You may have drawn your own conclusions based on this new evidence in the light of recent events, and wonder why I was still assuming such banal explanations as hypothermia. It is not so easy, in this scientific age, to throw logic out the window and hook onto some superstitious belief whole-heartedly, without feeling the need to test out the theory.

Well, Veronica perhaps could do it, but I couldn't. Frank is a bit unreadable, but I'd like to think he had the same doubts as I.

I couldn't help but think these things were caused by some entirely rational explanation. It would be silly to believe in vampires. If such things did exist, science would have found them out by now.

Of course, the monumental exception to this line of thinking lies in God. Billions of people believe in this entity, whether He is called Allah, or Krishna, or Yahweh, yet this entity has never been scientifically proven to exist. In fact many scientists believe in God.

And if God may exist without evidence, so could Satan, and angels, and demons, and in particular those demons called vampires.

Could vampires be something other than a demon, as our vampire games imagined? Could a vampire be a seductive, attractive being, capable of mercy and affection for its human victims?

Though our games imagined it was so, when confronted by all this, I felt the fear that our modern society has taught us not to feel. Our modern society finds the victim of the vampire to be an object of envy. It has changed our images of vampires from the killing corpse those peasant Romanians feared, to an impossibly attractive incubus.

No, we aren't supposed to fear the incubus anymore.

Yet fear him I did.

It may be difficult to explain to the modern person exactly what I feared about Lane. He looked like a boy my age, a gorgeous creature whose face could make you fall in love. In past times it was believed that to be beautiful was to be good. All fairy tale princesses are beautiful, because they are good people. The wicked characters are ugly because they are evil. This is why lepers were shunned and people feared those who were deformed. All of this is not politically correct these days, but we still have those beliefs: we avoid ugly people, avert our eyes from those who are disabled, and we worship beautiful celebrities and spend endless amounts of time and money trying to make ourselves beautiful, so that others will like us.

When I looked at Lane, I felt this effect. I was attracted to him, even though I didn't like the way I felt afterwards. What was so wrong about feeling drawn to someone? Nothing. Except that it made me lose control. And that was my own problem, not Lane's. It didn't prove anything. Right?

I clung to this line of reasoning, to the point where I couldn't see the truth of my situation until it was too late.