Chapter 4: Coffee and Confession
The café was a bubble of warm, buttery light in the damp Brighton morning. Yaa sat curled in a corner booth, her knees drawn up, shrouded in an oversized black hoodie that smelled faintly of cinnamon and rain. She’d scrubbed her skin raw in the shower, but the phantom sensations lingered—the deep ache in her muscles, the specific, tender puncture on her neck. She’d covered the wounds with two sheer skin-toned patches, but they itched like a brand.
Vanessa slid into the opposite seat, her nurse’s eyes missing nothing. She dumped her bag, shrugged off her coat, and immediately leaned forward. “Right. You look like shit warmed over. And you’re wearing men’s clothing that costs more than my monthly train pass. Start talking.”
Yaa managed a weak smile. “Nice to see you too, Ness.”
“Don’t ‘Ness’ me. You vanished from the club with Mr. Tall, Dark, and Apocalyptic. Phone off for twelve hours. You’re currently vibrating at a frequency I’d associate with shell shock or a really, really good shag.” She narrowed her eyes. “Which is it?”
“A bit of both,” Yaa admitted, her voice hoarse. She took a long gulp of too-hot coffee, the scalding liquid grounding her.
“Let’s see the neck.”
“What?”
Vanessa made a ‘gimme’ gesture. “The sweater’s hiding something. You keep tugging the collar. Did he get rough? Because I will find him and introduce him to my suture kit in a very creative way.”
Reluctantly, Yaa lowered the collar, peeling back one of the patches.
Vanessa’s professional demeanor snapped into place. She leaned closer, her playful concern evaporating. “Christ, Yaa. Those are puncture wounds. Clean, deep, spaced… what, three centimetres?” Her gaze shot up to Yaa’s. “Human teeth didn’t do that. Not like that. Did he use a tool? Some kind of… fetish thing?”
“It’s not like that,” Yaa said, too quickly. She covered the mark again. “It’s complicated.”
“Complicated is tax returns. This is a wound.” Vanessa sat back, studying her friend. “Who is he?”
Yaa swirled her coffee. “What if…” she began, her words tentative, feeling their way across a minefield. “What if I told you it felt… supernatural?”
Vanessa blinked. “I’d say you need a CT scan and a strong coffee.”
“I’m serious, Ness. Not just last night. For years. That feeling I used to talk about at uni, remember? The déjà vu that wasn’t déjà vu. Like I’d lived a whole other life somewhere hot and loud, and I’d left… something important there. Someone.” She met Vanessa’s gaze, her brown eyes unguarded. “What if that’s real?”
Vanessa stared for a long moment. Then a slow, incredulous smile spread across her face. “Oh my god. You’re serious. You met some goth in a club with interesting dental work and now you’re doing a past-life regression? Did he tell you you were a Egyptian princess in a former life? Because, babes, that’s page one of the fuckboy manual.” She chuckled, sipping her own coffee. “Next you’ll tell me he’s a vampire and you’re his long-lost undead bride.”
Yaa didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. She just held her friend’s gaze, the truth a cold, hard knot in her stomach.
Vanessa’s smile faded. “Yaa. You’re not joking.”
Before Yaa could formulate a response that didn’t sound utterly deranged, her phone buzzed violently on the table. DARREN flashed on the screen. She groaned.
“Don’t answer it,” Vanessa advised. “He’s a tumour.”
But the buzzing was insistent, a grating echo of the previous night’s confrontation. Against her better judgment, she swiped to answer. “What, Darren?”
His voice was slurry, thick with morning-after regret or cheap vodka, or both. “Yaa. Hey. Listen… about last night. At the club. I was a dick. A massive dick. I’m sorry.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Noted. Goodbye.”
“Wait!” The word was a panicked shout. “I mean it. I was jealous, okay? Seeing you with that… that freak. It made me realize… I still love you. We should try again. Properly this time. No games.”
The absurdity of it, this pedestrian, needy plea crashing into the cosmic upheaval of her reality, was too much. A cold, clear anger rose in her. “You called me a frigid bitch because I wouldn’t fuck you in a toilet stall, Darren. Love doesn’t look like that. Don’t call me again.”
