Something caught Solstice's eye as she was beginning to drift into a more
disinterested than weary sleep. She gazed across the dank, metal strewn cell
and thanked the powers that be that she; colured a lifeless chalk white and
clad in a dirty, patchy grey- appeared camolflauged against her similarly
monochrome surroundings.
She strained her eyes as the tiny shape moved again- ducking in
between a cluster of dreary rusted crates. It seemed... alive; desperate for an
escape- not unlike her. It yelped as it fought to escape this crampt prison. It
grew flustered. Solstice battled to make out the thing's shape. For most human
beings, it wouldn't have been easy to see at all without any pupils, but then,
she had ceased being human long ago.
She strained her eyes again, then recognised the creature's movement-
a flutter; a bat.
She smirked a devillish smirk and craned her neck towards the lofty
wire mesh trapdoor above through which she had previously been so
callously tossed. Reverberations in the metal so slight that even an over
sensitive sysmic scanner would have trouble detecting shuddered through
her bones and made her feel like a humanoid door buzzer. Someone was
coming, and what more ironic way to achieve her escape than to pander to
some of the world's most cliched vampire myths?
Jose gulped deeply and clung onto his wrist strap torch like a beloved
security blanket. He progressed gingerly towards the gauze grate in the grimy
iron gurdered floor and was careful not to get too close as he peered into the
darkness below.
He never wanted to join the cult. He didn't even understand it- what
he was supposed to believe and why. He had only joined up because his
mother had made him. Well, technically, she hadn't made him, since all
recruitments were strictly volentary, but forteen year old boys tend to listen to
their mothers, when they are forceful enough, at least. Jose was one such boy.
Mother had been so proud of him when he agreed to sign up, and besides, he
supposed being a devout member of the cult, he never had to go to school,
never had to do any homework; never had to do detentions and presentations
and so on.
He had always respected his mum. She had always wanted the best for
him in her own, funny, often utterly crazy kind of way.
Jose knelt down and became awestruck by the crampt nothingness
down there. He squinted. Assorted boxes, various junk from a bygone age, but
no captive.
Just then, he was broadsided by a shaggy looking bat as it leapt out
from between the gaps in the wire hatch and scooted off into the night.
Jose sighed a guilty sigh at an unwelcome realisation; that pesky bat
was the vampire, transformed, and now free. The family wouldn't like this. The
prisoner had evaded him, and as he recalled, right now she was his
responsibility.
He nervously fingered the collapsable steel ladder afixed to the rim of
the cage opening and recalled the head priest saying "you can use force if she
tries any tricks." Well, this certainly constituted a trick.
Jose pooled his limited bravery into one limp wristed action- yanking
the hatch open and reminding himself that the chilling prospect of being
locked in this outside world with the vampire was far less appealing
than locking himself away in there if only to be away from her. There was an
element of injustice in all this. Afterall, he was just a kid. Why couldn't one of
the superiors check on their new and highly dangerous captive?
Solstice bided her time in the shadows as Jose made his way slowly
down the ladder rung by rung, arriving after an apparent age at the bottom
only to curse the feel of the cold, stench emitting liquid which formed a series
of pungent puddles across the minimal length of the cell.
That apparent age, however, was about to become comparibly
fleeting.
Solstice couldn't contain her hunger and delight any longer. Not only
prey, but fresh, pure prey. Meek, succulent prey. She emerged from the
darkness behind the trembling form of Jose, raised herself onto the balls of
her feet to make up for her oft debilitating lack of height, wrapped her cold but
strangely graceful arms around his chest and torso and plunged her cruel,
serrated cainines into his soft, juvenile neck with such verosity that a cork like
pop and a subtle splat of blood could be heard as they burst the surface of the
skin.
Solstice shut her frightening blank eyes tightly, dug deeper with her
ferocious teeth and basked in the ecstacy of thsi moment. The heart pounding
adrenalyn rush. The gorgeous, metallic sour-sweet taste and the rich, silty
texture of blood gushing over he lifeless lips and pleasing her tastebuds as it
trickled over her tounge.
Jose flinched at first, almost paralysed with terror- a short bout of
struggling which Solstice calmly ended with a slight, forceful increase of
pressure on her hold around his body.
Jose's breath began to falter in stages as if he had just developed a
nasty case of hiccups. He wimpered, but his panicking brain failed to get his
body to move. Solstice disuaded him from futher wriggling with an astute tug
of his waist and delighted in the power- the primordial animalistic lust that
destruction brings; the buzz of drinking the forbidden nectar- a buzz which
never lessened.
She could have stopped at this point, if escape was her single aim-
even if revenge was her primary motivation. It wasn't.
Jose's eyes were growing heavy. He had lost all notion of fighting
long ago. Solstice- an inch shorter and considerably smaller than her far
younger victim, sucked the last vestige of succulent hemoglobin dry as if she
was polishing off the icy end of a milkshake with a blocked straw and cast the
pale corpse aside like an outdated tailor's shop dummy- consigned to the
already bulging junk pile.
She raised her head and smiled broardly, a roaming trickle of blood
drooping down her chin and off her face, creating little cloudy red ripples in
the stagnant sheet of water in which she stood.
There was a new energy now. She felt alive. She felt she could
almost leap up to that open hatch all by herself, although with the ladder she
wouldn't have to. In her case, at least, the way to a girl's heart was most
definately through her stomach.
She gazed down on the prostrate body- small and inanimate;
unadulterated and innocent. A human being would look on such a sight in
utter disgust and dismay; a child- a young, blameless child with a whole
uncharted future ahead of him- left carelessly strewn across the trash. But
Solstice's only thought was a complaint; why didn't human beings hold more
blood?
She used the back of her palm to redirect the red liquid spill from
her mouth back in and wiped her lips clean. "Addiction is indeed a most
troublesome thing..." she wispered in her quirky semi olde english dialect;
licking her fingers dry one by one like a toddler having just played in its
mother's cake mix; "...one must nourish it."
CHARACTER PORTRAITS FOR CHARACTERS FROM 'THE COMPENDIUM'
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