Chapter 3 – Laela

Chapter 3 – Laela

I met Laela on my second night. Kellan had wanted to make sure I had my every whim met, so he offered me a bunch of girls and told me I could pick a maid from any of them. I thought he was kidding until I noticed that there were actually twenty girls in the dining room, the youngest of them would be older than me.

“Pick the one you like the most,” Kellan had said. He stood close to me, I think, to prevent me from suddenly pouncing. And it was very hard for me to control myself, because I was able to feel reverberating deep in what would’ve been my stomach every single heartbeat. The mistimed rhythm throbbed to the sensual scent of the girls drifting towards me, and without warning I felt my tots protract and my muscles tense. “Take a good look and think about it.”

All the girls looked like replicas of each other. At that time, the people who volunteered into the profession of serving vampires were mostly models who were overnight out of a job. While it was necessary for them to gain some more weight to become satisfactory to vampires (that is, be more than just an appetiser), it also meant that they mostly had the same wary and desperate look about them. Heavy perfume barely masked their blatant uneasiness at being scrutinized by me, and hardly any of them met my eyes. I didn’t blame them; I wouldn’t want to serve me at that point either.

And then I came across one who was different. Apart from her dark eyes and shorter stature, she could pass for a lower generation vampire. She gazed evenly at my face, with only the smallest twitch at her full red lips showing mistrust.

So I walked up to her, and stood in front of her nearly a head taller. The other girls next to her shied away but she stood still, no longer looking to my eyes.

“What’s your name?” I asked her. She still didn’t look up, so I pressed in closer, almost forcing her to face me.

“Laela,” she murmured, looking at anything but me. Her pale cheeks grew pink, and I smelled not only fear but embarrassment from her.

“I want her,” I said to Kellan. I turned to walk away, but suddenly Laela grabbed my arm. The human warmth in her grip seemed to steadily burn through the material of my clothes and spread up my arm.

“What makes you able to talk about me like I’m an object for you to own?” she demanded, still not directly looking at me, but rather at her hand on my arm.

“If you don’t want someone to own you, then what are you doing in this group of girls?” I asked. She still did not let go of my arm. I could smell her scent more clearly now, and it was distracting me with promises of dark corners and rose petals. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want a maid who doesn’t want to be around me.”

I shook myself free from her grasp and walked away. Behind me the other girls had started whispering, and I could hear very clearly their words but I tried to block it out. I listened for Laela’s voice, if she was talking about me. The silence taunted me, and with a sense of longing my arm remembered the warmth.

This is ridiculous, I thought. Not everyone likes you the moment they meet you, and surely you’re being just a bit of an asshole to her? Owning her? Who do you think you are?

I turned around, “Okay look -”

Laela was standing right in front of me, her face had flushed magnificently. “I’d like to be your friend, though.” The other girls had all as a brainless group hushed.

“Yeah, okay that sounds good,” I answered quickly.

“Wait, were you going to say something before I did?”

“No, not at all,” I said. “Why do you think that?”

I found out two things about Laela the first night with her. Firstly, she was actually incredibly intelligent, if not overly shy. Secondly, her brother was killed by a rogue Fourth-Gen vampire.

Obviously, before the Purebloods had been Proclaimed (the humans all believed firmly that they had outed the vampires when the latter had accidentally slipped up and revealed themselves. Actually, the vampires had to more or less signpost to the humans to discover them. But that’s not my point) they had to have drank from and intermittently Draked quite a number of humans. Without the constraints of the Council as we have now, the Draking happened unchecked and unbalanced, and quite a few times when an accidental Fourth- or Fifth-Gen was Draked, they were not ‘taken out’ properly and survived to live a very painfully starved life. They would not be able to venture too brazenly out into the open to drink, because the higher Generations would destroy them on sight, so they lost their sanity very quickly to bloodthirst, and attacked many humans that were in the wrong place wrong time. Many corpses had to be made to look like another human murder before the Proclamation. And after the Proclamation when the story was leaked that a lot of unsolved murders were actually vampire murders, the outraged reactions had basically already been written.

Laela’s parents were devastated after the death of their son, and when they heard that Laela was offering herself to serve vampires they all but threw her out on the streets. In the end she couldn’t take the treatment her parents were giving her, nor did she want them to be constantly reminded of her presence and thus lack of her brother’s presence, so she sought out Kellan’s house.

“And Kellan let you in, just like that?” I asked. Laela was curled up in the armchair near the fireplace, which I stayed well clear of. I had no idea why Kellan put a fireplace in my room, apart from the fact that it looked very quaint and kept me very wary.

“Well no, actually I got kicked out twice. By Benjamin.”

“Ah Benny the Doorboy? I’ll go kick his ass tomorrow. So what happened next?”

“Mr Dante was there the third time I went up. I told him what happened, and he let me stay here.”

“When was this?” I asked. I still didn’t know a lot of what goes on at Kellan’s household.

“Just about a week ago. He told me to do some cleaning up at the Villa, and wouldn’t let me out. This was the first time I was allowed into the main part of the house.” Laela smiled mirthlessly. “I think he took me in just for you. He knew you were going to pick me.”

