Hearing Elaine’s voice was the last clue Vilena needed to understand the woman, at least to a surface level. There had been an in-between point in her life, after her death back home and before Ruthven had scooped her up. With no land of her own and hurled to the vicissitudes of capitalism, she had had little choice but to become a gutter lady, to dwell and cavort amongst those who had never had any honor or dignity. Despite everything, the demand for such services remained exceedingly high in both Leeds and Carlisle. While living there, surviving on pennies and the occasional favor from gentlemen—they liked her accent—she had come to know a decent number of girls like Elaine. They were the lowest of the low, too much a man to ever be elevated from the gutter but too much a woman to avoid falling there in the first place.
She bore every mark, though concealed well enough that someone who wasn’t as familiar with the type as Vilena was would fail to see it, hopefully. The height, the voice, the way she seemed afraid of everything, like the world was glass that she couldn’t help but shatter. How, she wondered, had a girl like this made it this far? And what did she think would happen if she made it further still?
And all this time, Vilena’s fingers were still holding gingerly onto Elaine’s wrist, as though she were at risk of falling over once more. Thinking quickly, Vilena shifted her grasp, pulling Elaine’s hand forward just far enough that she could drop low and kiss the backs of her knuckles.
“Greetings. I am Vilena Sofiyevna Ruthven, one of your hosts for the evening. Tell me, Miss Corbeny, has the party been quite to your satisfaction?”
It was only at that moment, apparently, that Elaine and her manservant realized exactly to whom they were speaking. Their rigid fear and wide-eyed glances made Vilena’s stomach seize up. She’d mostly become used to people being afraid of her; but realizing that the same was true even for someone who she considered the pinnacle of beauty? That hurt.
The manservant quickly stepped in, sketching out a bow.
“Lady Ruthven, the party has exceeded our wildest expectations. We thank you graciously for all of your good work as host. Hostess.”
The slip-up made Vilena giggle. It made her giggle. When was the last time she had giggled at anything, or even laughed out of emotions besides cruelty?
“English is such a funny language, isn’t it? I didn’t know a word of it until I arrived on Scrapyard. Judging by the sound, I’d guess you started from… Turkish?”
“Arabic, madam.”
Vilena saw the ugly twitch in the manservants pockmarked brow. “My apologies. I did not mean to make you uncomfortable, I merely meant to make conversation, one foreigner to another.”
Elaine was still staring at the back of her hand, at the lipstick mark on her knuckles. She was breathing slowly and shallowly, her whole body pale. It would be all up to Vilena to make conversation, it seemed.
“I have not seen you here before,” Vilena said. “So I assume that the guards let you in on account of your great beauty, Miss Corbeny?”
‘Miss Corbeny’ seemed the most neutral form of address. To Vilena’s eye, Elaine’s dress was shockingly expensive. Perhaps, then, she was one of those girls Vilena had only heard about in myth, the ones who held onto the secret long enough to put together some money before the ran, infiltrating the higher rungs of society, secrets held close to their bosom. It would explain the manservant, if nothing else.
Elaine’s lip wrinkled. “C—yes. Though there was some question about… being able to pass muster.”
“Absolutely not!” Vilena wanted to put a reassuring hand on Elaine’s shoulder, but settled for an exuberant hand flourish. “You are beautiful, Miss Corbeny. Beautiful enough to draw my attention from halfway across this chamber.”
The manservant stepped in once again, attempting to interpose himself between Elaine and Vilena. “Miss Corbeny, we do not have time for this conversation. Lady Juniper needs us to attend to her, remember?”
Vilena narrowed her eyes at him. Clearly he was running defense, but was he defending his mistress’s person or merely her honor? One was to be lauded, the other stepped on.
“Oh, yes, Lady… Juniper,” Elaine said, her voice going shrill.
Vilena shoved the manservant aside with a mere tap on his shoulder. “If I say Lady Juniper can wait, then she can wait. Unless this gorgeous creature would refuse her hostess’s attentions?”
Elaine’s gaze was still locked on Vilena, her hands clasped before her generous bosom. “You think me beautiful?”
“Isn’t this for the benefit of Lord Ruthven?” said the manservant.
Vilena waved him off; her eyes were still on Elaine. “He changed his mind. He has no need of a new bride, so he let his current ones take their pick. The very salt of Leedsrealm’s maidens.”
The manservant said something that sounded like an oath (Zahra!) and even Elaine’s face expressed a moment of urgency in response to it. Vilena’s heart sank as she assumed the only possible cause for that disappointment.
“You were hoping to earn my husband’s favor?”
