The Vampire Princess

by P. Mattern

  “Such a waste,” Eutropia continued, as the girl cowered in the corner. Now she’ll be good for nothing but blood brooding.” Turning, she fixed me with her penetrating gaze again.

  “Doubtless you have many questions. I don’t really care to answer any of them. All you need to know is that your former miserable and meaningless existence is officially over! We’ve arranged that a mutilated corpse be left in the city park located a half mile from your insipid High School. It will be headless and have your blood type. I am sure your many friends will mourn you. Oh wait!

  That’s right…we CHOSE you because you are a loner…not so much then…tsk tsk. “

  Eutropia turned my wrist over to show me two lacerations running laterally across it.

  “You have been’ bitten’ as of 5 hours ago. You are no longer quite ’human’ at the moment. You have venom percolating in your bloodstream. What you become in the future will depend entirely upon your comport and if the Prince decides that you are acceptable. If he does, then you may be called to Court. If not, you will spend the rest of your time below ground in a place such as this. We call these places ‘Silos’ and there are three main ones. They are basically holding tanks and storage units.”

  I had recovered enough from the shock of seeing the blond girl cringing in the corner to glance around at my surroundings. The room was very large, almost a small hangar with a domed ceiling into which rectangular fluorescent lights were fitted at intervals. The curved walls arching up to the ceiling were concrete, as was the flooring. There were concrete slabs that seemed to serve as tables, with shorter, solid blocks of concrete set around the rectangular slabs to serve as seating. All the surfaces of the concrete objects had been sanded and polished so that they resembled granite, but I could tell they were concrete because my ‘mom’ Desi had had such a floor put into our family room. It looked like something expensive after they painted and treated it—marble maybe. Definitely not concrete. A fake. A substitute.

  And Desiree wasn’t my mother either, I remembered with a pang in the area my heart should be. Another case of fakery. So no wonder my life didn’t make sense anymore.

  As I tried to sort through the jumble of strange information Eutrophia had spewed at me I blurted out, ”Why was I bitten—and by what?”

  “That information will be made available on a need to know basis,” Eutropia fairly snapped at me. “My God you are annoying, even for a human girl! Do you PRACTICE?”

  I looked over at two young women that looked as dazed as I did. They were sitting at one of the rectangular tables, both looking too afraid to speak. I thought I recognized one of them from a Mathaletes Regional Competition I’d been in that year.

  The staccato sound of heavy boots on cement pulled my attention away from the other girls. I almost didn’t recognize Seth as he came walking in with a regal air. He was wearing some long sleeve grey wool tunic over tight black jeans tucked into boots. His long hair touched the collar of his tunic and he smiled when he saw me sitting up on the slab by Eutropia and came walking right up to us.

  “What’s up bitches?” he said with a cocky grin. Then he turned to Eutropia and , placing his hand on the back of the woman’s neck, pulled her to him and started kissing her with a violent passion, looking at me out of the corner of his eye as he was doing so.

  I must have looked shocked.

  “As you can see, I have a VERY naughty mommy,” He told me with a wink as he pulled back from her, smirking, ”A very HOT naughty mommy I might add.

  I looked at Eutrophia’s face and for a brief moment she looked human, actually a little vulnerable—but within seconds her steely veneer returned.

  “Come with me,” she said briskly, holding out her hand toward me in an uncharacteristic gesture. Was she really going to hold my hand as we went…wherever we were going?

  As if she’d read my thoughts she laughed. It was a dry, mirthless sound, like dry leaves skittering across a cellar floor.

  “No no darling,” she murmured in a crooning voice ”I’m not trying to comfort you. I want to connect with you to be able to tell if you’re ovulating right now. It’s an ability that I possess, among other choice abilities. All of us who are the natural inhabitants of this place are gifted in different ways. Except for the humans, hydracites, and other dreary creature categories that reside here to serve us.”

