Author's Note: Written for the 31 Days of Flash Fiction Event
Day 2 Prompt: There was a ring in his teacup.
Max Word Count: 1,500
Actual Word Count: 1,439
On Order of the Vampire Queen
"You have one week. Do not disappoint me."
A soft, young voice escaped the lips of the rotting hag with a dislocated jaw, and Severus had to steel himself to keep a neutral demeanor. As soon as the walking corpse had shuffled out of sight, he finally allowed himself to breathe again.
"She couldn't have sent a fresher one to be her mouthpiece, I suppose," Severus grumbled.
It hadn't been his choice to be turned into a vampire by one of the Deep Queen's minions during the Final Battle either, but that ship had sailed long ago. Like all new thralls, he'd been brought into her service, and his undeath had been pledged to her for the foreseeable future. Now that he was, for all intents and purposes, an inhuman creature, there was no way he would willingly show his face to those he once knew.
Especially when he still had trouble controlling his hunger. He'd already made far too many mistakes as it stood.
It was official. Severus Snape was cursed. How else could he have had so much rotten luck?
"What's she need this time?" He could hear the impish expression on the face of his partner as she sat down across from him.
He looked down at the table before him and frowned. His teacup, the special one he used to sip his daily sustenance out of, was missing. Severus clenched his fist and turned his head upward to see Hermione sitting on the top of the backrest at the diner's scarlet booth seat, her leather boots pressing into the cushion as she stared down at him. She twirled his teacup around one finger and winked.
"Wouldn't you like to know?" he muttered, fixing her with a scowl.
"Oh, don't get your knickers in a twist," Hermione retorted, pulling a blood pack from her coat and carefully emptying it into the teacup. "Had to finish topping up the old emergency supply."
Severus felt his whole body tense as the coppery scent filled the air. He was lucky that the vampire cafe was mostly empty during this part of the early evening. He took the teacup back from her with slightly shaking fingers, and sipped at it with as much dignity as he could manage.
Severus could not reconcile this self-assured, winking woman with the mousy know-it-all he'd known long ago. The fact that the ravages of time had stopped ravaging him once he'd been turned meant that by this point, she was only a few years younger than the year he'd ended his human existence. A wealth of traveling and experiencing the world would do that to a person, he supposed, especially considering that Hermione had found a lucrative position as a high-ranking Liaison to the Queen. Her skills in magical creature diplomacy, knowledge of the workings of the Ministry of Magic, and ability to blend into larger Muggle society had made her invaluable to the cause of the Queen in finding a way to integrate vampire society into the wider world with as few fatalities as possible. Hiding in the darkness was doing no one any favors, and the lingering elder wizards who associated vampires with Voldemort had led to more than a few strained debates in the Wizengamot about the classification of a vampire in larger society.
"Are you sure you'd rather drink it like that?" Hermione asked. "I'm not squeamish about offering it from the source."
"Thanks but no," he replied, hating himself for how delicious her blood tasted on his tongue.
After all, he knew he wasn't her first choice.
Thanks to Blood-replenishing potions, it was easy enough for St. Mungo's to furnish the vampires with a ready supply of their main food source, and there were more than a few vampire "groupies" who would volunteer to feed a vampire in exchange for food, partnership, or additional benefits.
Vampires swore left and right that blood from a compatible donor gave them more strength and vitality. Perhaps this was why the Queen designated all of her Agents with a Liaison partner; a human with a compatible blood type who would furnish them with blood and provide support on missions.
He looked down. There was a ring in his teacup. He resisted the urge to press his face into the bottom of it to lick the red stain.
Hermione had only been his partner for a few years. She'd been with another Agent for almost a decade before that. Dimitri Wright had been everything Severus was not; blond, broad-shouldered, confident. There had been whispers that she'd fallen for her previous partner, and all of the high society functions they'd appeared at together certainly made them appear to be the perfect couple. But the Queen had suddenly reassigned her to Severus after his previous partner had—Severus preferred not to think about that.
"Hello, Earth to Severus?" Hermione was waving her hand in front of his face.
"You needn't be rude," he scoffed.
"And you needn't be staring off into space all night, yet here we are. What's the new assignment?"
"She wants us to find and disband a Blood-Letting gang," Severus said, already dreading it. "Apparently some hot-shot group of vampires has decided that they want to gorge themselves on blood like a bunch of vampiric Roman nobility. Normally, I wouldn't understand the urgency, but it seems this particular sect is actively exsanguinating muggles, and it's a bad look with the upcoming vampire legislation going before the Wizengamot. We only have a few days."
He pulled out the parchment that the inferi mouthpiece had dropped off with its cryptic message and unrolled it slowly.
She stood and came around to his side of the booth, scooching up against him and leaning into his side. "Oh? Where shall we start?"
"My bet is that whoever is hosting these ghastly events has some sort of base within a two mile radius of the vast majority of abductions," he said, frowning, as he looked down at the seemingly random marks spread across the map.
"May I?" Hermione pressed her shoulder against him as she drew her finger over each mark.
She always seemed so easy with physical touch in ways that he never had been, but he looked forward to these moments when he could write off her affection as something incidental to their casework. He couldn't help but close his eyes and breathe her in as she muttered to herself about various criteria.
"That's odd. Look," she mused, and Severus instinctively leaned against her to follow the movement of her finger.
"Each of the abductions took place within a block of an entrance to the Underground," Severus said.
"Are you sure you wouldn't like a little extra blood for the road?" Hermione said, pulling back her hair to expose her neck with a toothy grin.
"That would be…inadvisable," Severus said, his body growing very still.
"Fine, fine, I was just joking, you know," she said with a shrug.
She hopped up and grabbed her rucksack, then waited for him by the door as he gathered his things.
Severus carefully tucked the map in an inner pocket of his jacket and silently cursed himself. Her scent had nearly caused him to lose himself again. He needed to be careful, or he was sure that something terrible would happen. It had happened before, after all, and the last thing he wanted was to destroy everything again.
"You know, you've got a ring in your teacup," Hermione mentioned, her lips drawn up into a cheeky smirk as Severus reached the door.
"What of it?" Severus replied, keeping his expression neutral. Had she guessed that he had taken to washing it gently enough to leave the mark within so that if she ever did leave, it would always be there to remind him of their time together? Even thinking it made him feel like a creep.
"You'd better be careful, Severus," Hermione said, and his heart nearly stopped. Had she figured out his secret feelings?
"And why is that?" he asked, twisting the fabric of his pocket between his fingers.
"One of these days, I might just leave a different sort of ring in your cup," she said, and turned to go ahead.
"What is that supposed to mean?" Severus demanded, following after her at a brisk walk.
"It means that maybe you'll find out if we can catch some murderous ne'er do wells first," Hermione said, picking up her pace.
She was facing away, so she couldn't see when he allowed himself the merest hint of a smile. Maybe he wasn't cursed after all.