What Do Vampires Wish For?

The lanky undead considered the question posed by the chubby and hardly fearless fairy godmother before him.

“What do vampires wish for? To end the bloody boredom. Decades of the same old hunt and suck, dodge the prey in the day, bite the blighter in the night.

“If you do fall in love with one of the prey, you basically see how long you can wait it out for them to die–of natural causes or of you, whether you finally decide make them or not.  Ennui. Tedium. And double such, if you do make one of them, as being undead always changes a person in ways you don’t expect.  While there might be undying love, it doesn’t appear to be between the undead.

“It’s fun at first, especially making a new identity every few years, setting up Swiss bank accounts and such, but it wears on one’s nerves, always having to move on and on after culling the herd in a particular area. Some poor sods are as bad at death as they were in life, but at least they have no bills, no debts, or none that anyone can collect. They just bumble around, whining to anyone who will listen, and thinking of watching the last sunrise.

“There’s no fun in anything after a while, especially when you just can’t feel anything any more except the thirst, and eventually that too goes away. Life is wasted on the living, whose dull senses can’t smell the death in every rose, every breeze, every musician whose work scrapes across the eardrum. Even robots grind their bearings away and click their endless popping and fizzing circuits.

“I’ve tried to be one of those ‘righteous’ types who only take out drug dealers and whatever definition one might have of lowlife scum, but bankers just taste better than junkies.  I suppose I do my bit to clean up the gene pool too, sometimes taking out the whole family, one at a time, especially the younger ones, before they can breed.

“I’m not into killing innocent animals, and the closest I can imagine being a vegetarian is slurping an emergency pint of green coconut milk. Shudder. But then I can hardly worry about starving to death, and madness is not very far from where I live with my healthy dose of paranoia and my penchant for the nightlife and underworld. The Shadow does know what evil lurks in the hearts of men:  me.

“So what can you do for me, fairy godmother? You can’t kill me, you can’t make me fall in love, and I can see through any glamour you can throw over me.” His eyes gave her the piercing look that was usually followed by his piercing kiss.

“You’re right of course,” Maven said. “If you don’t know what you want, I certainly can’t give it to you. It’s a rule.”