My cousin Imelda was asleep in what used to be my room, and she looked like she had been sick for a very long time. I could see the bite marks covering her arms and neck, dark bruises around each of them as if they had healed poorly or had simply been reopened many, many times. Seeing those bruises was concerning. From my own experience, I knew that there was an enzyme in vampire saliva that helped to speed up clotting and healing, to the point that by a day after an encounter, it was like the wound had never been there. The scars covering Imelda's arms and neck looked like they had never been allowed to heal. It looked like someone had been snacking on her, over and over, feasting on her blood... because that was precisely what had happened.

My fingers curled into fists as I stood there and looked at her, and I felt that familiar impotent rage of wanting to do something but knowing that I was too late to be of any use.

"The whole family knows what's been going on," Ronnie said. "It was the mirrors that tipped us off, you know."

"The mirrors?" I asked, and realized just how dry my throat was. I coughed and looked at Claude to see if he knew what Ronnie was talking about. He shook his head and looked back to Imelda.

"The mirrors downstairs. That motherfucker thought he was so clever, tricking us into not seeing him, but we could always see him in the mirrors. Your mama was the one who figured it out a couple of months ago. Up to that point, she thought she was being haunted. We all thought it too, cuz every time anybody came over it was like there was always this feeling like someone else was in the room with us, but we could never see anybody. So we thought it was some vengeful spirit. It didn't help that he's always moving stuff and opening doors. He must have been laughing his ass off."

"How long has Imelda been like this?"

"Couple months maybe. It's only gotten bad in the past couple of weeks, but Imelda was sick on and off for a while. We thought she was anemic or some shit, but the doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her. She was perfectly healthy, they said, but we could see that she wasn't. When the bruises started showing up we all thought she'd gone back with that shitty boyfriend of hers—"

"Eric? I think I saw pictures of them on Facebook."

"Yeah, Eric. He'd gotten rough with her a couple times, but you know Imelda: she gave him bruises to match her own. Those two were like fire and gasolina, you know? El fuego conflagración."

"Boom," I echoed.

"Exactly," Ronnie smiled. "A lotta, lotta boom."

"But it wasn't Eric," Claude said, and Ronnie shook her head.

"Nope," she said. "Instead it was a motherfucking vampire. I would have taken a ghost any day. At least ghosts don't go around sucking your blood. They just knock over a couple of cups and stuff. Now I'm beginning to think that it's been vampires all along just fucking with people's heads."

I resisted the urge to jump to the defence and thought it to myself instead: #NotAllVampires. Goddamn Daemien.

"How was anybody to know? It's not like vampires are supposed to even exist, right?"

Claude just gave me a look, and I shrugged it off angrily.

"Didn't anybody think it was strange that Auntie Rosita was taking down all of the crucifixes and statues in the house?" Claude asked.

"She said it was because she was going to be painting and redecorating," Ronnie said. "You can see how far that got, but then again, Imelda was getting pretty sick right about then, weak all the time."

I could imagine it, Daemien walking into the room night after night and almost tenderly biting into her wrist or shoulder and letting the blood flow. Imelda wouldn't have been able to resist and would have just watched him, entranced, entirely under his spell, somehow convincing herself that it was what she wanted.

I felt guilt worming its way into my gut as I thought about all of the girls I had seduced since I had become a vampire. That bastard Sebastien had convinced me that I had been glammering the girls all along. He had gotten into my head, and all I could think was that glammering was as good as roofies. None of the girls really had a choice except to sleep with me once I glammered them, so what was the difference, right? He got me thinking that glammering had been a form of rape whether I knew it or not. For some reason I found myself thinking about poor dead Meredith, the one girl I had made a connection with. The one girl who had been killed because of her relationship with me. She had been sweet and had scared me a little because there really could have been something there between the two of us. There was no way that had been the result of glammering, it just couldn't work that way. Could it?

I wondered what Imelda had gone through night after night and knew that none of it had been particularly pleasant. None of it had been her choice.

I felt sick to my stomach.

"And my mom figured it out?" I finally asked.

"She saw him in the mirror just sitting there in the living room like nobody's business, but when she turned around, there was nobody there. Luckily, he didn't figure out that she could see him. Apparently, he avoided even looking at mirrors. Must be a vampire thing." Ronnie paused, looking at Imelda and then shook her head. "She got me to come over and look after Imelda, and she got the bowling club together. That was when the big breakthrough came."

"The council of the elders," Claude said, and Ronnie snickered.

"Don't let las abuelas hear you call them that. Cute buns or not, they will string you up and make a piñata out of you."

"She's not kidding either," I said.

"Duly noted."

"So yeah, las abuelas got to talking, and it turns out that all of the girls in the family were getting sick, and everybody was thinking they had a damn ghost."

"Aren't they all in this cul-de-sac? Don't they see each other, like almost every day?" This was from Claude, and he looked incredulous. "I remember there was a time you couldn't fart in one house and everybody not know about it within two minutes."

"El vampiro changed all of that, and we didn't even realize it. He's been working his way into la familia for a long time now. Maybe even a year. Pinché cabrón. Tu mama, she realized that the best she'd felt in a long time was when she was away from the house. Away from this neighbourhood. So when las abuelas got together, they all had lots and lots to say, and once they started comparing problems, they all realized the same thing was happening to them. Imelda, Rosalinda, Irena and even Rebecca."

