The Vampire & the Rebel (Completed)

Part 1: Chapter 12

I was standing in my appointed spot.

True to her word, every day I was assigned to add so-called aesthetic value to some corner of the leech's lair.

I was angry, but that was nothing new. I was also quite bored, but if the leech thought I was going to beg her to release me from this trial she had another thing coming.

There hadn't been even a single person go by for at least ten minutes. It seemed that she, or more likely her minions had deliberately chosen the least active spots to make this feel as long as possible.

Rotating my shoulders, I adjusted myself more comfortably against the wall and folded my arms in front of me.

Instead of allowing this to be a complete waste of time, I reviewed what I had seen of her lair thus far and tried to spot the weaknesses.

As much as I hated to admit it, she, or more likely one of her slaves, had a flair for ensuring that every possible angle was covered. There were well fortified exits in the walls facing out towards the four directions, the main gate being at the southern end of the area. I had watched the guards and I doubted they even blinked at the same time.

Even if there had been no watchful humans carefully guarding every corner, I had seen signs that there was a higher concentration of ancient human style tech here than was usual in our world. Most of the remnants of the world from before the vampires had pushed humans to their knees were in the bloodsuckers' possession.

The previous world had been taken from us and now we existed on the scraps they dropped, or what we managed to scrape out from the natural world. It was infuriating.

I gritted my teeth again. I would wear my molars down to the gums if I was not careful.

Footsteps sounded down the corridor. I stiffened and stared straight ahead.

A male voice broke the silence. "Can't you at least give me a hint, Vienne?"

"Not a chance." I recognized her voice like it was burned into my mind. "That was not part of our deal."

"You just like toying with me."

My thoughts from his mouth.

"Obviously," she agreed along with that annoying, self-satisfied laugh I heard so frequently whenever I was inflicted with her presence.

The footsteps paused.

"Why is there a human just standing here as if he's frozen?" the unfamiliar voice said, identifying the speaker as another leech.

My eyes snapped over as if of their own accord to see its face. Black hair, but the face was wrong, the nose was too thick, the cheeks too high, the eyebrows too flat. Not the leech I was searching for.

"I discovered the new human I bought was near useless so I decided to use him as decoration," she explained as if the answer was obvious and I were really no more than an object in the halls.

"Really, Vienne? Stop messing with the poor man," the other leech said, surprising me.

"Why?" she asked with her patently false guise of innocence.

It just looked at her, eyebrows raised.

She drew out her response slowly. "Fine."

I caught a flash of fang and she rolled her eyes at the leech beside her. "I'm only doing this because you're such a pitiful bleeding heart, because you're annoying me, and because I was boring of his statuary performance anyway. Seriously, Drak, how in the world do you live like this? Poor human this, poor human that? It's frankly pathetic and it must get woefully dismal."