"We could all use a distraction," Ildar said, coming to Lisa's aid. "Since things turned out this way, why don't we have a picnic at the glamping site? What do you say?"
"Oh!" Yesenia exclaimed. "What if we go to the fire pit? I know a spot in the woods near our street. There's a proper fire bowl there. I don't think it's used much; probably no one will mind if we take it."
"Great idea," Lisa nodded. "We'll warm up and still stay close to the houses. I really don't want to drive anywhere else after what happened."
"I might have a drink too," Ildar added. "But I doubt there's anything to find out here in this hole."
"I can only bring coffee," Lisa shrugged, offering a feasible alternative. "We brought some decent beans from Moscow."
"Coffee before bed after all that adrenaline is a straight ticket to a sleepless night," I muttered, staying silent while the others chattered and made plans for the evening. Ordinary conversation for ordinary people. And it made me angry.
At any other time, I would have joined them easily enough, but now everything felt wrong. Every word sounded like a staged performance, as if I were watching actors trying to convince me that the world around us was, in fact, real life.
Had Lisa been drawn into some kind of cult, and I'd failed to notice, which explained why she drank blood so willingly? No. If that were the case, there would have been other signs. And it still didn't explain the impossibly long, sharp fangs—or the bus incident. My mind was slowly unraveling, turning over every way to undo the events, to forget them, as if they had never happened, and to return to that vacation I had envisioned in my head: warm, happy, filled with Lisa's laughter.
But instead, the image kept returning—ugly and relentless—of my beloved in a summer dress with thin straps, exhausted, sitting on the asphalt, and without hesitation taking someone else's hand—his hand—and not for support.
The word burned through my mind like a searing flame: killer. If Lisa truly was a being that defied rational explanation, then her survival depended entirely on the blood of others.
Had I really seen the true Lisa for the first time? Seen her and been unable to accept it? I felt ready to scold myself for even thinking it.
I wanted to reach for my therapist, to confess, but I restrained myself. How ridiculous would I look, walking into a session and pouring out this mess—already layered thick in my mind with fear, sealed like a registered letter awaiting delivery? A letter in which ordinary Mark had stumbled headfirst into chaos, terrified of becoming one of the countless missing. She would never do that to me, right? I wanted to believe it.
"Hey, Mark," Ildar's voice cut through the whirlpool of my thoughts, merciless and abrupt. "What do you think of the plan? You've gone silent."
"Yeah, yeah, it's fine," I muttered mechanically, careful not to raise suspicion. "I just need to grab a shower and change my T-shirt. The bus incident really drained me."
"Of course," Ildar replied immediately. "No problem. How about we meet in half an hour at your place? We can take Svetozar out for a quick walk and feed him."
"Sounds good," Lisa agreed.
The car pulled up in front of the house we had rented. We exchanged brief farewells with the others, and Lisa hurried inside. I let her go ahead, unwilling to lose sight of her even for a second, but she seemed perfectly normal, moving with her usual ease.
"You don't mind if I take a quick shower first?" she asked.
"No, of course not. Just… don't linger in the tub, or we'll never make it in half an hour," I warned, fully aware of how easily she could lose herself in water.
She nodded cheerfully and disappeared behind the bathroom door. The lock clicked sharply.
If it were up to me, I would have stayed outside, waiting, but that would have looked suspicious. I needed to calm down, use this brief solitude to plan, to figure out how to bring the others into the open without leaving any doubt. Madness had one drawback: you never knew where its boundaries ended. I didn't consider myself insane, but I feared I was spiraling, feeding on the natural shock any human would feel in such circumstances.
My eyes landed on Lisa's bag, and I noticed the laptop peeking out.
The shower ran behind the door. Well, at least I'd be able to tell when she finished by the sound of the water—and put the laptop back where it belonged. I lowered myself to the floor, pulled it from the bag, and opened it on my knees. The system woke as soon as I lifted the lid, and the first thing I saw was a pristine white page in a text editor. Lisa had really done a thorough job: not a single line of text remained. Strange—I clearly remembered that there had been about ten pages just that morning.
