowledged as such. Yet, like humans, we have an outer temperature and a core temperature, the difference being that while a human’s core temperature is most often warmer than his exterior, a vampire, though his skin is as chill as frost, maintains a core temperature far, far colder than that of his exterior. Thusly, the warmer it is, the worse it is for him, as it is a negative departure from the core temperature. It is very much a myth that a vampire grows warmer when he feeds; the coldness of his body cools warm blood in seconds.

         We are so very much like humans. Just opposite.



London, England 1501

         The winter of 1501 is a winter that will be long in the forgetting. It will linger with me like the eyes of my victims, until years or circumstance fade them into the void.

         November had settled in, but had dragged with it the last tendrils of sepia October. The frost would come late; the breeze did not have the painful bite of coming snow. We were all uneasy; the vampires scurried about at night in high bad temper, even the well-mannered ones, and ripped unnecessarily at tender throats, and the werewolves prowled every street corner restlessly and often attacked carriage horses whilst their masters were occupied. Hunger and the weather made them even more dangerous than they already were. They wanted the biting winter winds like a grounded sailor longs for the sea. Werewolves, you see, are partial to extreme cold for the numbing effect it bestows upon their morphing bodies, which get rather stretched and shoved during transformation, thus making it a painful experience at best. I suspect it rather feels like a starving vampire; it is the worst agony one can suffer.

          But it wasn't just the warmth that sent the demons into an uproar. Something was coming.


         The mortals enjoyed this last hint of warmth as we enjoy the last drops of blood before the heart stops, but they were nonetheless uneasy as well. There were too many glances of unnamed things out of the corners of eyes, a shifting of darkness where it should be smooth. I pitied them after it happened; I think they would have preferred being attacked by our species.

         The vampires and the werewolves clashed frequently during this time, sometimes in open cloudy-daylight in front of passing mortals. Some were even injured in the ensuing violence. The rest just ran.

         A fight between a werewolf and a vampire is a brutal and gruesome thing to behold. The werewolf is by nature fiercer than your average vampire, and his strength and physique are far larger and are in near-constant vitality, as the ‘turning with the full moon’ story is but a myth. He changes sporadically at will, often out of necessity.

         But the vampire is smarter and quicker, and can take much larger amounts of injury before death is suffered. They are, in a word, equally-matched; often the outcome is the death of both respective parties. They will literally fight themselves to pieces, and die with their claws or teeth still in the opposed.

         On a Sunday evening, embroiled in said conflict, I met Jack.


         One cannot mistake the sounds a werewolf emits when he is engaged in combat; his voice is a powerful and doglike, whereas the vampire emits low growls and angry roars like lions do. That night, I heard both. My hunger could wait; we are creatures of a very morbid nature, and are often solo, and thusly are drawn to combat with the sole purpose of watching one of their kin pulled to pieces by its opponent. Sound appalling? Remember the Christians and the lions? There was always a crowd. Blood is a guaranteed ticket-seller.

         As I entered the alley I saw that the werewolf had a vampire in his crushing jaws, long fangs piercing through his shoulder and ribs so his opponent could not break free. The vampire in turn raked talons across furred hide, scrabbling for eyes that he could gouge out. Strips of flesh flew whenever the werewolf shook its great head, trying determinedly to snap its attacker’s neck and end the battle.

         I often carry a silver dirk, tucked into the hidden pockets inside my greatcoat. It can't kill a vampire, but will effectively deter any enemies should I be attacked. The only things it can kill are mortals and werewolves, and you must aim carefully to do that. Since it is always with me I pay it no mind, but tonight I felt suddenly glad to have it; a heavy lump of cold silver in my pocket was reassuring. The flahes of prophecies in my head, however, was not.

         The vampire was growing weaker by the second, and suddenly I found myself awash with the urge to save him; it was something about that particular creature that sent of strange clanging bells in my skull.

         I threw the dirk and watched the werewolf fly backwards with the weapon protruding from its head like a grotesque horn, hit the stone wall and slumped down still as death in a slippery puddle of gore. Quickly my gaze went to the vampire, who was struggling on the ground and watching raptly the greyish red streak the back of the werewolf’s head made in the wall as he slid down it. Slowly he turned his head and looked at me.

