The Vampire's Rival

Sins of the past and hope for the future

This time, Hadley showed up back in the dining room with a broken eye socket and a bruised jaw. Whatever it had been, her plan had obviously failed, and even with my blood in her veins, she was badly hurt. I was too weak to pull at my straps, but I tried anyway. Hadley was in chains now too, but no shock collar around her neck. Her hands and feet were bound by a few feet of chain link. The chain was connected to a leash that Mrs. Smith would pull at when she wanted Hadley to move. In my state of absolute agony, I wondered exactly what Hadley had done to deserve this.

But I wasn't completely upset. I even smiled a little. Despite everything Mrs. Smith had inflicted on her, Hadley had gone ahead and fought back. Fought hard enough to really piss her off!

That made today a wonderful day.

"Now, where were we," Mrs. Smith said in a sing song voice after dinner that night, pulling Hadley towards the gurney by her chains. "Ah, yes! We'll take a lung today. Her right one."

"Why are you doing this?" Hadley asked, pulling against her chains as she did.

Mrs. Smith smiled down at the vampire.

"Usually, it's for research. To find their weak spots. To make sure we'll be able to instil fear in them when we finally hold the reigns to this world. But not this time. This time, it's just to hurt her," Mrs. Smith said. "Even though it will never come close to what she did to hurt me."

Hadley stayed silent as she watched the woman slice out an outline of my right lung. Mrs. Smith was precise today. Careful. Surgical. Slow. Excruciatingly slow. Savouring every cut.

"You remember, don't you Ruqwik?" Mrs. Smith whispered, as if it was just the two of us. "You remember reaching into their chests as they were still screaming. Breaking their breastbones. Crushing their beating hearts. Not because there wasn't another way to kill them. A way that would spare them the pain. There are many ways to kill. Humane ways. You just didn't care, did you? You liked seeing the pain. Enjoyed killing them."

Back then, there was only one thing I fully believed: you had to be human to be humane.

I was born a vampire.

"Do you remember them, Ruqwik?" Mrs. Smith continued, pulling out my right lung and holding it up in triumph. "Do you remember my parents? Do you remember killing them?"

Even after she'd described these killings, that did not in any way narrow it down for me. When I said that we killed all the Familiars, by "we", I meant me. I killed all the Familiars. And there were as many stars as there were parents I had killed, especially in those days.

The link suddenly pulsed.

It took everything in me not to reach into Hadley's mind and bury the misgivings that had suddenly exploded inside her mind. I'd become so used to the connection between us bringing in feelings of sympathy and compassion in the last few weeks that the mistrust and apprehension I now felt from her shook me to the core. I almost did it. I almost gave in and broke into her mind to mute those feelings until she would never direct them towards me as long as she lived. It would use every drop of blood I had in me, and it would most certainly kill me, but I almost did it anyway. Almost. I grit my teeth and kept my mind shut. Held myself back.

But only just.

I couldn't quieten my mind that night to slow down, every emotion under the sun raging and storming through me unchecked.

*
The next day was brutal.

At dawn, a few hours before she usually brought Hadley down to the workshop, Mrs. smith hauled in another vampire's corpse. She hadn't worked with other vampire corpses ever since she started training Hadley. As with the others, a section of the spine had been cut out, but this wound was fresh, still dripping with blood. This vampire was newly captured!