“Vampires kill,” John Mitchell said with a frown, “but at least we have a conscience about it. And we do it by design, never by accident.”

“Oh, really? What of Lauren, then?”

George Sands stood up from the sofa and took several steps until he put himself quite close to Mitchell, who twitched his nose and half-turned away.

“Lauren’s death came about from your passion,” George argued. “You didn’t plan to kill her. It just happened--which means that makes it an accident, doesn‘t it?”

Both Mitchell and George broke off their conversation for a moment, each one retreating to a different area of the living room and pacing about as they tried to get control of their emotions.

George linked his hands around the back of his head and squeezed his elbows together, narrowing his field of vision as he stared at the floor and moved in a slow circle. Mitchell kept half-turned away from George as he walked back and forth in a straight line, his gaze alternating between the colorful panels that blotted out the windows of their flat and the wallpaper opposite.

Over the past few minutes, their voices had begun to grow louder, and the conversation more intense, as neither man backed down from the topic at hand and gave ground to the other‘s views. Up until that point, their lives together had been a typical Thursday night, with the three of them--George, Mitchell and Annie--staked out in front of the television, They’d drifted casually from one subject to another, integrating the evening news into their chat.

Following the story of a woman killed by her ex-boyfriend in Essex, Annie brought up Gilbert‘s name. Gilbert, a departed spirit that Mitchell had introduced to her one night at a local club, had passed in 1985; he’d told her when they’d met that he didn’t eat meat (a bit of a ridiculous statement, really, as a ghost couldn’t eat or drink anything). Annie nodded at the TV screen, which showed a man being taken into custody by the Essex Police.

“’Death for no reason is murder,’ Gilbert told me.” Annie plucked at the sleeve of her shirt. “It‘s horrific, dying at the hands of someone who says he loves you. Like what Owen did to me. I mean, how does one kill, anyway?” she asked, as she turned her curious gaze towards Mitchell and George.

From that point, the calm together-time evening had disintegrated into a who‘s-worse conversation when it came to killing people, vampires versus werewolves…

Mitchell wiped at his mouth as he tried to replay the conversation in his head and to backtrack to where it had all gone wrong, but his emotions choked off all logical thought. Finally, he glanced over at Annie, who sat curled up and forlorn-looking on the floor, uncomfortable over the argument going on between her flat mates and clearly upset of her small, innocent contribution to the turn of events.

For her sake, at least, Mitchell told himself, don’t go flying off the handle at George.

“We are all animals, in a way,” Mitchell began again, desperate to try and defuse the situation. The two men stopped their pacing and faced one another again. “Humans, vampires, werewolves,” Mitchell continued. “We’ve all got some animalistic drives in us that make us do things we wouldn’t normally do. Perhaps,” he conceded, “I misspoke when I said that my kind bring death by design. I’m just saying that I do have more control over it than you do. The blood lust that we live with is quite overpowering at times and, yes, that causes unwarranted casualties.”

George, still keyed up, fixed him with a glare. “More control? You call what you did to Lauren having ‘more control’, eh? Bollocks! And you said that I… that werewolves… kill mindlessly? I’ve never killed mindlessly. As a matter of fact, I’ve killed a person only once, and that was Herrick.” His look changed to one of derision. “We both know that you can’t boast such a record.”

“So what of the deer,” he challenged George as his temper flared up again, “and the squirrels and the rabbits and the stoats? They don’t count because they’re lesser creatures? That was still killing. And that was you, that was the wolf, acting instinctively.” He took a step forward. “And without… a… conscience.”

“And without a memory of it,” George countered. “It was not something that I knew happened. The wolf was hungry, the wolf killed--”

“YOU killed, George!” Mitchell’s tenuous self-control snapped. He waved his arms in the air in frustration. “My God, d’you think I don’t know anything about your condition? That I don’t know that, even after the transformation, it’s still you in there? You claim to have memory blackouts, but we both know that’s not the case--”

“It IS!“ he screeched, his face red and his eyes wide as he grasped the meaning behind Mitchell‘s words. “I have no memory whatsoever when it happens!”

“No.” Mitchell’s voice grew quiet and his face set like stone. “You’ve said that time and again, but I know better.”

George’s mouth trembled. “It’s a lie…”

“At best,” Mitchell continued in a monotone, “from time to time, it is all a blank to you. I know that. Sometimes you have no recollection of what takes place in your werewolf state. But other times? Hell, you’ve said it yourself, that it’s all like a dream. There’s the agonizing pain of transformation, then your consciousness go blank… and then you come back to yourself, don’t you? Just a little bit at a time…” He cocked his head and took another step forward. “Just as the wolf creeps in on you during your human state, so do you awaken within the wolf, to feel its power, to let it take you on its wild journey. And you revel in it--”

“Stop it!”

George backed away and dropped back down into his seat, one hand on his stomach as he grew pale. His body gave a violent, involuntary shake and he leaned his head back against the sofa. “I-- I don’t like to think about things like that. Nothing is within my control when I transform.”

