The Vampire's Crimson Kiss (Editing)

Chapter 5/The Seduction of Silence

Victoria's POV

As the days passed I tried to sleep as much as I could. While I did, I hid my gag from Mary and locked her out of my room while I slept hiding my talk. The image of the Duke's face plagued me. If I had been given pencil and paper I could have traced his sharp features out easily on the page. I desperately tried not to weaken and think about food or his eyes. At first, the Duke sent sumptuous plates piled with food to tempt me. This was a failure. The constant pain of starvation was something I had not expected.

There was little for me to do, so weak I tried not to move to conserve energy.

Bored I discovered I could look out of the secret window to the city beyond during the day, for recreation Mary pointed out the landmarks.

"See that building that looks like a half-eaten egg? That's St. Paul's. It's a good place to hunt rats. Those poles coming out of the water? Well, the towers underwater are Tower Bridge. That crumbling tower over there? This side has fallen down, but the other side still has a clock face. That's Big Ben. Beyond it is the lakeside village of Kensington; it's where I grew up. The fishing can be good there. With the right nets, fish can get trapped by the tide."

I looked down and noticed people walking around the docks. They moved in a familiar way.

"Who are they?" I asked Mary, pointing down.

Mary looked for a second. "Naked from the waist up, handcuffed. I would say they are viand prisoners. They are being brought from the prisons over there," Mary pointed to a small group of ancient buildings rising out of the water on the other side of the lake.

"What's going to happen to them?" I asked.

"They are viand prisoner, so they will be fed on. The ones who survive will be taken back to that tower to recover, then brought back when they have remade enough blood."

Looking down at the people again, some looked familiar. They had the same boots; my father's army didn't have a uniform, but they had raided an old factory and found many soldiers' boots. The boots were distributed, and everyone wore them, including me. There appeared to be fifty prisoners of war, all pale, drawn, and chained together. During the war, soldiers disappeared; the vampires enjoyed feeding on the bodies of their enemies. My brothers said the vampires were known to take prisoners and bleed them for years. They were like viands but fed upon until the day they died of anaemia, never to be free to return home. Here was my evidence; they were my people. I wondered if my father knew I wasn't the only prisoner of the Duke. We had promised an unpleasant share of our crops to stop the war. We promised enough to support more of an army of familiars and more prisoners to feed more vampires. I felt guilty there was nothing I could do for the people down there.

"My father's tribute will be used to feed them and, in turn, feed more vampires," I said.

"Can we stop talking about food? It feels like I've got a rat eating me from the inside," Mary said, closing the shutter, which prevented me from looking out, and plunged the room back into the candlelit half-darkness it always had.

Later I lay on the bed with little energy to move. I wasstaring at Mary as she slumped in the near by red leather chair. Neither of us had eaten for more than three days, and my desperation was growing, but I was equally desperate not to be bested by Mary, the succubus. Hunger gnawed at me, leaving me tired, drowsy, and painfully irritable.

"I still don't get why you're doing this," I said, my stomach growling. We talked so I could do something other than think about food or his perfect proportions.

"If you die, I'm going to be killed anyway, so why not?" Mary replied with a casual shrug.

A heavy silence hung in the air.