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It started, of all things, because of a Craigslist ad. Dante Dham had put it up, after Vanitas patently refused to move out of a hotel and into an apartment, citing a lack of desire to be tracked or to have any difficulties splitting if things went bad, and Dante realized that if Vanitas was spending all his money on hotels with room service, he would not be able to pay as many of Dante’s fees as he otherwise could have and so would hire him less. The ad had been somewhat of a desperate measure, as all other attempts to get Vanitas a roommate willing to split the cost of a hotel suite indefinitely had fallen directly into the shitter, and he honestly hadn’t ever expected a response. He likely wouldn’t have ever gotten one, either, if Noé Archiviste hadn’t been told by his guardian, whom he called Teacher, that it was time he make his way in the world and then been kicked out with exactly one bag and $567,898.73 in small bills to his name. This was a combination of his life savings—it had cost Teacher $567,890 in bribes, concessions, and court fees to foster Noé after he’d found the corpses of his grandparents—and an extremely generous going-away gift from his best friend Louis, who had given Noé exactly half of his own life savings, scrounged together from change that had fallen out of Domi’s pockets when she visited and that nobody else got to first. It had been $17.46 all in nickels, dimes, and pennies, and now they both had $8.73 from it, and Louis had made Noé swear to never tell anyone where the money had come from.
Because of this, Noé had put it all in a little plastic bag completely separate from the rest of his money, and when, scrolling through Craigslist for somewhere to live after Domi, in a late-night phone call some fifteen minutes before in which Noé accidentally gave off the impression that he and Louis were competing over who could find the weirdest and cheapest apartment listing online, had given him the website, he saw Dante’s ad, the only caveat he put in his application to it was a request that his possible roommate not ask where his money came from. This was accepted as long as nobody came to the hotel to try to kill him, and so, three days after he’d been sent to live on his own, he checked into the Hotel Chou Chou, got his room key, and went up to meet his roommate.
The room was empty when he arrived, both beds hotel-room pristine, and Noé waited all of fifteen minutes before claiming the bed by the window for himself and beginning to unpack—which basically meant that he dropped his suitcase at the foot of his bed, took off his shoes, and went promptly to sleep.
He awoke in the middle of the night to the sounds of a fight outside his hotel room door. For the briefest of moments, a voice in his head that sounded quite a lot like Louis whispered, it’s not your business, don’t get involved, go back to sleep, but Noé was already up, kicking his shoes back on and thinking that Louis’s caution was fine but Louis wasn’t here right now, and there was a woman screaming and a man laughing outside his door, and so he stepped outside to see the screaming woman doing her level best to bite through the laughing man’s neck, who was trying to find the right page in a nasty old glowing book, as the guy whose Craigslist ad he’d responded to filmed the whole entire thing.
Noé threw himself into the fight without a second thought, separating the man and woman and immediately getting bitten in the neck for his troubles. The woman’s teeth were long and sharp, and barely hurt going in, and then nothing at all hurt, and as his limbs began to feel thick and syrupy, he heard the guy filming yell, “Oh fuck, he’s been bit!”
But this was far from the first time someone had tried to bite Noé’s neck during a fight, and ever since his breakdown at fourteen Louis had been making sure Noé knew exactly what to do if anyone ever bit his neck like that again, and as his brain began to disconnect from reality long instinct kicked in and he judo-flipped the young woman over his shoulder and into a decorative fake plant on a table a few feet away.
“Damn,” said the guy filming. “That was hot.”
His companion laughed. “Perfect!” he shouted. “Hold her there—just one more moment—”
Noé’s head pounded and his vision swam, but he lunged forward and pinned the woman’s arms to the table. She turned her head and bit into his wrist, and then started drinking his blood. He could feel her tongue moving against his arm to get every last drop— clumsier than Louis, he thought, this is new— and then, this is bad, the first person I meet in the city and Louis is going to hunt her down and murder her—
“I’m very sorry!” Noé told her. “This isn’t your fault!”
The woman’s eyes met his, and he suddenly realized that she was completely terrified. Despite the fear, though, she dug her teeth in deeper and continued drinking, and Noé sent a silent wish that Louis, somehow, never learn about this.
