"Is it?"
"Well, yeah."
"So vampire are not romantic, but we are funny."
"When you put it like that..."
"Never mind. I have a request."
"Okay."
"I want some books, no, some novels that are romance with something paranormal thrown in."
The guard shrugged. "Make a list. Your wish is my command."
Baka turned away muttering to himself. "Sure it is."
He wrote to a couple of book stores and a couple of librarians and asked for recommendations. He asked for a list of best sellers within the genre. Because readers are always eager to share books they like with others, all four wrote back fulfilling his request and adding some of their favorites that didn't qualify as best sellers. Baka compiled a list of fifty books and handed it over to the guard on duty. He read through the list quickly, sometimes laughing at the various antics some authors imagined a vampire in love might do.
Vampire in love. Would it be possible for anything to be more ridiculous?
Of course both writers and readers believed vampire to be creations of fiction. If they only knew. That's when it hit him. But they don't know.
He could recreate vampire from his imagination as easily as the next person. Maybe better.
And so he set to work on a story about a young Transylvanian Alpine widow, the two step-children she was bringing up alone, and the vampire who loved her. He sent the manuscript to the publisher of his favorite of the books he had read under the nom de plume Valerie de Stygian and, within a few months, had a contract. By that time a second book was finished and ready for editing. The publisher was delighted.
He was self-aware enough to know he was using the vampire romances as a vehicle to redeem the reality of his experience. If he could just transform the horror of the killings into fantasies of romantic seductions full of pleasure and passion, then, if nothing else, he would provide a few hours pleasure to lovers of romance.
The only constant in Baka's life was time. Existence was bearable so long as his attention was carefully managed. The synthetic blood had been refined from time to time so that it had become slightly more tolerable. Still, the prospect of immortality alone in a fishbowl was depressing. He had begun to think that, if feelings counted, his goal was accomplished. He was dead. There was a part of his brain that was just too slow to realize it yet.
Having reached that conclusion, he had renewed his commitment to formulate a plan for suicide when he was informed that he was being transported to the New Jersey annexed unit under guard, of course, to act as consultant on a vampire-related problem in New York.
Outside? After being kept in a tower cell for nearly a hundred years, he was to see the world beyond the view of his narrow window and in person, not on TV. He had no particular emotional reaction to the news. He suspected that he had grown incapable of any feelings other than ambivalence. Shouldn't he feel something? Excitement perhaps?
Jefferson Unit hadn't changed that much. When he arrived, he was shown to Monq's offices and briefed on everything they knew about the vampire epidemic. The situation had grown intolerable and was, apparently, getting worse by the day.
Baka suspected the source of the problem was that the very underground system he had built had probably been rediscovered and was acting as a magnet to draw more vampire into the area. He promptly told them everything he knew about it.
Hours later, Monq and Sol secluded themselves for a private meeting.
They agreed that they would offer the vampire a temporary get-out-of-jail contract in exchange for his help. Desperate times. Desperate measures. They decided the prudent thing would be to take him back to his maximum security prison until the terms of the agreement were established and preparations made according to his instructions.
So Baka was once again bound for Unit Drac. On the way across the hub, with sixty pounds of chains draping his body, Baka was struck by an event that achieved the impossible. Something sparked his interest in living. It was the first time he had felt excitement since the night he heard Bach play his newly composed Toccata and Fugue.
What he saw was a lady knight, a wonder in itself, whom he judged to be extraordinarily strong by the way she controlled the ferocious beast who made no bones of the fact he would like to help Baka along with his death wish.
While Baka was wondering how long it would take to die at the jaws of such a fine animal, he looked up into the face of the woman who had tamed a nightmare. For the first time in centuries he felt the pleasure of genuine interest in something for its own sake. Not interest as a forced distraction to keep from reliving sins, but interest in the sense of wanting to get closer and hear her speak.
In the midst of hauling on the black dog's tether, her eyes met his and lingered just long enough to tempt him to break free. He smiled at her and saw in her response that she didn't know who he was and wondered why someone in chains was being escorted across the hub.
After all this time and dedication to the proposition of terminating the pain of consciousness for all eternity, there was something Baka wanted - to talk to the woman with the turquoise eyes and the strange, but enticing hair color. She was creation personified. He suspected that you wouldn't need vampire eyes to see that there was a field of rainbow color around her that moved and crackled with warmth and exuberance. Life!
If he could get close to all that energy, for even a few moments, he might remember what it felt like to be truly alive. She reminded him of something. Something buried so deep he couldn't quite identify it. But whatever that thing was, he wanted it.
In spite of the discomfort, he smiled in the darkness remembering the first time he saw Elora Laiken. He had wanted to gather her up like a bouquet of freshly picked flowers, press his face into the light of her aura and smell her fragrance, then hold onto her like a tether to the living. All that vivacity and spiritual power housed in such a bright and voluptuous body. At that moment it wouldn't have surprised him to learn that she routinely made the lame walk and the blind see. If she could cause Baka's monotony-numbed mind and ice packed blood to stir, those other miracles must be child's play for her.
***