Whatever it was, I began my silent guardianship of Francine after that first sighting, watching her grow and mature from a distance. I did not interfere with her day-to-day existence, nor try to influence her in any way. My intent when adopting a new ward (for lack of a better term) has always been to observe as unobtrusively as possible. Only a very few have been aware of my existence, though they tend to credit some obscure guardian angel with watching over them, which I find amusing or annoying, depending on my mood. Even fewer have interacted with me directly. I find it best that way. Mankind, while enjoying the literary fantasy of vampires, really doesn't want to come face-to-face with their reality. Staying in the shadows frees me from the tedium of explanations or cleaning up messy situations, and as I may have mentioned earlier, avoiding boredom is the reason I've lasted as long as I have.
Francine appeared to be doing well for herself, in spite of expectations. Her father had disappeared long before I spotted her and her mother had let his desertion drag her to quiet despair. The woman went to work to keep a roof over her daughters' heads, but she also made a habit of imbibing to excess, and it fell to Francine to become a surrogate mother to her younger sister. Francine took this all with good grace, turning down a scholarship that would have left her sister to fend for herself, and taking night courses at a local college instead.
It took her a while but she earned a nursing degree and found a job in the hospital emergency room. Though you may think me ghoulish, I delighted in her chosen profession. I reveled in the opportunity to be around the blood and found the gore fascinating, even more so, the ways modern medicine has found to heal wounds and diseases that devastated the people of my time, my time being the time before I became what I am, of course. Also, I found a certain irony in my preference for the sanguinary being linked to her choice of career, in a manner of speaking.
It was while Francine was still going to school, but not long before she got her degree, that she met Vincent Figaro. He was a policeman, impudent and bold, who brazenly accosted her on the street as she walked home one evening after class to ask her to go out with him. He was Italian, with the dark good looks and cocky self-confidence that so many women have found admirable throughout history. To my amazement, Francine agreed and it wasn't long before she and "Vinny" had set their wedding date.
I should not have been so irked by her actions; the very fact that human beings are prone to such foolishness and unpredictability is what has held my interest for so long, but I had grown fond of Francine, and Vincent had a subdued aura of violence that screamed to my senses so loudly I could not believe that Francine did not sense the contumelious nature that lurked just beneath his easy smile. They do say love is blind, so I suppose that must explain it.
It did not take long for Vincent to show his true colors. Francine's recently acquired ineptitude resulted in bruises, sprains, and the occasional black eye. If her friends and coworkers suspected her husband's perfidy, none of them ever mentioned it to her. Once her sister tried to broach the subject, but Francine managed to convince her that the bruise on her throat was the result of Vincent having had a vivid dream involving the apprehension of a particularly nasty felon, a one-time event rather than an ongoing problem.
You may be asking yourself how I come to know so many intimate details when I claim to go unnoticed (unless, of course, I choose not to). Let me say, without delving too far into particulars, that vampires have many talents that humans know nothing about, and a vampire as old as I am acquires a good many more than what is common among the general vampire populace. For example, I am capable of standing beside you without your knowing it. You might possibly sense your hackles rise or a sudden chill run up your spine--the phrase "a goose walked over my grave" comes up often in these cases, but you would have to be extremely sensitive even for that to happen-- or I distracted by other things at the time. Rare, but it does happen.
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