Don’t look so knowing and hopeful. Your self-deceptions annoy me and causes me to tire of our arrangement. You want the thrill and excitement of knowing secrets and I get free meals and a chance to unburden – no, to sanitize myself through confession.

You mistake our intimacies for romance: you are food. You take our arrangement as an indication that I feel some strain of remorse over what I must do to survive: you are a convenience. You mistake my confidences for trust: you are a way for me to clear my mind and (if I still have one) my soul.

And now you are hoping that, because I have agreed to hunt down and eliminate the thing that used to be a vampire named Harry Brindle, that it shows I have some compassion or ethical considerations, that I want to set things right or save some “innocent” life. As if I were one of those effete goths moping in their vampire covens, agonizing over the epic battle between good and evil.

I accepted the task of destroying Brindle because he’s a challenge.