PROLOGUE: HEMATOPOIESIS

ALL the best tales begin with rain. In reality, this is the end of the story I am about to relate to you, but I begin here, because I'm sitting waiting in the pitch-dark parlor of my old house, bare feet with their long nightmare toes peeking out from beneath an appropriately literary white eyelet nightgown. The rain is picking up outside from a sleepy waltz to a tarantella, and often when it rains like this, my lover John returns to me for the night. My lover -- the unfortunately feral and tragically beautiful -- may join me here, for he hates being out in the rain in the mulchy graveyards and unwholesome underpasses where he ordinarily stays. I am calling to him without raising my voice. I envision him standing solid before me. I want him to come in to me tonight.

I am listening to the rain with all my senses. Synaesthesia is one of my great rewards -- I can, if I wish, hear the raindrops hitting leaves outside with my skin, hear the molecules of wet earth opening and sprouting with my nostrils; it seems as though time stops between raindrops distinctly hitting the slate roof tiles in groups of ten or twenty. Moments like this make me insist and insist that we vampires are certainly not undead ghouls; as I sit precisely balanced on my bare tailbone which rests cool and damp against the wooden slats, sniffing the wet peat of long-dead, long-buried Oregonians wafting from a mile away, I feel more alive than any human creature ever felt. I am now so capable that restraining myself is a pleasure. Morality is delicious.

Nonetheless, the sight of my skulking, fey, lupine lover would please me no end. I haven't seen him for weeks. A week to me is a long time; I am mostly solitary and often idle, and my human scientist colleagues interpret my moody demeanor as aloofness. I'm sure they think I'm just some frigid workaholic who never sees any sunlight, one of those ice queens who wears a leather jacket, but still spends the evenings in a cold white laboratory.

My dearest friends are dead or far away. Oh Ricari -- I long for him sometimes -- I wish he were simply here to talk to, to tell me sad or freakish tales of his life, but he gave me almost two years of his guidance and companionship, and then slipped off quietly, in darkness of course, leaving behind him only a reciept for a one-way plane ticket to Toronto. He always did prefer his solitude. I think about Lovely's laugh, reading in Chloe's big bed while drinking ginger tea, and I miss them so much it makes my chest hurt.

John's here, though, in some ways at least. I'm not sure if he made the conscious decision to not be my companion, or whether he's just wandering about compulsively, like a half-wild housecat. I don't know why he became that way, while I became thus; the vampire blood pulsing through what was a human brain can do some weird things to people.

John and I were engaged to be married once, in that other life, that human life, so sane and silicone in comparison with this. It was about a million years ago, or maybe it was only five. I was then, as I am now, Ariane Caroline Dempsey, early twenties, American, of mixed race, molecular biology specialist, lover of plain black T-shirts and violent action films, and prone to sitting bare-assed in the middle of the floor during a rainstorm.

So I've been thinking about everything, reviewing it in my mind; we vampires have the unfortunate trait of having very sharp memories, even of things we'd forgotten when we were humans. We can remember every embarassment, every disappointment, every shitty little betrayal, as well as the joy of the first bite of fresh persimmon jam, or the sweetness of falling asleep after a night of worrying. Some get extremely testy, some stop caring about anything they've said or done, and some, like me, I guess, just step back and quantify. Thinking about the past gives me something to do while I wait, a back-process in my mind to pass the time, the inexorable time, the excruciating waiting-room of being alive.

For all the beings in my extended hemophagic family, the transformation occured at a particularly touchy time in a person's life, especially for those of us in the twentieth century -- that time in one's life where living becomes an effort for the first time. I was not old enough yet to see life as a blessing, as something to be treasured and appreciated as it goes along. Like Ricari, I have become long-lived right at the time when it no longer seems like something to desire. The very young take it in stride, take it for granted in fact, that the immortality that they feel inside is the real thing. After the age of forty or so, some people grasp at it desperately, see it as a grand cure for their failing eyesight, greying temples and temperamental bowels. All I saw before me was sixty years of degeneration, and the gradual loss of my youthful charms, which weren't that terribly many to begin with.

I'm not unhappy. Quite the opposite. I know myself now to an extent that would have been impossible otherwise, and I like what I know. I just wish it wasn't so hard, you know... So many deaths already and how infinitely many deaths to come...?

Ah! A scratching and a scribbling at my back door? I jump up and rush to the kitchen window and gaze out at the plaster birdbath in my backyard, bouncing with raindrops. A white sylph is materializing , indistinct through the veinlike tracery of rain on the windowpane -- John, naked, discarding heaps of mud-dark clothes onto my lawn and stepping with great delicacy into the fountain. He tosses his head like a Macedonian prince. So I open the back door for him, and he glides in, half-asleep seemingly, his beaded silvery skin icy to the touch. His dark eyes are impossible to read. Heedless, hungry, he touches me through my nightgown, wetting me -- look away, won't you?

I'll distract you with pretty stories. I'll tell you with my sharp vampire videocamera memory how I came to see through darkness and John came into the four sharp tines which currently, sensually, pierce the skin of my shoulder.