Well, you know where you went wrong. It was sometime around half past the fifteenth century, when you'd stopped coming up with creative ways to make them love you before you . . .

But that's where you went wrong, that's just exactly it. You'd passed the point of the stark scene or vingette: man walks into a bar. Ouch. Or rather, vampire walks into a bedroom, sees a young girl lying there, dowry chested under her white sleeping smock and fur blankets. Ouch.

Ouch indeed.

Passed, too, the novella, chapters spent on the first glance, the moment of cloying flowery randomness when that girl and no other looked and you looked and. And in-very-deed. Volumes of and. Two lines, maybe a paragraph, when finally you took her, these all in metaphor. Don't think about it too much.

Passed beyond the note: "Drank his blood -- nice."

Past the point of sonnets to veins and limericks about pearl necklaces and whore's hearts.

Passed rhyme and even the rhythm that must come so very naturally.

Ouch. Oh yes.

It was there, in that gone-wrong moment; you envied your prey their surprise. Envied the short sharp shock. Innocence in no sense.

Everything's been done. You pick a girl at random, stun her with your choirboy smile and then bring out the fangs. She swoons. Boring. Typical. You take her home.

Lord and Master, an interchangeable villian, one of a cadre let loose upon the world to torment the young and confilcted, watches you watching her. You've given her books, flowers, picked at night while they drowsed, any trinket she asks for. At that time you had not yet heard that the Aztecs liked to do the same . . . or was it the Maya?

He says, "Don't spoil your dinner." ha-ha. In the gold-shadowed memory of it, he watches you patiently, waiting for you to finish putting words in his mouth.

You've been waking up from nightmares for hundreds of years, living like a world-class drunkard while abstaining like His Holiness. You're St. Loki, patron of bastards.

And you know where you went wrong.