1 The Pandora's coffin

The coffin was one of the strangest things I've seen in my life. Made from blackened steel, mystical symbols and lines that looked like a prop for summoning demons completely covered it. The lid had metal nooses for padlocks, but vandals had broken them down long ago, leaving only sharp metal edges. Yet, as far as my dad's inventory note told, the coffin still wouldn't open even with a pry bar.

To say I was curious about what was inside, was to say nothing. Of all the antiquities that lied in the basement under my dad's shop, it was the most mysterious one. It was also one of the most recently acquired, and definitely a fake, just like many other relics my dad had bought out of his sentimentality. Still, there was something inside, and maybe it was more valuable. At this point, I'd take anything.

I moved my hand over the weird drawings, trying to discern by touch whether they were engraved or just painted. They looked too untouched compared to the declared age of the coffin—a century, give or take a decade. They also didn't look like any style of art popular at this time.

For a moment I thought the lines were warm under my fingers, but the feeling disappeared so quickly that I chalked it off to my imagination.

I leaned to explore the edge of the lid, searching for hidden locks with my eyes and my fingers, but only succeeded in scraping my middle finger on a jagged piece of metal. I swore under my breath and lifted it to my eyes to examine the damage. The wound was small, but bled profusely and deserved a tetanus shot.

"Damn. Does soap kill tetanus?" I asked myself, when I heard knock coming from the coffin.

I jumped on the spot and looked at it to make sure I didn't mishear, when whatever was inside knocked again.

I froze on the spot, torn between running away from the possible danger and running towards to help whoever was trapped inside. By the third knock, the second instinct won.

I rushed towards the coffin and pushed the heavy lid aside, forgetting all about how it was locked shut. Whoever was in there helped me too, and a few seconds later the lid fell onto the basement's concrete floor with a thunderous rattle.

And then I just gasped and gaped like a fish. Inside the coffin lied a man—an alive one. To top it off, it was one of the most beautiful men I've seen in my life, including Hollywood actors and professional models.

He was devastatingly handsome despite his sickly paleness and gaunt cheeks. Each one of his facial features wasn't that impressive on their own, but they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one with a beautiful picture on it. The waves of his strawberry blond hair framed his head like a gilded frame, if a little matted one. His clothes, a white shirt and dark pants, were dusty, wrinkled and torn.

Then two more details attracted my gaze. First, the man's red eyes (and not bloodshot red, red in irises as if he wore cosplay lenses, with cat-like slit pupils to boot). Second, two long, sharp fangs he bared together with the rest of his teeth.

By the time two (coffin) and two (fangs) turned into four (vampire) in my head, he was already out of the coffin and standing next to me. His icy fingers locked onto my right arm with a steely grip. Faster than I could think all this, he opened his mouth… and stuck my scraped finger in it.

As I stood, flabbergasted and increasingly more and more flustered with each passing second, he sucked on it like on a candy, his tongue caressing the pad of my finger and sending shivers down my nether regions. I tried to take my hand away, but the vampire held tight, completely ignoring the punches I threw at his chest with my left hand.

I should've hit his face, but it was just too handsome for it.

Finally, the vampire stopped sucking and let me go. I immediately stepped back. Clarity had appeared in his eyes, now green like fresh grass, while my face turned as scarlet as the vampire's eyes were earlier. He looked at me in confusion, then back at the coffin he came from, then back at me with wonder and disbelief. Then he laughed, a boisterous sound too big for the small basement.

"Je suis libre! Me voilà libre... après tant de temps!"

He had a voice like his face—the best voice ever. Smooth and sweet, a caress on my ears, and that without even mentioning the French. I didn't understand it, but I loved to hear it all the same.

While I stood smitten, the vampire's attention turned to me again. "Où suis-je? On est en quelle année, là?"

"Sorry, I don't speak French. Do you know Russian? Or English, at least?" I asked him, frowning.

"So, I'm still in Russia?" the vampire asked me. He spoke with a weird accent: part French, part just old. "What year is it?"

"Uh… Twenty twenty-one."

I felt like I was in a movie, or a book, and watching myself from the side. I must have been in shock. The books described the state just like that. Or I was hallucinating from some mildew I breathed in by accident.

The vampire didn't seem very surprised by my words. He nodded, sorrow filling his eyes for a moment. Then he gave me a flirty smile and a deep bow. "I am immensely grateful for my freedom, and ask to forgive me my previous… manhandling. My name is Jean-Jacques, though you must know it already."

