Find the Vampire To Win

A dark fantasy short story

(image credit: VGstockstudio/Shutterstock)

Adrian Moreau glared at the woman who was wasting his time. She seemed out of place at a black-tie affair. Her dress was long enough to be a ball gown, but it was stark white, with no sign of unique style. Not designer, certainly. Truth be told, it almost looked as if it had been made from a bed sheet.

The woman who wore it was no more distinctive. Her straight brown hair lacked luster. Her brown eyes looked dull. Her face was plain and, as far as he could tell, without a trace of makeup. Had he passed her on the street, he certainly wouldn’t have noticed her.

He wouldn’t have noticed her tonight, either, except that she was blocking his way into the private club where the party was.

“I don’t think you realize what you’re getting into,” she said. “Vampires have to kill to survive. Kill people, I mean. Is that really what you want?”

He had been just about to shove his way past her, but her last statement caught his attention. If she wasn’t connected to the party, how could she possibly know about vampirism?

“What are you talking about?” he said, trying to sound angry, though he was more nervous than anything else. She couldn’t know, surely. It was just an odd coincidence that she’d mentioned the undead.

She looked him straight in the eye, but her expression showed no sign that she had noticed his good looks. There wasn’t even the ghost of a smile on her lips.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. “No one comes to this particular party unless they know.”

“Get out of my way,” he said. He wanted to shout but worried that the party’s host might not appreciate someone making a scene right outside his door. “I don’t have to listen to you.”

“Unfortunately, you’re right,” said the woman. Much to his surprise, she stepped aside, looked at him again, and sighed loudly. “But before the night is over, you will wish you did listen.”

“Whatever,” Adrian said as he opened the door just enough to get through, slid past her, and closed it just in case she thought of following him.

The parking lot had been so brightly lit that the club interior seemed dim at first, but his eyes quickly adjusted. The Ordo Draconum was lit entirely by candlelight tonight, just as he had been told it would be. The one exception was the weird insignia—a red cross, wide as it was tall, outlined in yellow and with yellow flames shooting from its four ends—which glowed in garish neon on the far wall.

Adrian had asked about it the first time he’d been in the club and was told it was the symbol for the Order of the Dragon, a late medieval chivalric order to which Vlad II Dracul, father of Vlad the Impaler, had belonged. Adrian was pretty much certain the club had no real connection with any medieval order, but he could care less about the history. He was goal-oriented. Winning tonight’s game and collecting the prize was all that concerned him at the moment.

Since he’d been told a party would be used as the setting for the game, he was expecting music, but not the kind that was playing—an organ arrangement of Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor. However famous the piece was, no one could possibly dance to it. Then again, the game was no dance contest.

He could see a number of people in formal attire at the bar, in the booths, and just milling around, sipping cocktails and making small talk. But it was the woman coming toward him that captured his attention.

She looked like a model, and as she walked, he could easily visualize her on stage at a fashion show. She had the walk down perfectly, and her heels clicked rhythmically on the floor tiles, making their own music. Her long, black hair sparkled in the candlelight. He wasn’t sure, but he thought her eyes were violet, that rarest of shades.

“Mr. Moreau, I’m so glad you could make it,” she said, extending a delicate hand for him to shake. Her nail polish matched her dress, and her hand was the softest he’d ever touched. It was also slightly moist, perhaps from holding a drink glass.

She wore an odd wristlet on her right wrist. The flowers were small, pink, five-petaled blossoms that looked like roses, though some of the petals could have passed for those of a daisy.

Noticing his glance, she said, “I had to special order this from the florist. It’s made from sweet briar. It is said that after being cast out of heaven, Satan tried to climb back using a ladder made from sweet briar thorns.”

Adrian didn’t quite no what to make of that odd piece of trivia, so he just smiled and nodded.

“Nervous?” she asked.

“A little,” he admitted. She was smiling at him, but in the same way a receptionist might. That was odd, considering that he knew perfectly well that he was handsome. His tuxedo made it more difficult to see his well-muscled build, but even in the dim light, she should be able to see his long, blond curls, his tan, his blue eyes, his face that was as model perfect as hers. No woman had ever been unimpressed before.

Unless he counted the weirdo who was probably lurking just outside the door.

“There’s nothing to be nervous about,” said the woman.

“I didn’t catch your name,” Adrian said.

“Delilah,” she replied. “Did you bring the entry fee?”

Adrian handed her the briefcase with five million in cash inside. To his surprise, she took it without counting the money or even opening the case.

