[Submission] Mina the Vampire
The world loves her child. Her story. Or it says it does. Sometimes it feels more like watching Lucy die again, seeing what she knows twist into a monster. She wishes they saw him as a monster.
His face, hanging five or six deep on the rack, flayed silicone and plastic string. His cloak, draped like the wings of sleeping bats across clothes hangers. False blood in plastic tubes, white face paint, dull fangs to slip over human teeth, but they look so sharp, enough to bite down, tear –
Mina hates Halloween.
But shops these days are larger than warehouses, sell everything, so the butcher’s counter is at the end of the Seasonal aisle. Pre-packaged meat makes Mina squirm. Too much like piercing through clear skin to the organs.
She needs the butcher, and Emily is right there, crinkling behind the counter in her plastic apron. But Emily hasn’t seen her yet. Mina can still leave. Feed in the worse way, but better than remembering this time of year. Then she can hide in her tomb for the rest of the season. She begins to turn, but a prickle of pride makes her stop.
She’s not a child. She’s seen bombs rubble London, the first sparks of electricity run through its streets, Halloween turn from ignorable American niche to October-long nightmare. Too many years, too many Halloweens, for her to still be scared. Mina pretends to breathe, remembering how it once meant calm, and steps down the aisle.
Lights are so bright in the modern age. None more so than the supermarket after dark. Their cold, white beams replace the past shrieks of street hawkers, showing off the supermarket’s wares and stinging Mina’s eyes. They are useful, however. Everyone looks dead in their glare.
Her legs stiffen as she passes the costumes. Across the aisle, above chocolate spiders and jelly-sweet ghosts, a cartoonish vampire grins from an orange banner. Take a Bite into Halloween! His fangs. The void of his mouth.
Stop looking. Stop. There’s the butcher’s counter. There nothing changes, no matter the season. Emily catches her eye and smiles. Mina walks faster. Sickness, hunger, hunger-sickness, ticks in her throat. Hygiene has improved in the last century, but the supermarket air still smells raw, fleshy.
“Please, Mum!”
Mina flinches, the child’s voice cutting through the beeps and trolley-trundles. A round cheeked girl drags her mother towards a witch’s hat and broom. The mother looks as pale as Mina, keeping one eye on a crumpled shopping list, the other on her daughter.
“They’re so expensive, darling…”
“But I need a costume for the disco!”
The girl’s eyes flick from the witch’s hat to a black net dress, top half corseted in red velvet. Dracula’s Bride, the label reads. Ages seven to eight, it says on the hanger. Twelve pounds.
“Ooh, Mum, what about…”
Mina spins round, snarling. “Don’t.”
The girl pauses, her hand brushing the velvet. Her mother blinks, as if awakened from a dream.
Mina sees outside herself for a moment. How mad she must look, in her tattered coat and mud-cuffed jeans, snapping at a little girl reaching for a pretty costume. The child trembles.
Soft but firm, Mina adds, “Listen to your mother.”
Said mother snatches her daughter’s hand and hurries her away towards Dairy Produce. The girl starts crying, wails echoing to the ceiling.
Emily nods as Mina ends her stiff march at the butcher’s counter. “Good on you.”
Mina rests her hands on the counter’s glass. Without body heat, she never leaves handprints, but Emily never notices.
“So many kids now think they can whine and whine and get what they want,” Emily continues, swishing out a fresh plastic bag. “In my day we’d get what we get and we wouldn’t be upset.”
Mina hopes Emily doesn’t notice her lack of reflection in the glass, “Things have…certainly changed.”
Emily scoffs. “Don’t give me ‘certainly changed’, you don’t look a day over twenty.”
I’m not. Mina’s head spins like blood in the glass of a sophisticated hand. The artists always get that wrong. There was nothing sophisticated about the way he drank.
“Thank you,” she says.
“The usual, yeah?”
Another nod. Emily traps five livers in her bag-covered fist, pulls it inside out, ties a neat knot. The plastic sags around the livers. Not tight as skin.