She ended the call and blocked the number. Her hand was steady, but inside, everything was churning. Darren’s pathetic attempt at reclamation highlighted the staggering otherness of what had happened with Simon. One man saw her as a possession to be won back. The other saw her as a soul he’d once watched die. Both were prisons, but only one contained a terrible, mesmerizing key to a part of herself she’d always sensed was missing.
She looked at Vanessa. “I have to go.”
“Where? Yaa, talk to me. You’re scaring me a little.”
“I need to find out what’s real,” Yaa said, shoving her phone into the hoodie’s pocket. She stood, dropping a tenner on the table. “I can’t… I can’t live in this in-between. Not knowing if I’m having a psychotic break or if…” She trailed off.
“Or if your vampire boyfriend is legit?” Vanessa finished, her tone now utterly serious, all traces of jest gone.
Yaa gave a tight, helpless shrug. “I’ll call you later. Promise.”
She fled the café, the comforting hum of normalcy replaced by the piercing need for answers. She turned her steps not toward home, but toward the grand, columned facade of the Brighton History Centre. If there was a record of the impossible, a shred of evidence in dusty ledgers or folklore collections, it would be there.
Across town, in the perpetual twilight of the warehouse, Simon stood perfectly still before a cracked, age-spotted mirror. He was shirtless, tracing the faint, silvery lines of scars on his torso—a musket ball here, a bayonet slash there. Useless decorations on a body that refused to die.
A heavy knock, then the rasp of a key in the lock. Elias let himself in, a sturdy, middle-aged man with a weathered face and a cooler bag in his hand. He was a discreet supplier, a fourth-generation butcher who knew the value of silence and the strange requirements of certain exclusive clients.
“Brought your weekly,” Elias announced, his voice echoing in the cavernous space. He hefted the cooler onto the kitchen island. “Double-packed, chilled, O-negative, just as you like.” He began unpacking the sealed, medical-looking pouches of cold blood.
Simon didn’t turn. “Leave it.”
Elias paused, a pouch in his hand. He looked at Simon’s back, then at the unopened pouches from the previous week still stacked neatly in the fridge, visible through the open door. A slow frown creased his brow. “You’re stocked up. You haven’t touched last week’s.”
“I’m aware.”
“You sick?” Elias asked, his practical nature overriding protocol. “I can source other types. Different preservatives. Something’s off.”
“I’m not sick.” Simon finally turned. His complexion, while always pale, held a subtle, resilient tone it usually lacked. The hollows under his eyes were less pronounced.
Elias stared. He’d been servicing Simon for twenty years. He knew the look of a creature clinging to existence, subsisting on a cold, clinical diet. This was different. This was… vitality. A shadow of it. “You fed,” Elias stated, the words dropping like stones. “Actually fed. From a live source.”
Simon said nothing. His silence was confirmation.
“Christ, Simon.” Elias put the blood pouch down carefully. “After all this time? Who? Some club kid you’ll have to mind-wipe? A tourist?” His concern was genuine, edged with fear. “The risks—”
“It’s not like that.” Simon’s voice was low, gravelly with a tumult of emotion he couldn’t contain. “She’s… she’s back, Elias.”
Elias froze. He knew the stories. The drunken, grief-stricken ramblings on the worst nights. “No.” The word was a whisper. “That’s not possible. Simon, that’s a madness talking.”
“The scent. The blood. She said my name.” Simon’s grey eyes were blazing with a fervor Elias had never seen. “It’s her. Not a reflection. Her.”
Understanding dawned on Elias, followed by dread. “And you fed from her.” It wasn’t a question. He saw the haunted look, the mix of ecstasy and self-recrimination. “How much?”
“Too much. Almost too much.” Simon looked away, clenching his jaw. “I lost myself. For a moment, I was back there… and I was the monster they all said I was.”
Elias let out a long, slow breath, running a hand over his face. “Okay. Okay. So she’s alive? Recovered?”
“She walked out this morning. To think. To process.”
“And you let her? With the memory? With the marks?”
“She deserves the truth.”
