Vampiric Interdiction

[47] Culprit

Reading the swerea did the exact opposite of taking Villahr’s mind off Karolinna. His chest was heaving now, as he deliberately forced his body to take in the oxygen around him in effort to keep himself from imploding — it did not help. Perhaps he had breathed it all in already?

The top story today —in fact, every day this week — had been regarding disappearances throughout the region. Not just faelna, but males too. This had been the real reason he had kept such a close watch on his sister as of late, he knew that, and he had only assumed she figured this out as well, but clearly she hadn’t been nearly as paranoid in regards.

The mortals couldn’t care less about vicio disappearances and considering it was only published in the supe directed papers, chances are they didn’t even know it was happening. They went about their daily business and nightly cowering behind locked windows and doors like they always had, none the wiser. They would probably be praising the news if they were made aware or worse still, it might give them nefarious ideas they never in their wildest dreams would have committed to but now know is developing a surprisingly high success rate. They could take back their world. Their world.

Villahr tossed the swerea aside violently, as if it had just given him a nasty bite to the finger, and as soon as it left his hands it lost it’s rigid form and fluttered to the bed like a piece of paper to the sheets, the words upon it wiped away as if they never were, leaving the sheet blank and uninteresting once again; the way any mortal would see it naturally. Villahr had received many puzzled looked before from passersby and those with the annoying habit of prying, attempting to read over his shoulder, wondering why he was studying a piece of paper with nothing written on it so intently.

Fortunately there was no news in regards to Karolinna in the headlines, though he took no comfort in this as something that big would have been kept from the public knowledge and brought to the estate directly. There had been no harolds to the estate either, which didn’t bring much abatement. No news only meant no body, it did not guarantee Karolinna’s cognizance elsewhere.

Villahr left Dion with the shop with strict orders not to discuss his absence to anyone and keep up the ruse that he was still working hard on orders. Most vicio didn’t take kindly to Dion, and certainly didn’t want to hear that his handiwork was what hung around their necks on golden or silver chains, fixed to strings of pearls or bracelets — whether they were designed by Villahr or not, just a mortal handling the raw goods made most of them cringe.

This amused even Villahr, because not even he was displeased with humans that much — he had hired one after all, and Dion turned out to be an excellent worker. When it came down to making infradai, Dion was a fine craftsman, even Villahr had to admit it. He mostly stuck to polishing the blades, keeping the store clean, and doing the books but there were times when even Villahr couldn’t keep up with the workload. Dion wasn’t entirely aberrant, but he was certainly capable.

The sunshine that had plastered the sky as well as the hair to the necks of everyone beneath it — it was a particularly hot day, even for this region — had long since gone, and Villahr found himself checking the small cellular device he kept in his pocket for what felt like the umpteenth time today.

There was no word from Karolinna, not that he had entirely been expecting he would receive any —Karolinna wasn’t too big on mindfulness— but there were two missed calls from Dion, which had had since followed up on, leaving them faded against the bright white of the rest of the texts still unread. Most of them were about a month or two old and they were sent by Kayya. They hadn’t needed opening, as the general idea of their contents could be gathered from their subjects: ‘Won’t be home.’‘Short-staffed,’ or ‘Not until late.’All of which were punctuated with an ‘I love you,’ at the end, as if that made up for her absence and maternal neglect.