The Vampire's Crimson Kiss (Editing)

Three Weeks later, I was sitting at a café table in the Sin's Edge overlooking the night market with Madam Quaila, Lady Valencia, a vampire called Domina Abachz, and another called Domina Scheherazade. When we met, I felt like a spy with them. They were the true face of vampires, stunningly beautiful, breathtakingly confident, without any hint of shame, remorse, or any moral qualms, and they were completely unburdened by the slightest moral restraint or limit to their sensuality.

Individually, they were too much, and collectively, they were far worse. Lady Valencia lived on my floor; we had similar hair, and she was my image of what I would become if I had been sired. It wasn't that displeasing.

Today, everyone was excited about the upcoming hunting trip. We had been shopping for riding boots for the hunt. Valencia had insisted on getting ones with enormous stiletto heels, on the basis that the last thing you would be doing in riding boots was walking.

"Let's see what you have bought," Madam Quaila said in the shadow tongue as she sat down with a number of bags in her hand.

In practice, I would be hard-pressed to remember the last time I spoke in English. I dreamt in the shadow tongue, and it came naturally to my mouth and my hearing. Initially, I would hear, translate, think in English, and respond in the Shadow Tongue. At some point, I couldn't remember when, I stopped internally translating and relaxed into fluency. This was partly due to spending far too much time reading from the Duke's library. As promised, I had passed the point where I could read without speaking the words aloud, then to where there was barely a tremor in my lips, and now to where I was Mary's equal. I even began to develop an ear for the accent. The more recent bite-born would speak with tones of their original English, while older pure-borns had a different, older pronunciation that seemed more musical. I was able to spend more time with the Duke in an open secret, and he was tutoring me on the correct pronunciation.

I was now a regular member of the judicial court, so I tried to develop a more regal accent closer to his. They stopped calling me silver-neck and I had gained the nickname of iron-hand. This was partly due to my suggestion of horrific punishments for vampires. As I discovered more about the machines in the nerve garden I was curious to see them used on vampires more so than the high priestess. 

The humans I judged tended to be beastly people not deserving of sympathy. I had been lenient on one villager after a fight with a neighbor. I had advised that he should be drained only twice. Then he went back and killed the neighbor. I felt it was my fault so I was determined not to make that mistake again. So my punishments for humans tended to be pretty severe as well.  This delighted the bloodthirsty court, adding to the Duke and my own popularity. So when I did find a woman who was thrown in jail for stealing bread for her child they listened to me. 

On the plus side, Cub seemed strangely keener to do what I asked; she would leap into action at my slightest request. Mary kept calling me mistress, even when we were alone.

I was also getting quite handy with a whip and found myself quite immune to the pleas and whimpering of vampires than humans when I used it.  

"Only a vampire would wear stiletto heels on a hunt," I said in the shadow tongue as I envied the boots.

I was now used to walking in coven pumps; the vampire women enjoyed the highest of stiletto heels, using them like so much else to flaunt their sexuality. I was not to be outdone, and while you couldn't walk on soft ground in them, I was learning that the only soft ground in a coven was familiar's backs. Hunting, well, back home I had hunted with a crossbow on horseback, mostly for deer. Vampires didn't trust each other enough for crossbows; they preferred to fall on their prey with their teeth. To run the prey down, they hunted with dogs.