Chapter Text
The Vampire Yaxche’s Last Words and Manifesto
Originally written in Spanish, translated to English by the Vampire Ladrón
My name is the Vampire Yaxche. In Spanish, the Vampira Isabella. These are my final words before I give myself over to the loving embrace of Death.
I am young in all senses of the word. I was young at 16, when soldiers stormed our village and dragged us out of our homes. They gunned down my father and brothers in the streets and then separated me away from my mother and aunties. We were a large Mayan family, residing in the mountains of Chimaltenango for generations long before the Spaniards ever touched our shores and proclaimed these lands Guatemala.
I was only 21 when the Vampire Hai Rong turned me. She saw in me a mirror of her own grief, shadows of her former self forced to leave the shores of Canton for an arranged marriage, turned against her will by the vampire who haunted the ship to the Americas. There were decades between us that she spent wandering the Andes and the Amazon before she met me. But unlike her quiet sorrow, she could taste the thrum of revenge beating in my veins with hot fury, and vowed to help me and my people.
It must have been dozens, if not hundreds of soldiers, I drank from and discarded back into the earth. As their blood gushed down my throat, I heard the cries of their victims—my people, my own flesh and blood—in their wretched memories. The ways these soldiers laughed at and demeaned us, it disgusted me. I savored every drop, and I didn’t stop at the foot soldiers who were merely carrying out orders. I tracked down the generals, the colonels, every high-ranking officer I could find.
These were the years I spent as a ravenous fledgling. I was blood-thirsty in a way that my father would've been surprised by. What happened to his sweet daughter, the one who hid under the bed when there was a thunderstorm? Where was her innocence? Gone, disappeared the moment the soldiers dragged me out by my hair and lifted my skirts.
When my rage slowed down to a simmer, I enlisted my Maker’s help in locating my family. Most were dead. We made sure to clean their bodies (or what we could find of their bodies), dress them with the proper maize ornamentation in their mouths, and lay them to rest so they could walk the afterlife in peace. Of those that remained with us in the land of the living, some were in prison, some were kept in a private residence that might as well be a prison. We freed them all. We gave them weapons. For a long time, I was their weapon.
Now I am 42 years into the blood. This is a mere child in vampire years, I know. Hai Rong told me that the oldest she’d ever met was the Vampire Gabriella, who was nearing 300, but there were those much older. But I am happy, almost giddy, that I have done all I set out to do in my vampire life.
The truth is, immortality never appealed to me. I have no interest in living forever if I am to stay untethered to the land.
Thousands of years ago, my people cultivated maize, or the crop more commonly known as corn, and today humans eat it all around the world. For us, maize was not only our food, it was our way of life. Our years revolved around the spring planting and autumn harvest. We would hum songs while beating maize into corn meal and wine, songs that passed down generation after generation. It was how we communed with the earth, and with water, and with the gods, and each other. When we gathered to eat, we nourished and cared for each other with maize. It was our art, our medicine, our gift from the gods.
How different my life would have been, if I had been born in the Great Plains of North America, where they hunt the bison. The meat, they would eat. The bones, they would forge into tools. The animal hide, they would make into clothes and shelter. I would be a completely different person. Would I feel at home riding a horse, migrating across the plains following wherever the bison went?
Or what if I were born in the Polynesian islands of the Pacific, where they spend their lives on boats and travel with wind and water? I can barely swim. If I were Polynesian, could I hold my breath and swim to deep, deep down to depths that I could only dream of now?
Who am I without maize? What is my connection to this earth, now that I have switched maize for the red, red blood of the living?
I have asked myself this question everyday for the past five years, ever since Guatemala’s former military dictator died, may his soul suffer in hell for eternity. My time as a weapon for my people is gone. My fascination with my newfound powers has passed. Hai Rong has shown me her homelands and I spent nearly a decade drinking rice wine and wandering the streets with her in Macau, Hong Kong, Shen Zhen. They were some of the happiest years of my life, and they have made me even more sure of who I am and why I must go.
I raise this question to every vampire out there, do you know who you are? Do you know where you come from? I have met some of you who seem utterly lost. The pain you have inside you is so wretched, you inflict pain onto everyone who crosses your path.
I don’t want to live long enough where I forget who I am, an eternity where I fade into nothingness. I would rather join Death just as I am now. I am a woman of the mountains and the maize fields just like my mother, and my grandmother, and her mother before that, and her mother before that, all the way back to the first mother before Hai Rong ever bit into my neck. I know and love this land more than you could ever imagine.
I am also a woman of the rice fields and the fishing boats, just like my Maker. And before that, I was a nomadic Mongol warrior. And before that, a wealthy mathematician in Persia. I have traced the lineage of my vampiric ancestry and kissed the earth of every homeland that I could find, so that I would truly know the blood that runs within my veins.
I am satisfied. And I am going now.