  With that she turned and fairly yanked me along as we exited the room and entered a tunnel, less brightly lit. The tunnel wasn’t straight, but curved around endlessly so that there was no telling how long it was. I had the sensation that we were descending, although the floor of the tunnel seemed evenly graded. It seemed to be getting warmer also. I was no longer shivering in my coarse garment. I wondered briefly why I didn’t have to go to the bathroom, and then realized that I was probably dehydrated, and besides that, I was actually too scared to pee.

  It seemed as if we wandered endlessly. Finally as we rounded a curve that seemed nearly a circle harsh light again nearly blinded me for the second time in an hour. But even when I stopped blinking I had trouble processing what I was seeing.

  It looked like a spa from the classic Wizard of Oz movie. As soon as I stepped in with my nearly two day old straggly tangled hair and ugly grey shift (and where did my brand new unisex Chucks go I wondered), I was surround by no less than 5 happy looking females. They were all pretty and looked as if they ranged in age from 15-25.

  “I’m Esme,” the tallest dark haired one told me.”Mistress Eutropia says that you are to be made over from head to toe.”

  As she finished speaking, the other young women standing behind as to the sides of her introduce themselves in rapid succession. I caught the names ”Lettie”, “Morganna”, “Cammie” and “Triti”, but immediately forgot half of them as they propelled me forward to a heavily curtained area. Eutropia followed, her arm linked with Seth’s.

  As soon as I was behind the curtain Morganna whipped my shift over my head. I didn’t have either the time or sensibility to get embarrassed at my sudden nudity, even though I could see that Seth was quietly laughing at my reaction and getting an eyeful. There was a long rectangular table covered with the kind of paper pulled down from a roll that doctors use in an examining room to pull down over the examining table. I gracelessly hopped up onto it, trying to keep my legs glued together as I did. There was a pillow of sorts. The table was at a slight incline and I laid back.

  “The eyebrows have to go,” Eutropia said in a brittle and snarky voice. “It’s not the eighties anymore after all. Grooming has come into it’s own”

  While Esme tended to my out of control eyebrows, I could feel that someone was using an exfoliating file on the bottoms of my feet, with special attention to my heels. Both my hands were being worked on at once on either side of me. First I receive a hand massage with lotion that smelled of juniper and eucalyptus. I almost dozed off at that point. The practiced motions of the masseurs lulling me into a heightened sense of relaxation. My eyelids were half closed when I was jerked into wakefulness at the sight of Seth’s face above mine.

  “Having a nice time?” he queried. “Don’t get used to it. Nice times are short lived around here. You are sort of an experiment and you have a lot of hoops to jump through to fit in. Frankly my money is on the brunette over there.”

  I didn’t want to look and willed myself not to but in the end I couldn’t help it- I turned my head to the side and looked where he was pointing. Sure enough, not twenty feet away through a part in the curtained area across from the one that I was in I saw a teenage girl with long dark hair stretched out on a table too. She was motionless, and staring at the ceiling. I wanted to cry out to her so that she saw me, but I remembered the blonde girl with her teeth knocked out and thought the better of it.

  Seth bent down so that he was breathing into my ear.

  “The competition!” he announced, with almost a gleeful tone.”And she has some very toned upper arms…not a bookworm like yourself I’m thinking. Probably
an athlete or a gymnast.”

  “What the hell are you talking about you despicable lackey?” I shot back, emboldened by the fact that Eutropia had moved some distance away and was giving orders to the crew working on the brunette.

  Seth looked nonplussed for a second at my choice of words, then recovered and, grabbing a handful of my hair as it was hanging over the top of the table , meanly yanked my hair back before he answered me.

  “I mean you will be fighting her to the death for the title of Vampire Princess, that’s what I mean you little smartass, clueless, dick holster! And I hope she kicks your snotty ass!”

  It was my turn to look nonplussed, but I didn’t feel like asking any more questions. I was handed a towel and walked through a curtained partition into a room with the kind of sinks that you’d normally see at a hair salon.

