People walked wide around him as if he controlled an invisible shield that repulsed them. He stood back from the crowd and let his eyes slide over the women in the room. A beard and long stringy hair that curled under at the ends hid his face, and he had a habit of swinging it forward to shield himself from questioning gazes. I noticed that he didn't smile. At all. And he never took a pull from the bottle he held by the neck. When he took a step to his left, his eyes were cut by the shadow cast by the brim of his worn baseball cap, so there was no longer any chance to read his expression even if I had wanted to. I was left with the feeling that he was intently focused on me in the same way a cat watches a mouse.

Heavy bass and the vibration of the amped-up guitars filled the room and my head while warm beer splashed my feet each time someone bumped my elbow. Being a people watcher, I never stepped onto the dance floor. I was more of a voyeur. My eyes would dance around the club and observe the mating ritual of women moving suggestively and rubbing against men. Each time my eyes would do a round, they would come back to him, and a frisson of agitation would scurry up my spine. Unbidden, the idea filled my head that he might be a vampire, along with the members of the 80's rock band that was blasting out a cover of Come On Feel the Noise. The taste of blood filled my mouth, and I realized I had bitten through the inside of my cheek.

The band had an impressive set of lasers in their light show, and when a beam of light struck me in the face, I had to blink to regain my vision.

The guy was gone.

The bar was packed with tattoos. Two bartenders spun lightly around each other, flipping glasses, pulling the tabs to fill them with a golden froth, and then exchanging them for sweaty bills that drooped and slid to the bar. They held their hands to their ears to get the next order and then spun off to make their next tip, well-oiled. My eyes wandered the length of the bar, but no baseball cap, so I made my way to the dark hall and did a quick inventory. Two doors, one pay phone without a receiver, and at the end in the shadows, a long leg with a red stiletto wrapped around another covered in black denim.

A leather jacket picked up the light from the door to the women's room as it opened long enough for a drunk girl to stumble through. She tilted sideways as she passed me without a glance but righted herself when she slid against the wall. Meanwhile, I waited for the man to get that tingle of being watched. I already knew he wasn't going to have a cap on. He was too drunk. He didn't even notice me, though the girl did. A slow smile spread across her face as he smothered kisses along her neck. Her eyes reached for me only for a moment, and then she succumbed to the pleasure of his touch and let her head roll back against the wall. Not my business.

Back at the bar, I relaxed into the music, relishing the thump of the bass on my insides, and pretended to take another sip of my beer. The lead singer was more feminine than I was, and I couldn't draw my eyes from the way he swung his long auburn hair, twisted his hips, or ground against his microphone in his skinny jeans. Feathers floated out of sync from the roach clip pinned to a belt loop threaded through with a studded belt. He was the proverbial car wreck, and I couldn't stop staring.

Not that the crowd was any better. Drunken air guitars competed note for note with the band, and lighters glowed high above the crowd's bobbing heads. The percentage of men in the crowd with long hair gave the band a run for its money, and I had lost count of the number of tee-shirts that advertised Tennessee Whiskey. Women wore skin-tight jeans or miniskirts over tights and animal print tops altered to expose shoulders, backs, and the curves between breasts. It was a smorgasbord of white flesh.

The speakers were turned up a little more each set, and by the time I walked out of the club, I felt like my head was in a bubble. In the quiet of the parking lot, it was a long moment before the ringing in my ears was no longer as loud as the band had been inside. Since I had made it out untarnished, I figured the band with their pasty skin and electric allure weren't vampires after all. Or else maybe they weren't spending time with Mary Jane between sets and were already sated.

I hummed School's Out For Summer as I dug into my pocket for my keys. I had parked under a light in the lot, and it buzzed like a moth refusing to submit to the electricity coursing through a bug zapper. If a van hadn't parked next to me, someone might have seen what happened next. Someone might have tried to be my knight in shining armor and changed the outcome.

It was the man in the baseball cap. I could sense him creeping toward me before I could smell him or even hear the gravel grind under the toes of his shoes, and I waited an extra heartbeat. He had a shoestring stretched taut between his hands when I turned on him, and he flinched as if his heart had been pierced by the tip of a sword. I have that effect on some people. In that moment, they want to set back the clock, take back the look. In that moment, they still don't know they have a price to pay. And then, the next second, they did.

"No." He choked on the word.

"I will always find you," I whispered. Men like you.

I relished the way he quaked in front of me, how he couldn't look away, how he was frozen in fear. How he reminded me of a white rabbit I had held in my hands when I had first turned. He knew his life was over and I hadn't yet made one. Single. Move.

It's an interesting age. I've been around for a very long time and this is the just the latest generation of homo sapiens with a grotesque few who inserted spiked, plastic implants into their foreheads or filed their teeth into sharp little points. They had no idea how it allowed us to fit in. We received no more than a passing glance, a tremor of discomfort.

I leaned in to look closer at the man's eyes. The odor of fear, or even unwashed bodies, has never bothered me, but I've never cared for being high. When I was high, I was out of control. I did stupid things. Dangerous things. Things which could expose me. I had once left a body on a cross at the Trinity Church. In my intoxicated state, I thought I was making some sort of stand against the lurid gluttony of the church. Churches do not preach about gluttony anymore, and there is a reason for that, even if their congregation is blind to it.

Of course, the worry of ingesting chemicals that affected me two-fold how they affected a human being was only part of it. Matthew said, "The eye is the lamp of the body," and William Shakespeare noted, "The eyes are the window to your soul." It was the eyes that let me finish them. Always the eyes. Past the blue-gray or hazel specks, deeper than the darkest pupil, was truth. The eyes of liars and thieves and rapists don't dilate the same as the pure of heart. It is a subtle idiosyncrasy, but it is the difference between amnesia and death.

And in the light between vehicles, it was what bought this man a not-so-sweet and well-deserved release. As I drained him, I could feel each of the forty-two lives he had condemned to fear. My penance was their pain. His penance, though it was not enough, would never be enough, was thinking he would die beneath my touch, but then begging for it for the next forty-two nights.

Then I'd find another one. There was always another one.