When Daniel finished reading the manifesto that was making waves in the Latin American vampire crowd, he scoffed in disgust.
42 years in the blood, and 21 when she was turned. So that would make Yaxche what, 63? She didn’t even last long enough to make it to the end of Daniel’s human lifespan. What a coward.
Daniel sat with one foot on the fire escape, one foot brushing against the floor of his New York apartment. His back leaned against the frame of the open window. This was his favorite place to smoke, and tonight he did so while contemplating if he should throw this silly little manifesto into the night sky or fold it up and use it as a coaster, because at least that way he could get some use out of it.
The thought that someone could be given the Gift and turn into a lean, mean, revenge-seeking machine, and then just throw that all away when they decided they’d had enough—it infuriated Daniel. Was she stupid? Or did she just do a better job than Louis in hiding her depression?
She thought she had it all figured out. And after only forty-odd years of vampirism, at that. Did she really believe that she found all the secrets and solved all the mysteries? What kind of arrogance was she smoking and where can Daniel get some of that? Should all vampires just kill themselves because they can’t eat corn anymore?
“Calm down, Molloy,” he grumbled to himself, flicking some cigar ash down the fire escape. “Why is this pissing you off so much? It’s just some dead lady's blog post."
But it wasn’t, was it? Here came a soft voice lurking in the back of his mind, chastising him. It was a suicide note with a radical acceptance of death. The words of a vampire woman who, for better or worse, knew exactly who she was. And that was more than you could say of most people, immortal or otherwise.
Daniel had spent the better part of the past year staring down the barrel of his newfound immortality, wondering if this really was better than dying alone in the hospital. And while the interview with Louis was what got him in this mess in the first place, he was at least somewhat grateful that he’d already gotten the Fledgling 101 rundown that would keep him from an early demise. Let your body to shit everything out from both ends. Don’t drink dead blood. Don’t go into the sun. Things that Daniel’s Maker would’ve taught him, helped guide him on, if the Asshole had bothered to stick around.
That fucking prick. Daniel had also spent the better part of the past year doing everything in his power to stop thinking about the Asshole and throw himself into his work. Night after night, he spent typing away with his newfound claws, chewing on pens like he used to do when he was a desk monkey at the local paper. Sometimes he’d eat right after waking up. Other times, he’d first catch up on calls and emails with his agent and research assistant, both of whom found his new strictly nocturnal schedule quite annoying, before heading out for a little midnight snack.
Now that his book had been out for a couple weeks and was already flying off the shelves, it would appear that Daniel had done a piss poor job of that. Of ignoring the Asshole, that is.
The most irritating part was that Daniel wasn’t even aware that he was thinking of him so much. Apparently, it just came out in his book, and suddenly everyone was asking him why an investigative journalist of his calibre would have such a strange fixation on his own “fictional” character. It was infuriating. He had to delete Twitter just so he wouldn’t get a constant barrage of, “Daniel Molloy has entered his yearning era and he cannot get enough of those sweet Bengali doe eyes."
With a sigh, Daniel crumpled up the manifesto in his free hand and was about to throw it into the wind. He paused. Lowered his arm. Then turned around to chuck it in his trash can instead. No point in littering, New York already had enough of that.
Later that night, he fished the manifesto out to read it again.
Tried to burn it using his mind, like Louis and the Asshole described. Failed. Felt like an idiot staring at this piece of paper, just willing for fire to come out of nowhere. And then tore it to pieces.
The following night, Daniel took a subway ride to Upper Manhattan and started walking. And walking.
And walking.
He kept walking until he crossed over to the Bronx and found himself in Little Ireland, where he paused, took a deep breath of foul New York air, and felt so grateful to be reminded why he never hung out in Little Ireland. This place sucked.
I raise this question to every vampire out there, do you know who you are?
Daniel was white, one of the whitest guys you’d ever met. A good night for Daniel was jamming out to AC/DC and T. Rex, maybe sitting down for an episode of Breaking Bad or digging into a book about the Cold War. The only things that distinguished him from other white men his age were his disdain for golf (stupid sport, waste of land and water) and his disinterest in beer (an IPA could never beat a good martini).
But before he was white, he was Irish on his dad's side, going back at least another generation in America, maybe more. Truth be told, Daniel wasn’t sure. His father was too busy hitting the bottle and cracking the belt to give him a family history lesson. Was being a bad father something Daniel inherited? Was his father’s constant inhospitable attitude an Irish trait, a Molloy trait, or simply a bum-fuck nowhere trait of Northern California?
Daniel strolled down the street where the shops and cafes had long closed but the bars stayed open, an obnoxious display of American and Irish flags overshadowed only by the copious amounts of green. Green everywhere. Daniel thought back to Yaxche’s manifesto and her obsession with maize. She was convinced that humans had to be spiritually attached to something physical in order to have any real sense of identity. So what was his corn? He hoped to God that it was not a four-leaf clover, or even worse. A leprechaun.
