Helsinki, 7.

Sunday.

I woke up to the sound of scissors by my ear. That is not a nice sound to wake up to, and therefore it is a noise that wakes one up immediately.

The bed around me was covered in long, black hairs that until not so long ago had been a part of me. My hands flew immediately to my head, and as I pricked the fingers of my left hand on a pair of scissors I heard an indignant yelp, followed by a giggle.

“What the hell?” I sat up and turned to Kielo who was sitting beside me, a pair of scissors and a comb in her hands. There was also a bottle of vodka nearby, which smelled on her breath very strongly as she leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. Her hair had come undone from the buns of the previous evening, and was now falling in slightly curly waves around her head.

“Good morning!”

“I’ve had better…” I muttered and looked around me forlornly. All that hair, gone. My head did feel much lighter without it, but I felt naked. More so when I realized I was naked. Kielo just laughed, and kissed me again.

“But you look so cute with short hair. Like a pixie.” She offered the bottle to me and I took a long drink. I gave her a questioning look as I passed the bottle back to her.

“I thought it would calm my nerves. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No. Help yourself.” I could understand the need to forget last night’s trouble. What I couldn’t understand was how giving me a haircut would help!

Kielo drank from the bottle, settled it down in the bed, and picked up the scissors again. I hastily backed away from her.

“Oh don’t be such a baby. I’ve done most of our head already, it would look silly if it’s left like that.”

I lifted my hands back up to get a feel of the damage. She was right: most of my hair was just two, maybe three inches long now, except for a patch on the right side of my head, on which I had slept. With a groan I leaned back towards her, and she actually hummed a little as she got back to work. I reached out for the vodka to try and numb the pain of my sudden loss.

“It’s just hair.” Kielo said, and I could almost hear her roll her eyes. “You’ve got years to let it grow again.”

“I guess.”

“…are you really mad?”

I took another drink, the burning alcohol already mellowing me out. “Guess not. You could have asked, though.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I muttered and tried to follow my own advice as the scissors snipped on and the last of my long locks fell to the bed. “By the way, how’s your foot?”

The scissors stopped for a moment. “It’s all right. Only hurts when I step on it, but not much.”

“Good.” Vampires have some kind of a natural painkiller in their saliva which eases the victim’s pain when those sharp teeth sink into them, making them stop struggling so much as well. I inherited that from my father, and had thought it would help Kielo last night. So I didn’t lick her foot just because I have a thing about feet. It had been for her benefit as well!

I tried to escape from her clutches as she finally announced that she had cut off all the long hairs, but Kielo grabbed my shoulders firmly and wrapped her long legs around my waist.

“You’re not going anywhere. It’s short, but it’s a mess. I need to tidy it up first.” She punctuated her words with another long swig from the bottle.

I should have been more worried about letting a drunk person anywhere near me with scissors, but I relaxed into her stranglehold and caressed her legs lightly while she worked. My mind wandered to last night’s adventure, and I couldn’t help but wonder that something was going on here. Something more than what I was aware of.

Even if this Dorian was not one of the old and powerful vampires, he still should have had more control over these friends of his. Those buggers yesterday had been hostile; his deal with Kielo had been that he just wanted to talk with her, peacefully. To convince her to keep quiet about him being a vampire. Of course that could be a lie and he really wanted to kill her. That’s where I would come in. But why make it so complicated? Why not just attack her one night and be done with her? My heart contracted from just the thought, but my mind didn’t stop wondering.

Vampires have their laws and codes to survive in the modern world. Don’t kill the humans you feed on was one of them. Of course sometimes they had to kill to survive, but that was usually regulated and controlled. If dead people drained of all their blood started popping up here and there, the human authorities would become suspicious. Even if they wouldn’t figure out what had happened or who had done it, the vampires surely would. And trust me, vampires can be far crueller than humans if they want to be, and they will be to anyone who breaks the code.

But to get rid of someone who was a danger to them, like Kielo, they wouldn’t need to drink her blood. A normal killing would do the trick, and all the authorities would take it as a murder, nothing more. No one would think to link it to a vampire.

No. There was something more going on here, I was sure of that. And suddenly it hit me. It hit me so hard I jumped a little, making Kielo yelp with surprise and cut my ear with the scissors.

Dorian didn’t want her to stay quiet. He wanted her. He wanted to turn her into a vampire!

“Oh shit…” I muttered, then realized that my ear was bleeding. Kielo was fussing over it, apologising and asking what had made me jump like that. I just lied to her that I had almost dozed off, not wanting to give the real reason. The excuse made her laugh and lean over to kiss my neck.

“See? I told you this wasn’t so bad.” She of course meant the haircut, but her words still made the smile freeze on my face.

No, not bad at all. I muttered something incoherent and grabbed the bottle.

