i.

Hi, my name is Mike. I'm a vampire.

Okay, all right. That's a lie. My name is actually Michael Junior Owen but I fucking hate that name. The vampire part is true though. Well, according to some people, I'm not a really good vampire, but no one is going to deny that I am one, that's for sure. Well, maybe me, but that's just what you do when you're asked about it by the wrong people. I don't want to be skinned alive.

Okay, so, now I got to convince you not to close that book. There are a bunch of other books written about vampires out there, why would you read that one? And, yeah, I get it, I don't really like reading either, but I happen to be a successful Youtuber so apparently people like listening to what I got to say.

(Or maybe they like staring at my face. After all, I do make my money with my Instagram account... well, through sponsorships. You know. Oh, and my cat! Her name's Elenor but she also responds to Princess, Sweetheart and Buttercheeks because I call her that too, a lot. Posing with her on my bare chest really gave me the boost I needed to go viral.)

Do you know where I'm not popular though? With other vampires. Yeah, they don't really like this whole idea of me toying around with screens, among other things. Some of them even have their eyes hurting when I take my phone out, which is a damn shame because when they start complaining about it all I want to do is shove it in their face. It's just too bad for them! There are also those that are super allergic to selfies because they happened to be turned (unlike me) on a bad hair day. Or during the Middle Age, where everyone was small, ugly, and starving. Which, yeah, isn't their fault, but they had four hundred years to get over it, is growling at me really necessary?

Or maybe they are just jealous. I've considered the possibility before, it's not unlikely. Not to brag, but I am gorgeous, tall, and fairly muscular. Beauty standards for women changed, like, four times since I was turned but the ones for men are still a bit of a Wild West and I happen to be just that, a man (in case the fact that I am called Mike did not already give that away.) Maybe the long orange locks is a bit much for some but it's not like I can change them. Even if I shaved them, they would regrow really fast, same as before, all freshly dyed.

I'm supposed to be a brunette. That's what's written in my genes. But I had gone through a big breakup right before I was turned into a vampire and I did something radical about it, and now I'm stuck with the orange hair forever.

Did I say forever? Hah, no, actually, more like until I die. I'll die inevitably. There is no way I'll ever be one of those vampires that will see the end of time and I don't want to, to be honest. But, the day I go, I want it to be so fucking glorious I want them to remember me the day the Earth blows up.

I mean, as they say, you only live once.

___

ii.

So, it's a Tuesday night and I'm chilling. And then Arthur calls.

He always calls when I got nothing to do. Not that I am doing nothing, that's weird, but because I have no obligation for anything I got started on some romance shows that Elenor likes to watch with me. (She really watches them. She stares at the screen and listens.) And I am half-watching, half-chatting with some girl that slid in my DMs on Instagram, wondering when was the point she'd turn full thirsty when I am pretending not to get her hints, when my phone starts vibrating lit up and ARTHUR is displayed on the screen.

Yeah, I put his name in all caps. I thought it was funny when I did it and now I'm just too lazy to change it.

So I pick up because that's what you do when your boss calls you.

"Michael," he says.

"That's my name," I say.

"I'd like you to come to my office as soon as possible."

"Uh-huh." I pet Elenor. She's on my chest because I'm laying on my couch like a savage, and she starts purring but she can't even pull her eyes away from the TV screen. She's so cute when she's all focused on something, I love her. "What for?"

"That is something we'll discuss when you are here, Mike, not over the phone."

"Gotcha."

"Michael."

"Yep, sir! Gotcha."

There is a long silence on the other side. Oh, how I love pulling at his strings when he can't see my face. (For those that did not get it, he hates it when I tell him gotcha, everything has to be super formal when you talk to him.)

"Come quickly," he tells me when he is done giving up on me (or done mentally stabbing me in the heart. I bet he has those moments.)

And then he hangs up. And I'm the one that's rude? Bitch.

Elenor knows I'm going to leave. I mean, she heard me talk on the phone and she probably heard Arthur too, so there is no way she doesn't know. And, because she knows, she starts purring like crazy, standing up and curling her back and looking all cute and cuddly and fuzzy. She has those huge blue eyes and this long, silky white fur, she looks like a breathing cloud and she's just as sweet. She even goes to headbutt me my face, several times in fact, and each time I laugh a little and give her even more scritches. Because, well, I might be a big, scary monster of the night but who am I to resist my little princess?

And, well, it's embarrassing to admit it. But she might have gotten me a little distracted.

___

iii.

"You're late," Arthur says the moment I open the door to his office.

"Hi," I tell him because I was raised with fucking manners. And then I attempt a blatant lie. "There was a lot of traffic."