“A ha !” shouted the young man with the book. “Florifel!”
Blue light spun and spiraled through the hallway; the woman suddenly stopped struggling, stopped drinking Noé’s blood, and, shocked, Noé let go and took a shaky step back. He felt more lightheaded than he usually did after somebody had been drinking his blood, and as the woman gasped and held her hand up to her bloody throat, her teeth still as long and sharp and gleaming as Louis’s, Noé sank to the ground and leaned against the fallen table, shivers wracking him though he didn’t feel at all cold.
Except—he did, he was freezing, but there was no gooseflesh on his arms, and the cold did not feel external to him. It felt as though the cold was originating in his bones and leeching the heat from the rest of his body, and though he shuddered and huddled against the fallen table he could not get warm.
The young man with the book leaned over him. His eyes were the brilliant blue of Noé’s favorite moon, and of ice, and of the paint that Louis had set on fire the summer he was fifteen, after he’d gotten used to his new teeth and inability to eat solid foods. Noé stared at those eyes, shivering, and thought too late to suck in a breath, though he had not felt that he needed it and when he did so he coughed all the air out anyways, a great deal of blood spilling from his lips.
“Aw, fuck,” said the young man. “He’s turning.”
“Better fucking not be, that’s the roommate I got for you off Craigslist,” said the other man, lowering his phone. “Has money to pay as long as you don’t ask where it comes from. Also, he’s hot and probably gay. You’re welcome.”
“I’m straight,” said the blue-eyed man. “I have a girlfriend.”
“Jeanne pays you to fake it so her boss doesn’t worry about her complete lack of a social life and his uncle doesn’t realize she’s a lesbian.”
“That doesn’t make me any less straight!”
“Just keep telling yourself that, quack, you don’t pay me for therapy.” He grabbed Noé and started hauling him up before, quite suddenly, dropping him to the ground. “Fuck—old Orlok’s on the way. You take this guy back to the room and hide him and cure him once he’s turned, and I’ll lead the old fart off. We can spin it so he lets the lady go, it’s fine—just get your hot gay weirdo roommate the fuck out of here before he starts eating people.”
Noé tried to protest that he didn’t eat people, he wouldn’t, but his mouth refused to cooperate. The blue-eyed young man swore and tugged Noé up, and Noé just barely managed to stumble after him into their apparently shared hotel room and collapse face-first on his bed before everything blurred away to darkness.
When he awoke, it was to find a large spot of dried blood on his sheets and the two young men from earlier standing over him, surrounded by candles, holding the phone and ratty old book respectively, and staring at him like they were about to beat the shit out of him or maybe sacrifice him to the moon, like Louis told him town weirdos liked to do.
Noé turned over and went back to sleep.
“What the fuck,” said the one with the phone. “He was supposed to try and kill us, what the hell, this video isn’t going to go fucking viral! We have hundreds of comments asking to see him turn and go insane, why isn’t he fucking attacking us?”
“Why would I attack you?” Noé said into his pillow. His mouth felt strange as he spoke, but he chalked that up to the blood loss and ignored it. “It’s the middle of the night and I have a roommate.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Hey, quack,” hissed the guy with the phone. “Are you sure he got turned?”
“His throat was literally ripped out right in front of us, Dante, you idiot,” the other hissed back. “He’s definitely a vampire.”
“Seems like a pretty sane fucking vampire to me.”
“Vampires aren’t real,” said Noé.
“Look into a mirror, why don’t you,” said the blue-eyed man, who was still holding his book and who dropped the shiny piece of glass onto Noé’s bed.
Annoyed, Noé sat up and looked at it. The glass reflected the wall behind him and the dried bloodstains on his rumpled pillow, but he was nowhere to be found in the image.
“That’s weird,” he said.
“Those are fangs,” said the man with the phone. “You have fucking fangs—oh fucking shit, he’s a full blown fucking vampire, fangs and goddamn all, and he’s entirely fucking sane, what the hell, I can’t post this!”
