It couldn’t be helped if one didn’t know their own name. The girl shifted in place and hesitantly cocked her head to the side. It couldn’t be helped, either, that she didn’t know where she was. It couldn’t be helped that there wasn’t a speck of sunlight streaming in from that canopied roof. It couldn’t be helped that she was dizzy and had a headache the size of South Central Montana.
And maybe it also couldn’t be helped that she was being sold into slavery.
That was definitely what this was. There was the marble platform in the center, lined up with shiny clean, frowning people chained to the floor by both their feet and arms. Besides one of the enslaved people, a gorgeously buxom woman was yelling with a loud voice, prying open the slave’s teeth and accepting numbers from the crowd below. Ah, yes, the crowd. Another anomaly.
Because, despite all her misgivings, the girl was pretty sure these people weren’t people at all.
Was it something in the eyes? No, the fangs had to be the giveaway. They weren’t very remarkable, but after a while of people yelling you got to realizing that those pointed incisors were a bit more pointed than usual. It had also helped that one of them had sunk its teeth into a human, right there and then on the street. ‘Testing the merchandise,’ he had said with a grin, and everyone had laughed. She noticed that the girl he had sucked blood from wasn’t laughing.
The girl wondered what was happening to her. She was quite sure that, in all her deeply hidden memories, nothing like this had ever happened in her world. Vampires? Great, canopied market places? Slavery? No, this was very, very abnormal. But maybe it wasn’t. Oh, amnesia – her bane of life. Nothing made sense anymore and she didn’t even know why.
The girl looked down and noticed one of the vampires staring at her – it was the one who had taken the blood from the girl before. She recognized the blood dribbling down his shirt. He was a quite remarkable specimen for a vampire – she remembered that the undead were supposed to be gorgeous – despite the fact that he looked, well, dead. Chalky white, he was, though at the moment he looked a little revived. His eyes were deep crimson, not so far as to be called the color of blood, but more like the long old stain of blood which was twice as terrifying. He had ruffled sandy blond hair, strong angular features with a rough shave, and wore the most odd clothes; sleeveless, long and flowing, looking decidedly Persian. It showed off his remarkable biceps and abs nicely, even more so his scars so numerous they almost looked like a pattern.
When he noticed her staring, the vampire pulled up the corners of his lips into a cruel smile. He had blood stains on his teeth. Their eyes met.
You are mine. The voice echoed through the girls’ head and she jumped as well as she could with her unnecessarily thick chains rattling like noisy symbols. I will taste your blood.
Honestly, she didn’t know how to react. Maybe to wonder cautiously whether vampires could read one’s mind. Apparently not. After the first few nasty insults she went through in her head with no reaction from the vampire in front of her, she decided it was safe to think her thoughts were guarded.
“And here we have this specimen!” The girl was shocked back into reality as the woman vampire slave dealer grabbed her by the jaw and pulled her up on her toes (the vampire was unnecessarily tall, as these chains were unnecessarily thick). “Excellent quality! A full pair of teeth, none missing or implanted! Skin the color of milk! Soft as silk! Naturally colored hair the color of sunset! Tall, thin, beautiful! Perfect health and in the prime of her short life! Can I have an offer starting at 1,000 Belles?”
As the girl had suspected, the cruel vampire with patterned scars called out first.
“5,000 Belles!”
The slave dealer vampire looked ecstatic.
“5,000 Belles! Can I have 6,000 Belles, anyone?”
“6,000,” called one person.
“7,000!” another.
“10,000.” That came yet again from the cruel one. People – vampires, actually – muttered and chuckled.
“Can I get better than that? 11,000 Belles, anyone? A taste of blood, perhaps, to quell your doubts?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” said the cruel vampire with a sneer, stepping forward. The girl remembered legends about vampires, their inhuman speed, but it was really quite something to experience it firsthand. The scarred vampire was upon her without a second thought, grabbing her by the shoulders before she could even see him, pressing his fangs to her throat before she could think to scream. In an utterly terrifying moment, she realized that she was scared witless.
“50,000 Belles if he gets his filthy fangs off of her.”
Silence descended upon the marketplace so quickly it was almost funny. The scarred vampire’s fangs pricked the girl near the jaw line, but with a low growl – almost a purr – he pulled away.
The girl couldn’t see the person – no, vampire; she had to get used to that – who had spoken. He was a man, or at least she hoped there were no women with such a deep gravelly voice; it was a calm, collected, very authorative voice which was very alien in a place practically vibrating with a primitive air. Sophisticated – that was the word.
“Rosarie,” said the man loudly, and another profound silence scattered over the marketplace. “I hope you’re not doing what I think you’re doing.”
“And what may it be that you think I am doing?”
A timed silence during which time it took the scarred vampire in front of the girl to give her a sharp glare, and then disappear. He didn’t really disappear, just moved a step away, but at that speed he might as well have been Clark Kent. Clark Kent – who was that?
The girl finally got a glance of her would-be savior. Definitely a vampire and definitely a man, he was. Not overly tall, not overly muscled, but not too ridiculously thin, he held himself with an aristocratic grace which she supposed would have befitted vampires from the little she remembered of them. Against his ashen face his coal black features seemed to cast everything around him in a frosty shadow, sucking the life out of the little he had left, which was none. A light stubble of growth reached along his jaw, and one ear was pierced with a jade diamond. Though cold and stoic he was, for some reason, the girl found his presence profoundly comforting.
“Rosalie,” he said stonily, turning to the buxom vampire. “According to the laws and morals that govern the Nobility it is not proper to allow a human to be blooded in broad daylight, especially if that human is not property of the Noble yet. And according to Clause 25 of the Trader’s Guild, there is to be no exchange of blood in a public marketing facility under any circumstances. If you should stoop so low as to break both these laws, I warn you that the Monarchy will not let it pass lightly.”
The vampire, Rosalie, shrank slightly under his piercing glare. “It was only a taste, Julius – no harm done.”
The vampire, Julius, raised his hand as if to cut off any excuses, then turned to look at the girl. Her heart skipped a beat of fear as his velvet royal red eyes took her in, analyzing coldly every heartbeat and breath that left her body. She felt that being dissected on a cold white slab of marble would have been more welcoming.
“I will buy her,” he said at a length, and Rosalie’s face turned a slightly paler shade than ghastly white. “Don’t worry, you money monger – I’ll pay. But I will report this, and if such a thing should ever happen again steps will be taken. Am I understood?”
“Perfectly,” hissed Rosalie, acquiescing with a reluctant bow. Julius seemed like an important person.
The girl felt a sudden urge to utter something along the lines of, ‘So I’m bought now, huh?’ but the moment seemed inappropriate. She kept very still as the vampire Rosalie unlocked her chains, hissing under her breath about the damned and their idiotic Monarchy. None of these words rang a bell in the girl’s mind, and she wasn’t sure she wanted them to.
As the girl was tied up with slightly thinner ropes – prepped and ready to go – she risked a glance towards the scarred vampire, still standing there like a stone pillar. He wasn’t looking at her, thank heavens, but glaring hatefully at the vampire Julius till she thought the other man would start smoldering and burn up on the spot. Did vampires have powers like that? She had a thin recollection that there were some myths on the subject.
“Julius,” growled the scarred vampire, twisting his face into such a scowl that the girl’s heart stopped in absolute fear.
“Malcolm,” replied Julius politely, inclining his head. But he was glaring, too, baring his fangs as if he expected to fight any second, now. The girl didn’t like that – she didn’t like that at all.
“You’re merchandise, sir,” said Rosalie suddenly, cutting through the ghastly silence. The girl almost felt some affection for the buxom vampire till she remembered that she was the one who had sold her into slavery. And then she remembered that now she was a slave. She scowled, frowning a little. That wasn’t good, was it? No matter what she remembered, ‘slave’ wasn’t a very good context to start with.
“Er…”
“Shut up, human!”
The girl gasped as she was quite literally dragged down the steps from the marble podium, quickly jumping to her feet before she ended up with some very severe bruising on her calves. Once the merchandise was out of her hands, Rosalie seemed to care little about how damaged it became. That was some irresponsible marketing.
The closer the girl got to Julius, the more she wanted to turn tail and run. By the time Rosalie had reached him, she was pulling with all her puny might at the end of her rope, digging her bare feet into whatever slippery purchase the floor allowed – none, that is.
“This isn’t right,” the girl said quickly. That was one thing she was sure of – no matter what anyone said, she didn’t want to become some fanged beast’s slave.
Rosalie whipped around and roared at the girl. It was quite a petrifying experience.
“I told you to SHUT UP!”
“She can speak,” said Julius, eyes wide. He looked from Rosalie, to Malcolm, then at the girl again. “Rosalie – you didn’t dare…”
“She was a runaway,” growled Rosalie, inching away from Julius quickly. “You know that runaways are in my territory. I had every right to sell her! Every right!”
Julius glared at Rosalie, sucking the little courage she had left out of her undead body. Then he grabbed the end of the girl’s rope and tugged so fiercely that she almost went stumbling into his arms.
“We will discuss this later,” growled Julius, looking at Rosalie as if she was a repulsive slug. Then he tugged the girl’s rope again and started pulling her through the thick crowd which parted like the Red Sea. The Red Sea? Where was that?
“Excuse me,” said the girl after a while of trying not to fall flat on her face and get her blood sucked out by bloodthirsty vampires. “Um, where am I?”
Julius hardly gave her a glance. “Bloodfest Market.”
“Ah.” The girl dodged a group of suspiciously red-eyed travelers. “Nice name.”
This time Julius did glance behind at the girl and she wished he hadn’t. “No, it’s not.”
The girl struggled with the concept of a human being – oops, vampire – with no sense of humor. “I was using sarcasm.”
Julius’ eyes widened. “How do you know what sarcasm is?”
The girl rolled her eyes. “Oh, geez Louis, I don’t know. I don’t remember a thing.”
The girl gasped as she was suddenly pulled into a very uncomfortable crook between two marble buildings and was pressed between cold hard stone and even colder, harder vampire. For a moment, staring up into Julius’ wide red eyes, she was terrified that he was going to drink her blood. But he only grabbed her temples in his hands and stared at her on eyelevel, bending down to search her innermost soul.
“What is your name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you not have a name?”
“I don’t think there is anyone who exists on God’s green earth that doesn’t have a name. No – I just can’t remember anything.”
“Amazing,” muttered Julius, half-talking to himself. “The human speaks complete sentences.”
“I can speak in fragments if you so wish, master,” muttered the girl sullenly, trying to pull out of the vampire’s grasp. That was a bad idea. Julius scowled and dug his fingernails into her skin, splitting her skin as easily as if he was peeling an orange.
“Ow!” The girl cringed but held very still. Julius obviously was quite liberal with pointy things, including the fangs which were hungrily following the slow flow of blood down both her temples. Those would make ridiculous scars.
“You have no memory of your previous master?” asked Julius, still hungrily following the red flow of blood which had already reached below the girls’ ears.
“If I even had a previous master, which everyone thinks I had to have.”
“Of course. There are no more free humans on this earth any longer.”
The girl snorted. “Well, maybe they went off into space, then.”
The vampire Julius tore his eyes away from her blood and turned to stare into the girl’s eyes, looking quite serious. “Did they? You tell me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” wheezed the girl despite herself, licking her dry lips. “I mean, you can’t possibly mean…I mean, slavery…vampires…this is all wrong!”
“Oh, it hasn’t been wrong for three decades, now,” whispered Julius, turning back to examine her blood. He leaned forward and gave it a taste. A shudder traveled through his body.
“Excellent quality.” It was like he was commenting on wine years at a wine tasting event. Well, who knew – maybe the girl was on the rank of menial wine, to him.
“I wouldn’t know,” said the girl quietly, holding very still. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t kill me, though.”
Julius raised an eyebrow. “Why would I do that? It’s not often that I find a human with good quality blood. Humans have become so cheap, not even worth buying. Actually it’s ridiculous the prices they’re selling slaves these days. Honestly, all they’re good for is menial labor or…”
Suddenly Julius stopped talking, looking shocked with himself. “I’m having a conversation with you.”
“Yes, you are,” said the girl helpfully, uncomfortably feeling twin rivers of blood tickle under her chin.
“I’m having a conversation with a mere human.” Julius looked surprised, confused, and a tad horrified. “How is that possible?”
“It’s simple, really. You talk, I answer. I talk, and you answer. It’s the ‘throw-the-ball-back’ policy. Ever heard of it?”
Julius snickered. He looked passably not terrifying when he smiled. But then his face reverted to shock and confusion. “I just laughed at a joke a human made…how can you even make a joke?”
“Oh, we could go all day on that subject,” said the girl, realizing that she was getting a little too comfortable with her vampire slave master.
Julius shook himself. “You must have escaped from the castles of the King himself…remarkable. I hear he educates his humans for sport, but I never thought…it’s remarkable, I can almost imagine that I can have an intelligent conversation with you.”
“Vampire king,” the girl said, deciding to ignore that he was repeatedly insulting her intelligence. “Scary.”
The vampire Julius started following her trickle of blood again, which by this time had reached her neck. “Sarcasm or truth?”
“A little bit of both,” admitted the girl. Her breath caught as Julius stretched his fangs out to brush her neck.
“What are you doing?” she asked quickly, voice squeaking. Julius looked up in confusion.
“Drinking your blood.”
“Oh, big surprise there. Um…can you not?”
Julius’ eyebrows drew together. “Why?”
“Because I’d rather you not.”
“But humans are made for vampires to drink blood from.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why should I care what you think?”
“Good point,” muttered the girl as Julius nuzzled below her ear. Nuzzled. It sent the wrong kind of shivers up her spine, shivers that made her want to scream and run for cover.
“Hm…strange. You have no marks.”
“Marks?”
“Vampire teeth marks. I can only think that – “
Julius stopped quickly. “And there I go again, making conversation with my food. I’d advise you to relax.”
“What…?”
And then, with an explosion of pain on her neck, the girl’s world went black.

Julius felt full and content as he paced down the halls of the cool, dark castle, almost willing to ignore all the other unpleasant feelings surrounding him. That of pain and fear, permeating the walls, that of anger and hate, rebounding from some distant source, and that – most disturbing – of childlike innocence and a distantly peaceful, dreamlike state emanating from the slave he was dragging by the wrist.
Most vampires opted for dragging humans by the hair, especially the female kind, but Julius found that he was rather fond of that girls’ red-gold locks which looked good enough to make into a fur pelt. It was much more unnecessary skin touch than Julius preferred, but the slave was relatively clean and the dull reverberation of her gentle pulse against his palm was strangely calming, as if he was reassured of his possession of her by the sound of her blood. She had very fine blood, he mused, swerving to avoid a patch of artificial light flooding from a window (the slaves needed air). He could taste intelligence, wit, elegance, and youth in her, such as you would find rare to stumble upon in this day and age. It wasn’t bad blood, either, the kind you got hopelessly addicted to. There was no poison in her flesh.
A slave scurried by, crouching low to the ground and muttering, ‘Good day, Lord Julius’ as he passed, dark black clothes almost blending in with the surrounding midnight. Julius heard his labored breath and the dull stench of fear permeate from the man and quickly jerked away, making sure his slave didn’t catch the smell as well. He wondered how long that slave would last in these tunnels where oxygen was as thin as in the highest peaks of mountains, where the darkness was so profound that most slaves shriveled and lost luster within a month. He would not let that happen to his slave. Cuisine tasted the best when served to look delicious.
‘His slave’. The words did not sound as bad as they had just a few hours ago when he was shouldered with the unpleasant task of buying this one up before she could be poisoned by Malcolm. That vampire’s fangs were deadly if he wished them so, as were his whole clan, and that wretch would have used this delightful slave to infiltrate the inner reaches of the Nobility’s castles, seeking to kill, no doubt, Julius himself. Julius did not like the extra burden personal slaves entailed, the extra coin it took to keep them healthy and as happy as possible to make their blood ripen to the best stages. He did admit, though, that he had started tiring of the redundant taste of the food slaves, bred and primped to taste differently as required by different vampires. The problem was, they all had the same underlying stench, that of dumb cattle led to the slaughter.
It often cost a pretty penny to breed a slave suitable enough for prime taste and often worthless, considering the recent lack of intelligence in the human race. Many of the Nobility had personal slaves, bred from birth to be pleasing to eye and taste, but not many succeeded in a taste that was more than slightly better than food-stuff. The humans would end up depressed, melancholy, unwilling to learn and unappreciative of any service given to them. It was as if they did not understand the privileges they were given compared to the other normal slaves. Most of them died of pure unwillingness to live. How ungrateful.
Then again, it was not the food’s job to feel emotions such as gratefulness or have even a touch of sensibility. Julius had found flaws in the logic of breeding personal slaves and had been experimenting on the physiology of the human race for a while now, trying to find the infamous ‘missing link’ that would make the blood of a human taste at its most prime. Recently his studies concurred that, not surprisingly, contentment was the best breed for good blood, mostly achieved by sex or merely good food and luxurious living. People called him crazy and a ‘human lover’ for his studies, as if they didn’t realize that what he was doing could change the basis of good blood and raise standards to a new peak, not achieved since before that puny Golden Age of the human kind. Honestly, Golden Age. Julius snorted. As much a Golden Age as cockroaches tried to create a reasonable civilization. Though, Julius acquiesced, humans were slightly more useful than cockroaches. Many disagreed with him on the subject.
‘Free-minded’, they called him, snarling with disgust. ‘Human lover’ was only the beginning of many insults directed at him, not that they could do anything about it. Julius was one of the King’s Chief Advisors, slightly eccentric, but recognized for his talents in dubious fields. The King was surprisingly open-minded about Julius’ work, applauding his search for the exact right taste and searching broader than just ‘flesh deep’ solutions for cheap blood. But the words the King had spoken to him when he introduced his idea still chilled Julius to the bone.
“Do not forget the purpose of your ‘experimentation’, Julius.” The King had said, fixating red eyes simmering with some hidden emotion. “Humans used to be sly and cunning creatures; you were birthed after their first conquering but I and many others remember what they were and what they still have a potential to be. Puny, disgustingly weak and weak-minded, they were, and many did not change from what they are reduced to, now, but they were and might still be a difficult race to conquer. They are not cattle, as many foolish vampires think, and it would indeed be foolish to think so. I recognize what the humans can do, what they could do, I have seen how they charmed many a gullible vampire into something worse than the final death. Their allure is a frightening thing, their pure vitality something not of comprehension. Be wise, Julius, and do not forget who you are. Be careful not to be lead astray by this race in your studies of their mind. Because if that day should ever come, believe me when I say that I would not hesitate to slaughter even you.”
Julius shuddered. Charmed by your own food – it was a horrifying thought. And ridiculous, to most vampires, but Julius had seen it happen. Breeding good blood was a double-edged sword, as went the old human saying. By bequeathing intelligence and education to the humans one stirred inside them a deep animalistic instinct that no doubt still ran in human blood to this date, an instinct to survive no matter how hopeless the situation. Julius had only realized the real danger of his occupation when his assistant, Irisis, had been charmed by a human male slave and tried to free him and escape to the great Savageness. Julius had had no choice but to slaughter her along with the new crop of humans he had been breeding, as the single male’s ideas had spread to the whole lot like some infectious disease. The real problem at this stage in his project was how to instill intelligence and relative wits while removing the factor of free will and keeping the slaves servatile. Nothing was impossible, as his late teacher had often intoned, but Julius was honestly confounded. The more he delved into the human mind the more he wondered whether they could ever be tamed.
He was most worried about the slave he was dragging behind him. Julius turned around to observe the girl who was allowing herself to be dragged along the smooth marble on her butt, snoozing gently, almost peacefully. It was infuriating but Julius couldn’t muster any will to wake her. She wasn’t particularly tall, not too slim, but well-balanced in a manner that the majority of vampires enjoyed. Her skin was a smooth milky white, uncommon in this harshly-luminated region, so it was safe to assume that she was the personal property of some other Nobility in another distant region. Not that Julius was willing to give her up. If what Rosalie had been saying was true – which was dubious, but Julius doubted only with solid reason, especially when it benefitted him – the girl was his by all legal rights. There was a light brush of cosmetics on her slightly square-shaped face, concealing even more pale skin underneath a powdery white layer, lidding lavender-lined lids with pale red shadow and dark charcoal eyeliner. Her mascara-coated eyelashes curled perfectly over her top lid which Julius knew produced a pleasingly contrasting effect on her liquidly big, clear blue eyes which drooped ever so slightly to produce a very rodent-like effect. Those eyes made him think of rabbits and small mice, perhaps even a dog or very small cat. Animalistic, but in a disturbingly adorable way. It wasn’t helping that her nose was pert and slightly round, encouraging a rabbit-like complexion and that her proportionally small, rose-bud like lips curled unconsciously upwards in her blissful sleep. Unconscious, she looked very much like a small rodent, though as she woke he knew it would mature into a more womanly complexion, comparatively pretty among set standards. Those red-gold locks fell loosely to her mid-back and the skinny wrist he held in his arms felt ready to snap if he handled it wrongly. Not in a brittle, unhealthy and old way, but merely in a very delicate way. He found himself growing attached to her.
Only in a way that a master found amusement in a puppy dog, he convinced himself quickly, shaking himself from that dangerous line of thought. He would pamper her, yes, give her the best life after careful consultation of his studies, yes, but other than that he would completely ignore her. She wasn’t alive for amusing companionship or intelligent conversation, but solely for blood as his necessary and relatively enjoyable food source. Maybe his attachment to her was slightly bordering on obsession, but many other vampires grew such bonds with their personal slaves, as well, and they didn’t seem to have any trouble thinking of their slaves as merely food. Perhaps he should consult Pamelia on this matter. She had several personal slaves who had the best blood he had tasted among humans, and she seemed to manage them with relative ease. Her well-pampered males seemed always brimming and smiling, even if it was a slightly dumb and empty smile. Though it would be mortifying, Julius knew that she was most-likely the best authority on this matter. He had even used some of her opinions in his studies and found them productive. Now was not the time to be bound down by his sizeable pride.
As Julius neared his lab, the girl started stirring. He felt a jolt travel up her wrist as she woke and realized where she was, felt her mild struggle as she tried to pull herself up onto her feet. He squeezed gently and she stopped moving with a gasp. He turned over his shoulder and looked down at her. She was breathing normally, looking around with livened curiosity of her surroundings and making small filings of every insignificant detail she saw. He could only smell a hint of fear stench on her, only the slightest bit discomfort in her body of being dragged, but more than anything else overwhelming excitement mingled with confusion. It was an emotion he had never felt before in a slave. She seemed comfortable in the scanty slave clothes she was clad in but seemed discomforted by the traces of dried blood on the chest of her shirt. He noticed, rather ruefully, that she still had dried blood conglomerating on her temples and he had left four crescent moon scars on each side of her face. He regretted that and wondered if he could bother fixing them with surgery, not as if he didn’t have the money. Would she mind the scars? Most slaves seemed to resent them.
‘She’. ‘The girl’. Julius decided that he would have to come up with a name for her as he fished inside his shirt for the pass dangling from his neck, coming to a stand in front of two white doors set into the cave walls. What would be appropriate? Was she lying about her said amnesia? She didn’t seem to be and it would definitely explain the confusion and pure naivety. But was she lying?
“Excuse me,” she said politely, obviously struggling not to sound sardonic. “Where am I? And pardon me for saying, but the ‘caves of midnight darkness’ seem a bit over the top.”
Julius ignored her for a brief moment as he pressed his pass against the scanner and the doors slid open smoothly. Then he deigned to answer her.
“My laboratory.”
He could smell the sudden increase of fear in her breath mingled inside panic. She didn’t seem to like the word ‘laboratory’, not at all. Julius supposed it sounded a bit sinister, but he was merely answering her question. He couldn’t very well have lied and said it was his private pent house, no matter how reassuring that might have been.
“What are you going to do to me?” she asked with a quiver, struggling to stand. Julius squeezed again and she settled down with a subdued gasp. “What…this doesn’t make sense…!”
“Quiet,” said Julius in his firm voice, dragging her around to a corner in the room where he knelt to swiftly tie her up. “You’re my property, now.”
‘Kinky’, he thought he heard her mutter. He wondered what that meant.
Julius noticed a thin rim of bruising around her wrist and held it up to the light. He frowned.
“You bruise too easily.” He felt her forehead and lidded open her eyes. “Tongue,” he commanded, and she obediently acquiesced. Her tongue was pink like a kitten’s, he noticed arbitrarily.
“Bamean!” Julius yelled, standing and wonder where the young vampire had run off to. He was supposed to be here analyzing the older data on female humans during their time of month. Apparently it made them extremely grumpy and thus resulted in sour blood. They were experimenting on ways to stop the monthly occurrence and were coming very close to success. Of course, it presented the problem that the females could no longer reproduce, but Julius supposed they could somehow overcome that problem.
“Sir!” Bamean was there immediately, coughing delicately and snapping to attention at his side. Julius’ young assistant had been taken up more as a favor than not, seeing as Bamean was the last pupil of their shared teacher, Valerius, and his training was still incomplete. Vampires weren’t prone to develop attachment to their own kind, but Julius had considered Valerius both as a mentor and a valuable friend. When he had died last year of poisoned blood, Julius had thought it only natural to take up his last living pupil. Thankfully, the boy wasn’t dumb, just slightly slow, and had started showing potential for the eccentric intelligence that Valerius instilled in his students and often encouraged. He was young, though, hardly twenty years into birth, and had much to learn, still. After he had killed Irisis, Julius had been hesitant to take another partner, considering the risks, but Bamean, though naïve, knew better than to fraternize with human emotions. The sandy-haired, mildly-temperamental vampire knew better than to fall to the charms of intelligent humans.
“Test this human for disease,” said Julius briskly, shrugging out of his coat and rolling up his shirt sleeves. Bamean spared a moment to gape at the innocent female slave roped up to the wall, eyes widening, but then quickly snapped to attention. That was good. Now if he only didn’t show his obviously open-mouthed expression on his face he might become a decent vampire.
“Sir!” said Bamean quickly, sounding like some military trainee. Julius sighed. Bamean had been brought up in a military clan and some of their strict habits had managed to rub off onto the carefree and oblivious youth. It was tiring, sometimes.
“And clean her up,” said Julius as an afterthought as Bamean started untying the girl from her nook. ‘That girl’, again.
“Sir!”
“And find a private room for her.”
“Sir!”
“Get her a caretaker and some human slaves to take care of her.”
“Sir!”
“Fit her into the sunbathing schedule, too. Tell them that she’s my slave. That should clear the paperwork.”
“Sir!”
“Stop saying ‘sir’.”
“Sir! Uh…?”
Julius sighed and rubbed his temples. “And think of a name for her. She doesn’t seem to remember it. While you’re at it check for brain damage or hemorrhage: she seems to have amnesia.”
“Uh, sir?”
“Hm?”
“Don’t you want to name her yourself?”
Julius turned around from where he had been sorting out papers on his desk and raised an eyebrow at young, open-faced Bamean. “Why?”
“Well, sir,” said Bamean with a bright grin, baring his fangs in a friendly manner. “This is your first personal slave, isn’t it? I mean, don’t you want to name her?” Bamean’s smile faded at Julius’ expression.
“You may not want to,” acquiesced Bamean quietly.
Julius sighed and turned to crouch in front of his lovely, animal-faced little slave. She was staring at Julius very simply, tilting her head to the side as if she was, at the moment, just trying to absorb everything around that was new and foreign. Those eyes were bright and sparkling and didn’t shirk from staring him in the eye, though Julius knew that most human slaves found their eye color disconcerting. ‘The color of dried blood’, Julius had heard one whisper in passing.
“What would you like to be named?” asked Julius before he could stop himself. He let the horror sink through him as he realized that he had just spoken to a human slave in the presence of another vampire as if she could answer him intelligently and he hoped that Bamean took his words as the way a master talked absentmindedly to his pet. But the girl answered.
“I don’t mind,” she said thoughtfully, staring into his eyes so vividly that he imagined she was trying to suck the very soul out of the depths of his mind, to examine it and twist it around in her fingers till she figured out his deepest, darkest secrets. “I’d like a new name.”
“How about Yewona?” tittered Bamean with excitement, laughing at the joy of naming a new pet. “I’ve always like that name. Or how about Irene? You could name her Julinia – I’ve heard some vampires like naming their slaves after themselves. Or…or…!”
“She’ll be Lilith,” said Julius quickly before Bamean could get any more hyped. He stood quickly and with the swiftness of the undead went back to his desk. He didn’t like rushing so, but he felt disconcerted around that slave’s honest eyes.
Lilith, he reminded himself, seating himself and brushing his fingers across the screen to start up his computer. ‘That slave’ is Lilith.
He felt a shiver as he thought her name. That name seemed finalizing, as if the naming chained him to her for life. No, it was the other way around – and he wouldn’t mind using her for her whole short life for food. Her blood was exquisite, and if he managed to maintain her happy-go-lucky life he might keep it that way. He hoped that he could. He decided to consult Pamelia immediately tomorrow.
He didn’t notice when Bamean led Lilith away. He didn’t notice when day turned to night and the howls of the active vampires reached him through cold stone. He thought no more of Lilith and her alluring eyes. Their relationship was simple – he was a vampire. And she was his food.

Lilith was her name. How nice it was to have a name. Lilith smiled despite the fact that she was roped, scantily clad, and feeling very light-headed after having her blood sucked by a red-eyed vampire. She stumbled slightly despite not wearing any shoes and traveling over smoothly uncluttered ground. The youngish vampire – Bamean – hauled her up easily and kept her walking.
Lilith wondered at this new world she had been born into where humans were sold as slaves and vampires ruled the earth. She wondered if she should be frightened or desolate, delighted or resigned, excited or terrified. Would she be experimented on and changed into a mindless slave who wouldn’t question her ‘master’? Would she suffer pain? Would she bear pleasure? Would there be other humans there who would be her companions? How would the vampires treat her, treat the human race? How should she respond? How should she act? Who was she?
Lilith decided that, if anything, she had maybe gotten the better bargain in life when Julius had chosen her rather than Malcolm. What would have happened to her, she wondered, at the hands of that hissing, animalistic vampire? Would she have been sucked dry and left to die, or tortured till she was completely servatile to him? Was she still in that danger? She didn’t believe that Julius was the kind of man – excuse me, vampire – to do something like that. She then laughed out loud at her own silliness for assuming that she knew someone – something – after knowing them for what of a few hours, a great half of which she had spent sleeping. What did she know about Julius? What did she know about anything? What did she even know about herself? Why, she didn’t even know what she looked like! She hadn’t spied any mirrors handy and the best glimpse she had gotten of herself was a blurred image of a hazy-faced girl in soapy, sudsy water as she was bathed and prepped for ‘selling’. Absentmindedly, Lilith flipped her hair over her shoulder and noted the color – red-gold. It was a pretty color, very fine and naturally falling in curls to her waist. Well, if anything, at least she had pretty hair.
Looking up, Lilith noticed that Bamean had been staring at her, but as she looked he turned away quickly, looking embarrassed that he had even been looking at her. Lilith wondered if she could get him to talk. Was she allowed to talk? Rosalie hadn’t seemed to think so. Lilith was infinitely frustrated as she walked along behind Bamean, wrinkling her brow and fidgeting while trying to dislodge a strand of hair from her mouth, wanting to talk and question that sandy-haired boy but too afraid that doing so might earn her some sort of punishment. To put her confused mind to rest, Lilith decided in a finalizing way that she wouldn’t speak to vampires unless spoken to till she could find some human who could explain her situation to her. What could have happened in the years lost in Lilith’s memory? How could she be so certain that vampires had not ruled, hadn’t even existed in her previous memories which were so hazy like smoke? Julius had said that vampires had ruled for three decades in their short conversation in the Bloodfest market. She couldn’t possibly be older than thirty, could she?
Lilith hated this ignorance.
Lilith decided to forget about her messy and confusing past and instead concentrated on her present. She looked around the large white expanse around her; Julius’ laboratory. They were in a circular room with many doors lined up as a semi-circle on one side opposite the entrance, elevated on a platform which surrounded the walls and could be reached by stairs or a caged elevator. The entire centre was occupied by a massive white ‘thing’, a container which oozed some sort of reddish liquid inside its clear glass mass, nestled snugly in a platform of complicated white mechanics. It reached the brightly-illuminated roof and loomed as a dark shadow over the smooth white floor, casting Julius’ neatly cluttered desk in a shade which the vampire didn’t seem to mind. He had summoned a holographic computer from seemingly nowhere, tapping away on it with silent beeps and seemed to be utterly unconcerned with what was happening to Lilith. She had lost sight of him as Bamean tugged her around the big clear container, leading her to the nearest metal staircase, but on the upper platform she got another good glimpse at him. When they had first met, Lilith had had only a hazy image of her master; everything had been happening so fast and so frighteningly that that morning in Bloodfest Market seemed as blurry as her past. Julius, as Lilith had deduced at first sight, was a very stolid man – cold, consuming, no-nonsense, no sense of humor at all and a tad straight-laced; those words were what Lilith would use to describe her vampire ‘master’. He sat very still and very straight behind his desk, staring intently at the holographic screen with keen rusty red eyes shaped perfectly like almonds, eyes which were so dark despite their color that Lilith imagined they could have been twin black-holes. His nose was very straight and his face was slightly round, though not soft; harsh black stubble climbed up his jaw untended and his dark brown hair was in a perpetually messy halo around a pristinely chalk white head. Deep black bags sagged under his eyes, inching on turning indigo blue, and his raspberry-tinted lips hung limp and slightly ajar. Handsome, Lilith wondered? Rugged, a bit. She wondered if he was in the habit of shaving when he wasn’t engrossed with saving human slaves from pointy-toothed, evil vampires and working on some project that read ‘Mens-something’ backwards. She thought he might look dashing with a clean jaw in that unique way that only a few blessed men were allowed to possess. Oh, she wasn’t falling in love with him, no doubt about that. Lilith smiled triumphantly in a strange pride that she had at least managed to garner a relatively handsome ‘master’ who seemed to be on the better temperamental scale going by vampires. Malcolm had been handsome, yes, in that very sandy, beach-boy, ‘I’m-going-to-run-you-over-on-my-motorbike’ kind of way, but all Lilith had felt looking at him was fear. He had been terrifying. She didn’t feel that around Julius.
Lilith turned her gaze to the thin back of Bamean, observing with interest his square-shaped, severe brown haircut which seemed like it had been grown in a box. He didn’t look like a vampire. If anything, he looked like a gangly teenager easing ungracefully into adulthood with a lot of questions and a lot of limbs. Only his rustic reddish eyes framed with their feathery black lashes and the unusually prominent fangs in his mouth gave away his deception. Every once in a while, his back would twitch, as if he wanted to turn around but was too afraid about the consequences of such an act. Like it was sacrilegious; as if Lilith was something unclean and unholy. The thought of vampires and religion paired together roused a surprisingly humorous feeling in the pit of her stomach which she couldn’t fathom.
Lilith followed Bamean into a wide, breezy elevator, leaning with delicate weariness against the shiny gray metal. She yanked her wrists back and forth thoughtfully, observing the way the slinky, chain-like roped stretched and retracted tensely with her movements. The feel of death cold metal was foreign on her abnormally warm skin. She observed the moments of her fingers, feeling their strangeness, as if she had momentarily forgotten how to use them but undoubtedly still knew how to form shadow shapes on the walls. Like forgetting how to walk but still being able to run. Like she had lost all her senses in some tragic accident but still was, for some reason, able to use them. She watched a simple dog bark his way across the opposing wall as she contemplated this conundrum. She was still unsure of what she was allowed to remember.
“You fidget a lot, don’t you?” the words burst from Bamean with abrupt suddenness, as if he couldn’t bear to keep silent any longer. He was half leaning towards her, not exactly looking at her, eyes fixed on the changing landscape as they traveled upwards, ever upwards. Lilith obliging folded her hands in her lap, wondering whether the brief sentence from the youngish vampire constituted rights for a proper conversation. She decided to risk it.
“The more I fidget, the more I remember.” Lilith stared at Bamean openly, hoping that her brief repose of amnesia allowed her to be innocently rude. She was fascinated by her surroundings, fascinated by this amazing world she had been newly born in. A world of vampires and deep dark caves underground, of eccentric vampire scientists in pristine white laboratories and human slaves sold in elaborately-named squares. She should be frightened, she knew, but she couldn’t bring herself to feel any fear. She was just so confoundingly curious that she didn’t know what to do with herself.
Bamean turned to glance at her once, and then quickly turned back to their ascent. Lilith frowned, feeling very let-down after expecting a half-descent conversation with the vampire. What was with this strain between humans and vampires? Did they not cohabit the same earth? So why were humans sold as slaves to vampires and treated like premium beef cattle? Gingerly, remembering her earlier encounter, Lilith raised her cuffed hands and brushed her fingers against her neck, feeling the two pinpoint indentions where Julius had bit into her skin, scabbing over delicately already. It had been, without a doubt, the worst experience of her new fledgling life. The travel through the desert had been hot and thirsty, but not direly uncomfortable. Getting clubbed over the head the first thing she knew had, admittedly, been disconcerting but hardly painful. Being sold as a slave, and approached by the vampire Malcolm had, without a doubt, been extremely terrifying. But getting one’s blood sucked…it was an experience she wished fully never to repeat again. There was no real tangible way to describe it, be it the waves of nausea which overcame her as she struggled unsuccessfully to faint, the tearing, ripping feeling on her throat, the acute pain like two-inch thorns digging, abrading in her flesh, and then finally the blissful relief of unconsciousness where she had slipped into a dreamless slumber. More than painful or frightening, it had been the most uncomfortable, nauseating, and irritating feeling she thought she could ever feel. She had honestly thought that she would die.
The elevator came to a slightly jarring stop, and Bamean quickly pulled Lilith out with a jerk on the leash, causing her to stumble slightly over the cold marble floor. The world they came into was large, noisy, and impossibly complicated, dazzling to the eyes. As the doors of the elevator closed behind them, Lilith noticed the floor number – B-21.
The long, wide hallway leading down from the elevator was infested with humans of ever race and sex, milling and bleating like unaccounted cattle. Doors were lined up on either side, continuing down a sharp right angle turn at the end of the hall, and a few were open, showing glimpses of hairy, dully-colored carpets, large mirrors, plush beds, and miles upon miles of shimmering wardrobe, allowing glimpses of clothing which were mortifying for Lilith to even look at. Lilith could tell that the beings were human by the flush in their cheeks – equal parts artificial and natural – and the dull, unexpressive looks in their eyes (not to mention the fact that fangs were not present in their pearly whites). There were no vampires that Lilith could account for, no matter how much she stretched and peered, and by the look of pure reluctance on Bamean’s face, the reason was because humans were extremely undesirable company. A muttering hush fell over the hall as Bamean and Lilith made their entrance, empty faces fixing on the two briefly, and then they turned back to what they were doing, plodding airily as if they had just been clobbered over the heads. Lilith felt a kind of keening wrenching in her stomach, an explosion of emotional pain which she comprehended as despair for her race – human. Was this what they had come to? Was it possible that humans had always been like this, meek little sheep with not a thought in their heads? That was impossible. Because if it was, then that would mean that Lilith wasn’t human.
Almost immediately a tall, plump woman with plain brown hair pulled back into a simple bun approached them, head bowed, hands clasped tightly in front of her, staring at Bamean’s toes in some kind of mumbled greeting. Lilith struggled to discern the woman’s almost imperceptible words, jumbled together like stringy cheese and spoken in such a soft baritone that Lilith wondered that she wasn’t just hearing very loud breathing. But she did make out a great part of it, the rest filled in with imaginative guesswork.
“My lord, what an honor it is to see your presence. I am Dollard (it could have been Dullet), the floor-master. What may I do for you?”
Bamean wrinkled his nose at the woman, and then replied in brisk, sharp tones. “I have a new slave of Master Julius’. He wishes a caretaker to be found for her expediently along with apartments and some slaves.”
Lilith observed the woman Dollard’s reaction curiously, wrinkling her brows together. The woman just wouldn’t look up, wouldn’t stop talking in those imperceptibly soft tones. She supposed that the woman, being the caretaker, had to be a woman of some importance – guesswork, merely – but she was acting like the lowest dredge in a bucket of scum. And Bamean treated her as such. What was wrong with the human race?
“Of course, my lord,” mumbled Dollard, bowing even more than her usual hunch.
“Fit her into the sunbathing schedule, as well, and make sure she has sufficient exercise. She must have the best.”
“Of course, my lord.”
Bamean frowned at Lilith briefly, and then strode towards the elevator, jabbing the buttons impatiently.
“I’ll be coming to conduct some tests on her later in the night,” he said without looking back, arms gripped tightly behind him till the tendons showed like bulging ropes. Lilith observed him pensively. He looked to be in exquisite pain, for some reason or another. “I expect her to be presentable by then.”
“Yes, my lord.” Dollard bowed low to the floor, quite past the ninety degrees mark, and feeling compelled, Lilith made a little bob of her own. She wondered if she should call after Bamean, ask him to deliver a message to her ‘master’. But it hardly seemed appropriate for the situation. Instead she watched him as the elevator arrived with a ding, watched him as he loaded himself unceremoniously into the iron cage, all arms and legs, and then watched as the doors closed on his young, troubled face, watched as their eyes met briefly. Then he was gone.
Dollard straightened and Lilith anticipated the appearance of an entirely new personality in the woman now that no vampires were present. But nothing changed. Oh, the eyes were lifted more along the line of the knees instead of toes and the voice was louder than a hardly tangible caw, but it seemed that servitude had been too deeply ingrained in the woman to remove it, even in brief spasms. At that moment, Lilith felt very, very sorry for Dollard.
“Hello, Dollard,” said Lilith brightly, hoping to revive the woman some. “My name’s Lilith. Pleased to meet you.”
Dollard didn’t even blink. She merely beckoned with her fingers – long and bony; unattractive – and started scuttling down the hall, threading through the crowd of warm-blooded humans. Lilith, finding that her chains had fallen to the floor as Bamean let go of his end, hurried to follow after the woman, jostling elbows, unintentionally kicking people in the ankles and doing a kind of half-dance through the crowd, turning around to apologize, blithely dodging people who appeared suddenly as she turned, ducking under outstretched arms with muttered curses (she still remembered a few, thank God). She wanted to speak, wanted to ask a million questions and one, but she couldn’t seem to catch up to Dollard. The woman would have taken the gold in scuttle-racing.
“Hello! Miss Dollard!” Lilith pushed through a mingled crowd of young blond women and was briefly met by an open space of carpeted hallway, a rare pocket where humans weren’t lounging or dawdling. The floor-master paused briefly, turning around slightly, and then beckoned towards an open door which she subsequently entered, as silent as a ghost. Mixed curious and wary, Lilith followed, peering into the wide expanse of room beforehand cautiously.
If she had expected anything to jump up and leap at her, she was sorely disappointed. The room was mediocrely large, a comfortable space with another door leading off into a bathroom, by the sound of running water. It was plush and poised on the edge of extravagancy, as if afraid to totter into the luxurious, hinting just enough restraint to give a modicum of severity. The ankle-deep carpet and walls were a deep ocher red, a pleasant color akin to black, and though the lack of windows was a rather dooming factor, with the elegant four-poster bed with plump, turned-down sheets, a frilled sofa and what looked like a TV, the room was not what Lilith would have expected for a slave. Inside, Dollard waited patiently and meekly, accompanied by a tallish, willowy young woman and two others standing a ways back.
“This is Tontimes, your caretaker,” said the quiet woman dully, hands folded obediently. “She will assist you henceforth.” And then, without another word, she breezed – or more like wilted – out of the room past Lilith, disappearing silently with her softly-treading soles. Surprised by the lack of verbal contact, Lilith blinked up at Tontimes, uncertain and awkward. The willowy woman took a step forward, and then bowed at a neat forty-five degrees angle.
“What may I call you, miss?”
Lilith, taking a slow step forward, took her time in observing the other woman. She hardly seemed more into her twenties, though too bony for innocent youth; sharp cheekbones stood out from her unhealthily pale face, a jutting but pert chin outlining a square jaw and full lips. Her strands of pale blond hair were pulled back neatly into the very same bun Dollard had had, every unruly escapee pinned back with black bobby pins. The face was washed out and hollow, as if belonging to an invalid not part of proper society – though she had a general air of delicacy, Lilith could tell that the woman was, comparatively, possessing of a mind of her own, if carefully hidden and tucked away till cobwebs gathered and dust accumulated. She could tell by the hidden spark that had been roused in Tontime’s milky gray eyes as Lilith had entered; mingled reproach, regret, and interest which had been quickly snatched back on a tight leash, leaving Tontimes’ breezy face blank again. Though the billowy, unremarkably gray clothes that she wore were not at all flattering to her stick-like figure and the lack of any makeup considerably took away from her potential, Lilith could tell that the woman was at least moderately pretty, in a pale, cretin-like way. She was used to being underestimated, to drawing the short stick in life, and after finding that she could do nothing about it, consequently had shut away her feelings tightly in an undersea vault, unwilling to even broach the subject for fear of pain, both physical and emotional. But she was not like the other humans in this place, with no decent brain between them, lifeless – given up on life. She still had a sliver of hope, and even if Tontimes couldn’t admit that to herself, Lilith saw the spark. And she immediately knew that this was one woman to reckon with.
“Lilith,” she said slowly, and then took a step forward. “Tontimes. That’s an interesting name.”
“It was the name given to me by my nurse,” said Tontimes quietly, bobbing her head. “Now, if you please, Lilith, we must ready you for inspection.”
“Actually, I…”
“Lilith, please – we haven’t much time. It will be nightfall soon, and your master may call on you.”
Lilith froze at the thought, the very breath leaving her body. Call on her? As in, call on her to drink her blood? The very thought was so disgusting that she allowed herself to be hustled towards the bathroom door, speechless and thoughts whirling. The fact of the matter was that Lilith had entirely too much to tell Tontimes. Firstly she would have to explain her amnesia, and then ask Tontimes to kindly explain her situation – she would have to ask about the history of this society and how she was supposed to act. She needed to know what, as a human, she was allowed to do, what would get her head chopped off, and why in heaven’s name there were vampires ruling the earth. Then, if all evidence was conclusive, she would have to ask Tontimes to be her confidant and help her escape. Tontimes would be the perfect accomplice, and her spirit, unbroken even after twenty-so years in this place, deserved better.
But all these thoughts vanished as she caught the first glance of herself in the floor-length mirror.
Lilith saw a young, short, slightly plump girl in the mirror – a pipsqueak, really – with red-gold locks of curled hair down her back and to her waist, unrestrained by any ornaments. She saw a slightly square-shaped face, not jutting and defined like Tontimes’, but softer, more heart-shaped. She saw a face full of makeup, dramatic and complimentary to her pale complexion, and big, slightly drooping blue eyes the color of the elusive sky. She saw a rodent-like nose and small rosebud mouth, an inquisitively perpetual c*** of her dark auburn brows and a spazzle of beauty marks under her right eye, partially hidden by layers of cosmetics.
The more Lilith looked, the more she found faults. Perhaps her stomach could have been flatter, more toned; perhaps her thighs could have been skinnier, her knees less knobbly. Maybe her face was too big for her features and her ears stuck out a bit, like a monkeys’. But she had gotten the better part of the bargain, she knew, and she didn’t think it wise to forget that.
“Close your eyes, Lilith,” muttered Tontimes in a mildly soothing voice, approaching her with a swab of cotton and a bottle of some oily substance. Obliging, Lilith shut her lids and Tontimes swabbed the cotton over her lids, removing the bold bronze eye shadow and liner, working expertly on the mascara so that no eyelash was left caked. She then moved to the lipstick, and finished there, made Lilith wash her face with clean, herb-scenting soap. Lilith had a vague feeling of being taken care of, like an overused doll; her thoughts were in perpetual bemusement as she was helped in taking her skimpy clothes off, escorted into a large, scalding hot tub which was just right for her frozen limbs, a relief from this stone cold cage. As her hair was washed gently, expert fingers massaging her skull and bath salts were poured in one after another over her body, raising a heady, moist scent in the air, Lilith closed her eyes and lingered on the thought that she shouldn’t be enjoying this right now – she had to talk to Tontimes about her predicament as soon as possible.
But…mm…maybe it could wait for a few hours…

Julius knew that logically there must be times in one’s life when pride had to come second handle. It was inconceivable to refuse something, to refrain something, just because it was a bit humiliating and degrading. He had always pitied those brainless souls who had pampered their pride a bit too much, reduced to vampires and vampesses who were in ruin because they couldn’t take simple advice. In his opinion, the vampiric race had altogether too much pride (he had included it in his theses second winter last).
Never before in his past had he felt more sympathetic for the prideful.
“And so,” drawled Pamelia, lounging catlike in the sofa, elbows buried into the plush lining of the cushions, long calves kicked up lazily into the air, ankles crossed and red-painted toes pointed in deceptive daintiness. “It comes down to this. The great Julius, invincible scientist, asking me how to please a human.”
“That wasn’t my question,” snarled Julius, fists clenched. He had been perfectly relaxed about asking Pamelia questions about slaves – he had before for research, after all – until the moment he had informed her that it was his slave he was asking after. For some reason, after informing her that the slave was not only human but also female, she had become even tipsier with roiling, rich laughter. And while Julius was used to some proximity of ridicule, somehow having it come from a close acquaintance, a world-wisely one at that, was decidedly irritating.
“What was it, then?” asked Pamelia with a gasp of low chuckles, shaking her head and flipping her long blond hair over her shoulder with a sharp snap of her long neck, the creamy length of it unadorned by jewels or pearls. Pamelia was a rare breed of vampire, both literally and idealistically – she was from a clan of light-dwellers, a mutated kind of variation which had, after decades of evolvement, developed the ability to dwell under the sun with comfortable ease. Most vampires shared an aversion to natural lights, both sun and moon, though not to the point of death, though searing headaches accompanied longer samples of harsh nature. The NardVar, Pamelia’s family, were able to live under the sun almost as well as humans if covered properly, and in the days before vampires had become known to humans, had been able to dwell with them in anonymity, a prospect which had cause no small stir among the vampire community. Even after the crumble of the Golden Age and the second coming of the vampire kind, the NardVar had always had a special, unique kind of connection to the human race, and with their ability to discern and understand the intricacies of the mortal mind, their findings and memoirs had become invaluable to him in his research. His most ready source of information, Pamelia, was unusually comfortable with humans, not having any qualms of being exposed to them over long periods of time as more of the snobbier vampires did. With long blond hair brushing the backs of her knees, a tall, lithe body and the face of pure perfection, Pamelia was a known seductress, hostess at numerous social gatherings, and lusted after by every vampire in the Seven Havens as prospective mate, though never husband – no one would be fool enough to approach this vixen with that prospect. Personally, Julius enjoyed Pamelia’s refreshing honesty and factuality; her surprising sensibility about human matters and intelligent conversation with just the right amounts of dark humor and wit to enliven their little rapports. And he liked to think that she felt the same, though sometimes he suspiciously thought that she might enjoy his occasional flusterment a little too much.
“I asked not how to please her, but how to keep her content.” Julius sighed and settled back into the lush settee, unable to keep his back straight any longer in the sinking fabric. The whole room reeked of elaborateness, of Pamelia’s lounging lavishness which she sprinkled like festive fairies; a massive glazed pottery vase here, a master’s painting there, a fancy armchair located in an unserviceable location, merely there for decoration rather than use. “After getting my first slave I’m not going to very well let her blood spoil. She has the most exquisite blood I’ve ever tasted…untainted, lush, like out of the courts of the King himself. I suspect she came from there, at any rate.”
“And you have no intentions of returning her to your liege?” asked Pamelia with undue amusement, popping a gooseberry between her plump, puckered lips. Julius snorted.
“There is no inconsequential proof that she is actually his. Besides, I’ve been needing a pay raise.”
Pamelia quirked an eyebrow so blond that it was almost nonexistent. “Julius, you just might have made something close to a joke. Or ironic, at least. Sarcastic at best. What has happened to you?”
Julius groaned and rolled his eyes up into their sockets. “Pam, just tell me what I want to know. Save me my misery for later.”
Pamelia laughed like a cascade of velvet fountains, rolling her head around coyly and bumping the back of her foot against the couch arm repeatedly. “Oh, Julius, you’re so funny today. Alright, I’ll tell you, but I expect to be able to sufficiently tease you about it afterwards.”
“Naturally,” said Julius dryly, eyes starting to hold a decidedly fixed glaze.
Pamelia sat up, then; her sea foam green gown fell skimpily down her long, feline body like the waves of a titan ocean, spurts of white froth mixed into the vertical folds of the sheer material. Her back was completely bare, though her hair more than made up for it, and though the hem came well over her ankles, brushing the floor, she still managed to impart a sense of astounding beauty and sensuality which no amount of fashionably short skirts or flimsy tops could commute.
“Well, then, my dear pupil; what do you wish to know?” Reaching over with deliberate care to place the bowl of fruits on the glass table in front of her – carved to look like glacial ice – Pamelia flashed her irises up amusedly, lips tugging up in an unmanageable smile. It was just like her to enjoy this as much as she could. Pamelia was decidedly hedonistic.
Julius considered his first question with care. Generally, it was accepted that no two slaves were exactly alike, though it vexed most vampires to admit it – some strange reason which Julius could never comprehend, though as part of his race he had an inkling – and though cloning had succeeded with some specimens, the results were sadly weak and deformed, dying before they could grow from infant to adult. Julius himself had not been part of that specific research team – his talents laid in different areas – but he had a close colleague who had informed him at unwanted lengths as to how the experiments had proceeded. It disgusted Julius, the idea of cloning. He was no human lover, but he was sensible enough to know that there were some things that not even vampires should dare to do. And besides, the whole action was pointless; one could not clone the soul and personality. Many had tried removing it completely. And yet, surprisingly, it was that exact psyche which gave blood its taste and texture. A cruel irony which Julius had suspicions could never be really figured out. He decided to pose a general question at first.
“At what time of the day or evening do slaves have the best-tasting blood?”
Pamelia snorted in a burst of derisive laughter, pealing like a bell. “Oh, Julius, darling! What a silly question to ask. No, no; I think it’s better if I both ask and answer the questions.”
Shaking her head, Pamelia snapped her fingers and immediately, emerging from behind a curtain, a bulkily-muscled young human slave emerged, dressed in the normal garb of the Xue Province, loose and brown and sleeveless. Without a word, the slave fell to his knees beside Pamelia with a low sigh, stretching out his wrist willingly. Almost absentmindedly, as if nibbling at some tea time cuisine, Pamelia took the human’s arm and lifted his wrist to her mouth, biting in shallowly to draw a minimum of blood. She sampled a middle-sized vein, sucking gently, like a kitten lapping at milk, and then, almost as quickly as she had begun, stopped. The human stepped back quickly, nursing his arm with a nauseous but enthralled look on his face. Julius observed blankly. He knew that humans found the blood-drinking process unpleasant, but Pamelia managed to soften the blow somewhat by making her slaves actually want to give her their blood. An amazing process. Still, Julius had no time to sleep with his slave just for some pricier blood.
“Frankly,” said Pamelia delicately, dabbing at the corner of her colored mouth. “I’ve told you just about everything technical you need to know about breeding slaves, but you’ve never really shown interest in the psyche of the human race so I’ve never bothered. But since you seem to be interested in the delicacies, now, you have no choice but to learn.”
Julius frowned. “Pam, my job is to observe the human psyche. I am the leading scientist on the growing of pure blood. I think I know a bit more than you give me credit for.”
Pamelia snickered. “Oh, Julius, you just don’t understand.” Her coppery eyes took on a different emotion. “You think you understand humans, hm, Julius? What do you know about them? You know that they love luxury and lust; you know that they need affection and care. You know that they want freedom and control and you know that they would let emotion rule their lives if you let them be. You know that confinement makes them unhappy. You know that beating and pain makes their blood go sour. You know that sex makes their blood taste best and contentment is the best remedy for misery. But what you seem not to realize is that a human being is much more complicated than that.”
A brief pause. “The NardVar had a distinct way of feeding on humans back when humans ruled the world. It was a skill that ever vampire mastered. It was affection, Julius – vampires needed a certain love for humans that couldn’t be faked. There is no faux love, Julius, no matter how convenient that is. Humans can tell. And despite what you seem to think, it is not the physical act of sex or contentment that makes a human the most delicious; what makes the most exquisite blood is that moment when a human feels loved. It’s when they feel wanted. It’s when they feel important. And so when the NardVar wished for quality blood, all they did was fall in love with the human.”
Julius struggled with this overload of information. “Fall in love? No. A vampire cannot fall in love with a human. That is…inconvenient.”
Pamelia looked distantly considering. “Yes…it is, isn’t it? For me, I pretend to love my slaves; I heap them with gifts, spend time with them.” A grin curled on her luscious lips. “Have the wildest adventures with them. I fake it and it works to some extent. You yourself have admitted that my blood is the best.”
Julius sighed, suddenly tired. He leaned back into the settee. “And? Is there a difference between pretending and actually being? Can humans even tell?”
“They can’t.” Pamelia laughed at the irony of some hidden sentiment. “Humans are thick and dull. They can’t tell when love is pretended or really meant, even amongst their own kind. Insufferable creatures, they are.” But Pamelia’s voice was too controlled for comfort; too distant and dissecting. Julius’ eyes narrowed. She was hiding something.
“Was there some point to this discussion?”
Pamelia shrugged. “You know all the technicalities, Julius. I’d dare say that you know even more than me. The advice I would give you is to somehow make your delectable slave fall in love with you. Or at least hold some modicum of affection for you. Everything is much easier that way.”
But something wasn’t sitting right in Julius’ mind. This new information was interesting, yes, and entirely plausible – but there had to be more. Pamelia wasn’t a vampire with the best-bred stock of human food for nothing. Even among the NardVar she was considered a foremost expert on the subject, despite her youth and apparent inexperience with pre-humans, as the humans before the first coming were referred to. And that was because she was modern, flexible – dangerously open-minded for a vampire but as tough as steel beneath. Julius had often regretted with chagrin that she would have made wonderful scientist had she not been bred in luxury.
“Pam,” he said quietly, darkly, leaning forward till his eyes were staring into hers. She stared back evenly, utterly composed. “What else is there?”
At least she didn’t beat around t he bush, as humans used to call it. “You don’t want to know,” she said calmly, eyes wide and perfect. “You would detest the idea as every other vampire would. Even if I told you it wouldn’t help you with anything.
“Pamelia,” said Julius with certainty, eyes as serious as he could make the; a gaze which even his fellow vampires had branded as a devil-look. “I’m a scientist. Whatever you tell me would only cause to further my studies.”
There was perhaps the longest silence Julius had ever heard from Pamelia – pondering, wise, and utterly unlike her. Pamelia was never serious. Pamelia laughed and tittered and chided and joked, teased and was sometimes – most of the time – insufferable. Julius had a sudden urge to take back what he had said, to scrabble back to safety from the crumbling rocky overhang which he had foolishly climbed onto in a vain effort to fetch the rarest flower in the most inaccessible part of the landscape. But by then, Pamelia was already speaking.
“It’s not like it’s something you haven’t guessed already, Julius, if unconsciously. You’re a smart vampire – smarter than the pigheaded dolts of our generation. I’m surprised that you haven’t come to this conclusion already. Most likely it’s because you’re a coward.” She paused at Julius’ outraged demeanor. “We all are,” she added slowly, and then shook her head with a sigh. “Julius; to get the best-tasting blood that one could ever have, the NardVar records are unanimous in concluding that a vampire and human must share mutual love.”
At first, it took a while for Julius to mull that statement around in his head. He repeated the damning words in his head – a vampire and a human must share mutual love. Mutual love. Shivers ran up and down his spine as he comprehended what she was saying and he stood up quickly. Pamelia looked at him steadily, eyes unrelenting. It wasn’t her fault, after all; he had practically insisted upon her telling him.
“Pam…I…”
“You have to fall in love with her, Julius.” Pamelia stared at Julius with a look of mixed pity and wonder on her face. “No matter how ridiculous it sounds, if you wish for the best blood then that is what you must do.”
Julius gulped palpably. “You…what you’re saying is…”
“Heresy, I know.” Pamelia shook her head with a chuckle and looked away as she reached for a grape in the bowl on the table. “You asked, and it’s an indisputable fact drawn from numerous memoirs and records. You’ve seen it happen before, haven’t you?”
“Irisis,” said Julius with a dry mouth, rolling the word around his tongue like some new sample of human food which didn’t quite go down the right way. Pamelia looked mildly annoyed at the mention of the name.
“Yes; your pretty little assistant. What became of her?”
“I killed her,” said Julius quietly, regaining some of his composure. Somehow, remembering what his assistant had been reduced to calmed him. He was getting flustered over a mere concept – absurd.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Pamelia chuckled, biting her lip as she tossed her hair behind her shoulder. “The one you killed is the one who had found the key to your life’s passion.”
“Irisis was not in love with that human.”
“Oh?” Pamelia looked up sharply. “What was it, then? Obsession? Because mere affection would not make a vampire like Irisis throw away her life and beliefs for some food slave, no matter how idiotic she may have been. Admit it, Julius – she was crazy about that male. It’s addictive, you see, love; for humans I think it is different, but for vampires it is unhealthy. The exquisiteness of the blood, the savory of it, is enough to hook a vampire more than any fang poison can. The more one takes, the more one wants. An endless cycle. It can drive a vampire mad; I have seen it happen.” Pamelia gazed at Julius in a quiet, dulcet way. “Vampires were never made for love, Julius.”
Julius snorted derisively. “Of course I know that. Do you think I flaunt myself as a scientist for mere show? It is unhealthy; highly un-recommended.”
But he could feel his thoughts drifting off into dangerous quarters, tickling ideas which were too outrageous to even consider. He shut off his mind quickly. “Thank you, Pam; it has been most instructive talking to you.”
Pamelia looked doubtful, but then shrugged, as if unconcerned. “Be careful, Julius. Never assume that you can predict humans, especially a human out of the King’s court.” Her eyes narrowed suddenly, as if recalling a foul memory. “He is the only one who can truly control them…He…He is a true monster.”
Julius deliberated on this morsel of heresy for a moment, filing it into the back of his sizeable brain, and then turned and walked to the door. He turned around, then, feeling it his duty to dispense some sort of warning to his long-time friend.
“Be careful, Pam. I love your free form of thinking, but in this day and age, too much of it can get you killed.”
Pamelia’s face was carefully blank. “Thank you, Julius. I much appreciate the warning.”
Nodding carefully, not sure his friend had really taken his words to heart, Julius turned to walk out the hallway back to his lab. But not before Pamelia’s madly laughing voice reached him like some sort of haunting specter.
“And you, too, Julius! Make sure that your ‘studies’ don’t lead you down the wrong paths, hm?”
Pamelia’s cackling laughter followed him all the way down the cold, stone corridors.

Lilith had slept – a lot. In fact, when she tried to rise out of her plushy comfortable bed – a feat which was difficult in itself – she was pressed down firmly by Tontimes and made to sleep for another three hours. At least, she reckoned it was three hours – there were no clocks – by the timely growl of her stomach. Now reluctant to roll out of her fluffy downs into the stone cold room outside, Lilith had laid in her bed lazily, collecting her thoughts, and was threatened to drift off to sleep again except Tontimes – that faithful buzzard – had practically rolled her onto the floor and forced her to eat an outrageously healthy breakfast of slightly wilted vegetables, a portion of well-cooked meat, and a kind of lime green juice which taste exactly as it looked; like lime (the stone kind). After this, without even a word out of her mouth, Tontimes had whisked Lilith into a warm, sudsy bath of scented grapefruit – good for the murky mind, she remarked absently when Lilith asked – and then brushed for about ten minutes through Lilith’s long red-gold hair, ordering some of the meek-mouthed servants to fetch some outfit or another, to gloss her nails, to remove some obscure hair on her body with something that looked like a pinpoint pen. Obviously, this didn’t afford for much conversation. As of the moment, Lilith had finally managed to pin Tontimes down and tell her of her predicament. The conversation had gone something of the following:
“Tontimes! Stop! Don’t leave! I have something to tell you.”
Tontimes had turned around slowly. “What is it?”
There had been no way to say it but to lay it out frankly. “Listen, Tontimes; I have amnesia and I can’t remember a thing since yesterday. I don’t know who I am, where I am, and heaven’s help me, what I am. I have no idea what’s happening around me. I only know that vampires’ having a dictatorship over earth is something that is very, very wrong. Vampires themselves are wrong enough. And honestly, I’m very confused, very ignorant, and very scared. So I would like to know what’s going on.”
Tontimes had seemed bewildered by the sudden run of words out of Lilith’s mouth. Lilith wasn’t surprised. By all she had heard out of the mouths of the humans in this place, one had to assume that nobody spoke much. Julius had shown incredulity at Lilith’s ability to form coherent sentences. This bespoke a concrete lack of education in humans, something which Lilith frankly found frightening. But Tontimes seemed different. Tontimes was, if not educated, smart.
“You do not remember anything?” she confirmed in a carefully calculated level voice. Her eyes were as blank as a dead fish’s, except, in some ways, prettier.
“Nothing,” Lilith agreed, nodding her head emphatically. She was perched on the edge of the settee, ordered to stay perfectly still as her nails dried a pale opal color, edges rounded to perfection. Tontimes had been reaching for the door, but now came to a stand beside Lilith, thoughtfully ringing her hands. Except, Tontimes didn’t look thoughtful. Lilith just assumed that she was thinking because her eyes became a lot blanker.
“You know what the blood-masters are, though?”
Lilith decided that something had to be done about all this extravagant naming. It took away from the simplicity of matters. “They’re vampires, aren’t they? They drink blood. Sometimes turn into bats?”
Tontimes looked horrified. Her short, stubbily filed nails dug into her palms so hard that her hands started shaking. “We do not call them vampires! That is what the pre-humans called them. And they do not turn into bats. How did such an idea enter your head?”
Lilith shrugged apologetically, wanting Tontimes to continue talking. The other woman paused for a long while, face stonily still, as if carved out of granite. She slowly came to sit beside Lilith, knees together and ankles to the side, hands perched limply in her lap. And then she spoke.
“Not much is known about history to humans. Even if I told you, you could do nothing about it. We humans do not need to know history. We just need to know who were are and how we should act to some extent. Knowledge is the privilege of the blood-masters.”
She talked as if reading meaningless words off a textbook that she didn’t believe were true. Tontimes was smart, yes, but there were smarter than Tontimes. And those smarter people would know without a doubt that Tontimes was the rebellious soul that she was. She may be able to fool doe-eyed human slaves and boyishly youthful vampires, but Julius? Julius was all sorts of blind and ignorant in the sort of ways that mattered, but he would know who Tontimes really was. And Lilith had the cold feeling that that would get the other woman killed one day.
“I don’t claim to know you, Tontimes,” said Lilith softly, hesitantly reaching out to close the unfathomable distance between the two. Tontimes stiffened and Lilith immediately leaned back. “But you are smart; I can see it in your eyes. You know about our history, at least more so than others, and I need you to tell me about it. I need to know what has happened to the world.”
Tontimes looked even more horrified than when Lilith had called the ‘blood-masters’ vampires. She looked positively petrified, like a statue frozen in fright. What instilled such fear inside the woman, Lilith didn’t know, but she assumed that it was the knowledge that Tontimes looked smart. Perhaps the other woman knew that being smart, in this day and age, was something unforgivable. Lilith did not envy Tontimes growing up.
Tontimes glanced up at Lilith, looking solemn, as if writing her own obituary. “You seem smart, too, Lilith. I do not know why, but I advise you not to act so in front of the blood-masters. Nor even the human slaves, especially the personal properties. They often share an unhealthy bond with their masters and will inform them of anything heretic they see going on in the slaves’ quarters. And I…” Tontimes gulped unsteadily, the first sign of concrete emotion Lilith had seen from the other woman. “If I am overheard telling you what you want to know…the punishments…”
“I will handle the consequences,” said Lilith with as much authority as she could muster, wriggling on the settee so she could get closer to the other woman. “Do you know the vampire – don’t look like that; fine, blood-master – Julius? You do, don’t you? I am his, well, food. And I think that I have some influence over him; I hope I do. I think that I’ll be able to protect you. Please, Tontimes – I need to know.”
Tontimes sighed shakily. “Master Julius…he is very powerful. And also very soft towards humans; softer than most. I will tell you, but first you must promise not to repeat anything of this to anyone. Also promise not to speak in front of your master without being spoken to. Speak simply and shortly; you will get into trouble if you appear educated.”
Lilith sighed. “That’ll be inordinately hard. I’ve just realized recently that I’m rather talkative. Alright, Tontimes – I swear. Cross my heart.”
Tontimes looked confused at Lilith’s choice of words, but then shook her head and set her face. “Very good. I will tell you what I know – it isn’t much. Please do not ask me where I got such information, for I will be forced to betray someone I care for deeply.” The struggle in Tontimes’ face was palpable. “Humans used to rule the earth what of fifty years ago. It’s impossible to imagine…but the blood-masters lived in secrecy. No human knew of them except in legend. These humans are what we know now as the pre-humans. At one point in time, though, the blood-masters deemed it necessary to conquer the earth.
“As you can imagine, as we humans are weak and slow, we were easily conquered. Records are not clear, but the blood-masters ruled for about fifteen years. After fifteen years, the humans rose in a rebellion and recaptured most of the earth. Eventually, most of the humans lived in one large city, though I do not know where exactly. The humans refer to that time as the Golden Age; the blood-masters did not attack them and, though life was simple, the humans were happy.
“But after five years the blood-masters struck and completely decimated any rebellion. Humans were made into food slaves and the world was filled with the blood-masters’ cities. And the same situation has been continuing for, I think, about thirty years.”
For some reason Lilith felt like the air had been struck out of her lungs. She found it hard to breathe; she closed her eyes quickly and inhaled deeply through her mouth. Bile rose in her stomach and an uncomfortable knot formed in the back of her throat. She didn’t know why she was affected so much, but some part of her dormant memory protested against this situation – this laughably ludicrous situation. Some part of her screamed that this was impossible, absurd, unimaginable, foolish, some sort of sick joke or a horrible nightmare. Vampire dominion – it was so horrible that she felt like bursting into hysteric tears, curling up into her bed for days on end and just lying there till this melancholy, hopeless feeling vanished. But that was impossible. This feeling would never pass. This was reality. Oh, and what a horrible reality it was. Lilith almost regretted asking Tontimes about it.
“Lilith?” Briskly, Tontimes shook Lilith’s shoulder, and then pressed her forehead against Lilith’s clammy one. “You don’t have a fever, but obviously you’re overwrought. It happens sometimes. I’ve heard from the floor-master that a blood-master is coming to inspect you at some time. You must be well by then. Come rest.”
Lilith allowed herself to be led to the massive, canopied bed and tucked underneath the warm feather blankets, dress removed and changed into a set of loose sleeping clothes. But before Tontimes could leave, she grabbed the other woman’s bony wrist, gripping as tightly as she could. Tontimes looked down on her cooly, posture as rigid as a bamboo shoot, eyes unfeeling.
“Tontimes? Tell me more.”
The look in Tontimes’ eyes made this seem like a very bad idea. “No, Lilith. You must rest. I’ve upset you. You need know no more than what I’ve just told you. Knowledge is dangerous in this world, at least for humans. Believe me; you will be better off not knowing.”
Lilith struggled with this bit of knowledge. She wanted to go to sleep, sleep away this horrible, strangling feeling, but she had an urge to know more. “Tell me about yourself then, Tontimes. Tell me what it was like growing up in this world.” Tontimes’ arm tensed, and Lilith knew that the answer would be refusal. She became desperate.
“Please, Tontimes!” she looked up with as much of a pleading, helpless look as she could into Tontimes’ void-like eyes, trying to imagine some shred of caring in that hard, lined, bony face. She tried to imagine what those cheeks would have looked like with smooth, healthy flesh covering those painfully jarring contours, what those milky eyes would have looked like without bluish bags and sunken sockets and with some spark of happiness hidden underneath. The mere thought of it was so discouraging that Lilith almost burst into tears. It was more horrible because she could imagine perfectly what Tontimes would have been like – she’d have been gorgeous.
There must have been some shreds of humanity left in Tontimes; maybe the look in Lilith’s eyes had just been too pitiful. Because after a split second of hesitation – Tontimes didn’t seem the kind to hesitate for very long over any kind of decision – Tontimes lowered herself to sit in a wicker chair beside the head of the bed, firmly untangling Lilith’s fingers from her arm.
“Alright. But close your eyes. My life is very boring. You will most likely fall asleep.”
“That’s the idea, isn’t it?” Lilith muttered, tucking her hands underneath her pillow and laying on her side, eyes closed and buried into her soft white pillow. That comment from Tontimes – to close her eyes – had been strangely familiar, strangely warm and fuzzy; the golden glow of it was so comforting that the tears she had been holding back came flowing out like dammed rivers. But she didn’t let Tontimes see that. One sign of weakness and Lilith was sure that the other woman would force her to go to sleep, if she had to spoon feed the sleeping medicine down her throat and hold Lilith’s nose herself.
Tontimes started speaking immediately in a new tone; lulling and quiet so that Lilith had to struggle to hear, though not too much. No doubt Tontimes was trying to make Lilith sleepy. Well, she couldn’t say that it wasn’t working.
“I am twenty-seven. I was born shortly after the end of the Golden Age. The blood-masters killed the first generation, anyone over the age of fifteen. I never knew my birth mother – I assume that she was killed after giving birth to as many children as she could. Anyone who had anything to do with the Golden Age was required to be killed. I do not think anyone with any memory of the Golden Age exists anymore. My nurse maid was a girl named Celeste. She was no older than ten. She could not speak or write except for simple commands, and the same was the situation for many of the second generation. Many of us have strange names, some have none; some were named by their masters, some were named after sounds. The only of us who are literate are those who were made into vampire food or personal servants and were ordered to be taught.
“I grew up in a rookery of thirty children. We were all under the care of Celeste. She tried to teach us; she had a small picture book and we all tried to read it. A few of us were smart enough, as we grew older, to decipher some sort of alphabet from the little we had. We read that book over and over again. I have it memorized even now.
“When I was ten, I became a nurse maid for another group of children; only five of them. I taught them the letters and words I knew. I named them Sarah, Mike, Jake, Sally, and Hee from the book.”
There was a long silence from Tontimes. Lilith, half asleep and still crying, held her breath and kept very still. When Tontimes continued, Lilith gathered that she had skipped quite a bit of time.
“I was chosen to become a caretaker. I was trained for five years. I’ve taken care of about twenty slaves ever since. None of them last; many die in this climate. I am one of the few from the second generation who has become accustomed to this weather. The damp and cold kills many. I try to keep them alive, but many are weak, especially the imported ones.” A longer silence from Tontimes. “Are you asleep?”
Lilith didn’t answer. She made my breath long and even, even then struggling not to drift off into sleep. She had a feeling that if she did, she would miss something very important. Indeed, after a few prolonged seconds, Tontimes stood with a hardly palpable rustle of linen and reached over to press her fingertips against Lilith’s tear-stained cheek. Her skin was chapped and dry, rough and scratchy, like the bristles of a beard. But she was soft; incredibly soft.
“You are weak, too. But you must live. One day, you may be important. I will not lose another like you.”
And then, without a sound, Tontimes disappeared from Lilith’s side, as quiet as an exiled spirit. Lilith felt herself drifting off into sleep as the other woman left, nestling deeper into her pillow, sighing softly and feeling her body become light and blurry. She felt, for some reason, much better. She would have felt even better if she hadn’t dreamed during the night (or what she thought was night).
It is hard to recount a dream. But Lilith’s dream was so frightening for the fact that she remembered it with brilliant vividness.