I closed the file, opened the browser in incognito mode—which immediately erased all traces of my searches—and began hunting for anything that could help me. I started by looking for detailed information about what vampires were supposed to be: what they feared, how they lived, how one could expose them. But useful articles were scarce. Most of what I stumbled upon were fan forums, people debating whether vampires could exist in reality.
One user mocked the very idea, pointing out that a dead body is, by definition, immobile, and that all the romanticized scenes in gothic novels—lovemaking with pale, impossibly beautiful creatures with long black hair—were absurd. Where would a corpse find an erection? Or any functioning organs at all?
I found another user's theory far more intriguing. She suggested that vampires live on borrowed life: as long as blood flows through their veins, it sustains them, powering their bodies—and their most pleasurable faculties. While a vampire is even slightly sated, they can do anything. Even make love.
That explanation fit within the realm of possibility—if one ignored the glaring questions of biochemistry, the absence of aging, and so much else. Of course, no authoritative research, no peer-reviewed articles, no experiments or conclusions existed. If such knowledge did exist, it was surely confined to a narrow circle with classified access. Even now, I could barely imagine it. God, I couldn't believe that I was seriously searching the internet for this kind of thing!
But time was slipping away, wasted. I changed tactics, recalling the dates of Lisa's events and scouring hashtags for news about missing persons on those days—or any brief reports of unusual incidents near the locations where she met her readers. At first, nothing stood out: a drunken fight in central Moscow, a few tow trucks hauling away cars parked irresponsibly. Foolish acts always made it into local newspapers in short, forgettable blurbs.
After several fruitless searches, frustration mounting at the loud but utterly banal headlines of the yellow press, I finally found a needle in the haystack. After one of her book presentations, a girl around Lisa's age went missing. I dug deeper and found a photograph on social media: a bright, lively girl with crimson hair, even posting a selfie with Lisa. The sweet caption revealed how much that encounter with her idol had meant. The girl was writing her first novel, sharing quotes and excerpts on her page, while friends and followers flooded her posts with comments about how much they wanted to hold her book, hoping she would get published soon.
I ran the girl's face through a reverse image search and combed other articles mentioning her. By the third page, I had learned her tragic fate. She had become known—but not in the way she had dreamed. Her smiling face stared back from a small news article: a week after her disappearance, her body was found in Mytishchi, drained of blood and horribly mutilated. How she had ended up there, no relatives, friends, or investigators could explain. Beneath the short article, framed in red, a bold contact number offered a reward to anyone with information about her last days.
Drained of blood. Could it really be her blood on the lining of Lisa's jacket? One thing fit neatly into the other.
I was horrified by myself. Only recently, I had seen nothing in Lisa but light—tenderness, warmth, something fragile and pure. And yet, in a single moment, my image of the woman I loved, the woman I wanted to protect more than anything in the world, had been turned upside down. I believed the worst with unsettling ease. I didn't even try to defend her in my own mind. What frightened me most was that I couldn't understand why I kept postponing the moment of truth, pushing it off into some vague, abstract "later."
Maybe I should have talked to her right now. Asked her directly. Looked her in the eye and listened to what she would say.
But I was afraid. Afraid to hear confirmation from her own lips and to change everything forever. For some reason, it felt as though cornering Lisa one-on-one might turn me into yet another missing person.
I tried searching for our acquaintances from the glamping park online, but there was too little information. I only knew their first names and roughly where they were from. That path led nowhere. I considered contacting the owner of the glamping site to find out their surnames, but I doubted the elderly woman—so fiercely devoted to privacy—would willingly share information about her guests.
That was when a brilliant idea struck me. What if I pretended I wanted to congratulate the future newlyweds and arrange, say, a flower delivery? Without additional details, that would be nearly impossible—and the owner, conveniently, was aware of Ildar's plans. I justified the deception by telling myself that even a scrap of information could lead to more. And who knew—perhaps Ildar had a few dark stories of his own. Stories that could steer the conversation in the right direction and force the two vampires to explain themselves.
It could work.
It had to work.