The Final Embrace

By: Shaun Avery
September 8, 2008

I know what you’re going to say about me.

I’m sitting here crying, two bodies in front of me, one of them dead and one of them almost dead, and I know exactly what you’re going to say about me.

You’ll say that I was weak, that I’ve been misled, that I’ve been played like a sucker all along. But only I know the truth, and the truth is, you’re wrong.

So wrong.

Please God, let you be wrong.



Three fingers, an ear and any small sense of self-worth and masculinity I may have once had – that’s what I lost the first time I tangled with Kyla the vampire, and on the cold, lonely nights when my phantom body parts ached, as we staked out another dead town searching for her, I remembered our bitter fight and pictured the bitch, angered by the fact that she was still out there, laughing at me.

I’d failed in my attempt to capture or kill her, but failure was nothing new; ever since my parents spawned me, not out of love but because they wanted a child to carry on the family tradition of hunting, I’d been nothing but a major disappointment. They’d been desperate for me to follow in their footsteps, but I was a hopeless study from day one, and when, at the age of six, I had a captured goblin brought before me to slaughter, I had not been able to do so, and thus had begun the years of scorn at the hands of my parents.

Such treatment caused no small amount of resentment in me, and in the end I went into the business just to spite them, to prove them wrong, to show I could be as good a hunter as they were, perhaps even better. But as well as being a poor study, I was also pretty lousy in practice, and whereas my direct forebears had been at the top of their game, I ended up being a last resort hunter, a bottom of the barrel, bargain basement type of guy.

At least I wasn’t alone, though; I fell in with a fellow bunch of no-hopers, and from them I eventually picked out a sidekick called Charlie, and together we hit the road, living hand to mouth between assignments, often being forced to feign an appetite for bugs and insects, which led to a few nights of pretty intense vomiting for us both, though Charlie was too stupid to know just why we were being so sick. Things looked pretty bleak, and we thought that we’d never get a lucky break.

Until we found Kyla and her brood.



I’d thought, at first, that it was a joke.

Our latest employer, a weird millionaire (is there any other kind) had invited us – us being my partner Charlie and I – to his huge mansion, luring us in with the promise of a business deal that would be mutually beneficial. He collected artefacts of the supernatural world, you see, and nothing was more prized to him than genuine vampire body parts. He showed us his collection and then, over drinks, said, ‘I’ve been lucky with the things I’ve acquired so far. But there’s still one thing I want that eludes me.’

‘Really?’ I was surprised; this huge house and the many mementoes dotted around it seemed like everything a person could ever want. But I indulged him a little and said, ‘what’s that?’

‘I want Kyla.’

I looked up from my drink, shocked, looking for signs of sarcasm on his face. Seeing none, I said, ‘Kyla? The Kyla?’

His grin was savage. ‘The very same.’

I had heard the legends of her, of course; we all had, in this game. Kyla was a creature that straddled the line between hero and villain, legend and actual fact, for all of us hunters. You’ll learn more of her story later, as will I, but for now, all I said was, ‘that’s dangerous prey.’

‘The most dangerous of all. That’s why I’m offering big money.’

That’s why I took him up on his offer; I was tired of dining on things that crawled around on the floor, and the chance to dine in a big, fancy restaurant with the guy’s money looked pretty damn tempting. So we started searching for Kyla, killing a few of her kind alone to way to whet the millionaire’s appetite, taking their heads over to his house on a weekly basis and collecting our fee. I was actually doing pretty well for once, but things were about to turn sour at a spectacular rate, and it all started when Charlie said:

‘You see that?’

We were parked in the middle of another deserted country town, on stakeout, playing cards to help pass the time, and I’d almost forgotten why we were here. But Charlie’s questions instantly got my attention, and snapped me back on track.

I looked up and out of the window, and further down the road I saw a bunch of shapes moving, with one of them clearly in the lead, at the front and a few footsteps ahead of her companions, and even from this distance I was able to recognise (and appreciate) the female form of the leader.

