The Spanish vampire Manuel de Rivera y Vargas paced through his Paris apartment living room.
Manuel had been a successful concert pianist throughout Europe in the 1930s.
When the chilling winds of war blew through that continent, he moved to America and in partnership with a pair of dance instructors opened up a dance studio there.
He had been turned into a vampire against his will by the ancient Egyptian vampiress Isis (the sister and also sister-in-law of the millionaire and formerly billionaire ancient Egyptian vampire Set) back in the 1940s.
Back around Christmas, 2004 he had become friends with the famous vampire hunter Dracul Van Helsing who slew only evil vampires.
Back in the summer of 2007, Manuel had fallen in love in Paris.
His love was Fatima Pahlevi, an 18-year-old Iranian girl.
The other vampires at the Vampire Club in Paris told Manuel that he was too old for her.
When Manuel pointed out that most mortals were too young for most vampires ("Look at Bella Swan and Edward Cullen!" he pointed out), they replied, "True but most vampires don't date mortals who are under 25."
But Manuel was an individualist and dated Fatima anyway.
They walked along the River Seine, dined in the finest Parisienne restaurants, ate cheese on croissants in the sidewalk cafes, talked philosophy and art, and remarked on how short French President Nicolas Sarkozy was.
Back in May of this year, Fatima told Manuel that she wanted to return to her homeland to campaign for reformist Iranian Presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.
"The power of the fascist mullahs over our country must be loosened," she had told Manuel.
Manuel understood.
He offered to go with her.
"No, being a vampire, you'd automatically be suspected by the authorities of being a agent of the so-called world Zionist conspiracy that fictional bogey-man the mullahs have conjured up to serve as a scapegoat for blaming all the problems facing Iran," Fatima replied.
So Fatima had returned to Iran.
And then when Twelver sect fanatic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who personally believed that only initiating a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East could pave the way for the return of Islam's messianic figure the Imam Mahdi) stole the election from Mousavi, she had joined the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in the streets of Tehran calling for new, free and fair elections.
But that disciple of Satan who posed as a man of God the Ayatollah Ali Khameini had different ideas.
At Friday prayers this past June 19th, he called on all Iranians to accept the June 12th election results and basically gave his own clerical blessing on the police to unleash all means of sheer brutality against the protestors.
Manuel was starting to get worried.
He had followed what Fatima was doing on Twitter.
But she hadn't updated in the past 12 hours.
Manuel continued to pace the apartment floor of his Paris apartment.
Finally he went over to his computer- a Mac (his friend Dracul Van Helsing had strongly recommended a Mac ever since the famed vampire hunter had got one) and turned to YouTube. He went to youtube.com/citizentube which had all the latest news from Iran.
There he watched a video horrified as a group of demonstrators carried away the body of a beautiful young woman who had been shot in the chest by police bullets.
It was his beloved Fatima.
Writer Anne Rice had changed the nature of people's perceptions about vampires.
In central and Eastern European vampire folklore, the vampire was viewed as little different from the African zombie- merely a walking animated corpse.
In Bram Stoker's Dracula, the vampiric corpse was now viewed as having intelligence and the ability to speak, charm and even seduce.
Anne Rice's vampire novels had presented vampires as still having souls united to their bodies and like mortals, their souls could be good or evil or like most mortal men, some grey area in-between.
One thing about mere corpses.
They do not cry.
And Manuel de Rivera y Vargas was now weeping buckets of tears.
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