“Just to make sure you understand the rules, you have until midnight to identify the vampire among us. Succeed, and the vampire will make you a vampire yourself, with all the perks that come with it. Fail, and you will have no further chances.”

“Perks like immortality,” said Adrian.

“Of course,” said Delilah, her smile broadening.

Adrian nodded vigorously. It was fitting that his perfect face and body would be preserved forever.

“Good luck to you, Mr. Moreau,” she said, picking up the case and walking away with it. The view alone made it almost worth parting with the five million.

He could rule out Delilah herself as the vampire. Her hand should have been much colder. But there were at least fifty other people in the room to choose from. He scanned the possibilities as he sauntered over to the bar, where he ordered the Romanian equivalent of a Tequila Sunrise—vodka, grenadine, and orange juice, garnished with an orange slice.

“I’ve got to enjoy my sunrises while I can,” he said as he paid the bartender, who didn’t seem to get the joke. But maybe the bartender didn’t know what was going on. He certainly wasn’t the vampire himself. A dark tan ruled him out.

Or did it? Adrian had a tan. Would he lose it after the change? He wasn’t certain.

However, the bar was the best lit place in the club, with enough candles to be a fire hazard. The bartender wouldn’t have needed so much light to mix drinks by if he’d been a vampire. Adrian tentatively crossed him off the list.

By now, Tocatta and Fugue had ended…to be replaced by the theme from John Carpenter’s Halloween. So far, the playlist seemed a bit too on-the-nose, but the game wasn’t about music appreciation, either.

Sipping his drink, Adrian made his way gradually around the room, shaking hands to test skin temperature, checking faces for signs of pallor, checking eyes to watch how the pupils responded to variations in light.

After half an hour, Adrian had made his introductions and was no closer to discovering the vampire than when he came into the club. He began to suspect that the use of candlelight was a deliberate attempt to thwart using visual cues to pick out the vampire. It was also hard to miss the fact that all of the guests, both male and female, wore gloves, which made testing skin temperature much more complicated.

Adrian walked over to the bar and ordered a Bloody Mary. He didn’t attempt to joke with the bartender this time. He wasn’t in the mood.

The sounds of Liszt’s Totentanz (Dance of the Dead) playing in the background did nothing to lift his spirits, though watching some of the guests dancing to it cheered him up a little. They all seemed to move with an unearthly grace, even to music that didn’t have anything like a dance rhythm. A vampire might be able to move that way—but too many of them were doing it. It was impossible to pick out one vampire in a room where everyone seemed vampiric.

Adrian glanced down at his drink, wondering for a moment if he had been drugged. Hallucination might explain what he was seeing, but he felt perfectly fine. The club could have hired professional dancers. Yeah, that had to be it. Carefully choreographed ballet dancers could have managed something like this performance easily enough.

He had some garlic in a plastic bag in his right pants pocket, but he didn’t have enough to sprinkle it indiscriminately on everyone. He also had a battery-operated UV unit in his left jacket pocket, but he feared shining UV light on a vampire might produce an angry response. He didn’t think it was a violation of the rules, but he wouldn’t be able to justify himself very easily if his throat had already been ripped out.

He hadn’t asked, but he guessed that he was the only competitor. Nobody else was mingling all around the room. People paid attention mostly to whoever they’d come in with, and that was about it.

Except they were all eyeing him now. At first, he’d though he might be imagining it, but now, they weren’t even trying to hide their interest. Those guests who had a line of sight to him, even the dancers, tracked his every move—rather like a predators sizing up their prey.

They all knew what the game was. Yeah, that was it. They all knew, and they were playing along, acting like vampires so that he’d have a harder time picking the real one.

But why was his heart beating a little too fast? He couldn’t say. Bartóks Transylvanian Dances, which was now playing, sounded more festive than the earlier selections. Maybe that was causing his heart rate to pick up, though as the music progressed, it varied considerably in tempo.

That didn’t seem to deter the dancing guests, who moved flawlessly, almost hypnotically, to the music, regardless of the tempo.

He glanced at his watch and was horrified to see how close to midnight it was. Had he really been here two hours? He could swear it was forty-five minutes at the very most.

If he didn’t want to waste his five million, he had to try a higher risk strategy. He pulled a cross out of his pocket and adjusted the chain until the cross hung just beneath his bow tie—impossible for anyone looking at him to miss.

He walked slowly through the club, chatting with people as if there was absolutely nothing strange about wearing a cross over a tuxedo in a dark night club. Everyone noticed it. Sometimes, he could even see the gleam of the cross reflected in their eyes. But no one said a word about it.