I’m embarrassed and ashamed to say that, to admit that I felt some stirring of arousal when I laid eyes upon the creature we had been hired to slay or capture. In my defence, all I can say is that when you’re a deadbeat like me, shunned by regular society and even by the sub-society of hunters that my parents represented, you don’t get a great deal of sexual action, and it becomes all too easy to forget that women actually exist. My few experiences in that respect had been spaced years apart, and were all in the dark with toothless old crones that were sleeping with me for money – so yeah, I have to admit that seeing Kyla come up the road in the skimpiest of clothing was a turn-on.

This attraction wouldn’t stop me doing my job, though. I still had something to prove, and it would take more than the female figure to make me forget that.

I looked to the side and saw that Charlie was still waiting for my reply, unable to proceed until I gave the word. He was strong physically, the kind of strength that we call ‘ox-like’ in the business, but very slow mentally, perhaps even a little retarded, and he’d hooked onto me for dependency, for someone to give him orders, long ago. I was normally happy to give them to him, and now was such a time.

‘Go!’

He obeyed my single-syllable command as if it was the word of God, and the car zoomed forward towards the mob, towards the vampire and her children, and Kyla looked up. She waved her arm and her companions scattered, running into the multitude of empty buildings all around us, and then hissed as we pulled to a stop in front of her and I dived out of the vehicle, axe in hand.

I’d have preferred to mow her down repeatedly, crush her bones beneath the wheels of the car time and time again until her body felt like a large lump of jelly. But our millionaire benefactor had stipulated that we bring him only decapitated heads with unmarked, undamaged faces; otherwise, we would not be paid.

With that in mind, I jumped out and came at her from the front whilst Charlie, the muscle, threw himself at her from behind. We’d used this technique a few times before, and despite my usual status as a failure, we’d actually pulled it off on those occasions, resulting in some sweet severed heads for our rich benefactor. This success ration made us confident, and there was absolutely no reason in the world why it shouldn’t work again.

But it didn’t.

She moved, and my assistant rammed into me at high speed, sending us both to the floor.

Panicking, not wanting her to escape, I pushed Charlie aside and sprang up after her, grabbing onto her ankle, tripping her up as she tried to run away. She looked back at me, snarling, and I returned her gaze with victory in my eyes.

Until I realised something.

I no longer had the axe.

She did.

I went cold inside, and I let go of her leg and backed off. Beside me, Charlie was getting to his feet, but I couldn’t turn to look at him, couldn’t drag my eyes away from the sharp, gleaming weapon in the vampire’s hand.

All around us, I could feel the eyes of her children on me – watching from the houses that they had invaded, sitting atop the dead bodies of the original inhabitants, who they had drained of all blood. They were willing their mother to strike me, wishing victory upon her, and in that instant, I knew that my parents and the world in general had been right all along; I was a failure, and losing the axe was probably the biggest mistake I would ever make.

But it wasn’t the only thing I lost that day.

She loomed high over me, and I looked up for mercy and saw none, and before I knew what was happening, my bladder was giving way and a hot stream of urine was cascading down my leg, pushed out of my body by sheer terror.

Charlie saw this, and somehow the look of shock on his face at seeing his friend, mentor and hero fouling himself in such a way was worse than the sight of the semi-clad avenger before me.

But not for long.

I felt more than saw the axe come down, and suddenly the side of my head seemed to be on fire, streaming hot blood onto a cold and indifferent ground.

I put my fingers to the wound, and then the axe struck again, and they were the next things to go. Thank God it was only my right hand; thank God that I’m in the minority as a lefty.

She could have killed me there and then, but her mothering instincts took over and she ran off, to tend to her watching brood. I guess I went into shock, and by the time I woke up, I was lying in bed with Charlie watching over me, looking after me – something that I felt incapable of doing for myself anymore.



