Wrong Side of the Coffin: A WIPpersnappers Anthology

The King's Pet Hunter

The King's Pet Hunter

by Delphine Crown

Knit, knit, knit, purl, the start of a new row. Tess read over the budget he was supposed to approve, glasses precariously balanced on the tip of his nose, the clicky-clicky sound of the knitting needles bringing some interior peace.

Tess la Faye was, by mere sheer luck, king of all vampires, protector of peace, head-chief of idiocy, blah blah blah. He kind of enjoyed being king when there weren't any headaches forming: there was something rather soothing about reading over papers and signing them off to go, or writing in the margins with a red pen things like "Are you stupid? - T" before sending them back to the Board of Governors for review.

It was really relaxing, especially when his niece came in from Paris or Okinawa or wherever she had been hanging out, with new knitting magazines in her designer bag so he could knit even more beautiful things.

Sure, knitting wasn't exactly an activity that matched his image of vampire king: Tess, to anyone outside of his inner circle, was a dark, brooding slip of a boy - he'd been fifteen when his father had retired, and with one of his sister dead and his brother incapacitated by said dead sister, the crown fell on Tess' unprepared, undeserving head. His father always had thought him a weakling, and thus, never prepared Tess for receiving the crown. He had the last laugh, though.

Tess had adapted: his mother helped in the first few years, and even was the one to suggest he present a powerful image, since he was all but a boy-king, prone to "accidentally" falling heart-first into a hunter's stake. He'd abandoned the human poetry contests he'd used to go to, stopped painting, and had to halt being creative in favor of seeming like a perfect copy of his father, all warrior-like and angry, because otherwise vampires would not respect him.

It had been painful, actually, but two hundred or so years of being king had given him a smattering of other hobbies that Tess kept a tight secret. Knitting had been the one that stayed because, really, it was easier to hide. His dearest niece had brought him some lovely alpaca wool yarn from Peru, and he was giving the finishing touches for a scarf he'd gift her.

Of course, vampires did not feel much cold, but he still worried about Camille while she traveled: after all, as much as he disliked his siblings, she was still their only daughter and technically his heir.

Glass broke, and he looked behind his comfortable chair, still knitting absentmindedly. Standing on broken glass, with a few cuts on her face was Aradia Satie, part-werewolf in the sense one of her ancestors was one and it had been passing down her family line like some sort of fungus, and mad enough that it made the whole affair fun.

Perhaps Tess was the mad one, but hey, it ran in his family too. Vampires and werewolves had similar origins, so why not share the madness while they were at it?

"Hi, Aradia!" he chirped as if she had come through the door, and Aradia dusted her clothes She wore a dirty leather jacket, shorts that had once been blue, and a faded red shirt, coupled with a mask, opaque black metal, crafted like a two-sided mirror. A quick glance behind her told Tess that yes, she wasn't dressed for the snowy weather. "Oh, no need for that, I got Andrew to get a glass that doesn't leave dust behind."

Aradia took her mask off. She wore it half to protect her from the glass, half to hide the Hunter's Mark: the proof of her bloodline, a black wolf whose snout ended by her nose, its head buried in her dark hair, going down her neck and disappearing under her clothes. By what Tess had caught, from the little snippets Aradia leaked out, it was thanks to that that she'd had nothing akin to a normal life.