  Once seated the warm water that the beautician sent flowing over my head felt heavenly. The shampoo they were using had the same calming eucalyptus scent. I tried to stay aware of my surroundings even though my eyes were closed. I could catch fragments of conversation from time to time, even though most of the employees of the underground spa were speaking in low or muted voices.

  “….but the other girl is bigger…”

  “…such a shame..”

  “…yes get them all beautiful just to bury them…or give them to the hydracites to eat…”

  What I was overhearing just made me feel more confused than ever so I switched from trying to listen to trying to block their conversations out. Except—I wondered what a hydracite was. It was the second time I had heard that term since I had awakened.

  After a heated discussion the two beauticians assigned to my hair decided not to even trim it. They blew it dry after rubbing a mousse like substance into it and then used the longest curling rod I had ever seen to arrange it in long loose ringlets. They went light on the makeup but did use a lip liner and filled in with a pinkish purple shade that suited my complexion more than any lip color I had ever worn. Then they slipped a white robe on me and lead me into a different part of the ‘Spa”.

  My attendants got me up on what I thought was a massage table—it had one of those holes at the end to fit your face through so that you can lie completely flat. I thought I was probably going to get a massage, but instead of that a bearded man with long hair to his shoulders pulled up a stool and clicked on a tattoo gun that I could barely see out of the corner of my eye. I was so surprised that I yelped.

  “No tattoos!” I yelled, “I don’t do them! I don’t have any. I don’t WANT any!”

  Eutropia appeared out of nowhere and was instantly in my face.

  “The tattoo is REQUIRED Tristina. As a brand …it marks you as one of us. This Japanese Kanji symbol goes back to the 5th century. It is considered an honor to receive these markings, and will enhance your powers as they develop.

  That is…if you live long enough,” she practically crooned as she finished.

  I don’t care what anybody says, getting tattooed HURTS. It’s a heightened pins and needles sensation with a red hot razor cat scratch sensation finish thrown in…I didn’t care for it and lay seething as the tattoo artist plied his trade on the back of my neck at the base. In a way it was a good place to have one…it would be covered by my hair most of the time. But because it was nothing I would have chosen it rankled.

  The tattooist, who explained that his name was Cosmo, told me that the ideographic symbol looked like a small square beside symbols that looked like a 13 with a slash mark through it

  It was the Japanese Kanji symbol for “Vampire.”

  For some reason, as he worked on me, there was nobody else around for a few minutes, and I felt like he might be someone that I could talk to.

  “Cosmo I was kidnapped,” I told him, “I know this isn’t your fault but I just want to leave…can you help me?”

  I’m sorry,” he said, with enough genuine regret in his voice so that I knew he sincerely felt some remorse for my dire situation. “We are all prisoners wherever we are. I am bound to this place also. Bound as tightly as you are, though not for the same reasons.”

  “Backstory?” I asked, ”How did you come to be here?”

  Cosmo shifted around in his seat uncomfortably.

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about that. Especially to you. You might not be around after tomorrow. You’ll be fighting for the Presentation, the formal ceremony to meet the Prince. It’s between you and the other girl, Theda.”

  “Fighting how? With what? They’re going to make us square off in a ring or something? I don’t get it!” I said crossly. I was feeling better now that I was clean and groomed, revitalized somehow. Strangely enough I felt as if I COULD fight something…even tigers at that point.

  “Finished for now,” Cosmo said, swapping at the area at the base of the back of my neck with a soft cloth. The pain had subsided to the feel of second-degree sunburn at that point. I wondered what the tattoo looked like.

  “Do you have a mirror?” I asked sitting up and gathering my short robe around me. I could see a vanity table to the side. I wanted a hand mirror so that I could get a decent look at the tattoo he’d just inked.

  Reaching into a black slouchy snakeskin bag, Cosmo reached in and handed me an oval mirror that appeared to be set in an ivory frame. It looked like an artifact, maybe something that had been around for hundreds of years. I hopped off the table and sat down at the vanity and lifted my hair up off my neck with one hand, holding the oval mirror at an angle with the other hand so that I could see the new marks on the back of my neck.

