The Vampire’s Feeder

More Debts

[Yara]

"Unhand me!"

The guard ignored that completely. He grabbed my arm and pulled me upright and I twisted against his grip the way a person did when they still had some fight left and hadn't yet accepted the futility of the situation.

"Stop squirming," he grumbled without much feeling.

The Madame was already in front of me before I finished processing that I was standing. Up close she was older than she had looked by lamplight—the expensive fabric and the rings doing significant work to suggest a woman in her prime rather than well past it. She took my chin in her hand and turned my face left, then right, deeply scrutinising me.

"Potential," she said, to herself rather than to me. Then she stepped back and looked at the rest of me and some of the satisfaction left her expression. "But skinny."

"I don't belong here," I pulled away.

But she wasn't listening. She reached out and took both my arms and lifted them slightly, flapping them at the elbows the way you test the weight of something you were considering buying. "Far too skinny," she clicked her tongue, shaking her head. "We'll have to fatten you up before you're any use to anyone. And you'll work hard and repay every coin spent on you. That's how this works." She dropped my arms. "What's your name?"

"Yara." I pulled my arms back to my sides, unsure why I was even giving the name out. "And you're not hearing me. I don't belong here. Someone knocked me out on the road and I woke up in this cell! I don't know how I got here, I wasn't brought willingly, and I haven't agreed to anything!”

The man behind me made a sound. Not quite a laugh, more the suppressed beginning of one, the sound of someone deciding whether the situation permitted it. The Madame looked at him and then back at me and let it out herself, a full and genuine laugh that had nothing warm in it, and something lurched in my chest at the sound of it because it was the laugh of someone who had heard this exact speech before, many times, from many girls in many cells, and had stopped finding it relevant a long time ago.

I had started to laugh along with them in that horrible, reflexive way a body did when it hadn't caught up with the situation yet, and then her hand closed around a fistful of my hair and the laugh stopped.

Roughly, I was drawn forward, close enough that I could see the annoyance in her eyes. "I paid for you," she spoke cruelly. "Which means you belong to me now. And if you want to leave, you'll work off your debt first." She paused, letting that settle. "And you wouldn't want to know what happens to the ones who get… hopeful ideas."

She didn't point to the cell across because she didn't need to. The empty cell was still open. The silence where its occupant used to be was instruction enough.

When she shoved me backward, the guard caught me. I felt his hands before I saw him and twisted away on instinct, which sent me down to the floor in an undignified heap. When I looked up he was grinning with the grin of a man missing most of his back teeth and finding the whole thing enormously entertaining.

"Careful with the new product." The Madame's voice had sharpened. She looked at him the way she had looked at me—with nothing but disdain—and then looked back at me on the floor with something that might have been almost maternal if it hadn't been so entirely mercenary. "She's fragile. I already know which client will pay extra just to be the first to taste her."

My heart skipped a beat at that.

She turned to leave, already done with me, moving on to the next item of business with the briskness of a woman who ran a tight operation. "Your meal will be brought in soon," she said, not turning back. "You'll eat every drop, every time. We’ll shove it down your throat if we have to." The door at the end of the corridor was already open. "The food will be added to your debt, of course."

Then she left.

The guard locked me back in, still smiling with his ruined dentures, and then he was gone too and the corridor was quiet and I was sitting on the floor with my knees drawn up and the bars at my back.

For the first time since leaving the castle, I regretted leaving. Not the leaving itself, as I would have left regardless; but the timing of it. If I had stayed just a little longer. If the hairpin hadn't worked on Rey or the door had been locked or the horse had been weaker, then I wouldn't have made it back to Valley Town.

I wouldn't know they were all gone…

And knowing, it turned out, was its own kind of wound. One that didn't close the way some others did.

My eyes burned. I shut them hard and let the tears come because there was no one left to be strong in front of, and I began to hum in a low, soft melody that came when no words were enough. The sad kind. The kind I had only ever sung alone.

My father had died years ago, my mother was gone now and Elias was the only person left in the world who was mine and he was at a war front I couldn't reach, so a stupid letter is sent in desperation.

But I was going to get back to him.

I opened my eyes and looked at the wall across the cell, and whatever had been soft in my face a moment before wasn't there anymore.

I was going to find out who did it and by the time I was done, they were going to wish they had burned a different village.