CHAPTER 5

If somebody told Count Dracula that one of his descendants would be dating a daughter of the saints, he would probably revel in delight, thinking that his bloodline could finally conquer the Christians. If he was told that the descendant decided not to turn that saintess into a vampire, though, he would probably blow up mad, going on a long monologue about what a pity, then he’d try and take that woman for himself only to spectacularly fumble again like he did with the purehearted Mina Harker. Not that it mattered, though, since Count Dracula was dead and Kou was the one alive, so who’s the winner here?

The answer would be Yamato Himiko, because the girl was adamant about not letting Kou’s hand go.

“Um…,” Kou awkwardly started, “Yamato-san?”

“Hi-mi-ko.”

“Himiko … san?”

“Hi. Mi. Ko.”

“H-Himiko? San? Um…!”

“What are you being shy about, now? It’s not like I’m telling anyone that you’re a vampire.”

Kou was blushing from head-to-toe, not exactly because of embarrassment, but simply because he had no idea how to react. It was probably his vampiric nature—vampires were traditionally attractive, after all, at least if they continuously drank blood. It was part of their survival strategy: the more attractive they became, the easier they lure victims to feast upon, which would replenish their attractiveness, which attracted more victims, and so on. It’s like how the venus flytraps attracted flies with the right colors and scents. Kou kept drawing people in from both ends of the gender spectrum, but even with all that interest, not once was he ever interested in romance.

That was, at least, until he met Yamato Himiko.

It was nothing as cheesy as love at first sight. Sure, Himiko was cute, but even Kou’s instincts were yelling at him that something was wrong with her. It was probably her golden eyes. It was probably her disposition. It was probably her weird fixation with bringing Christian symbols around despite not being Christian herself. It was probably the way she smelled, though he wasn’t sure how to describe that specifically. Everything about Himiko was setting off danger alarms in Kou’s Authority, but opposite all that, all that Kou could feel for Himiko was adoration.

The girl wasn’t above general mischief, but it wasn’t like she was malicious either. If anything, she’s probably closer to the knight in shining armor than Kou could ever be. She was friendly towards everyone. Some people would say that it’s the sign of someone without best friends, but that simply wasn’t true for Himiko—she just wasn’t being selective about who to befriend. It’s like she believed that everyone was kind in the very core, and she was willing to give everyone a chance because of that.

She believed that if she were to give kindness, it would be returned to her.

It was honestly the principle that Kou tried really hard to attain, and it came so naturally to her.

Kou kept drawing people in from both ends of the gender spectrum, but even with all that interest, not once was he ever interested in romance.

That was, at least, until he met Yamato Himiko.

There’s still that issue about her being an exorcist, of course, but Kou wasn’t worried. There was one and exactly one caveat to the vampires’ immortality. Kou had two, one of which was the challenge against his Authority due to his circumstances as the King of the Night and all, but he was an exception in that regard. The other caveat he had was the one he shared with all the vampires, and it came as two words: vampire hunters.

As Himiko so smugly mentioned just the other day, humanity was a creative race. They’d take every bit of information they could, absorb it all like a sponge, then squeeze them back out as something else. There were various ideas about how to kill a vampire, and it used to be a mystery even to the vampires themselves, but humanity would try and try and try everything out until they found whichever ones actually worked.

When Van Helsing finally killed the newly-turned vampire Lucy Westenra, he did literally everything he knew about what would hurt a vampire: he staked her in the heart, cut off her head, filled her mouth and her grave with garlic, consecrated the ground, and left religious symbols, too. He had no idea what would work, so he tried everything. He got lucky—Lucy Westenra died and didn’t come back.

But Van Helsing was a doctor, not a vampire hunter.

Vampire hunters were way more meticulous. So meticulous, in fact, that it’s virtually impossible to notice one only at first glance. Even among the exorcists, vampire hunters existed only in quiet whispers. They knew their enemies were powerful: a lot of vampires used their long lives to accumulate wealth, making them influential, like Count Dracula or Countess Karnstein. Vampire hunters couldn’t touch these higher vampires with only guts. They had to be silent, careful, unknown and unannounced.

