Blood Rebel [COMPLETED]

Chapter Nine - The Moon Goddess

“Selene, yours will be white. We’re doing something different this year. I want you to look...innocent.  Perfect. Whole and pure: like the full moon.”

Diana was strutting across the stage in front of a large screen that hung from the ceiling. The lights in the theatre were dim, and projected onto the screen was a drawing of Selene, wearing a long white dress, covered with tiny embroidered moons. It was stunning. 

The dancers sat in the front row, watching. The dresses flashed up, one after the other. Jackie and Cecily were to wear silver dresses, and the others were to wear black. Selene was aware that the girls were disgruntled at the plainness of their dresses in comparison to hers, but she tried to ignore it. 

It’s not my fault.

“Come with me Selene.  I have to take some check measurements.”

Selene followed Veronica, Stanley Hall’s resident seamstress, to her office backstage. The room was small and full of bits of paper, sketches, drawings, and rolls of thread. An orange angle-poise lamp sat in the middle of the table, shining brightly.

Veronica pushed a mannequin to one side, to make more space. The old woman strained, her back hunched, as she heaved the headless, limbless figure. Selene moved to help, but Veronica waved her away. 

“No, no, no. Manual labour is not for dancers.” 

She stepped back, slapped her hands against one another to removed the dust, and looked Selene up and down, as though calculating her exact measurements.

“Now, let’s see,” she said, taking a measuring tape and moving it round and over Selene’s body. “You’re very thin. Are you eating?”

“I’ve been distracted.”

“Well, I’m going to make this dress with a bit of room, which I expect you to fill. A scrawny dancer is not appealing. You need curves; breasts.”

Selene nodded. 

“Do you like the moon motif?”

“It’s very pretty.”

“I designed it for you. Selene: Goddess of the Moon.”

Selene frowned. She had never heard that before.

“Which fabric do you like? It’s still going to be summer, and likely warm, so I think something light would be appropriate.” She lifted some different rolls of white fabric from where they were propped upright in the corner of the room. 

“I don’t mind.”

“Oh come on Selene, I need some input here! This is the most important dance of the year. And it’s in the state rooms at Central Control. I need to make sure you look perfect. Can you at least try to show some interest?”

Central Control was a strange place. It was a vast black building, a great unearthly monolith, set in its own park, and had been built where Buckingham Palace had once stood. The Vampires had destroyed the royal palaces when they took over, not wanting a physical reminder of an archaic system of human rule. Instead, Central Control loomed on the edge of Green Park, dark and mysterious. Inside, the human prisoners were kept before they were dispatched to the Bleedings throughout the city. Anyone, Vampire or human, who was mentally unstable was locked up inside. 

But Central Control had a dual purpose. It also housed the Vampire Parliament: the Grand Chamber.

The Grand Chamber met regularly, to discuss rules, laws, law-breakers, and the future of their Vampire prisoners. Vampire executions were not public, in the way that human ones were. They weren’t a spectacle. They happened in secret, inside Central Control. There were no witnesses other than the members of the Grand Chamber, and no details were ever published in the press, aside from a brief line stating the execution of so-and-so had taken place at such-and-such a time.