“Because you don’t want it in your control any more than you want to remember what‘s happened.” Mitchell hovered over him. “But you’re wrong, you know. The beast is within your power. Why do you think you’ve gone so long without killing a human being? Because you, George, have kept the animal from doing such harm. There’s enough of you in there--”

“And what of you?” George retorted. “Mister Vampire, the elegant creature of the night.” With some effort, he cast aside his nausea and stood up again, putting himself face-to-face with Mitchell. “Where’s your control at? You go on the wagon, you go off the wagon. You find victims and invite them on dates… and then it’s Russian Roulette at that point, innit? Will they live or will they die?” He sneered at Mitchell. “At least with the wolf, I know where I stand. You’re your own worst enemy--fully aware of everything that you‘re doing as you‘re doing it, and yet letting it go on even when you know what the outcome will be.”

Mitchell trembled under the truth of George’s words.

“Even if you weren‘t a vampire,” George finished, “you‘d be a *****, shagging everything in sight just to satisfy another desire, walking around, smelling of it--”

“SMELL?!?”

With a sudden screech, Mitchell aimed both hands at George’s chest and shoved George away from him. George stumbled back, gasping as the sudden, unexpected and incredibly powerful blow pushed the air out of his lungs. He dropped to one knee as he fought to get his wind back.

“What do you know of smell?” Mitchell raged. “You smell! The wolf smells! You stink to me, George. From the first night we met, your scent has struck me as being downright putrid. You have no idea the amount of nausea that just being in the same room with you brings me.” He bent over George and grabbed him by the back of the neck. “But I’ve kept that under control, haven’t I? Not a word of complaint. And here, you had no idea how much the mere scent of your cursed blood offends me!”

With a swift upward movement of his arm, George swiped at Mitchell and drove him back with a sound smack. Mitchell swore and curled one hand around his lower jaw.

“And what of your blood, then?” George retaliated. “You think I can’t smell you and what you carry? The darkness, the death? My blood may be cursed, but at least it’s alive. Yours has centuries of memory in it, everything that those before you have experienced… pestilence, plague… vampires before you have drank it in and passed it down, and now you…” A quick, angry laugh escaped him. “You’re the most disgusting thing of all. You’re a walking memory of death. No. Worse. You’re the continuation of unnatural death.”

“No, he‘s not,” Annie said in a hollow voice. “But I am.”

The solemn words snapped the tension in the room, and both George and Mitchell turned to look at Annie.

She glanced up at them with a sad expression. “I am unnatural,” she said in a near-whisper, “moreso than even you and Mitchell. At least you two can still feel things. You’ve got blood--however changed it may be--coursing through your veins. You can smell. Eat. Drink. Interact.” She plucked at her shirt again. “You can even do something as simple as change clothes. I can’t. I’ve lost my connection to this world forever. There is nothing more unnatural in this world than being in it but not being a part of it.”

With a hard swallow, Mitchell went to her and knelt down. “But you are a part of it, love,” he said softly. He reached out and stroked her hair. “You were so in life, and you still are.” George slowly brought his right hand up to rub at his left shoulder, the injured shoulder with its never-fading scars. His face, flushed and fierce just moments ago, went pale and concerned as he looked down at her. “Oh, Annie,” he breathed, “don’t say such things. You’re a part of our lives, at the very least.”

“You feel things,” Mitchell added. “Not like you used to, but in different ways. New ways.”

Annie, close to tears, nodded. “But where did we go, Mitchell?” she asked, her voice breaking. “The people we were. Where did we go?”

Mitchell pulled her close, unable to answer. He knew what she meant, and it pained him to think of a response. Sure, in appearance and mannerisms, the three of them hadn’t changed all that much from the way they’d been before… but they had, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And for once, Mitchell felt glad that he couldn’t see himself in a mirror. He didn’t want to look into his own eyes, to see his true age that he knew would be reflected back at him, and to see the dark soul of the creature that he’d become over the decades.

Behind him, George removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes, then turned and headed towards the stairs.

“We’ve had a… long day,” he said slowly. “Best to… put it… behind us.”

“Aye,” Mitchell heard himself respond. Annie, one hand up to her face to hide her tears, nodded in agreement. George paused at the foot of the stairs, put one hand on the banister, and glanced back at his flat mates. For a few moments, his long-forgotten Jewish heritage crept back into his consciousness. He knew that Judaism did not consider anger to be a “bad” trait, only a dangerous one. But misdirected or misused anger, like rage, became a self-serving emotion--it had a destructive, animalistic nature…

The word “nature” in his mind triggered another, fresher memory. “Man is evil, by nature man is a beast…”

George shivered. Those words had been spoken by Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis. The 90-year-old Jewish man had died just the other day, and George had read that sentence in the newspaper. Now, as he looked at Mitchell and Annie, seated on the floor and still holding onto one another, Edelman’s words came back to him.

“We need to be better than man,” George muttered to himself as he turned and slowly marched up the stairs.