I came out of hospital angrier and bitterer than ever before. Not only had Kyla robbed me of precious parts of my body, she’d also caused us to lose our deal with the guy we’d been working with, and it was back to eating bugs – not the best meal for a guy in recovery.

Times were more desperate than ever, and I saw no escape in the near future. But when things did start to look up, I was surprised to find myself turning down potentially lucrative jobs in favour of pursuing a personal vendetta against the woman who had caused me such pain.

Kyla – the vampire. Mother to a group of bloodsucking children who followed her everywhere, who she loved like a family. One day I was going to make her pay, make them all pay, and I wasted whole days in trying to think up an adequate way to have my vengeance.

Another frontal assault was out of the question; the first time had been woeful enough, and that was when I was still a full man, still with a full set of fingers on my right hand. No, if I was going to pull a plan off, it had to be something sneaky, despicably cunning . . .luckily, however, that type of thing was right up my street.

Charlie had been growing increasingly worried about me during all of this, and to my shock he threw a kind of surprise party for me one night, gathering all of our hunter friends together for a night of cards, whores and booze.

It was my kind of night, and I would normally have been able to lose myself completely in it. But this time, nothing could grab my complete attention; this time, a small but substantial part of me remained trapped in dark places, brooding, and nothing I did could make me leave that area.

A couple of the guys noticed this, and locked me in a room with one of the prostitutes, and said they would only let me out when they heard the girl screaming.

Interpret that however you want.

Kyla had screamed.

I remembered that now, remembered the rage in her voice as she had brought the axe down on me. The memory was almost enough to make me feel angry again – until the woman started giving me a lap dance, started gyrating against me, wiggling her skinny behind and. . .

Skinny.

That was it.

I suddenly knew how I was going to kill the vampire.

My hands finally found the stripper’s body, but by the time I did what the guys outside wanted and made her scream, it wasn’t her face I was seeing; it was Kyla’s.



Charlie and me drove down South early the next morning, as soon as our respective hangovers had died off enough to let us think. Earlier, I’d rang ahead to secure an appointment with an acquaintance of ours, a guy in the business called Industrial Eddie.

I wondered, as we drove, why so many of our peers in the hunting game felt the need to hide behind silly nicknames. Take the guys at the top: Mr. Midnight’s Merry Men – despite that overly masculine name, half of them are women! Then there’s Spiky Dave – so called because of his spiked-up punk haircut, and the name still held even though he’d been bald for the past two years, ever since a human/gorilla hybrid tore out all of his hair in a particularly violent battle on top of a mountain overseas. For whatever reason, we picked our business names and stuck with them no matter what, taking security and comfort from the fact that they were the only sturdy things in our lives.

The nickname of the guy we were going to see was pretty accurate, though.

Eddie was a man of industry.

And his industry was disease.

Eddie kept zombies, werewolves, vampires and even the odd serial killer chained up in his laboratory, slicing them open and mixing their blood together, injecting them with every drug under the sun to break down their immune system, using the dirtiest, most tainted needles he could find, just to keep the germ level at a high, but always making sure he only created viruses that attacked from the inside out, nothing contagious, as he didn’t want to be a victim of his own genius.

It was night by the time we reached the abandoned factory where he worked, and the dying embers of a fire that he had made for light and warmth illuminated us as we drove in and stepped out of the car.

I couldn’t help noticing our shadows as we walked – Charlie’s was so much bigger than mine. I looked up at him with envy, and reflected, not for the first time, that I’d lost much more than an ear and some digits when I’d squared up against Kyla.

Eddie looked up and smiled, saying, ‘fellas! Good to see you again!’

Charlie looked at me, confused. ‘Have we met him before?’

My partner had something of a hazy memory sometimes. I patted his shoulder with affection, or as close as I could get to that friendly emotion, and replied, ‘yeah, buddy. We know him.’

