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“No.”

“No what?”

Vi looked down into the casket, its lid still off, her sister’s face a little sunken moon in the pillow. She didn’t know ‘what,’ honestly, and the more she thought about it, the more silly it seemed. Eve was looking at her with a perfectly placid and porcelain expression, the type of clean pokerface which made her such a legendary hunter among the Sidhe clan, but Vi knew better than to underestimate that look. She swept her hand side to side.

“Well, what?” Eve said again. She pushed the shovel out, stretching her arm. Vi gestured again, looked away from the corpse. She dug her pointed shoes into the side of the grave and climbed it like a stair.

“Nothing, Eve. I said nothing.”

Eve continued to stare. Half her face was lit white, and the other lingered in deep shadow. She was beautiful, even for a vampire. Her long dark hair was pulled into an almost liquid bun. A waterfall of dense blackness spilled over where her heart didn’t beat. She paused another moment, but Vi merely gestured again. After 30 years together, there was little need for more detail than that. Auguste, the baby of the three, and silent til now, stepped out of the shadows of the tree above her sister’s grave, and clanked the lid shut. Locked it. Eve threw a small scoop of earth, then a larger one, atop the serene and glinting redwood. They each landed with a thud.

It wasn’t like vampires to want to linger out alone in graveyards, at least not in these times, when every kid with divorced parents thought they were ready to be the undead. No, these days it was better to stay shuttered indoors, a life made much easier with the nascence of home delivery technology. Auguste, a mere 17 when he joined the Sidhe clan, took to it the fastest. Soon, their ancestral manor was packed with every manner of Amazun gunk and Eynstein Co. tech. He was a fast learner, much faster than Vi, who, unlike Eve, at least was willing to give it a try.

She remembered the time he brought home that plastic printer, what was it called? That crouching, gray machine zipped and buzzed and wired together all sorts of contraptions only little Auguste could have thought up. Eve always rolled her eyes, but Vi found it so funny, honestly. She played right along, and when Auguste, born 1786, told her he’d invented a mechanical blood-sucking device, she swallowed her own tongue so as not to let it slip that dialysis machines were how they got their blood now.

It soothed some itching, aching part deep inside her, from before she was turned, to think that a vampire could still create things. That from death could come real life.

When Eve and Auguste finally left the graveyard, not without their usual warning that the light is coming earlier now, it being April, and the groundskeeper Jacob is always right on the hour, Vi wondered silently over her last cigarette if, maybe, it might be pleasant to watch the sun come up. Maybe it would warm her. Maybe she would feel it.

The movies made it look awful, dying by sunlight. Massive lava explosions everywhere, and lots of screaming. CGI and low budget angst. Vi had never seen a vampire die. She was only 62 herself, so she supposed it was possible to witness some day. She supposed she had time.

The earth over her sister’s body looked warm. Warm, and soft. Rich, and a little red. Vi took a slow drag on her cigarette. The tip flickered vermillion against the blackening blue of the sky. She watched the smoke dance and bash against the tree behind the headstone and noticed the white pointed flowers for the first time. Magnolia? Was that what they were? She knew Auguste would know. It was a shame the silly kid didn’t smoke, and wondered with a start if maybe he feared death. Did he? Could he? Could a vampire fear death? Even after over 300 years?

Was that what made him make pipes and transformers with his silly plastic toothpaste machine?

Was the urge to create some kind of… fear of death?

Vi’s head hurt. The hunger was coming. She ashed the cigarette on the headstone she was sitting on, like the goth kids did in her 1980s high school. Life seemed so terrible then. So much more terrible than death.

She shivered. Cold. More and more the pains of dead, dry, rotting mortal flesh would return and worsen until she drank blood. She never understood what ‘pain worse than death’ meant until she let Eve turn her that one fateful winter’s day, at the party.

There were pains worse than death. Fears worse than death. Hungers worse than living.

She tried to tell Maria that once, but.

The air was starting to feel too fresh. The sky too green. A bird chirp stabbed the night too loud, too close. Vi checked her watch, and her eyes went wide. 4:44am.

“11:11, Vi, make a wish!” The memory was so sharp, sharp as birds. Maria loved that sort of thing. She was so superstitious. So sure.

“It’s 4:44!” She’d once said, nearly clapping, tapping on the clock between the driver and passenger’s seat.

“What’s that mean, Mar?” Vi’d asked.

“It means God is watching. It means the angels are near.”

The wind picked up her hair. It picked up the leaves of the magnolia tree. Petals wavered around. Vi put a hand over her face. Tears that smelled like metal and rot slid between her fingers.

Maria wasn’t supposed to die, not for real. She was supposed to turn. Just like the movies and the books. Just like what happened to Vi at the party, to Eve before that, and to Auguste before that.

She was supposed to turn.

4:44am. God is watching. The angels are near. Ok, Maria, sure.

Vi couldn’t believe that. Wouldn’t. She knew what would make her believe in God again, and she knew what she needed right now, more than anything else in the world.

Green-blue sky turned paler. Sharper. Crisp as the magnolia buds, backlit by a glow. It moved up the hill slowly, across the pines. Across the graves.

More than anything else, Vi needed to see the sun.