"Even Rebecca? Wow."

"Seriously, wow," Claude echoed.

My cousin Rebecca was 14 and puberty had hit her extra hard. She had developed a heavy moustache the same time that acne had exploded all over her face and found out that she needed braces. Teenage life had been particularly difficult for her. She got into a lot of fights. I mean a lot of fights.

"When Auntie Rosita told the abuelas about what she had seen in the mirror, that was the game-changer. Auntie Alice caught the motherfucker on camera, and they all realized it was the same guy."

"How did they figure out it was a vampire?" I asked.

"Them freaky blue eyes of his. We looked it up on the internet, and there are all these stories about vampires. Some really freaky and stupid shit, but some scary shit too that didn't seem like it was made up. A couple of stories had pictures of the vampires too, and they all had these freaky blue eyes like they'd steal your soul, you know?"

I unconsciously blinked and looked away, feeling the presence of the dark brown contact lenses that covered my own freaky blue vampire eyes. Right then would have been the worst time to feel one of the contact lenses trying to escape my eyeball, but thankfully the universe seemed to have taken a break from fucking with me, and all was well.

"The plan was to get all of the family together in one place and get the jump on him, but then you decided to come home." Ronnie gave me an odd look. "I still can't figure out how you were able to see him without the mirrors. It's like he had no effect on either of you guys."

"Hey, I was wondering why nobody was looking at this dude in the living room who very clearly didn't belong."

"Maybe," Ronnie said thoughtfully, "but it was more like you knew exactly what he was."

Ronnie was looking right as me as she said this and I could see her brain working overtime. I looked at Claude, and he just shrugged.

"Something you want to tell me, guys?" Ronnie said, glaring right at Claude with his good looks and charming grin, the kind of guy you'd expect to be a vampire. "If you're keeping a secret, you know Auntie Rosita is going to find out mucho quick. Especially if one you is a vampire."

We both looked shocked. My heart pounded in my chest, sure that Ronnie was about to out me and I wondered what had given me away.

"By one of you, I mean Claude," Ronnie said.

"I swear to you, I'm not a vampire," Claude said with all honesty.

"Me neither," I mumbled, but Ronnie wasn't even considering me. Kind of hurt my pride just a little. She threw a condescending look towards me and smiled.

"We've seen a couple of things," Claude admitted, and Ronnie nodded wisely, glad she had figured out our secret.

"I knew it!"

"Yeah," I agreed cautiously. "Toronto is a big place. Lots of weird stuff going on down there."

"When I come visit, you know I'm crashing with you, right? You gotta teach me some stuff. How you guys took down that vampire was pure Reality TeeVee. I got it all on camera too."

"Please don't put that up on YouTube," I said, my heart pounding in my chest.

"Or Instagram," Claude chimed in. "Or anywhere for that matter. There are more of them out there and the less they know about Bob and me, the better."

"I got you," Ronnie said. "No social media."

There was an awkward pause.

"You already put it up, didn't you?"

"Kinda, sorta, yeah..." Ronnie glanced at her phone and tapped the screen. "It's okay. I can take it down from Insta. It's only got like forty views... Now fifty-three... Do I have to take it down? It's about to blow up!"

Claude pulled out his phone and gestured to Ronnie.

"I have a friend who can make your accounts disappear in about six minutes. Please don't make me make that call."

"And deleted!" Ronnie pushed a button and glared at me. "You need a new best friend. He drives a hard bargain."

I looked back at Imelda on the bed and thought again of Daemien sucking on her arms and neck so much to cause such lasting bruises. That motherfucker.

"So, what happens now? I asked, an icy dagger of cold hot rage slicing through me. "What happens to the vampire Daemien?"

"We're going to go downstairs, and we're all going to make a pin cushion out of this motherfucker. And then somebody's going to make some tea."

***

The scariest thing was how quiet everyone was. When we came downstairs, my mom's bowling team and kickers-of-vampire-ass, Las Ninjas Rosas were all clustered in a small group in the kitchen. The family was spread out in small groups, and they all had that shell-shocked look on their faces that spoke of a determination to see this thing through, whatever it was. And yet, there was that wariness as they looked at Claude and me.

"It's okay," Ronnie said. "They've seen some vampires in Toronto."

"It's not like they're vampires themselves," my mom joked, "then we'd have to kill them too!"

There was laughter, and some of the tension went out of the room. My aunts Angelica, Alice, Vivienne and Connie who were all members of Las Ninjas Rosas, cackled at the joke but there was still this look in their eyes that belied their humour. I could see that same look on everyone's face and knew it for what it was: they were all about to murder a dude who had been terrorizing the family for months, and they wanted it done and over with.

Claude, Ronnie and I descended to the landing and Mom gave me a huge hug. She pulled back and looked at me proudly and sincerely, and yes, it is possible to do both at the same time.

"Seriously though, if I ever find out you're a vampire, I'll kill you myself."

She clapped me on the shoulder before I could say anything and turned to the family.

"Let's go kill this vampire."

***

And then, we killed the vampire who called himself Daemien.

Music: Radiohead - Man Of War (from OK NOT OK)