“The truth could get her locked up! Or get you hunted!” Elias’s voice rose in frustration. “Simon, listen to yourself. You’re talking about a reincarnated princess. This isn’t your usual brooding. This is a cosmic-level event. And you… you bit her. What if she tells someone?”
“She won’t.”
“You don’t know that! People process trauma in weird ways. She might go to a therapist, a priest, a fucking podcaster!” Elias paced a short, tight line. “You need to find her. Not to claim her, you idiot. To contain this. To explain properly, before her human brain rationalizes it into something she goes blabbing about over brunch.”
Simon’s head snapped up. The image of Yaa talking, sharing, the truth becoming a anecdote, was a new kind of terror. Elias was right. He had been a fool, wrapped in a sentimental haze. He had given her the truth like a gift, not considering it was also a weapon, or a liability.
“I don’t know where she went,” Simon said, the admission grating.
“Then you’d better hope she comes back,” Elias said, his tone grim. He gestured to the untouched blood. “And you’d better decide what you are now. A ghost living on bagged blood, or whatever the hell you become after tasting something real for the first time in four centuries.”
Elias left, the door clicking shut with a sound of finality. Simon was alone again, but the silence was different. It was charged, pregnant with the echo of Elias’s warning. He stared at the cooler of blood. The thought of it now—cold, sterile, dead—turned his stomach. He could still taste her, feel the hot, living pulse of her against his tongue, the way her very essence had seared a path through his deadened senses.
He was changed. The sustenance he’d relied on for decades now seemed like ash. He was hungry again, but not for the cooler. He was hungry for the light in her amber eyes, for the sharp retort of her tongue, for the terrifying, glorious reality of her existence.
And he was terrified that, in seeking the truth, she was now walking through a world entirely unprepared to believe her, dragging his ancient, dangerous secret behind her like the train of a ghostly gown. He moved to the window, staring out at the grey expanse of sea and sky, willing a familiar, petite figure to appear on the street below, walking back to him.
The wait was a new kind of torture.
The wait was a new kind of torture. It wasn’t the passive centuries he’d endured. This was active, needle-sharp, each minute a question mark. Would she return, or had he finally succeeded in chasing the echo away for good? The sterile pouches of blood in the cooler seemed to accuse him from the island. He couldn’t look at them.
He spent the afternoon cleaning. It was a futile, human gesture. He scrubbed the black sheets from the bed until the water ran clear, erasing the rust-brown evidence of his failure. He opened the high windows, letting the saline wind scour the room of sex and iron, replacing it with the damp chill of the sea. He was trying to erase the night, but every action just underlined its permanence.
Dusk was bleeding the last grey light from the sky when a silhouette darkened the frosted glass of the warehouse door. No knock. Just the presence, a palpable shift in the air. Simon was across the room in a breath, yanking the door open.
She stood there, soaked. Rain plastered her braids to her scalp, dripped from the ends of Simon’s borrowed hoodie. Her expression was wiped clean, a mask of exhausted resolve. She looked smaller than he remembered, and fiercer.
They stared at one another in the watery light from the streetlamp. The downpour hissed on the pavement behind her.
“I need to hear more,” Yaa said, her voice flat, cutting through the noise of the rain. “The full story. Not the poetic version. Dates. Names. What exactly happened in that courtyard. What you did. What she did.” She pushed past him, her shoulder brushing his chest, and stepped into the warm, dry darkness of the loft.
Simon closed the door, sealing them in. He watched her drip onto the concrete floor.
“You’re going to make me dinner first, though,” she stated, not looking at him as she shrugged the sodden hoodie off her shoulders. It landed with a heavy slap. She stood in her jeans and a simple black bra, her skin pebbled with goosebumps. “I’ve been hungry all fucking day. Lightheaded. That’s your fault, too. So you owe me. Again.”
The casual intimacy of her semi-nudity, the raw practicality of her demand, left him momentarily unmoored. His eyes, against his will, traced the line of her spine, the powerful curve of her shoulder. The healing punctures on her neck were dark, stark marks against her skin.
