"That is, apparently, a way we are different. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of assholes who take suddenly having superpowers and a reputation for being monsters as an excuse to live down to the legend, but they're a minority and I'm not one of them." She rubs her neck. "The jerk who turned me was, but I came out of it fine."

"Good for you."

"So if your kind of vampire are ninety nine point nine percent sociopaths, why are you dating one?"

"He's a point one percenter. Actually, not even all the sociopaths are completely uncivilized, there's some who have a kind of sex-work-like business model, I have no quarrel with those even as I cannot vouch for their emotional complexity."

"Well, that's...better than several of the alternatives, I suppose. I can't imagine going for it myself, though."

"They make a living on it, it seems consensual, boyfriend says they don't have skeletons in the closet, I leave them be."

"Yeah. I can't imagine they have the problems literal sex workers face."

"They may or may not have that as a sideline, but I'm not sure they work as vectors for infections and positive they don't work as vectors for babies, so."

"I meant more along the lines of not being assaulted or abused or virtually enslaved. Problems specific to sex workers and not, also, people who have lots of casual sex that is not a transaction. To be honest, the STD and pregnancy thing hadn't even occurred to me. My kind of vampire don't work as vectors for those either."

The stake goes back into her messenger bag. "I mean, their immunity to that is largely predicated on their willingness to use violence, since if they don't there's no material advantage in the situation to being a vampire except maybe lesser emotional vulnerability? But I imagine the customers think twice, anyway."

"Using violence in self defense to prevent someone else from using violence on you is something most people are willing to do. I'm not sure how vampirism is different from having a tazer in that regard, aside from being more effective."

"They're vampires - my kind - so I bet it's pretty available to them on an emotional level, but some people with souls freeze up in violent confrontations."

"Vampires don't have souls where you're from? Well, I guess that would explain the sociopathy, if not the point one percent."

"Oh, my boyfriend just turned out to be using his soul for a smaller set of things than most people," she shrugs. "Like, he's different, but still personable. He may technically be a sociopath, I'm using the word very much unadvisedly and have not looked it up as a psychiatric condition or anything, but he's nice and he doesn't eat people because it would bother me."

"I guess someone who was already a high-functioning sociopath would probably be better at sociopathy than someone who had lived their life with more empathy," Gloria said. "I suppose technically we haven't proved that souls exist in my universe, but I've seen some things that would be hard to explain without."

"I'm not actually sure how it is supposedly known that soul loss in particular is part of the vampire-becoming process, but it's a convenient shorthand if nothing else and I don't have a strong reason to doubt it in the context of vampires and such existing to begin with."

"...What?"

"I mean, even if your kind of vampire happen to all be saints, which isn't the case, it could interact really badly with my kind, or with some sort of demon, or with brain-melting magical powers, or something like that. I'd be tempted to take it for myself but I'm already upgraded and don't want to fiddle with that lest that interact horribly - a lot of things in my world are just sort of disposed to be horrible - and I can't make avoiding death by old age a particularly high priority until I'm sure I can do better than all my predecessors at not dying of violence."

"Predecessors at what?"

"You called me a monster hunter, my title is technically 'slayer'. Bella the Vampire Slayer, at your service, although I slay other things and do not invariably slay vampires, as discussed. There's only one of me at a time."

"So you're upgraded in order to fight anything that isn't human, but mostly vampires, and there's only one of you at a time. If your vampires were anything like me and mine, I would express the hope that that meant no one else was hunting us, but as it is I can only assume that your world was the work of a particularly malevolent Creator."

"If there's anyone doing the job, they're doing it badly. There are some, you know, things, but nothing that seems definitely responsible for the whole shebang."

"So why are you wearing...oh, lovely, your world's vampires are allergic to crosses?"