For seven days and seven nights her master had starved her. It made her weak and woozy but what was worse, for her, was knowing why he'd done it. He wanted her to lose control. He was going to tell her to do something she really didn't want to but her thirst would overcome her. Whether it was a punishment for refusing to drink from that poor young man or if it was always a tactic he was eventually going to use, she did not know.
'You're going to enjoy this,' he said with a smile. 'You and I are nightmares. We feed on fear and pain, and I've got quite the treat for us. Your target is another young man. This one's name is Stephen. Don't worry, he's an adulterer and a thug. A lowlife who won't weigh on your conscience. I want you to charm him, I'll show you how, and lead him to me. If you feed on him before then, or kill him, I will be very unhappy with you.'
'Yes, master,' she said through gritted teeth.
He taught her the powers she could employ to charm him over the next few hours and sent her off. When she was younger, she'd been taught courtly graces but that had never seemed to help her. What her master had armed her with, however, was a deeper understanding of the powers of her blood. She entered Stephen's favourite tavern in a low-cut top which immediately earned her the attention of dozens of its male patrons. Upon seeing her red eyes, most turned away but a few did not. Her mark was at the bar, allowing her to scoot up next to him. Putting her lessons into practice, she made herself flush when she looked at him, before quickly turning her head away as if in embarrassment.
When she ordered her drink, he offered to pay for it and she put up a small amount of resistance, ensuring that he thought he was impressing and overawing her when she finally yielded. They took their ale to a table in the corner and she noticed that he'd pocketed his wedding band along the way. He was stocky and had bright blue eyes. When he stared at her she called upon her blood, just as her master had taught her, and hypnotised him. 'We should get out of here,' she said and he agreed immediately, in a dull voice that indicated she'd enthralled him. He then followed her out of town and deep into the woods, and kept walking until her hypnotic lure had worn off.
'Wait, wait, wait,' he said, trying to get his bearings, 'can't we just stop and do it here?'
Internally she shivered with disgust but her body remained composed. 'Oh,' she said, smiling, 'I'm just waiting for my grand-sire.' It wasn't even a lie.
'Dreamling bitch!' he shouted, as his head whipped around, suddenly spotting a dozen pairs of shiny red eyes in the darkness. 'You've set me up!' Before he could think about running, a nightmare emerged from the darkness. It was a hellhound and it ran right at him. It should've eviscerated him but, instead, it simply bit one of his ankles and kept running. Intuitively, she knew that her master was in command of it somehow. The spray of blood and Stephen's cry of pain drove her mind into a frenzy as the nightmare within her urged her to sate her thirst.
She repressed the feeling, though it was very hard, and remained still. The young man continued to cry and even soiled himself when a dozen fairies came at him, nipping and stinging him and crawling under his clothes. He frantically batted them away, even knocking one out but then her master emerged, with the hellhound in tow. 'Grab his left foot,' he barked at her and she complied. The hellhound bit down on what remained of his right and her master grabbed the man's hands. Stephen screamed in fear and agony as they pulled. Within seconds, it had become too much from her and she broke her grip.
Her position was swiftly taken up by another nightmare and she turned away, even covering her ears. What she hated most was how much it had sated her. She was still desperate for blood, of course, but the man's sheer terror had done a lot to calm her nightmarish side. Stephen's torture continued for hours, until she could stand starvation no longer and partook, feasting in much the same fashion as a famished animal. She noticed, soon after, that the experience had driven her master into a frenzy of his own and they fought over their kill until there was little left of it to consume. He looked at her then, drenched in blood, and she saw only a predatory hunger in his eyes. In an instant, she readied herself for a fight to the death, half hoping she'd lose and half hoping she'd win.
They tore pieces out of one another but he came out the better for it each time, until he finally frenzied beyond control and sank his fangs into her neck. That was the end, she thought, as she felt her lifeforce begin to fade. Before she could settle on a pleasant memory to reach for, however, her master broke contact and recoiled from her, clutching his throat. He began to vomit and she saw the blood - her blood - burn his mouth and throat as he did so. His jaw began to crumble into ash and he shot her a look of pure dread before flying away at blazing speed, far into the night sky. She found herself with excruciating cuts all over her body, standing in a pile of blood and viscera, surrounded on all sides by maddened nightmares, but alive.
