The morning sun was warm against my skin as I walked toward the main building. I had to keep my pace steady—my legs kept wanting to move faster. There wasn't a soul in sight. Or at least, it seemed that way. Still, I tried not to take unnecessary risks, no matter how tempting the quiet freedom felt.
Passing the other rental cabins, I listened closely. My first impression—that the glamping park was suspiciously empty—quickly dissolved. From inside the houses came all the familiar morning sounds people wrap themselves in: breakfast sizzling on hot oil, a radio playing softly, a couple's voices murmuring about love. Knowing that there were, in fact, other guests here should have comforted me, should have made this place seem perfectly ordinary—if not for one detail.
That morning, I'd opened the file of my new novel and found text I didn't remember writing.
At first, I thought I'd misread the page count. No one could have written that much overnight. Vampires might move faster than mortals, but our creative drive wasn't any more productive for it. Art depended on skill, yes—but imagination and the time it takes to give it form are equal burdens for humans and immortals alike. We might have the advantage of sleepless nights before a deadline, but strangely enough, so did many of my writer friends. They drowned themselves in coffee just to keep up.
Of course, I could easily picture the perks of being a three-hundred-year-old vampire novelist writing about his youth. No need for fact-checking or consulting historians about a particular century—he'd lived it. He'd watched customs change, cities rise and crumble, time itself evolve before his eyes. And yet, every story still depended on the storyteller's perspective. An author's truth always strays from the one printed in black ink on white paper—in textbooks or on the Internet.
Instead of savoring my first morning in this new place—or the breakfast Mark had cooked—I'd spent the early hours investigating. The only reasonable explanation was that my laptop had been hacked. But who would bother sneaking new text into my unfinished manuscript? The idea was absurd. If someone wanted to swap my book for another, they'd wait until I'd finished writing. And even then, it wouldn't make sense—any substitution would be exposed the moment my editor sent back the revised draft.
Just in case, I checked everything: my bank accounts, personal photos, documents, folder by folder—nothing suspicious. I thought about asking Mark to look into it. As a programmer, he'd notice details I'd probably miss. But my laptop was running perfectly, and there were no fresh gossip pieces about me on fan sites or in the tabloids. If someone had actually hacked my account or cloud storage, my phone would have been ringing off the hook with calls and messages from the clan. Instead, the morning melted away like cream in coffee, filling the new day with sunlight and the forest with birdsong.
Nature was waking, the world was in motion—while I, by vampire standards, was crawling toward the library hall.
And the theory of a hacked file vanished completely the moment I began reading the first page.
Like some cruel joke, the characters in the story had our names—mine and Mark's.
The text on the screen described an ordinary morning between two lovers—a scene I could easily picture, so vivid and intimate were the details, so familiar the tone, the gestures, the feelings. As Mark set a plate of breakfast in front of me, I glanced back at the laptop and froze. The words on the page now described a bug-eyed breakfast with bacon ribbons and a grotesque grin of ketchup. Both Marks—mine and the one in the story—had made the exact same breakfast for their women, each equally lacking in artistic flair, their triangular-toothed smiles far too unnerving to be called charming.
I had thought, last night, about starting a story about a couple like us. But naming the heroine after myself? That was too much, even for my ego. I'd only worked for a couple of hours at best, writing a few clumsy, sparkless pages—just enough to lay a foundation. The first chapters always went through endless rewrites anyway, crafted and recrafted to keep the reader hooked from the very first line. Convinced the words weren't coming, I'd finally given up and gone to take a bath.
Taking a bath—that was my signature trick, my way of quietly quenching my thirst under Mark's nose. Back home, I'd announce loudly that I was running a bubble bath and planned to read for a while, and then I could indulge myself in peace for as long as I needed, without Mark suspecting a thing. The habit had slipped seamlessly into our life together. Even on this trip, I'd packed a few bath bombs, rose and orange essential oils—props to maintain the illusion.
The only real challenge was bringing blood to the glamping site.
In our Moscow apartment, I'd solved the storage problem with a small renovation. Behind the decorative wall paneling—tiled to match the rest of the room—was a hidden refrigerator compartment. Press the right spot firmly enough, and a cold stash of donor blood would reveal itself. I never had to smuggle the bags in myself; the cleaning company employed by the clan handled it for me. For them, dusting the furniture and slipping in a few blood packs was child's play—certainly easier than some of their other assignments.
Few vampires truly enjoyed feeding from a cold bag. For those like me, the heat of life fading on the tongue, the rush of adrenaline from the hunt—it all felt like an essential, rightful part of existence. A natural order of things that didn't need to be changed. And sometimes, after feeding, vampires left behind a trail of bodies, blood, and ruin. That was what the cleaning teams were for.
But after Mark entered my life, I'd started relying more and more on donor blood. I was afraid that one night the hunt's frenzy would overpower me—and that Mark's neck might be too near to resist. Most humans still seemed like prey to me. Parasites who only consumed, giving nothing in return. No matter their hair color, their eyes, or their skin, beneath it all they were the same: sacks of blood. Food for a predator like me.
Mark was different. He stood a step above the rest, somehow—morally, spiritually. It was his boundless kindness, his empathy. He wanted to see good in everyone, and inevitably, he did. Even in the monster he shared his bed with.
Donor blood kept me sated, as much as it could. But no matter how much I drank in advance, the hunger always returned, steady as the tide. Control was an illusion. Sooner or later, nature always claimed what was hers.