A flinch. No, then? Or perhaps Elaine simply could not hide the fact that the thought of becoming Ruthven’s bride disgusted her, regardless of what she had come here to do. Vilena’s curiosity became inflamed, almost as much as her passions: she wanted desperately to have a chance to talk to Elaine without the swarm of onlookers present in the ballroom.
“Would you perhaps like to go somewhere more quiet? I can take you upstairs. A quiet room, a soft seat, and some tea might make you feel better. You’re quivering like a fawn, darling.”
“Elaine wants nothing of the sort,” the manservant cut in. He tried to interpose between Vilena and Elaine, but as a vampire, Vilena was simply quicker. She kept her eyes half-lidded, waiting calmly for Elaine’s response.
“No,” said Elaine. “Not quite. I think… I think I would like to rest upstairs.”
The manservant grew only more frantic. “What are you talking about? Lady Juniper will be here any minute, and I don’t need to remind you how important it is that we be here when she returns!”
“I think it should be a… very good idea,” Elaine continued. “It might be fun! I’ll h—I’ll visit the forbidden areas, see what the staff don’t want us to see.”
“I promise, I have absolutely no ulterior motives,” Vilena said, even as the thought of drinking Elaine’s blood made her stomach spasm. “It pains me to see a thing as pretty as you in such distress.”
Vilena put her hand around Elaine’s wrist, but before they could go anywhere, she and her manservant had to complete whatever psychic battle was ongoing between them. The manservant looked furious, and Elaine vaguely apologetic, but it was clear she knew what she wanted. After a little while of this, the manservant clenched his fists, shook his head in regret, and waved her off.
The instant she was given leave to do so, Vilena yanked hard on Elaine’s outstretched arm, making for the stairwell. All around them, the partygoers split in order to give Vilena a path, none wishing to get in the way of a vampire moving with a purpose. That included another vampire. Her name was Imogen, the first of Ruthven’s wives and the one who Vilena hated the most. As the couple moved past her, Imogen’s eyes went half-lidded with a cruel solidarity that said that she thought she knew exactly what Vilena was doing.
It was in that moment Vilena became determined to prove her wrong.
Vilena pulled Elaine up four flights of stairs and out into the hall beyond before she finally cleared away the heat and hunger enough to remember that Elaine was a human and likely possessed of limited stamina. She slowed, expecting to see a panting, heaving, sweating mess. Elaine instead looked entirely unperturbed, as though being asked to run up four flights of stairs at a moment’s notice was a common, everyday experience for her.
“My apologies,” Vilena said. Best to acknowledge the issue even if Elaine didn’t seem to notice. “There were words who yearned to tear from my chest that could not be spoken in all that noise and with so many watching eyes.”
“That’s a very pretty thing to say,” Elaine observed.
Hearing Elaine say that made Vilena so giddy that the emotion circled around and made her feel sick. “Thank you. When I asked if you wanted to go upstairs to catch your breath… was that all you wanted?”
Elaine twitched. “No, it wasn’t.”
“As I suspected.”
Vilena closed distance yet again, pulling Elaine’s hand close to her chest, though not quite close enough to touch. They were nice hands. Strong, firm hands, though also expertly made up, the skin rendered soft not by nature but by a great deal of effort. As Vilena’s grip shifted down the forearm, she was delighted to discover that, though concealed underneath the long sleeves of her dress, Elaine’s arms were shockingly muscular. The kind of strength that sparked her imagination.
Elaine, for her part, looked away, though her lips were pressed together far too tightly for the disinterest to be anything but a ruse. “What… part of the castle is this? Where are we?”
Vilena had to look around before she could know for certain. “It has many purposes. Ruthven likes to entertain guests here, when he entertains guests in private. It has his best artwork, his most well-made display pieces, the best fireplace, his piano…”
“A piano?”
“He plays,” Vilena said. “And of course he’s very good at it. Centuries to practice I suppose.”
“A piano is… a musical instrument?”
Vilena stopped groping Elaine’s bicep for just a moment. “You don’t know what a piano is?”
“Erm. They do not have those where I come from.”
“I see. On that topic, where are you from? That accent of yours is quite enchanting…”
Elaine’s mouth opened, and sentences vomited forth. “The Corbeny family is from Swansea, copper industrialists, but when the red skies came and Leedsrealm was taken to Scrapyard, I was visiting relatives in the country. I miss my mother and father very much, but at least my uncle keeps a loose leash on me.”
“So you’re from Wales?”
Elaine nodded.
“They do not have the piano in Wales?”
Elaine nodded, then shook her head.
