Bought by the Vampyren

by Seth Eden

  Alek pinched the bridge of his nose. "Is she being harmed?" He'd specifically said for her to not be.

  "She's reaching for the other girl," Pan said unexpectedly, pointing to where a blond girl in a green dress tried valiantly to get to the war prize he'd selected.

  "Let them go together," he said, rubbing his temples. "It hardly matters."

  Pan did nothing more than raise his chin at the guards, who instantly stood aside, letting the two women rush together and cling to each other, before they were taken by the biceps and steered stumbling out of the room on the stilts they wore.

  Vampyren women wore boots like every Vampyren male. Special occasions they were more beautiful boots. Why did human females insist on hobbling themselves before someone did it to them? Their shoes were laughable.

  Then he got a glimpse of the girl he'd chosen being slammed into the bedroom and saw her legs in the improbable shoes, and thought maybe he understood it after all.

  He shook his head and looked at the humans remaining in the room. They moved constantly, passing into the unit next door and being moved back by Alek's men who had gone through to stop them escaping.

  There was nowhere to escape. Crawl into a hallway and a guard would consider it a snack. Get out into the city and they'd find that while they were so clearly holed up in this place, things had changed. There was a system of tattoos in place now, marking what humans were allowed to do. Categorization at a glance. At checkpoints Vampyren could determine if the human had a job, had offspring to protect, had an assignment on an ongoing basis that benefited their new masters, or could be considered food, and whether or not in that instance they had to be kept alive.

  "Listen to me."

  If anything, the noise inside the condominium increased for the first few seconds after he spoke.

  Alek refused to raise his voice. "Listen to me, or you're all going to die."

  The noise dropped. The last few speakers were frantically shushed by those who didn't want to be heard talking with them. Or at all.

  "You'll want to be quiet," he said, and even their restive shifting stopped.

  Alek paced.

  "You'll want to be attentive."

  Their eyes watched him. One or two of the women traced his lines of power, from shoulders to arms, from chest to trim, flat waist and the heavy abdominals women found so desirable.

  Human women were silly and weak and frivolous. Good for the uses he'd already considered.

  The one he'd chosen, she was beautiful, the most beautiful in the room and therefore the best and because he was commander here, the best was his due. She'd be no more intelligent than the others at this event. But her aesthetics pleased him.

  Pleasing him meant she and her friend could live longer than might otherwise be expected.

  The others here might not be so lucky. The men could be taken to a tank farm, hooked up to equipment and subject to daily bleeds. It wasn't the worst that could happen to them. They were cared for, illnesses were corrected, they were fed and sheltered and could sleep when they wanted to. It wasn't much of a life, strapped into a chair most of the hours of the day and only let up to move around because it was better for the blood.

  It beat being eaten and left dead on the street. If any of the men proved to have enough spark, enough intelligence, they might be conscripted into the battle forces. The enemy was coming and there were fewer Vampyren to meet it than the humans knew. Men who voluntarily joined with the militia were better treated. They had more food, better quarters, less beatings. They even occasionally got to try their luck with a Vampyren female. Even those who didn't live through the experience had an experience before they stopped living.

  The group of women would be broken up by age, though he didn't think any of them present was past breeding age. By beauty, then, with some of them taken for the amusement of the men, others for food, others for breeding. There were enough of them, he might even arrange a hunt, letting the girl loose in the city for sport.

  And the girl he'd spotted, the one with the long, long legs made shapelier by the stupid shoes, she'd be his.

  Alek gave a short series of command and started back toward the bedroom door, behind which she surely waited.

  3

  She hit him with a lamp.

  The instant they were shoved together into the condo bedroom Candy crossed the room and looked out first one of the windows, then the other three. It was a corner bedroom, the far end of the second condo that had been overtaken by businessmen on holiday. They'd been in here literally dozens of times since the siege started and never alone. The men had taken advantage of the breakdown of any kind of rules. The bedroom, the one farthest from where the whole of the party still mingled, was the most private. The one from which the screaming, if there was any, didn't carry.

  They'd both looked out the windows more than once, looking for fire escapes that definitely weren't there on the eighteenth floor. Looking for anything that could mean freedom.

  There was nothing. And now there were the exact thing they'd sheltered with the grabbers to avoid.

  The enemy had come.

  That didn't stop her from looking out all of the windows, as if a solution had grown over night.

  When she turned back, about to say something to Candy, something that was instantly driven out of her head, Mindy saw the doorknob begin to turn.

  "Candy!"

  When her friend looked at her, Mindy gestured violently at the door and Candy all but sprinted away from it. The next instant the door began to open and Mindy grabbed the first thing she could get her hands on.

  Then a Vampyren stepped into the bedroom, and Mindy hit him with a bedside lamp.

  Surprise made him stop, nothing else.

  Surprise made Mindy stop, too. She stood holding the shattered remains of the lamp in her hands, staring at the alien who had come through the door.

  He was young, she saw, and though she didn't know how the aliens aged or anything at all about their world, how long their years were or how ages compared, she thought they were close to the same age.