“You only see people in their eighties buying these now,” Emily says. The bag squelches as she places it on the counter. “So often we’re throwing these out. Glad you know what you’re doing with them.”
It’s better than the other way.
“I don’t like waste,” Mina says. “How are you getting home tonight?”
“Same as always. Pete’s picking me up. But it’s nice of you to check.”
Mina knows more than anyone the importance of checking. What’s out there keeps her going when she has no money for livers. When the livers aren’t enough.
“Be safe,” Mina says, taking the bag and walking away down a different aisle. Enough bravery for tonight.
She picks up a new bottle of foundation and pays for it along with the livers. There’s many aspects of herself she can make excuses for, but not the blistered cross on her forehead. She feels it without touching, skin tighter and drier, stretching across her brow down to the bridge of her nose. Unclean, unclean! What a wonderful day, when she thought that was as tainted as she could get.
Mina steps from the supermarket into the street. It is never truly dark in London now. Not just because of the streetlamps, turned on and off by some faraway switch. Shops never close their blinds, but blind with backlit displays all night long. Cars and buses glare at the world with white eyes. Mina can’t remember the last time she saw the stars.
She sinks into the crowds bleeding out of theatres and bars and just-closing shops. Locals, tourists, students, beggars, shouting and laughing in hundreds of languages. Their heartbeats, the blood pumping under their skin, warms Mina as she glides between them.
It used to overwhelm her, this London turned up high, but she has a trick. Look, listen, for the ones that won’t be missed. Men who shout crude comments. Drunks kicking cups the homeless gather their change in. Anyone with a sharp word, a sharp hand, for a child. He wouldn’t consider his prey in such a way. He didn’t care. It’s too small a consolation. They’re prey all the same.
So, not tonight. Tonight will be kind to her, since she was brave and went down the Halloween aisle. It will let her wend her way back to the cemetery without encountering any heartbeats that need to be stopped. She will have a quiet evening in her tomb. Light the candles to warm away the damp. Suckle on the livers to content her hunger until masks and capes are replaced with tinsel and old men in red. Her lips twitch. Sometimes that man reminds her of Van Helsing, when he was grandfatherly and gentle. Before she disappointed him.
A man is following her.
Mina feels his eyes caressing the back of her neck, confirms the suspicion through a glance in a shop window. His eyes glint. Seeing her body but not seeing her soul. Her humanity. If he’d tried, he wouldn’t be so intent on pursuit.
She can’t sigh anymore, but her shoulders drop as if she does. If she loses him in the crowd, he will find someone else. Someone weaker. She licks the back of her teeth. Time to be an animal.
It is never truly dark in London. But Mina knows where it is darker.
This alley will do. The rot from the skips will hide his scent. The bus horns and laughing crowds will hide any screams. But she’s an animal, not a monster. They never scream for long.
Not too sharply, Mina turns into the alley’s shadows. She slows her footsteps, so she can hear how close the man is behind her. Very. Not put off by her change in direction, not unnerved by the darkness.
Men lose their self-preservation when it comes to desire, Mina has learnt, as if they are at sea and believe they’re reeling in a prize fish. They get too close, invite her to darker places, in this case follow her to them. The man’s long arm even reaches for her shoulder like a line, his fingers hooks.
Mina stops. Mina turns. The man smiles, surprised at his successful technique.
Little does he know he’s reeled in a shark.
#
Mina steps from the alley, wipes her mouth on a tissue, and carries on. Her hands shake. He deserved it. He can’t hurt anyone else. Her plastic bag still shivers.
A wallet hangs heavy in her coat pocket. She pretends it’s hers, tries to forget who’s rotting in the skip. Maybe there will be enough money for something nice. Something to make her tomb more like a home. A new blanket, perhaps.
Or a book. Mina passes a bookshop window dressed in orange and black netting, paper bats dangling from the window frame. Even the reminder of Halloween doesn’t stop her from stepping into the bookshop’s amber glow. If she presses her nose close enough to the glass, she can smell new paper.