"Sit down."

I do, on the squeaky plastic chair. It's a miracle its armrests allow me enough space to get in there at all. Not to brag, but I'm massive. It's a blessing and a curse and Arthur should really think about upgrading his furniture before I accidentally break it.

Okay, so must be thinking that I am a huge asshole at this point, unless you've been in my shoes once in my life and you understand that it's Arthur the asshole in this situation. But, really, I'm not that late. I just took some time to pet my cat a bit, and then I had to change because there is no way I'm going out of the house with cat hair all over my shirt. And, I ask you, how can I be late if Arthur didn't even tell me at what time he expected me in the first place?

Talking about my shirt, Arthur's squinting at it. I can feel the questions coming and I can't wait to answer them.

"What is that?" he asks, pointing at my chest.

I look down to check, as if I don't know what I'm wearing but, you know. I know. I picked that one on purpose.

"A black shirt," I say. "Blue skinny jeans? Clothes? Me?"

"What's that on your shirt?"

"You mean, the motif?"

"Yes."

"Vampire fangs."

He pauses. Like, I can see him genuinely lagging as he tries to process what I just said. So I help him.

"Wait, look, here." Shit, what are the flat teeth called? I try my best anyway. "Front tooth, almost-front-tooth, fang. Canine. And it's big, so it's a vampire canine."

"You are a vampire. With a shirt with vampire fangs on it."

"Yeah?"

He stares at me. I give him my absolute best impression of a braindead stare with my mouth slightly opened as if I had forgotten to close it. Like, his intellectual prowess is so vastly above mine that I struggle to understand what he wants with me.

"Michael Junior Owen," he says.

I cringe inwardly when he uses my full name. I really hate it. It's like a stairway to hell, or three punches to the face where each punch hits harder than the last. No one has any business calling me that when Mike is so much shorter unless they want to parade around how much of a big dick they have by slapping me in the face. Metaphorically, of course.

(He's not done talking.)

"I dare hope that someday you'll take your place in the world a bit more seriously." Ooooh boy, here we go again. "I am doing my best to try and teach you what I can but, as you can see, I am a busy man... a man that is starting to wonder if I'll even be up to the task of teaching you. You are a challenging case, to say the least." Thank you, glad you noticed. "But maybe I've been going about this all wrong."

He gets up disappointed-dad-style. You know, by playing his hands on his desk, leaning forward, and standing up slowly. Not that I care. He's not even the dude that made me into a vampire.

"I'll make it short, for you. There is a group of younglings - vampire your age - that has been founded recently. I've withdrawn your candidature at first, even if they were looking for someone of... your type." My type is the brutish, stupid meathead, according to Arthur. "However, it has occurred to me that your equal might be better equipped to teach you proper behaviour than I will ever be, through examples. Illustrating the process of growing into oneself as a proper Child of the Night, if you will, as your unit will be given various tasks to accomplish. Any question so far?"

"Wait. Other vampires my age?"

"I..."

He seems at loss for words. I think he believes that I'm still processing the very first sentence he told me, which is the point of this question. I got what he told me. He wants me to go to the goodie-two-shoes and maybe learn a bit about how you don't say gotcha on a phone call with your vampire boss. I know that he's basically admitting to my face that he gave up on me. Fucking finally, one might add.

"Look, Michael, I think it's best if you went there yourself to get a feeling for how it works. You're more of an action type."

Am I really?

He walks around his massive desk and I already know he's going to come and touch my shoulder. It always gives me mixed feelings because, yeah, I'll admit, Arthur is sort of cute. Dirty blond, blue-eyed, dimples when he smiles - which I saw him do like, once in my life - and he looks like he's in his early thirties. But he always touches me in such a patronising way, and I'm pretty sure he's straight so it's probably some creepy vampire urge of either murdering me or either threatening me that's behind it. He's a vampire, it has to be that. How do I know?

Well, sorry to break it to you guys, but I'm a vampire too. I know.

So he grabs my shoulder like he's holding the back leg of a sheep he's about to shave and he looks at me in the eyes while I'm still seated on his office's crappiest plastic chair. Then, he sighs, because he's yet to drop the disappointed father act.

"Michael... I know we haven't always had the smoothest of ways together," he says. "I'll admit it: I do not think that our personalities mesh well. But I genuinely hope that this is a fresh, new start for you."

I nod.

"They are a promising group too, the most promising I've seen in years," he adds. "If you can make good connections... well, maybe there is hope for advancement. Even for you."

I doubt that, Arthur. The advancement for me part, that is. I'm sure all those other younglings can suck a mean dick though, I believe in them too.

"I wish I could have done more for you. I genuinely do. But it's time that you fly with your own wings."

