I'm a Vampire Who Broke All His Rules For The Girl in the Bookshop, And Now I'm About to Devour Her

My existence is a curated stillness. The city moves below me, a complex system of lights and noise I have no part in. From the sixty-second floor, the people are indecipherable, their lives reduced to the slow crawl of headlights on wet asphalt. My apartment is silent, save for the low hum of the climate control. I have curated this silence over decades. It is the primary condition of my life. Stillness. The glass wall that constitutes the whole of my living space is not a window, but a barrier. It keeps the city out, and it keeps me in.

The hunger arrives on schedule, a dull ache behind my ribs. It is not a frenzy, not a rabid desire. It is a biological imperative, and I treat it as such. In the sub-zero refrigerator, medical-grade pouches of O-negative are arranged by date. Sourced ethically, they tell me, from a private service that caters to a clientele with unique dietary requirements. The donors are anonymous, their life force reduced to a barcode and a blood type. They are vessels, nothing more.

I select a pouch, place it in a thermal warmer until the liquid within reaches 37.7 degrees Celsius. The precise temperature of a living body. I pour the contents into a crystal glass, not for the aesthetics, but because the weight of it in my hand is a familiar, grounding sensation. The blood is iron and salt on my tongue, its metallic tang coating my throat. It does its work, quieting the ache. There is no pleasure in it. It is like taking medication for a chronic ailment. A joyless necessity.

This discipline has kept me from madness. For the first century, it was a necessary armor. It allowed me to build this life, this sterile fortress against the chaos of what I am. But the fortress has become a tomb. Each night is a precise replica of the last. I watch the city. I consume my measured dose. I wait for the sun to force me into the oblivion of sleep. The patterns of traffic, the cycle of neon advertisements across the street, the indistinct faces in the windows of the opposite tower—I have memorized them all. There are no new variables. I have existed for so long that the world has run out of surprises. It is a particular kind of hell, to be eternal and have nothing left to see. The grey monotony of immortality is its own prison, and I am its sole, willing inmate.

Then, on a Tuesday, the stillness broke. Not with a sound, but with a detail. Across the street and sixty-two floors down was a bookshop. It had always been there, a brick façade wedged between a pharmacy and a cafe, its bay window usually dark by the time I began my night. But tonight, a warm, yellow light spilled out onto the pavement. And inside, there was a woman.

My focus sharpened automatically, a predator's instinct honed over centuries. I registered the rhythmic beat of a heart, the warmth of blood moving through veins. The usual ache started, low and familiar. But then it stalled. The response was incomplete. I was looking, but I was not hunting.

She was stacking books on a table near the window. She was tall, with dark hair pulled back from her face, though a few strands had escaped and fell across her cheek. She wore a plain grey sweater. I watched her pick up a book, run her thumb over the cover, and place it on the pile. Her movements were efficient, economical. There was nothing remarkable about them, and yet I could not look away.

She paused to push the loose hair from her face with the back of her hand, a small, unconscious gesture. The gesture did not signal vulnerability or invitation. It was simply a person, moving through their space, performing a task. The sheer, uncomplicated reality of it was the aberration. For two hundred and forty-seven years, humans had been abstractions to me. They were systems of blood and bone, sources of sustenance, or indistinct shapes in the urban landscape. This woman, under the yellow light of the bookshop, was not an abstraction.

I found myself leaning closer to the glass, the cold surface a familiar pressure against my forehead. I watched as she ran a finger along the spines of a shelf of books, her head tilted. Her brow was furrowed in concentration. The sight did not stir my hunger. Instead, it produced a different sensation, something that felt like a gear grinding in my chest, a mechanism unused for so long it had rusted over. It was curiosity. A feeling so ancient I barely recognized it. I watched her until she turned off the light, plunging the shop into darkness, and still, I remained at the window, staring at the empty space where she had been.

For a week, she was a figure in a diorama. My diorama. I watched her arrive in the morning, a cup of coffee in her hand. I watched her move through the lit interior of the shop, a constant, warm presence against the backdrop of the city’s evening chill. I learned the rhythm of her work. Tuesdays were for new stock, Fridays she stayed late to rearrange the window display. I did not learn her name. A name was a tether, a piece of information that made an abstraction real. I preferred her as a collection of gestures, a silent film playing only for me.

The hunger changed. The clinical need remained, sated nightly by the cold pouches from the refrigerator. But a second, sharper hunger grew alongside it. It was not centered in my stomach but in my teeth, a low-grade ache in my gums that I had not felt in over a century. It was the body’s memory of the hunt, an instinct I had suppressed into obsolescence. And it was directed, with unnerving specificity, at the woman in the bookshop.

On the eighth night, I did not go to the window. I put on a coat, a heavy, dark wool thing I had not worn in years, and took the elevator down sixty-two floors. The lobby was sterile and empty. The automatic glass doors slid open, and the city air hit me. It was damp, smelling of exhaust and rain-soaked concrete. I had not stood on a city street in decades. The sensation was jarring, the sheer volume of sensory input a physical blow. I crossed the street, the headlights of a passing taxi glinting in my eyes, and stopped before the bookshop door.

I could hear her inside. The soft thud of a book being placed on a counter. The whisper of fabric as she moved. Her heart, a steady, quiet beat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. It was the clearest sound in the world. I put my hand on the cold brass handle and pushed.

A small bell, suspended above the door, chimed. The sound was bright, cheerful, and utterly offensive. It announced my intrusion. The air inside was warm, thick with the scent of decaying paper and binding glue. Beneath it, another smell. It was faint, clean. Soap. The unique, subtle scent of her skin. It was not a perfume. It was the smell of her life, and it flooded my senses, an immediate and unwelcome intimacy.

She was behind the counter, looking down at a ledger. She glanced up when the bell rang, a polite, neutral expression on her face. Her eyes met mine for a fraction of a second. They were dark, inquisitive. I felt a jolt, a current of pure energy that had nothing to do with sustenance. I gave a stiff, formal nod and turned away from her, moving into the nearest aisle of shelves.

My control, so absolute for so long, felt brittle. Every sense was screaming. The soft light seemed to press in on me. The silence was not silence; it was filled with the maddeningly gentle thrum of her pulse. It was a drumbeat beneath the floorboards, in the walls, in the air I was breathing. I ran a hand along a row of paperbacks, the gesture meant to look casual, but my fingers were numb. The proximity of her life force was a physical pressure, a heat I could feel across the room. The ache in my gums sharpened into a needle-fine point of pain. I had to get out. I turned, grabbed a thick hardback from a display table without looking at its cover, and walked back towards the door. I did not look at her as I left, pulling the door closed behind me so the bell did not have a chance to ring again.