Cascade

I had forgotten my greatest love, my greatest fear and my greatest adventure.

Suburban motherhood contains very little in the way of adventure or fear and ours is a different kind of love, and that had been my life for a decade: take the children to school, drive to work at Victim Support, drive home via Tesco, make dinner, put the kids to bed… then repeat. And repeat, and repeat. It’s not a bad life, if you love your children and have a worthwhile job, especially after you leave your controlling, boring husband.

From before, prior to that decade on the family-work axis, I actually remember very little of my life. One fine March morning I had woken to reality in a hospital bed, bloody and battered and weak and completely amnesiac. Over time, I had regained memories of my childhood and adolescence spent in another country and had some fleeting impressions of moving to London of my own volition, but any life I may have led in London lay buried under a red fog I called before, a fog I could never shift.

Until now, when a man I knew appeared unannounced in my upstairs office at Victim Support.

I was working late to support a newcomer to the night shift, but he turned out to need hardly any support and in any case my eminently competent colleague also working the lines had him well in hand. I took the opportunity to organise my files and clean my inbox, something that hardly ever happened as evidenced by the piles of written reports and the 2000+ e-mails. I had barely reached item 1406 when the door clicked shut. I schooled the annoyance off my face and glanced up, and my blood froze.

Angelo. His name was Angelo, and he was from before.

That wasn't all, though - he was also a vampire.

I think my world stopped for a full minute in that realisation: that I knew vampires were real. Not storybook draculas or edwards or lestats, not emo superheroes, not invariably even heartless, loveless monsters preying on their once-fellow humans - just vampires, as varied a bunch of ageless narcissistic sanguivores as your heart could desire.

I must have stared at Angelo the whole time but he never even flinched, just gazed at me with hazel eyes from below dark eyebrows, still as ridiculously handsome as he had been two decades before. (And how disorienting it felt to remember that far back! Like suddenly acquiring x-ray vision and being able to see through previously impermeable walls.) Tonight his curling chestnut hair was tied back with a ribbon, giving him what I imagined to be something like his original air of 18th century Italian gentleman. All he needed was one of those collared jackets and tight trousers.

That thought reminded me of another. My face heated and this time my heart turned over in my chest. I swallowed through a sandpaper throat.

"Go away," I said and turned to the window.

Angelo sat down on my desk (my visitor chair had been appropriated weeks ago and never replaced).

"I'm sorry to intrude on your important work," he said. He still had that Italian accent and that singer's voice that befit his name. I had heard him sing--impossible that I should have forgotten that, but I had. "But I have no one else to turn to." He paused. "You see... Maria has gone missing."