Every horror novel the bookshop owns crowds behind the window. Her book is propped up in the centre. A new edition, title silhouetted against a full moon.
Which one of the men put the book together? Maybe all three, hence the pseudonym. But it’s her book. Her hours at the typewriter, reading all the letters, listening to that madman scream and how Lucy died, gathering evidence so the world would believe them. The typewriter’s keys imprinted on her fingertips like the cross on her forehead.
Her only child sits in that window.
“Shop’s closed, love,” a man slurred, his reflection passing in the gap where hers should be. Not too close. Not pausing to continue their one-sided conversation. He can walk home.
Mina carries on in the opposite direction. Her child. She’d flicked to the end of that book once in a library, just to see if the men had told the truth. Poor Quincey still died. A less disappointing version of herself lived. Cleansed. Uncursed. Blessed with a son.
It’s a nice ending, the one the men cobbled together. Rushed but triumphant. The truth would be too depressing.
#
Jonathan had crept into her cabin on the train home. None of the other men had made a move to stake her yet, but she heard them murmuring as Jonathan opened her cabin door.
“…not long for this world.” Val Helsing. “We should consider…”
Jonathan closed the door. None of the men had spoken to her since the cross had failed to fade from her forehead. She couldn’t be trusted now. She was too exhausted to defend herself. Too exhausted to rise from the cabin bed and close the blinds.
Jonathan sat by her feet, hands in his lap, like a child waiting to confess to their mother. His body swayed with the train. Mina sunk further into the bed and closed her eyes. If he wished to deliver the blow, she could think of no one better.
He undid the top buttons of his shirt.
With a shock of energy, Mina sat up, gripped Jonathan’s wrist. “No.”
“I said I would follow you.”
“No.”
He didn’t know what he was asking her to do. It wasn’t just a bite. She would need to slit a line in her skin with nails sharpening even now. Bring Jonathan to her body, mouth to breast. She knew what it tasted like. How the blood flow took away her breath. The grip of fingers in her hair.
What if he changed his mind? What if he resisted? The animal growing within her already whispered, growled; he will be a perfect pet. If he changed his mind, so might she.
Mina shook her head, pulled away from Jonathan. “They will kill you.”
“Damn them!” he shouted, crawling towards her end of the bed. Since his month in Transylvania a new gleam had entered his eyes. Another thing to hate his captor for. “Those cowards aren’t even trying to help you.”
Did she want to be helped? She did not want to leave like Lucy, not because of the stake, but because of the contempt she would see in the men’s eyes before hers closed. How they would talk of her afterwards. A Thing. Unclean. As if she wanted his teeth in her throat.
But what was the alternative? To be like him. No matter how she died, she would never be a light of lights again.
“We tried,” she said.
Jonathan shook his head. “You cannot give in.”
Giving in was all she could do. To death or undeath.
Jonathan began crying before she had a chance. He fell on her chest and sobbed, fists in her nightgown, as if she’d agreed to turn him. As if this was his wound.
She found her arms numb as they circled him. Holding in her sigh as his sobs vibrated through her chest, waiting until she could trust herself not to snap. He had his wounds, she had hers. Even after reading his diary, she knew he hadn’t written of everything that occurred in that castle.
They lay together like carvings on a medieval tomb. Neither slept. As dawn snuck across her face, Mina said, “I want my death to be mine.”
Jonathan looked up at her, eyes still wet. “I will die without you.”
“You will live for me.” Mina sat up, cradled Jonathan closer. His eyes widened as he rested his head on her chest. Her heartbeat had already begun to dim.
“Then I want you to live for me,” he said. “Even as you are. Promise me.”
He didn’t realise how cruel he was being. Just as cruel as when he asked her to turn him. Yet her reason was powerless against animal instincts. Feed. Grow. Live. Mina stroked Jonathan’s hair as his eyes flickered closed. Love.
She left at the next station, without anyone except a conductor noticing. He gave her a wary glance, perhaps already seeing the creature beneath her skin.
