Diamond leaned against the door frame, tugged fruitlessly at the anti-casting collar around his neck, and tried to decide whether the person strapped to a table in the next room was breathing.
They were hooked to something that looked remarkably like a crude apheresis or dialysis machine, aside from the glaring absence of a return line. The attendant vampire had apparently been peckish and impatient, because they were drinking directly from their prisoner as well, leaned over the prone figure on the side opposite the machine. Diamond was lucky they were occupied, or he would have been noticed already.
Diamond could handle one vampire. It was how he’d escaped his own imprisonment. The damned collar certainly prevented him from casting any spells, swallowing down any active magic and delivering a blinding shock of pain besides: enough to completely wreck his focus and leave him dazed and confused for several long seconds. But his telepathy...
His telepathy was right on the border between magic and physiology. There were parts of it Diamond genuinely could not turn off, and that seemed to confuse the thing and keep it from fully engaging even when he did use active telepathy. It had been unpleasant in the extreme, but he’d been able to control one of his captors for long enough to get them to unlock his cell door, enter the cell in his stead, and go to sleep.
He could do something similar here.
(...it would be foolish, and Diamond knew it. The person on the table was too pale, too still; even if they were still alive, and even if he did intervene, they likely weren’t in any shape to survive much longer.)
(And yet… a chance. There was a chance.)
Diamond gathered his strength, reached for the vamp’s mind, and threw his entire will behind forcing the blood drinker to sleep. A vicious buzz ripped through his body from the collar. He gagged and hunched over, sliding to his knees, but clung to his focus on the vampire’s mind with stubborn tenacity.
The collar muffled both his perception and his influence; the best Diamond could manage with it on seemed to be a powerful compulsion, not the outright control he was used to having against untrained minds. There now, turn the damned machine off, doesn’t the floor look inviting, you can take a break…
The vampire blinked and drew back from their victim, giving their head a woozy shake.
It felt like it took a fucking eternity. But eventually the vampire palmed a control on the machine and sank to the floor, curling up to sleep. As soon as their thoughts grew muddled with unconsciousness, Diamond dropped the compulsion with a shuddering gasp.
It was harder to catch his breath than it had been the first time. Still, there were bigger things to worry about. Like whether all that effort was for an actual person or a corpse. (Or a soon-to-be corpse, because Diamond sure as hell didn’t have the resources to deal with decompensated shock right now.)
Diamond swallowed, hauled himself to his feet, and…
…and the victim already looked less like death and more like death warmed over, a bit of color returning to their complexion and their eyelids stirring. Diamond slid into the room and pressed himself against the wall out of easy view of the hallway, but didn’t approach any more closely. He wasn’t sure what was going on, here.
“...hey,” he said softly, not wanting to disturb the sleeping vampire. “Anyone home?”