Fangs? Noé raised his fingers to his mouth and found that—somehow—his side teeth were long and pointed, and all the rest had sharpened just slightly. He felt around his mouth, thought, something in common with Louis, thought, Louis is going to fucking kill me, thought, I hope Domi doesn’t cry again, thought, oh, shit, I hope Domi still speaks to me after this—she pretended Louis was dead for two years after this happened to him—I hope she isn’t mad at me too—
“Those are fangs,” he said, surprised. “I still don’t think I’m a vampire, though. I mean, those aren’t real.”
“What the fuck do you think’s happened to you, then?”
Noé shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe I flossed oddly.”
“You flossed oddly.” The man with the phone’s voice was completely deadpan. “That made two of your teeth grow four inches. You flossed oddly. ”
“Well,” said Noé. “All of them changed, those are just the only ones that grew.”
The blue-eyed young man grabbed Noé’s jaw and examined his teeth. “What the shit, they’re sharp,” he said. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Nothing, what’s wrong with you ?! I was sleeping!”
“You were dead is what you are!” said the other. “And now you’re undead, and—I’ve never seen teeth exactly like that before. You are quite the interesting specimen! —What’s your name?”
“...Noé Archiviste,” Noé said. “What’s yours?”
“You can call me Vanitas,” said the young man holding his jaw. “The baldy over there’s Dante.”
“I’m not fucking bald, ” said Dante. “I have hair coming out my ass that’s how much hair I have, fuck you. Stop flirting with the vampire, he’s going to eat you and then I’ll be out of a job.”
“Tell me more about your ass hair, Dante, that’s so hot of you,” said Vanitas.
“This is why everyone thinks that you’re gay,” said Dante.
“I’m not fucking gay.”
“You’re not fucking at all, because your girlfriend’s a lesbian and the closest you even get to kissing her is goading her into drinking your blood.”
Vanitas flipped him off.
“I know you’re not bald,” Noé told Dante, and smiled at him.
“Thanks,” said Dante. “Even though you’re a vampire, you’re hot.”
“Stop flirting with him, this is my sane hot vampire roommate,” said Vanitas.
“I’m still not a vampire,” said Noé. “I’m not an idiot, I know vampires aren’t real.”
He knew it—because Louis had told him himself, vampires weren’t real, it didn’t matter if Louis had fangs and could only drink blood and didn’t age and didn’t have a reflection in mirrors, it didn’t matter that he’d killed and eaten five children and nearly got Noé too, he wasn’t a vampire and vampires weren’t real.
“Vampires are real,” said Vanitas. “You’re a vampire, and the girl from earlier—Amelia Ruth—she’s a vampire now, too.”
“No,” said Noé.
“You’re dead,” Vanitas continued ruthlessly. “Dead as a doornail. Vampire hunters are going to come after you—and after your family, too, if they can find them. Anyone you’ve ever cared about. They’ll torture them, and kill them if they don’t cooperate—or they’ll turn them against you. You’ll be alone, starving, and hunted.”
“Geez,” muttered Dante. “Sugarcoat it a little, maybe.”
None of that had ever happened to Louis. Maybe—maybe this was different from what had happened back then. Noé swallowed.
“Do people often become vampires in the city?” he said. “That sounds—far fetched.”
“It happens oftener than you’d expect,” said Dante. “Most of ‘em lose their minds right off, go on a rampage, kill a bunch of people. Then they come back to themselves, but they’re still enthralled to the bat that turned ‘em. Uh—no offense to the present company. Anyway, Vanitas here goes around removing the enthrallment however, and he pays me for intel, and, uh, other stuff, sometimes.”
Right—Louis had told Noé about this. He’d warned him not to ever get involved with it, but Noé did know what Dante was talking about.
“Right,” said Noé. “He pays you for anal sex, right?”
“What?!” Vanitas shrieked.
“That’s why you know about Dante’s—butt hairs, isn’t it?”
“I would literally rather die than fuck the quack,” said Dante. “He pays me for protection and shit sometimes, not fucking anal sex. The freak’s a virgin, anyway.”
“I’m not!”
“Bullshit you’re not.”
“I’m a virgin too, it’s alright,” Noé assured Vanitas. “I’m sorry, I thought that was why you thought Dante’s butt hairs were sexy.”
“I literally don’t,” said Vanitas. “I hate this. I hope you both die fiery deaths.”
