Chapter One (Abandoned)
After she had left him it hadn't taken him very long to decide that he didn't want to be dead.
She was his world, his life, everything. His existence centered on her, she had made him. She was his sire. He belonged to her.
When he had been nothing but ravening hunger that consumed even the dark, when he had known nothing, when he had nothing, not even a name, she had come to him and bound him to her.
In the way of their kind she said, in the way of Sire and Childe, she said.
He was hers before he was his own.
She would not allow to him to feed, restraining him easily with her greater strength.
She enthralled him as he writhed and fought in the delirium of the metamorphosis.
She was all he knew, his sire or his oblivion.
She fed while he stood by, immobilized by her power, slavering and whining like a beast, his eyes wide and black and his fangs exposed.
She would not allow him to feed. But when she had dropped her prey dead at her feet, when the thunder of her prey's heart had stilled, when the blood scent hung like a fog of perfume around her, then, then she would open a wound in her breast, over her heart and allow her cursed blood to flow crimson into his waiting mouth.
Never enough, it was never enough, he hungered always. She held him in an iron grip, playing out that life giving substance like the potion and poison that it was, the elixir of life, the elixir of death.
Only when she was sure he was conquered and cowed and wholly her creature, did she lift her compulsion enough to tutor him in the ways of the night.
She would require him to hunt and capture her prey and relinquish it to her.
She would not allow him to feed. She compelled him to watch her drink. She compelled him to trap and torture her hapless prey and forbid him the taste of the blood he spilled.
She compelled him to love her, she took her pleasure of his body, whether he willed it or not.
Often when she was displeased with him she would force him to ground. His greatest fear, to wake in the dark again, entombed.
Slowly she edged him away from the beast, her lessons harsh always. He learned to control the beast in order to please her; he learned to subordinate his desires and hungers in order to placate her. Christina molded the soft clay of her Fledgling, her Prince and Bastard.
Finally came the night when she had elevated him.
That sweet time before dawn when after she had compelled him to love her, when after she had ridden him to her satisfaction, when after she had allowed him his release, then, he waited for her to grant him the taste of her blood.
She captured his eyes as she bared her pale breast. With one hand behind his neck she pulled his face close and plundered his mouth with her tongue. She pressed her tongue to his pallet, forcing his fangs to drop. His eyes darkened to the same glittering jet as her own as he watched her dimple the skin above her nipple with a finger tip.
"Here," she said, "You may bite here." When she had pulled his head down until his lips touched her flesh then his instincts had burst into bloom.
Flawlessly he pierced her skin and ruptured the pulsing vessel beneath, flooding his mouth with the molten crimson of her life, the life that made him. He had crawled up her body attached to her chest like the leech that he was.
For the first time he had drunk of an unrestricted flow. When the dawn had taken him, for the first time he sank into her oblivion sated.
When he woke the next night his Sire had raised him. He was no longer her creature, her pet. He was now her Childe and Consort.
For a further six months they had hunted and fed and loved in abandon. Their lovemaking was a fiery and instinctive escape to paradise. They feared no end to their desires or wickedness.
The fledgling was hers; she kept him, her purse never empty, her servants saw to all.
She had taken to allowing her fledgling to hunt on his own though she now forbade him to kill, fearing that it would raise the alarm against them.
Her childe was a quick study; he had caught the eye of a barmaid as she passed him by in the public house. He had compelled her to go into an alley and wait for him there. He had pushed her unceremoniously into a doorway, rumpling up her skirts and entering her roughly and biting her savagely and without finesse in his hunger.
One moment the blood was sweet in his mouth and her flesh clamped warm and tight around him, the next he was lying across the alley, his shoulder dislocated and coughing up his own blood, where his broken ribs had punctured his lung.
He snarled his challenge to Christina, as he struggled to his feet but she had made short work of rendering him incapacitated. The barmaid sat blank-eyed and staring amid her skirts.
His sire had often indulged herself by dressing in his clothing and masquerading as a human male, with her silken hair tucked up under her cap or held clubbed at the nape of her neck. She made a handsome if somewhat effeminate lad. So she appeared tonight as her servant stood by silently holding the bridles of two well trained horses.
The fledgling groaned aloud and vomited bright red blood when his broken ribs shifted as she lifted him so that he hung over the horse's back. The servant bound him swiftly in place as Christina came around and, taking his chin, twisted his face towards her. She kissed his lips most tenderly and whispered in his ear, "The year is up."
Then she mounted her horse, and leading his mount she cantered away noisily down the street. It was a nightmare journey for the Fledgling as he watched the road pass directly under his head and his body burned and convulsed. He lacked the resources to heal and he lapsed in and out of consciousness.
For two hours she rode first by wagon track and then by field, until at last she halted and dismounted in front of a farmer's cottage.
The farmyard dog barked wildly only to fall whimpering at Christina's glance.
The old man who emerged cautiously from the cottage door relaxed visibly when he saw the young lord. He came forward with his head respectfully bowed as Christina said, curtly imitating the cracked voice of a youth, "My companion fell from his horse, he is injured. Help me get him down."
As the old man came up alongside of the fledgling, Christina reached out a negligent hand and struck the farmer under the jaw. He crumpled to the ground in a boneless heap. She came around to the other side of the trembling horse and with her little silver knife cut the ties that bound her Childe's body. He slid gracelessly off the horse and landed with a grunt, thankfully on his uninjured shoulder.
The Fledgling rolled to his back and lay staring with unblinking black eyes at the stars.
Christina came into his field of vision, and snarled at him, "The year is up; I shouldn't have to do this." But she had flipped him over and dragged him by the back of his doublet until his cheek rested against the back of the old man's head.
"Surely you are strong enough to find the teat...little prince," she mocked him as he slowly nuzzled his way to the old farmer's whiskered neck and finally managed to sink his fangs.
She stood watching, hands on hips, as he drew greedily on the human. She said conversationally, "Stay out of my territory. If I see you again I will kill you."
The Fledgling snarled as she bent and reached towards him, a feral lifting of the lips to bare his embedded fangs, but she only grasped his wrist and sharply pulled his shoulder back into alignment.
When he came to, she was gone. His mouth was full of cooling blood and the old man's heart had slowed to an uneven rate. His need was great and the vampyre quickly resumed his feeding; only relinquishing his hold when the heart shuddered to a stop.
Bereft and in shock at his sudden desertion, after tipping the old man's body into the well, the vampyre secreted himself in the darkest corner of a root cellar behind the cow byre. There he hid for a night and two days, until he was forced by hunger and his instinct to flee his Sire's wrath, to leave his shelter.
After she had left him it hadn't taken him very long to decide that he didn't want to be dead.