The Vampire Gene

Rebecca and I would travel back to Banbury today. Mark, her younger brother, was arriving from Barbados this evening where he had been on holiday with their mother and older brother, and I had promised to fetch him from the airport. I wondered how he'd be, whether the news that he too had the vampire gene had sunk in yet, with all it's implications and complications. He would become one of us, but we had no idea when this would happen. He was only fourteen. Rebecca had changed when she was seventeen, although Marcus postulated that meeting me had precipitated the transformation.

Either way, he was still human, and until he became a vampire, he would need protecting. There was an army of blood drinking vampires still out there, and we had no idea how many of them there were, or even who their leader was, now that Jack was dead. Julia's sister Anne was the most likely candidate, but Julia couldn't believe that she'd be capable of something like that. I wasn't so sure. The way Jack had spoken of her suggested that she was more of a partner than a captive.

Rebecca and I left before the others, who were all due to travel on the family jet to Russia later that morning. We had a few hundred miles to travel, and a white kitten to spring from her holiday accommodation at a local vet. Mark would never forgive us if we forgot to fetch her. I thought of how attached we had all become to the little cat and smiled. It would be good to be back home, with Rebecca curled up on the sofa with the cat, and Mark searching my kitchen for coffee and something to eat.

It seemed incredible how alone I'd been before they had arrived in my life. I guess it wasn't that surprising, then, how much I relished the company of my own kind.

Rebecca

I was prepared for the exhaustion that I knew would sneak up on me as soon as the immediate threat of Jack had been dealt with. I had appropriated a couple of pillows and a soft wool blanket from Angus' childhood home, and had stashed them on the back seat just as we were saying our goodbyes to his brothers and the family of iron metabolisers we'd met what seemed like months ago, but was actually only a few days ago. Simon and Lucy still had the stunned look of people who had just found out that they're vampires-to-be, and Oliver looked as he usually did, ridiculously good-looking and self-assured. Julia glowed with a kind of inner peace, especially when Marcus was around. Fergus, well, he was Fergus, my irreverent and mischievous "big brother". I would miss him the most.