“You love us really,” said Dante. “Especially my ass hairs.”
“Not anywhere near as much as Johann does,” Vanitas said, his voice vicious and biting, and Noé wondered who this ‘Johann’ person was.
Dante seemed to know, though, and his face went red and furious, and Noé watched, fascinated, as he tried to hit Vanitas in the face, and then the two of them started tussling on the hotel room floor, seemingly heedless of all the candles they had lit there. Noé realized that he probably was not getting back to sleep that night, and so he stood and carefully picked his way out of the circle of candles to make for the little kitchenette in the room, meaning to make tea. He didn’t think tea could be that hard to make—it was just hot water and dried leaves—and so he went to the sink, poured water into a cup, and went to put the cup in the microwave. By the time it dinged, Vanitas and Dante had stopped their fight and Dante was filming him again; when he took the cup out and went to open the window to get some leaves, Vanitas got up and went straight to the kitchenette and dumped out Noé’s cup of lukewarm water.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
“Well, I was trying to make tea,” said Noé, “since I don’t think you’re going to let me go back to bed anytime soon.”
“You need to sleep during the daytime now, you’re a vampire,” Vanitas told him. “And that isn’t tea. ”
“Of course it is, it’s leaves and hot water,” said Noé. “I make tea with things I find in the forest all the time.”
“You’re insane.”
“You got me turned into a vampire, ” said Noé. “I’m not the insane one here.”
“Oh—fuck this,” Vanitas sighed, going and getting a pair of mugs and slamming them on the counter. He turned on his heel, got an electric kettle, filled it, turned it on, let the water boil, poured it into both mugs, and dropped a tea bag into each.
“There,” he said. “Tea.”
“Oh! Thank you!” Noé said, smiling at him.
“How domestic,” Dante muttered.
“Fuck off, baldy—are you filming this?!”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m making a new channel. Vanitas’s Adventures with a Vampire Roommate. Ad revenue’s gonna be great.”
“Jump off a cliff and die,” Vanitas advised him.
“But then who would sell you information on vampires?”
“Your mother.” A cup of tea was shoved in front of Noé, the tea bag deftly plucked out and tossed, dripping, into the trash. “Don’t put milk and sugar in, your stomach can’t handle it.”
“You don’t know anything about my stomach,” Noé said, offended.
“I know plenty about freshly turned vampires,” said Vanitas. “You should only be drinking blood now.”
“I don’t drink blood, that’s unsanitary,” said Noé. “Blood is a biohazard, you know! It isn’t safe to leave lying around.”
Vanitas and Dante exchanged eye rolls, and then Dante pulled a wickedly sharp knife out of his boot, stomped over to Noé, and drew it swiftly across his arm. Hot red blood immediately lept out of it, bubbling up and spilling down his arm, and Noé could feel all of his senses zeroing in on it. Though he knew logically blood had a tangy, metallic scent, and one that typically brought memories of dead friends and nearly dying up alongside the contents of his stomach, it smelled sweet to him now—better than anything else—so, so good—and he thought it would taste just as good, too—
“Drink,” ordered Dante.
Noé, slightly confused, took a spoon and pushed Dante’s blood into his teacup until the liquid turned cloudy, and then drank the concoction as Dante bandaged his arm up.
“Wow!” said Noé. “Blood tastes amazing, actually!”
“You’re a freak,” said Dante. “Most vampires would take it straight from my arm.”
“Oh,” said Noé. “May I?”
Dante and Vanitas exchanged glances.
“If you go into a blood frenzy and try to turn me, I’m stabbing you to death,” said Dante, and then he unbandaged the arm. Noé carefully took it—it was still bleeding, though the earlier blood was smeared all over his arm, gluing his hairs to his skin—and carefully placed his teeth in the cut. It was, he could, easier to gain traction there now that he had the fangs, and though it was kind of hard at first to drink the blood neatly, he found that it wasn’t anywhere near as hard as he expected, and the blood really was delicious, and more filling than anything he’d had in his life. It wasn’t much more than a minute or two later that he sat up, Dante’s arm licked clean, wiped his mouth, smiled, and said, “Thank you.”
