CHAPTER EIGHT: Dracula Doesn't Love

ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN YEARS AFTER LAST CHAPTER

I felt so young, and yet I was still so young. A hundred and eleven years had changed the world. A hundred and eleven years had taken friends and all the people I cared about. But it hadn't changed me. It hadn't taken me. I currently resided in the city of Columbus, in the American state of Ohio, and it was the year 1911. The only regular thing in my life was my profession. Now that the world of myths and monsters was a world forgotten and replaced by a world of logic I could freely work as a steady doctor without suspicion. As for my self-control, centuries of practice had blessed me with such control as was unbelievable. Naturally I was known for my good work, because the past year had been filled with nothing but medical learning and discovery and experience.

The Denali clan still lived in Alaska, as was my knowledge, and I still did see them from time to time. Eleazar had returned from the Volturi and with him he had brought a young female vampire, Carmen. Carmen was a long, willowy woman with darkened hair and a strange olive complexion. The two mates had met sometime during Eleazar's journeys with the Volturi and were almost immediately married and inseparable. Although Carmen was beautiful, as all vampires are, and although I was happy for both of them, my romantic notions struggled with a small pang of jealousy. I had searched this vampire world for my whole, for my beloved, for a Juliet. How was it that Eleazar, who had not even been looking, had stumbled upon what I longed for most. Maybe that was the key. To find love, you must not be looking for it. After too many years, I had given up looking.

One beautifully dreary afternoon I was returning from a house call in one of the more unfortunate parts of Columbus. The houses were all a rural wooden structure, and most lacked any real windows or doors. I was just within the part of town in between the lesser neighborhood, and the expensive side of the city, when I heard an abrupt yell that sounded like the person had caught her loud fa paux and was trying hard to stifle it. I walked at a human pace in the direction the the sound had come. Then the human scent hit me, but I didn't even register the venom flow, or the way my throat tightened, because crumpled on the ground was a beautiful young woman clutching her leg. I immediately ran over, maybe a little too fast, to attend to her. She looked up at me startled, and then her eyes clouded over in a look I often received from women, only the look had a sweeter edge to it. Flustered, she began to speak.