Hunter ✔

Initiation

When I was around six years old I captured a bird. It was called a laughing dove. It had a black-flecked ring around its neck and cinnamon-coloured back feathers. I made a little wooden cage for it and I put it inside. The dove kept flying left and right in the little cage. At one stage she hurt her foot, but she kept flying against the side. At a later stage she broke her wing so she kept running left and right trying to escape. Eventually she ran against the side of the cage and snapped her neck. The cage drove her insane or maybe it was my fault for capturing her in the first place. In my defense I thought I was rescuing it.

As a young slave the greatest commodity you have is your innocence. By that I mean the fact that you have never been bitten.

As I waited for the Initiation to happen I became painfully aware of what the Initiation Estelle spoke of actually is. It was quite simple. An Initiation was where a human slave would be bitten for the first time. They would have their innocence stolen in that way.

Alexander did not waste any time in starting to explain to me in ecstasy how it was extremely painful to be bitten under normal circumstances but that it was even more painful if it was your first time. He told me how the bite of a vampire was poisonous to a human. Although it was not venomous enough to kill a human being it still caused a great deal of pain.

He explained that biting someone for the first time was like when someone would inject someone with a vaccine for the flu. They injected you with a different version of the virus in order to have the one virus destroy the other. As you are bitten the first time the virus overwhelms your body and it breaks down the resistance your blood has towards the venom.

He told me that one of the torture methods to deal with a disobedient slave was where a vampire would bite a human numerous times all over his whole body and how the poison would take over the whole human's body and he would be in agony for weeks, even months afterwards, but still he would not die.

He spoke about how he had seen Estelle do this once to a slave who had attempted to run away and how the human had gone insane. He ended up killing himself by ramming his head against the wall of his cell a bunch of times.

For someone like me who prior to this hated any form of violence and found it hard to kill a rabbit or a chicken, it was strange being flung into a world where violence was their first instinct. I think that in a way he only said those things as a means of psychological abuse. He could clearly see that I was terrified.

According to Alexander vampires paid large amounts of money to bite a human who had never been bitten before. It usually took place the second a new slave was taken. Alexander referred to it as a form of branding on its own. I imagined young boys and girls of about nine or ten. How did they survive living in this world for so long?

I also learnt that every house of vampires and every individual vampire had his or her own brand that they put on their slaves. The House of Godfrey was signified by a tear on the left side of the slave's face on their cheek. Estelle liked to have her name branded on her slaves so that they would never forget her and constantly be reminded of the fact that she owned them.

I hated how casually Alexander said that Estelle owned me as if though I was a pet.

Estelle was known to go through slaves like it was a new pair of shoes. She would wear them out until the brink of death and then she would find pleasure in killing them or sending them to a Harvesting Farm.

If she chose to kill them she would never just kill them. That would be merciful in all the things that Alexander had told me in great detail that she had done. A part of me hoped that Alexander was lying. That he was just trying to scare me, but then I kept thinking about how cold her eyes had looked. How could something so beautiful be so cruel?