When Dregan finally let me leave, I couldn’t help but chase after Mikael. Still, he’d a long head-start and could be anywhere now. After searching Southern city, I made my way up north to Central. The city was different than before.

Old, decrepit buildings were torn down at some point and newer apartments were put in their place. Buildings worth saving were stripped out and redone. Everything looked newer than the old city I had loved.

Still, that same sense of emptiness lingered in the air. The scent of mold and dust lingered on the cool autumn breeze, and death. There were vampires here... everywhere...

As I walked the lonely streets, one thing niggled in the back of my mind.

Was he right? Does Mikael really need me like I need him?

The memories swept past me then like a silent picture show...

He was a vampire with denial. A product of my creation. Vampires with denial aren’t true vampires. They’re “halfies” as some call them, unable to bare witness to their actual need to kill and drink from a mortal life.

Most cave to the agonizing pain within their hearts and kill themselves. Others find a way to live with the fear and pain despite the awkwardness and unknown. Mikael was one of the lucky ones, as he learned to deal with it.

And I… I had searched his whereabouts for fifteen years before finding him in a worn-down apartment above a club. At last, I thought, I can give him true immortality. Something I couldn’t do before.

But it wasn’t so easy fighting with my own emotions—something I hadn’t felt in almost a century. Fear. Confusion. Love?

Thus, I couldn’t tell him I was the one who left him to die all those years ago. Would he hate me then and not want my companionship?

So it was, I continued to lie and cheat just as I’d been taught by my old vampyre companion, Christopher Moreaux.

After playing hell with Serena and Chris, I’d finally decided to give him the gift he’d been longing for. To end his denial once and for all, and to make him a vampire...

But it was such a crime for me to take the last bit of his humanity. No, it was a crime for me to attack him in the first place. He was but a 24 year old human, possibly with a girlfriend, a career, and a life to live when I made him what he was.

Unlike myself. I’d never had what all these humans around me had.

A life to live...

No, Mikael was my life.

Not the cold, hard streets which I grew up on.

Not Serena, the bitch who used me for years before finally taking my mortal life.

Not Chris, the corrupted son-of-a-bitch who taught me to lie, and cheat, and play games.

No, Mikael is my life. My partner. My lover. Perhaps, my greatest enemy. And yet, since the time I offered him my companionship to now, I’ve wanted him to need me. Forced him to love me.

I couldn’t let him leave. Not back then and not now.

No, he must know my true emotions for him. He must be given the opportunity to make his own choices.

And if he chooses to leave me of his own accord, I...

As I came around the corner of a local bar, I heard the familiar drone of his voice echoing against the wind. There he was, casually shooting-the-breeze with a local woman. That really wasn’t like Mikael at all.

When we had haunted the land together before, I was the one who usually picked up our victims. Now, he was smiling and seemingly at ease with it.

Maybe he was just a natural at it, now. He had changed after all these years. Without me, he learned to live this dreadful immortality all on his own.

Maybe Dregan was right, Mikael didn’t need me.

... I would die alone.