Virgin Sacrifice - Van Helsing Fanfiction

7 - Blood Oaths and Secrets

"I am going to ask you one more time," Verona's velveteen voice wavered, "Or you might force my hand, tiny human." 

Marseille mumbled, "It is your fangs that I'm more worried about." 

Verona sighed. Pacing through the suffocating blackness of the human's tower-prison, the eldest of the vampire wives seethed with an unspoken ire. It had been two pitiful days of this torturous routine: swapping shifts with her sisters to keep an eye on the pesky human thing that would adamantly not speak. They had tried threatening Marseille with their vampiric powers, but her constant usage of the star anise flower would render her immune for hours longer than they had any patience for, and had also tried to tempt her into trading secrets for a chalice of water or a tureen of soup (which they had acquired from an ex-victim). Though they could clearly hear the protesting grumbles of her stomach or see the ring of crusted, dried flesh that outlined her lips as a constant reminder of her dehydration, she would not cave. 

The vampire wife frowned. Her sculpted, elegant face - Gothic features that had been praised by countless poets and immortalised by thousands of ballads - were twisted and warped with a hollowed agitation. Not for the first time that hour did Verona curse her husband's decree that they were not allowed to physically harm or maim the human.

Inspecting the human, Verona considered the girl a truly feeble sight. For over twenty-four hours had her arms been shackled back at the wrists and her legs weighed down by thick, unyielding clasps of merciless iron that allowed the girl little movement other than being partially suspended, arms forced to remain stiff and upright. There was obvious pain written across the human's face: the dark, fatigued shadows that encircled her eyes, the intense pucker of disguised agony in the shape of her lips, even the way her body seemed to dangle like the discarded plaything of a small child. There was a tiny reverberation in Verona - something like empathy - but it left only an echo of compassion in the vampire as she stalked forward, smoothly and gracefully, and seized the human by her throat. 

Marseille choked. 

"I will ask you once again," Verona remarked coldly, "Do you speak Latin?" 

Through a weak breath, the human answered, "Non est dicere copiose." 

Not fluently, Verona translated. 

"Must you make things so endlessly difficult for us?" Smiling bitterly, Verona mused, "I had expected you to be more practical." 

Marseille mimicked the vampire's tight smile, "Was it practical to consort with a vampire when Vladislaus Dracula killed you?" 

Verona stilled. The woman's sharp, sudden paralysis irritated the diaphanous material of her dress, white lace that was woven intricately to reveal the subtle silvers of skin beneath. She was the only bride who chose to keep her throat concealed by a frilly, lace collar. Marseille understood: as the first victim of Vladislaus Dracula's fatal taste for intriguing and exotic women,  Verona must have learned not to be so trusting of others. The idiom went "fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice..." 

Verona's voice was clipped and sharp, like ice shattering, "If you test my patience once more, Vladislaus' wrath or not, I will kill you." 

"Isn't that what you said the last time?" Marseille said flatly, "And, yet, here we are." 

Verona's face contorted again. 

"Do not mistake my lack of action for mercy," Verona's voice was brisk, a breath of calm, "My sisters have attempted to make you speak with the use of threats and punishment. Efforts that have proven useless." 

Gasping, Marseille battled to claw the breath back into her lungs as Verona released her throat. Elegantly settling herself on an ironwork chair that, sometime throughout the human's confinement, had been brought as a reminder of her inability to sit down or rest. A symbol of her torture. Placed just out of reach, just barely too far for the human to stretch. It had been Marishka's idea.