Even as her body weakened, Mina was still a train fiend. She found her way to Paris, fainting only once. To Calais, staring at the veins pulsing under her fellow passenger’s throats. To Dover, feigning seasickness and tossing with the waves in her cabin.
Once on English soil, she looked for a quiet place to die.
#
Mina passes the cinema. It’s an oddity for businesses to be independent these days. They congratulate themselves on it, and so do their patrons. Hayfield Pictures is no different. It pretends to be the same cinema it was in the Thirties, with a gleaming white letterboard above the bulb-crowned entrance. Dracula Film Festival, it reads, letters bloody. 25th-31st October.
The world loves her child. Her story. Or it says it does. Sometimes it feels more like watching Lucy die again, seeing what she knows twist into a monster.
She wishes they saw him as a monster.
Posters line the cinema walls, illuminating the pavement in slabs of gold. She slips from tired-but-living to dead, dead, dead, washed out by their light. She wishes the films could be true, that the brightest light of all would obliterate her into dust.
A beautiful woman swoons under his red eyes. The Strangest Passion the World Has Ever Known!
A beautiful woman in a nightgown swoons, collarbones exposed to the bloody teeth hanging over them. The Terrifying Lover Who Died – Yet Lived!
A beautiful woman in a leg baring dress rears from his enlarged face. Who Will Be His Bride Tonight?
A beautiful woman lies under his gaze, smooth breasts like hills he has not yet conquered. Throughout history, he has filled the hearts of men with terror, and the hearts of women with desire.
A beautiful woman swoons in his arms. Love Never Dies.
She stops. It’s the same as the others, but somehow the worst. Background like a gravestone. The beautiful woman so limp, so helpless. And his stare. Not him, impossible, but it catches her all the same. Resist me if you dare, it says, but I know what you really want.
Mina steps closer to the poster. She can’t weep, she can’t breathe. All her anger, all her panic, curls in her head like a cornered dog, snarling and spitting. I screamed. I cried. I never wanted this. Her shadow stretches behind her, long and dark as a freshly dug grave.
Love Never Dies. Her jaw tightens. Love. Love?
“Fancy getting tickets for the festival?” a boy says.
Two young people stumble from the cinema’s entrance, not drunk but overexcited. Maybe they’ve seen a comedy. They both wear clothes they’d likely call vintage, but Mina remembers them on mannequins in department store windows. The boy’s flat cap perches on his sandy hair. A girl under his arm, all in black, has a grey beret angled over her curls. She’s smiling true, not trying to wriggle away. The boy is safe.
The girl pouts and looks at the boy from under her lashes, “I never read the book in school. I won’t know what’s going on.”
“You don’t need to read the book. There’s a vampire, he bites some hot girls, the German bloke stabs him. The end.”
“Isn’t he Dutch?”
“Ah, so you did pay attention!”
The boy wriggles his fingers under her armpits and she cackles, swatting him away. Mina can’t stop watching their breath in the air, their chests moving up and down. A hundred years ago it could be her and Jonathan, teasing each other about Wilde’s latest play.
When their breathing slows, the couple gaze at each other. Mina looks away. She’ll give them their privacy, reimagine their kiss with her and Jonathan’s faces back in her tomb.
Their lips stay apart by a scrap of air. The girl is the first to blush and look away. “A little bit.” She turns towards the posters and shivers. “I remember it’s scary.”
“Well, have I got some bad news for you about Halloween…”
“Not fun scary. Proper scary. You know I don’t like that.”
The boy’s face softens then. He scoops an arm around the girl’s shoulders and leads her to the posters. He’s so close Mina can smell the body spray men use instead of cologne, but he doesn’t excuse himself as he passes. Doesn’t even look at her. She might as well not exist.
“Nah, none of them are really scary. Especially this one.” The boy points a thumb at Love Never Dies.
“Ooh, this one looks kind of hot,” the girl says.
