Another night, another work shift, another threat of violence over the broken ice-cream machine. So far so standard for fast food work in Hull. For now though, it was over, I begrudgingly waved goodbye to the off-yellow strip lights of work without turning around, put my headphones in and turned up my music. I sighed through my nose and started heading home. It was the middle of October so nights were nice and long, the sky was still fairly clear and the air was cool and crisp.

The last bus had gone hours ago, which was the beauty of night shifts, it gave me the chance to stew on the night's work as I trudged back to my flat.

A guy had come in today and demanded a bacon cheeseburger without the bacon, then pitched a fit when he was given a plain cheeseburger. I mean it literally, a full-on toddler screaming tantrum with stamping feet and stopping just short of rolling around on the floor. That about summed up my work. As much as it sucked, it was work and with qualifications like mine, it was about the best I could hope for.

I didn't live that far from the city centre, about 45-minutes walk, but it feels like a whole lot more when you're doing it at 3am. I had made this journey hundreds of time over the last year-and-a-half, so naturally, as soon as I was comfortable and complacent, something went wrong.

A guy on the other side of the silent road crossed over, making a line right for me and I was on edge right away.

“Gimme your phone.” They grunted. It was a man, or boy, rather. Well, a lump of meat really. Barely sixteen years old wearing a cheap off-brand tracksuit with the hood up, a baseball cap underneath concealed his face, he had one hand in the pocket of his jacket and the other one hanging loosely at his side, tucked so his hand was hidden in his sleeve.

By now, I was exhausted from a long and boring day at work, so it didn't occur to me right away that he was trying to rob me.

“What?” Was all I could manage, taking me headphones out and raising an eyebrow at him.

“Gimme your phone.” He repeated, glancing over both shoulders. Once he was confident nobody was around he pulled his hand from his coat pocket and pushed a knife at me. A cheap kitchen knife he had probably bought from the pound-shop that morning.

I gave him a level, steady glare. I wasn't about to be menaced by some random thug on the street. A voice in the back of my head pondered on the last time I had eaten, but then noted that the thug stank, he was carrying more than a few diseases and drugs in his system, and indulging myself wasn't worth the upset stomach.

I should explain that last part. I'm not human. I'm actually kind of a monster. And not in the teenage goth sense, my father is a literal Vampire, which makes me some kind of Dhampyr as I understand it. This gives me a few advantages over 'normal' people, one of which is being able to talk my way out of most situations.

“Don't be stupid, mate.” I added a little extra layer of something into my voice when I spoke, a resonance that would make my words seem that little extra bit appealing to him and help him see things my way. “I don't have anything you want. How about you just go home?”

Normally by this point, they just walk away, mumbling to themselves. So imagine my surprise when that thug snarled some curse word and swung his knife at my side.

There was a sudden scramble of movement between him lunging at me and me trying to shove him back. I couldn't tell you what happened here in any detail because I honestly just don't know. There was a flash of pain somewhere in my side, then everything went red. My whole body went to boiling point and I started swinging my arms like an amateur boxer hopped up on every drug you could name. Somewhere in that chaos, a panicked shriek that was quickly cut off and turned into a choked gurgle.

My vision came back to the scene of the would-be mugger laid in a heap on the cold tarmac, half in the road. The collar of his jacket had been shredded open to reveal his mangled throat, a circle of teeth-marks around his jugular outlined a massive chunk of missing flesh and everything was soaked in blood.

The taste of metal in the back of my throat helped me put together the events and my heart almost stopped when the realisation hit me. I brought my hand up to my mouth and it came away covered in blood, black in the pale orange street-lights. I wasn't scared of blood, I had drunk blood from living humans before. I needed to do it to survive. But that was at drunken parties and nobody had ever been hurt. I had just torn a chunk out of a man and he had been dead before he hit the ground. Why?! Why had I done that?!

I couldn't stay here, if I got caught I would spend the rest of my life in prison. Rational thought was shoved aside and the gorilla part of my brain took over the controls. I ran with all my strength, faster than I thought I could ever be capable of, and didn't even slow down until I reached home, despite the burning in my throat and how much I just wanted to curl up into the foetal position and wish it all away.

