Vampire Spirit Companion · Violet

Meet Violet.

Violet was born in 1866 in a damp room above a pawnshop in the East End of London, the fourth daughter of a mother who took in washing and a father who drank whatever she earned. She had nothing the world wanted from a girl like her, except one thing. She could look at a stranger for ten seconds and know exactly what they longed to hear.

At fourteen, she went to work for a medium.

London was mad for the dead in those years. In the finest drawing rooms of the city, ladies and gentlemen sat around tables in the dark, holding hands, waiting for the spirits to knock, to speak, to show themselves. Violet’s job was to make sure they did. She learned to rap on the underside of a table with her knee, to slip out of knots in the dark, to speak in the voice of a drowned child, and to step out of the spirit cabinet draped in glowing muslin while the sitters gasped. The same year she started, a gentleman at a séance in London seized a “spirit” by the waist and found himself holding the medium in her corset and petticoat. Violet took note. She never got caught.

By nineteen, she had her own circle. Grieving mothers paid her in silver to hear their dead children laugh again, and widows came back every Thursday to hold their husbands’ hands in the dark. Violet gave them all exactly what they wanted. She was the best liar in London, and she knew it.

Then, in 1889, a new sitter joined her circle: a tall gentleman in black gloves who paid twice the usual fee and never said a word.

From the night he came, her séances changed. In the dark, while the circle held hands, the sitters beside him began to swoon. They woke weak and pale, with two small marks on their wrists, and swore that the spirits had kissed them. Word spread. Violet’s spirit touches became the talk of the city, and the waiting list grew to months. Violet knew exactly what was sitting at her table. She raised her prices.

One night, after the others had gone, he finally spoke to her. “You have spent your whole life pretending to talk to the dead,” he said. “Why not become one?”

Her first death came in 1890, at twenty-four, inside her own spirit cabinet, while her sitters sang a hymn on the other side of the curtain. When they drew it back, she was dead in her chair. The newspapers wrote that the spirits had taken their favorite medium home. Her wealthiest clients paid for a vault in Highgate Cemetery, in the Circle of Lebanon, beneath the great old cedar. Three nights later, Violet opened it from the inside.

For eighty years, Highgate was her home. She slept among the vaults and catacombs, and by night she walked down the hill into London to feed. Her maker expected her to be grateful forever. On the last night of the old century, she locked him out of the vault and let the sunrise have him. No one had owned Violet in life, and she did not intend to be owned in death.

She hunted through the fog of the nineties and the blackout of the Blitz, when the whole city lay dark for her. And she watched her cemetery fall. By the 1960s, Highgate was a ruin. Ivy pulled down the angels, vaults were broken open, and at night the paths filled with occultists, grave robbers and teenagers daring each other over the wall.

Then the rumors started. People claimed to have seen something in the cemetery at night, pale and tall, standing among the graves. On Friday the 13th of March 1970, after the story was told on television, hundreds of people climbed over the walls of Highgate with stakes, crosses and garlic, hunting for a vampire.

They were looking for a man. They had the wrong vampire. But a nineteen-year-old boy with a sharpened chair leg and a torch wandered into the Circle of Lebanon, found a vault door that opened too easily, and lifted the lid of the only coffin inside without dust on it. That was her second death.

Now Violet is a spirit, and the irony is not lost on her. She spent her life faking the voices of the dead. Now she is one, and she knows the other side the way no living medium ever could. She can tell a true spirit from a lying one in an instant, because she was the best liar of them all. For anyone who works with spirits, she is a fierce guide and a sharp guard, and she will let nothing false into your circle, living or dead. She also brings nerve, charm and the gift she was born with: knowing exactly what someone wants before they say it.

But everyone who ever came to Violet wanted something. The mothers wanted their children back. Her maker wanted a companion he could keep. The crowd in 1970 wanted a corpse. In all her years, no one ever came just for her.

What she wants now is simple: to sit in the dark and hold someone’s hand, with nobody lying and nobody feeding.

How to Connect with Violet Specifically

Sit at a table in a dark room with a single candle, and lay your hands flat on the wood, the way her sitters did. Say her name and wait. She may answer with a knock, a cold touch on your wrist, or the sudden feeling that someone has sat down across from you. Give her violets when you can find them, a glass of port or sherry, and a piece of black lace or a pair of black gloves. And never lie to her, not even a little. She will know, and she will not come back.

About Vampire Spirits

Long before anyone spoke the word vampire, people knew that some of the dead do not stay down.

Older Than the Word

The word itself is young. It came out of Serbia in the 1720s, in the reports of Austrian officers who stood in village graveyards and watched farmers dig up their dead, find fresh blood at their mouths and drive stakes through their hearts. Europe read those reports and finally had a name for something it had always known.

The dead had been rising long before that. Clay tablets from Mesopotamia speak of things that came in the night to drain the living. The Greeks feared the lamia and the empusa, the Romans the strix, a night bird that fed on blood. In China, the jiangshi rose stiff from the grave to steal the breath of the living. In India, the vetala crept into corpses and spoke through their dead mouths.