Now she creeps closer, no longer fearful but in awe. Her heart beats faster, but Mina knows the difference between the rhythms of fear and desire.
The girl traces a black-tipped finger down the actresses’ cheek. “God, I wish that was me.”
I wish I’d grabbed his throat in both hands and throttled him. I wish I’d smashed the vase on my bedstand over his head. I wish I’d thrown myself over Jonathan’s body, protected him, instead of giving in.
The boy laughs. “We can make that happen.”
The girl glances at him, smirks. “Oh, what are you going to do? Induct me into your harem of the night?”
“Well, now you’ve discovered my dark secret…I’m afraid you have no choice!”
With a twirl and a squeal, the boy spins the girl into an alley by the cinema. Mina follows their laughter into the darkness. She knows what can happen to women there.
The girl leans back against the cinema wall, the boy looming over her. Two muscled arms pin her in place. Yet she smiles, teeth white and cold, like those women from his castle. Come sister, come to us. Come! Come! Past and present laughing at her. Mina’s tongue is lead in her mouth.
“Oh, please don’t hurt me, Count,” the girl breathes. Please don’t hurt him. Don’t hurt Jonathan, please! Mina’s mind buzzes like an untuned radio.
It’s getting colder. The couple’s breath smokes between their lips, merges.
The boy puts on that stupid voice. “Ah, blood of my blood…”
It’s not real.
“Flesh of my flesh…”
It’s not the same.
“Let me induct you into eternal lifffe…”
He smirks and dips his mouth towards her throat.
Leave her alone, leave me alone, leave her alo –
Mina’s hands are on his shoulders. She’s so much stronger than him, pulling him away from his meal and making him her own. What would the caption on this poster be? Fear her madness, fear her wrath! The Bride Bites Back! Love Never Dies – Neither Does Hate.
Blood gushes into her mouth. Without breath it doesn’t suffocate, but fills her with his iron strength. She takes it away from him and hides it in the dark space of her veins, where he may never use it against anyone again.
She holds his arms to his sides. He can’t break free, only wriggle like a fish. Pathetic, pathetic man. How had he ever pinned her down in her bed, drank from her without her noticing? She’s stronger than him, she outlasted him, outlasted everyone. She will see the stars die, not him.
His screams ring her ears at first, until she bites deeper and they cut off. Such a high pitch. She would never expect him to scream like that. She likes it. She sinks her mouth into the hole in his throat, pushes it wider. Try being a lover now, she’d say without blood in her mouth. All those women, they’ll see you, and they’ll know what you are.
Another scream. The girl. Mina looks up. Her screams die down to heavy breaths, as if her lungs can’t take in enough air. Poor thing. So frightened by that horrible man.
Mina drops the body. It crunches on the tarmac. The girl flinches and hops back against the wall, eyes so wide Mina sees the blood vessels running through the whites. Mina reaches a hand towards her. For the first time, it doesn’t shake.
The girl runs. Puddles from that morning crash under her black boots.
Mina’s hand drops. Her red hand, blood splatters to the elbow. At her feet a limp puppet of a man, blood drying like paint over his skin. A void in his throat.
Not him. Not even someone who deserves it. Just a boy, loving a girl in a way Mina can’t understand. She sags to her knees. Cradles the boy’s head in her lap. Is this how you wanted me to live, Jonathan? Is it?
Once the body is hidden, she staggers from the alley. Glares at the posters.
Prowling back through the decades, she smears her bloody hands over his mouth and eyes. The excess drips down the poster’s glass, adds a red glint to the light on the pavement.
She steps back, shaking the last drops from her hands. There he is. The man that loomed over her, teeth and eyes red. Not the lover. The animal.
Everyone. They’ll see you, and they’ll know what you are.
This short story was submitted to the White Lily Society for the limited time submission prompt “vampire girlfriend”
Catrin Lawrence’s short fiction has been published by These Pages Sing, Gwyllion Magazine, and Black Hare Press. Corvid Queen will be publishing one of her original fairytales in November 2025.
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