That backstory was complete bullshit, and Elaine had clearly spent much more time working on her voice and carriage than she had on learning how to maintain a cover identity. Her brief spark of suspicion was quickly drowned under other, wetter emotions: obviously Elaine was pretending to be from a good family for the sake of a marriage to Ruthven. Vilena would have done the same thing.
“Walk with me, darling.”
They walked together, moving nowhere in specific. Over time and a few attempts, Vilena cajoled Elaine’s arm into the crib of her hands, holding onto her like a husband holding onto his wife’s arm while the newlyweds promenaded down the riverbank. She was going to have to break the bad news.
“I told you already that Ruthven is not looking for a new wife, yes?”
Elaine nodded wordlessly. She didn’t seem too upset; or perhaps she was just very good at hiding her emotions.
“But this is… this is a good thing, in the end. He would not have taken you, I’m sorry.”
Again, Elaine was unperturbed. When she asked why not, it was out of genuine curiosity, not disbelief. Vilena paused for a moment, squinting into her eyes, doubting her own judgements.
“Because… because, Miss Corbeny, of the kind of girl that you are. He wouldn’t tolerate it. And yes, I’ve figured it out, and yes, I still think you’re beautiful. But Ruthven’s tastes are more… conventional than mine.”
Elaine made a noise, some half-verbal sounds, but was too overcome to respond; and no wonder, considering what Vilena had just done. It made her want to self-immolate. But there was nothing to be done about it; better that Vilena be cruel now and make it up to Elaine than Elaine get herself thrown out or worse. Over Elaine’s shoulder, there was a doorway leading into an adjoining chamber from the music room: that would do it.
“If you want to cry, I won’t judge.”
“I won’t cry,” Elaine said. “I… do not like Ruthven anyways.”
Vilena wished she could put to speech just how much she agreed with that sentiment. But it was a truth that she had hidden for so long that it became stuck; not even Elaine could she trust to hear how much this existence chafed at her. While Vilena choked on her words, Elaine took a few further steps into the room, suddenly fixated on one particular segment of wall.
“Do these belong to Ruthven?” she asked.
It was a few seconds before Vilena realized what she was gesturing to. It was a set of weapons hung on hooks on the wall, a pair of swords and a big shield.
“I don’t know,” Vilena said. “I’ve never seen him with a sword. Or any other weapon, for that matter. He prefers his bare hands.”
Elaine stared up at the mounted blades, one hand absentmindedly drifting to her throat. “Vampiric strength.”
“Precisely.”
And then Elaine did something quite unexpected: she reached up as high as she could, and got a hand around the pommel of one of the swords. With one swift motion, she dragged it out of the loops holding it aloft and took it into her hand.
“Heavy, this one is,” she said, and her accent thickened quite abruptly. “Long in the hilt and quite dull… but of good construction, good art.”
Elaine moved her arm in a complicated way, her entire posture disrupted for just an instant… until Vilena made a noise of confusion. Suddenly, the demure girl reasserted herself, and the blade was held in her hand in a clumsy, unstable manner.
“My father was a fencer,” Elaine said meekly.
“Ah, of course,” Vilena replied. That was probably also bullshit; but did that mean Elaine was a fencer, herself? Vilena had met fencers: they did not carry swords the way Elaine had, nor did they have much interest in the medieval paraphernalia her husband kept around.
“What is that room over there,” Elaine asked, pointing over Vilena’s shoulder.
Again, Vilena had to look with her own eyes in order to remember. “A guest bedroom. I invited you up here to take a rest from all the noise downstairs. Would you like to go there?”
By the time Vilena turned back around, the sword was exactly where it had started off.
“I shouldn’t,” Elaine said. “Though… I have been standing for hours, and these shoes are terrible for my feet.”
Vilena chuckled. “Not much experience?”
“No, not much at all.”
“Then let us rest your sore feet, Miss Corbeny. Come along.”
The door to the guest bedroom was, of course, locked. Vilena kept the keys in her cleavage, one of the few pockets provided to her by the dressing gown her husband had her wearing. In that particular moment, though, she was quite happy for her lack of pockets: it meant she got to watch the look on Elaine’s face as she retrieved the still-warm keys to the bedroom.
Inside, Elaine did not hesitate to fast-walk over to the bed and, with some ado to account for the bustle, collapse down into it. The side-sitting posture necessary didn’t look comfortable at all, but at least her weight was off her feet.
