The sun was rising. He could feel it in his blood. Five hundred years of living, a room he’d designed home he’d built where no sliver of outside light could penetrate, and still he always knew when it was sunrise.
Even when he was at Darkside—so named because the colony was built on the far side of the moon, he still knew to the second when the sun rose. And wasn’t that an odd sensation, in a place that never saw the sun. He’d checked it, and found that it was sunrise at his ancestral home in England
Which just went to show, he supposed, that one never really outgrew his roots. And it was a useful talent, for one who couldn’t bear the touch of the sun. Or it had been useful, before everything ran on a twenty-four hour schedule, and specially designed windows that filtered out all the dangerous radiation while still allowing one to look out at the sunny day.
He was old-fashioned enough that he didn’t care for windows. Aside from an instinctive paranoia, he couldn’t help feeling that any opening that allowed someone to look out also allowed someone to look in, and he valued his privacy too much for that.
So, he kept to his nocturnal schedule by preference if not necessity. He had rooms with the special filtering windows, of course, and rooms with normal windows, too. There were appearances to keep up. He had no wish to draw additional attention to himself.
Some attention was bound to come his way, of course. It was inevitable. He was lucky enough to be thought charmingly eccentric rather than dangerously crazed. And he valued that distinction.
Stephen Shylock’s family was well known—among other things—for being suspected and sometimes openly claiming to be vampires. Most people considered an amusing, if rather odd family tradition.
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