The Journal of Michael O'Shane

An entry dated back a few years. Best to assume all of my entries have the potential toward having adult content unless proven otherwise. *Grin*

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Journal Entry – March 27, 2005

Tonight, I thought about my earliest years as an immortal.

I don’t know what in particular evoked the train of thought, aside from a short conversation several of us engaged in over cigars and glasses of scotch and brandy. An elder from one of our area covens had been away since Peter returned to Philadelphia and it was the first time he realized my brother and second-in-command was the infamous vampire assassin Flynn. My brother’s alter ego follows him around like a ghost. I don’t pity him, this much is for sure. Especially when others turn white as a sheet the way Joseph did.

I think all of the vampire convention can boast of some rather unsavory years in their past. We are what we are, after all. Hunters. Predators. The next level in the food chain beyond the mortals whose world we inhabit; whose world we fail to conquer because the Natural Order dictates we each have our own place and parts to play. It isn’t that they are faster… smarter. We know better than that. We also know if given the proverbial keys to the universe, we would not hesitate to undermine everything we enjoy about this mortal coil in the first place.

Perhaps I should say, more selfishly, everything I enjoy about this mortal coil.

I digress. The point of all this being… afterward, the concept of unsavory years hung close to me like a coat while I walked the estate grounds and glanced from trees to sky and all about. It should be stated I make no apologies for what I am and the things I have done since becoming a vampire. If called upon by an inquisition, I would gladly relay tales of good and bad with equal amounts of deference and without any excuse given as to why I did the things I’ve done. Anybody who knows me knows the manner I conduct my life is never up for debate. They also know I am not the same vampire many of my brothers and sisters are.

What goes a long way in explaining my mentality can be traced back to those very first sacred years I enjoyed as a fledgling vampire. I say ‘sacred’ as something of an oxymoron. To us, they are sacred. What we worship, what we relish, and what we enjoy, in part, about existing for an eternity finds itself bottled in concentrate within those first few years where immortality is a field in which we run wild and free. I never was a conflicted vampire. I woke knowing what I became and with ample warning of what I would need to do to survive.

The only thing Sabrina never prepared me for was how much I would enjoy it. I never harbored the desire to hurt another living creature as a mortal, and yet my detachment from humanity made it easy for me to part ways with my former self and follow my own path. The first time I drank blood from the veins of the living, I consumed my victim to death and didn’t care very much for his fate, except to say I lived another day and thanked him for it. We were in Dublin at the time, about to pass into Liverpool on our way to Manchester and eventually, London. I could still taste his blood well into the British Isles.

The chain of people who followed marked a capricious lot of those I let live and those I let die. On occasion, the mortal in question humored me enough, I spared them a glamour and let them on their way. Others drove me to the point of ending our night early and being done with the pleasantries. I chose my meals according to my whims until we entered France and Sabrina sensed the time was right to begin a few festivities. This is when the art of seduction was imparted on me.

Sabrina eased me into it without giving it a name. Words like decadence never graced her lips and neither did the word seduction itself. It simply was explained as ‘having a little fun’ with somebody she thought worthy of our attention. We would tease them. I would play the role of gentleman while she slipped into the shoes of a whore and at first, we chose our victims for blood and whatever the contents of their pockets might contain.

She was the first to spread her legs for one. “Fetch his wallet while I distract him.” I still hear her speaking such instructions and would follow her request while questioning why I had to wait for distractions when we intended to finish him off by the night’s end anyway. I can’t recall when I figured out she enjoyed the pleasure of bedding them in its own right. I only recall the first time she held one in a state of thrall after their tryst and said, “Taste his blood, Michael. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

And I wasn’t. The taste had changed, be it due to the endorphines still racing through his blood or something in my head manifesting a psychosomatic reaction. Perhaps it was adrenaline. Heaven — or hell, more accurately — only knows. I only know I broke from the feed desiring Sabrina as I’d never desired her before. His body soon fell to the ground and this time, I took his place between her thighs, seeking pleasure while drawing it out from her. Intoxicated is one way of describing my reaction. I only know the next time I fed, I plucked a whore from the streets and waited for her moans of completion before I drank from her neck.

From here, the slippery slope led me to places my imagination fashioned only in its darkest corners. I bedded the women, then bedded the men and discovered I enjoyed the conquest of both genders in equal fashion. I became quite adept at sizing out the men who would follow me into the bed chamber and a cunning devil at wooing ladies into private. A shiver yet runs through me with the mere thought of voices both deep and high crying out in ecstasy. I taste the unique mixture of blood and lust simply sitting at my desk and turning those thoughts over in my mind.

It would be very easy to gift me a mortal’s conscience in what followed, but I can’t attribute a crisis of self as the cause of why this practice tapered off for me. Rather, it was a moment of clarity a decade later which served to demonstrate just how consumed I had become with our new game.

Our wandering through France brought us to Amsterdam around the turn of the century. Days of travel left me hungry and in dire need of feeding and another indulgence in my favorite pastime. It took a matter of minutes spent in a brothel for me to find a man glancing at other men and women in that hungry manner I’d become all too gifted in recognizing. All it required was a touch of his shoulder and a word whispered in his ear for me to lure the handsome gentleman into the room Sabrina rented.

Sabrina had ventured out to walk the city streets and I held a rapt audience with the gent as I glamoured him and stripped him of his clothing. He moaned at all the right times and quivered and quaked, expectant with pulse rising and simply waiting for the moment I would disrobe and claim him as I had so many others who came before. It was at the moment that my nakedness collided with his that my maker wandered back, discovering the state we were in and all too willing to be made a part.

For some reason, I hesitated. Not because I wanted him purely to myself, but as she had him remove her dress, I saw a mirror image of myself in my mistress. The look in her eyes, incensed with need, and the fangs out waiting for the right moment to pierce his flesh… I furrowed my brow and looked over his shoulder while she laid on the bed before him and suddenly, our game had a face gifted to it.

Not to say I did not follow through. Three bodies intertwined and while I drew from his shoulder, Sabrina claimed a wrist and we drained him simultaneously. The taste had lost its luster, though, banality poisoning the very lifeblood pulsing through his veins. I neither claimed Sabrina, nor laid beside her once our conquest laid dead upon the bedroom floor. I dressed, instead, and sought the streets of Amsterdam, wondering what I saw in this any longer.

I asked Sabrina for the immortal gift to travel the world; to see its people within the confines of foreign lands and learn their languages. I wanted an eternity with which to do so and instead, I sought the pleasures of the flesh instead of the nourishment of mind and soul I turned into a vampire to experience. By dawn, I returned to our room, and the next few nights I sought conversation rather than pure indulgence.

This isn’t to say I never indulged again. Or even that I regretted the decade which preceded. Rather that I learned exactly who and what I was and stared myself in the eyes without blinking. We are what we are and we do that which pleases us, but eternity is about more than the blood and decadence we feast upon like royal subjects in a gracious king’s court.

We are the ones who define ourselves. Both because of and in spite of our natures. Each time I relish the carnal, I do so because I choose to and each time I abstain, it is because I refuse to allow any inclination to rule over me as if I were a slave. I think we all learn this lesson at some point as well. Or die before seeing all immortality has to offer.

Sláinte,
Michael