It was dark, a blindfold covering one good eye, cold metal against flesh, concrete against a cheek while a body laid on the ground. Noises echoing in a room the body was laid out within, water trickling, slow and shaking breaths, an AC unit running, distant music. The room old, musty, with few other tones identifiable beyond the acidic vomit a few feet from a nose.
An eternity on the floor, a few brief minutes, probably something between both, a door opened and footsteps dully echoed. Heels, more sturdy shoes, two people? Smells, too many smells, acidic vomit an overwhelming force holding all other thoughts back like a dam. Someone speaking, words I could understand, words that couldn’t process as more than a noise.
A foot on a shoulder, body rolled over onto my back, the wolf a cowed creature laid there and-
Pain.
An iron rod driven into a chest, a stomach, a face, heeled foot crashed into the side of a head and ground into the flesh. Weak coughs escaping the body, blood joining a new wave of vomit, coming up a nose stuck there while muscles forced it to bend forward on themselves. Someone else screaming, yelling, more arguments, more crashes of pain into a body limp on the ground.
Hair gripped in an icy vice, like a limp doll dragged across stone through a puddle of vomit. Face thrown forward, icy water engulfing a head, all sense of practicality, this takes too long to kill a werewolf, dulled by pure instinct. A body that should have known better thrashing, muscles burning, lungs that didn’t need breath burning with want, a mouth opening that refused to breathe in, knew it couldn’t breathe in.
An eye that could see nothing turning red, screams coming through even under the water, silver cuffs digging into wrists and ankles, fur threatening to grow even with the collar around a bodies neck. A scream that couldn’t escape escaping a throat and muscles no sooner starting to turn the head was snapped back by the hair.
A voice in an ear, growling, coarse words, nothing processing as words but just the pure sense of behave upon them. Unable to even force a nod of false agreement, though the unsaid agreement enough as the collar fell from a neck and a blindfold was removed.
A white light blinding the body, one good eye blinking a dozen times as the figures in front of it came into view. Two people, two silhouettes, only half-recognized in the back of a mind even as hair was released and the body dropped limp to the ground.
Mind running, pulling in and out, something spinning in the back of a head until the first figure spoke. The words almost understood, enough to start the mind working, the long pause again before a familiar voice said, “do you understand. Nod.”
The body nodded on its own, a movement more ordered of it than a proper response even as the man with her yelled, “I didn’t want this!”
Mind rolling, voice familiar, recognized, not a deep connection and something in us reaching out to try and pay attention. The thoughts a slow river trying to search through whatever it could find to recognize the voice while the woman responded, “you didn’t want this…. And what may I ask did you…expect? She’s a former Purist, a wild animal, she doesn’t respond to my rewards, treat her like an animal, no?”
Silence, the man looking disgusted at The Lady while my mind tried to figure out just what was going on. The Lady crouching by my body, the cuffs on my ankles and wrists undone and the silver tossed aside with the sound of splashing water.
My limbs remaining spread around me, refusing to move laid out on the ground, something refusing to process anything going on while The Lady paced around me. A brief exchange going back and forth, the mind slipping long enough that I missed whatever meaning was behind the words the body heard.
Consciousness snapping in and out, words exchanged, and the man she spoke with announced, “I didn’t want her to suffer, but… you promise she won’t come to my house again? I can’t have this part of my life mixing with my family, you promised me that at least.”
“Promise she won’t come to your house again,” The Lady repeated, each word spitting venom as she stopped by my side. One heeled foot raising up and then driving down into my right hand, the dulled tip practically impaled into the still healing bullet hole through the leather glove. Burning pain coursing up the limb and at the same time belonging to a body not my own. The Lady almost proud as she answered, “the next time she attends to your home she’ll either be dead soon after or it will be under my command. In the mean time…
Her other foot raised up, a full body’s weight on my palm, and a moment later the second foot crashing down.
Vision white, a scream I wasn’t quite sure if it escaped my throat or not, and The Lady stepped off my arm; the broken limb left in place, too pained to move. Tony staring down at me like he was resisting the urge to run over and help or run away even as he asked, “can I leave.”
“Leave,” The Lady answered, a thin smile crossing her lips as she led him to the door, “it’s oh so late, I hope you… sleep well. We’ll speak more tomorrow.”
Tony looking ready to say something more when the door was closed in his face, and The Lady turned to face me on the floor. One her hands blindly reaching behind her, fumbling with something on the door, a metallic click of a lock filling the room like a gunshot.