A brilliant shower of white and pale pink revealed a massive green lawn, showered with sun and bending poplars centering on a glistening white fountain of a thousand doves in flight and flowers potted in a circle around it to portray the image of an opening lily. There were hundreds of people – humans – milling around, laughing and screaming as they made their way around dozens of tables laden with heavy foods and spirited drinks. A five-story cake of cream and peach sat on the center-most table, two sugary figurines perched on the top holding a bouquet of flowers overhead. Lilith realized, with a small shock, that this was a wedding. Looking down, she saw the tips of her toes shoed in satin pink slippers, handfuls of ruffled cream dress flowing into sight in the slight wind.
Something was wrong with the sun, over-bloated and hanging red in horizon; Lilith’s vision was wrong as well, dizzying and irritating as she watched the world as if through the end of a telescope. The thumping pulse in her head and the screaming sounds of people around her blended into one, horrifying buzzing sound, invading her mind and very soul till she realized that the buzzing was actual buzzing – the yard was being invaded by thousands of massive bumblebees the size of small poodles, emerging from the poplars and potted flowers. The wedding guests didn’t even twitch a vein; indeed, no one even seemed to notice. When Lilith realized it, they were all gone, leaving an empty lawn with littered paper plates and whipped cream. It was evening.
Terrified, Lilith ran as the bees pursued, rattling the handles of the massive double doors of the towering mansion that had suddenly appeared. The bees were closing in, humming around her head and brushing their massive, hairy bodies along her bare arms.
They were all shouting in unison something in a distantly human voice. As Lilith screamed, the voices came into clarity.
“You’ve been chosen!” calmly stated a thousand bees in the voice of a cool, professional woman; clear and pleasant. “You’ve been chosen! You’ve been chosen! You’ve been chosen!”
For some inconceivable reason, those words frightened Lilith more than any number of bees could have. Yelling out in frustration, Lilith threw herself against the doors and stumbled into a massive theatre. She blinked in confusion at the blaring light, blinding her of the thousands of seats filled with old men with white hair and red sunglasses. Slowly, Lilith turned around and saw that the whole stage she was standing on was painted clinical white; the bright lights around her came from surgical positions, pointing to an elevated white bed a little to the right in the stage with a silver platter of knives and chill-inducing implements next to it, held up by a kneeling man in a doctor’s lab coat, face completely covered with a surgical mask and cap.
A dozen people filled the stage, all identical in their spotless white lab coats and aprons, masks and plastic caps. A man stepped forward from the crowd and Lilith saw bushy white hair peeking out from under his cap, eyes filled in with red sunglasses. He held his hands up in plastic white gloves, as if afraid to dirty them.
“You’ve been chosen!” he said in that woman’s clean, clear voice, and then took another step forward. “You’ve been chosen! You’ve been chosen!”
“No,” said Lilith firmly, sounding much calmer than she felt. Crouching down, she jumped and launched herself towards the roof, helped along the way by a pair of giant bumblebee wings which had sprouted from her back. Triumph flooded through Lilith’s body, sending a thrill of excitement and adrenaline through her body; she felt as light as a feather. Reaching the rafters, she looked down and observed the scene below.
There was no sound; the man with white hair and red sunglasses had taken center-stage, gesturing wildly and yelling something which echoed in Lilith’s ears, though she couldn’t hear direct words exactly. The rest of the white-clad doctors had gathered around the lighted bed; a linen-wrapped body had been laid on top of it, the face covered with a red cloth. Curious, Lilith floated down on her bumblebee wings, coming closer and closer to the body on the bed with some mounting dread building in her stomach, though at the time she could only feel euphoria and numb delight. Actual alarm bells start ringing through the theatre, red sirens casting ghastly shadows across the clean white surface of the stage. And then one of the doctors removed the red cloth.
Lilith stared into the face of herself, except it wasn’t herself; it was frozen blue, covered in ice and frost, lips and eyelids dyed blood-red purple and snowflakes perched on her eyelashes. Her red-gold hair was frozen in a matt of ice and snow and her nose was as beet red as Father Christmas. And then the frozen self opened her eyes.
“You’ve been chosen,” said the frozen being in Lilith’s own voice, serene blue eyes steady and unseeing.
And for the rest of the night, Lilith was pitched into horrifying dreams of buzzing bees, frozen mummies chasing after her in Indian weddings, and a flight attendant’s voice saying over and over again, ‘You’ve been chosen! You’ve been chosen! You’ve been chosen!’ while the plane plummeted to the ground.

Julius was hungry.
It’s not like he could help it. Sitting in his office, surrounded by exactly fifty-three things to do – according to his schedule – his stomach was growling like an over-stretched samba drum and he felt as woozy-headed as Bamean during the Fifth-week holiday. There was no helping it. He’d have to call for Lilith.
Julius was not one inclined to be overcome with stray emotions such as awkwardness and feeling uncomfortable. Neither was he impractical and ruled by every premature mood-swing. But as he sat behind his desk, half dead from starvation and head splitting like a rotten cactus, he recalled everything that had happened in the past few days. And as he did, he let out a long, haggard sigh along with another growl of his stomach.
It had been three days since he had last seen Lilith. Two days since he had gone to see Pamelia. That would be three days without even a morsel of blood – not even a quick noonday snack! – and that was neither healthy nor safe. A vampire needed a regular intake of blood, preferably every other day with small bites sandwiched in between to satiate irritable twinges. A hungry vampire, after all, was an unhappy one – and an unhappy vampire was a hazard to the whole community. In all Julius’ studies of the human nature, he had also delved quite deeply into the vampire psyche, and if he had come to any conclusion, it was this – the two races were on such completely different levels of mental understanding that even trying to make a comparison was a righteous pain in the ass. Julius felt that separate dictionaries were needed to describe the same words pertaining to each species. In this case, unhappy – for a human – would be classified much on the same level as a fit of mewling or a case of severe melodrama. From a vampire’s point of view, unhappy was akin to murder, destruction, and bloodfeast riots razing through the city. Normal, for a vampire, was a state of barely-contained hostility. And so, in conclusion, an unhappy vampire was a very, very bad idea.
And yet, whenever Julius thought of ringing the food quarters for Lilith to come down, a strange pit of dread started forming his stomach, twisting and grinding and engorging till he felt like he had just swallowed a heapful of jagged gravel (this could partly be because of his extreme hunger). After much pondering – during which he had gotten no work done, sacrilegiously – Julius had separated the root of the problem into two categories.
One; whenever Julius imagined drinking blood from Lilith, he remembered the exquisite taste, the feel of satiation, but above all that, he remembered the considerable pain she had been in during so. This irked him. He did not enjoy inflicting pain, nor did it excite him; on the other hand, it rather made him feel disgusted at himself, much to his mortification. Julius had always been a strange vampire; not part of any clan, no home, no competitive friends as a child that he could bare teeth with – the only vampires he thought he had ever come close to considering as ‘friends’ or ‘family’ was Valerius and Pamelia, and those two were, discouragingly, hardly more normal than himself. Not for the first time, Julius wondered if there were ways that vampires could feed on humans without causing discomfort. It would certainly be a considerable leap in the science of blood, as well as far more practical, considering the unwanted side effects which could be observed in the slaves afterwards.
And then there was two – much as Julius hated to admit it – which was his conversation with Pamelia two days ago. Even as he recalled it now it caused him to shift uncomfortably in his seat, remembering the outrageously heretic topics that they had discussed. Julius almost half-turned around in his seat, as if there could be some snooping vampire nearby who would read the thoughts printed plainly on his face and report him to the sentries. Julius let out another worn sigh and slumped back into his chair, covering his face with his hand, taking respite in the brief darkness he was allowed under the hood of his palm. There was no rule or law that said that a vampire was not allowed to fall in love with a human; there were no rules or laws in this world, anyway, only mandates issued by the King. But there were things in this world that you knew without actually having to voice into words, and this issue had been voiced aplenty. In the first place, having a relationship with a human was…disgusting. Wrong. Distorted, mutated. It was accepted fact that humans were a species of lower rank and brain capacity, and even though they had been ruling the earth for a few millennia in the past, they had even managed to muck that up. And even if there had been some spark of hope for humans in the past, there was none of that left now – humans were dumb, slow, dependent, and cowardly, little better than cattle. But Julius, having studied the subject for quite a while, knew that there was more to the disdain of humans than obvious reasons. The fact of the matter was, with no fancy words or diplomatic dodging, was that vampires hated humans. And sometime in the past, it was probably imaginable that humans hated vampires, too. Perhaps that was the fate of two species inhabiting the same cosmic rock. It had certainly happened with humans and animals, separating the two with a chasm that couldn’t be breached. With vampires it was worse – at least with animals, humans had some kind of link to them, being of the mammal kind and holding distinct similarities. A vampire was neither mammal nor reptilian, insect or bird; a vampire was an entirely different, totally unrelated species of ‘thing’, incomparable to humans in every aspect but outward appearance. The thought of them being together in any kind of mutual relationship…it was so impossible, so unimaginable, that it was immediately rejected and hated with intense ferocity throughout the vampire kind. When it comes down to it, thought Julius reproachfully, vampires are just static beings who fear change to the point of abhorrence.
These two topics were so broad that Julius had dallied at least an hour just considering each subject, sometimes pausing to type in a few of his thoughts into his journal, the contents of which he one day hoped to compile into one giant theses which would mark the pinnacle of his career. No doubt if some other stoic vampire read the contents of his journal they would immediately ostracize him, and then come after him intent on murder. With a dark chuckle, Julius recalled that that was the exact situation he was in at the moment. But one day, he hoped, though he knew that it would be long before such a day would come; one day, he hoped that this world would have changed enough for his thoughts to be able to be published without fear for his life. The chances that that would happen in his lifetime was low, considering a vampire’s stubborn longevity. But one day it would happen. It was impossible for one culture, even a vampire’s, to go on so long without just a little bit of change. And that one day, future generations would come to value his ‘dark age’ works. That, at least, was his dream.
But this was getting ridiculous. He was getting so distracted from his present predicament – the starvation part – that he was starting to actually feel himself ebbing on the verges of unconsciousness. There was no more time to hesitate like a maiden in distress (the saying came from old earth). Though Julius would have preferred not to use this as an excuse – this was an emergency.
The food quarter was a short phone call away.
“Fifth Quarter; how may I help you?”
“Yes. I need my slave. This is Julius. My slave’s name is Lilith. Tell her to hurry.”
“Yes, my lord. Forgive me for asking, but may I have a last name for verification?”
“You don’t need one.”
“Of course, my lord. Forgive me. Your food will be arriving shortly.”
Hanging up briskly, Julius leaned back in his chair and tried to make the minutes turn into seconds, to ignore the bristling pain in the gut of his abdomen. He wondered how long it would take. He knew that most high level food quarters, such as the ones in this Coven, often took time to make the food look pleasant before sending it out. They would make them take a bath. Get them dressed up and dolled. Primped and prettied. Scented and salted. And all that would take so unbearably long. For a moment, Julius was tempted to call up the fast line where they had slaves waiting with preference-bred blood, able to be delivered in under five minutes. But something stopped him. With a wry chuckle, Julius wondered if he had acquired an expensive taste.
There was the sound of the elevator clanging in that jarring way it did whenever it hit his floor. Julius wondered if Bamean had come back down for some forgotten material of his – that boy’s practical memory was near useless – and opened his mouth to tell him – politely – to get the hell back upstairs. But when he opened his eyes, it wasn’t Bamean standing there; it was Lilith.
Julius was shocked. And rather bemused. Rather pleased. Very hungry. Lilith was standing on the landing of the second floor, lead by a withered-looking caretaker who was bleached and beaten by time. Those caretakers were the ones who had the explosive implants inserted in their brain; a costly and dangerous operation, but it was worth it as long as vampires themselves had no need to come in full contact with humans. The lengths to which the vampire kind would go to ensure their non-defilement were absurd.
Lilith looked different. Julius had to say that he was rather pleased with the result. The last time he had seen her she had been clad in that daring slave’s outfit; skin bared and unnecessary gold bangles, earrings, and pendants clanging like wind chimes at sea, makeup dark and black and striking, like a tribal savage’s. This time, though, the caretaker seemed to have decided on an entirely different approach, one as light and breezy and angelic as it had been dark and heavy and devilish before. She wore a sleeveless gown the colors of a clear sea, molding tightly to her chest, and then flowing playfully from her upper waist in spiraling swirls and hidden folds like the intricate tentacles of a jellyfish, swaying even without a breeze. Her milky skin was smooth and freckled with a dust of gold-colored spots with little attempt to cover them; her rodent-like face was framed with her natural mane of red-gold curls, held up at the crown of her head in a half-baked attempt to stem the flow of her shimmering locks. There hardly seemed to be any makeup on her, giving off a whispy, wraith-like impression at first glance. But Julius, rather than appreciating all the intricacies that must have gone into her beauty, didn’t look at all this – his eyes went straight from her face right down to her neck. He saw the barely palpable twin marks where his fangs had sunk in before. Good mother of earth, he was famished!