“Is that so bad?” I teased, deciding to step closer to the flames. Flames made most vampires wary, not because we could be burnt to death (we could, but not easily) but because the heat from the fire was as potent as the heat from the sun when it came to bloodthirst.

“No, I just felt used,” Laela shook her head. “That’s why I was annoyed when you did pick me, as if you’d just eaten out of his hands.” She bent over to pick up a piece of firewood to feed into the fire.

And pricked her finger on a splinter.

I was standing right behind the armchair by that time, feeling the danger of the flames sinking into my bones. But I thought I would be okay, I still felt I was in control.

But the moment that the small droplet of blood appeared on Laela’s finger, all the shackles holding down the monster were torn, and I wasn’t even aware that I was on top of her sinking my tots into her arm. I only noticed the feeling of the liquid ruby past my tongue and down my throat.

And then I passed out.

~~~~

“You broke her arm, you nearly drained a fatal amount of blood, and most of all you terrified the girl out of her mind!” Kellan shouted. “Why were you so close to the fire?”

“I thought that I could…”

“Don’t think! Know! I’m on the forefront of Co-Ex movements, if you had killed a human do you have any idea of the consequences that would ensue?”

“I’m sorry, Father. Is Laela okay?”

“You’re goddamn lucky I was keeping watch outside. She’ll be fine, but you shouldn’t ask to see her or try to contact her for a while. Did you know about her brother?” Kellan took a large gulp of amber scotch, and turned away from me.

“Yes, I did.”

“Then I don’t have to explain why you have to stay away from her?”

“No, I understand.”

For the next fortnight, Kellan put me under an extreme regime to control my thirst. He taught me how to stop myself from losing control when in the presence of blood, and taught me ways to keep my thirst at bay.

Against his warning, I wrote Laela a number of letters apologizing. I didn’t receive any replies. I thought that maybe she didn’t want to reply, she was that mad, until I remembered that I had attacked her writing arm. I’d be lucky to ever get a letter from her.

After the two weeks, when Kellan was more confident in my abilities to restrain myself, I thought it would be acceptable if I were to visit Laela, or at least leave a message saying that I had tried to visit. I knew Laela was being treated in the Villa, which was where the human servants lived, but when I tried to enter the Villa I was stopped.

“I’m sorry Miss Sera. Lord Dante had given me specific instructions to stop you from entering the Villa.” It was Benny the Doorboy, who had clearly been demoted to Benny the Guy Who Pisses Sera Off.

“And if I was to ignore what he said and push my way in?”

“With all due respect, Miss,” Benny said, with absolutely no respect in his voice, “I don’t think you could defeat me in any way.”

He was probably right, being a vampire servant and significantly bigger than me. But there was one thing I had over him, and that was my status.

Purebloods and Nobles had the very handy ability to make any lower Generation vampires to do their bidding. It had something to do with the inflection of our tone, and a certain hypnotic pheromone that we give off. That wasn’t to say we controlled the lower Generations unconditionally, because if they tried hard enough (or were thirsty enough, in different contexts) they could ignore the instinctual calling for submission.

I doubted Benny the Dumbshit had the will, so I looked him square in the eyes and growled, “Let me through, Benjamin.”

He blinked slowly, and then stepped aside.

“Thanks. Now cluck like a chicken,” I commanded, feeling mean.

Laela had her arm in a sling and looked very tired when I saw her. But she still seemed cheerful enough at my sight.

“Please take me outside?” she asked after ensuring me that she was fine. “I’m sick of being cooped up indoors.” I sniggered at the word ‘coop’, and helped her onto a wheelchair. Remembering the season, I took some heavy blankets and a thick coat for Laela, trying to remember how much clothing the weather called for. “Are you going to be okay in the sun?”

“I’ll be fine,” I replied. Tucking her into a blanket cocoon, I pushed her out onto the small cobbled paths of the Villa. We exchanged a few words as I took her through a small bush path, and to the bank of a lake nearby.

It seemed impossibly idyllic, with the sun’s winter rays cascading gently into the ripples of the water, and a chilly soothing breeze keeping me calm. It was very quiet, occasionally disturbed by the soft sounds of the lake and bush, reminding us that nature was never quiet. Laela sighed in disbelief.

“Where is this place? How do we possibly have a lake in our backyard?” Laela asked.

“Well, to explain that, we’d have to call our backyard the wider bush and Kellan’s house an insanely big mansion.” I sat down on the damp grass. I’d always loved winters in Melbourne, but as a vampire I really appreciated the winters out here. It had a different heartbeat to the angular icy winters in the city.

I took Laela back when she fell asleep watching the sunlight play on the surface of the lake. With the help of some of the other servants at the Villa, I returned Laela into her bed, pleased that I did something well.

“Thank you, Miss Sera, for taking her out. She looks a lot calmer now,” one of the guys remarked as I was leaving the Villa. He was middle aged and looked to be the gardener type. I could tell at a glance that he was one of the few characters Kellan would trust to watch over the Villa at all times, so I trusted him as well. “By the way, why was there a boy outside trying to scratch up the ground and acting like a chicken?”

I laughed, “I don’t know, sir. Take care of Laela, alright?”

“Don’t worry Miss, Laela will be safe with me.”