The Lady’s steps slow, the woman walking to a nearby wall and dragging an old red chair from one corner to the center of the room. Her face a stone wall while she went to my side and, with the ease of one carrying a sack of potatoes, lurched me off the ground with no care for my arm and sat me in its place. The useless limb near limp at the forearm, pure white agony radiating up its length even as she stared down blankly down at it.
“Mary,” The Lady started slowly, the word almost sounding forced, “you did not… tell me your hand was injured so severely, I would have gifted you blood for healing if you’d just asked. But then you… Chasseresse will be spoken with about her behavior, but I don’t believe we must speak of it more with you. Ask me to heal you.”
My mouth went dry, every party of my body screaming not to ask and the pain winning out as I near begged through the tears on my cheeks, “please heal me. I’m sorry, please just heal me.”
The Lady smiled, a genuinely warm smile that felt unnatural on her while she walked off to the side. Moments later coming back with a table she sat at my side and then an old metal bowl she filled from the room’s fountain and sat there. A handkerchief pulled from her dress, dampened in the water, and I couldn’t even bring myself to growl while she wiped my face.
Her work slow, traces of blood and bile wiped away and then wrung out while she muttered, “heal you… I would be tempted to do it if not for how you acted. No, you went to a contact’s home not trusting me to tell you where and when to go, not even speaking to me of it.” Her expression once more stone while she worked, my eye trying to focus anywhere but her as it drifted to the statue and found that as disappointing.
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A naked woman laid out on a stone slab, arms spread out, a steady stream of water coming from two marks in her wrists and neck. The features feeling too familiar, too exact, and The Lady catching on as she briefly spoke in some language I didn’t know, the words feeling almost natural before she switched back to English in her normal manner, “my… creator commissioned it of me. A celebration of my turning. In Rome it was fed by mountain rivers and hear I have adapted it. Beautiful, no?”
Even as much as she hid it, as much as she sounded like she was remembering a word in the moment, the venom shown through in the words. Blinding pain and the wolf’s cowed fear an overwhelming force on my brain, some part of my brain hoping she would let me leave if I answered, “Beautiful.”
She snorted, head shaking while cleaned me and spat the word back, “beautiful…” the woman pausing a long moment before she continued, “you would have not liked my creator. I don’t like to hurt my pets, Mary, something I learned from him. His dogs were always fed, given burials and headstones, fed better than most… workers at the time.”
I nodded, not sure what else to say while I muttered, “that’s good.”
“That’s good,” she agreed, handkerchief tossed in the bowl while she walked back to the statue and stared it down, “he paid more for his favorite dog than me.” whatever reaction my face shown apparently enough for her to continue, “he bought me from the captain who first did, alongside… I can’t quite remember, a dozen girls? More? Less? We worked for him in… tunnels under a home we only entered at night; half of us dead before the first week, and I was all that was left when he decided I was worth turning. If he had heard what you’d done, you would not have gotten off so lightly.”
“I’m sorry.”
The words slipped out without though, more natural than anything else I could have said then, and The Lady turned to face me fast enough she hardly seemed to move. Her face stone though something beneath it while she repeated the word, “sorry,” head shaking while she slowly paced towards me, “there’s nothing to be sorry for, he’s in chains at the ocean’s bottom and we are here. This is about you, my pet, and making you understand how much I… dislike you’ve made me hurt you like this.”
I nodded, lips feeling almost glued together even as she crouched in front of me, an ice cold finger reaching up to trace my jaw as she asked, “how… old do you think I was? What do you think my name was?”
I shook my head, a nail digging under my chin to force me to answer, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t know,” she agreed coldly, red eyes narrowing as she forced me to meet them with my one, “time is impossible to tell in the dark, the names he gave us became our own, I can’t even properly remember how many winters I’d known before I left my home, just I grew in that dark and never saw the sun until centuries had passed. Could you imagine such a… existence?”
I couldn’t answer, mouth dry, every part of my body screaming in agony, The Lady’s cold stare holding onto me expectantly. Only as I felt more tears forming in my eyes she seemed to take that as answer rising to her feet.
“I have tried… kindness, and now we’ve tried the rod,” The Lady announced, an ice cold hand reaching out to brush the hair from my face. Her face stone while she finished her threat, “I don’t…enjoy using the rod on you. Let us return to the status, and if not… well, I think we’ll skip the rod, and we’ll see if a softer version of my creator’s methods would work. Your boy is still young.”
The blood in my veins froze, the pain radiating through my body passing away only a moment to let the threat of fur start growing as I begged, “you promised me, you told me you wouldn’t hurt him.”
“I wouldn’t hurt him,” she repeated, shaking her head a moment before specifying it, “I won’t hurt him; however… a decade? Some time more? He could make a servant: werewolf, vampire, no? I did not kill my creator for some time, no matter how he deserved it, and what if he’d not been a brute? Is it so wrong to expect loyalty from others?”
