“It needs to go on my eyes,” she said. “I can’t drink it because the spell in my throat will just absorb it.”
“If you get on the table I can drop it in.” He took the spell from her and lifted her onto the table. She lay back, and he uncorked the bottle.
She forced her eyes open. The potion stung a little as it splashed her pupils. She shut her eyes and imagined her human self. Her living self. What a different girl she seemed to be, in Parsons’ mind. It was overwhelming to consider.
She heard Dennis take an awed breath. “It’s working.”
Her eyes opened. She looked at her hands, seeing the last glimpse of her carved nails before they were swallowed by illusions.
She was staring at the hands of a real girl, flesh and blood and vein. There was no mirror here, so she couldn’t see herself. Instinctively, she touched her cheeks, but she felt the same. The illusion was only visual.
Dennis shut the bottle without looking at it—he was looking only at her—and stuck it in his pocket. He helped her off the table.
It’s easier for him now, she thought, with slight dismay.
But then he put a hand on her cheek and shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Don’t think it.”
“Come on, I can’t help but think it.”
“You’re beautiful and you do look very much like your mother. But what makes you so alluring is knowing that I’m the only one who will know the real you. I had to fight my own brain to get you. It’s better for the struggle.”
“That doesn’t make much sense.”
“Sure it does.” He pulled her closer and tucked her hair behind her ears. “So much for not attracting attention. They’re still pointed.”
“Oh—dear.” Parsons had forgotten to imagine that when the spell was activating. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she could snip off the tips and sew them up later and the illusion would follow. (Or would that only make it worse?)
“It doesn’t matter. Your hat covers them up and if it doesn’t, we’ll say something mysterious about fairies.”
“Will that be one of those tall tales you told me about?”
He laughed. “Sort of. But we’d better go. Before they find us.”
“Yes. I don’t think we can trust the people in the farmhouse either.”
“Time to run, Miss Belvray.” He swept her into his arms and opened the door.
He dashed into the woods behind the shed, clambering over rocks without even having a free hand, and springing over bushes with ease. The first time she’d ever seen him, before she knew what he was, she’d been jealous of his physical power, and that remained true. It would’ve been wonderful to run beside him. But maybe it was for the best that she could never even be tempted to become a vampire.
When they had gotten a distance away from the shed, they walked under the thick cover of the forest until the sun was starting to set. They seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. “Where is the steel factory?” Parsons asked.
“Obviously, we’re on the outskirts,” Dennis said. “All we need is the nearest train station.”
“Which way do we go?”
“South,” he said. “To Baltimore.” He took her hand. “Are you nervous?”
“Yes.” She gave him a look. Of course she was nervous. “I can’t help but worry that I’ve made a terrible mistake. At the same time, I think staying would have been a mistake too. I think I couldn’t win.”
He nodded. “I’m nervous myself. But at the same time, have you ever had a dream about something wonderful and impossible? One of those dreams where you sort of know it’s a dream even inside the dream, and you keep looking for a way to make it real when you wake up? I feel like I’ve managed it. I got you out of the dream world and into my world. I’m not going to let the dream die. Whether it’s in Baltimore or elsewhere, I’ll find a place for us here.”
When the sun dipped out of sight, Dennis turned up his collar and tugged down his hat, then dared to walk into the open. They found a country road of packed dirt. A horse and open carriage came around the bend in the distance before long, and Dennis stopped walking and hailed the driver.
There was a human in that carriage, then. She was really here.
Two strong brown horses pulled the carriage. In the back were a few chickens in cages. The man sitting inside looked about a thousand years old to Parsons, practically a corpse; stooped, white-haired, wrinkled, with spotted skin. He was smoking a pipe and wearing a sturdy, threadbare combination of vest and trousers. Old humans really looked terrible.
“How far to the nearest train station?” Dennis asked.
“Hellertown. That’s where I’m headed for the night.”
“Would you mind?”
“Not at all.” He waved at the empty length of seat beside him. If one could call that rickety plank a seat. It was strange that she was in America, the land of progress, and the first thing they encountered was a cart that could have existed in her own world a hundred years ago.
Dennis lifted her up and then climbed up himself. “Thank you, sir.” He offered a hand. “Dennis Faraday and this is my wife Bernadette.”
“Pete Schruber.” The old man shook Dennis’ glove, with a slightly confused expression. “What brings you out here?”
Parsons could hardly believe this was happening. She was sitting next to a human and he wasn’t even blinking at her appearance. The carriage started moving, and she felt like her screws were going to rattle loose sitting in this cart.
Dennis leaned back and took out his cigarettes. “I’m going to take my girl to Baltimore.”
“What’re you doing down there?”
“I might start with buying her a proper Coca-Cola.”
If the old man found this to be a strange goal, he didn’t show it. “Well, I think you can get a Coca-Cola right in Hellertown while you wait for the train. You haven’t had one before?”
“No,” Parsons said.
“I have a lot of things to show her,” Dennis said, putting an arm around her as the road stretched ahead of them.
