The Wanderer

It's 6 pm. Viviana wakes up to get ready to work her shift at a club. She doesn't remember actively choosing to be a bartender, but those late hours, in darkly lit rooms, have always served her well. Being anonymous has saved her many times over, although she thinks it may have been easier in times long ago when you could get paid daily and no one asked too many questions. Her latest residence in a densely packed city full of lights and mystery has her sometimes wondering about her past, but not often because she has found when she thinks of these things too much she blacks out for days and has to move again with no preparation. She stays mostly in the north because the days are shorter and the nights longer, enabling her to be out and among people longer. The larger the city, the easier it is for her to feed when the need arises, but not from one person. Fortunately, her skin is still quite dark instead of alabaster pale, like many of her kind. Well, part of her kind. No one is completely like her, both living and unliving. More like a comic book character that these young people enjoy these days. She knows she cannot stay in this city much longer. Many of the staff at the club have started to notice how her eyes change colors with the seasons, and how most people do what she says without question. That's how she got the job to begin with, although the whispers of this are getting louder. As she selects her usual outfit, skin-tight black on black, she wonders what her life would have been if she wasn't everything all at once. If she had been born a human and cursed to die. Living forever has its challenges, and she wonders if she has the stamina to keep going for another decade, century, millennium, or eternity. Not that she found a way to die or even be injured, not that she hasn't tried. When she first became undead after centuries of being part of the fae, she tried, being locked away from her home and everyone she had ever known. No one had ever been both at the same time, and they were afraid of her. Now as they migrate out of their secret places, she often must hide, even from her family, because they have orders to kill her on sight. When they cannot, they are punished with death for themselves. She feels a pain in her head, she's been thinking of the past too long. About those she misses the most, and those who have been lost completely. As for the other kind, those she does not hide from. She goes willingly into their dens to mete out her revenge for making her like them. They never question anything about her. Like they cannot feel her otherness, or have no sense that she isn't completely like them. But they must know, when she is in their presence she can feel their age. The older ones make her teeth hurt, even tho they are not as old as she. They are hesitant to be around her, maybe with them, age does give wisdom. But they all succumb and let her in, and then she kills them and leaves the warning for others. It has been many years since she encountered any of the others. Maybe they have learned to hide better, or maybe she has killed them all. This cannot be true as she still hasn't found the one that made her, nor heard a tale of him from her victims. He must be in hiding, or one step ahead of her. He knows she is coming, not how or when, but she is. She doesn't know his name, but his image is forever locked in her mind. The only memory that doesn't fade or cause her pain. The reason she keeps going. As she leaves her home, or what she calls home, the adandoned building she currently hides in to go to the bus stop she wonders again if she should relocate. Six months is a long time for her to be in one place, and she know there are no more vampires in this city. She took care of all of them within a week of her first arriving. She still has all of the goods she was able to get from their nests before she burned their bodies on a shared pire. These may have been too easy to find. She wondered if they had been here soo long they cared not for being caught or were too young to realize the danger the humans could be to them. She believes the latter, it didn't take much for them to allow her in. The youngest are always the easiest to kill.