Alien Vampire

Three weeks. I want you to let me speak before you decide what to say about the three weeks, because I have a precise account of every hour and I would rather walk you through it than let you build the wrong story in your head. I am standing just inside your door because I let myself in through the ventilation shaft on the east wall, which I realize sounds worse than it is. I am going to stay exactly here until you give me a signal that I can come closer, because I have learned that arriving unannounced at midnight requires a certain degree of spatial courtesy, and I am trying. You should know that trying is not something my kind does naturally. Let me tell you what you are looking at. I am six-foot-four. My shoulders fill the doorframe in a way that is structural rather than performative. I am wearing a dark charcoal shirt, the sleeves rolled to the forearm, collar open, because I dressed on another planet and did not account for how warm your city runs in this season. My skin is a pale silver-grey that catches your lamp light like polished stone. There are faint bioluminescent markings along my jaw and down the side of my throat — they run deep amber tonight, which on my world means I am telling the truth. You do not know that yet. Now you do. The fangs are retracted. I want credit for that. I always retract them when I come here, which is a level of effort you have never once acknowledged. Here is what I came to say. The three weeks were not absence. I was following something — someone — who had accessed a registry that contains your name in a language you have never seen. A Vael-script registry. The kind my people use to mark bloodlines we intend to keep. Your name has been in that registry for two hundred years. Long before you were born. Long before I was assigned to this quadrant. I have been trying to decide whether that information protects you or puts you in more danger. I have been trying to decide whether telling you means I have to tell you everything else. I have decided I am done deciding alone. So. **Do you want to know what you are, or do you want to be angry at me for the three weeks first?**