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Nightfall is cold, wrapping around Caitlyn like a drafty cloak. All the disadvantages of darkness but none of the benefits, letting in chill yet not quite dark enough to hide her from any sort of predators. She uses a lamp-light to make her way through the forest, brambles crackling underfoot, stinging nettle scratching her platformed boots up to the ankles.
A truly horrific night for her, with the inn she’s traveling to still at the outset of this forest that she’s unwisely chosen to traverse at night rather than day. It’s too late to make reversals now, though.
The intern retreat—an annual week-long tradition of budding doctors from Piltover congregating in a remote location to purportedly foster camaraderie—had run late into the evening, and she couldn’t say no to Mel’s insistence on her attending the afterparty since God knows what she’d do with her ex-boyfriend Jayce and his boyfriend Viktor breathing within a mile radius of her without her bosom bestie as a mood purifier.
So here she is, bearing the brunt of her bad decisions in haste.
All of a sudden, there’s a sound in her ear. At first, it’s like the wind whistling, and then a crunch and a screech.
Caitlyn cautiously edges towards the sound, adrenaline-laced fear creeping up in her lungs, eager to confirm it as some sort of passing critter and not a creature of the night.
Her luck, as is typical, fails her.
Crouching in the brush is a hunched figure in a black sleeveless vest baring sculpted shoulders with tattoos tracing to its elbows and getting lost in bandages wrapped around its forearms.
The creature—the woman—the vampire, it seems—turns to look at her and freezes, caught like a deer in the headlights.
Its mouth hangs open baring long fangs. A sweep of red hair shades one side of its face, leaving the other half exposed to show pale skin, darkly purpled above its eye with pitch-black sclera glistening in the lamp-light.
Blood drops from its fingers onto the forest floor.
Caitlyn’s stomach lurches.
“Is that a fucking rat,” she asks.
The vampire scrambles on the undergrowth before finally coming to a stand, stepping casually over to poorly hide a pile of intestines behind one leg. Composing itself as though it were a moderately human thing. “No. I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Caitlyn stares, incredulous, at the entrails smeared across and from the edges of its mouth. “You have a tail on your chin.”
The vampire wipes its face with its sleeve. The bandages on its forearm become ruined, smeared with rat tail and tiny delicate intestines. “There’s nothing on my chin. I don’t know where you get off accusing me of things.”
“I just saw you eat a rat, that’s disgusting.” Caitlyn thinks she might hurl, actually. “Of all things, that’s so unhygienic, what if you catch the black plague or something? Rats were the–”
“The black death died out centuries ago, and I never caught it.”
“You say you never caught it, like you were there when it happened.”
The vampire startles, as though it hadn’t meant to slip up, as though it had done a perfectly fine job of proving its utterly human innocence before this. It pivots to face her, like its getting ready to square up.
Caitlyn, who has seen her life as well as others’ flash before her eyes a number of times and in a number of incidents before, who has endured twelve plus hours of small talk and socializing with gunners and was signed up for a week more of that, decides this is as good a time and as good a way as any to go. She is so utterly finished with tonight.
“Just kill me now. I know you want to, since I saw your dark secret of feasting on a rat or whatever. Just do it.”
“I don’t kill humans. If I did, do you think I would be eating a ra— a not-rat?”
Caitlyn closed her eyes, and still sees the image of rat guts imprinted on the back of her eye lids, like a permanent brand on her brain.
A pause. “I wasn’t eating a rat.”
“Multiple rats, then.”
“It was not a rat. But I eat non-rats because I don’t eat humans.”
Bloody hell. Caitlyn pries her eyes open and tilts her head back to stare at the open night sky and ponder that statement. The stars twinkle back at her in mirth. The heavens are amused. She looks back down. “I guess that makes sense. How are you going to shut me up, though?”
“We end it here and never see nor think about each other again.” The vampire reaches back to pull a black hood over its flaming hair and those eyes, as it starts to move, but Caitlyn will not be able to forget this encounter for the next five decades.
“Easy enough for you to say,” Caitlyn bites. “I just saw someone eat a rat in ten seconds flat.”
That gets the vampire to whip around.
“I. don’t. eat. rats, as I’ve said many times before. Maybe you should get your eyes checked, Cupcake.”
“Why would you call me something conventionally edible in this situation? Unless…” she brings her arms over her core.
“Get over yourself!” The vampire has its hands stubbornly on its hips. “You smell like that manufactured crap you humans gorge yourselves on. It's sickening. Leave me alone.”
Since the vampire has dropped the human facade, and the situation is already going to hell in handbasket, and this just so happens the most stimulating conversation she’s had since starting her medical training, Caitlyn figures she might as well give in to her perseverating inclinations. “I can’t believe you just ate a rat. That was the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen, the way you just slurped that poor little guy up, just like inhaled –”
“Why in the world would you phrase it like that? That’s so distasteful-”
“You’re really going to say that after what I just went through? I’m sure it can’t be as distasteful than the taste of a plague-infected rat in your—” Caitlyn clamps a hand over her mouth to will down the nausea. “Oh god, I can’t even think about it anymore.”
“Then don’t,” the vampire snaps. “Good riddance, I never want to see you again.”
When Friday comes sooner rather than later, Caitlyn finds herself at nightfall traversing through the forest again and encounters the same vampire downing an entire family of toads. She pukes right then and there onto her own boots.