"Trophy in Red" [Microfic]
This is the third entry in a series of microfics I'm writing with @priestess-of-asphalt-and-silicon! The theme this time was "I'd Almost Forgotten". Read Rosie's story here:
https://www.tumblr.com/priestess-of-asphalt-and-silicon/819520761655164928/the-world-will-not
**CW for a reference to defanging**
The thing in the cellar of Fort Danstirth can hardly be called a vampire anymore.
It’s pale enough to be one, bloodless skin pulled taut over scrawny limbs and smudged with dirt. The similarities go no further. It lays in a dog bed in the corner of a musty, lightless cell, gnawing on a leather glove. Its eyes, dull pink like raw chicken, stare into the dark, registering nothing.
Outside its cell, the trudge of boots on cold stone. It freezes.
“...replaced the losses by now, but some of the lads still worry.” A woman’s voice, roughened with age and drink but strong with authority.
A younger woman scoffs. “What is there to fear now?”
The elder gives a whisky-voiced chuckle. “Patience, pup. I’ll show you.”
An amber flicker of torchlight creeps along the corridor wall towards the cell. The once-vampire winces. Even a candle is harsh to its atrophied eyes now. It settles as a pair of figures in dark leather and mail step into view outside the bars. The two women, their hair back in pragmatic buns. The older, tanned and wizened, meets the thing’s glassy eyes with her flinty stare.
The younger one, holding the torch, scrunches her face in disgusted curiosity. “This is the one you captured?”
“As a trophy, you could say.” The elder fumbles with a key ring on her belt for a moment, before fitting the right key into the cell’s lock.
Shadows dance across the younger’s features as her disgust turns to surprise. “Not the Countess herself? This thing?”
“The Countess had a lot of little freaks lurking about her manor.” The defeat of the mistress vampire Countess Strigona is, without doubt, the proudest moment of this order’s history. In a single night of silver and fire, they’d ended her decades-long reign. No longer did she rule the countryside through fell magic and fear, snatching maidens from homes for her twisted desires.
“Trust me, though.” Turning the lock, the elder pushes the door open and steps inside. “This one’s special.”
As soon as she enters, the thing that had been a vampire crawls over to her, ignoring the bruises on its knobby knees, and sits at her feet. Again the girl’s face twists in horrified fascination.
Pushing aside the greasy strings of the thing’s unkempt hair, the elder grabs something coiled around its neck. A leather collar, studded with silver. “This,” she says, “keeps it docile.” Straightening, she reaches into her overcoat pocket. “That and the starvation.”
The girl’s eyes flick between her mentor and their captor. When she looks at it, her stare softens to something dangerously close to pity. “When did it feed last?”
“I’ll feed it tonight.” From her pocket the elder draws an old leather glove, matching the one discarded in the dog bed. Slipping it on, she offers her hand to the thing.
A dim spark flickers in its hollowed eyes. It meekly takes her fingers in its mouth, and begins to chew the supple material. There’s no danger. It was defanged after its capture.
The girl is glad her mentor’s back is to her, for her revulsion is now plain on her face. “And it’s been here ever since you brought down Strigona.”
Perhaps it’s best the girl doesn’t see her mentor’s wolfish grin, either. “Every moment since.”
“It’s a ghoul.” The girl, green as she is, is still developing the stomach- and mind- for vampire hunting. “I’ve seen thralls with more dignity.”
Her mentor laughs. “That’s just it,” she says. “This wasn’t a ghoul when we caught it. This IS Strigona.”
The girl’s face slackens. While the raid on the manor predated her joining the order, she’s seen a portrait of the Countess in her prime. This withered thing bares almost no resemblance to the proud, dagger-eyed woman portrayed there.
In the remnants of the ghoul’s fractured mind, however, a rusted mechanism clicks. Shudders as it almost springs back to life. Pausing mid-suck, its face twitches. Trying to claw something back from the foggy reaches of its memory.
An elegant red dress, matching crimson lips and cheeks.
The coppery sweet of blood, sipped from a crystal wine glass.
A small legion of servants and thralls, townsfolk groveling for mercy at her feet.
The soft crackle of a hearth as she read by moonlight.
Village girls blushing as they offered their bodies and blood to her, seeking her vampiric blessing.
Ghosts swirling within that rusty haze.
For a moment- for the first time in many years- the ghoul’s eyes are alight. Glowering up at its captor. Ablaze with hatred.
The old huntress grins back down at it, and draws something else from her pocket. A small vial full of rich dark red. “You’ll be a good girl for us,” she leers, “won’t you?”
And then it’s all gone. Countess Strigona is pushed back beneath the waves by maddening hunger. The ghoul perks up and opens its mouth, tongue lolling out at the promise of sustenance.
Uncorking the vial, the huntress lowers it to the ghoul’s mouth and, teasingly slow, pours the blood in. The thing that had been Strigona guzzles it with a desperate whine, then laps at the vial’s open mouth. It hardly tastes the liquid’s metal tang. It just feels it sizzle along its tongue and flow down its throat, coming to smolder in its belly with the unfulfilled promise of satiety.
“Attagirl.” The huntress pulls it away and returns it to her pocket. Then she steps out of the cell and shuts it, old metal groaning. It takes the girl a moment to wrest herself out of her stupor, brewed in equal parts disgust and fascination. The dread Countess, reduced to a pet. The huntresses then leave.
The ghoul lingers on its knees a moment. Lost in the fog. Floundering in the dark ocean of fading memory. Then, it crawls back to its bed, crumples into it, and returns to nibbling on the glove.