We had met him before, but we had only ever met him here, as Eddie never left his place of work; he saw his many guinea pigs as a family and thus was unable to leave them. This meant that he was somewhat cut off from the rest of the world, and meant that he was full of questions for me, wondering what was going on in the hunting game, who was killing who, if we good guys were winning, that sort of thing. I brought him up to date as well as I could, and though I loathed telling the story again, though I hated to be reminded of my latest failure, I eventually had to explain what had happened to my fingers and my ear.

The explanation wasn’t getting any easier – in fact, every time I had to tell the tale, my bitterness grew, along with my determination to make the vampire pay. This time, though, I cheered myself up by remembering that Eddie here held the key to my payback.

The recollection left me feeling lethargic, and when I was done, I decided that stretching my legs might make me feel a little better. So I got up and walked around, stopping by a teenage male who was chained up with various syringes sticking out of him at odd places, moaning against the gag stuffed into his mouth. I supposed this image makes you think that Eddie’s idea of ‘family’ was a little warped, and maybe you’re right – but considering the upbringing I’d had by my parents, who am I to comment?

I laid my hand on the youth’s shoulder, turned back round to face Eddie and said, ‘it’s been nice having a chat with you. But I’m actually here to talk business, buddy.’

‘Oh?’

He seemed surprised, and so did Charlie; I hadn’t yet mentioned my new plan to my partner, and though this was undoubtedly bad protocol, I had been doing it more and more often lately, keeping him in the dark about important facts, keeping cards close to my chest that I really should have been sharing with him.

‘Yeah,’ I replied to Eddie, and walked back towards him, back into the light. ‘See, I plan to get the witch that did this to me –’ I indicated my missing ear – ‘and I need your help to do it.’

‘How?’ Eddie asked.

But I think he already knew the answer.



We picked up Kyla’s trail a few nights later; her victory over me had made her get cocky, and she’d given up all pretence of hiding herself and her family of children, and was acting out in the open, practically begging us hunters to come and get her.

And she wasn’t the only one keeping busy – her boldness had made her something of a figurehead to other creatures in the supernatural community, and they were all hard at work, too, keeping my peers and me pretty busy.

Since they were all occupied elsewhere, the path was pretty much clear for me and Charlie to put all of our efforts into going after her. In truth, no one else wanted the job; they’d been put off by what she had done to me.

Not so I, and by the time I found her again, I was ready for revenge, and trust me when I say that I wanted to make the creature suffer, wanted no quick and clean death for her. Step number one in this process was burning the house that her family had made its lair.

Charlie did the honours, since my incomplete hand made it hard to hold a can of petrol. He was a fairly un-complex person, and he saw our eternal battle with the creatures of the night in totally black and white terms, with no grey areas allowed; we were the good human guys, and they were the evil inhuman enemy, there merely to be destroyed by us, as simple as that. I was generally deeper than this, more prone to guilt and angst, but that didn’t stop me from doing what needed to be done: namely, setting fire to Kyla’s brethren in a bid to lure her out.

The screams of painful death and the scent of mournful loss floated up into the air, drifting around us and into me as I banged a steel spoon against a pan and shouted, ‘come on, queen bee, show yourself! Come and get me, come and try to save your family!’

No answer. But I could feel her somewhere close to me, her eyes on me, full of hate. The attack would come soon, I knew – and so I dropped the pan and spoon and laid a hand on the syringe tucked into my back pocket.

‘Come on, Kyla, it’s me, look at me! You tried to kill me before, but I’m still here! Don’t you want another shot at me?’

I could tell that she did. But she clearly wasn’t going to be goaded so easily, and her first priority would be saving her children, not confronting me.

Sighing, I told Charlie, ‘ go and find a live vamp for me and bring him over here. The younger, the better.’

Standing in the middle of this country town, one robbed of all its life by Kyla and her clan, I let my eyes scan the windows of the buildings, long since made empty by the brood’s relentless bloodlust. She could be in any one of them . . .but going looking for her, stepping into a dark, enclosed space that she had no doubt made her own, would be a death trap. No, she had to come to me, and for that to happen, I would have to play on her mothering instincts, on her need to protect her children.

Charlie threw a vampire at my feet, a scruffy looking boy, and I scooped him up immediately, wrapping my right arm around his throat and using my complete left hand to stick a knife against his cheek. His eyes went wide in fear, and I hoped that Kyla was close enough to see them.

‘Okay, toots, last chance! Boogie on down to me or it’s cutting time.’ I moved the knife further down his body, stopping at his groin. ‘And I’ll cut lower down, if you get my meaning.’

That threat, predictably, did the trick.

She swooped down from the top floor of a high building, screeching all the way, and she landed on the boy and me, her long and sharp nails clawing my face, making blood drip into my eyes, and Charlie ran over to help me, but one hard kick from her bare foot knocked his wind out and sent him to the floor, and then the two vampires and I were rolling along the ground, hitting each other, biting each other, and in all the melee I struggled to stick my knife into the boy’s stomach to stop his fangs from incessantly snapping at me, and then I had the syringe out and Kyla’s breath was hot and fetid in my face as I finally managed to throw both of them off and then stuck the needle into Kyla’s back, injecting her with Industrial Eddie’s disease concoction, brewed especially for me.

She reared her back and screeched again, and she began to turn towards me, and the adrenaline that had been motivating me suddenly ran out, its place taken by fear, and I retreated a few steps, walking backwards, scared that she was about to pounce, ending whatever passed for my hunting career.

But no; her maternal instincts took over, and she picked up the boy that I’d held hostage and stabbed, and she ran off into the night with him, cradling the teen in her arms.

I helped Charlie to his feet, and we started walking, and we found the boy dead and alone a few miles down the road – surrounded by his own blood and laid down reverentially beside the river.

I bent down to examine the body closer.

I could still smell Kyla’s tears upon his corpse.



It was done.

I had effectively signed Kyla’s death warrant, and I knew that she was out there dying, that the small number of her children who’d managed to escape would now be looking after her, not the other way round. Before too long, I would be able to step into our car and have Charlie drive me across the country until we found her dead, shrunken body, and that would be the start of a new and glorious period in my life. I had finally showed that I wasn’t a loser, and I would take her body to everyone who had written me off and scream into their faces, ‘look, I did it, I’m a winner, I did what no one else could do and killed this vampire lady!’ Then I would call up our former employer, the eccentric old millionaire who’d wanted her head for his private collection, and tell him that he’d never see a bit of her body; that he’d had his chance with us and he’d blown it.

Good times were on the way.

But I felt oddly restless. Things seemed so anti-climatic, and I realised that I’d fooled myself into thinking that all of my problems in life, all of my unresolved feelings towards my pushy parents and my self-hatred of myself for being such a lousy fucking failure, would somehow disappear, beaten into submission by the thrill of actually succeeding for once. This had not proved to be the case, however, and my satisfaction felt oddly flat as Charlie and I tried to get back down to business.

And then came the phone call, startling me as the mobile phone that normally never rang actually went off for once.

‘You bastard, what have you done to me?’

I had never heard her speak, only shriek, but I knew instantly that it was the vampire lady.

‘Kyla, my dear, how sweet of you to call.’ I signalled for Charlie to come over and listen to the call, switching the phone on to loudspeaker. ‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’

‘You know why I’m calling. I want to know what was in that syringe, and I want to know now.’

I pictured her body wasting away even as we spoke, her skin shrinking, her bones beginning to emerge where the fat was disappearing. I saw no need to lie to her, and replied, ‘it contained a virus made up from bits and bobs of every body-wasting disease known to man, and a few more besides.’ Something just occurring to me, I asked, ‘where did you get my number from?’

‘One of your hunter buddies. You’ll find him in the morning – minus his legs.’

If she were expecting that to cause me any grief, she’d have been sadly disappointed; my affection for my colleagues was nothing like her love for her brood, and such a comment bothered me not at all. Shaking my head, I told her, ‘I’m surprised you still have the strength for that.’

