The Vampire's Rival

A bloodthirsty blast from the past

I woke up strapped to a modified gurney, unable to move, but fully aware. I noticed my throat first. There was something wrong with it. I could feel the open flaps of throat skin and I couldn't make a sound. My vocal cords were gone. Given enough time and blood I could grow new ones, but whoever had done this had stuffed my throat with something that was impeding my healing ability. My head was harshly strapped to the gurney, but I found that I could shift it ever so slightly.

To my left was a table. An operating table, but not one for humans. Immaculately clean, it belonged to a veterinarian's clinic, from before the Human Error. I only knew what it was because I had visited quite a few at several low points of my life when blood lust became desperate and the hunt for humans would put me dangerously close to revealing our existence. Everything around me was made of wood of different shades of brown. I was in a cabin. A large one too. Large enough to hold another floor above.

The wood panelled walls nearest to me had an assortment of instruments hanging off them. Many of them were saws of different shapes and sizes. One of the other walls was filled with the mounted heads of a variety of animals, from predators to prey. And another of the walls had shelves filled with containers of different sizes that held a variety of organs floating in cloudy liquid. There were large yellow spotlights above the operating table. The space may have looked like a clinic, but it had the feel of a workshop, more than anything.

I turned as far to the right as I could.

The room was a massive open plan space including a living room at the opposite end to this workshop area, a little dining area in the middle and a kitchenette on the wall to the left. Almost every piece of furniture was made from wood. Handcrafted, with incredibly detailed inlays on most of the wooden surfaces. If I wasn't so horrified with what else filled the room, I would have been thoroughly impressed. The living room space behind the dining table was filled with dead bodies positioned to look like they were casually sitting and chatting together.

Not just dead bodies.

Taxidermies.

Vampire taxidermies.

A door opened into the dining room and a woman walked in pulling someone in with her. The woman wore a brown puritanical dress that covered her from her neck to her ankles, with an ornate, thick, brown leather belt cinched at the waist. On her feet were brown moccasin boots, undoubtedly made from the tanned skins of some of the animals whose heads were mounted on the walls of the living room. The brown tone extended to the woman's skin. She wasn't as dark as Hadley, but not that much lighter either. Her hair was pulled back into a severe high ponytail, with shiny waves running through the length of it and ending in a wide afro. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black, and she had a button nose and thin lips. She could have been pretty if she didn't wear what looked like a permanent frown.

The woman was pulling in a Wildling. I'd know those markings on her clothes from anywhere. Every Wildling Tribe had their own symbol embroidered on theirs. This one had a gaudy axe etched onto her leather jacket.

"I can't understand how my sister believed anything you said to her!" the Wildling said, struggling in the woman's grasp. The surprisingly strong grasp.

The woman stayed silent, pulling the girl further into the room.

"And you killed her anyway!" the girl continued. "All because you couldn't stand the truth!"

The woman pulled the Wildling to the kitchenette's sink, forced her to her knees, then grabbed a weapon from the top of a shelf above the sink. A captive bolt stunner. I'd only ever seen one in use at a swine slaughterhouse centuries ago, to discombobulate the pigs before slaughter. She pressed the gun-shaped weapon's barrel up against the Wildling's forehead, right between the eyes.