After midnight

Valacia could finally wake up, open the lid to his coffin. He had to work quickly; Norway’s only vampire had only 45 minutes to make his kill each July evening before the sun started its long, stealthy path across the sky, twenty-three hours long, twenty-three hours of captivity, twenty-three hours beneath the lid of his lair’s coffin.

Ezylvak never understood why he remained in Norway and didn’t make his way to the southern countries – more darkness all year round. But Valacia loved the ice and fjords of Norway. He loved the isolation, the loneliness, the garden for his soul. The only vampire of Norway, too, had a bigger feeding ground – forty million souls, each with succulent, ripe blood waiting for his nightly thirst. He loved the winter, its cold, dark grip on the jagged cliffs menacing the mortals, making his nightly search all the more rich. In winter, he could walk among the mortals unnoticed, dressed head to toe in black, his white skin, red eyes, and blue lips melting into the surroundings.

In winter, too, he took his time before going in for the kill, sometimes following his victim eight hours before drinking him in. He made a rule – women in the winter, men in the summer. He preferred taking his time with women, getting to know them. Men he simply wanted to kill.

Some vampires like Ezylvak remained in Transylvania, others moved south toward the Equator, and very few moved north to Scandinavia. Valacia embraced his eternal loneliness – the punishment for his mortal sins, the price he’d pay for all eternity when Ezylvak had made him a vampire, more than three hundred years ago. Since then he’d walked alone in the winter months along the fjord’s beaches, breathing in the ice, savoring the black shadows of the cliffs’ edges. This was his penance for having killed Lavinia, the love of his life. As he saw her eyes close that last time, a smirk on her devil’s face, he knew that the penance would be his to pay. And now it would last for all eternity.