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“I break the rules and protocols
And I just keep on missing you
Straying nights and after all
Would you be waiting here if you knew?
I'm just alone and cynical
But I will never not need you
No, I will never not need you.”
-In Your Likeness, Woodkid
.
.
Here’s the thing:
Jeremy has known Guillermo for decades. He knows him like the back of his hand, like the bus route he takes to get to his job at the party supply store, like the bookshelf full of comic books he’s collected over the years, pages worn from years of use.
So of course Jeremy notices when Guillermo drifts away. He’s been drifting away for years now, untethered, like a balloon swept along by a gust of wind, disappearing into the clouds. Jeremy worries—he worries that one day, Guillermo will stop replying to his texts. That he’ll delete his Steam account, change his gamer tag, give away all his video-games, and disappear without even a goodbye.
Every rare occasion that they meet up in person, Jeremy wonders if it will be the last time. Will this be the last smile? The last time he hears Guillermo’s laugh, happy tears shining in his eyes at whatever silly joke Jeremy had made?
The thought settles like a stone in the pit of his stomach.
Growing up, they had spent almost every waking moment together—and in the beginning, yes, it had been forced, manufactured by bullies who got their kicks abusing their awkward underclassmen, but it was also one of the best things that had ever happened to Jeremy. Guillermo had been his first friend—his first real friend, someone who liked him for who he was, who wasn’t just being nice to him out of a misplaced sense of sympathy.
At this point, he had spent so long at Guillermo’s side that he was sure he could draw his profile from memory alone—if he was any good at art like Guillermo was.
Perhaps it’s the nostalgia, perhaps it’s the aching loneliness that comes with realizing a close friend is slowly outgrowing you, but Jeremy keeps reaching out to Guillermo anyway. Sometimes all he gets is radio silence for days, weeks, months, even. But every now and again, Jeremy checks his Discord and sees a message from Guillermo.
It’s never anything long—usually just a sentence or two, mostly replying to whatever link Jeremy had sent, and rarely does Guillermo expand upon his work life aside from the occasional vague bitching session, but it settles the fear in Jeremy’s heart all the same.
Guillermo was safe. Alive. And still had an Internet connection, wherever the Hell he was.
**
When Guillermo gives an obvious half-hearted invitation to some party organized by his eccentrically dressed, foreign boss (truthfully, Jeremy couldn’t place the man’s accent or features to any geographical place), Jeremy jumps at the chance despite all the warning bells that go off in his brain.
He had never seen the house that Guillermo supposedly worked and lived in. He wants to know Guillermo again—this new Guillermo, the one who knew more about rates of human decomposition and ancient burial practices than what Jeremy would consider to be healthy… or normal.
Distantly, he knows he should be concerned—perhaps even frightened. But this is Guillermo, the same kid that sniffled at animal shelter commercials, who donated all his old vampire costume stuff to a hospital just in time for Halloween, who had comforted him as Jeremy cried over the death of his childhood dog.
He trusted Guillermo and that was all that mattered.
**
In the aftermath of the party—orgy, really, now that Jeremy was very much in the know thanks to Constantine—Jeremy goes off to search for Guillermo.
It was late—later than Jeremy had ever stayed out before, but it was apparently going to be a night of many firsts for him. Not that he was complaining.
“Guillermo?” He called, searching the second floor with little luck. He hears something that sounds disturbingly like bats screeching at each other, but ignores it in favor of searching the first floor. That too shows little sign of his friend—just the vestiges of a party… or an attempt at one. Jeremy still wants to ask Guillermo why the chocolate in the chocolate fountain is red, but he hadn’t really gotten the chance since he was almost immediately intercepted by Constantine after finding a place to put down his backpack.
It was only when he was backtracking his way to the front door, accepting the fact that Guillermo was probably already asleep and he’d have to leave without saying goodbye in person, that he hears two hushed voices, one of which he recognizes immediately as Guillermo.
Not really one to snoop, Jeremy is ready to knock on the door and let his presence be known, but his hand falters at the last second. Something—perhaps it’s what little bit of self-preservation that he still possesses—seemingly compels him to stop at the cracked door. He stills, silent, listening like a fly on the wall.
He feels some shame in eavesdropping, but it isn’t enough to override the overwhelmingly sudden feeling that he shouldn’t interrupt whatever was going on behind the door.
“I am very disappointed in you, Guillermo,” a voice says, obviously in disapproval. It doesn’t take Jeremy long to place the voice as belonging to Guillermo’s boss.
Through the gap between the door frame and the door itself, Jeremy can see Guillermo’s crestfallen expression. His sweater was covered in something red—something that looked like blood, but very well could have been steak sauce or ketchup, Jeremy tells himself, though even he is aware that this is a meager attempt at an excuse at this point.
He was always making excuses for Guillermo, nowadays. He wasn’t sure if he could stomach the reality of it—the truth that was so plainly staring him in the face. You could compartmentalize a lot, Jeremy knows this, has managed to stamp out the embers of years of bullying through therapy and the blessedly numbing power of time, but he could feel it all unraveling at the seams.
