My Servant Is An Elf-Knight From Another World

Chapter 21

When the car engine roared to life and Irene's foot stepped onto the pedal, I almost expected and wanted her to barge the car right into the empty building Ash just went into.

Took the correct turn, the correct street towards its location, but instead of barging in, Irene made a turn in the opposite direction from it, leaving the abandoned lot simply as a shrinking figure at the backseat of the car.

"Wait, wait!" I shouted, resisting the impulse to turn the car right around myself. "What about Ash? We just saw her there - she's still alive!"

"There was never a doubt in my mind that she was. Matriarch's do not outright kill their victims, they slowly feed on them until nothing is left but a hollow shell."

"All the more reason to then!"

"We have time, relax!" She said, her tone verging on annoyance. "We only came here today because I wanted to confirm the Matriarch's location. I followed her there last night after I was attacked but I lost sight of her before I could find out. I figured one of her puppets might hang about that area, and I figured one of them might be your friend, so I brought you here. Now that we've seen them, now we know and now we can plan."

"And they hang about - Ash was outside, why exactly?"

"It's routine," Irene explained. "Vampires are nocturnal. They need puppets in the day to search out for fresh food in their place. To anybody else they look normal, except for the fact that they have no will of their own and they don't speak, well... only to their subjugators, I suppose."

There was a time not long before this, where I would have been very much doubtful over everything that has happened. Like being explained a vampire's daily life cycle for one, past-me would have shrugged it off and went on with life.

Now I'm taking all of this in like it was the word of God. Now, instead of shrugging it away, I'm about to ask a question about it. Funny how life works sometimes.

"If she's going to frenzy," I said. "Why would it be necessary to send out puppets to look for food? Frenzy would mean she couldn't care less about whose neck she gets to sink her teeth into."

"Correct." she said.

I saw her lips tightened, her forehead lined with creases. The shake of her head, the sharp hiss through clenched teeth. Bad news. Uh-oh.

"Two possibilities then. One - I could be wrong about the timeframe and she's not going to frenzy at all meaning it's business as usual, one victim a night."

"That's the good news," I said, noticing the sun sinking lower down the darkening horizon. "What's the bad?"

Her hand shook as she shifted gears. "Two - The Matriarch that attacked your friend, and the Matriarch that attacked me aren't the same person. Meaning to say..."

"Two. You're saying there's two of them?!"

"The most unlikeliest scenario possible," she said in a quiet voice. "But I know I'm not wrong about the timeframe, I've seen how she looked... and there's no other possible explanation for this, so..."

She trailed away, she didn't have to say anymore. We both already knew what this meant.

"One Matriarch needed an entire army just to bring her down. At least, that's what the game's codex entry claimed," I said, taking in a gulp of air that was also filled with her scent, except I wasn't affected by it, not this time. "Now you're telling me we have two of them running amok in this city, with one about to frenzy."

Irene gave a fleeting glance at my direction before turning her eyes back to the road.

"You're panicking," she said.