My flat was a stereotypical inner-city affair, a huge, square U-shape around a central square that liked to pretend it was a garden. All the doors were arranged along a central balcony that faced inwards towards the square with a staircase at either corner. By some small mercy, all the windows on my side of the building seemed to be off. I jammed my key into the locked outer door and wrestled it open, hurling myself up the spiral staircase four steps at a time, the only thing guiding me to my door being muscle memory.

I almost shoulder-barged open the door to my flat. The door opened to an untidy living area with a kitchenette inexpertly squashed into one side, not filthy, just as untidy as you'd expect a bachelor pad to be. Discarded clothes, DVD boxes and snack wrappers flanked a third-hand fabric couch. The highest resolution TV you could get on a tight budget listed slightly forward and to one side on a stand that hadn't quite been put together correctly.

I bumped the couch on my way past and almost headbutt the far wall, stopping just short to make the turn down the hallway that led to the bathroom.

In a single motion, I pushed through the door, slammed and locked it behind me, pulled off my coat and threw myself into the shower, turning on the water. I didn't even notice the icy cold of the water before it slowly transitioned to liveably warm.

The surge of cold made my adrenaline crash and time shifted from impossible speed to agonising stillness as I sat on the floor of the shower with my head in my hands, fully clothed, staring at the blood swirling around the drain and biting back the urge to vomit.

“Mac? You in?” A voice cut through the closed door and sounds of running water, coming to me clear as if the speaker had been standing next to me. It was my flatmate, Jason. In my panic, I hadn't noticed that he wasn't in when I entered.

“Mac?”

“In the shower!”

“Everything okay?” No. No, it wasn’t.

“Yep.”

“Is this blood out here?.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Mac. Open the door.”

I gulped, my breathing turning heavy again and my heart starting to pound even while I tried to control them. I couldn't act as if there was nothing going on now. I didn't know how to hide it if I wanted to and I couldn't risk Jason calling the cops. I hauled myself up to my feet and stumbled over to the door, unlocking it and lurching it open. Then I just stood there, dripping wet and soaked in blood with Jason just staring at me, jaw slack with horror.

“I fucking killed someone.”

Jason just kind of stared at me for a while after I said that. His gaze alternating between my face and the red running down my front and up my arms.

“You…Killed someone?” He tested, the two of us still standing either side of the bathroom doorway. I couldn’t answer, only nod slowly, looking down at my hands. The blood had dried slightly before I had made it home, staining my skin.

“Anyone see you?” I stared at him for a second. The tone of voice had shifted away from the man I knew, the man I had seen getting stoned and spending all day playing video games to a much more severe one. One that implied he knew what he was doing.

“Uh, no, don’t think so…” I kept my eyes on him, my head was still spinning and my heart still racing. I wasn’t in the mood for more surprises.

“Where did you leave him?” He turned away from me and started towards the front door, quickly glancing outside at the small dead-end road that leads to our building before closing it and pulling the curtains shut.

“Uh…near that kebab place on the corner.” This talk was making more nervous. I had moved out of the bathroom and was slowly circling around to the kitchen.

“Which one?”

“Jericho, the Turkish place.” I answered unconsciously, staring baffled at Jason. He nodded and pulled his phone from his pocket and fiddled with it, sending a text message.

“I'll send someone to clean it up.” I froze in my pacing at that statement, rational thought finally got through and I cottoned on to what was really being said.

“How long have you known?” I had always made an effort to keep my head down thanks in no small part to my dads'' insistence, so how had Jason not only figured me out but more importantly not freaked?

“Since before we met.” Jason only briefly glanced up from his phone as he bounced messages back and forth. “Your dad asked my dad to keep an eye on you.”

Another bit clicked into place and strangely it helped me relax a little. “You're with one of the Families.” I stated. My hands were starting to cramp up and felt stiff, I absently rolled and flexed them while we spoke.

