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draw back until they had completely pulled all the life from their victims, so Sonafi and I were careful to chaperone our own offspring until they could be trusted to feed on their own, without killing those they fed on.
    I have sired cruel offspring.  Monsters I was loathe to turn loose on society, but a progeny I have sired directly demands more regard than a similar Juvenile created through a transfusion of blood, and so I have never killed one of my own, at least not while they were young.  Such cruel, brutal Vampires seldom lived long, anyway, often antagonizing one or another of the Community to the point where they are killed, though it is not always the case.  There are several such very old Vampires.  Careful Vampires.  Vampires who thrived on the pain they could inflict.  Who lived just for that.
    As hard as it is sometimes to face the things I do, the things I have done, the monsters I have created, in my own defense, I have lived a very long life that I did not choose for myself.  This life was thrust upon me not of my will.  The unwanted byproduct of an egregious experiment gone terribly wrong, yet was I so terribly different from those who had created me?  Am I not compelled by the same physiological needs as every other living being, to survive, to eat, to procreate and expand my kind.  Does the lion feel guilt that it sires a cub that will, throughout its life, if it can even survive to adulthood, kill and eat many thousands of living, breathing animals.  It does not!
    Yet I do.  I have to live with the horror a conscientious being knows that I have caused endless suffering.  That I will continue to do so.  That I can see no end of it.  Not in the foreseeable future.
    There are yet things I will not do.
    The woman, suddenly deprived of the bite she craved, stepped forward to embrace Sonafi, but Sonafi side stepped her.  She was no longer where she had been and the woman's arms closed on empty air.  Without a backward glance Sonafi went out the window and was gone, as if she had never been.  She may as well have for the woman's meager ability to perceive her movements.  The woman moaned piteously.  Bereft and abandoned, she turned to me.
    “Not this night.”  I told them.  “Return to your slumbers.”  They turned immediately to do as they had been bid, but not before the woman cast a last, imploring look my way.  I remained implacable and my command drove her onward to her bed.  As if they had never awoken, they were asleep as soon as they were under their covers.  I climbed quickly out the window, my fingers adhering to the rough brick and mortar.  Like a spider I hung there then closed the window one handed. Quickly I scurried to the ground, faster than a Human could run.  Sonafi waited for me on the sidewalk.
    “She had been trying to get pregnant for some time.”  Sonafi said when I joined her.  “I suppose it is our fault she has had such a hard time.”
    “I suppose that is probably true.”  I agreed, but said no more of it.  We gathered our shoes and began to walk.  We would have to feed somewhere else, but there were many hours left in the night and thousands of people in this area upon whom we could visit.  We were herders.  Humans we re our flock.  The only difference being that we did not have to slaughter our herds to feed.  Was this not more humane?  Were we not a notch better?
    “I find that, as I age, I have a harder time doing the things a Vampire has to do.”  Sonafi said quietly as she walked at my side.  I had known she was going to say something about it.  It was a cruel twist that all Vampires had to face sooner or later.  All but the very worst of us.  I had seen it building within her for some time now, something that we tried to avoid facing, because there was nothing we could do about it.  A mellowing with age of the instinctive Vampire urges, like Human evolution as a whole, the rise from primordial beast to thinking, reasoning