"What happens if I fuck up?" I ask.

His face closes. I'm not going to like what he's about to say.

"I hope for you that you do not."

Oh, okay, I'll get executed slowly and painfully by a sadist in some underground torture dungeon. That's good to know. I'll think of it when I'm about to do something stupid again.

"Well, now that this is cleared out, I'll give you the address of their headquarters." He finally lets go of my shoulder to head back to his desk. "It's a little hard to find but if you have some trouble, I suppose that you can call their leader and she can help you."

Arthur still hasn't heard of Google Maps, as you can see, and I'm not going to be the one that tells him. He hands me a post-it.

"Destroy it when you know where it is. Don't forget."

I nod.

___

iv.

Okay, so, give me a moment to explain to you how this whole vampire thing works.

Like, I hope you already understood that you become a vampire by being turned by another vampire. That's not what I am going to tell you about. I mean, if you want details on that, I'll gladly explain later, but that will be later. Now, I'm going to tell you about how a vampire's supposed to be raised.

So, first, you got the older vampire that's like, wandering the night on their own, doing old vampire things like trying to break in people's home to sexily drink their blood, I think. (It's a bit rapey.) But, oh no, they want to have someone by their side. Someone they teach their ways to. Or maybe they just stumbled across a really, really hot human, I guess.

When that happens, though, they can't go around making a vampire all willy-nilly. No, they got to make sure the other vampires that are living around them are cool with it, so they call for a council and they petition for their rights to get a baby vampire in their care.

Let me skip to the part where everyone agrees and bam, there is a new vampire.

Now, being a vampire sucks for plenty of reasons, especially at the start. It gets better eventually but, in the beginning, everything is confusing and scary and, on top of that, you literally want to drink blood. A lot of blood. That's all you can think about, it's like being a teenager all over again. Except with blood. You get the picture.

But you can't have that. Being a vampire is supposed to be a secret thing. I know you say "I'll take this secret to the grave" but, really, that's a lie. When humans start dying right and left it starts to get really hard to keep this whole long teeth thing under wraps. So, that means that a vampire got to learn to control themselves, and that takes a little while to do that.

(Am I good at controlling myself? I'd say I'm not the best but at least I can go out in public. I just make sure I'm always well fed. I got my ways, which I'll explain later, when that will come up. I'm still now done talking about this whole education thing.)

So, when the younger vampire can behave, that's still not when they are done with being educated. Because, of course, older vampires got massive, massive egos, and, you know, they grew up during times where the peasants still sucked their ruler's dicks just because. So once a vampire's like, all polite with humans, they got to learn to be all polite with the older vampires. And, oh boy, you better be really polite with those older vampires.

Among other things, you're expected to:

1. Not talk to them with modern words.

2. Be really, really polite, but in an old-timey way, so you got to bow and shit.

3. Do everything they say you got to do.

4. Sit and smile when they are being absolute jerks to you and threatening you.

5. Let them take your stuff if they want to have it.

6. Pretend that they are soooo witty and amazing and go to their shitty parties where they have like, actual musicians play on their violins and cellos like we're still in the third century.

7. Read between their lines and understand everything they want you to understand even when they are pretending they are being nice to you (I'm pretty good at that one, I think, even if I pretend I'm not.)

8. (Jesus Christ, the list is still going on.) Not take their stuff, even by accident.

9. Not get caught going against any of the other rules.

10. Probably more. I forget. I'm not supposed to be educated beyond the "being polite to humans" stage so I'm not really expected to know all this shit. I'm also a Youtuber, and lists of 10s get more views. So. There you have it, I guess.

Also, something I forgot to mention: vampires like to pretend that they are in a community with a hierarchy, even if that's bullshit. And, towards the end of the baby vampire's education is around the time where the vampires that are even older and more powerful start looking over the shoulder and is like "that's a funky little servant you got here. Mind sharing?" So of course they got to share. And that means putting the younglings in a little group unit and making them do the bottom of the barrel jobs. You know, because that's what they are: worthless. Well, worthless, but still needed to do the things no one else that's more important wants to do.

So, in order for vampires to learn to cooperate like they are in a big happy family, the older vampires sometimes decide to gather all the useless young fuck-ups that's just chilling in the night and put them together. And then they wrangle their finger at them, tell them "behave," and make them work together whether they like each other or not. And, considering the fact that being a vampire inherently means that you are an asshole, they often can't even stand each other. But they got to do it anyway.

And I've just been assigned to one of those groups, apparently.

Like I said: being a vampire sucks. I hope I die for real soon, and that when I do that Elenor (somehow) finds someone that spoils her as much as I do.