The Vampire's Doll (The Heiress and the Vampire Book 1)

by Jaclyn Dolamore

  “Okay,” Parsons said. “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Elsitha. Just call me Els, though, unless my parents are around.”

  Els ran down the hall in her careful Halnari way, and Parsons dashed after her. It felt like great freedom to walk out the school doors right in the middle of lunch and crunch her boots in the snow.

  Els immediately balled up snow and pitched it at Parsons.

  “Hey!” Parsons snapped, but as Els cackled, Parsons quickly realized this was not her usual sort of friend. Els’ parents must have some prominence in the Wodrenarune’s palace, for her to be here, but she was not a creature of propriety and Parsons had a feeling that if she was bad at math, she didn’t worry over it.

  Parsons packed snow between her gloves and pitched back. They battled back and forth, trying not to laugh or scream so no teacher would hear and interrupt them. The side of the school was quiet, blanketed with soft fresh snow.

  “Hey,” Els hissed. “Let’s hide.”

  “Why?”

  “So we don’t have to go back to school today.”

  “We can’t do that!”

  “Sure we can. No one really cares if you keep up your marks. I’ve done it before. We can hide in the attic part of the gardener’s shed and play Fallen Lands.”

  “Play Fallen Lands?” Parsons was intrigued despite herself. “Do you know I’ve been there?”

  “You’ve been there? Even better. You can pretend to be from the Fallen Lands and I’ll be from here and you can teach me all about your home.”

  “I’ll be from Paris,” Parsons said, getting excited. “And my name is Marie and I’m an actress.”

  “Wait until we get there. Come on.” Els grabbed Parsons’ hand. She didn’t seem shy about touching her although maybe it was because Parsons had the gloves on now.

  They crossed the schoolyard to the rickety gardener’s shed, which was unoccupied during the winter, and shoved a snowdrift out of the way to open the door. It was locked, but Els used her telepathy—or rather, telekinesis—to unlock it. Inside, it was full of tools and smelled faintly of soil, suggestive of summer. Planks nailed to the wall climbed up to the attic, and in a moment they were tucked away in a large empty room where they could only stand up in the very center, beneath the roof’s peak. The windows were filthy and dirt-streaked.

  “You’re not cold?” Parsons asked.

  “No. My mother forces me to wear woolens all winter,” Els said. “This is perfect. Now let’s pretend this is Paris.”

  From that day onward, Els was the closest friend Parsons had ever known. Having a troublemaking friend turned out to be a much more invigorating experience than having studious friends.

  At first, Parsons tried very hard to keep up her marks. Her mother’s reputation weighed upon her pride. But she stopped worrying about being good. Els showed her that being good was highly overrated.

  Parsons’ father was a little less than thrilled. “Els is a bit of a wild girl, isn’t she?” “I don’t think you and Els should go down the river anymore; there are some common people down there and they don’t always treat Fanarlem and Miralem girls well.” “Is Els troubled at home?” He couldn’t stop making comments at dinner, but he never forbade her from anything, not even going to the river.

  Els was the one who did get in trouble, all the time. The Halnari nobles had strict standards of propriety. Els had to take special classes in comportment and dancing twice a week. Occasionally, Parsons went to her house and squirmed through the visit, because her parents were so elegant they didn’t seem real, and Els was different around them. She was scolded for soiling her clothes. She was scolded for not walking in the proper way; Parsons soon learned that the Halnari gait was not just a result of their shape-shifted feet and heeled shoes, but was partially deliberate. It was bad manners to make any attempt to run or skip or jump; Els was supposed to look like she was walking on a tightrope at all times. Even Els’ baby brother, at two years old, was already dressed in stiff fabrics and being instructed in table manners and to speak in a soft, measured voice.

  Parsons figured she was doing Els a favor by helping her be naughty. That kind of life couldn’t be good for anyone. Mama surely would have agreed with that, even if Els was a bad influence on Parsons’ education.

  They liked the river because it was full of common people, different sorts of people than the ones they saw every day at school and in their wealthy neighborhoods. Parsons and Els loved to watch all the different laborers in their old-fashioned traditional work garb: leather aprons, woven sandals, short patterned tunics and brimmed hats worn by boatmen, the women who sold fish out of a basket on their back and carried a set of knives at their belts for deboning them on the spot. The city was full of immigrants who came to work in the new factories, and their children roamed around in little gangs. They came in every sort, the scrappy little dark-eyed children of the lowlands near Atlantis, the dark skinned Islanders who laughed a lot, the proud long-legged people of New Sajinay who reminded Parsons of horses, always running.

  Sometimes they even saw Fanarlem prostitutes as they prowled the banks of the river trying to catch the eye of a lonely boatman.

  Parsons would never admit she was ever so slightly fascinated by them. They dressed in short tunics and stockings with ribbons around their thighs, and were made to be beautiful. But if they looked her way, she always hid her face so they wouldn’t see she was a Fanarlem too. Once she wasn’t quick enough and one of them tried to talk to her.

  “You should be careful here,” the prostitute called. “It’s safer to stay close to the shops.”

  Parsons and Els quickly huddled and screeched nervously, then ran away.

  “I can’t believe she dared to speak to us,” Parsons said haughtily, once they were safe out of sight. The prostitute certainly should realize that Parsons was of a higher class.

  Parsons no longer grew the way other children did, and Fanarlem were only made in four sizes. Cheap Fanarlem slaves usually went through two bodies before their adult one, from a toddler’s body to the size of a child of eight or nine, and then to an adult. The more expensive Fanarlem had the option of an extra size, but at eight years old, Papa had already opted to give Parsons the second-largest body available. Even full-grown Fanarlem women always had a somewhat girlish aspect and were never very large. The women were always five feet tall and the men were five feet and three inches. Skeletons were not made in any other size.

  And so, throughout her school years, everyone around Parsons looked older and grew taller, while she was stuck in the same body. Her classmates kept treating her like a child even though she was the same age as the rest of them.

  Papa must have been oblivious, so she reluctantly started asking him, “When do I get to have an older body?”

  “At fourteen,” he said.

  “Why fourteen?”

  “Because that’s what the Fanarlem maker recommended and I’m sure he has an idea of these things. That’s when girls become women.” He coughed, and started busying himself lighting his pipe, and she could see that he didn’t want to talk about it at all.

  Becoming a woman meant starting one’s menses, and for Els this came at thirteen. In the Miralem cultures, this was marked by a huge coming of age ceremony, with a feast and all of the women in Els’ family giving her toasts and advice. A banquet table was set with elaborate centerpieces, baskets overflowing with exotic fruits—a Halnari girls’ coming of age ceremony traditionally had to have twenty different fruits—and tropical flowers bought from the Wodrenarune’s conservatory.

  Much fuss was made of Els letting down the pinned-up braids of childhood—now she must wear them to the floor and never get them dirty—and a skirt that also trailed on the floor. She must be careful to pick it up whenever she walked outside, and hold her arms high, because her sleeves might trail on the floor also. Every step she took for the rest of her life was supposed to be deliberately considered, to teach discipline.

 
; Parsons was invited, of course. But she felt very out of place. Her best dress, dark blue with black buttons down the front, a lace collar, and a red petticoat underneath, was simple and somber compared to all the trailing, gauzy elegance of the Halnari women. And she knew all of Els’ more distant relatives must be wondering who the little doll girl was.

  For Els it was a terrible day. She looked close to tears through most of it. And Els and Parsons had a pact not to cry, but Els broke it later that night, when they sat alone together in the gazebo in her family garden.

  “I can’t do it,” Els sobbed. “I hate it, all of it. I need to run away.”

  “Where would we run?”

  “To the woods. The old city. Of course.”

