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Avianhurst seemed completely deserted that day, which offered a promising start to his stroll. Armed with a fine bag to hold his sketchbook, freshly sharpened pencils, and custom-made binoculars, Zoyander intended to find a distraction from his messy situation. If he remained stuck here, after all, there was no harm in some leisure, at least until he’d figure out his way back home.
Sprawling tracts of rocky mountains and dense, emerald woods offered a perfect refuge for an avid birdwatcher. Local fauna had been kind to him thus far – far kinder than its human counterpart. Most of the people here lacked manners, respect, and, worst of all, style. Being subject to the wide variety of tasteless, mismatched fabrics made him long for the fabulous wing patterns only the greatest designer – nature – could craft.
With the sun at its scorching zenith, the vampire ached to sink into the blissful shadows of the forest. Just when he reached the edge of the town, however, he witnessed a wonder in full might.
On a white picket fence, there perched a bird. And not just any bird: a nightingale. A glorious, mesmerising, rare nightingale.
“My, oh, my,” he murmured, approaching carefully. “Hello, beautiful–”
The moment he stepped too close, he heard the bird’s little heart miss a beat: danger, it warned. And the animal was gone, fluttering away for its life.
Zoyander sighed. That was not the species he most wanted to observe, but it remained high on his meticulous list. He never hated immortality, except when it spoke for him uninvited. The man fixed his bag, ready to depart in search of better luck, when he saw it again; the nightingale had flown deeper into the garden and was now dabbling in the water of a bird bath.
He moved toward it on instinct, then stopped himself. The fence lined the boundary of a private parcel, one he had not visited before. Unroofed spaces required no invitation, but trespassing could be unwise in his position, with a hunter likely roaming around. If only he could turn invisible for a moment… but he was too weak, his stomach filled with nothing but caution and promises of a future meal. Sometimes he would feast just to use the skill later, buy a few extra seconds before the birds would inevitably sense him and take flight – but he could not allow himself such liberty yet, not on foreign ground.
The nightingale fluttered its wings, careless of his indecision. Are you coming or not? mocked its marvellous, tiny beak. Are you coming? He was. Of course he was. With a gentle push on the gate, he found his way into the garden.
He remembered who it belonged to now – that pale, young girl of dirty blonde hair, one who never spoke and lived alone without explanation. Was she home now? He could not smell her in the tranquil quiet of the pathway. Zoyander shrugged and ventured forward, struggling to keep focus on anything but the bird. And so what if she caught him here? What would she do? Her silence meant no one would hear of it, and their reservation meant no one would care.
The man finally stood by the fountain and took in the sight like one takes a deep breath. The animal turned its little head, utterly preoccupied with the new playground. The water, adorned with golden specks of sunlight, stirred gently under its yellow beak. Zoyander admired its shape in enchanted silence, blind to the passage of time. The gentle bronze of perfectly aligned feathers sank into his eyelids, painting a picture for the memory. Unknowingly, he smiled, and his proud features softened. What a marvel, he thought, and his hand reached for the sketchbook. A paper touched his hand. His heart sank.
The nightingale still ruffled its feathers, but the rest of the world came to a halt. Slowly, feeling his senses gather like storm clouds, Zoyander turned his head. He hadn’t opened the bag yet.
The girl was there, watching the bird alongside him. She kept her eyes fixed on its movements from beneath the flowery hat, hand still on the paper she had passed. Too stunned to speak, the vampire mindlessly accepted her handout and opened it.
Do you like birds?
He stared at the neat calligraphy in disbelief, his mind making out letters, maybe words, but never sense. When he looked at the girl again, puzzled expression on his face, he met a calm, expectant gaze.
“I… I am quite fond of birds, yes,” he dragged out. “Sorry, uh, can you… Can you hear me?”
Perhaps this was a stupid question, but until now, he had never considered this possibility. If the girl were mute and deaf, it would at least explain her strange detachment.
But she nodded in response, then tilted her head. Her curious motion resembled that of the bird, but it didn’t make him feel any better.
“Look, I’m sorry for… intruding,” Zoyander bowed slightly in a show of mannered remorse. “I didn’t hear you coming.”
He did not, and it disconcerted him even further. He failed to trace her scent, catch wind of the grass bending beneath her feet… only the beating of a mortal heart, finally audible, stopped him from batting away. Whoever she was, this girl was human, most likely an ordinary one – not a hunter, that is. They didn’t make hunters this young, and he thanked god for that.