  The tattoo was done in silver, outlined for definition by an azure color, the color of the sky on a summer’s day. In the brightened light of the spa it shone almost jewel like on the back of my neck. I had to admit that it was lovely in a strange way.

  Something in the corner of the reflection caught my attention and as I turned the mirror to see what it was I gasped and nearly dropped it at what I saw.

  It was a creature with a manlike form yet horrifying, with sunken eyes and a mouth full of needle sharp teeth. Its skin was a grayish yellow, and in it’s hands it was holding a tattoo gun.

  I gasped and whipped around, but all I saw was Cosmo, and he snatched the mirror out of my hand.

  “You FOOL!” he hissed, “You SAW me, didn’t you? Don’t bother to deny it! I know you did!”

  I realized with a jolt that the creature I had seen was Cosmo…but that thought was difficult to wrap my mind around.

  “I don’t know what I saw,” I said gulping.

  Cosmo got up off the stool and started toward me.

  “I HATE that! How DARE you look at me!” he began shouting. I could hear feet running toward our curtained area from every direction as he kept shouting at me.”You’ll be sorry! You’ll probably lose your match with Theda, and then you know what will happen? They’ll feed you to the flesh eaters here for a treat…I’ll be DINING on you by this time tomorrow!”

  Eutrophia was the first to burst in and began beating Cosmo with a sort of wire whip that shone silver as she raised it again and again. Cosmo dropped to his knees cowering, his hands trying to protect his head from the lashes.

  “Get OUT!” she screamed at him. He obediently got to his feet, grabbed his snakeskin bag and hobbled away through the curtained opening.

  Eutrophia then turned her fury on me.

  “How DARE you upset my employee you thankless, feckless wench!” she practically screamed at me.”We have RULES here Tristina!”

  I didn’t want to, but I felt myself instinctively cowering like the rest of the girls I’d seen.

  “It was an accident!” I told her. I was speaking in a low key voice trying to diffuse the tension between us.”I was looking at my tattoo using a hand mirror…and I guess I saw something I wasn’t meant to see. I’m sorry,” I added for good measure.

  She seemed pacified by my apology, if only for the moment. My curiosity got the better of me as I asked, “But what IS h
e Eutropia? His reflection looked hideous.”

  She actually smirked.

  “MISTRESS Eutrophia to YOU,” she corrected, ”And the only reason you saw what you saw is because you have been bitten. You are what we term a ‘half-vampire’. You can see things that others, particularly humans, cannot. There is a thin veneer over the world that is the result of a spell cast centuries ago by an ancient Vampire Mage. At first the curtain between the Worlds was thick, so thick that only the most powerful vampires and mages were able to see the hidden energy forms that travel at will from one dimension into another. Some are what humans would mislabel “demons” although that is so generic a term as to be meaningless. Others are what humans would refer to as “ghouls”.

  Cosmo, your tattoo artiste, is a ‘Ghoul”. He is a flesh eater. Ghouls are also shape shifters and often take the form of the last person that they last consume. Hence, at the present time Cosmo bears an uncanny resemblance to his last MEAL.”

  At my shocked look Eutropia threw back her head and laughed heartily.

  “Oh my dear girl,” she confessed wiping tears from her eyes, ”Your naiveté is so humorous and refreshing, you have no idea how boring it can be here. That is why I volunteered to keep the house in Milton…with humans around it never gets boring.”

  Those Girls Fight Like Girls

  I didn’t remember falling asleep, but when I woke up the next day I was in a room with stone walls. Curiously it was circular and although it wasn’t comfortably furnished it seemed less austere than the other rooms I’d been in since my arrival. There was an oval shaped handmade rug in the middle of the room, and a dry sink with a china basin and pitcher set in a floral pattern to the side. My stomach growled as the aroma of food floated over to the small bed I was lying on. I could discern the menu, bacon and eggs and hot buttered toast. Before I knew what I was doing I was running toward it in my bare feet, even though the flagstone floor was cold.