Only One Coffin by A.J. Truman EPUB & PDF – eBook Details
- Author: A.J. Truman
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Series: None
- Price: Free
- File Size: 1 MB
MAGNUS
Each year, I celebrated Christmas the way it was meant to be celebrated: I
shut all the curtains, put cotton in my ears to drown out carolers, poured
myself a blood martini with three olives, nestled into my coffin, and read
books by candlelight until I fell asleep with a page stuck to my cheek.
Happy Holidays indeed.
I was never into the Christmas season, and this was likely the case when I
was human, too. The pageantry. The songs. The sticky residue from halfeaten candy canes.
Christmas was all about…joy. And togetherness. And crucifixes.
I would rather drink water.
Vampires weren’t about living lives of joy. For one, we weren’t living.
But more importantly, we lived in the shadows, in the empty spaces of human
existence. The world continued turning, but we weren’t allowed to be part of
it. We settled on the fringes lest we be chased by mobs with stakes and garlic.
Did you know how smelly garlic was? It was like being chased by a giant
swarm of armpits.
The truth was, I wanted no part of the human world. Humans had futures
to look forward to. They had hopes and dreams and plucky attitudes;
vampires only had an interminable forever.
Maybe if you were lucky, you had a lover to fritter away the unending
days with, a partner in the foxhole of forever, someone with whom you could
poke fun at humans (one scroll through social media could give us fodder for
days), someone who found purpose in trying to elicit a smile from you.
But not all of us were so lucky.
Or even worse, some of us were lucky once upon a time, and then that
luck was cruelly ripped from us.
There was one post-holiday tradition I kept. Every year, on the night after
Christmas, I turned myself into a bat and zipped across the Atlantic to stay at
The Draugr Hotel in Iceland for a week. It was isolated in a desolate
mountain range, surrounded by active volcanoes, and like all vampire
vacation spots, unreachable by humans. It was the perfect place to get away
from civilization for a few days and relax. Best of all, there were only four
dreaded hours of daylight to deal with each day.
I’d been visiting the hotel for a century; unfortunately, they didn’t offer a
rewards program.
When I arrived in Iceland on that wonderfully frigid December evening, I
was greeted by the Northern Lights glinting against the glaciers in the
distance. After one hundred years, the sight still did not get old.
Unlike human hotels, there was no grand front entrance. We didn’t want
to attract attention. A small wooden sign carved with an intricate design and
WELCOME in the center hung above the entrance to an unassuming cave.
After the usual stroll through cold darkness, the glow of the hotel burned in
the distance, a light at the end of this tunnel.
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