Free The Vampire-Alien Chronicles by Ronald Wintrick Page B

different.”
    “Anyway,” Sonafi added, “why are you worried about my little curios?”
    “I just didn't want to see you give up on your little things.”  I said.  “You know they can never be replaced, and I know how much they mean to you.”
    “How did you manage to turn this conversation around onto me?”  Sonafi said with a mirthless smile.  “We were talking about you.  You were trying to convince yourself of the necessity of returning to the Old Country.”
    “Yeah.  Thanks for reminding me.”  I said.  “The truth is, I was trying to forget.  Not necessarily the people’s hatred, but the things I have done to those people.  I was a monster beyond reckoning then and the things I did make the worst of the worst to come after seem humanitarian by comparison, so if those peoples have long racial memories, it is only because I traumatized them so severely.”
    “You could not have known better.”  Sonafi said, now quickly wrapping her curios, a blur of movement a Human would not have been able to follow.  “I would have been even worse.  I do not understand how you found the room within your heart to forgive them at all.  A child, even a Vampire child, forced to live alone, no friend anywhere on an entire world.  I am only surprised you were able to attain sanity.  I am sure I would not have been able to do so.”
    That drew a genuine smile from me, for the manic twist of her lips she had used to emphasize her last statement.  When she had been changed into a Vampire, when I had changed her from a Human lover to my lifelong companion, she had undergone a transformation of such magnitude that for long years I had to struggle with the notion of having to put her down myself or facing the certain hue and cry of an outraged populace.  We moved a lot in those early centuries we were together, as Sonafi committed outrageous, excessive acts of violence every place we lived.  She was a being nearly completely possessed by her wanton desires, and it was only after she had sated her nightly hunger that she would return to semi normalcy, but only a shadow of the way in which she had lived her Human life.
    Then she would cry.  Beg me to kill her.  She was both hot and cold.  While caught within the frenzy of the hunger, she was uncaring and brutal, a killer with no remorse, but when sated, her hunger abated, she was the kind, caring being whom I had fallen in love with, against all odds, in the first place.  With her thirst slaked, her non-Human half quiescent, its need met, she could feel those things which Humans hold to be dear, which were otherwise completely overwhelmed during her periods of great hunger.
    Of course I had not been able to kill her.  That was a very long time ago and I must admit to having tolerated, at that time, a lower standard than I allowed now and even more so from Sonafi than I allowed others who perpetuated such things.  It had not been so very long before that (when you consider the entire expanse of my long lived life) that I had been doing the very same things myself.  I had of course understood what she was going through, and when so many of the Vampires I created went through very similar periods, I had then no hope that it could be any different.  It was a part of Vampire make-up that has been slowly, but too slowly, changing.  Yet most Vampires can be convinced to curb their more atrocious, obvious acts, if it is a matter of their own lives which are at stake.
    I held the Community to a higher standar d now than I did then- at least to the best of my ability.  Humans have become civilized and organized.  They take murder very seriously these days, at least here in the United States, though there remain places where it is still the law of the jungle, where it is eat or be eaten, and those passerby who witness these things are only glad it was not they who lay in the dust, and who hurry on about their business without a second thought.  If I did not hold