  As recently as a century ago, people lived in the woods north of the city. They hunted and operated lumber mills and kept “spirit houses” tucked away in sacred spots. The spirit houses had an opening at the top of the roof where spirits could come and go, but Lord Jherin had outlawed worship in spirit houses. The ruins of all the homes, the mills and the spirit houses were still out there, so they said, and this was where Parsons and Els planned to run away when they were in a running-away mood.

  Parsons knew she was supposed to play along. But a part of her was feeling inexplicably angry at Els for the very existence of this ceremony. “You don’t know the first thing about hunting or fishing and neither do I,” Parsons said.

  “We’d learn,” Els said, a little desperately.

  “There’s nowhere to run,” Parsons said. “Not really. And you don’t mean it. I don’t want to talk about it if it’s only a game…”

  Els slumped against Parsons and put an arm around her. She sniffed into her long sleeve.

  “At least we don’t have to get married,” Parsons said. Miralem women were never forced into marriage the way Daramon women were. “It’s temporary, isn’t it? When we are completely adult, we could get on a ship and move to New Sajinay and go into business together.” People said New Sajinay was the new frontier, where you went if you had a taste for adventure.

  Els brightened slightly. “You’re right. We’ll be twenty before we know it.”

  Parsons thought they had a good plan, but—despite herself—Els seemed to change in the next year. She noticed boys. Well, she just didn’t notice them. They suddenly consumed at least half of her waking thoughts. And as she seemed to notice the boys, they also seemed to notice her. Even though she was a Miralem, and most Daramons were wary of allowing telepaths into the family, the same wildness that attracted Parsons into friendship now drew boys like moths to a flame. Daramon boys were taught to be chivalrous. They wanted to carry her books, lift her across puddles, even fix her hair if it got out of place. They were not at all interested in Parsons, the eternal eight-year-old.

  But Parsons’ fourteenth birthday did finally come, and as promised, Papa took her to the Fanarlem maker for a new body.

  Despite her eagerness to get on with it, this was not a pleasant experience. Parsons had never had her body changed, only repaired. Now, even her face must be changed, so she would look adult, or at least as close to adult as possible. Fanarlem always looked a little doll-like by design, the maker said.

  “We could make you look even more like your mother,” he said. ”But no available illusion spell is strong enough to entirely capture flesh and blood permanently, so you would remind people of a wax figure brought to life. The effect is more uncanny than pleasing. It’s better to acknowledge your artificiality than to try and hide it.”

  She ordered a new wardrobe ahead of time, in the standard size of an adult Fanarlem, and one of the new dresses was sent to the Fanarlem shop so that when she arrived for the transfer, a body was all ready for her down to the shoes. All that had to be done was for the Fanarlem maker to release her eyes from their sockets and place them in her new body.

  Parsons had never gone through this before, and she was terrified, but she forced herself to lay down stoically and widen her eyes.

  The maker sprayed her eyes with a potion to help dissolve the spell that normally kept them firmly in place, yet movable. “Shut your eyes and roll them around a bit,” he said.

  She twitched, betraying her terror.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It only takes a second.”

  “I’m fine,” she insisted, but her voice was trembling too.

  “Open your eyes.”

  She opened them a crack and saw his fingers coming at her. Instinct took over. She twisted her head aside and he obviously expected this. One of his assistants gripped her jaw as his fingers shoved past her eyelids and pried out her eyes.

  She was ripped from her body, floating in space. The room swept by her vision. She wanted to speak or move but her body was an illusion.

  Her eyes were hugged by new sockets and suddenly she had a body again. She flailed and moaned, all the reactions that she had tried to do while she was bodiless suddenly bursting out of her in an embarrassing display. Papa caught one of her hands.

  “It’s okay,” he said gently. “That was the last time.”

  “You did great,” the assistant said, in a soothing tone that made Parsons pull herself together, shutting her mouth into a tight and silent line. Papa kept hold of her hand and paid the bill.

