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Prelude

          Even from inside my room, three levels below the Manhattan world of cold concrete and passing cars, I could feel that it was distinctly winter, and I was glad to be somewhere safe and warm. Five centuries of travelling teaches one respect for simple comforts: running water, clean sheets, friends. I was beyond comfort, in that room, in that building; I lived in luxury and insisted on nothing less. Red velvet, murals painted on the walls and ceilings, the bars stocked with the finest in liquor and a live band hired for the night's entertainment-- it was all a matter of paperwork and money, the latter a commodity I had and have in bushels.
          This was exactly as I had wanted it to be, nearly eighty years previous when I first bought the abandoned meatpacking plant, in the District of Manhattan named for that industry, that would become the Macabre. My Macabre. Every morning, when I went down to my room to sleep, I would have comfort in the knowledge that, in eight or ten hours' time, there would be a rush of people, vampires and humans who would dance and drink and talk, who would sway to music and feel the contentment that only comes when one feels perfectly in place.
          I was bored stiff of all of it. Of the luxury, and the lights, and the blood vodka cluttering the shelves behind the bar. Of knowing that Vincent, my friend, my comrade, would be waiting up there for me every night with moon eyes and a ready smile, and maybe some mildy amusing story of how Henry, our new bartender, had messed something up again. Of my gauzy dresses from India, of the smell of blood and metal on polluted air when I stepped outside of my own little world.
          If I'd know what was to happen, and how quickly one can change from bored to impassioned... I want to say that I would give up anything for my boring life, with its dresses and Vincent and heady blood smells, would give up anything not to have ahd to deal with all that happened just as I was feeling ennui, but to say such pretty words would only expose a single facet of me and my soul, if it exists.
          What happened, happened, I suppose. Why I'm compelled to remember it when I'm half a world away, I'm not quite sure. But recollect I will, on its beauty and its grit, on the blood shed and kisses shared.