He turned abruptly, grabbing a thick, wool blanket from a nearby armchair. He held it out to her, his gaze fixed on a point above her head.
Yaa seemed to realize her state then. She looked down at herself, then back at him, a flicker of surprise crossing her features. It wasn’t invitation. It was a profound, unsettling carelessness. She had no sense of shame around him. Why would she? He’d already seen, and taken, everything.
“Oh, piss off,” she muttered, snatching the blanket from him. She wrapped it around herself like a cloak and stalked to the large leather sofa, collapsing into its depths. She pulled her knees up, a fortress of damp wool and frustrated energy.
Simon moved to the kitchen, the familiar routine a lifeline. He worked in silence, the only sounds the sizzle of oil in a pan, the chop of vegetables, the quiet hum of the extractor fan. He made a frittata, something dense with protein and iron. He poured her a large glass of cold orange juice and set it on the coffee table with a thud.
“Eat,” he said, placing the plate beside the glass.
Yaa uncurled, keeping the blanket tight. She ate with a single-minded intensity, barely tasting it. She finished half the plate and drained the juice before speaking again. The color slowly returned to her face.
“The Brighton History Centre is a useless pile of tourist pamphlets and local council minutes,” she announced, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “But the folklore section in the stacks… that was more helpful.”
Simon stood leaning against the kitchen island, arms crossed. He didn’t move.
“Books on books,” she continued, her voice gaining a brittle, academic edge. “Pages and pages. Eastern European myths. Victorian penny dreadfuls. Clinical anthropological studies on predatory archetypes. Was I going crazy? I had no clue. But the pages were telling me what it was about.” Her amber eyes locked onto his. “What vampires did. How long they’d been on this earth. How they just don’t die unless you stake them in the heart. Silver. Sunlight. Aversion to crosses—though that seems culturally specific, doesn’t it?”
She was trying to box him in with taxonomy, to make him a specimen. He remained silent.
“So much information. Too much for my brain.” Her defiant tone cracked. She looked away, a tremor in her jaw. “I took a breath. Sat at the table with my head buried in my hands. I must be going mad.”
The memory of the sterile reading room, the weight of the absurd truth pressing down, was vivid in her voice.
“Then my phone rang. My mum. All the way in Ghana, retired and living her best life.” Yaa gave a short, humorless laugh. “She’s yapping about auntie drama and the heat. Then she notices how quiet I am.”
She recounted the conversation in fits and starts, her gaze distant. Asking about royalty in their family. Her mother’s confirmation—kings, queens, even princesses. Stories passed down about formidable individuals. That Yaa definitely had that blood in her from Sarai herself, from Yaa’s late father.
“I hesitated. Then I asked her about the rumors. The ones about our family history being involved with the occult. Witchcraft or something.” Yaa’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She was quiet. Then she told me it was true. But every generation had a chance to stop those practices.”
Simon’s stillness deepened. This was new history, a thread he hadn’t known existed.
“I asked if she thought those things were still out there today.” Yaa finally looked back at him, her eyes wide and dark. “She asked me what happened.”
A long, strained silence filled the space between them, heavy with the rain’s rhythm on the glass roof.
“I told her it was nothing. That I just met a guy who was saying a whole bunch of stuff. Not to worry, I’d find out more.” Yaa swallowed. “She asked if I’d ditched that Darren guy. I wasn’t ready to be talked to about relationships. I hung up.”
She let out a long, shaky breath, the confession leaving her deflated. “So I decided to do the unthinkable. Come back here. To the source of the fucking headache.”
Simon pushed off the island. He walked to the sofa but didn’t sit. He lowered himself to one knee on the rug before her, putting himself below her eye level. The gesture was one of submission, of apology. “Ask your questions,” he said, his voice rough. “I will answer.”
Yaa looked down at him, this ancient, lethal thing kneeling on the floor. The blanket slipped a little from her shoulders. “The courtyard. Start at the beginning. Not how you felt. What you saw. What you heard.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, not to escape, but to find the precise memory. When he opened them, he began speaking in a low, steady monotone.