Don’t let me be right, Jeremy thinks, bringing a hand to his mouth, chewing on his thumbnail like he’d done back in school whenever a rush of anxiety hit him.
“I’m… I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Master,” Guillermo responds.
Jeremy can’t see the other man’s face, just the long trail of his fur robe as he steps closer to Guillermo. For a moment, Jeremy wonders if he’s intruding on something a bit more personal than a conversation between a boss and their employee. Not that he has any room to judge—he had just publically lost his virginity to a house of strangers so if Guillermo had some… unusual kinks, which included a salacious relationship with his boss, then Jeremy would do the right thing and walk away.
Except he doesn’t get the chance to walk away.
The door opens with a shuddering amount of force, hitting the opposite wall with an audible thud. Jeremy pales at the realization that neither Guillermo nor his boss were anywhere near the door when it opened.
Guillermo’s boss gestures vaguely to Jeremy. “You did not want him to be eaten, did you?”
Guillermo has panic clearly written upon his face. He laughs, but Jeremy has known him long enough to know it isn’t genuine. “Haha, nice one, Mast—err, I mean, sir.” He turns to address Jeremy. “Sorry about him, he’s… very foreign. Sometimes his jokes don’t land very well.”
Before Jeremy can respond, he locks eyes with Guillermo’s boss and feels himself being compelled to enter the room. It’s as if his limbs are no longer his own, each step taken completely against his will. He manages a shuddering cough, heart galloping in his chest. He doesn’t know if it’s a panic attack or an actual asthma attack, but his hands remain frozen at his side despite wanting nothing more than to reach for the inhaler in his backpack.
“I-I think… I think I need my inhaler,” he manages to wheeze out just as the door closes behind him. He hears a lock click into place and pales even further. He’s staring down at a coffin—an actual wooden coffin, propped open to reveal a fur-lined interior. He’s sure that if it wasn’t for whatever is currently possessing him to walk further into the room, closer to the man with dark eyes and—honestly, how had he missed it before—actual fangs in his mouth, he’d be passed out on the floor from fear by now.
The man—vampire, he assumes, now that he’s finally putting the last pieces of the puzzle that was Guillermo’s life together—merely looks to Guillermo with a grimace, fangs jutting down upon his bottom lip.
“What is an inhaler? Is it an elixir?” His gaze darkens. “Or is it a weapon of some kind? I will not be threatened in my own home, little man.”
Guillermo intercedes without a word, rummaging through Jeremy’s backpack. Jeremy kept his inhaler in the same place he did back in high school so it’s both no surprise and slightly heartwarming that Guillermo is able to find it so quickly.
“It’s medicine,” Guillermo explains, realizing immediately that Jeremy still has little to no control over his own body. He administers the inhaler to Jeremy, giving him a few short puffs before pulling away.
He knows it’s technically Guillermo’s fault that he’s in this situation to begin with, but Jeremy can’t find it in himself to be mad at Guillermo.
“Thanks, man,” he says, no longer feeling as if he’s moments away from gasping for air.
All at once, Jeremy feels his limbs relax, as if the phantom strings that were once controlling him were now thankfully severed. He’s able to take his inhaler from Guillermo and stuff it back into his bag.
“Mr…” Jeremy trails, hesitantly attempting to address the vampire.
“Nandor the Relentless. But Nandor is just fine, little human.”
“O-oh, okay, Mr. Nandor. My name’s Jeremy—“
“I do not care.”
Jeremy tries to laugh off the blatant display of rudeness to little effect. He settles on an awkward cough. “So, uh, Mr. Nandor… do you think I could go home now?”
Nandor tilts his head, clearly in thought. “I really should just kill you. Nadja will be upset that I did not go and rip off your non-virgin head like she asked me to do. Orgies are very important to vampires, you know, and you losing your virginity before we got to eat you was a real mood-killer.”
“Master, what are you saying—“
Nandor interrupts Guillermo smoothly. “Hush. I can just get Laszlo to wipe his memory later… whenever Nadja’s done with him.”
Guillermo’s eyes widen behind his glasses. “Wait, are you saying you’re just going to let Jeremy go?”
The vampire regards Jeremy where, for a terrifying moment, Jeremy’s certain that he’s about to have his head severed from his body before Nandor’s gaze eventually flickers back to Guillermo. “This human… he is a friend of yours, is he not?”
Guillermo nods. “I’ve known him since we were kids.”
“Why did you not tell me this back at the human supply store?”
“I-I didn’t think it would matter to you. You all wanted a virgin to eat and Jeremy was the only one we found.”
Nandor scoffs. “I do not care about your silly little human relationships. What matters to me is how this would affect your service. I do not want a sad, mopey familiar trailing me all night.”
Guillermo sighs, dejected. “Right. Of course. That’s what matters.”
“Precisely,” Nandor nods. “Also, my head ripping gloves are still out in the garden. I’m too tired to go and fetch them now.”
“I should have fucking known...”
