“What the fuck was that?”

Count Nosferatu was half bent over holding onto the wall. Broken ribs always hurt like hell for at least an hour but he couldn’t remember breaking them today. He reflexively put a hand up to see if they’d torn through his shirt.

“They bit us, Nos.”

The young vampire, Tommy, sounded like the innocent victim he once was, in war torn France just over a century ago. It was this, as much the disrespectful shortening of his name that brought Nosferatu back to the present again. Only to be met by the awful sensation of his artery pumping blood like mad to make up for their recent flight. Only to be made to pump even harder as mind numbing terror set in.

It had started out promisingly enough.

They had been cruising through the centre of town in an old Cadillac hearse that Tommy had tricked out with necro-tempered glass which looked smoked on the outside without the vampires getting smoked on the inside, even an hour before sundown. They were doing their usual slow drive-by of all the bars at closing time and, it being a quiet night, got as far as Jono’s Irish Pub. The clientele of Jono’s weren’t really prime dinner options being a bit too stringy in general and they didn’t wash as much as the rest of the patrons of other places but some nights you have to eat meatloaf.

Two men with wild hair and beards were outside, so drunk that they were leaning against each other neither one being able to stand on their own. As Viella, Nosferatu’s niece, piloted the hearse to the pavement one of the drunks slurred, “Vampires suck” - reading the bumper sticker out loud.

The three vampires flowed out of the hearse with unnatural grace and speed, ordinarily this was the beginning of the pants-wetting human terror rising from their lizard brains telling them that this was not ordinary or natural. The drinkers hadn’t even this much awareness.

In the silence before the attack, Nosferatu could hear a soft plashing sound, like the sound the blood makes when you hang a corpse from a tree. It was only then he noticed a stream of human urine winding its way across the pavement to the gutter. He turned to let his gaze follow the piss into the alley beside the pub and then moved forward intercept whoever was going to come out of there.

It was then that one of the leaning drinkers chose to cough which woke the other one who seeing people nearby immediately asked, “Please, mate, can you spare us a bit of change to get the bus home?”

Tommy stepped forward. Nosferatu couldn’t fault the boy for wanting to have a bit of fun with his dinner. These pleasures have always been the vampire prerogative.

“Do we look like we carry money around with us?” he asked, a massive, genuine grin on his face.

The drinker had squinted at him then. This is the moment that every vampire undies for. In short order the squint would turn to bewilderment, realisation and then fear. That squint would relax and then the eyes would widen, pupils dilating in terror. Perhaps the beginning of a scream would rise in the drinker’s throat just before Tommy bit it out.

But the squint never widened. Instead, moving with a sudden lunge like a snake striking, the drunk bit Tommy on the nose. And clamped down. Viella ran forward to render assistance dislodging the other drinker who, seemingly without ever regaining consciousness span around on the spot, propelled by Viella’s forward progress and landed a clenched fist on Viella’s jaw. Obviously vampires are not much inconvenienced by human punches from a pain or damage point of view but they can be occasionally knocked off balance and so Viella fell into Tommy and the first drinker, catching them unawares and soon they were all three rolling on the ground, Tommy’s nose still firmly held in the crocodilian clamp of the drinker’s jaw.

The still standing drinker dived on.

Some military memory came unbidden to Nosferatu from his pre-vampire existence. It was a pair of soldiers fighting in a camp in Wallachia, gouging at each other with hooks, eventually one fatally wounded combatant biting the lip from his exhausted opponent. This was no time for pleasant memories though and Nosferatu strode towards the pile to put the drinkers out of their misery.

It was then that the pisser from the alley landed on his back. He reached back there intending to pull the pisser straight over his head and dash his brains out on the floor but what he reached into had teeth. You prey on humans for several lifetimes and you get to be a connoisseur of bites. The dainty bites of the females as they struggled to keep their worthless lives were not usually even painful. A few of the men would try to bite something or other off and sometimes even succeed. Eventually everything grows back. This bite immediately felt bad, like some kind of contamination was leaking into him. Poison. Did humans have venomous bites? He’d never encountered it before. But could it be?

The pisser was biting his hand but had both hands free and now was trying to push, what was that? A small ballpen, into Nosferatu’s ear.

At that moment Viella let out a piercing scream. The drunk that had hit her with the haymaker was in the process of tearing her ear off with his teeth.

Nosferatu felt like his whole arm was cramping up. The distraction had allowed the pisser to use a hand like a padded gauntlet to drive the pen deep into Nosferatu’s ear. A small flesh wound, like a burst eardrum, would ordinarily heal in about an hour but it still was quite painful. Suddenly he felt very old and tired.

He sank to his knees and pulled his hand back to the front of his body and the pisser’s head with it. He drove his fangs into the man’s neck but the man responded by zipping another pen up the seam where Nosferatu’s fangs joined and into his gum! Shocking insolence. He tore his hand from the pisser’s mouth and clamped it to the pisser’s neck intending to snap it but he found he did not have the strength to do so.

It had all devolved into a punishing scrap and the continued blows dimmed Nosferatu’s perception. Eventually sirens made themselves heard in the distance and the drinkers somehow withdrew. Nosferatu didn’t even see them go.

Nosferatu had roused Viella and Tommy then. They had run four blocks, although perhaps limped at speed better described their journey and now were in the overgrown garden of an abandoned building.

Nosferatu could hear his heartbeat. For the first time in millennia. He felt like crying. “Oh yes,” his mind sang back at him. “First the blood and then the tears.”

“Count? Uncle?” Viella sounded as she had when she was a little human.

“Viella?”

“I can feel my heart. I’m allllllliiive-”

The word became a wail, an insane, unthinking noise full of grief and loss…