I opened my eyes. Once again I thought what a miracle it was. That happened to me a lot. Unlike most of the others I had observed sleeping, it didn't take me an infinite amount of time to get going again once I woke up, my thoughts immediately ran at full speed. And that was strange, wasn't it? But not surprising. I was just different. A common first thought I got was that I was way too familiar with this situation. Quite regularly, in fact. And I dreamed, I even dreamed a lot. A lot of blood and a lot of fire, a lot of shadow ... These were dreams I would never tell anyone, I couldn't. It was all too confused, there were so many disjointed and chaotic pictures that I could never have put in the right order. It was a good thing that I was silent. That I was always silent. I thought of DuCraine. How long have I been here now ...? Too long. I would think of it again. Maybe I could ask Sally. She would answer without asking questions. Had she always been like that, or only since she met Doctor DuCraine? I didn't know, I had no idea about her past, or even his. And yet I was here now. And I would stay here. My life would never end, it had a beginning, but the end would ... would be bloody. I didn't know that yet, but I would find out soon. The chance to simply sleep peacefully after living a long, fulfilling life was taken away from me on the day I was born. Actually before that. Well, my life was likely to be long, and that was something. That was logical.

I sat up. I had to go downstairs, I had slept a long time, I could feel it. I had to go down the stairs, which I should go down many times.A narrow, and rather unsafe construction, and I was lucky that my sense of balance was fine. At first glance, you'd have thought the DuCraines were a pretty poor family, but the doctor had told me they weren't. Some time ago he had inherited a great deal of money from a 'distant relative', a small fortune that was now earning good interest in a simple account. He was saving, but DuCraine had cleverly dodged the question of what he was saving for. He had told me that on the day of my adoption ... everything had happened so quickly ... I grabbed the top from the day before, pulled it over my head and fought for a moment with my sleeves. I needed something with buttons, anything. I had to talk to Sally about it when I got the chance. There was no one to watch, but there was something immensely humiliating about its own sweater.

When I got into the kitchen and almost got stuck on the door frame - everything in this house seemed small in a special way, maybe just too crowded - Sally looked up automatically and smiled. Then she winced and looked at her hands again, not without my seeing her grimace. She cut her finger. I stood a little uncomfortable, but didn't think she'd noticed how uncomfortable I was. While DuCraine seemed made for this house, which was so functional, cluttered, and twisty, everyone stopped at Sally in surprise, for a simple reason. She was beautiful. Not in a cold, sacrosanct way, like many of DuCraine's business associates I'd seen so far, but it still seemed to belong on the cover of a magazine rather than in that shabby kitchen, and I could only guess why she stayed.Even in the early morning she radiated enough glamor in a cooking apron to make the room a little brighter.

With one hand that was surprisingly shaky, she put the knife down and wiped her hands on her apron. “Already awake?” Sally didn't bother to feign surprise. For my part, I slept a long time. Then she shrugged. "So much the better, I would have woken you up one way or the other."

The moment seemed quite unreal to me, cut off from the world, perhaps because outside, behind the windows, there was still a pale darkness. Nothing moved. “Would you like to have breakfast?” This time I shook my head, and although she had turned away and was cutting her fruit again, she asked no further because she knew my answer. I noticed their constant efforts to make conversation, but I just couldn't respond. As well as. What should I say if it had nothing to say?

My situation was as unchangeable as it was strange. DuCraine had taken me off the street, and when it turned out that nobody knew me, nobody missed me, he adopted me. The weeks between picking up and adoption blurred reluctantly and sketchily into an ugly chunk of time, and what was before ... In my opinion, I might as well have fallen from heaven as I could have been sent out of hell. But it went without saying that no one was satisfied with that - no one but me. And that's why I was now Jess, actually Jess DuCraine. That name was as good to me as any other. I looked outside again and slowly walked to the window. Silence. For months. Three months. Three months and two days, now I knew it again. So it was slowly getting light over the rooftops. It was the sixteenth of February, a Monday, and I was going to go to school again.That was decided after they gave me a ridiculous test. And now I had the hope that school could break the silence, a silence that neither DuCraines obvious inner calm and his external nervousness, nor Sally's friendly nature could break. Maybe it would work. Maybe.
The school was a complete disappointment. There was alternately a much worse silence than at home and a terrible noise. Loud voices, many words, a lot of arguments, and everything is terribly pointless. I didn't notice much, especially nothing of interest, and was largely left alone. The constant furtive looks didn't bother me. In that narrow, stuffy room sat people who would have been the greatest waste of my life to talk to, and my life so far was short and far too long.

