They exchanged an old world greeting- kisses on the cheek, a brief hug totally devoid of anything that even mimicked affection. Vincent stepped back and bowed slightly and a glance told me to do the same. I almost did, but instead I curtsied, which I knew how to do for some reason even though it was incredibly awkward in my slutty dress. Vincent’s eyebrow quirked up. He almost seemed impressed by the gesture.
“Lady Elizabeta, my thrall… name?”
“Christine,” I murmur.
“Yes, that’s it. Christine.”
She took my hand. Her fingers were as cold as ice and I could have sworn I felt something move under her skin, like her fingers weren’t jointed quite the right way. Her eyes were worse than him. I could feel her paging through my mind, like someone leafing through a book they found on the subway.
“My, you’ve been brutal with this one. I find myself surprised she remembers her name. May I?”
She was not asking me. Vincent nodded and she took my face in her hands, tipping my eyes up to meet hers. She tilted my head this way and that, patted my side, slapped my butt.
“This one has a lot of potential. I would ask where you found her, but I already know.”
“Quite.”
“It is rather an insult bringing her here. Brazen, I must say. I would be impressed if I didn’t feel bound to eat your heart. I see no gift. By what right do you claim protection as guests?”
“My gift is this,” said Vincent. “My thrall to use as you will on the condition that she be returned to me unharmed at the conclusion of festivities.”
“You’re learning,” said Elizabeta, nodding in approval. “I am as impressed as I am enraged. Get out of my sight.”
Vincent nodded to her and stepped off into the party, if that was what it was. I moved to follow.
“Not you,” she said. “You heard him. You’re mine.”
Chapter Ten
I didn’t speak. I wasn’t that stupid, I hoped.
Turns out I didn’t need to.
It wasn’t like when Vincent did it. When Elizabeta picked through my head I could feel it like, a bug walking on my scalp. I trembled as she went through my memories, what was left of them. She was actually shorter than I was by an inch or two. Her hair was a wig. Beneath it her skin was as pale and smooth as an egg. It wasn’t a good wig. She didn’t seem to particularly care. I know she knew what I was thinking but she ignored it.
“He hasn’t taught you anything. These youngsters don’t understand the finer points of their gifts. What has he told you?”
“To obey,” I said.
“There are formalities when speaking to me, but you don’t know them, so I will forgive you. Vincent hopes you’ll anger me and I will lash out at you.”
She eyed me. There was something voracious in her gaze. She was utterly alien in a way that even Vincent wasn’t. I didn’t dare look her in the eye.
“I can read your mind, but I prefer that you give voice to your thoughts. It pleases me to converse. Speak.”
“Yes. Should I call you master?”
“No, I am not your master. Just speak.”
“What hasn’t he told me?”
“The most elementary facts of your nature,” she said. “You seem to be laboring under the false impression that you were a human being. You were no such thing.”
“I don’t understand.”
She smiled. I shuddered at the sight. She touched my shoulder.
“You think you are a woman named Christine. You believe it. You are not. This is the first lesson wise undead teach their progeny. You were born the night he turned you. Nothing more, nothing less. The feelings and memories that disturb you are like hairs left on borrowed clothes. They mean something to one who wore them first, not you. You have this Christine’s body, but you are not her. You are new to the world. That woman is dead.”
I stopped walking and stood there, mounting dread flooding through my body.
No. No, that wasn’t true. I was Christine. I had to be.
The little voice murmured in my ear. If I was, why couldn’t I remember being her?
“You are to fear neither noose nor blade nor arrow, but the touch of the sun or open flame is your undoing. Know this. Fear these things. For us there is only the truth death. When we die we return to the nothing from which were born, and never were.”
“I want to go home,” I said, softly.
“You are home. If I was capable of empathy I would wish a gentler master on you, but it amuses me to see Vincent try and beat you down. I expect you’ll kill him one day.”
I felt a flush at that. A real flush. The last memory of anger.
“Gird your thoughts, child. He senses them now, though by taking you on as a servant I can obscure them ever so slightly. He knows I told you something that fostered hope in you, not the details. I should not be so cruel. He will know later when you tell him and he will not be kind when he learns.”
“Why is this insulting to you?” I said, trying to change the subject.
“You came to rest in my territory,” she said. “Downtown is mine. Vincent poached you and that other one. I know about her.”
She knew about Andi. Would that mean she knew about… I tried to stop myself but the thought was there before I knew to try.
“Walk with me.”
Keeping two steps behind, I followed her to the window. The view would have been breathtaking but I just didn’t care anymore. I’m not sure she did, either. She took a glass of wine from a passing tray and held it in her hand but never drank from it and eventually put it down, and moved around the room, never speaking to anyone. I tried not to look at the other guests.
“We rank ourselves by age. I am very old by today’s standards. I first wore this flesh first four hundred years ago. Almost exactly.”
I stumbled.
Four hundred years, of this.