It did, however, make for a much more comfortable angle between the two of them when Vilena sat down on the bed as well. As an experiment, she set herself down twice as close as they had been up until that moment, close enough that she could feel Elaine’s body heat, and had to move carefully to avoid brushing against Elaine’s bust. Elaine, for her part, looked uncomfortable in only the best possible way: her eyes were lingering much the same way as Vilena’s were, her ruby lips parting slightly to account for heavy breaths.
“Why did you come here, if you do not like Ruthven? Was it for the money?”
After a second or two of hesitation, Elaine nodded.
“It’s not worth it,” Vilena said. “There are better ways. I have money of my own, you know.”
Elaine swallowed again. Something about the proximity, the way Vilena’s hand lingered and played against hers, had entirely overwhelmed her capacity for speech.
“I could keep you for myself,” Vilena continued, speaking not to Elaine but to herself. “Keep you a secret, or half a secret, make you a place to escape. You would be beloved that way.”
Elaine leaned closer, chasing the whispers. Vilena could hear her heart pounding away, see the engorged capillaries pulsating under the skin of her cheeks. Hunger thrashed, the vampiric urge to feed growing more overpowering with every instant. But Vilena had to resist, to prove to herself if nobody else that she was capable of a love that was about more than consumption.
Vilena lunged. What should have, could have been a lunge to feed, though, became a lunge of an entirely different sort: when Vilena’s lips touched Elaine, it was not to break the skin, but to feel the touch of lips against hers. Elaine was so warm, and her mouth tasted like bitter tea.
Elaine lurched back, held in place by the structure of her own clothes, eyes bulging wide. Wordlessly, Vilena watched her react, watched the horror and disgust slowly fade away under a lust so strong that it made her hands tremble. Had Elaine ever even been kissed before by someone who wasn’t paying her to do it? When Vilena closed the distance once again, it was slow, precise, careful. They kissed a second time, and this time Elaine groaned into it, something being let loose that had been held back for far too long.
They kissed a third time, then a fourth, each more daring than the last. Vilena was thankful now for all the wine she’d drunk, erasing the taste of blood in her mouth and sparing Elaine from being subjected to such horrors.
“I want you,” she said, and she meant it in so many different ways.
The open-mouthed expression of pure desire on Elaine’s face, so lascivious that she seemed shocked by herself, only egged the vampire on further. She became more daring with hands and mouth alike. Her fingers were unavoidably firm with Elaine’s chest, but by the way her back arched Vilena knew it was appreciated. Her lips, meanwhile, sought out other places, flicking her tongue against Elaine’s earlobe, pressing lipstick marks against the side of her neck.
“Vilena…” Elaine whined.
Elaine sucked down a desperate, gasping breath, then as Vilena’s lips tickled at her collarbone, her whole body shivered uncontrollably. The noise was animalistic, shrill, even her lungs were taken so badly by that paroxysm that they were incapable of making a proper sound. Vilena realized what was happening about three seconds too late to avert it, even as she relinquished the grasp her mouth had on Elaine’s neck and made for some space between them.
Over the course of a few dozen panicked heartbeats, Elaine slowed. She remembered how to breathe again, and breathed as if she’d run miles, deep sucking breaths for a body starved of oxygen. The slackening of her expression was beatific.
“Oh my goodness,” was all Vilena could think to say. “I hadn’t realized you were so… you must have needed that quite a bit.”
She laughed, partly because it was funny and partly to reassure Elaine that it was funny, just a silly thing that happens sometimes. Hopefully Elaine wasn’t about to fall asleep: that would make this difficult.
Elaine instead stared down at the bedsheets, clenching and relaxing one of her hands. Vilena gave her the space to have whatever thoughts she was thinking: with the air let out of the party, she knew that she had gone on rather strong, and the last thing she wanted was to scare her off with continued pressure.
It was a minute or two before signs of life returned to the pretty Welsh girl. She reached up, grasping onto Vilena’s shoulder with a fierce intensity, nails digging into the skin. She used that contact point to lift herself up, her shoulders popping quietly as she extended herself as much as she possibly could given the circumstances. She gazed directly into Vilena’s eyes.
And what Vilena saw there haunted her. The darkness of Elaine’s pupils and irises had sunk, falling back into deep pits that belied no emotion. There was a vast emptiness behind those eyes, a well too deep to ever be climbed out of.
“Elaine?”
Vampires are resilient creatures, more so than humans, but they are not invulnerable. Blades cut them, bullets pierce them, clubs smash them, hence the necessity of the mist-trick to be truly effective in combat. So it was that Vilena’s nose could not help but shatter and break, blood fountaining forth, when Elaine drove her forehead directly into it with the entirety of her quite considerable physical strength.