A flicker of an emotion Jeremy can’t quite place slips over the vampire’s face for the briefest moment before he sighs. “Fine. Your tone was highly disrespectful, but I suppose I should tell you the truth. I do not want to kill your pathetic human friend because it would…. hurt you. I do not want to hurt you, Guillermo.” Nandor grimaces, looking as if he might be sick. “Eughhh, I cannot believe I said that aloud.”
The smile Guillermo gives Nandor is so wide that Jeremy recognizes it immediately for what it is.
Oh no, Jeremy thinks, He’s totally in love with this vampire guy. Jeremy wasn’t blind; he had seen the way Guillermo had silently pined over some of their classmates back in school. At even a scrap of attention or praise from the person he was enamored with, Guillermo’s entire face would light up, cheeks flushing red.
Before he can ponder the weirdness that is finding out that his friend almost sacrificed him to a house of vampires and was currently head-over-heels for his vampire boss, he finds his attention turning to Nandor against his will.
“Sleep,” the vampire says, voice brokering no argument.
He thinks he feels Guillermo reach out to cradle his head before it could meet the wooden floor. Within moments, Jeremy is, figuratively speaking, dead to the world.
**
When Jeremy wakes in his own bed the next morning, his head is swimming. He groans pitifully at the strip of light that lands across his eyes, burrowing further under the sheets.
He feels near-death, as if he’s nursing both a hangover and the worst flu known to man. But, when he tries to wrack his mind for answers to what had occurred at Guillermo’s party last night, he finds a disturbing amount of holes in his memory. Along with the pain that lances through his head, he can’t seem to piece the night’s events together after his dalliance with Constantine. It’s all a blur of color and mismatched dialogue.
He vows to message Guillermo later when he can stare at a screen without it causing him to feel a wave of debilitating nausea. He’s sure his friend can help him fill in the holes in his memory.
**
The thing about wiping a human’s memory that vampires won’t tell you is that it isn’t always permanent. If you have a strong enough force of will or are just stubborn enough to continue to poke and prod at whatever gaps in memory you have after your encounter with a supernatural creature of the night, then, eventually, you might regain those memories.
They’ll come back in pieces, nonsensical flashes of events that will often creep into your consciousness in the middle of REM sleep. This, of course, makes it easy for the human to discard the regained memories as merely a byproduct of random action potentials, neurons firing in an attempt to make sense of the dark behind your eyelids. Dreams, most humans reason, have no bearing on a person’s waking life.
This is true. But the line between dreams and supernaturally-manipulated memories is as thin as a fraying white fiber in your neocortex. One morning, you might wake up and find yourself confused and disoriented, the dream you woke from seemingly so real that you’re certain it must have actually happened. In this case, you’d be right.
It is no wonder that Jeremy, a few months after the events of the orgy, wakes with the sort of mortal terror that leaves you sweaty and pale, heart hammering so violently in your chest that you almost think it might break through your ribs.
Jeremy settles his shaking hand over the inhaler on his bedside table and uses it, the panic slowly ebbing out of him with every passing second. The dream—which had seem so real in his sleep—cracks under the light of dawn. His thoughts slow to a comfortable amble. There was no monster in the room—monsters didn’t exist! And Guillermo was just working for an eccentric foreign guy. There was nothing overtly malicious about that.
He almost wants to laugh at himself.
Vampires. Really? Of all the things that Guillermo could be hiding, his subconscious had dredged up his friend’s obsession with vampires and dressed it up, made it seem startlingly real for the brief moment between sleep and wakefulness.
There was only one thing that didn’t make sense, though. It whittled away at him, the nagging feeling that this tidbit of knowledge, something he had no memory of having up until waking from that nightmare, plagued his thoughts. He turned it over again and again in his mind, the name that he had seemingly bestowed upon Guillermo’s boss while dreaming.
Later, after breakfast and a few hours playing WoW, Jeremy finally settles onto his sofa and types out a message to Guillermo. It had taken a worryingly amount of effort to even fish his phone out of his pocket—he wasn’t sure he was ready for Guillermo’s answer. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever be, really.
Hey, ‘Memo! This is gonna sound really random, but what’s your boss’ name?
To Jeremy’s surprise, he hears his phone chime a few seconds later.
His name’s Nandor. Why are you asking, though?
Jeremy stares at the phone screen for a long time. So long that he’s sure Guillermo probably thinks that he’s busy doing something else.
Eventually, Jeremy responds, a cold shard of fear nestling just below his heart.
I was just curious, y’know. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on doxing your employer anytime soon.
Flinging the phone away from him, Jeremy sighs, the truth weighing as heavy as a boulder on his shoulders.
Vampires were real.
Vampires were fucking real.
And Guillermo had almost used him as a meal. Granted, he had apparently had a change of heart, but the betrayal stung all the same.
“Well… fuck,” Jeremy says to an empty apartment.
Guillermo was going to have a lot of explaining to do when they met up again. But first things first, Jeremy reasons, he wasn’t going back to that house without making preparations. He couldn’t trust that Guillermo would protect him—or could protect him, if it came to that. He’d have to fish out the Bible in his closet and find that crucifix his aunt had given him ages ago.