Humans are such fickle creatures. Their emotions click on and off and back and forth faster than a light switch. So flaky. How odd that they, the very ones who possess life, must refuse to simply live, to absorb what encompasses them and take things in on a much larger scale. Sometimes I wonder if they've ever felt the hunger, the raw hunger for power and survival that we as lifeless beings can appreciate. I think we feel more alive than the living ever will.

Happiness is a joke. Satisfaction and fufillment, the warmth of food and drink and the sating abilities of passion, these are what the dark ones climb out of their coffins for. It's the thrill of the hunt and showing no mercy to the weaker prey that gets the blood pumping--figuratively speaking, of course--and gets the mind racing. Adrenalized blood is that much sweeter, did you know?

Death for a vampire is Purgatory with boiling pits on the outskirts of Hell. Believe me, I should know. It's just one big, giant tease. A soul cannot be charged with the crimes the body committed without its presence, but the chaos will not go ignored. Down there, the keep you on the edge, test your thresholds, torture you, then dangle release in front of your face like a carrot on a stick. And He allows it, because to taste something so wholly is to taste what He Himself endures. God and the Devil have quite the twisted and torrential relationship; the Infallible One's Heaven is ironically enough in Her bed.

Yes, that's right, the Devil is a woman, but of course the ancient scholars could never write a female into such an important historical role, no matter how evil. That part was saved for the small damnation of Eve. The Devil is the woman of all women, the first sexual being, succubus, siren. Like the embodiment of pride and lust and vanity wouldn't be extraordinarily beautiful. She did, after all, wed the Supreme Being.

They're the perfect couple, really: God and the Devil. He is the skies, She is the earth, and every you and I between Them is symbolic of Their marriage. They're not fighting a war, like so many humans think. Oh, sure, They have Their share of lovers' quarrels, but They're actually very modern. Perhaps the new millennium got to Them, but it all falls into place in the end. Good does need evil for either to exist, and the rule goes both ways. He's not the first, nor the last person to grace Her bed, as She is to Him. He commits no crime in Their sick love, and She can and will commit them all. Now that's an ambitious working woman if I ever saw one.

Jesus was Their spawn--pity the boy took after His Father's side of the family; from what I've read, He had a lot of potential. But some qualities will be passed on regardless of psychological identity: Lazarus was His childe. So you can see how much closer we, those who fall, are related to Them than man could ever hope to be.

Rule number one, boys and girls: cleanliness is not next to godliness. Embracing a devil is.

How strange it was for me to taste the sun after what felt a thousand years. The heat. The light. Like riding a bike, impossible to forget, but easy to think that it's beneath you after you've been given a shiny new roadster. It's winter now in the City of Angel(u)s, which means sporadic rain. Most vampires wouldn't dare venture outside during daylight hours for anything less than a black hurricane for fear of a crack in the clouds.

I'm still going through the motions of nightly unlife; torturing Angelus, torturing myself with building a new gang using the slop they call demons in this town. It really is a lengthy process that tests even my patience, and I had acquired a great deal of it by my fourth centennial. Too bad such infections are so gradual. That's the thing about diseases; they take so much time to become addictive. Need to add a little salt-festering to the blood--the young people here are far too sweetened up on mind-altering substances for my tastes. But it's either that or bad Mexican.

Drusilla's off in some shadowy corner she's decorated with lace, excorsizing her mind-blight with one of the dozens of dolls adorning the damp floor. We've a quaint little nest set up, I guess. For now. It's nothing special; just a roof loft in an abandoned building that leaks when it rains and has cobwebs for curtains. Dru has her toys, and I have my view, but this is no way for two ladies of our stature to be living regardless of its novelty.

My granddaughter really is a special wisp of a thing. She acts as if Angelus turned her before her age even hit double-digits. She was seventeen, perhaps eighteen, I've forgotten the exact date. Sometime in the summer. August, I think. Yes, being a Virgo would suit her. I was made a Leo, myself. Does it show?

I like watching her; the way she moves, how her thin hands flit around like birds. She's talking to the spiders now. Asks them to dance. And the sick thing is, they do. Their legs moves swifter than normal and they run circles around the floorboards, and Dru giggles and claps her hands. Even her solitary applause sounds dank as it echoes through the room, and I remember how cold it is. Up here, with the gray of the clouds and the chill of the wind, I can see my breath when I force it from my lips, like the night my boy rose.

Jasmine candles burn slow with the absence of oxygen. Drusilla had wanted rose; I promised it next time. The bed we share is unkempt, its mismatched pillows and blankets sitting expectantly like propped-up body bags. The pale blue sheets are cool to the touch as I slip beneath them and curl my arms around my knees. She joins me, cradles me like a mother would I child, switching our roles as she so often does. I wonder, does this make her a god? She always was the closest one to Him out of the four of us. But that's what our kind is, right, all gods and devils? Human and demon? A Frankenstein-esque hybrid of the two? Evil's legacy, its warning, or maybe just something else entirely.

No one wants to be a demon, but everyone at one point or another wants to be a vampire. We're an original sin, tempting, eternal and pretty, and sins are the only things that possess all three sirens' songs.

She can feel my melancholy this afternoon, and pays no mind to it. I think she likes it when I'm this way, all reflective and tragic, passing to her curiosity nothing more than silent stares just as her dolls do. She says I rave and scream murder in her face when I'm like this, says my voice would rival that of the moon if I could only be so loud. But that's beauty to Drusilla: sadness. When time slows and becomes numb, stilling everything into a picturesque quiet, and motions flow and trail black stardust. She does have a way with words, what with her Addams Family nursery rhymes and plague melodies.

The black spot on the white comforter still smells of ink from when she took a fountain pen to thin paper on the bed. It reeks sour to me and I have to scramble away to escape the stench. Dru looks confused and merely dips her finger into the fabric, as if to demonstrate to me that the ink is dry and can no longer stain my skin. Doesn't matter. It's still there, and every time it's touched it will ripple and spread and eventually envelope the clean alabaster cotton into its murky scent.

I crack my neck and compose myself, and feel itch for blood in my bones. She feels it too, of course. Our beings are synched. I shrug into my jacket--just a little something I picked off a starving ingenue, python-print and worth more than she would have spent on a week's meals. And I think to myself, how appropriate: a snake for the snake that damned the prayer that damned the God-fearing child. So Biblical.

Such bullshit.

And so we descend down the creaking stairs, past the cold, gritty concrete and grime-encrusted metal to the murky stench of the sewers below. This is where Death feeds, is it not? This is where the demons thrive. Where we thrive, in this version of sickly Hell.