More to the point, no one flinched away from it—not even a little bit.

He started sweating as he came close to running out of people. He also became suspicious. Was there really a vampire here? What if the whole thing was some kind of con? He’d been shown evidence of the existence of vampires, but even if it was all true, that didn’t prove the club actually had a vampire. What could he have been thinking to have spent five million on something like this?

Delilah smiled and winked at him as he ran out of people to flash the cross at. By now, it was clear that the smile was mocking.

With only ten minutes left, Adrian visited the men’s room and stared at his frantic face in the mirror.

The mirror. Vampires didn’t have reflections. That was the one thing he hadn’t tried.

Adrian smashed his fist into the mirror several times, heedless of the cuts on his knuckles. They wouldn’t matter once he was transformed. Eventually, the glass shattered, though it took much longer than he expected, and he was able to retrieve a large shard.

The prelude to Copland’s Grogh, a ballet inspired by Nosferatu, was playing as he walked out of the restroom. Gripping his glass shard, blood dripping from both hands, he must have looked suspicious, to say the least—someone who had finally snapped and was now preparing for mass murder. Yet the guests, their eyes still on him, seemed oblivious to the change.

He had expected that someone—the bartender or perhaps Delilah—would object, but no one did. There wasn’t any sign of Delilah as he walked around the club, shoving the shattered mirror fragment in people’s faces.

He had also expected that someone might object to that, but everyone just stared at him, usually without expression. A few of them smiled. None of them had fangs, but he knew those were retractable.

As Adrian continued his trek through the club, Adrian noticed some of the guests sniffing or flaring their nostrils—smelling his blood, or pretending to. The problem was that more and more of them did that as time ran out, leaving him without a clue.

He was positive he hadn’t heard anything at eleven, but at midnight, when the music stopped abruptly, and the dancers halted, he heard a clock chiming loudly.

Delilah popped out of the shadows as if summoned by the sound. “I’m so sorry, Adrian, but time’s up.”

“You cheated me!” yelled Adrian, waving his glass shard around. “There’s no vampire here!” He was so angry that he hardly noticed the music had started again. Nor did he recognize that the theme from Jaws was playing.

Delilah smiled, and for a moment, he could have sworn he saw fangs. Then her teeth appeared normal. “Actually, we’re all vampires here. Easiest game in the world. All you had to do was pick any one of us.”

“But we shook hands when I came in,” said Adrian, his voice both quieter and shakier. Had he really seen fangs in Delilah’s mouth? “Your hands were warm.”

“I ran hot water over my hands right before you came in,” she said.

“But you all have reflections!” he protested, though it occurred to him he hadn’t checked Delilah for one.

She took a step closer. “You really should have done more research. Vampires show no reflection in mirrors backed with silver. But these days, most mirrors get their reflective qualities from an aluminum coating.”

Adrian became uncomfortably conscious of people all around him inching out of their booths or, if they were standing, positioning themselves so that he was completely surrounded.

“But…but the cross!” he said. His heart was beating far too fast. His hearing was playing tricks on him. He thought he could hear his blood dripping on the floor tile.

“That only works if you have faith,” said Delilah, taking another step toward him. “Funny thing—people with genuine faith wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

Adrian was having difficulty breathing. He felt as if fright had frozen his lungs.

“Uh…um…I’ll just be going, then,” he said. He would have stepped back, but there was no place to step. “I’ll pay for the mirror.”

Delilah sook her head. “Oh, Adrian, you’ve already forgotten the rules! Remember the last part—you will have no further chances.”

Adrian’s heart was pounding so hard that, under normal circumstances, he might have thought he was having a heart attack. “But…but that means no further chances at immortality…right?”

“Silly boy!” said Delilah. “It means no further chances at anything at all. You really should have asked if you weren’t sure you understood.”

“I have more money!” said Adrian as tears ran down his cheeks. “Lots of money!”

“We already have lots of money,” said Delilah, taking the final step to position herself right in front of him. “We bring in five million a week just from this kind of party. No, what we really need is food. And it’s so much easier when we can…order in.”

She smiled again, and in the moment before her fangs reappeared, the candles lit her just right. Adrian thought she looked like an angel.

Of course, she was no angel. Too late, Adrian realized that the woman who tried to stop him from coming in was the real angel. Fear shattered his mind as completely as he had shattered the mirror, and he saw that woman transformed, surrounded by light, shaking her head sadly.

“If only you had listened,” she whispered to him.

Adrian could still see her in his imagination when he felt Delilah’s fangs sink into his neck, and the others rushed forward to claim their share of his blood.