The Vampire's Rival

When she puts you back together

Once at the Barn gate, I buzzed in then looked up at a camera mounted to one of the pillars that the giant entrance gate was attached to. It was only one of many cameras that surrounded the Barn, which begged the question as to how this girl had been able to get past them all. There was an electric buzz before the large gate slowly slid open.

The girl and I walked across a relatively large driveway as the gate slid shut behind us. The driveway wasn't used that much ever since the Barn had finally become self-sufficient almost a century ago. The humans here now produced most of their food and fuel and everything else in between. The only deliveries here these days were trucks ferrying Wildings to replace a dead, or undesirable, member of the Barn population. Lujeo valued absolute perfection in the humans who made up the population of his Barns. Imperfection was the one thing he was determined to breed out of his humans, but was still struggling to.

At the end of the driveway was a small office that housed the Barn's security hub, where a team of vampires were supposed to be watching the camera feed off all the cameras that surrounded the place. I looked at the girl walking beside me, a glum, resigned look on her pretty face. I grimaced. Someone was going to have to answer for her escape. Both human and vampire.

I did not have time for this!

"Ruqwik!" the vampire in the office was clearly surprised to see me. And even more surprised to see the girl I was dragging beside me. "Who's... oh, what the? How did she...?"

"Exactly what I was wondering Hiltro," I said.

Hiltro was a New Ager. Extremely young too, at thirty years old as a vampire. I looked around. There was no one else in the security office. I turned back to Hiltro, pulling the reluctant human forward with my hand still on her forearm. I had tied up her wrists and that had upset her quite a bit at first. However, she'd gone really quiet in the last few minutes, lost in her thoughts, seemingly absent from reality. I was hoping that being all pensive didn't mean that she was already scheming on how she could make trouble.

"Hiltro, I have lost a huge part of my day working to bring this human back here and I'm curious to know why," I said, reaching into the New Ager's mind and making sure she understood just how upset I was. Hiltro shook under the strain of questioning. I pulled back on the telepathy. I had forgotten how strong I was with several pints of fresh human blood coursing through me. It made me reckless. "Let's just start with this. Do you know who this is?"

Hiltro slowly nodded.

"That's Hadley Fisher," Hiltro said, her voice trembling slightly.

"Exactly!" I replied. I wondered if the New Ager, Hiltro, knew just how big a deal this was. But how could she? She hadn't lived through the horrors of three hundred years ago like I did!

Fisher. It was a name I hadn't thought of for decades. Twenty years ago, I'd brought in the girl's mother, Queen Aadya Fisher, and her sister Zenobia Jamieson. Dark skinned and blue-eyed Aadya had been heavily pregnant, married just a few months prior to Chief Barret Fisher. The bundle in her womb must have been this girl. Hadley. I liked the name. It was strong. It suited her. Hadley. Beautifully rolled off the tongue. Too bad I was going to have to cut out her tongue. Her mother's and her aunt's tongues too. It would break the deal I had made with Aadya all those years ago, when she walked up to my cabin's doorstep seeking asylum, but there was no avoiding it.

I couldn't allow this dissent to go unpunished.

"Thank you, Hiltro," I replied. "Now tell me, what is Hadley doing outside the Barn? And how does no one know she's missing? Where is everyone who's supposed to be manning the office? Do you know just how bad it would have been if anyone else but me found her? Seriously, where is everyone?"