Belle Morte Bites (Belle Morte 4.3)

The Green Man

Emsworth, England,1967

The upside of living in a small town was that it offered a quiet, unobtrusive life, which was really all Gideon Hartwright wanted.

The downside was that it was a lot harder to hunt for food.

All too often, Gideon had to rely on sneaking onto the local farms at night and feeding from the animals, or catching ducks that paddled up the gleaming stretch of the town millpond. When he did manage to feed from humans, it was easiest to get them when they were too drunk to really know what was going on. He never felt good about that. Even though he wasn't hurting them, and he never took more than a person could spare, there was something morally dubious about the fact that he couldn't ask their permission, or tell them what was really happening.

But what choice did he have?

Vampires no longer had to worry about attracting the attention of violent mobs because so few people actually believed in them anymore, and the few that did were thought crazy by the majority. But in so many ways, humans still struggled to accept anyone who didn't fit the narrow mould of what was considered normal – they weren't ready to know that vampires walked among them.

Maybe they never would be.

Science was advancing in leaps and bounds, mankind pursuing more knowledge, more discoveries, and if they found out that the creatures of myth and legend, reduced to little more than cardboard villains on the cinema screens, were actually real . . . well, Gideon couldn't see that ending well.

So he kept to the shadows, and only took blood where he could.

Gideon leaned on the metal railings that overlooked the millpond, watching a family of swans as they drew close; the adults like great drifts of snow moving through the water, the cygnets still small and fluffy, bobbing about in their parents' wake.

Behind him, two young men passed by, deep in conversation, and Gideon turned his head to watch them.

"This is such a huge step forward," one of them said.

"I know, but forgive me for being wary about this. It took them ten years to implement this, and we still don't have the same rights as everyone else. And there's nothing to say they won't take it back in a few months," the other replied.

His friend slung an arm around his shoulders. "Relax, would you? This is a historic day."

The other man shook his arm off and looked nervously around; Gideon quickly turned his eyes back to the pond.

"We still can't do that in public," the man hissed.

"Okay, okay, I'll behave. But as soon as I get you home . . ." His companion's voice trailed off suggestively.

Gideon glanced at them again, studying the way they'd paused, gazing into each other's eyes. There was a respectable distance between them, but there was no mistaking the heat in that space. Definitely more than friends, then.

But what had they been talking about?

Why was this a historic day?

They started walking again, and Gideon silently followed them, keeping his head down and his gait casual in case they turned and saw him.

"To be honest, I still can't quite believe it's real, anyway," the second man admitted.

"It is real. Maybe we still have to be careful, but it is real," the other insisted. "And who knows what this will lead to. Maybe one day I'll even be allowed to marry you."

The second man laughed. "Now you're just being ridiculous. Two men marrying? It'll never happen."

"People once said that about legalising our existence, and look what happened today," the first said.