“It goes by so fast you’ll hardly realize it. I gloried in my turning, but even those who do not quickly learn to adjust. At least by my standards. The first fifty years or so will be difficult. You will cling to the morality of beasts, convinced that the cattle beneath our feet deserve to roam freely and lead out their meaningless lives. In time you will come to see that they are no different from the cattle they themselves feed on, that the meat left behind in their passing is no more important than the excreta they themselves flush away. They’re just food. You’re not.”
Fifty years. Fifty years of this?
“Am I going to get older?”
Her reaction was completely neutral. “I assume you mean, will you age? Not as humans do. Hair color goes first, then hair itself. Otherwise your body will remain much as it is, assuming you continue to feed. I know you’ve seen what the ravages of thirst can rage on us. Vincent showed you when he cast you into the fire.”
“I don’t want this.”
“I know. Your suffering is amusing. Perhaps Vincent was right not to correct your misunderstandings about your nature.”
“How can you think it’s funny?”
She stopped and looked at me.
“Because it is. Humans are born from nothing, eat, shit, rut and suffer for a few brief years, then return to nothing, having meant nothing. We at least have the potential for eternity even if very few of us reach it. What humans crave most is denied them and given to us.”
There was a wry irony to her tone.
I didn’t want to listen to her anymore. So I looked around. That was a mistake.
There were more like Vincent at this party. More vampires. I could pick them out easily. They moved like puppets, unnatural, their movements either too smooth or too jerky. Their chests were frozen, their eyes dead. They looked like me.
Most still had their hair. Vincent had to be old, I realized, for all the color to leach out of his, unless he bleached it on purpose. That was silly. They had to have a way of knowing who was older without something like that.
People roamed the penthouse. They were barely dressed, if they
were dressed at all. I saw a vampire take a girl by the back of the neck and lead her away, down a hallway to a bedroom, walled off from the rest.
“Feeding is a somewhat private thing for some of us,” Elizabeta noted, plucking the thoughts from my mind.
Private, but not quiet. The screaming cut through the soft sound of cordial conversations for a moment, but was quickly ignored. The living people just wandered around. When I looked into one of their eyes it was like running my hand over invisible sandpaper. There was just nothing, like his brain had been hollowed out, leaving him to wander with a placid, slightly bemused expression.
There were other things, too.
I saw it wander through the room. The vampires treated it the way the humans treated them. It was like watching Vincent walk through the casino. The thing shambling through the gathering was dressed in filthy clothes, stained with what could have been blood. It wore coveralls and a hooded sweatshirt and a jacket over that. It had the hood up, but when it turned my way Elizabeta pulled me aside before I saw what was under it.
Something slid over my back, cold, like a block of ice rolling across my shoulders. It was looking at me.
“What is-“
“Do not ask. Do not speak to it or acknowledge it in any way.”
“Why-“
“Because I cannot make it leave. It will come and go as it pleases. Do not engage it and it will not engage you. That is all.”
I pointedly averted my gaze from the thing in the coveralls. There was plenty to look at. Others I picked out as not human. Their movements were just wrong. One came up behind me as I stood next to Elizabeta, leaned over me and sniffed me. He was huge, almost seven feet tall and half as broad, powerfully built in a hulking v-shape. He looked like he’d never shaved or cut his hair and crawled out of some book about mountain men before putting on a surprisingly well fitted bespoke suit in an English cut.
“This one must be fresh,” he rumbled. “I almost took her for feeding stock.”
“She’s not mine,” Elizabeta said. There was a hint of resentment in her tone. She put it there on purpose, molded it. This thing didn’t resent anything.
She thought me a look, and smirked. She was probably proud of being a thing.
“Vincent’s, then.”
“Yes.”
He reached over with a huge hand and played with a lock of my hair. I froze. He let out a long chuffing breath and it stank, like rotten meat and acid. A predatory smell, like a dog’s breath amplified by a thousand, or more.
“Shame. I’d have had fun with you.”
He let go of me and I let out a breath.
“Stop that,” said Elizabeta. “You don’t need to breathe.”
“I don’t need not to.”
She tilted her head to one side. “Point. In time you’ll forget how. I have.”
“What was that guy?”
“That matter is complicated. Be glad you’re dead. His kind only eat the living.”
I swallowed.
“Stop that,” she said, drolly. “Oh, never mind. You’re too fresh. Still, I’d ride you harder if you were mine.”
She touched my chin. “It would be harder on you in some ways, yet easier in others. When I still raised thralls I made them comfortable, taught them, nurtured them to live as rulers of the Earth. I would treasure you. Feeling your sorrow as you watch your beauty fade, exulting in your joy as you reach for eternity. Founding a kingdom for you or snuffing you out when you reached to usurp me. You know he’ll kill you soon. I’ve never seen one of Vincent’s thralls last more than six months.”
I gripped the sides of my dress to stop my hands from trembling.
“It’s not fair.”
“No, but then, neither is anything else. Come with me. It’s time.”
She ascended the staircase and stood at the railing in front of the elevator, overlooking the guests. I took my place behind her, and nervously watched the crowd below. She was about to speak when she saw what I did, her gaze drawn by reading my mind, maybe.