Thank you so much for reading! The story of Parsons and Dennis will continue with book 2 in fall 2017.
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Don’t miss…
If you enjoyed The Vampire’s Doll, don’t miss The Sorcerer’s Concubine!
Born of wood, cloth, and a substantial dose of magic, Velsa is a Fanarlem, a beautiful artificial girl. Raised to be a concubine, she has seen her friends at the House of Perfumed Ribbons sold off to be the pets of wealthy men. Now her own dreaded day has come… Chapter one is below!
Most of the men who came to the House of Perfumed Ribbons knew what they wanted. The girls came in a few classic types. There were the innocents with their youthful air. The vixens, sultry and experienced—the only girls who had been with men before. The bodyguards, trained in fighting. The “Little Wives” who would provide domestic comforts along with the physical, and the entertainer girls who could play an instrument and make witty conversation.
Velsa already knew she was not a bodyguard or a little wife, or she would have been pulled aside at a younger age to learn how to cook and nurse, or wield a bow and arrow. And certainly she was not a vixen, who periodically spent time with a more experienced male concubine.
She had spent hours upon hours plucking the strings of a bastir, in the hopes of being an entertainer. She figured any man who came to buy an entertainer girl must be well educated and appreciate the arts; maybe he would value her m
ind and not just her body.
Now that Velsa was finally old enough to be acquired, she found out exactly where she stood.
“You’ll be with the Village Girls,” said Dalarsha, the House Mother.
“The Village Girls?” Velsa was dismayed. “But…”
“I know, you have been very diligent with your music practice, but I’m afraid you just haven’t achieved the level of skill men will expect. You still make mistakes. There’s nothing wrong with being a Village Girl.”
“There’s nothing interesting about being a Village Girl either,” Velsa said.
“Listen, my dear,” Dalarsha said. “You don’t need to be interesting. Men don’t really care about that anyway. Just give them your sweetest face, and some man will be happy to treat you well.”
Soon Velsa would be a stranger’s possession. With luck, he would be kind. He would treasure her and give her gifts and take her to parties dressed in fine clothes to show off his wealth. But every girl knew they might not have that sort of luck.
And even the luckiest girls had still been created for a single purpose, in the end. Even a man who was generous and complimented her beauty would expect to have his way with her, any time it pleased him.
“Anyway,” Dalarsha said, more solemnly. “You have a golden band. We don’t want you to seem too dangerous.”
Velsa put a hand to the circle of gold locked around her throat. The enchanted band suppressed the telepathic abilities she had been born with. Without that assurance, no man would buy her—they wouldn’t feel safe. But even so, many Daramon men didn’t trust telepaths, and they wouldn’t look twice at a girl with her powers.
The girls who had come of age before her were excited to welcome her into the front of the House. They all couldn’t help but look forward to this right of passage, even as they feared it, because either way, it meant they were grown women, and the course of their lives would soon be determined. It was a tradition, on that first night, for all the girls to lend the new initiate their favorite pieces of clothing, clothes the girls often scrounged their tips to buy in the hopes of attracting the finest and wealthiest of men.
If the girl was lucky enough to be chosen on her very first night, all the beautiful clothes would go with her. It was a game that someone won every year or so. When this happened, word quickly leaked back to the younger girls who had not yet seen the front of the House, and they would all lament the necklaces and headdresses and shoes that would never be seen again, most of them purchased with the tips they earned with their charms.
“If I lose my best stockings, I can always buy more. It’s too much fun to dress you up like a princess,” said Pia, one of the vixen girls. “And it helps with the nerves.”
“Hopefully,” Velsa said. Her voice was a little shaky. She was standing in her chemise in front of the mirror, nearly as naked as she’d ever been, unused to being the center of attention.
“First, my dragon stockings!” Pia exclaimed, waving her hand to flirtatious little Bari, who presented the neatly folded stockings like a crown. Velsa remembered Pia from their school days, before Pia came of age and went into the house a few months ago. She seemed more jovial than Velsa remembered, as if she actually preferred male attention to education.
Velsa pulled each silk stocking onto her legs slowly, admiring the way the design unfolded. The tails of the dragons started at her feet, the sinuous golden bodies running all the way up above her knees. A tiny button had been sewn onto the back of Velsa’s legs, to help keep the stockings up, and over these Pia tied yellow satin ribbons snug around Velsa’s thighs. Her bows were so perfect that Velsa would have to ask her how to do them later.
“Lift your arms,” Pia said.
“You don’t have to dress me.”
“We must dress you! Just for today. Princess Velsa. No, Queen Velsa. Why settle?” Pia slid an under-robe over her shoulders. This was a simple garment, but over it came a beautiful dark red sash of fabric woven and dyed in Halnari, where some of the finest textiles were made—especially sashes, which the Halnari women also favored. Even as Pia was tying the sash at the back of Velsa’s narrow waist, Amleisa was stuffing her feet into heeled shoes made of red brocade.
“Is—is there anything I should know?” Velsa asked, fighting off another wave of panic. “When the men come in?”
