Vladira felt her brow twitch.
Her eyes darted between Charlotte and Alaric, Her Stomach turned in anger.
A fire ignited in her gut and spread through her whole body, silent and shaking. Her claws slid out from beneath her nails without her meaning them to.
"You look tired, Voss. Why don't you get to the room first?" she said, fighting to keep her voice level. "I'll ask her a bit more about the surrounding area and opportunities. I think I might be a fit for that weekend desk job."
Alaric eyed her. "You know what I want to say," he muttered.
"I won't eat her," Vladira promised. "Yet."
"Pardon?" Charlotte clutched her collar. "You won't what?"
Alaric left.
Vladira watched until he was far enough away, then turned back to the desk.
Charlotte had grown visibly uncomfortable in the silence, perhaps starting to feel the edges of the hold she was under, or simply understanding that she should be afraid.
"I will speak as plainly and colloquially as I can manage, you vile hag," Vladira hissed, seizing the clerk by the throat. Charlotte grabbed at her hands, eyes bulging, choking as she tried to pry herself free.
She had no chance.
"If I ever, ever, see you attempting to charm, flirt, bewitch, or enchant that man ever again, I will do to you what I did to thousands of my enemies in ages long past. Impale you on a post in front of this very motel, letting the crows have their fill as you beg for death to take you. That slayer belongs to me and me alone. Am I understood?"
"Yes, Mistress!" Charlotte choked. "Yes! I understand!"
Vladira dropped her.
Watched with satisfaction as the woman gasped and wheezed against the desk, fighting to get her lungs working again.
"Excellent. Now — is there a breakfast buffet for my future toy, or will we have to make our own arrangements?"
"I — uh — I can stock the mini fridge with milk and cereal."
Vladira frowned. "That man needs to eat roughly a full-grown cow each day to maintain those glorious muscles."
"I'll…see what I can do, Mistress?"
Vladira smiled, showing her fangs. Charlotte let out a brief shriek. "Excellent. In the meantime, there's one more thing I need your help with."
Charlotte gulped. "Y-yes, Mistress. Whatever you need."
"Tell me about that weekend job."
---
This first night was going to be pure agony. Not the physical kind. The kind that wounded the spirit.
Sharing a room with Vladira, the Blood Princess herself, was a fresh sort of Hell he'd never thought to imagine for himself.
Her presence pulled his thoughts backward. To his father. To the mission he'd been told might one day fall to him.
"Your left arm lacks strength, Alaric." His father's voice still lived in the back of his skull, along with a catalog of every inadequacy the man had ever listed. And then, always, the one that mattered most: "One day, perhaps you or your brother will have to face Vladira Noctyra like your grandfather before us. Do you think you're ready?"
"I'm sorry, father. I will improve, I swear. I will awaken my blessing soon, I promise!"
His father had sighed.
Alaric knew what came next. He watched in his memory as his brother Rickdar uncrossed his arms and walked over, posture easy, unburdened by guilt.
Alaric's eyes had been wet even before it started. "No, father! Please! Not the cross again!"
"The price of resurrection was crucifixion for our Lord, and so shall it be for you. Rickdar, tie him to the cross in the courtyard and leave him for the night. He can come down in three days — or when he finds the strength to pull himself down. Whichever comes first."
He had hated his father for that.
For about two days. Then the breakthrough hit him like a bolt of lightning. The Voss Blessing tore through him all at once, raw and new, and he shredded the rope binding him while the crows watching from the post scattered into the dark.
After that, his father and he saw eye to eye. Even Rickdar treated him differently. But what he mourned wasn't the pain. It was the boy who had stood there weeping, begging, who ceased to exist that night.
He was ten years old.
Being a Voss meant belonging to a family the Bloodbane Order had cultivated for generations as weapons against monsters.
From ten onward, he had been shaped into a perfect killer. Blessed. Enchanted. Sculpted. His first hundred demons fell before he turned eleven.
No humble apprenticeship. No ordinary childhood. Just iron, blood, and the Angel's Tear.
His father had put the whip in his hands on a gloomy night much like this one. Three heads on separate chains, each one a point of the Holy Trinity.
The Father. The Son. The Holy Ghost — the one ghost the Voss Clan would never send to Hell. The Pope himself had blessed it.
Every crack of it was a prayer.
Now here he was, forced to share a room with the very creature the weapon was made to destroy.
His past twisted into something unrecognizable. He kept his hand on the Angel's Tear anyway. It was still a symbol.
Still a reminder of what he had paid to become this.
His new mission was not to slay a monster. It was to partner with one. The notion sat in his chest like a stone. It felt less like the work of God and more like something Loki might devise for sport.
Had the Trinity forsaken him? He didn't feel their presence here. Perhaps that was the Vampire Queen's effect on the air around her.
She looked like a god in her own right. Pale. Almost luminescent. Comically perfect in form. He scolded himself for the thought, but the longer he was forced to be near her, the harder it became to look away.
What made it worse was that she seemed almost human sometimes. She chewed her lip when she was thinking. Rubbed her hands together when she was nervous.
Kicked at the ground when something upset her. She made little sounds — "Hmmph!" — and looked at him with wide, genuine grins that were harder to resist than they had any right to be.
It was a ruse. Had to be. A creature like her didn't have real warmth. Beneath that mask of womanly perfection was something that gnashed its teeth in the dark, all fire and rot.
She was a monster, not a maiden.
He would do well to remember that.
It was just getting harder to remember with every passing hour.