We sat in a long silence, the tension unbreaking between us until I broke down and told her, “I’m loyal.”
“You’re loyal,” the vampire repeated, turning on her heels and starting towards the door, unlocking it as she finished her point, “now that we have an… understanding, let’s return to gentle. I will see you the first of January for work, and you can spend your time resting. I’m sure the child misses you.”
“I can’t see him,” I muttered, the woman raising a brow while she glanced over her shoulder at me, “you… I don’t want him to see me like this.”
A long pause, too long, and the vampire left me with, “Samuel will make you presentable.”
The door opened and The Lady left while a pair of maids came in with mops and buckets to start on the floor. Neither offering me more than a half-worried glance while they worked until another maid came with a wheelchair.
The woman not speaking while she worked an arm under mine, mind and vision turning a blaring white as I was moved. One moment in the chair The Lady had placed me in, the next in the chair being wheeled through The Lady’s halls.
It was late, thin rays of moonlight coming through the windows, maids running through late night cleaning. Maids I vaguely recognized from previous visits doing their best not to look at me until I was wheeled into the sitting room. The woman who brought me in quickly leaving and letting me sit alone in the room stewing in my thoughts.
Pain the strongest, as used as I was to pain this wasn’t cuts and scrapes and bites. Those were their own pain, even transformation not quite the same with how it tended to break and shift the bones. It was like sections of bone had been replaced with glass and then shattered in my body, my one eye’s vision a constantly dimming and brightening view of the world around me while something shifted in the bones of my temple.
A constant pain and turning within me that told me I was healing, but too much broken for it to be quick or easy. My body was trying to do what felt like healing most the bones at once, my right arm still at a wrong angle, flesh turning a purple and green pattern everywhere I could see.
Below all the pain, the wolf was ready to attack.
Not afraid, not feral, just angry. Like if I screamed hard enough I could rise to my feet and march to The Lady now and rip out her throat, turn her to dust, end her fucking life now. She was fucking prey, I was a wolf, I wasn’t someone she could beat and leave a broken mess on the ground. Barbie in front of me, trying to say something, her words not processing as real while I let myself sit in the moment.
Her threat the only thing stopping me trying until the door opened once more and I looked up to Samuel. The man stood stock still, face a statue with a large duffle bag under one arm, even he seeming taken aback by my appearance until I saw that little switch in his head click. Emotions pushed back, whatever thoughts he had pushed aside, pure practicality and professionalism in his movements as he walked over and started working.
Samuel’s bag slowly unpacked, a few piles made, and he started to look over my broken arm with a barely hidden disgust. A few words said, barely processed, and another bout of blinding pain while the arm was moved into place and he tied a splint. His expression only faltering briefly while he lightly prodded the flesh across my torso with his thumb.
The first words to break the silence between us, “it’s not as bad as you think.”
“I’m going to kill her.”
My words didn’t fully process for me until they were said, and I felt a little caught off guard by the fact while Samuel hardly reacted. The man shaking his head while he continued working like nothing happened.
After a while, apparently satisfied with my condition, starting to prepare a syringe while explaining, “the fact you didn’t have this happen after your stunt last month, or after what happened with Barbie? She likes you, consider that a compliment. She’ll forget she was ever angry with you by the time you see her again, it’ll be like it never happened.”
“She threatened my son.”
Samuel faltered a little at that, nearly dropping a needle before he saved it telling me, “she’s threatened to kill a hundred people I know, and do worse. She gets angry, she gets creative, and if you’re pretty or you stay good for a couple months she forgets. The fact you’ve gone this long without this is a sign you’ll be fine if you just keep your head down better.”
I nodded, not sure what else to do, watching Samuel measure out a dose while I asked, “how strong are you going?”
“Was going to do enough to keep the pain off, but can knock you out for a bit too,” he agreed, frowning as he glanced back at the table, “your clothes are going to be a bit of a struggle if you’re not awake to help though. I brought a sundress, figured just slide it on, but-”
“Just, cut them off, throw them away,” I told him, watching the man hesitantly increase the dosage before I repeated my point, “I’m going to kill her.”
Samuel nodded, wiping a spot on my good arm with an alcohol wipe and comforting me, “it’s always worst the first time, just… count from a hundred and you’ll be fine.”
I nodded, eyes closed while I let my thoughts drift on. Counting the last thing from my mind as I let myself focus on the anger instead. Ideas crossing my mind, thoughts coming together, and something resembling a half-dream of a plan already coming together as thinking became impossible.
Barbie almost looking concerned as I smiled with a realization.