Before he could decide on any action, she snatched the paper from his hand and scribbled something again.
What kind of bird is this? I see them around here sometimes.
Zoyander blinked once, then twice, but she remained where she stood, disappointing him in the hope this was but a mirage of hunger. Great, a thought crossed his head, now I have to actually deal with this.
But somewhere in his chest, a tiny hope bloomed. He hadn’t had many chances to talk about birds as of late, and children were terribly curious. It was foolish, of course, to entertain oneself with such conversations, as if they were of any substance, but…
“Oh, this?” He returned his gaze to the nightingale, feeling a cascade of words gather on his tongue. “This is a common nightingale, Luscinia megarhynchos. It’s actually quite rare in those parts, funnily enough. People mistake them for sparrows sometimes, but they’re larger and more lean.”
A whisper of dopamine sounded in his veins. Tulip – that was her name! – nodded again, actually pondering the meaning of what he had said. Then she took up writing again.
You seem to know a lot about them.
“Well,” he almost blushed at the compliment, “when you live as long as I have…”
He paused when he realised what he had done. She caught onto it, too.
You don’t look that old at all.
Zoyander chuckled nervously, vigorously berating himself inside. One slightest mention of birdwatching and he was already lowering his guard, practically leaving his heart exposed for a stake. But the girl didn’t do anything to him, of course, so he simply chose to resume with more caution.
“Ah, I just thought that, you know…” He made a gesture so vague he could not interpret it himself. “For people your age, a few years probably feel like… a century, right?”
Tulip immediately tilted her head again, then again, to the other side, as if studying him to make a decision. Whatever she saw in his features apparently satisfied her; she nodded and sent her pencil gliding across the paper once more. Zoyander suppressed a sigh of relief.
They keep eating my berries. I try to leave seeds for them, but they eat the berries anyway. What do I do?
Her genuine curiosity in his craft pushed him back onto the right track.
“Oh, you probably tried scarecrows already?” He couldn’t help but give her a knowing smirk. “Yeah, that won’t work. Nightingales actually have great depth perception, so they understand what’s real or not better than most birds. Here, let me just…”
He looked around, searching for a place to sit, and found himself on a little wooden bench. Tulip followed closely, hanging her head low over the blank page of his sketchbook. Delighted to have an audience, Zoyander began drawing. His artistic abilities were limited to grey sketches – he was more of a music guy, really – but he managed to draft a perfectly legible side view of an avian retina.
Whether the girl actually understood any of his cheerful babbling, he couldn’t tell. She kept pointing to specific parts of the graph and writing down her questions, unknowingly blessing him with a chance to keep talking about what he loved. He found Tulip quite astute for an orphaned commoner; it even crossed his mind that she could be a noble, abandoned in the countryside for her bloodline-staining deficiency, and it planted a quiet seed of kinship between them.
After the fruitful lecture, Tulip asked:
I don’t want to hurt them by scaring them away. If I find the seeds you mentioned, do you think they will take them instead?
His heart almost moved, and before he could think, Zoyander blurted out:
“I have those seeds at home! Oh, a whole bag, really. I can bring you some tomorrow, if you’d like.”
Did he really just do it? Did he just schedule a friendly hangout with an actual child? He found himself too uplifted to care for indignity. Who the hell cared? None of his friends from home would ever hear that today, he had the time of his life.
He would come to give her the seeds the next day. And then more times, day by day, to tell her about other birds they would spot together in the garden. Tulip proved herself as an exceptional listener, and he learned to leave her some time for additional written comments. She’d ask clever questions he had never considered, and if he didn’t know the answer on the spot, he would note them down for future research. With his mind happily preoccupied, Zoyander nearly forgot his entrapment.
This is the story of how, bird by bird and note by note, Tulip Mirabelle became his friend.
***
That one time was different. Just as he was about to leave, Tulip turned around on the bench and picked something up from her basket: a beautifully woven, crimson flower crown.
He caught a sharp, alluring scent when the girl’s hands entered his view.
But this couldn’t be. Did she prick herself with a thorn? Did she cut her hand while preparing a bouquet? He knew she did not.
Slowly, he reached for the crown and removed it from his head. What he held in his hands was red, thick, unmistakable; the petals stained his fingers with human blood.
He turned to her and met an observant eye, so different from the one that had first greeted him in the garden. It was a mature eye of a woman, a woman who not only caught his strong reaction – she had been anticipating it.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
With a gentle smile, she opened her mouth and spoke in a low, pronounced voice:
“I’m Tulip. Who are you?”