In the early hours of Monday morning Mina stepped on the scales to find that she had broken fifteen-seven for the first time in three years, going in the right direction.
She knew that she couldn't expect to continue to shed weight at more than a pound a day for very long, but she calculated that she could reasonably expect to be below fourteen stone by the end of April and below twelve by the end of June. Come Hallowe'en, she might be the woman of her dreams: not an ounce over nine stone and fit as a flea.
Mina had never contemplated the future in any frame of mind but abject horror, but now she found herself wondering about various matters. When would she no longer be big enough to feed two hungry vampires? Would she have to choose between Marcian and Szandor, or would they settle her fate between themselves? How long could a sap continue to feed a single vampire, if she made every possible effort to maximize her blood-production?
One Friday when she wasn't due at the After Dark, Mina asked Lucy Stanwere if they could meet up for a drink. Lucy looked her up and down, as if trying to decide whether Mina had lost sufficient weight to be fit company in a sap-filled wine-bar, but eventually nodded.
"Let's have dinner," she said. "Do you know the Arlequino Andante in Marylebone High Street?"
Mina promised to find it, and to meet Lucy there at eight.
"I've been meaning to have a chat to find out you were getting along," Lucy said, when they'd ordered, "but you know how it is. It's obviously working. Happy?"
"Never happier," Mina assured her. "I've been wondering about a few things, though. I don't like to trouble Marcian with too much chat while he's drinking."
"Oh, Marcy wouldn't mind. He's a real chatterbox by comparison with my Otto. What is it? The not-going-out-in-daylight business?"
"That too," Mina admitted, although it had not been among the items preying on her mind.
"They don't catch fire and shrivel up or anything Hammery like that," Lucy told her. "It's just a matter of habit. Evolution designed them as nocturnal hunters, like most other vampiric species - bats, bedbugs, etc - but they're adaptable. They could give it up if they wanted to, but they don't."
That prompted Mina to think of another question. "If natural selection gave them such long lives," she said, "why did we poor saps get stuck with seventy years?"
"An accident of mutation - we poor saps never got the one that freed the ultras from the burden of ageing. One side-effect is that they reproduce very slowly."
"That's convenient, though," Mina pointed out. "Necessary, even. If they multiplied too rapidly, they'd run out of food - unless, of course... "
"No," Lucy said, "it has to be human blood; no other species will do. That's okay by me; I wouldn't want my Otto looking lovingly at a sheep or a horse. The Parma ham's good, isn't it? Nice texture."
Mina found the ham a trifle too chewy, but she didn't say so. "Have you ever met any vampire women?" she asked.
"No. Marcy says that ultra females are far rarer than males, and very precious. I think they're kept in seclusion - not in harems, because there aren't enough of them, but carefully protected. If there aren't many of them, and they can only give birth once a century or so, I suppose it makes sense."
It wasn't until she was tucking into her veal Marsala that Mina raised the question of where her new relationship might be headed, medium-term-wise.
"Hasn't Marcy told you?" Lucy asked. "Szandor will take you on. His English should be improving - he's doing night-classes as the City Lit. Marcy's the fixer for the entire London community, but he'll drop in occasionally to see how things are going when Szandor starts home visits. I'm glad we no longer live in an era when lifelong spinsters who entertain mysterious strangers by night were automatically assumed to be consorting with the devil, aren't you?"
"Yes," Mina agreed. "When you say lifelong...?"
"Don't worry about that," Lucy said. "If you're worried about it, just think about the alternative!"
Mina was still the right side of thirty; that didn't seem too high a price to pay for years of slenderness. She summoned up the courage to ask whether Lucy had sap boyfriends as well as Otto.
"I had a few, when I still wanted to catch up on all the stuff I thought I'd missed out on," Lucy admitted, frankly. "It didn't take long to realise that I hadn't missed anything worth having. Once you've got a vampire, you've got everything you need."
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The names attributed to the two heroines are a small homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula, which also features victims of vampiric predation named Lucy and Mina. Marcian and Szandor are named for the two vampires whose legend is recounted in Paul Fe[a]val's The Vampire Countess.
The comedy is broader than most of my works in this vein, but it remains conscientiously dark. Like Mephistopheles in Dr Faustus , I tend to the opinion that Hell isn't a fiery pit that requires portals through which to send demons to afflict us; it remains where it has always been, in the worst of the desires and impulses that direct our lives.
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