“Not really,” Bari said. “Just bow and look shy and ask them a few questions about their lives and then look impressed—the men will love you.”
“Don’t smell the men,” Pia said breezily.
The other girls laughed, but Velsa’s innards shifted with fear. “Are flesh and blood men really that bad?”
“Sometimes,” Pia said. “Depends on where they’re from. The city merchants are the worst. Like they have no time to bathe and living on top of one another has dulled their sense of smell.”
“The girls we really should be asking for advice are the ones who have already left,” Amleisa said, with a wistful air.
When girls were chosen, occasionally they still wrote letters back to the House, but usually they were never heard from again. Dalarsha told them that men didn’t like to consider the previous lives of the girls they purchased. They wanted to believe they were buying a newly minted person, who had been created just for them, not so much a frightened and inexperienced girl, as a toy fresh out of the box, created to be played with. Not that Velsa’s teachers worded it like that exactly, but she understood the unspoken truth.
It didn’t seem fair or reasonable to Velsa, that she should pretend the last eighteen years of her life had never existed. Even Fanarlem girls had to grow up on the inside, no matter how their bodies looked on the outside.
Still, Velsa knew she was fortunate to have been created for the House of Perfumed Ribbons. It was renowned across the region as the most reputable place to purchase a Fanarlem concubine, because the girls were well cared for and allowed to come of age in a natural way. In fact, the older girls said some men didn’t like to buy from their House because the girls seemed a little too real. The men almost felt like they were buying flesh and blood girls, and that was entirely illegal and immoral.
But what Fanarlem girl didn’t want to be seen as a flesh and blood girl?
Pia had pinned up the corners of Velsa’s under-robe so her stockings could be seen in full. Velsa felt exposed, but of course that was the idea. And the next garment was an over-robe, which she could pull around her body to hide if she felt the need, although this was certainly not advised if she wanted to be acquired…unless, of course, the man liked his girl to be demure. But that was usually the province of the innocents. This over-robe was made of expensive dark red silk and had a dramatic collar that fanned over her shoulders, made of black brocade edged in silver thread.
The final touch were two clips in her hair, just above her ears, in the fashionable shape of wings.
Bari sprayed a mist of floral perfume around Velsa’s neck. Velsa sniffed the delicate floral fragrance. It made her think of spring, even on a rainy autumn night.
“That’s how Village Girls smell,” Pia teased, like it was a bad thing. Vixens didn’t smell of spring flowers, but of spice and musk.
“Now what?” Velsa asked.
“Now, we wait,” Bari said.
Night was creeping in, and the district was springing to life. Dalarsha placed lit lanterns in the windows. The girls were grouped into different rooms according to their general type, so Dalarsha could steer the visitors toward girls of interest and keep them separate as much as possible, so the girls in each room could shower all their attention on one or two men at a time. Each room was decorated to reflect the girls inside, so the Little Wives gathered around a hearth making popcorn or roasted nuts while the men settled into cushy chairs, and the vixens had a pleasure den of wispy curtains and pillows on the floor. The Village Girls had a parlor with a sofa and a crackling fireplace, and walls decorated with romantic prints of beautiful girls looking over their shoulders, as if they were al
l beckoning the men to follow.
Every night, many men came simply out of curiosity, to see the famous Fanarlem concubines. In all the world, most Fanarlem were created as slaves, particularly for working in mines or with dangerous chemicals and dyes: all the jobs that were hazardous to flesh and blood people. Many households also kept a Fanarlem slave to do the most grueling household labor.
It cost far more to make a Fanarlem like Velsa. Fanar lem—it meant, literally, a person made from scraps. An animated rag doll. Velsa was certainly not made from scraps. Her innards were carefully constructed to mimic the muscles of a living woman, and her skin was made from soft yet durable fabrics. Her hair was real and thick, and her face had been shaped by a master craftsman. Spells were woven through every aspect of her body, to make it look and feel even more real.
Still, she had been reminded all her life that she was still a lesser being, a cursed soul. As soon as the girls learned to read, they were handed moral tales of noble Fanarlem suffering. The girls even learned penmanship by copying phrases like, “My soul is redeemed by following the orders of my masters” and “It is my greatest joy and virtue to surrender my will and accept my place in the world.”
She must have done some misdeed in her past life, or else her soul would have been too strong to have been called into an artificial body. If her future master was kind to her, she should count herself lucky. If he was not, she should also count herself lucky, because his cruelty would be her penance, and her reward would come in the next life.
Velsa knew it was true.
But the words never failed to taste bitter.
She waited in the softly lit room with Amleisa and Nraya, the other Village Girls. Just outside the window, a few men came down the street, pointing up at the sign for the House of Perfumed Ribbons. It depicted a hand with stitches at the wrist, with a ribbon tied around one of its fingers.
“Skarnwen!” jeered one of the prostitutes who were all over the streets in this district. Tonight a few of them were hiding out under the balcony of the house across the way, keeping out of the rain.
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