“The marble tiles glistenes. They’d dragged me across the ground, bound, a bag on my head. The smell was roasted corn, goat shit, and the oily scent of palm nut soup. I can still remember the sizzle of my skin in the sun. Yaa… she rushed from her place as the table. She wore a simple colorful kente but she was a queen. She put her body between me and the man ready to take his sword. Her betrothed. His name was Kwame.”
Yaa listened, motionless. The name ‘Kwame’ sparked nothing.
“She tried to vouch for me, tried to tell her family, her people, that I wasn't a demon. That I felt pain. Love. That I deserved to live. "Simon’s voice hitched, just once. “He called her a witch. The crowd murmured, whispered. Obayifo. It was not a metaphor. They thought maybe he was telling the truth. Her defiance proved it to them.”
“What did you do?” Yaa breathed.
“Nothing.” The word was ash in his mouth. “I was weak from sunlight, from silver bonds. I roared. I threatened. It was noise.” Simon’s hand twitched on his knee “Prince Kwame challenged her uncle King Kwesi, told him to cut off what was not good for his kingdom, but King Kwesi could not do that, not to his beloved niece. Angered, Kwame’s spear came down. Not on me. He was not a fool. He wanted to break her. He drove it through stomach, clean. She stumbled back, I caught her before she could fall.”
Simon touched his own stomach. Yaa flinched.
“She didn’t cry out. The weight of her... The blood was immediate. Hot. It soaked the white linen, soaked my trousers. It had a scent—hibiscus, amber, and a copper tang. The same as yours.” He was staring through Yaa now, into the past. “She was trying to speak. I bent my head. Her breath was bubbling. She said ‘Simon.’ Just once. And then nothing. The light left her eyes. It took less than thirty seconds.”
The flat, horrific recitation was worse than any poetic lament. Yaa could see it. The orange dust. The brutal, political efficiency of the killing. A public execution masquerading as justice.
“What did you do then?” Her voice was a thread.
“What any monster would do.” His grey eyes refocused on her, full of a weary, self-directed savagery. “I broke the silver chains. They were not prepared for my grief. I killed Kwame first. Tore his throat out with my teeth. Then I killed the guards. I killed anyone within reach. I was painted in her blood and theirs. I ran when the sun began to crest, her body in my arms. I buried her where the forest met the sea. I screamed until my voice was gone. Then I began walking. And I have not stopped.”
The silence that followed was total. The rain had eased to a soft patter. Yaa realized she was crying. Silent tears tracked through the residual dampness on her cheeks. They were not for herself. They were for that fearless princess in the dirt. For the monster she created.
“You loved her,” Yaa said. It wasn’t a question.
“She was the last living thing that made me feel human. Her death was the final nail. I have been a ghost ever since.” He finally looked away, the confession draining him. “Until you walked into that club. And the world, for a second, had color again.”
Yaa wiped her face with the edge of the blanket. The emotional storm receded, leaving a strange, calm clarity. The facts were aligning. The family history of power and occult accusation and practice. The reincarnation. The vampire. It was insane, but it was consistent.
“Your blood,” she said, shifting the subject to something she could almost grasp. “When I… lost consciousness. You said I needed your blood to live. Did you give it to me?”
“No.” He looked back, sharper now. “I offered. You refused. You passed out from blood loss, but your heart kept beating. I used my saliva to seal the wounds. It has mild coagulant properties. You healed on your own, just... slowly.”
“But you wanted me to drink.” She remembered the fevered command, the press of his bleeding wrist against her mouth.
“In that moment of madness, yes. To tie you to me. To make you eternal. It was the most selfish thought I have ever had.” He stood up suddenly, the movement agitated. “It is what my maker did to me. It is not a gift. It is a curse. I would not wish it on you, not even to keep you from dying in my arms a second time.”
Yaa let that settle. The selfishness of his desire, the self-loathing that checked it. She untangled herself from the blanket and stood, facing him. The distance between them was two feet, charged with history and a shocking, unwanted magnetism.
“I don’t know what I am,” she said. “Yaa Mensah, psychologist. Or a princess’s echo. Or just a woman who got mixed up with a dangerous myth.”
“You are all of it,” Simon said, his gaze burning into her.