Vampire Girlfriend: Tatiana (special preview)

There are nights where the stars in the sky spread out in the endless ink that it feels like eternity isn’t such a far off concept. I can see it up there, each star a bullet point into the how and why of it all. From my little garage I can understand that my eternity has only begun. I have so much farther to go, so many years, so many lives to lead. Being a vampire, eternity is a game rather than a fairy tale.

For the last few years I’ve operated a small garage at the end of town. I’ve hired a few good guys to run the place during the day, then at night, me and the other members of my brood come out and do the rest of the work. As I said, it’s small. There’s just five of us, seven if you include the day shift. It’s nice, it’s quiet compared to the life I left behind. You could say I ran away from home twice. Once when I was sixteen, and again when I was thirty-five. Although the second time was a bit different, even if I looked the same as the first.

The garage was a means to protect me and my boys. As vampires, we had a certain ‘look’ to us that was hard to hide. So we dyed our white hair, tried to cover our pale skin with grease from work. We looked like the black and white images on the TV screen. So we called ourselves the TV Boys. We worked, we played around on our motorcycles, we just tried to live a life of our own.

On a night where eternity was laid out before me, Henry came forward with a poster in his hand. “Hey, Boss, look at this. We could go when it gets here!”

I took the poster which advertised an upcoming carnival. It boasted an aerial act and lots of performances. “What would you wanna go to this for?”

“Oh, c’mon, Boss!” Henry smiled at me, big and goofy. “It’ll be fun. They never happen at night!”

I chuckled, thinking over the poster. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt. We just gotta make sure to get all our work done before we go.”

“Yeah! That’d be great!” Henry took the poster back.

Although, I had to wonder what sort of carnival was only opened at night. It made me itch a little bit. I’d fallen for a trap like that once before, I really didn’t want to do it again.

When the carnival did arrive, it made me more suspicious. It came up in the middle of a field, but it did so in the blink of an eye. Or so it felt. Henry was excited about it. He’d been talking about nothing else since he found the poster.

At the entrance there was a petite woman who was remarkably just as pale as us. Her hands were so thin and small I feared a finger might snap off when I paid for our tickets.

“You boys aren’t going to get too rowdy now, are you?” She asked. Her dark eyes peered over us, but they fell on me in such a strange way. Something about her reminded me of a porcelain doll and it made my skin crawl.

“No, ma’am! Promise,” Henry said excitedly. The others started filing inside while I felt anchored there to the entrance. I went with them, but I turned, eyeing the small woman selling tickets. She turned, looking back at me. Something about her sucked my soul up through my ass.

I caught up with the boys, following them as they argued over where to go or what to do next. We went down an alley where there were games to play and prizes to be won. Of course, this turned into a competition real quick. They wanted to see who could win the most, get the biggest prize. I was stuck holding the gains. Stuffed animals, wooden toys, things that wouldn’t matter after about a week. It was hilarious to watch, we rarely got this sort of entertainment outside the pinball machine at the bar.

I then saw something from the corner of my eye. Turning slightly, I caught it again. The something was poised at the end of the game alley and it was a woman. She was tall, all legs, and was wearing some kind of wonderful costume to show them off. She was turned away, talking to someone else. Then, just as Henry was walking up to me, she moved and I saw the red paint on her lips. I then saw her eyes as she looked directly at me.

“Boss, look!” Henry stood in front of me. He blocked my view of the woman to show off a stuffed toy. “I got the big one!”

“That’s great, Henry.” I stood up and tried to move around him to see if she was still there. Unfortunately, like the moment, she was gone.

“Boss, what is it?” Henry asked, concerned.

I held back my frown. “Nothing. Hey, haven’t ya’ll had enough of this? Why don’t we go see a show or something?” I handed off the prizes to Henry as I attempted to lead the brood to a show or anywhere else in this carnival. I wanted to see that tall, leggy woman again, but I feared I may have missed my opportunity.

We decided to go off to the main tent to see the big show. The people leaving from the first performance seemed pleased but a little shaken by the event. Me and the boys went inside, taking seats near the front. Henry had grabbed himself some popcorn and was happily smelling it.

“What’d you get that for?” Reggie teased him.

Henry was the youngest of all of us. He’d been made not too long ago. Actually, Henry had been the catalyst for me running away from home the second time around. “I miss the smell of it. My dad had a theatre, you know?”

“But what are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“Just smell it. There ain’t no harm in it. Right, Boss?” Henry looked up at me, giving me eyes that surged the paternal feeling in my gut.