         Surveying my manner of dress greenly, he showed me his fangs. “What business have you in an alley?” he hissed. “With your manner of dress I’d expect you the type to be drinking your fill of the fatty ichor of politicians and aristocrats.” He leaned toward me slightly and sniffed. “Freshly bathed, eh?” he scoffed, and dipped his fingers into the puddle of blood beneath him, smearing two lines beneath his eyes.

         “There,” he said firmly. “Now it’s established. You are the gentleman and I the beast, not domesticated in the slightest. You look at me now as though I were a stray dog with my thin ribs poking through my thin flesh. You killed that werewolf out of pity for me, the poor, starving flaw of our breed. Yet you offer no scraps.” He eyed my suit greedily.

         “There is no reason to be trite with me,” I countered casually. “If you’d wanted to die, which you surely would have done had I not been here, then I must apologise for my interruption. But any vampire knows it is death to fight a werewolf on a full moon.” I yanked the blade from the werewolf's head and thrust it upwards to the sky, and the vampire’s yellow eyes followed until I could see the moon’s reflection in them. He was silent.

         “Come with me,” I said, extending my hand. “I will give you rest and I will feed you until you are stronger.”

         “Ah, so you are offering scraps. Why do you want to help me?” he inquired, flinching from my hand.

         “I don’t rightly know,” I admitted, “but I am a seer as my sires were before me, and your image has blocked out all else. I suspect you may be useful, but not in your current state. I could leave you to the sunlight of morning; you can barely crawl. You shan’t escape in time.”
The yellow eyes smouldered still, but after a time he slowly nodded his head and attempted to get to his feet.

         “Name’s Jack,” he breathed before he fainted.


By the end of the evening I was carrying him home cradled in my arms like the image of Mary cradles the crucified Jesus. My home was nothing at all close to holy ground, but I carried him through, refusing to be embarrassed at the state of my quarters. Vampires are messy by nature.
Thankfully he was unconscious when I laid him down upon the guest bed.

         I kept my room’s door shut and locked. Otherwise the strygoi in my room would try to escape into the house. All guests would be dead in seconds and devoured in minutes. It had happened before, and I spent two days scrubbing bloodstains out of the carpet. I heard him croon at me as I passed the door. Imagine I quite reeked of the smell of blood and vampire and werewolf, and smiling I rapped two knuckles upon the door. The croon increased; the sound reverberated throughout the house; the sound was a mixture of deep-chested howling and growling. He frightened the servants daily, but as much as that amused me I never gave orders to clean my room. I have known to be uncaring, yes, but never cruel.

         A scratching at my door came then, and I opened it gently and stepped inside. “Hello, William,” I said, and sat down upon the bed.
William bared his fangs at me in a smile and sat on the floor at the farthest corner, where he began to sway his body gracefully from side to side, muttering things to himself.

         William had once been a resourceful and cunning vampire, and he was admired until the blood drought drove him to measures he would have never even come close to. Half-starved, he grew weak and distant from his morals, and within the space of three nights he had killed and eaten all of his immediate family.

         He was a curious mix. Vampiric was his appearance, which he got from his sire, but shortly after his transformation he was attacked by a werecat. The two inflictions nearly cancelled each other out and killed him, but in time he grew stronger, though his mind never was the same, and discovered that he could morph his body into a four-legged position at will, his hips and legs reforming with loud cracks, his spine becoming more flexible, and his feet changing into great paws that made the ground fly from beneath him. He could outrun anything and use his talons to drag down his prey. He stayed in this form nearly all the time; his thoughts were too wayward to settle on his appearance.

         And he was completely mad.

         He roared with the best of the lions. He was mine. I found his incessant, disjointed yammering amusing, and often I came home to find my room cleaned meticulously and him crawling around on the carpet, fretting that he did not do the job properly. Such was the case this evening.

         “Failed, failed,”he moaned. “The lion distracted me.”

         “It’s all right,”I said quickly. “You’ve done a wonderful job. Even the lion is gone, see?” I pointed to a random part of the room where I thought a lion might most likely rest. William looked but didn’t see.

         “Where is the lion?” he implored sweetly, crawling up to me and pawing at my legs.

         “There no lion here, mate; I should rather think that’s your brain doing funny things to your eyes.”

         “No lion?” The eyes were liquid pools of ebony and silver. William’s eyes did not have whites.

         “No lion.”

         “Then he is on the loose,” said William matter-of-factly, and he stood. “I will find him. You warn the new vampire you brought in just now or he’ll be eaten up. From the smell it seems as though he’s already half- eaten.”

         “Sit down, William.”

         He sat, pouting slightly.

         “There is no lion, William. Do you understand? It’s your brains doing funny things. I told you that already. Plus, you’re related to lions in a way; so why would you want him to stop doing what is in his nature?”

         William faltered.“But he bit me and it hurt!” he exclaimed, thrusting forth his right arm. Much of the skin and muscle were gone and the pearl sheen of exposed bone sat wetly in the middle of the wound. I examined it.

         “This is from yesterday, Will. You did it to yourself. There is no lion.” He flinched when I released his arm.

         “Emily did it then,” he moaned. “I knew she was sneaky.”

         “Emily is pretend, not real. She could not have done that to you.”

         William by this point was developing a high keening sound in his throat. He clapped his talons over his ears and began to rock again, humming and weeping and laughing all at once. He believed very strongly that Emily was real. In a sense she was; she was a real porcelain doll that sat in his corner. Dried rust-coloured streaks were present on the cheeks and mouth; William always saw to it that Emily was fed. Her blank stare was fixed accusingly on me as if to say How dare you make him cry!

         I was overcome with the sudden urge to fling her out the window and let her shatter on the cobbles.

         “I have food, William,” I said at length. The humming stopped and he removed his hands from his ears and looked up at me beadily.

         “Meat or blood?”he asked anxiously.

         “Meat. Cow meat. I’ll warm it for you if you like.”

         “Yes, warm,” he whispered, more to himself than to me. “Warm bloody flesh…William loves it.” He began to purr. It sounded like a boat motor.

         “I know,” I said.

         “Can I come out of the room tonight?” he asked suddenly. “It’s dreadfully cramped in here and the water’s rising with the sun.”

         I no longer bothered to decipher his words and had grown to ignore his disjointed prophecies and hallucinations. Seldom did I release him from my room, and when I did it was because the house was empty of others. He couldn’t hurt anyone in an empty house.

         “Not tonight, I’m afraid,” I said soothingly. “We’ve got a guest, remember?”

         “Yes, and William wants to see it,” he whimpered.

         “He’s wounded.”

         “Why didn’t you drink of him then?” William asked, aghast. “Why is he in our house? He’ll be dead soon enough; I can smell the maggots in his belly, I can. They smell like cinnamon and myrrh.”

         “He smells like a victim of a lycanthrope to me,” I replied.

         “Oh, was that how he was wounded? I wondered.” William absently raked his talons through his cropped hair. His long white fingers came away bloody. “I like werewolves,” he said thoughtfully. “If only they were more like cats. Then we would have a fine time. Your little friend will be a werewolf by morning, I expect. Such a fine time,” he sighed.

         “You’d have a painful time,” I said. “I’ve got to go tend to our new friend. Behave yourself.I don’t want to see blood on the walls again.”

         “Emily did that,”he said brightly. “It’s such a lovely shade. She likes it because it matches her dress. If I didn’t do it she would cry.” He sighed distantly. “Such a lovely shade, yes…”

         “Not on my walls it isn’t. I’m going now, but I will be back with your dinner as soon as I’m done patching our friend up.”

         “Bring leftovers!” William called after the closing door.

         Leftovers. I ask you. And people wonder why I keep him under lock and key. William is a hopeless case; he will forever be insane. But his words had disturbed me; I didn't think of what might result from a fight with a werewolf. Quickly I ducked my head out a window and scanned the sky. I saw no full moon, and breathed a sigh of relief. Werewolf victims can only change into one if he is attacked by one on the full moon. William's words faded into the general category of his mad ramblings again.

         Immorality has its thorns amidst the roses.

         He began to croon again as I left and his voice followed me down the hall.