Virgin Sacrifice - Van Helsing Fanfiction

11 - A Stare (Like Murder)

There were candles glowing in the rough iron fixtures. They did not bring much light nor comfort to the room, that was in itself chilled and largely made of damaged mortar and chipped stone, but there was something in the habit of striking the iron and the flint to make the fire that Verona found soothing. Reminded her of the many times where she would need to light the fireplace in her parent's home to placate her crying baby sister, who mourned her mother's absence while she was away. She remembered how transfixed her sister's eyes became when the warmth of the flame began to burn: how it painted her pale features with an ember glow and made her smile. Her sister's eyes had the same glazed, absent look as they did when her mother had drawn the pall over her breathless body after the child had been claimed by the pox.

Verona set down the flint sharply, hearing it clutter on the surface and thump against a book.

Now was not the time to remember. It was too human to remember, to grieve over time that had passed many centuries ago. Her parent's hut would be nothing but dishevelled wood, sticking out of the ground like the remnant of some tragic fire. The old barn nothing more than a memory in her mind, where she could return, with trepidation, to remember.

"You are unsettled tonight, sister," Aleera's voice had no such note of human concern but indicated merely boredom, "What has troubled you?"

"Why, the Master, of course," Marishka's voice boomed.

The vampire bride was standing on the edge of a workbench, combing her fingers through her tawny hair. She moved gracefully across the surface, moving her arms in gliding motions and swaying with the tempo of unheard music. It did not concern the youngest bride that she was standing on the unfinished memoirs of a scientific mind now dead and buried, nor that her prancing footsteps spilt ink across the tabletop and stained the textbooks crunched beneath her heels. In the back of her throat, she sang a low, forgotten song.

"And what would you say against our Master, Marishka?" Verona cautioned. "He would not be pleased to hear you were speaking ill of him."

Marishka recoiled.

"I don't speak ill!" Marishka spat. "You know what I'm talking about, Verona – and Aleera, you know it too! Ever since we brought that little human back to the castle, the Master has been acting out-of-sorts."

"He has been acting strangely," Verona admitted softly.

Aleera stood with a sweep of pale silk. There was a sharp, narrowed set to her eyes that Verona found only too familiar: she had seen the vampire bride's eyes become this way as she hunted, becoming cloudy and bloodshot in her thirst for blood. But this time there was no blood around to make her look this way, just the bloody images of her imagination.

"And for what?" Aleera demanded, "That dull creature?" She batted her hand aside dismissively, "Who is she when compared to us? What is she? We are his immortal brides: goddesses of beauty in eternal skin. Roses that will never falter nor wither with age or disease. She's nothing when compared -"

"She's like a bug," Marishka giggled suddenly, a high-pitched sound butchered in her too-thin throat, "She is, isn't she? Like a dragonfly I'd once trapped under my glove: she'll grow blind soon as it did and stumble about helplessly. Her wings will forget how to flutter – what I'd give to rip them off," She said absently, "Those pretty wings."

Verona felt something like a lump in her throat as she turned away from the brides to face the window. The sun was just about to sink below the darkness of the horizon – then she could get away from them. Then she wouldn't have to listen to their petulant remarks and groans. The sunset would be beautiful, Verona was certain, and she tried to remember the colours as they twisted together in that dark and brilliant miasma: blue like throbbing veins, pink like bitten lips, red like injured arteries.