“You’re polite for a vampire,” said Dante.
“Thanks, I guess,” said Noé, who was unsure how he felt about that comment, as, with the exception of his teeth and the new bone-deep coldness that had already become almost commonplace to him, he felt wholly unchanged.
“We’ll see what happens when the sun rises,” said Vanitas, his voice as uncaring as if discussing the weather. “If he rampages, he’s great at faking sanity. If he—sleeps, then he’s somehow the only vampire to turn, remain sane, and not be enthralled to the vampire who turned him.”
“How d’you figure that?” Dante said.
“Well, genius, if he doesn’t rampage when he fully turns, and he doesn’t rampage when he scents or tastes blood, and he doesn’t rampage when the sun comes—”
“I meant the enthrallment, quack.”
“I have my ways,” Vanitas said flippantly.
Dante rolled his eyes. “Fine, be that way,” he said. “Sunrise is in—” He checked his phone. “Two and a half hours.”
“May I have some more tea?” said Noé.
Vanitas rolled his eyes. “I’ll make you a pot,” he said. “Then I have some studying to do, so don’t talk to me.”
“Alright,” Noé said, pleased at getting more blood-tea, and he watched as Vanitas fiddled with the electric kettle again, this time filling it almost to the brim and then, once boiled, dropping three teabags into it.
“Hey, baldy,” Vanitas said.
“$50 for a half-pint,” Dante said immediately. “One time only rate.”
“You’re fleecing me!”
“This is my fucking blood we’re talking about here, did you think it was gonna come cheap ?!”
Vanitas slapped a twenty and a five dollar bill on the table.
“Oh, bullshit,” said Dante.
“Look at the fucking kettle, does it look like I have room for a half-pint?” said Vanitas. “$25 for a quarter pint. Bitch.”
“Fine,” said Dante, snatching the money off the counter, and he took out his knife again and made a cut in the other arm, bleeding directly into the kettle for a minute or so before deftly and quickly bandaging his arm as Vanitas mixed the blood into the tea with a used toothbrush. “This is a one-time-only thing, you hear me? I’m not doing this again.”
“What, the price or the bleeding?”
“Bitch,” muttered Dante in lieu of an answer, and he started filming again as Vanitas plopped the kettle in front of Noé.
“Drink this, don’t bother me until sunrise,” he ordered.
“Alright,” said Noé, and he smiled up at Vanitas. “Thank you.”
Vanitas stared at him for a minute, strange and deeply lonely emotions swirling in his blue vitriol eyes. Then, wordlessly, he went to sit as far away from Noé as possible, picking up his massive, ratty book, flipping it open to a page near the middle apparently at random, and beginning to read.
“So what’s the deal with you and the quack?” Dante said as Noé began to pour his cup of tea.
“You mean Vanitas?” he said.
“Yeah. What the fuck is up with you two?”
“I don’t know,” said Noé. “We only just met today.”
Vanitas twitched, and turned the page in his book rather violently. Noé and Dante both turned to look at him, but he didn’t say a word until Noé opened his mouth, and then he snapped, “I said don’t bother me, freak.”
“I didn’t even say anything!” Noé protested.
“The quack’s just a dick like that, don’t let it bother you,” advised Dante. He watched as Noé took a few more gulps of tea and burned his mouth, and then he said, “You like my blood?”
“Yes, it’s delicious,” Noé told him.
“Huh,” said Dante.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Dante. “I’m a half-blood—a dhampir. Most vampires think my blood tastes like shit, like brackish water.”
“Well, I like it a lot,” said Noé. “Thank you for letting me drink it.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Dante. “Seriously, don’t. A guy can get in a lot of trouble for consorting with vampires, you know.”
“Didn’t you say something about posting video of this online?”
Dante shrugged. “Half the time people think it’s doctored, and the other half they turn a blind eye ‘cause what the quack over there’s doing is actually useful, as much as everyone hates to admit it. And I don’t show my face or name or anything in the videos. I’m not dumb enough to live-stream anything.”
Noé nodded. This was reasonable enough. “So you get paid for working for Vanitas and for your YouTube channel, then?”
