What do you imagine when you hear ‘ship wreckage’? You see the water and the people swimming, the ship sinking behind them in slow motion like the Titanic. That’s about it, you see. But do you feel the desperation floating in the air, hear the surviving hearts struggling under the flesh, inside the tight ribcage, feel their shortness of breath with each wave that collapses on their heads? Do you feel like drowning as well, only by picturing them? Is your imagination that strong? Mine wasn’t. Until I met him that is.

“We’re here.” And just like that, we all got out of the car in the soft light of the dawn, with our driver running for his life towards the fancy mansion that stood in front of us. Red bricked with white windows and walls dressed up in evergreen ivy, the house didn’t scream vampire at all, but more like “rich old guy living with twenty y wives”, thing which was partially true, I guess. “Aren’t you going to come in?”

“I still don’t know your name,” I said, realizing I was following a complete stranger into a stranger’s house. “Mom taught me never to trust strangers. Plus, the light of the dawn is so pretty,” I watched the almost white rays play on my skin, slightly biting it, but not doing the damage it used to at the beginning of my baby-vampire life.

“It’s Yoongi. Now could you please come in?” He frowned from the shadows of the insides of the house.

The guys were all trying hard to stay awake, so I chose to accept the invitation into the vampire lair. Surprisingly, it was a quiet house, a dwelling in the darkness provided by heavy, coal coloured velvet curtains that fell over the windows. There was nothing giving out the owner’s tastes, everything so perfectly kept in place.

“What,” Yoongi smirked, “don’t tell me you were expecting bats and spider webs.”

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” I muttered, my eyes drawn to the imposing stairway that led to the second floor. “He’s here.”

“Yes. And we should go to him.” There was something in Yoongi’s voice that raised some question marks in my head. But seeing the guys encouraging me to follow him upstairs, I only sighed and started climbing the stairs as fast as the sickness allowed me to.

Door after door after door, they were all closed in the darkness of an uninviting corridor. All of them whispered secrets in an unknown language as long as you didn’t have the key. Only one was slightly cracked open, the darkness inside thicker than on the corridor.

“Something’s not right,” I heard myself saying while trying to back out. A chill that went down my spine warned me about what laid ahead of me.

“I’m afraid Namjoon’s a little… unwell,” said Yoongi, pushing open the door leading to infinite darkness. He reached in and a dim light crushed the shadows, revealing a messy bedroom, with paper scattered all over the floor. The walls were full of claw marks, the bed broken and feathers flying around with each step I took. He was in there, drawing me in, luring me inside his nest.

“What happened in here?” I whispered, trying to take in all that was around me, unconsciously scratching my right wrist.

“Namjoon happened. He went on a rampage,” Yoongi sighed, picking up a book from the floor.

“But why?” My thoughts were flying around inside my head like a flock of scared birds. I was thinking of everything, trying to take everything into consideration. But what I heard next never would have crossed my mind.

I followed Yoongi across the room, to the broken bed. The pillows had been bitten, ripped apart, the bed covers thrown on the floor. The dim light in the room didn’t seem to touch this one corner, right beside the wrecked bed. The little power left in me allowed me to see the image that made my soul scream on the inside: he was there, curled with his knees at his chest, eyes closed and face washed by trails of coagulated blood. His feet were bare, his clothes torn, few sizes bigger for his awfully skinny body. Seeing his sharp nails dug into his arms made me feel sick, scratch my right wrist again.

“His soulmate died,” whispered Yoongi.

All of a sudden all my bonds with myself were cut off, leaving my consciousness suspended into the void of a silenced mind. My physical pain, the sickness carving into my body – nothing mattered an