When I opened the front door and ducked my head so as not to run into the lintel, I found myself wishing the doctor would be home. Sally was fine. In fact, Sally was very fine. Only Sally, with her pretty, heart-shaped face and her slightly dreamy eyes, seemed so infinitely ignorant, and after all I had enough questions of my own. Now I just wanted to talk, and there was only one person worth talking to. That was DuCraine, despite his slightly eccentric manner.

The voices that I had heard at the beginning of the street became much louder here. I expected them to come from one of the outbuildings, but I should have known better. My hearing didn't deceive me, never. It originated in the middle of our living room. (How quickly it was so easy to think 'us'!) - or rather stood. If you could even call this room a living room. It was more of a warehouse for all the books, notes and other mountains of paper that could no longer be put in the cupboards.They piled up everywhere: on the floor, on tables and chairs, under and on all the seats ... At some point I should maybe start working through all the material. This might finally give me an insight into the work of our doctor; he hated questions about his 'research', almost as if he were uncomfortable with it.

And now this well-balanced master of secrecy was standing knee to waist high in the fruits of his mysterious work and glared angrily at a man whom I - it didn't really surprise me - had never seen before. Or maybe it was just a boy, hard to tell. He didn't seem much older than me, but that didn't change the energy he seemed to exude. Instead of going over there as usual and having myself introduced, I stood tall, unfortunately at a point from which I could no longer catch a glimpse of the doctor. The visitor, who was almost a little girlishly gracefully built, stood in the door of the room with his arms crossed. I waited.
Time is very fleeting. One could imagine it had a principle - and that would be a fact - but it would not be the truth. There were no truths. I was human - that was a fact - but it wasn't the truth. The truth was I was a vampire - or was that a fact too? Or should it say 'that I wasn't a vampire'?

The cold night air brushed my cheeks, but it couldn't make me look up. It's unbelievable how I would have loved to have been a part of it, just fly wherever I was carried, just don't think about it anymore. There would no longer be any questions or facts as inauthentic as the nightshades that danced across the asphalt in the moonlight at my feet. That's exactly how I felt right now, like a waning ghost, unrelated to this terrifying world. I was human, I wasn't human, the truth played hide and seek with me - no, that was too easy, it was more fundamental, it was more.There was no truth. There were only questions and no answers. Did i believe that Did i know? What could i believe in? Was there a difference? I suddenly found it difficult to breathe, and a red haze seemed to float across my field of vision, which disappeared as I blinked.

I saw the doctor in front of me again, deranged from how he had looked when he called me over. Maybe he heard me close the door. I had never met him like this before. His clothes had looked a little wrinkled at times when he'd slept in them instead of taking the time to go to bed, but he'd always made it a point to look decent, no matter how old-fashioned he might be. I would never have expected that I would ever see him with his shirt buttoned so sloppily. The strange visitor seemed to be staring at me blankly, just as I was studying him, but in his eyes I discovered a suppressed glimmer of interest that was so unexpected that it could not possibly be imagined. His features were finely cut and everything about him was so obviously perfect despite his girlish body; of such a penetrating beauty that one could feel insulted in its mediocrity - although I did not consider myself to be average. You would have had to be blind not to see through this boy. He had the face of an angel, or maybe a gangster, but in his eyes God and the devil were fighting, a touch of madness and a lot of genius, faith and knowledge.

When I looked at DuCraine again, who was looking at us attentively from the shadows of a living room