She clearly saw no need to skirt around the truth with me, either. ‘Oh, it was touch and go at times. But I’ll last long enough to take you apart, bit by bit.’

It could be argued that she’d already begun this task, when she’d taken the axe to my face and my hand. But who was I to point this out?

Her threat made, she cut the connection, and Charlie rang around all of our colleagues to find out if any had been reported missing, wondering which one of them had given up my number before losing his legs. We got a name and we got a last reported location, but as we headed for the car, it all seemed too easy, and I couldn’t help but suspect that Kyla had planned it this way.



I slipped into a semi-doze on the way, tormented by bad dreams and the phantom sting of my missing parts. Most depressing of all, I couldn’t get the vampire’s voice out of my head, couldn’t stop dwelling on how wheezy and pathetic she’d sounded, couldn’t quite match up that voice with the image of the tough and strong woman who’d brought the axe down upon my defenceless body.

That was the memory that plagued me the most, naturally – I just couldn’t get over it. But now, I was seeing it from all perspectives, from all points of view, and horror of horrors I was actually able to empathise with her. Sure, she’d taken away my fingers and an ear, but only in defence of her brood, of her children. To a guy like me, who’d always craved devotion like that from his merciless parents, there was something in her spirited gesture that was slightly moving.

Coming out of my doze momentarily, I glanced across at Charlie, and envied his simplistic view of the world, his moralistic take on good and evil, his ability to see us as heroes even when we were setting fire to a building full of kids – vampire kids, kids who would never grow into adults, but kids all the same.

Drifting back into sleep, I pictured Kyla as a mere skeleton, her body destroyed by the virus.

One that I had given her.

The skinny stripper back at the party, her physique so ravaged by years of heroin abuse that her ribs protruded, had given me the idea. Her stature had made her look vulnerable, weak, and I’d known, watching her, that I could do anything I wanted to her, and she’d be powerless to stop me. That was how I wanted Kyla to appear, and it hadn’t taken me long to think of contacting Eddie, and it had taken him even less time to cook up the virus that I wanted.

‘I want to eat away her body, piece by piece,’ I’d told him. ‘I want her to be in agony for days before she finally wastes away to nothing. I’m going to take everything away from her.’

My need for vengeance had outweighed any sense of mercy I may have had, and I hadn’t objected when Eddie had suggested testing the virus out on one of his ‘family’ before we left. He’d picked the teen that was chained up with the syringes sticking out of his every orifice, and sure enough, the victim had gone into death throes in about four hours. But his was a mere human immune system; with Kyla’s advanced one, it was difficult to tell just how long she would last.

She’d sounded pretty damn ill on the phone, though.

I had stopped dozing by the time we reached her lair, and we crashed into it, kicking the door open like cops, shining our flashlights into the gloom and calling out her name. But the place was empty, and I breathed in a mixture of relief and disappointment as I walked further into the subterranean area, searching for traps.

I found none. But I did find a dozen pools of vomit, dotted all around the room. ‘Watch your step,’ I warned Charlie.

He obeyed, and as he came to stand behind me, his big feet crunching loudly against the soft floor, I bent and dipped one of my remaining fingers in the puddle of sick and brought it up to my nose, sniffing the thin liquid.

I’d expected it to give me the smell of victory.

But it didn’t smell like that.

I didn’t know what the aroma made me feel. But it helped me focus, helped me remember that Kyla was somewhere nearby, weak and almost dead. I headed outside again, eager to remove that ‘almost’ part.



We’d barely gone a few steps when we came across one of her brood.

This one, a pigtailed girl, was nearly too much to take; even Charlie gasped when he saw the state that she’d been left in, and I had to fight hard to keep my gorge down.

Kyla, too weak now to hunt, had turned on one of her kind, and the girl was missing a throat and a hand – one chewed off and one torn out.

