"Ssh now, don't say a word, dearie, things will be alright. You've been very naughty coming looking for me; Miss Edith is very cross, so very cross with you."
Druscilla looked down with compassion at the girl strapped to the table in front of her, squirming in pain. With a slight shake of her head, her mane of black hair came down in waves around her face, framing it against the darkness and making her eyes look like pits of despair.
Looking over at a shelf in the room, she winked at one of the porcelain dolls that looked on as if spectators. Of the many dolls, this was the only one that hadn't been mutilated in some way; she had been kept in perfect condition, loved by her owner.
In her hand she held a poker, the tip a flaming red, warmed by the small brazier that hung from the ceiling. The girl in front of her was bare from the waist up, her shirt ripped and discarded long ago on the floor. Small welts crossed her chest and breasts in a random pattern, designed only to cause pain.
"The stars have been talking to me, they told me you were coming. But now there's confusion! I can't see them through the ground anymore; they're abandoning me because I haven't killed you. I don't want to kill you. Not yet."
Lowering the poker again, Druscilla touched it softly to the base of the girls neck and giggled when she screamed in pain through the gag in her mouth. The mark was lightly coloured, and the vampire made a chain of them in imitation of a real one. The tip hovered above the twin punctures marks that had barely healed, marking the place that Druscilla had drunk deeply.
"Are you ready to talk to me?" she said, tilting her head, her voice child like and innocent, "it's very rude not to talk to the host, very rude indeed." The girl looked away, tears streaming from her eyes. "Why has the slayer sent you here? Has Buffy sent you here to die?"
The girl in front of her was, of course, a vampire slayer. One of the hundreds created after Willow Rosenberg had extended the gifts of the Chosen to any girl with the potential to become a vampire slayer. With the end of the battle against The First Evil it had fallen to Buffy Summers and her friends to reorganise the slayer line and re-establish the Watchers Council. Of course there were slip-ups. Like Alice.
Alice was a young slayer from France who had been instructed by Rupert Giles to travel to Romania as soon as she could. With the help of her Watcher, one of the few to survive the attack of the First's minions, she had travelled by bus and train to the forests of the eastern European country to investigate reported sightings of the vampire Druscilla.
Since leaving Sunnydale, she had virtually disappeared. Fleeting encounters with other vampires and the occasional demon hunter had put her in Europe, but no one knew where she had landed. Six months beforehand, stories started coming out of Romania about horrific murders, whole families tortured and massacred. Travellers found dead on isolated roads, drained of blood and hung from trees.
Only one of the victims did not die straight away. The young girl, barely eight years of age, had told the local police of the strange woman who had come to their door, dressed in clothes that belonged to a time centuries in the past. Claiming sanctuary from men chasing her, the girl's father had invited her in. It was to prove to be a fatal mistake for him and his family.
She had seemed normal at first, speaking the language with a native accent. But her speech had become quickly garbled, a broken mix of Romanian and English. And then she produced the doll. Calling her Miss Edith and sitting her on the table as if she were a person, the woman spoke to her as if receiving conversation back.
The family became unnerved by her erratic behaviour and she was asked to leave, politely at first, but then more insistently when she refused to listen. That's when things turned nasty. As the father took her arm firmly, her face seemed to twist and change before his eyes. Then it became a massacre.
By the time Alice had arrived at the hospital the girl was staying, her mind was broken by the trauma, her body deteriorating. She retold her story via a translator and with a final, gentle sigh, died. Alice did not cry, she knew by the look of contentment that had crossed her face as she left the world that she had gone on to a better place.
Travelling to the small village, now wracked with grief, she discovered that the family were not the first to be killed. For more than a month people had gone missing, mostly farmers that worked the land furthest from the town, away from civilisation and help. The police had dismissed the desperate pleas of family and friends as ravings, and never once went near any of the farms.
Doing her own digging, Alice came up with nothing. It was as if the men had disappeared into thin air. Weeks passed with no hint of Druscilla or anything else supernatural or malicious, and Alice was beginning to wonder if the young girl had been wrong all along. Then she encountered the first vampire.
It was a starved creature, devoid of reason, insane with bloodlust. It attacked her from the sewers that all met underneath the town centre. Before she killed it, she recognised it as one of the men who had gone missing. Her fears had been confirmed: there was a vampire in the area turning farmers.
Over the next five nights she fought and killed each of the remaining men, besting them all quickly. But all along she felt like she was being tested, watched by someone trying to measure her strength. Little did she know.
On the sixth night, Alice ventured into the forest, alone but armed. Unlike many other potentials, she had been trained by birth first by her father, himself a Watcher before he died years earlier, and then by the woman appointed by the Council. And even more rarely, she had killed vampires before receiving the gifts of the Slayer. All her training and skills led her to this moment.
That morning she had received a phonecall from Rupert Giles, briefing her on what to expect if she encountered Druscilla. Druscilla was a vampire of legend like Angelus or Spike. One never expected to encounter them, and believed most of the stories as being exaggerated or complete fabrications. What she had been told chilled her to the core.
Druscilla had killed scores of people in the most gruesome way possible. She had powers that other vampires did not possess. She had already killed a Slayer. Alice felt sadness in her heart to know that the Slayer Kendra had fallen to the beast.
Hours later she walked, vigilant and aware of her surroundings. And searching. Eventually she came across the cottage, small and dilapidated, easy to find in the end. There was no sign that it had been inhabited for many years. There were certainly no signs that a vampire had lived there. That was to be her downfall in the end.
As she turned to leave, her missed the creaking of the hatch that led to the basement. Silent as a cat, Druscilla overpowered her easily and as she slipped into unconsciousness, Alice knew that she had failed and her life was over.
For seven days Druscilla had kept her chained up and barely fed. The food was often rancid and mouldy, but edible and she had lapped it up for all the good it had done her. She had been tortured for hours on end, and often for nothing more than Druscilla's pleasure. Her years of practice showed and Alice could feel every lash as if it were being relived in the vampire's head.
But now it was coming to an end, that much was becoming clear. Druscilla's rants were becoming more unhinged and she babbled much more than she had at the start. It wasn't clear when she had last fed and Alice was having trouble keeping track of time between periods of unconsciousness.
Looking up into the deep brown eyes of her beautiful torturer she knew that when she died it would be in agony and pain, begging for her life. It did not make her feel better to know that she would beg for anything, but she knew this to be true.
"It's time, precious, time for all your suffering to end," Druscilla said, walking around the bed. She put the poker down with a thump and giggled again to herself, mumbling as she did so. Walking to the shelf she picked the doll up and danced with it around the room.
"Look at Miss Edith, how she glows! She likes you, dear Alice, yes she does! She doesn't want me to kill you, but we both know I have to. Otherwise you might go back to that bad Slayer and tell her where to find me, and we can't have that."
With a flourish, she put the doll down again, placing her carefully on a shelf and turned back. Her forehead had wrinkled and her teeth lengthened as she assumed the guise of the undead, the trademark look of the vampire.
"Did you know that the blood of a Slayer warms my veins? It makes my insides feel like fire." Alice tried to talk through the gag but Druscilla stopped her by putting a finger to her own lips. "Ssh now, no talking."
She walked to the head of the bed, and her head looked even more grotesque upside down. Druscilla smiled at her, warmly as if Alice was a friend. Then with a growl her teeth flashed and she ripped her throat out.