All thoughts of whatever sort of misgivings he had had about Lilith as food flew out of the window with remarkable speed. Jumping up and knocking over a neat row of pencils – decorative, of course – Julius flew up the stairs and ramp and then grabbed onto Lilith’s upper arm. He heard her give a small gasp of shock but he hardly noticed.
“I’ll be taking it from here,” he muttered politely to no one in particular, and then dragged her back down the stairs. She was protesting, he realized, in a fumbling, colt-like way. He tried to listen to what she was saying.
“…not really…have to…oh, damn it, will you stop dragging me! I don’t really…ouch! You don’t have to…Tontimes! Tontimes!”
Julius wondered who the bloody hell Tontimes was. Oh, well, he didn’t care. Rather, he was getting increasingly annoyed at this girls’ incessant chatter. He hadn’t really realized how good some other vampires had it – what with their dumb as sheep slaves – until he had met Lilith.
“Oh, stop fussing,” he snapped, feeling increasingly unhappy. Dragging Lilith across the floor, he unceremoniously dumped her in his chair and bent in to take a bite of blood.
He was interrupted by a pair of very small hands.
Julius stared at them incredulously, noting the pale shade of coral-pink nail polish. Then he looked up and, for the first time today, really looked into Lilith’s eyes. He realized, with a small shock, that her pretty blue eyes were on the verge of tears.
“Excuse me?” he asked with barely contained impatience, grabbing one of her hands and easily pulling it away. Childishly, she raise her other. And so Julius grabbed that one. But then she ducked her head and managed to weave herself under his arm. And then, when Julius let go, she yet again pressed her hands to her throat, as if intent on choking herself. And so Julius grabbed one hand. And then the other. And then she dodged him, maneuvering herself into such a ridiculous position that helpless laughter burst from Julius’ nostrils. He realized, in some murkily vampiric part of his nature, that this was not typical slave behavior.
“Stop it!” he commanded, holding back flabbergasted laughter as she again clasped her hands to her throat. Realizing that he’d have to try a different approach, Julius grabbed both of her chicken-skinny wrists and pulled them above her head. He grabbed one of her thighs with his other hand and made sure that she didn’t wriggle out of his gasp again. And then, with the intent of aiming for her jugular he glanced up at her face. Now, if Lilith had been crying her eyes out and pleading on her mother’s grave for him to spare her, Julius would have taken her blood without a second thought. But this reaction of hers stumped him. She was laughing.
This was contradictory to everything that Julius had ever studied about the human race. Humans, when forced to do something they didn’t wish to by an unstoppable force, would nine out of ten times react with fear and tears (the other one time Julius had half a mind to discard since he wasn’t sure that subject had been right in the head). Humans did sometimes have a tendency to laugh when they were afraid, true, but that was more of a scattering, hysterical sort of laughter which quickly melted into laughing sobs. By the wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, the dimples in the cheeks, the whole-wheat smile and unconscious baring of the throat as she threw back her head in delectation, Lilith was, by all signs, laughing out of sheer amusement.
This had to be wrong.
“Stop laughing!” grumbled Julius even as he had to bite back infectious spurts of giggles, a phenomenon which he had never had a chance to experience before; people were much too daunted to ever try laughing in front of him, even as a child (Pamelia was an obvious exception, for she not only laughed with him, but most of the time at him). But Lilith didn’t stop laughing. If anything, she seemed to be overcome with another rigorous bout of giggles and had to gasp for breath, tears – the good kind, curse her – brimming in her eyes.
Unfortunately, Julius was much too conservative and morally conscious to take the blood of a human – even a slave – while she was shrieking her head off in delight. More so, he felt that it would just be wrong, like stealing candy from a baby. Stumped, starved, and feeling on the verge of hysteria himself what with the combination of irritated, jumpy nerves and contagious giggles, Julius could only crouch over her awkwardly, pent-up laughter and anger threatening to break the boundaries of his precarious sanity.
“Stop!” he finally yelled, desperate enough to sound pleading. “Stop! Please, stop!”
It took a while, like trying to stop a speeder without brakes. Slowly, in minimums, Lilith began to stop laughing, hiccupping and sniffing loudly as she seemed to realize the gravity of the situation. If Julius tried to speak to her, she’d fall into another fit of giggles. If he even moved, she seemed to leap into hysteria. So Julius had no choice but to wait patiently as the laughter subsided, feeling his vision go hazy and red with the need for food. He didn’t even have any strength to see that this situation was through-and-through ridiculous.
“I’m sorry,” Lilith muttered at a length, her crooked smile slowly fading as she stared up into his eyes. Really, how could she? Humans were supposed to be disconcerted by eye contact with vampires. “You know…I guess it was just a bit ridiculous.”
“You steal the words out of my mouth,” grunted Julius precariously, bending his head as his empty stomach gave a sudden sharp pang. Lilith noticed.
“What’s wrong?”
It was infuriating, having to look into those innocent sapphiric eyes which held such subconscious devilry. What was wrong? Bah! She was wrong! Every single delicious part of her was wrong! Cuisine wasn’t supposed to talk; cuisine was cuisine, as food was food, as blood was blood, as humans were humans. Vampires were vampires. The differences were striking. And yet, this one human – this one tiny human – seemed to be the only anomaly in a carefully constructed world of uniform pieces, the one small shred of proof that disrupted all Julius’ previous calculations. The world would be a perfectly symmetrical place if only she weren’t in it. And yet, there she was – alive and laughing. How infuriating.
“I’m hungry,” Julius explained with saintly patience. He noticed Lilith’s expression of mingled surprise and dread and snorted, wondering distantly why he wasn’t drinking her blood already, now that she had stopped her infernal laughing. “Don’t look at me like that. Why do you think I went through all that trouble of buying you? You cost quite a lot, you realize. How many of my experiments do you think I could have funded with the amount you were at? And honestly, the day that food doesn’t act like food, I’ll say…!”
“Julius.” Lilith looked up at him quite innocently, a slight grin on her lips. “You’re talking to your food again.”
That took Julius aback. He stared at Lilith, wide-eyed. She seemed confused at his amazement. What kind of vampire, he wondered – even the King – would dare make such a creature as this? Such an intelligent, such a tempting, such a warm-blooded mammal like Lilith? Even for such an exquisite taste, wasn’t this too dangerous? Who was Lilith?
No matter – at this point, he was first and foremost famished.
“My arms hurt,” commented Lilith suddenly, turning her head to examine her pinned wrists. “And you’re heavy. And…” A long pause, followed by a bashful bat of the eyelashes. “I’d like it very much if you didn’t drink my blood.”
She seemed stupid.
“I haven’t eaten for three days,” snarled Julius, trying with vehemence to keep his temper under control. “I bought you for the purpose of food. You – the food – and I – the hungry – are in the same room. Logic states that I must drink your blood.”
Lilith looked stunned by this bit of news. “Well…I-I’m very sorry that you’re hungry, Julius, but don’t they have, like, canned blood or ‘blood-in-a-babe’ or something around these parts?”
Julius gagged. He couldn’t help himself. The thought of blood, cold and frozen and derived of all its nutrients and tastes, was so revolting that the idea had never even crossed his mind. “Are you an idiot? What use is blood to vampires if we can’t have it fresh? Once outside the body, it is little more than plasma and blood cells.”
Lilith struggled with this bit of knowledge. “What difference does it make?”
Julius sighed. He did not want to have a conversation with Lilith about the delicacies of vampire digestion, but it seemed as if she wasn’t keen to let the topic drop. He remembered what Pamelia had said before, about making her slaves feel ‘loved’. Well, Pamelia didn’t have slaves who were amnesic and could form complete sentences and also had a very shrewd sense of humor. Still, he decided to indulge her.
“I’ll be as simple as possible,” said Julius with mock slowness, carefully pulling her hands back down now that there was no sign of her wriggling away. “Blood is the life of humans. Without blood, humans cannot live. Oh, they used to say that it was the brain or heart or nervous system or whatnot, but blood is the main source of energy for the human kind. Now, Lilith, listen carefully, because heavens help me I’m only going to say this once – vampires do not feed on blood, they feed on the life energy in blood. Once outside of the body, blood has no life energy. Thus, just a collection of plasma and clot. Savvy?”
Lilith gnawed on that piece of knowledge for a bit. Just when Julius was about to bend down and take a snap from that freckled neck of hers, she just had to pose another question.
“So you are mythical beings, then?”
“Depends on what you classify as mythical,” muttered Julius, once again dodging under her chin to reach her throat.
“And…so can you turn humans into vampires?”
Julius sighed again, this time more loudly, and then looked up into Lilith’s anxious face. She was stalling, he realized; and afraid. There was no way a vampire could ever experience the blood-taking experience, being it impossible as it was, but he imagined that it couldn’t be pleasant. According to the halting explanation he had gotten from his subjects, more than painful, it was decidedly nauseating and disgusting; uncomfortable. If it had been pain, Julius thought, this would have been easy. But nausea – repulsion – was a trickier matter. If Julius hadn’t been a scientist he wouldn’t have minded, but after his conversation with Pamelia, he was curious – how good could Lilith’s blood get before he crossed that irreverent line?
“You ask a lot of questions.”
Lilith smiled tentatively. “It’s only fair; I don’t have a lot in my head.”
“You have too much in your head,” muttered Julius, and Lilith giggled nervously. Julius sighed. He loosened his grip on her wrist.
“Mortal beings can’t create life, much as we’ve tried in the past few decades. As a book said once, ‘each after its kind’.” Julius looked up into her flighty eyes. “And you’re stalling.”
“I’m nervous,” said Lilith flatly. “Why are you talking to me?”
“Imagine trying to calm down a spooked animal,” muttered Julius under his breath, and then sighed and stood up. Lilith blinked in surprise.
“What?”
Julius crossed his arms and stared at Lilith fitfully. “Are you going to let me drink your blood?”
Lilith gulped palpably. “You’re asking, now?”
“Think of it as a controlled experiment.”
“Right.” Lilith licked her lips and looked up through her lashes. “Do I have a choice?”
Julius considered this question. “Yes, I suppose you do. Does that make a difference?”
“Quite.”
“Interesting,” muttered Julius, itching to reach over to type that morsel of information into his journal. But now wasn’t really the time. It was the crucial part of the experiment.
With cruel acuteness, a sharp pang of hunger shot through Julius’ stomach and, unwillingly, his face twisted up into a scowl of pain. He was tempted – very much so – to just grab that damn human and drink her blood. But he was a scientist – cool and logical. He could control a bit of hunger pains.
Suddenly, Lilith leaned forward and stared him square in the face. “Are you alright? Does it really hurt that much?”
“Of course,” muttered Julius, feeling surprisingly vulnerable as she stared up naively with concern. Of course, that concern couldn’t be real, could it? Why would she be concerned about someone like him, considering what he had put her through? “I don’t suppose you’ve ever tried spending three days without eating.”
“Why didn’t you just eat, then?”
“I was absorbed in my work.”
“Then this is just your fault, isn’t it?”
“Lilith!” Julius closed his eyes and prayed for whatever entity’s patience could be spared. “Just make your damn decision!”
Julius felt cold hands suddenly pressed against the nape of his neck, and as his eyes flew open, found a bare expanse of neck near his mouth. Oh – that had been easier than he had expected. But something was wrong…something didn’t sit right.
As Julius opened his mouth and dug his fangs into Lilith’s soft flesh, he realized what it was. That brief moment of pain had been a spasm of weakness; and Lilith wasn’t doing this out of voluntary choice. She was doing it out of pity. Pity, because he was in pain. Julius had never observed pity in a human before. It was highly unlikely that they could experience such an intricate emotion being at the bottom of the food chain, clinging to life and fighting day out of day just to stay alive. He had always felt that humans were too frantic to feel pity. But there it was – Lilith was feeling pity. And infuriatingly, while the taste of blood in his mouth was amazingly fresh and beautiful, he couldn’t help but feeling annoyed. If she had allowed him to drink her blood out of pity, then that meant that she had some sort of control over him; or at least it felt like it. What spurred this conviction? Julius didn’t know. But it made him very uncomfortable, possibly even more uncomfortable than Lilith was feeling at the moment.
Lilith’s blood was, if possible, even more delicious than it had been three days ago. It couldn’t be described, just as taste couldn’t be described without reference to some other taste, but Julius was sure that this blood was the best he had ever drunk. Better than Pamelia’s slaves’, he’d go so far as to say. So did this mean that his experiment was going as planned, or that everything he had ever built on was slowly beginning to come unraveled?
Julius didn’t know – but for the moment, he didn’t care.