Even their existence was shrouded in almost as many myths as the vampires themselves. Some cultures held that all vampire hunters were born only on Saturdays, as that was the day of the sabbath. Some cultures said vampire hunters were taught by faeries to detect evil and fight them. Some cultures said they were fed specific types of herbs since childhood so that they developed no fear for vampires. Some cultures held that vampire hunters could transform into white animals like how vampires could transform into black ones. Some said vampire hunters were always part of church congregation, others said the opposite due to their dirty work. Some cultures even had specific words for vampire hunters—the Croats, for example, called them kresnik. All in all, it’s almost impossible to distinguish the truth from the lies with vampire hunters, almost as hard as it would’ve been with the vampires themselves.

In many ways, vampire hunters used the vampires’ own weapons against them.

Vampires were immortal and each one usually lived rather long, so for the most part, their curiosity had long been snuffed out. Vampire hunters, however, were humans. They had all the time in the world to be curious, as they didn’t have a lot of time in the world at all.

If anyone actually knew how to kill vampires, it would’ve been vampire hunters. And they’re very keen on secrets. They couldn’t trust anyone, after all—any normal human could’ve been bloodlinked to a very powerful vampire, for all they care. Vampire hunters had to keep their existence, and their trade, very safely under wraps, because no one must ever know when they were coming.

Vampires never knew when the hunters would come until they did.

That said, though, like Abraham Van Helsing, Himiko wasn’t a vampire hunter. She was an exorcist, sure. Her golden eyes also definitely belie something else about her bloodline that Kou felt he shouldn’t ask so directly to the person herself. He’d never seen her exorcise anything before—heck, she only came clean about her exorcist job right before confessing her love to him—but the way she stood when she confessed, the way she expressed herself when she told him, the leaning she did into the spiritual, Kou felt it all. She wasn’t just an exorcist, she was a well-trained one. Kou wasn’t used to combat and even then he could tell that she could be trouble in a fight.

It would, however, make no sense for Himiko to come out about her secret job to Kou, which was why he hoped it should mean that Himiko was at least not a vampire hunter. Also, it would be weird for him to respond to her suddenly dropping the bomb, so he kept playing the fool. At least until she outright said that she knew he was a vampire.

“At the very least, I know you’re a nightwalker,” she said. “I also know that you’re not using transformation magic, because I don’t feel any magic on you, meaning you have to be humanoid. I know you’re wearing contact lenses, so your eye color could actually not be blue. Then there’s this irresistible urge in me to glomp on you whenever we get close … now, that could just be how much I’ve fallen for you, but it wouldn’t be natural for me to feel this way since we first met, would it?”

Kou was entirely dumbstruck. “And that made you think I’m a vampire?”

“I can ask my dad to be sure, but yeah—my conclusion is that you’re a vampire, Kokonoe-kun. And I know this because I’m an exorcist. I don’t sense any disbelief or the like coming off of you, so you must know about nightwalkers as well, yeah? Let’s drop the pretense.”

“Uh…,” Kou sighed. His danger sense had flared up to beyond maximum since she started talking about being an exorcist out of nowhere, but he realized that he couldn’t exactly put up a fight at school, either. There was also the fact that he’d been crushing on her for like a year now. Of all the people I had to fall for…. “Are you going to kill me?”

“What? No!” Himiko swished her hand. “As I’ve told you, I’m in love with you. For realsies this time. Nothing vampiric about this, nope. I enjoyed the time I spent with you and I think I’d really like it if … well…,” the front of the brave girl suddenly melted into a goopy blushing mess, “… if we could be … more than friends….”

“… what?”

