The Vampire & the Rebel (Completed)

Part 1: Chapter 10

The leech's lair was oddly silent after we had all been herded off to our quarters and basically told to sit still and shut up. It was never that loud normally, but there had at least been the almost imperceptible movement of life.

Now, this place was a tomb.

I was alone in my room because Stump was off doing who knows what at the leech's command.

Then the silence was broken by the sound of someone weeping and wailing far off. The sound faded and it was gone.

It was a stupid instinct considering I was surrounded by human traitors, but I wanted to snap a chair in two and go and stake that leech in that moment.

But I did not. It was probably just Marcel being a drama queen again and he was fine. At least physically. His mind was clearly not.

Or perhaps it was some of the visiting vampires.

I made myself wait on the surprisingly comfortable bed. Like the food, the little luxuries the leech provided seemed to be an insincere strategy to get humans to lower their guard. It was harder to remember the true nature of the monsters when one was lying unmolested on a comfortable bed as opposed to chained to the wall.

However, I had the memory of everything that mattered in my life being destroyed to keep me from forgetting the nature of the beast.

I needed to stay ready, but I also needed rest. Relaxing in bed, I fell asleep and woke again to the sound of the door opening. I opened my eyes in time to watch Stump cross the room and toss what he was carrying on his bed.

As he started rummaging through his wardrobe, a glint of metal on his bed caught my eye. I looked closer to discover a dagger that was slipping out of its sheath.

My breath caught. It couldn't be, could it?

Was there more to Theo than the traitor to humanity I had assumed?

"What's that?" I asked him.

He seemed surprised that I had spoken to him willingly. He straightened his glasses and looked at me, before looking at the bed.

"What's what?"

"You have a dagger."

"Oh, yeah." He shrugged and turned back to his rummaging. "Don't even think about it."

"About what?"

"Stealing it. I would know about it and I would inform our mistress."

I ignored his foul mood; it was not like I had tried to play nice with any of the slaves before now. "I wasn't planning on it, but why do you have it?"

He looked at me as if I had the intelligence of a stick. "I'm one of the guards, do you really think we wander around unarmed? I know you must know there are visitors and we're on high alert."

"But you're a slave," I pointed out.

"So?"

"Why would you have a weapon?"

"You're really having trouble with this, huh? We're human, don't you think we would be pretty useless security against vampires or even other humans if we didn't have some way to counter them? What do you think the guards on the walls do? Throw rocks?"

I did not bother to answer. The fact that the human guards were potentially walking around with weapons and the leech was still somehow standing was difficult to fathom.

Surely, she must be controlling their minds. I really was trapped in the centre of a thriving insect colony. My stomach felt sick. The leech was the queen ant in the centre and all the slaves were her mindless drones, rushing around, working, feeding her, doing her dark bidding.