The Blood Omen Victims
Have you ever stopped to wonder how vampires get away with blood drinking? In the olden days, when Lestat and Louis were prowling New Orleans, there were no police, no forensics laboratories, no explanation needed. People just disappeared and it was part of life. Now we have CSI and a deep network of investigative bodies. But still, the vampires find their ways. And where the authorities interfere, they can just pay them off or use mind-control to make them forget. The Blood Omen vampires are, for the moment, invisible...
Hunting animals isn't always enough
"Please help me," a voice whispered,
and then I saw the owner's face come into the little light that was thrown off
by the nearest candle: a young human woman with straggly blond, blood-soaked
hair. Her face was damp with perspiration, her lips trembling and red with
smudged lipstick. Her blue eyes bored painfully into mine.
"Don't let him kill me, please. Help
me…"
Then I saw the mark on her throat where
vampire teeth had torn into her, and I realised, as my nostrils flared, what
the smell was that had tempted me so: the metallic tang of fresh blood...
"The people in there…they deserve to
die," David said.
"How can anyone deserve to
die?" I asked him in horrified amazement.
"Some vampires think all mortals
deserve to die," he commented, smiling sadly. "But those
people," he continued, tilting his head to indicate the tadhia room,
"are murderers, rapists, child-molesters… the hurters of innocents, the
scum of humanity. We just pass a faster judgement on them than a court of
humans would."
He shrugged.
"It's just a game to you…to vampires,
then?" I demanded.
He looked sharply up
at me, staring me straight in the eye. "Dea, when you live as long as we
do, with the existence we live with, with the blood lust we have…you sometimes
need to have some fun; let your instincts out to play. And hunting animals
isn't always enough."
Evil tastes better / Mercy killings
"How could she be bad? She looks so innocent,"
I wondered aloud as I watched them.
"They usually do," Mica said with a
wry smile. "She's Russian. She killed her little half-brother in a fit of
jealousy and hid his body in a dumpster before coming to the UK."
"But did she do it deliberately? I
mean…" I said carefully. "Is she really a bad person? Maybe
she needs help…you know, like from a psychologist or something…maybe she isn't
a typical murderer?"
"What's a typical murderer?" she
asked me. Then: "Come on." She stood up and I followed. "You
know what we are Dea. We need blood to live. There's no avoiding it."
"I know…"
"Listen," she insisted. "We try
and go for bad guys whenever possible. And like Lucas said, there are enough of
them out there." She waved a hand at the crowded concourse. "And the
plain fact is that evil does taste better." She smiled. "Or we go for
people who are dying anyway: mercy killings."
"Like the girl who owned my dress,"
I said.
She nodded before continuing. "But like I
said, at the end of the day we have to go for what we can get and it doesn't
always work out fairly. But then…we don't think like you do."
"You mean you don't have morals," I
said.
"I mean we can't have morals. We
kill. Humans, animals; it's all the same to us. If we cared too much or felt too guilty, we wouldn't be able
to live with what we are. Remember, we're born needing blood. We'd have
a pretty miserable existence if we felt guilty every time we took it!"
Easy pickings
"They have a breeding program," he answered
grimly. "They call them the Unknowns: people bred as food."
I felt the colour drain from my cheeks. He saw this
and shook his head.
"I know. It makes me feel sick too," he
said. "But of course, a ready food supply doesn't satisfy their need,
their…instinct for the hunt. So they also take humans from the streets,
too."
"How is that possible?" I’d often wondered
but never wanted to ask
"The same way it is for our Coven," Santi
replied with a gentle smile.
I looked at him expectantly.
"Go into any police station," he said,
putting his hands behind his head and looking up at the sky. "And you'll
see a missing persons poster."
I nodded for him to go on.
"They're all vampire food," he said. "Homeless
people on the street- they go unnoticed and unregistered anyway: vampire food.
Runaway kids: vampire food. Travellers; foreigners; old men and women sitting
at home alone, dying of the 'cold'; people dying in hospital: vampire food. All
of them ours for the taking."
People in hospital…I thought, the idea hitting too close to home.
But he hadn't finished.
"People don't like to make a scene; you saw that
when you came with us to the train station- most people look through us; not
seeing what we are or what we do."
Or not wanting to see, I thought, remembering how the
people had glanced at Charlotte as she fed. And then turned away.
"But the people who have family?" I asked. "The
people with relatives and police searching for them? How can you hide their
disappearances?"
"Mystery deaths; closed cases. Who believes in
vampires, anyway, Dea?" He sat up and ran a hand back through his hair;
his sign of discomfort or irritation. "We are invisible."
The new solution? Well, Apophis is coming...