“Okay, one, I don’t work for Vanitas. He buys shit off me sometimes, and sometimes that shit includes services like backup in a fight, and sometimes it’s information, and sometimes it’s my actual, literal blood—though that’s never happened before. Though I guess we’ve never found a vampire like you before, either.”
“Maybe it’s because you watched me turn?” said Noé.
Dante shook his head. “Can’t be. We’ve watched half a dozen turn and it’s always the same song and dance—and I bet he’s seen twice as many on his own. You’re the first different one.”
Noé thought about Louis at fourteen, about how he’d killed five children and nearly killed Noé, about how it had taken years for him to forgive Noé and stop trying to kill him whenever they saw each other and even longer for Domi to stop saying that he was dead and that Noé was just seeing ghosts where ghosts couldn’t be.
“Why?” said Noé.
“No clue. —I mean, assuming you are different from the others.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never met a vampire before, other than the woman earlier. —What’s her name, by the way? Is she doing alright?”
“Amelia Ruth, and she’ll be fine, probably. We’ll be meeting with Orlok—he’s the natural vampire in charge of this part of the city—later on to talk things out, but I got the video just fine. She’ll be sent home soon enough, and just have to get used to living as a vampire. Just like you, if you don’t, you know, try to kill us when the sun comes up and get turned into dust.”
“Do I get a choice about that?” said Noé.
“The dust thing? Nah, I mean, you can’t control it. Sunlight just kills you if you’re up during the day now. And when the sun comes up, if you aren’t in a coffin with grave dirt on you, you either go on a rampage or you turn into a normal corpse depending on whether or not you’re sane. No way to control that except for whatever’s in Vanitas’s book over there, and he can’t use it on you without proof you’re in sane.”
“Oh,” said Noé. “That sounds like a pretty big responsibility.”
“Eh, the quack handles it,” said Dante. “I’m just here for the cash.”
“Oh!” said Noé. “Let me pay you back for the blood you let me drink earlier. How much was it?”
“Nah, don’t worry about it,” said Dante. “That was on the house.”
“Really?” said Noé. “Why?”
“Cause I like you better than the quack.”
Both Noé and Dante looked over at Vanitas to see how he reacted to that, but he just kept his eyes firmly on the page in front of him, and after a few moments, they turned back to each other.
“So…” said Noé. “What are your favorite foods?”
The conversation continued, somewhat awkwardly, from there, but they made it until the sky began turning pink, at which point Dante turned back on his camera and Noé finished up his blood-tea.
“What do I do n—”
Noé awoke in his hotel-room bed, the bloodstain on his pillow even older. Outside, the sun was setting; he had the distinct impression that he had just lost an entire day. Dante was no longer in the room, but Vanitas was, sitting in a chair by Noé’s bed and watching him.
“Good morning,” he said, lips twisting into something a more charitable person than Noé could possibly have called a smile. “Congratulations! You’re a sane, non-enthralled vampire. Who could have guessed?”
“...You did,” Noé said, sitting up, his hand going to his throat. The woman last night—Amelia Ruth—had torn it out, he’d thought, but the tea had gone down just fine, and now he felt nothing but smooth, unblemished skin. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” said Vanitas. “I knew that if you jumped into that fight, you’d be turned.”
Noé frowned. “No you didn’t,” he said. “You didn’t even know who I was until after I woke up—and Dante was the one who reached out to me over Craigslist. What’s this about?”
“Sharp of you,” said Vanitas, and he grinned like a feral thing. “I want you to be my shield.”
“Sorry?” said Noé.
“You’re hardy,” said Vanitas, “and a good fighter, and most importantly, you’re already dead.”
“That’s rude.”
“You’ll make the perfect shield for me! Really, there isn’t anything more I can ask for!”
“I don’t want to be your shield.”
“Of course you couldn’t pass up such an amazing opportunity! I’m glad we agree!”
“You know,” said Noé, “I really, really do not like you.”
“Well,” said Vanitas, standing and cracking his back, “I don’t like you either. Come on, get up.”
“Why?” said Noé. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve got work to do!” said Vanitas. “The woman from the other day—Amelia Ruth. Orlok isn’t letting her go, and it’s time we find out why.”