Bait

Vladimir's POV










Being born a vampire afforded me many advantages over your everyday vampire. I didn't have an insane aversion to the sun, I moved faster than the speed of light, I could live for all eternity and oh, my sense of smell was a hundred times better than a human’s. But there were times just like this when those abilities were more a curse than blessing. I wasn’t even in the room yet and the stench of terror and fetid piss was already clogging up my nostrils. So much so it was hard not to make my eyes water. I pressed my hand against the fingerprint scanner and waited for the flash of green that let me through. When the flash and beep sounded, I turned the heavy  silver ornamental handle counterclockwise. I made three rounds before heavy mechanical dings rang throughout the basement.

Final security measure complete, and I was finally able to push the black metal door open to reveal my prize. Behind a vault more secure than the federal reserve system was not gold, diamond or any jewels but something more precious to me than that. He was an overweight middle aged man with more alcohol in his system than blood. Currently, he was in a fetal position, the same way he has been since he passed out after screaming his lungs out. This yellow bellied excuse for a man was my ticket to freedom.

The old fool had even managed to excrete on his body. Along with his piss and vomit, the whole area was nothing short of revolting.  If he thought he’d gone through the worst, then he had no idea what I had in store for him, what I had in store for all of them.

Every single second of pain and sheer terror that I suffered for two hundred and six years, seven months and eleven days, I was going to visit on each and every single descendant of Kostov and the seven sisters.

More than two hundred years ago, the seven sisters had concocted and enacted a flawless coup. One that had caught me off guard, mostly because I had been an egotistical fool who had been reveling in his power. Of course I’d known about their alliance with the hunters and how both factions had planned to usurp me. The plan had been  for the head of the hunters -Kostov- to send his son to infiltrate my life and discover my weakness. It was a painfully simple and straightforward plan and I’d chuckled at the silliness of me being so gullible as to fall at Sven’s feet and spill all my secrets. That was the first red flag, one I’d willfully ignored. 

Kostov was a fool and he was a homophobe and he couldn’t have fathomed that his dear son would have ended up in my bed else he would have made sure to send Sven very far away from me, if he didn’t kill him first, that is. The seven sisters however, knew about my preference for the male gender and they probably figured out which way Sven swung -a fact his father had been oblivious of- and used him as a bait for me. 

The plan had gone off without a hitch. 

Sven’s entrance into my life was a rather chaotic one. It was on a moonless night and I was quite irritable. Lilya, my childe, was little more than a babe at twenty in vampire years, but she should have been able to control her bloodlust. Should have. 

The night’s lesson had been about teaching her restraint but she botched it something awful. Tall, handsome prey were meant to be fed upon, not drained until their life force was completely diminished damn it. 

I sent her back to the coven before I was forced to visit my anger upon her in ways even her worst nightmare couldn’t conjure up. I was taking a walk through the boundary that separated my territory and that of the hunters when I happened upon three men in a scuffle.

Or rather, two bulky men were beating a lanky youth to a pulp. (It would be weeks later before I found out that the scene had been staged. A risky endeavor though, what if I hadn’t stopped to help him?) In a moment of very rare compassion, I stepped out of the shadow and came to the rescue of their victim who was no longer moving.  I knocked the two weak humans out and pricked the motionless body with my feet. The body didn’t move but I knew he was still alive. Even with my superior vision, it was still hard to determine the colour of his hair. Sighing in defeat, I bent and picked him up.

He was shockingly light in my arms and he appeared to be bleeding from his nose and mouth and his shirt was torn. I could also feel that his ribs were broken and there was blood flowing freely from where he had been stabbed. The blood had now seeped onto my pristine white t-shirt. Why, oh why had I bothered to rescue this mutt? Now I had to play nursemaid. Maybe I should dump him at the nearest alley. I would have done exactly that and said ‘good riddance’ but then he opened his eyes.

Hypnotic, cerulean eyes held mine captive and I knew then that I was forever lost. This underfed mutt was my beloved. The other half of me fate had created just for me. He was mine and no one will ever hurt him again.

Our love affair had been fast and it had crashed just as hard. No, it had gone up in flames and it burned everything I knew and held dear in its wake. I was consumed in the throes of passion, elated in the joy of having found my beloved. Even when I had found out who his father was and the real reason the hunters had put him in my path, I’d still played the ignorance card just so I could keep him next to me. 

I'd held all the cards. I knew all of their secret plans and reveled in the knowledge. Oh, how naive I’d been. I had known all of the hunters’ plan but it turned out that they were simply pawns and it was the seven sisters who controlled all the pieces. The plan had been to learn all of my secrets and I had their spy in my bed. Sven turned out to be merely a trojan horse meant to deceive me and the real spy, I hadn’t known of his existence until it was too late.