If Dorian wanted to turn her, why were his friends so hostile towards her? Did they think she was some kind of a threat? That she would steal him from them, or hurt him in some way? This was more than a bit puzzling, and the vodka wasn’t helping. It was time to talk to Alby again, maybe he could figure something out of this mess. He knew more about vampires and their minds than I did, which showed how rusty I was.

Kielo hummed on as she worked, her legs still around me. Buttercup surprised us both by coming to sit on the bed, staring at us with her yellow eyes. I figured she wanted food, but it was still strange that she would come and demand it while there was someone else here. Still, she wouldn’t come any closer despite Kielo’s attempts to sweet-talk her.

We passed the bottle between us until it was half empty and she was satisfied with my new hair. I wanted to get up and see myself in the mirror, but Kielo wouldn’t let me up. That didn’t really boost my confidence in her idea of a good haircut.

“Believe me already, it’s fine!” she laughed as she played with my hair, scooting a bit closer to me. Her naked breasts pressed against my back and she leaned her head on my shoulder, letting out a content sigh. The sun was shining outside, and even though its light barely passed though my heavy curtains, its warmth enveloped us. I didn’t want to move, didn’t want this moment, this peace to end. Everything felt so perfect, all I wanted was to stay like this forever.

That’s when I realized I really was falling in love. The thought was a little scary, for it meant opening myself to this human being who was still almost a stranger to me. Hell, I didn’t even know where she was born or whether she had any siblings! We’d only talked of her work and more recent things, like the vampires after her.

This was something I should, and could, rectify.

“Kielo.”

“Yes?”

“Tell me about yourself.”

She lifted her head so that her chin was on my shoulder instead of her cheek. “What?”

“I just realized I don’t know much about you. Have you always lived in Helsinki? What do your parents do? Do you have any siblings? How did you meet your roommate?”

She laughed at the questions I just blurted out and returned back to her previous position. “I don’t know much about you either. So if I answer your questions, you have to answer mine as well.”

“Fine by me.”

“I have two brothers, they are both older than me. I’m from the north originally, Oulu, where my parents and brothers still live. My father has his own company where mom and one of my brothers also work. I came to Helsinki to become a beautician when I was eighteen, but I soon dropped out of the school and got the job I still have. My roommate I met two years ago when I heard through a mutual friend that she needed a roommate. I needed a place to live in. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

“Yes,” I muttered, somewhat distracted by her hands which had started to wander all over my torso. It was a little less information than what I had hoped for, but it was quite hard to concentrate on asking more questions with those wandering, tickling hands.

“Your father was a vampire, I know that much. What about your mother?”

I tried to drag my brain together enough to answer, and succeeded quite admirably. “She was a witch, she and my sister.”

“Oh really? So, can you do magic as well?” her hands were now wandering around my waist. Really not good for my concentration.

“Not really. I never had it in me. I can do some basic protective wards, like the ones here in the apartment.”

“Like some kind of a security system?”

I laughed a little. “Kind of. My home is protected from vampires and were-beings. They can’t get in past the wards. Normal burglars would be a different thing. Don’t have much protection from them, but there’s the gate downstairs. They’d have to be quite determined to get through that without a key.” The front door to the apartment building was protected by an old, heavy iron gate, common in old houses like this.

“Well, I guess that in your line of work the vampires are more likely to come after you anyway.”

“Unfortunately so.” I muttered. I hadn’t noticed when my eyes had fallen closed, or when Kielo’s hands had slipped below my waist, underneath the sheets that were pooled in my lap.

“So if those vampires from last night followed us they couldn’t get in?”

“That’s right.”

“Good.”

“And even if they would have gotten in, I would have protected you.” I said with a grin and craned my neck to brush my cheek against her head.

“My hero.” Kielo said and turned to kiss me. That lead to another kiss, and another, and soon she was on her back on the bed, I on top of her. I didn’t even notice that my hair wasn’t there anymore, falling all over the place as I looked down on her slightly flushed face. The sight made me grin, more or less like an idiot. An idiot in love.

“My my my, what big teeth you have!” Kielo just about purred under me.

“Better to… eat you out with, my dear.” I said, my grin turning cheesy. Her near hysterical laughter at that pretty much flattened the romantic mood, but, for honesty’s sake, not as much as my stupid answer already had. Still, I let out a growl and dropped on top of her, kissing and playfully biting her neck.

Buttercup decided that she’d had enough and left the room in a hurry.

We woke up again in the late afternoon. A nap had proven quite necessary after the exhausting… exercises. And Kielo was hungry. Me, I don’t eat that much, but I had a couple of frozen pizzas and some ice-cream in the freezer, which we shared while watching a silly movie from my collection. We were still quite drunk: we had ‘only’ drank half a bottle of vodka between us, but it’s not exactly the same as beer now, is it? At least our drunken state made the movie seem funnier than it really was. Not that I was paying that much attention to it: we were cuddling on the sofa, still almost naked under the large blanket I had wrapped around us. Cocooned in our own little world.

It was moments like these that made it all worth the trouble.