“Sorry, this really came out of nowhere, yeah? I know I’m putting you on the spot right now,” Himiko was sputtering rapid-fire out her mouth, her face growing redder and redder by the second. “A-anyway! I wanted to tell you that I know I’m an exorcist and you’re a vampire and all but I still like you very much! And I want to let you know how I feel! I’d be really happy if you would go out with me!”

“Um!” Kou felt his face growing hotter. “I’ve—I’ve actually had a c-crush on you since like early i-in our first year and I think you’re r-really cool and I honestly have—I have no idea what to do about your exorcist job but I’d really like it if you d-don’t kill me and I’d also like it if we, if we can go out, if that’s alright with you! It’s alright if you don’t though but I’d really like it if you do!”

He had never stammered so many words in such a short time that he wasn’t even sure he got his point across, but his eyes were shut and his ears heard only a massive storm. On second thought, it wasn’t a storm, it was just the rush of his own blood.

“I won’t kill you,” Himiko said clearly. “I love you. As long as you don’t hurt people, I can’t bring myself to hurt you.”

“Th-then…!”

Kou finally opened his eyes. Under the afternoon sun, Himiko was just about as red as he felt himself to be. “Y-yeah, I think so.”

He could only bow to her. “I—I’ll be in your care!”

“M-me too, Kokonoe-san.”

What Kou never thought was that Himiko would be the type whose bets were all off the moment they started dating, because come next morning, she actually greeted him in class with nothing short of a hug in front of their stunned classmates.

At the time, Kou had just come clean to his sister about dating someone whose entire job was to kill his own subjects as a King, and this happened after they chased after two oni who went rogue for the first time in hundreds of years, which happened only less than an hour after he had his own romantic progress for the first time in all sixteen years of his life, and Kou just short-circuited right away.

“Y-Yamato-san,” a bold girl from their class approached. “Are you … and Kokonoe-kun…?”

“Mm-hmm!” she just hugged Kou even tighter. “We’re going out!”

This was followed by a cacophony of oohs that reverberated throughout the class, and then by a slurry of congratulations from their classmates, and Kou could’ve sworn he saw some people leave the class to spread the news to the other classes before homeroom began but he couldn’t really be sure as his brain wasn’t really functioning just yet.

Only a few days afterwards, Kou again found himself in the same predicament as Himiko hugged his arm and refused to let go.

Thankfully, though, this time, they were alone in the library—it wasn’t quite the test season yet, so not a lot of people came to the library to begin with. Kou was alone on library duty. It was actually supposed to be Sakura’s shift, but he couldn’t find that senpai of his wherever he looked—the third-years had no clue, either. They just said she’d been absent for a few days now.

Where Kou saw trouble, Himiko saw a chance.

“Look,” she said, “we haven’t even gone on dates yet. I know you’re busy with your part-time work after library duty, but I would’ve really liked it if we could go somewhere. Just the two of us.”

That would have to be during daytime. No way Kou could tell his sister that he’s going to be spending his afterschool with Himiko instead of preparing to attend his kingly duties (which weren’t his duties to begin with, if he were to be fair, but he digressed). That said, Kou usually spent his weekends either helping out some sports clubs or just resting up to replenish his own essence after the nightly patrols, so he wasn’t really sure if he should spend the weekend out.

Well, not that he didn’t want to, though. He decided to grab Himiko’s hand.

“How does next weekend sound?” he said. Himiko’s eyes lit up.

“Oh, let’s go!”

“Where’d you wanna go? We can do something simple like a movie date, or we can just head out to lunch and karaoke, or we can go to the aquarium, or—”

Himiko chuckled. “Someone’s excited.”

“I mean, Yamato-san….”

She glared. Kou gulped.

“Himiko … san, you were pretty excited yourself, weren’t you?”

“I know.” She leaned on Kou’s shoulder. “I guess I’m just happy that I wasn’t the only one excited about it.”

Kou tightened his hold on her hand. This kind of pace every now and then was pretty nice, too.

*