Knowing how much Kyla had loved her children, I wondered how bad it must be for her to make her turn on them like this. The child, full of love for her mother, had probably offered herself up, and Kyla had obviously been too weak to resist the offer. It wouldn’t make a difference, though; no amount of food could turn back the relentless journey of the virus, eating its way through her body with neither mercy nor hesitance.

The sight of the girl made me so sad that I did something I had never done for anyone or anything up until that point: I closed the girl’s eyes, hiding the love and devotion that still shone there for all to see.

I wondered if, as her mother had fed, the child had said, ‘thank you?’



I ordered Charlie to bury the body and wandered alone into the night, thinking.

I couldn’t stop imagining the girl’s final moments, picturing her wrapping her arms around her mother as Kyla fed, dying at the same time as she enjoyed the final embrace. I knew that I was going to die alone, not united with someone like she had been, and I wondered how it would feel to be in her shoes, to die for love. I had never felt that emotion, not for myself and not for another, and I had been fascinated with the concept of Kyla and her surrogate family ever since I’d first read about them.

I said earlier that we’d get to the story of Kyla’s past, the legend of what she did, in time, and now the time is here.

She rescued children who were being abused and with one kiss gave them the gift of eternal life, and she also provided them with the means to take revenge on the people who tormented them; whether they did so or not was entirely up to them. She was a truly loving mother, her greatest gift possibly that of the free will she gave to all who travelled with her, and she had become something of an icon, an urban legend, for young people suffering the world over.

I’d once wished that she would come and rescue me from the horror of my parents. But she never had, and maybe my hate for her was rooted in that fact, going back way before she’d ever hurt me with the axe.

I was starting to doubt everything – not just what I’d done to Kyla, but the whole life I’d led, the existence I’d had on this world. Had I done more harm than good by taking away a figure of hope like her? Further to that, was the whole hunting game just an excuse to pursue personal vendettas, and not a way to make the world a better place?

Charlie would never have had these doubts, and neither would Industrial Eddie. Both thought that our work was good, and both believed that our overall mission fully justified any questionable actions we may have to make. I’d once thought so myself – but now I wasn’t so sure.

Wasn’t sure about anything, to tell you the truth. But if my whole life had been a mistake, I soon realised what I had to do to make amends for it.



Charlie barely had a chance to wake up.

The figure that fell upon him was Kyla – or rather, a thin, wraith-like shadow of the formerly proud vampire lady once called Kyla. He started to struggle, coming awake instantly, snapping out of the rest he’d allowed himself after driving all day and then having to dig a grave, but one blow to the head with a hammer made him lie still again.

I had wept as I swung the weapon.

I have to believe that the blow killed him. I have to believe that it wasn’t shock at my betrayal that stopped him from moving.

I had found Kyla shivering in a park, and she’d hissed, a truly feeble sound that broke my heart, and waved a shrunken arm around, trying to scare me off. But I was beyond being scared, and I’d picked her and carried her back to where Charlie and the car were waiting.

My assistant, my friend, was lying down asleep, and I’d set my former foe on the ground next to him. She hadn’t eaten since the little pigtailed girl, and she hadn’t drunk blood in days, and she fell on Charlie with unholy abandon.

I know what you’ll say – she’s a vampire lady, and I’m a vulnerable, broken man, and you’ve no doubt seen all the movies and read all the books and you’ll say that she put some kind of curse on me, spoke some kind of magic spell down the phone to me the night before that had washed my brain, made me turn my back on the life I’d led and the friends I’d once had. But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.

I told Kyla of my past, of my cruel, mocking parents, as she fed, keeping my back to her, uncertain that she was even listening. But when the sound of flesh being torn and blood being drank finally ceased, I turned around and saw something in her eyes that I had never seen from any person before:

Understanding.

Without a word, I walked over to her, sat down, took her hand in mine and let her head rest against my shoulder, and as a new day dawned all around us, my tears flowed down into her lank, greasy hair.

They carried on falling long after the beating of her heart had finally ceased.