  He stood over seven feet tall, his blue-black hair falling loose to his shoulders. Many of the invaders wore their hair plaited back, out of their way but it looked scraped and uncomfortable. His loose waves of midnight black hair didn't make him look softer at all but it was beautiful, silky and soft where it fell to his shoulders. It made him look less murderous, maybe.

  So did the fact that he was starting to laugh. Mindy threw a worried look at Candy who was easing along the wall toward the door as if she could dart past the imposing man who stood there.

  Until this moment Mindy hadn't even known if the Vampyren could laugh. There was nothing of cultural exchange about their arrival on Earth. They'd come as a military force to overthrow and overtake. This was their planet now and while they might relax among themselves, they kept ironclad control around humans.

  Or so she heard. She'd seen them in the streets but only from the eighteenth floor. She and Candy had already been at the weekend-long party when the invasion happened and no one had left except those thrown out or those too drunk to be kept inside for fear of attracting the wrong kind of energy. Their supplies had come from places still delivering, because the Vampyren didn't care about trade, whether it continued or not, and according to the local news that was all that was left of news broadcasts – and calling it that was giving it a lot of credit – the invaders wanted human life to continue in some form of normalcy just because it made controlling them easier for the Vampyren.

  Deliveries meant the vampires knew for certain there were live people in the condo building and seemed stupid to Mindy, but try and keep the wheeling and dealing businessmen from their vodka and whisky. The food had been delivered from grocery stores, some of it, but a lot of it had been scavenged from the other condos. Many of those were unoccupied. No one wanted to think what had happened to the owners. They just treated the unoccupied units as places to forage, and did so after the f
irst couple weeks, sending the girls and some of the junior executives to bring back everything.

  Anyone else alive in the building who had not been invited to the party could apparently fend for themselves.

  Mindy had never been a fan of businessmen, even if they were the ones who usually hired her.

  Now it looked like she was getting a new lord and master. Like her days of being sold or at least rented out, bits of her life and looks paying for her continued existence, was now going to be sold to the highest bidder. That's what she'd heard, the scuttlebutt online, what everybody said. The Vampyren bought and sold people, holding biddings against each other.

  She'd end up being sold to the Vampyren.

  The shaking started in her stomach. Her hands seemed incapable of dropping the base of the damned lamp. Not that it mattered. She'd probably managed to hit his shoulder more than his head, he was too damned tall, and he clearly wasn't even injured. It wasn't like she'd induced amnesia and could pretend it wasn't her and it wasn't Candy and that the two of them had run off the person who really hit him.

  The door behind him darkened and Mindy swallowed hard. A second alien had joined the one she'd hit, this one tall enough he had to duck to enter the room. He wore his hair in the scraped back way, and his eyes burned with anger.

  "What is this?" he demanded, looking first at the man she'd hit and then at Mindy and her lamp. He picked a piece of glass off the first man's shoulder and threw it to the ground. "You little ***!" The word he used didn't translate, though she could guess at its meaning. He stepped into the room, moving fast, starting toward her.

  Mindy took several steps back, dancing away from him, colliding with Candy partway and realizing she'd been trying to come to Mindy's aid.

  I didn't mean to!

  But that was the dumbest of all potential things she could say. Of course she'd meant to. There was no way to accidentally hit someone with a lamp.

  She backed away silently, her hands up in front of her, warding at first but slowly they formed into fists. Her father had insisted she learn to protect herself and she had her red belt in TaeKwon-Do before she quit. Maybe she couldn't win, but she could go down fighting.

  Only she didn't have to.

  "Pan. Stand down. Pan. Stand down."

  It took a second for the second alien to respond to the command, either because anger was driving him or because he'd gone too far into his own feelings about what she'd done. He stopped halfway across the not-that-big bedroom, much closer than Mindy had wanted him to get. His eyes locked on hers, he said back over his shoulder, "We cannot allow – "

  "Leave it," the first man snapped. "She was afraid and she defended herself. That's what we'd expect Vampyren to do." His eyes didn't leave hers so he didn't see the shiver of complete rage pass over the face of the one called Pan.

  "She is not Vampyren."

  At that, the first of them shifted, turning to face the one called Pan. "I know that, brother. But I admire a spirit that doesn't give in. I admire a girl I could pick up with one hand taking a stand against me."

  She'd been looking back and forth between them, watching as at least some of the anger drained out of Pan. Now she said without thinking, "It's not like I managed to do anything."

  "No," he agreed, and when he turned his dark eyes back to her, she shivered involuntarily. "My name is Alek Tybolt. I am a Lord of the Province of San on our world and here I am what you would equate with a General. This is my brother Pan Tybolt, and he is what you would consider dangerous." He paused, his eyes on hers.

  Mindy swallowed. Before she could think of anything to say, Candy stepped up beside her. "And you're not?"

  Alek turned slow eyes on her but it was Pan who spoke. "Oh, he's dangerous. He's far more dangerous than I am." He seemed to preen with the statement.

  Alek smiled slightly, still facing the girls rather than his brother. "I need your names," he started.

