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mutations are almost immediate… loss of hair and elongated fangs and claws.”
    “Is that what usually happens to you?”
    Armando opened his mouth to respond, but then stopped. He looked over at Garvan, and they both shook their heads.
    “No, it will not happen to us—
definitely
not!” His eyes flashed in anger and the smell of ginger grew stronger. “There is not enough time to explain how this whole thing works tonight. Our adversaries once started out like us, but then changed. We are different, based on something in addition to the germ in our systems, something that makes us truly unique. Thus, our numbers run much smaller than theirs.”
    He paused to look at the door again. The doorknob shook as someone tried the lock.
    “I’m afraid I must wrap this up.” Armando’s voice dropped to a whisper as he drew nearer to me.
    “So, are you two going to try and drink my blood?”
    His face came within a few inches of mine. The scent of ginger was cloying and made me choke a little. I feared a repeat of last night, where in the blink of an eye my blood had been drained—enough to make me pass out. What would happen if they took even more blood tonight?
    “You are a silly girl, Txema!” he chided me, pausing to look again at Garvan, whose face had also drawn near… so beautiful in his deathly comeliness, his brilliant eyes pulling on my heart. Or, was it my soul?
    Garvan smirked. He had obviously picked up my last thought. “We have no intentions of defiling your sacred fountain… at least not tonight!”
    His smirk widened into smile and his fangs glistening in my flashlight’s glow. They seemed bigger than before.
    “As I said, we are
not
like the others that are here—these once-human chupacabras,” Armando continued. “Think of us instead as a holier form of humanity, and one that is immortal—at least in terms of what you understand immortal to mean. We are like the Greco-Roman gods of old. They were based on what we are. And consider this, Garvan and I do not need to read history books to learn what took place in Europe during the last five hundred years. We were there!”
    “This is true,” Garvan chimed in. “I’ve spent many a night in Marie Antoinette’s presence, as a member of her court. Most of her aristocrat attendants had no idea that I was different from them. I never needed to powder my face to blend in!” He chuckled as he reminisced.
    The doorknob jiggled again, and a key slipped into the lock from outside the room. There was a knock and I heard Elaine call through the door, “Tyreen? Txema? Are you okay? I thought I heard male voices.”
    “Time to go, Txema!” said Armando. “Garvan told you last evening to stay indoors, and that edict remains in effect for you. This is mandatory from sunset to dawn. They are hunting you. Each victim they take will be closer to here, I fear. Although, I do wonder why they left a corpse behind. Usually, they take a body with them to feed on for days and weeks… like an African crocodile.”
    I hoped he said that merely to drive home his point.
    “They struck again?”
    I was distracted by a crack of light. When I turned to look back at my visitors they had vanished.
    “Yes,” Armando and Garvan’s echoed voices said in unison. “Stay alive, Txema!”
    “Txema? Tyreen?” Elaine stepped into my room, armed with her own flashlight. Her blonde hair was disheveled. She looked like she barely had time to don her slippers and a bathrobe over her nightgown. She repeated, “I thought I heard a man’s voice in here.”
    As if a guy wouldn’t be somewhere on our floor during most nights.
    Nearly all of the rooms on the women’s wing of the fourth floor have seen their share of men come and go. I guess maybe it’s a question of discretion. A glance at my bedside alarm clock showed that it was 2:41 a.m. The murder, or if my vampiric benefactors were to be believed, murders, put everyone on edge and one of them must have awakened a girl on my