The Reborn (The Reborn trilogy book 1)

Chapter 20

The biased trial

Mr Marks smiles at hearing daddy Crayton tell me off. Continuing with his questions, "Did you ever let any harm come to a human you weren't feeding from?" does this guy have a law degree? I didn't realise that I was on trial for my time as a vampire.

"Yes."

"Did you ever cause physical harm to a human outside of feeding yourself?"

"Yes." I sigh, I can see the picture they are trying to paint and it's not pretty. I'd like to see them handle the situation I was in, bet they wouldn't last two minutes.

"Did you ever harm a human for fun?"

"Not mine." I say fighting off the impatience. We've barely started and I'm letting them get under my skin.

"Please answer yes or no."

"It's not that simple. Did I harm people? Technically yes, it was my hands doing the work. Did I want to harm them? No. The masters compelled me to do it for their pleasure."

"You seemed to spend a lot of time under compulsion, Miss Walker?" council member Venn asks.

I take a steading breath. "I'm stubborn. I refused to become a mindless follower like the others, so I was kept under near constant compulsion. The masters thought it was fun to try and break me but I think I had the last laugh." I say, with a one-shoulder shrug, looking each of the council members in the eye as I talk. Mr Abbott and Ms Phillipson, whisper together and from the looks of the encouraging smiles they've been sending me I think I've won them over. I just need to keep my cool.

"How did you escape my hunters when they took out your masters?" Head council member Crayton blusters in again, clearly unimpressed with my answer to Ms Venn's question. Now here is someone who doesn't know how to keep his cool.

"I escaped from the masters over thirty-years-ago."

Mr Crayton pounces on my words like the cat who got the cream. "You escaped while under constant compulsion? From what I hear, compulsion makes you little more than a puppet carrying out someone else's will. By your own words you've said you were made to do things you didn't want to while under compulsion. Now you're saying you had enough control to escape?"

"I actually said near constant. There were only brief moments where I was left alone, so I made the most of them and escaped." Get your facts straight Crayton, who put him in charge?

Mr Crayton's jaw audibly grinds together.

"So now your free of your masters. Did you still feed from innocent humans?" Mr Marks jumps back in, covering for his boss's bull-headed blunder and steering the narrative back the way they want.

"I can't attest for their innocence but yes I fed from humans." I answer Marks, watching his every step as he paces in what I assume is meant to be a predatory tactic. He keeps focusing on my life as a vampire but hasn't asked one question about my life as a reborn.

"So, if you didn't have your masters compelling you. How do you defend the lives you took after leaving your masters?"

"I didn't kill anyone." I say in shock.

"But you admitted to killing people earlier." Marks says with a gleam in his eye.

"Yes, I did." I say through gritted teeth.

"So, which is it."

"Yes, I killed people while under compulsion, but I didn't kill anyone once I was free of the masters."

"So how did you feed for thirty years if you didn't kill anyone? You can't have done one without the other."

What? "I just took a little blood and let the person go."