  Parsons had gained six inches of height in one day. She was clumsy just walking off the curb and opening the door of Papa’s automobile, and newly self-conscious looking down at her dress.

  She had breasts now, and although they were not as large as Els’ she still kept glancing down at these pointed shapes poking forward from her chest. Her rib cage and hip bones were both larger in proportion with her newfound height, but her waist was tiny. There was, of course, no reason to give a Fanarlem girl much of a waist. Small waists were in fashion anyway, and it took extra material to pad them out on purpose. But she was so much curvier than before.

  Neither Papa or the Fanarlem maker had said one word about sexual organs, and she hadn’t asked either. Fathers didn’t discuss these things with her daughters. When she got home, she locked herself in her room and took off her clothes to see if they had changed her there, and she didn’t really know what she wanted to find.

  A lance of shock raced through her when she dropped her plain white cotton chemise and there was now a slit between her legs. She lifted one of the mounds aside and found her cloth skin folded and shaped like one of the exotic flowers at Els’ party. She had anatomy classes at school so she knew she looked like a woman should look, and it all seemed correct, but alien.

  It didn’t feel to her the way it must feel to Els. She had the body of womanhood foisted upon her; it was all for show since she would never have children. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been given this because someday she would be married off to someone, that now everyone was going to look at her differently now and boys would notice her breasts and figure. She was made like a Fanarlem concubine, not a Fanarlem servant. Why would Papa have ordered this for her if he didn’t think she would need them for a marriage bed? And she didn’t want to get married.

  She put her underwear back on, trying to smother some deep sense of betrayal.

  At school, Els immediately gushed. “You look so pretty!”

  “I don’t care about being pretty.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be like that. I know you’ve been left out lately, and I’ve hated it, but really—it’s so much fun to go out in couples.”

  “I don’t want long hair or fancy clothes and I definitely don’t want any boys,” Parsons snapped.

  Els’ face fell. “You know I don’t care about hair and clothes either.”

  Parsons realized she had been cruel, but then, Els never seemed very sensitive to Parsons’ aversion to courting. “I’m sorry,” Parsons said. “But you know it’s different for me.”

  Els looked down, wheels turning behind her eyes. “Parsons—are you still—not really a woman?”

  “I’m a woman,” Parsons said. “I guess.”


  “Well. I guess you need time to get used to it…”

  “I’m not interesting in getting used to it. I hate the boys and the boys think I’m weird. Truthfully, I don’t even like watching you with them.”

  Els sighed. “What’s the problem? I always make sure to include you.”

  “You’re different. Your laugh is different. I’m starting to think that by the time you’re twenty you really will be a proper Halnari woman.”

  “Never!” Els shoved her shoulder. “Take that back. So what if I’m just having fun? I’m starting to think you don’t know how to do that anymore.”

  “I just want it back to you and me,” Parsons said, but she already realized that wasn’t possible.

  “It’s always you and me,” Els said.

  And in some ways this was true. Outside of Els’ dates, they continued to be best friends as always, and they continued to do things their parents disapproved of, although the flavor of them changed.

  They couldn’t go down to the river anymore. That was proven as soon as Parsons had her adult body. She was walking with Els and a man grabbed her by the arm. His boldness shocked her so much that she didn’t fight him off right away, even though she had always imagined she would.

  Els smacked him instead. “Hey! She’s flesh-born!” she yelled.

  “Oh—my mistake.” He rushed along, ears turning crimson.

  Parsons shivered.

  “It’s okay,” Els said.

  “He just—he grabbed me.”

  “I took care of him.”

  “If you hadn’t been there—”

  “Next time, just fight back.”

  “He couldn’t see I was flesh-born. He thought I was a slave!” She was horrified all over again by the thought of being a woman.

  And it didn’t get any better. Every time she dared to leave the familiar world of her own neighborhood and the palace, strangers treated her like she was someone’s property. Not all of them, not most of them. But enough of them that she was constantly on edge.