  Behind him, Pan hissed. "You need their ID numbers. Nothing else."

  This time Mindy saw the expression that Pan didn't see on Alek's face. It was part amusement, part exasperation and one-part anger. This was something they'd disagreed on before.

  "What for?" She was stalling. Neither she nor Candy had their IDs. Those had been taken from them at the start of the hostilities by someone in the party who had since vanished. She didn't think the two were connected – surely the Vampyren had a way of tracking who was carrying what ID. She thought rather they'd been taken to keep all the girls compliant and then something had happened to the asshole who took them, or everyone had simply forgotten.

  From the sound of things going on beyond the room they were in, everyone at the party was suddenly very sober, but she knew for a fact how long it had been since anybody could say that.

  This time he didn't smile. He said sharply, "You'll be safer if you comply without arguing. I am trying to assist you in keeping safe, but I cannot do that if you fight me." His eyes bore into hers and she shivered.

  No one had ever said that the aliens could read minds, but in that second it felt like they could.

  Maybe he can tell me what I'm thinking, then. Because she didn't know. Her mind was full of bees. She was terrified and angry at the same time and she had no reason to lie about the IDs. The things had been created by the aliens and distributed to humans who didn't die in the first waves of death that rolled out over the city.

  When they'd arrived in summer, the ships had rained fire on the Earth. They had the ability to make surgical strikes, cutting away a section of freeway or city, a part of a building, leaving the rest of it to collapse. They could pick out one motorist, one motorcyclist, speeding to safety, and incinerate him where he rode.

  At the same time, they dropped bombs no different than humans did and seemingly with less precision. In the months since the first attacks, she'd heard theories from the men who held her and formed her own. Very simply she thought all the weapons had the same purpose: to confuse. To oppress. To kill. The bombs that fell as bombs and scattered rubble and body parts through the streets were warnings. They were used infrequently enough and either the invaders had enough to level the planet or they didn't.

  It didn't matter to those killed in the attacks and didn't matter that much to those left having to sift their way through the rubble for anything they could use to survive.

  When life became nothing more than a game of survival, resistance didn't end, but it had to be put on hold. What was important at first was mere survival. Food. Water. Shelter. Safety. And all those things were in short supply when there were ships overhead that could pick off a single human out of a herd.

  Candy had a slightly different take on it that they'd batted back and forth between them during the times that the businessmen fell into a somnolent snoring slumber and the two girls sat on the terrace and watched unmanned vehicles sweep the streets for weapons and survivors and runners. Candy's theory was there weren't as many Vampyren on the planet as they wanted everyone to think there were. "It's a front," she said. "Like the way cats puff up to look bigger."

  "They're big enough," Mindy had said.

  Standing before one who she was no longer amusing, she agreed with herself, the comment she'd made back when life was simpler than it was now. When they'd just had to worry about Larry from Duluth. She suddenly realized that there was every chance that Larry and all the other men in the other condo unit were dead and felt everything she'd managed to eat in the last day threaten to return on her.

  Drawing her courage, she faced he invader. "I don't have my ID and neither does Candy. They were taken from us by the men here. They might still have them. I don't know what they could have done with them."

  "Burned them," Pan said without looking at her.

  "Why?" Candy asked and Pan turned to look at her.

  She didn't sound afraid, Mindy thought. Probably she was.

  "It's considered an act of rebellion."

  Candy gave a complicated So What? Shrug, but Mindy s
aw her throat move in panic. "I don't have mine. Neither does Mindy. And it's not our faults."

  Alek made an irritated noise. "It doesn't matter. We're taking you with us. It's not like you need them in human government."

  No, Mindy thought. Probably not. The humans had been left in the urban areas to govern themselves under the guise of some kind of freedom. Anyone who believed it really was freedom had only to step out of line as far as the vampires were considered to find out exactly how much that freedom was good for.

  From the other end of the condos, more screaming started up, then swearing in the guttural native tongue of the Vampyren, followed by sharp sounds of some weapon discharging.

  Mindy turned to Alek to see he was watching her closely. "What about the men?" she asked. Not that any of them had been all that decent to her and Candy and the other escorts, but they were human. Her allegiance was to humans.

  "You don't need to – "Alek started.

  Pan cut him off. "If any of them are anything other than soft, they'll be assigned as peacekeepers or soldiers. If any of them have any kind of rudimentary intelligence and speed," he said, and Alek made a snorting sound that sounded like disgust at Pan. "They'll be used in the games or hunted through the streets." He stopped, threw a look at his brother, then met Mindy's eyes directly. "I love a good hunt."

  She vomited. No warning. Just lost everything she'd struggled to find. There might not be shortages yet but that didn't mean the businessmen had been going out regularly or bringing back anything healthy, or like they wanted to waste food on the girls.

  "You see?" Pan asked.

  She didn't know exactly what he meant, only that it was delivered at Alek and that Alek then turned on his heel and left the room.

  4

  The party had devolved into chaos. The men in it, less flabby than Alek expected, had started to fight back and his own men had reacted the same way warriors often do when the kill isn't clean.