Here is a little character play that I did with some vampires, to see if they could capture me into telling their stories. They just might have.

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“Please, Val. Please!” The honeyed female voice skirted the border of whining as a pale young thing leaned her head on the knee of a man engaged in smoking a clove.

“I said no, Seph. You’re not ready,” was his taut reply as he exhaled a wreath of smoke about her silver-streaked head.

The sweetly whine came again. “But I’m hungry.”

A smooth ivory wrist was extended to her silently but, in a childlike tantrum, she pushed it away. “I don’t want to drink from you! I want to go out on my own!” The young woman leapt to her feet, standing over the reposed man, obviously her senior and steward. Her pretty face held a childish rage but suddenly softened as she spoke her thoughts.

“I want to walk through the night, feel the moonlight on my skin, and find some pretty young boy – one that can’t resist me – get him alone and have some fun. I want to feel what you feel, Valarn. I want to feel it warm and smooth in my mouth and sliding down my throat. Will you deny me that? I want to go.” She sank to her knees before him again, her eyes pleading.

Valarn looked down at her for a moment, having just taken a long drag from the clove. The cigarette was balanced perfectly between two long slender fingers, his elbow resting on the high arm of the Victorian sofa. His eyes were still, unemotional, unmoved as he looked at Sephira; then, without a word, he exhaled another plume of smoke, right into that cute little face of hers.

“No.”

The rage returned to Seph’s eyes and she raised her hand to slap that annoyingly-calm face but Valarn’s left hand gripped her wrist tightly, vise-like. She gave a little yelp and pulled, trying to get away and baring her fangs in anger.

“Let me go, Valarn! You can’t keep me in here forever!” she fumed.

Valarn simply rolled his eyes, strands of his golden hair falling before the sharp grey orbs. “Stop acting like a child, Sephie.”

But she just struggled all the more.

Finally, he did let her go, allowing her to stumble back and fall on her backside, crying angrily, the dark of her mascara making little black trails down her pallid cheeks. Then her eyes lit on a face beyond Valarn’s and he smiled, knowing exactly who was behind him.

“Jacob, you just missed a fabulous show. Seph was just telling me how eager and ready she is to be out and about,” Valarn’s tone was mocking and then grew cold. “Go to your room, Sephie-dear. I’ll deal with you later.”

She didn’t move.

“Now!”

Scrambling to her feet, Sephira stalked off down the corridor, the click of her spike heeled boots echoing off the walls.

“Why do you tease her, Val? I think she’s ready.” Jacob leaned on the back of the sofa.

Valarn put the clove out in his palm, watching it smolder and smoke. He then flicked that slender hand, tossing the ashes into the air. “That’s nice, Jacob But, unfortunately, you’re not her sire.” He stood. “I am. And I decide when she’s ready.” He walked slowly around the couch, his bare feet silent on the marble floor.

Jacob cast a glance back down the corridor where Seph had disappeared. Yes, she was Valarn’s “child” and Jacob must do his best to stay away until Valarn decided that she was “of age”. Until then, she would drink from him and stay indoors at night.

Valarn had many talents that his brood did not know about and so smiled to himself, his back to Jacob. He knew every thought that raced through the young vampire’s mind.

“Tell me, Jacob. I haven’t seen you on the hunt lately. Have you a blood doll that we don’t know about?” Val turned, leaning his hips against the elegant oak sideboard, a glass of white wine in his hand. His thin lips were half turned up in a curious, intruding smile. “Are you avoiding the streets, Jacob, my dear boy?”

Jacob’s eyes flitted away off to the side, dark green circles of truth. He never was a very good liar. He didn’t like to hunt that much and had found a pretty girl who suited his taste. He now kept her in his home, feeding from her when he needed to. Until she died, that’s what he would do.

Valarn tsk’ed. “My, my, my. Whatever would Sephira think if she knew you kept a blood doll? I think she looks up to you as the knightliest of vampires; it would be a shame to dash her fantasies like that.”

“Stop it, Valarn!” Jacob’s voice was far sharper than he had intended it to be.

Valarn turned from his prowl around the sofa that he had begun, staring back at Jacob. Emotion never flickered in his grey eyes, always stony, always calm. He sipped from his crystal flute and leaned a knee on the sofa.

“You see, Jacob? This is why she isn’t ready. Until Seph finds a better role model than you, I shan’t let her out. She is far too impressionable. She needs a stronger mentor. Like, oh say, Victoria.”

Come get the bait, little one.

“Victoria?!” Jacob snapped around at Valarn.

Caught!

Valarn nodded, sipping from the flute again. “Victoria.”

Jacob’s face looked just a shade paler, almost transparent.

Victoria, or Lathspell as some of them called her, was by far the most vicious of all their “family”. In fact, she had sired Jacob himself and he had come to hate her for her brutality in all aspects of life. Though Valarn was the strongest and, no doubt, the most dangerous of their little cohort, Lathspell was a force in and of herself. She had a pension for bloodlust that left no room for argument. She killed for pleasure, not just because she was hungry. Jacob had watched her torture cats and rats when pickings on the street were slim, or just to amuse herself. She loved to make her victims suffer. She had played around a good deal with Jacob himself before she’d embraced him. Only fear of Valarn’s wrath had kept him from killing her at the first chance presented to him.

Lathspell was the very epitome of sadistic malevolence. She was always thinking of new techniques to torture, pinning humans to hard board cards like so many insect specimens as she contemplated their fate. She had actually created a specimen case once, collecting quite a few different “species of kine” as she called them. It had been “great fun” in her mind and then she’d tossed them to Val’s dogs when she was done with them. “Doggy bags” she called them.

Yes, Jacob hated her and he hated that Val sought Victoria as a role model for little Sephie. But just what could he do about it?

Nothing, that was what.