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He avoided others of his kind.

Until recently, he avoided humans until the hunger consumed him.

He hunted from the shadows.

He observed from the shadows.

He existed only in the shadows.

Perhaps that is how the Shadow world found him.

The Stranger had always supposed all but a very few of his kind did the same, lived the same as he. He thought they avoided being noticed. He thought they avoided being seen, found, caught, identified. He thought they sidestepped humanity altogether. He thought they sidestepped the human authorities. He assumed it was the majority of their existence, even their identity, to move unseen through a human world.

Now, of course, the Stranger wondered about that.

This other, this Shadow, lived so differently.

He lived so very, very differently.

He lived so loudly… so much more loudly… so much more visibly than the Stranger ever had, at least since they took away his soul.

The Stranger lived underground. He lived like the Mole People. He remembered seeing a documentary about them as a kid, back when he was human. It scared him then. The people who lived underground scared him, like they had evolved into another species altogether. They lived in sewers and subway systems, collecting food and trash and sharing what they found.

He ate the people he found underground now.

He ate them, but they were closer to his kin than this man in his arms had ever been.

The Shadow lived on top.

He lived as a rock star, a celebrity.

Even when he wasn’t playing god to the humans, he worked for them.

The Stranger found it all so disturbing. It unsettled him, watching the other live as if he wasn’t what he was, seeing the other expose his alienness so openly, so brazenly. He lived like a human. He fucked and loved like a human. He had family like a human, friends.

The family he’d chosen weren’t even vampires.

Not a single vampire lived with him, even now.

His coven was made of humans and hybrids, half-breeds and fulls.

It was wrong.

Everything about it was wrong. Profane.

Unnatural.

He couldn’t help but find it delusional, even darkly depressing. This other one, the Shadow… he seemed to revel in pretending to be human. Perhaps he even believed himself tobehuman, if in some modified fashion. Perhaps he convinced himself it was true, that he was still alive, still the man he had been before they ripped out the most important part of who he was.

Perhaps the other one clung to that.

Perhaps he clung to the shreds of his humanity.

Perhaps he was mentally weak, and could not face the truth.

The Stranger decided the other must believe. If the Shadow held onto some semblance of who he’d been, that ghostingshadowof a life, the echoes of what he once was… he could avoid looking at who he’d become.

He could avoid facing what he truly was.