Vincent was talking to the thing in the dirty clothes. Conversing with it, laughing. It just stood there staring at him, but he paused in the conversation as if it was answering. I felt something move on my back, like needles raking up my spine. Vincent cracked a smile as he spoke but a thin trickle of dark blood slid down his cheek, like a tear. He looked up at Elizabeta and raised his glass of untouched wine and stepped past the creature.
“Interesting. What’s he up to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t,” she said. “You’re a toy to him, not a confidant.”
She rapped her knuckles three times on the railing and the room went silent. Rising to her full, unimpressive height, she looked down her nose as the things assembled below her.
“My honored guests, by ancient tradition it is time for the presentation of guest-gifts. You have partaken of my board and bread but each of you has offered me a gift and I am honor bound to offer one in exchange, and do so happily,” said a creature without anything like happiness in her, “and with great pride. In lieu of an individual gift of baubles or trinkets I instead present to you an evening’s entertainment. Form a circle, please.”
The milling guests spread out, opening a pit in the middle of the room, around what they used to call a conversation pit in old home and garden magazines. Two living men in suits dragged a terrified pair of people out of the back rooms towards the open pit. I didn’t know them, but when I saw the creatures standing a circle part to allow them to be shoved down into the pit, I had a sinking feeling. Elizabeta smiled and there was something real in it, actual enjoyment.
Understanding stirred in what was left of my heart. I began to realize what these things really were.
She knew I knew and it widened her smile.
They couldn’t be much older than I was, maybe a little younger. A man and a woman, maybe a boy and a girl. They were dirty, scared, in torn clothes. The way they clutched each other told me everything I needed to know. She was blonde, skinny, pretty. He was average, and he loved her. I knew it when I caught a flash of his eyes. The little voice whispered in my ear, like a flick of a television channel quickly turned away.
Milling around them, the things that formed a ring around the pit watched them with glee.
“Hear me, children,” said Elizabeta, looking down at them. “Look up now.”
They looked up.
“These are the rules. Two of you, one blade. Fight to the death. The survivor walks free from this place, never to return. You have two minutes.” She nodded her head just barely. One of her lackeys produced a hooked blade and tossed it to the floor. “Try to fight your way free and you both die. Refuse and you both die.”
She drummed the bannister with her fingers as the girl reached down and picked up the knife.
“Go.”
I rushed to the rail.
The girl looked at the knife in her hands. The boy took her wrists.
“You know they’ll do it,” he whispered, but his voice was so loud to me he may as well have been shouting.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You have to.”
They warred silently, readying themselves for the sacrifice. I caught the girl’s confusion and fear in her eyes, her understanding of what was about to happen. A sick, sad kind of love. Her lover was going to give the ultimate proof of his devotion, and she knew it.
It had a taste. It tasted sweet, sweeter than blood ever would. It was like a warm breeze in my face.
What was I becoming?
“I can’t,” she whimpered. “Please, somebody-“
The boy pulled. The blade met his chest. It wasn’t like a movie, where it makes a sound effect. It was more like a whuff noise, just from the impact, and a little crunch. She stared at him in horror as he pulled the knife into his chest by her hands and collapsed into a heap on the floor in front of him. She dropped it and looked at her bloodied hands and screamed at the top of he
r lungs.
I realized what I was seeing. The end of someone else’s story, the last chapter in their tale. I’d never know it.
I hated these things. I wanted them all to die.
Elizabeta did not seem surprised at that.
What she said next should not have shocked me, but I made a choked sound anyway.
“I said you had to fight. That was not fighting. Kill her.”
It was like watching ants swarm a piece of food. They all threw themselves at her at once.
It started when I tasted the blood in the air. The cold in my belly moved. It swirled. It grew scratchy legs and clawed at my insides. I was moving before I realized it. My feet hit the railing. I jumped. It was an impossible, bone breaking leap, but I made it with ease, landed in a rolling crouch and threw myself into the melee. I don’t know if it was the boy or the girl. I think it was the girl’s. The skin was too smooth. I got my mouth on it and I bit and there was so much screaming.
At least it ended for her fast, I think. She was in pieces before I realized I was covered in blood, swallowing more and crouching over a dead body, shoulder to shoulder with monsters.
Only a few stood apart. The elders, the powerful. Elizabeta. Vincent, watching me feed, smirking so softly to himself.
Never had I wanted to die so badly as that moment. I shouldn’t have begged him for mercy.
I should have just let him kill me.
Chapter Eleven
I don’t cry or scream this time. I just sit there in a daze, hugging my knees to my chest, my eyes fixed on nothing.
He gets up. He comes over and he sits next to me. He reaches out and his hand nears my cheek.
“Don’t,” I say.
He pulls his hand away and rests it on the bed.
“Just leave me alone.”
“As you wish.”
He leaves me alone. He takes the notebook and his pencil and he closes the door behind him but doesn’t lock it, because a magic collar will choke me like a misbehaving puppy if I try to leave. I slide down the bed and stare up at the ceiling and wonder why, of all the people I’ve hurt, I am alive, or something like it, and they are not. I want to live, no matter how unworthy I am.
Thrall (A Vampire Romance) Page 9