"Huh? Why would I?"

JJ—this was how I decided to call the vampire from now on—gave me an incredulous look. "You lifted the seal without knowing who was inside?"

"Seal? What seal?"

"This seal," JJ pointed at the lid of his coffin. "The one that stopped me from breaking this coffin apart for more than a century."

I understood there that JJ meant not the lid, but the drawings on it. "Seal… Like a magical seal?"

"Of course," JJ clicked his tongue and shook his head. "Ma chèrie, you are the first witch I've met who doesn't know these things."

Now it was my turn to be incredulous. "Because I'm not a witch, duh!"

JJ smiled at me with amusement. "Only a witch or a witcher could lift a seal like that one. If you don't know this, this means you are just a very ignorant one."

"I'm not a witch! I'm just a girl who's currently experiencing vivid visual and audio hallucinations," I said, as if convincing myself would make said hallucinations disappear. "And I have better things to do than bask in them, really."

Instead of assuring me he was real, JJ just smirked. He stepped towards me, and I stepped back, hiding my right hand behind my back.

"And what are those, ma chèrie? Maybe I can help you. Maybe we can help each other. If in the last century technology progressed as fast as it did when I was put in this coffin, there's a lot I need to learn about current time. Also…" he licked his full lips, a seductive, tantalising gesture. "I require nourishment."

I made another step back and almost knocked my head on a shelf rack. The basement wasn't big enough to run away from JJ for long.

"I have a business to run, you know. Debts to pay. In money. I need to find things out there," I waved my hand, encompassing the shelves full of old boxes and carefully packed antiquities. "That I can sell to pay for the debt Dad left on me, unless I want to sell the shop itself."

"The shop?"

I pointed at the ceiling, where, just a storey above, it stood. "His antiquities shop," I said, feeling a tug of grief at my chest. My dad's death was still fresh in my memory. Such a stupid car accident…

"He left it to me. I always wanted to one day turn it into the biggest, most famous one ever. Host auctions. Rent relics to big museums. Show them at galleries. I went to a college to study history for that… Now I was forced to take an academic leave. I probably won't ever be able to finish the course."

I didn't know why I was telling all this to a virtual stranger and a vampire to boot, but he listened. When I finished talking, he smiled at me, the same way Mephistopheles smiled at Faust.

"What's your name, ma chèrie?"

"Diana. And what does 'ma chèrie' even mean?"

"Diana… We certainly can help each other," he stepped towards me and took my left hand into his. I tugged back on it, but he didn't let go, though neither he tried to gnaw on it. "Businesses are my hobby. I've built quite a few trade empires in my time… And I need somewhere to live and someone to teach me about this century. It will be the most mutually beneficial."

He leaned towards me, his green cat-like eyes gleaming with red sparks and lust—or was it bloodlust? Either way, I leaned back only to hit the shelf rack. He backed me into a wall.

"You can't help me if you aren't real. And I won't let you chew on me. I like my blood inside—I kinda need it to live."

"Trust me, ma chèrie, I'm very real. But don't worry, my thirst wouldn't kill you unless it was my goal to drink you dry. Though, if you insist, I can find nourishment elsewhere. It just needs to be done soon."

I gulped, suddenly feeling very, very present again. My cheeks heated, and I saw JJ's eyes reddening a little more.

"It won't be painful," he said, leaning closer. I could feel his chilly breath on my face when he spoke. "Quite the opposite, in fact. What a better way to seal a deal than a bite?"

I shook my head and squeezed between JJ and the shelf rack. I put several steps of distance between us. When JJ turned towards me, I raised my chin, squared my shoulders and pretended that my head didn't spin in circles from what just happened and that I was absolutely sure about my decision.

"No, thanks. A handshake is enough, understood, JJ? I help you, you help me. But search for your food yourself! Without killing people!"

If his smile said anything, it was that my bravado didn't impress him as much as I hoped it would. "If you insist, ma chèrie," he reached a hand towards me for a handshake, his smile teasing now. When I didn't come to him immediately, he beckoned me with a finger.

I still could barely believe vampires existed, even with even with the best proof of it standing right in front of me. It was even harder to believe I agree to host one of them, but in the end…

I walked up to him and shook his outstretched hand.