Yes, there were other whatever-generation Irish kids that Daniel grew up with in Modesto. But no one ever talked about that. If they were to talk about race it would be more fear-mongering about MLK Jr. and the Black Panthers, plenty of red scare and yellow fever barbershop talk every time China, Korea, or Vietnam came on the radio, or anxiety about the rising numbers of Mexican immigrants in California. An ‘us against them’ mentality that often left Daniel feeling confused and uncomfortable in his younger years.
The rising tension around him and his own position as an uncomplicated, uncontroversial, unassuming white guy—the default American, you might say, the most generic human being you could ever meet—had left Daniel with a pit of emptiness that he filled with journalism as soon as he had any say in how he spent his time. Cold, hard, relentless investigation. Something to help him understand what the hell was going on in this complicated world that he felt unceremoniously dumped in.
He was also possibly, very likely but not confirmed, part Armenian. His mom never talked about it, but the early summers he spent with his grandparents on his mother's side had convinced him for a while that his parents decided to ship him off to some Middle Eastern foreigners before they explained to him, “No Daniel, that’s your real grandmother. She’s just not that great at English."
It was a strange time for young Danny. His grandparents looked white, but they didn’t talk white. They didn’t act like any of the white people that Daniel knew. They grilled meat in the backyard in a way that Daniel would only ever see in Mediterranean restaurants, and let Daniel try a drink that he would later learn was arak and wouldn’t drink again til he traveled to Lebanon in his adulthood. Their last name was Kazarian. They had to be Armenian.
Even though his feet weren’t tired, thanks to the elasticity of his new vampire muscles and joints, Daniel chose this moment to stop and sit outside a pub. The humans inside were drinking beer and singing karaoke. Daniel had a feeling he could find someone to drain for lunch if he waited long enough.
The air outside was chilly. They were nearing the end of October, so the season had fully shifted, providing a refreshing bite of cold in the air that promised the incoming winter. Daniel found himself blissfully alone on the bench until the shadow of a person approached him.
“Good evening, sir. Do you happen to have a light?"
Daniel looked up to see a middle-aged, dark-skinned woman with enormous glasses. With her cropped hair, round face, and expensive black knitwear, she looked like she was cosplaying that fashion designer from the superhero movie his youngest was obsessed with. What was it again? Edith Mode?
“Yeah, sure,” Daniel shrugged, finding the lighter in his pocket without looking and throwing it up in the air. If she caught it, he wouldn’t eat her. If she didn’t, then he would.
She caught it. Damn.
“So,” she said, returning the lighter to Daniel’s hands in a pointedly careful way. She had a strange way of talking with an accent that didn't pass as New Yorker, or American for that matter, but Daniel couldn’t quite place. “What brings you out to Ol’ Donovan's on this fine Tuesday night?"
Technically it was early Wednesday morning now, Daniel thought petulantly. Out loud, he replied shortly with, “Just thinking."
“Care to elaborate?"
“Nope."
“Ah. But enjoying your night?"
“Nope."
The stranger smiled subtly. Daniel had no idea why she would.
“You’re Daniel Molloy, aren’t you?” She asked, tapping her tote bag with her black manicured nails. “I just bought a copy of your latest book. A very intriguing read. Quite the departure from your previous work."
“Yep.”
“Was that a mistake, when you published it as nonfiction? Shouldn’t it be in the fantasy genre?"
“Nope."
“Fascinating. Would you sign my copy? I have a pen."
Ugh, he should’ve known she was a fan. Daniel hated it when people tried to approach him outside of book signings and interviews. There was a time and a place to chat. Any true Daniel Molloy fan should know from reading his memoir that he was not one for small talk or useless banter.
Actually, now that he thought of it, he had a meeting with his agent in a few days about the book tour. They had most of the stops planned already, a multi-city route that would take him to at least half of the fifty states. He had been looking forward to it, it would give him something to do other than eat annoying hipsters in Brooklyn and stare at his daughters’ old summer camp postcards. But nothing was finalized, right? There was still time to change the route.
And they had bookstores in Ireland.
Daniel stood up. “Look,” he said, interrupting the stranger procuring her copy of IWTV from her bag. “Why don’t you find someone else to talk up a wall tonight, okay? I’m not in the mood. If you liked the book, tell all your friends. I could use the royalties."
With that, Daniel left without another glance. He could’ve sworn he heard her say something like, “have something to eat, Daniel Molloy, and get home safe,” but that felt too bizarre to linger on. He drained a rando on the way to the train, trying his best to block out the memories of the stranger’s shame in hitting his girlfriend, and spent the ride home looking up bookstores in Europe that carried English-language books. No one batted an eye at the front of his shirt covered in blood or his glowing amber eyes under his sunglasses. To them, it was just another night in New York.