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Mercifully, the sun came up about two hours later, banishing most of the nightmares. A few fairies lingered to pester and peck at her but she crushed them with ease. Glinting within the bloody puddle that used to be Stephen, she found a few shillings, which was when it occurred to her that, even if she was now free of her master, she was also free of her inheritance. Figuring that she'd be stealing either way, she decided to give the money to Stephen's widow and steal a change of clothes from someone less likely to miss them. Before she put any such plans in motion, however, she found a lake to bath herself in, washing off the blood and helping herself think, as her wounds healed up. Her blood had burned her master as if it were sunlight, something she'd neither heard nor read about.
Was that what it meant for a dhampir to be the ultimate weapon? She didn't like to think about the full implications - that she could've stood her ground and been safe from him long before she killed anyone. She realised that there was no going back, however, literally or figuratively. Dozens of people had seen her with Stephen and would connect her to his disappearance, and the woman in the cave might've said something as well. In effect, her master had succeeding in turning her into a monster. Whether she would embrace or try to atone for it was not something she quite knew though she suspected that a mix of both would be involved.
She held her breath underwater, knowing as well as anyone could that she didn't need to be breathe. An hour passed by and she felt fine. After that, she rose from the water without swimming and glided across the forest floor, not wanting to get her naked feet dirty and shaking herself dry in the meantime. Eventually, she was able to slip into town completely undetected and tuck the money into the right pocket. She searched the town for a wealthy family or young woman but gave up at nightfall and flew to the next town. She didn't even realise she was doing it, soaring through the air, until she was halfway there.
It filled her with exhilaration as the cold air buffeted her skin and she let out an involuntarily giggle as she found herself doing loops and twirls. Fairies danced around her and she let them, evading their attempts to nip at her with perfectly timed dodges and bursts of speed. The next town over was walled and patrolled by guards but that only made infiltrating it more exciting, as she timed her movements to get past them unnoticed. Next, she tried something she dearly hoped would work. She found a sleeping beggar, an old man in ragged clothes, and hovered behind him, sinking her fangs into his neck and covering his mouth to muffle his screams. She drank for only a few seconds before pulling away. The urge to drain him fully was exceptionally hard to resist but she pulled it off and, once she'd flown out of sight, she realised that she still felt sated.
From now on, she reasoned, if she ever had a craving for blood, she knew that she could satisfy it without killing. The beggar put the guards on high alert for the night but it had still been worth it to find out. What literature she'd read about dhampirs, which was not much, said that they could not transmit the vampiric infection but she still watched the beggar as the sun came up, just in case, as did the guards. Thankfully, he didn't turn to ash nor did his eyes turn red. Afterwards, Laurel began her search for fine clothing. She soon spotted a well-to-do woman with three young charges, one of them being around her own size and age.
The woman was horrible and reminded her of her step-mother, which sealed the deal, and she spent the day stalking them from the shadows. Since it was daytime and she was as silent as the grave besides, none of them so much as whipped their head around and she soon learned all of their habits. The oldest girl, and the one whose clothes she'd be stealing, was seventeen and had been frustrating her parents by refusing to marry. The middle child was a brainy, argumentative and surly girl of fourteen, and the youngest was a sensitive and frail eleven-year-old. She could've swiped a set of clothes at any point but something kept her returning to the house over and over.
At first, she thought it was the sheer thrill of risking discovery but that made less and less sense to her as she realised just how unlikely any of them were to catch her. No, what drew her into their home at night was the same thing that drew all nightmares. The eldest would sleep uneasily, menaced by cruel dreams, as Laurel hovered over her, sometimes close enough to smell her blood. The fear sated her thirst as if she were sucking blood from her neck and the more she exposed herself to it the more she started to notice it everywhere she went. Humans were so very afraid and the urge to truly become a nightmare grew and grew. One night, the girl she was watching - someone she'd become more than a little obsessed with - birthed a dream creature.
She'd never seen the process before and it fascinated her. Shadows seemed to pour out of the sleeping girl's mind, from beneath her eyelids, slowly coalescing into a shape by the side of her bed. The resulting creature, a nameless horror with an obscenely wide grin and large lidless eyes, did not live longer than a minute, however, as Laurel slipped behind it and sank her teeth in, lifting it off the ground and holding its grotesque mouth shut. She took that as her cue to be done with the family, as much as it pained her, and she stole an old dress the girl had grow out of and a pair of boots. She stayed outside the girl's window until the early hours, just to hear her beautiful scream when she found a desiccated monster carcass on her bedroom floor.
'I'd make a much better nightmare than that thing,' she boasted to herself.
