Nosuë: The Wandering Vampire

My clothes were stained.

An ugly speck of dried blood stained the cuff of my thin black camisole. Humans didn’t have eyesight sharp enough to see it, but I did. More importantly, I smelled it.

I hated my clothes smelling of blood.

I was born and raised in a certain way. My upbringing had no blood on clothes.

In my family, in my home, we adapted. We had needs, and the humans in our care met those needs. We lived in a remote mansion, our clothes always clean, we devoted ourselves to what we loved and cared for our flock. We were made that way.

I was born among those humans, and very soon I was raised to be one of the vampires.

I was six years old and my mother, with a worried expression, took me by the hand and led me to one of the most luxurious and ostentatious rooms in the mansion.

There were curtains, tapestries and cushions everywhere, but, of course, no windows. There were only windows in our house, where sunlight streamed in from dawn to dusk.

There were also three vampires; I recognised them by their skin colour. We had brown skin; they were completely white.

Two of them were male and stood next to the woman, who laid languidly among the cushions. She looked at me with red eyes glowing like burning embers, and smiled.

“Come closer, boy,” she said softly, barely a whisper.

I looked at my mother, who nodded, and after releasing her hand, I approached the vampiress who was calling me.

Suddenly, she held up a hand for me, and I stopped a few steps away from her. She had red hair and full, suggestive lips.

“What is your name?” she asked in a sweet, gentle tone.

“Hugin,” I answered.

“Hugin!” She laughed. “It doesn’t suit you, you know. Why don’t we change it?”

“Change it?”

I looked at my mother, uncomprehending, but she didn’t move, didn’t even look at me. I turned to the vampire.

I was startled to see her standing inches away from me, fangs bared, pupils dilated.

One of the men was holding her arm firmly, but she was smiling as if she didn’t mind being restrained.

“Nosuë,” she whispered. “That’s what you’re going to be called from now on. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means ‘kiss’.”

But that was almost four hundred years ago.

Four hundred years since I lost everything.

Everything.

Ritz limped.

“Let’s go!”

I pulled her, urging her on. She tried to follow me, but I could see it in her eyes: she was too weak. The arrow wounds wouldn’t stop bleeding. Their points were of gold, and they were for me, not for her. It was me they had aimed at.

She had saved me.

“Ritz!” I called her. “Ritz, come on!”

Our home was in flames behind us. Screams could be heard: the slayers didn’t differentiate between vampires and their flock. We were all the same scum to them.

They were slaughtering them.

Ritz fell to the ground.

With a very human grunt, all too human, eyes bathed in red tears and breathing out of sheer inertia, I bent down to pick her up if I had to, but she grabbed my elbow and looked up at me. She stopped me.

“No,” she whispered. “I can’t. I can’t.”

“Ritz?”

Her hands grabbed my shoulders and then my face. I noticed that her eyes were also bathed in tears. I swallowed. Nearby, too close, my family, men and vampires, were screaming.

They were killing them.

“Come, my little one,” Ritz whispered. “Come, my cub.”

See pulled me to her, held me close, pressed my lips to her throat.

“Bite,” she murmured.

“What…? No… No.”

"Bite.”

It was an order. I was her pup, she was my sire. My will was bound to hers.

I didn’t want to bite. I didn’t even want to draw my fangs, but I did. I did and I bit her, and some of her blood landed on my tongue. I tried to pull away, I didn’t want to take her, but she held me, she forced me. She forced me to break free of the cosy bond that had bound me to her from the very moment she infected my body with her venom, transforming me into what I was meant to be.

Then she pulled me away and looked me in the eye. She spoke only one word, the last command she could give me as her blood changed me forever.

“Run.”

And I ran.

And now I wandered among the humans without them recognising what was in front of them, hiding in plain sight. I lived in dusty garrets and my clothes were stained with blood.

The loss of everything I loved, and to see how low I had fallen, little more than a vagrant, was painful. All that I was, all that I loved… lost.

Grief shows itself in different forms. Humans cringe, cry tears of agony. The vampire does not. The vampire growls. A vibrant, brutal growl, like a furious lion.

“God! Did you hear that?”

Someone had heard me.

I tried to restrain myself and took a step back, looking around through my fringes.

I was in a dark alley with a frankly annoying smell that dulled my nose a little. I could hear the carriages driving along the nearby avenue, the hooves of horses pounding on the cobblestones, the people walking leisurely along the pavements of the pleasure quarter.

It was an apt name for this collection of streets dedicated to the vices of mankind.

A couple of centuries ago, the vices were tournaments and festivals, I remember. Nobles and not-so-nobles would come together to feast, to fight, to give free rein to the pleasure of honourable fighting.

Not now. Now the vices were in those strange narcotics that were becoming more and more famous, in the taverns with alcohol flowing unceasingly, and in prostitution.

I saw a couple appear around the corner. I backed up against the wall; the shadows hid me, but they were still trying to find me.

“Darling, let’s go,” the woman asked.

Her little heart was beating fast, frantic in its fear, while the man’s was calmer and stronger: he was excited.

“Wait, wait,” he insisted. “I’m sure I know that sound.”

“It must be a very big animal!”

Animal, of course. That’s how they see us, like wild beasts. But it was unpleasant to hear, to think about. I was no beast escaped from the zoo.

“If I’m right, my love, it’s not an animal,” said the man.

“Oh, again with…?”

"Chist.”

The man let go of the woman and walked into the alley. His steps were slow and hesitant.

“Hello?” he called out loudly, scanning the shadows. “Hellooooo? Is anyone there?”

“Darling, please...” his partner murmured, huddled in the corner, still in the light of the new street lamps on the avenue.

“We don’t want to hurt you, we just want to see you. We are not hunters.”

The human definitely knew very well what he had heard, and not only did he not run away in terror, but he came looking for me.

Saying ‘I’m not a hunter’ was the same as saying ‘I’m a hunter, so run away before I see you’. But that particular one was telling the truth, that’s why he was a fool… a real fool.

’I’ve spent two years in this town,’ I thought to myself with some dejection and irony. ’It’s about time to get back on the road and find a new town, isn’t it?’

I hated being a wanderer, but settling down is very difficult for a vampire. We don’t age. We don’t change. We don’t walk in the sunlight. I had been human with a family, I had been turned, and I had been raised to remain sedentary and familiar.

I had lost it, and I didn’t know how to get it back on my own.

To go out and let them see me meant exposing myself to hysteria. Hysteria led to rumours, and rumours attracted vampire hunters. That meant leaving.

And humans are very, very… very hysterical.

But I had nowhere to go anyway, no one to go with. No one was waiting for me, I was on my own, so… what was the point of not changing cities?

So I stepped out of the shadows and approached, cautious.

The woman let out a faint cry of fright, but the man looked at me with very bright eyes.

“Is it true?” he asked in an anxious voice. “Are you a blood…?”

“Careful,” I warned in an icy voice.

“Vampire?”

“Yes.”

The normal reaction of humans who don’t belong to a flock is… to scream.

The man screamed, but in a new way: with a smile on his face.

“I knew you existed!”

We know a bit more about Nosuë… About his past and his loss. What do you think? And what about those odd humans?

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