The Vampire & the Rebel (Completed)

Part 1: Chapter 6

I was almost as confused as I was furious.

The bloodsucker was playing with me. It had pushed me until I broke my cool and that pissed me off.

It was undoubtedly vile, but most of all, it was persistently annoying. Its words sounded true, but then it would backtrack and contradict itself with that self-satisfied smile on its evilly alluring face.

After being exposed, I had been trying to throw it off its game when I had pretended to resign myself to my new life as a feeder. Then it had refused me, which made absolutely no sense at all.

Leeches did not simply refuse blood. They hunted with a single minded purpose, they destroyed homes, and they sucked the life out of their victims without a single consideration.

This had to be some sort of game. If it was trying aggravate me until I desperately wanted to stake it out in the sunlight, it was winning, because I did.

After pushing me into the corner, it had sent me off with Leif. He had dragged me around the leech's lair and shown me things like the slaves' dining hall, the kitchen, the training yard, the gym, the hospital wing, and on, and on.

I was forced into submitting to a physical and the doctor pronounced me nothing more than moderately underweight, which was something that a balanced diet could easily fix.

Then, I was forced to exercise. I had known the word, but the concept of exercising for the sake of exercising was sheer madness. It was a waste of precious time and energy. Nearly every conscious act of survival was innately exercise.

But now, I had some trainer ordering me around, giving me numbers of reps to complete on this or that piece of machinery.

I might not have minded the task if I had been there on my own volition, but I was there at its command and that made me want to refuse every directive.

But I did not.

At some point, a number of its traitor slaves came in and chatted amongst themselves while exercising. Blondie and a couple of the others seemed most determined to include me in their little bonding sessions, but my terse responses eventually warded them off and I was left in peace to figure out what I was going to do.

I could almost, very nearly, understand why these traitors to humanity seemed contented here. I had been out in the wilds; I had been captured and held by other vampires and in the holding pens beneath the capital building most recently. Materially, this place was much better than any of my previous locations, if one discounted the blood theft and the slavery.

But a gilded cage remained a prison and I was no trapped bird waiting to be tamed, no matter what the monster thought.

Maybe they hadn't seen what I had, the complete slaughter of everyone I cared about. That had been the first time the bloodsuckers had caught me and the first time I destroyed one of the monsters and escaped from their clutches.

That first time had been almost entirely luck, but I had learned a lot.

This leech would not hold me forever, but killing it to escape might not be strictly necessary. These slaves seemed happy, relative to most humans I had met, even in the wilds. I wouldn't accept this life, but if they had no drive to escape, I would leave them to their own fate.

* * * * *

The leech summoned me, via an unknown slave. I was taken to a balcony where the monster was standing, looking out into the distant darkness as if it was thinking something deep. It turned its face towards me and the light of the room behind me and I was struck by its similarity to a spider lurking at the centre of its web, awaiting its prey, watching from the shadows for its moment to strike.