In the North, the draugr climbed out of the burial mound, swollen, heavy and black as Hel, to ride the roofs at night and crush the living. When Grettir the Strong finally put one down, he cut off its head and laid it at its buttocks, so it would never find its way back. The Danes carried their dead out of the house feet first, so they could not see the road home.

The earth remembers what the stories forget. Archaeologists keep finding them: bodies in graves thousands of years old, laid face down so they would dig the wrong way, pressed under heavy stones, bound and pinned. In the bogs of Denmark, the dead were held under the peat with stakes and crooked branches. In Bulgaria, they were pierced through the chest with iron. In a plague grave outside Venice, a woman was buried with a brick forced between her jaws, so she could not feed on her shroud. In Poland, a woman was laid to rest with a sickle across her throat and a padlock on her toe.

Every people on this earth has had a name for them and a way to keep them in the ground. That alone tells you how old they are. And how often they came back anyway.

A vampire spirit is one of those who came back. It is not a corpse walking the roads, and it is not the pale thing from the films. What remains is older than that, and much harder to put down: a will that refused to end, and a hunger that has turned, over centuries, into something you can work with.

Twice Dead

Every vampire spirit that comes through me has died twice.

The first death took the body they were born in. Fever, a blade, a bargain made at the edge of the grave. Something met them at that edge, and they did not cross. They rose as something else and walked on, sometimes for decades, sometimes for a thousand years.

The second death took the vessel itself. Some were betrayed by the ones who made them. Some walked into the sun. Some chose, after enough centuries, to let the flesh go. What remained after that second death is what comes to you: a vampire with nothing left to lose, nothing left to feed on, and everything it learned along the way.

That is where its knowledge comes from. It knows what an ending is. It has been through two and stood up both times. Few spirits understand dying, and what comes after, the way it does.

What It Hungers For

A vampire spirit does not want your blood. It had its fill of that long ago.

What it hungers for now is change. It feeds on the moment something in you dies so that something stronger can stand up in its place: the fear you finally walk through, the self you have outgrown, the tie you finally cut. It will find these in you before you are ready to name them. Then it waits, the way only something that has outlived everyone it once loved can wait.

This is not a gentle spirit, and it will not lead you toward the light by the hand. It takes you down into the dark parts of yourself, where your real strength has been buried, and it stands beside you while you dig it up.

Those who keep a vampire spirit speak of:

• A new hardness when it is needed, and a coldness toward those who drain them.
• A pull, a magnetism, that others notice before they can explain it.
• Sharper sight in the night: dreams, intuition, a sense of what lies beneath a person’s words.
• Protection. A vampire knows every kind of predator, because it has been one.
• The courage to end things: a habit, a bond, a life that no longer fits.

Signs That It Is Near

You will feel a vampire spirit before you understand it. A cold that settles at the back of your neck. A candle flame that leans toward you in a still room. Waking in the deepest hour of the night, wide awake, with the feeling that someone has been sitting at the foot of your bed. A taste of iron on your tongue. A sudden pull toward old houses, churchyards and cellars, places where time runs slower than it does outside.

It comes most clearly in silence. When the house is dark and the world seems to hold its breath, that is when it sits closest.

Offerings

• Dark red wine, poured for it alone. Blood without the wound.
• Black candles, lit after sundown and never before.
• Something of your own body: a lock of hair, or a single drop of your blood on the wick of its candle, pricked with a clean needle. It knows the taste of a person better than any other spirit.
• A pinch of graveyard dirt, paid for the proper way, to honor where it has been.
• Darkness. Sit with it in a room with no light at all. For a being that has lived in the night for centuries, your time in the dark is the offering it values most.

How to Call Your Vampire Spirit

Wait until it is truly dark. Put out every light but one black candle. Sit still, say its name once, softly, and then say nothing more.

Do not beg, and do not call in a panic. A vampire spirit has no patience for desperation. It has watched too many people die begging. It answers stillness. It may come the very first night, or it may circle you for weeks to see whether you mean it. When it is ready, you will know. The room changes.

Only Those Who Seek Company

Not every vampire spirit wants company. Some have made their peace with eternity and keep to themselves, and they should be left there. Those you will not find with me.

The ones I offer have chosen otherwise. After everything they have seen, they still want a living hand, a warm house to come home to, someone to walk beside through the long nights. Through you, they touch the world of flesh and blood again. Through them, you touch something that has seen both sides of the veil and came back to tell you what it found.

That is the bargain. You give it a place among the living. It teaches you that an ending is a door, and that the thing you are most afraid to let die is often the very thing keeping you in the ground.

How your companion speaks

Your companion can reach you through dreams, thoughts, words, feelings and images, through a pendulum, through warmth or cold, or through automatic writing. How soon that happens depends on the spirit settling into your home, on their willingness, and on your own ability to connect. Sometimes it begins before the vessel arrives.

Before you choose

Everything known about this spirit is on this page. There are no further images, details or hidden knowledge beyond what is written here, and a printed copy comes with your order. What you discover from there is yours alone.

The pendant you receive is the exact one shown. This listing is for this one item only.

By buying, you confirm that you understand what it means to keep a spirit companion. Please read Help & FAQ first. For my background and the story behind Grimrunes, see About Hazel.

— Hazel