The Vampire’s Feeder

An Example

[Yara]

I swallowed hard, feeling the blade graze my bobbing throat.

“You’re not as skinny as I remember,” he lowered the knife slightly and looked me over, even daring to spank my butt.

The force of it made me jerk and stiffen, jaw clenching tightly in annoyance.

“Come along now,” he lowered the knife to speak and instantly, I took off.

He was faster than he looked.

I had made it about twenty steps away before a rock hit the back of my leg and sent me sprawling. My ankle twisted on the way down, a sharp pain that told me immediately it was the end of my little plan to flee.

I hit the ground hands-first and was still processing that when something connected with the back of my head and the world went sideways and then went away entirely.

***

When it came back, it came back wrong.

Stone floor beneath my cheek, the smell of damp air and dirt in equal measure. My wrists were bound behind me, my ankles tied together, and the darkness around me was not the open dark of a mountainside but the closed dark of a room with walls. Iron bars caught the thin light coming from somewhere to my left. There was a window, high up on the corridor wall, letting in a narrow strip of moonlight that reached approximately nowhere useful.

‘A cell?’

I was in a cell!

The panic arrived before the thinking fully did. I pulled at the rope on my wrists, twisted, found nothing, and then opened my mouth. "Help." My voice came out dry from thirst. I tried again, louder. "Help. Someone! Is anyone out there? Help!"

"Give it a rest." The weary voice came from across the corridor.

I went still, looking straight ahead into the cell opposite. The darkness there was too complete to see into properly, but there was a shape—a seated silhouette which was not moving.

"There’s no point," the voice continued. "No one is coming."

I stared at the shape. Female, from the voice. Young, I thought, though it was difficult to tell from one sentence in the dark.

"I don't know who you are," I said, because it seemed like the thing to establish first, "but I can't just sit here. Where are we?"

"Beneath the brothels of Aldenmoor."

Aldenmoor? That was the nearest town to Valley Town, close enough that people made the journey for market days, far enough that Valley Town pretended not to know what happened there. The slave trade, brothels, and women who came from other villages and didn't go back. Everyone knew, but nobody said it plainly.

Valley Town was at the furthest edge of Belmund and surrounded by rocky Mountains and rocky ground which often led to thin harvests and farming that broke people’s bodies slowly. But there were other ways to earn in a region like that. Either you mended things, sold things, or sold yourself.

Aldenmoor had made an industry of the third option, and the women working there were not, by most accounts, there by choice.

"Is there a way out?" I asked, hearing how stupid the question was even as I said it.

She scoffed. The sound had no humour in it.

"Look closely."

I did. I leaned forward in the dim light and looked at the cell across from me, and then she pushed her arm through the bars and I jerked backward hard enough to hit the far wall behind me.

The arm ended at the knuckles. Somehow, every other finger was removed. The skin over the stumps was somewhat new and healed, which was somehow worse than if it had been old.

"Part of my punishment," she gestured, pulling her arm back into the dark. "For trying to escape."

My mouth had gone dry. "I don't belong here," I said, and heard immediately how useless it was. How many women in cells beneath brothels had said exactly that?

"Get in line."

The metal door at the end of the corridor screeched open before I could find a reply for that. Three people came in: a woman in the middle, older and dressed in the kind of clothes that cost more than most people earned in a month—deep fabric, good trim, a lamp held in one ringed hand. There were two men behind her, broad and blank-faced, the kind of men often hired specifically for their willingness not to think too hard about instructions.

The woman went to the cell opposite first. She gestured at the men without looking at them. "Unlock it. Get that fool out."

“Yes, Madame.”

They did. The door swung open and they brought out the woman who had been speaking to me, and I understood now why her voice had carried that exhaustion. She was barely there. Hollow cheeks, skin stretched over the architecture of her bones with nothing between them, legs that bent wrong, the hand with its missing fingers hanging loose at her side. She looked like someone who had been surviving on the idea of surviving for a very long time and was nearly done with the project.

The woman with the lamp looked at her with the expression of someone examining a disappointing purchase. "Are you ready?" she asked pleasantly. "To tell me what happened to the other girl? The one who made it out?"

The prisoner looked at her. Something moved across her ruined face that might, in a different life, have been a smile. She said nothing.

The Madame slapped her. A single motion, no buildup but the way someone swatted a fly.

"Take her out," she instructed the nearer guard. "Make her into an example, then dump her body where the others get to see. So no one gets any further ideas."

He took her. The door at the end of the corridor closed behind them and I sat in the silence they left and tried to make myself small and invisible and entirely unworthy of attention.

A cough escaped me. One, then another, my chest doing its familiar betrayal at the worst possible moment.

The Madame turned and the lamp came up. Her eyes moved over me slowly, from the top of my head to my bound ankles, with the assessing quality of someone calculating a price.

"This must be the new one," she mumbled to herself, staring longer than necessary. Her expression shifted into something that was not quite disappointment and not quite interest but lived in the uncomfortable space between them.

"This won't do."