“Yeah.” Jason finally put his phone away and flashed his teeth at me, showing a pair of long, pointed canines. That was comforting in an odd way. The Families were the big-name Vampire groups, a kind of combination of the Italian mob and British nobility with a healthy sprinkling of blood-sucking on top. I had a little interaction with Family members in the past but never wanted to get involved. They're gangsters after all.

“You never thought it was odd that you found somebody who was looking for a flatmate for this cheap on your second night in town?”

I couldn't help but laugh, it was weak and confused but it was a laugh, which meant I wasn't breaking down in a panic.

“Well, when you put it that way.”

“Look, I'm not going to go forward with this if you're not interested.” Jason's phone buzzed and he showed me the screen. A message read “On our way”.

“My guys can protect you from the cops, we can also get you a proper job. But only if you want it.”

How could I respond to any of that? I had just killed a man and now my flatmate was revealing that not only did he know I wasn't human, but neither was he. And now he was asking me to sign on with the mob?

“I don't have much of a choice.” I said with a shrug and something twinged in the side of my abdomen, making me stumble over the last syllable. “Oh, shit.” I looked down to see the bright green plastic hilt of a kitchen knife sticking out of me, just below my ribcage.

“Oh, shit.” Jason parroted, awkwardly offering a hand. “You want some help?”

“No, I -ah- got it.” I yanked the knife out carefully, it slid out smoothly enough and only a short pulse of blood followed before the wound already began to close, my recent ingestion of fresh, living blood meant I would heal from anything for a little while. I pondered for a second, turning the knife over in my hand, examining the blade. “What should I do with it?”

“Just chuck it in the sink. I'll have some guys come by and clean this place up later.” I nodded and threw the knife into the oil-stained sink where it clattered off a saucepan and ceramic plate before coming to rest at the bottom.

The next step was getting changed. I couldn't walk around soaked in the blood of two people like this. My coat stayed where it had fallen by the bathroom door and I nudged open the door of my bedroom with a shoulder, not wanting to spread more blood about the place. I stripped out of the bloody clothes, wiping my hands clean on the shirt and ditched them in a pile at the foot of my bed, grabbing whatever vaguely clean-looking things I could find. Some torn up old jeans, a t-shirt of a long-gone metal band, hooded camo jacket and some chunky steel-toed work boots.

I've always been fairly lean, muscle never seemed to stick for me no matter how much I worked out, and my hair was perpetually wiry and a murky kind of black beyond the wit of any barber, but something felt especially off about my body right now. It was my forearms. Tiny cuts ran in circles around the outside, but it didn't hurt and they weren't bleeding. In fact, they itched. And underneath the layers of exposed flesh, something hard glistened underneath.

Dad was always cagey when it came information about our family history. Especially on mum's side of the family. So unfortunately for me, there's a lot of unknown ground when it comes to what I could be capable of. I made a mental note to grill Jason for information later.

That thought made me pause midway through pulling on a forest camo military-style jacket. Was I really going to go on with this and work for Jason's father? Fuck it, I didn't have anything to lose. A job I hated and a squalid flat? Boo hoo. I stuffed a few essentials into my backpack and then suddenly felt very sluggish, the adrenaline had worn off and I was now crashing hard, having to almost drag myself back through to sit on the sofa with a heavy thud.

All that left me with was a burning lump in my gut. I sat on the sofa, my gaze had fallen on Jason, he was standing near the window and was pacing back and forth. He had been my flatmate for a few years now. It was a hell of a lot cheaper splitting the bills with someone, and we got along well enough. He had black hair, buzz cut fairly close. Dark-ish skin though he was generally pretty pale all around with a gaunt face and sunken eyes thanks to years of weed and sleep deprivation. A sudden surging headache hit me and I wound up with my head in my hands and taking a sudden interest in the stain on the carpet between my boots.

“Well tell him to hurry.” Jason’s tone was hushed, keeping his eyes on the windows. “No way they didn’t see this. They’ll be here any minute…Yeah, I’ll have him ready…You think so? Okay. See you then.”

Jason came away from the window, letting the curtains fall shut as he came back. “So?” He asked, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “Are you interested?”

I sighed through my nose. “Sure.”

Jason smiled and gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder