Nadine Pascal-Said was fourteen years of age, and she was smashing the window in her hospital room with a chair. It hadn’t really occurred to anyone to put her in a room with bars on the windows or the chairs bolted down, but they probably should have. Any minute now, a nurse was going to show up with her rape kit, and she wanted to be gone before that happened. Her story was never designed to stand under scrutiny.
It was easy enough to get them to believe the headmaster of Ruby Ranch had been abusing her. She’d told them her hairless state was thanks to his insistence on waxing her, to make her look even younger. She’d blamed the bruises from long nights with her classmates and a bar of soap in a pillowcase on the headmaster’s abusive proclivities. Nadine didn’t actually care that they’d kept ‘forgetting’ to feed her, but it had done a lot to bolster her case. So had the scab on her scalp where another girl had ripped out her hair, before she’d shaved it off. Quite frankly, she was amazed no one else had thought of this before. Or maybe destroying someone’s livelihood didn’t come as easily to other people.
Fuck him. His livelihood is shit.
Smashing a window with a chair actually took forever. They made it look easy, in movies, but the protagonists in movies weren’t usually as waifish as Nadine. She didn’t have time to make it clean, to clear away with glass so it’d be safe, so she was just going to have to avoid it instead. And if she didn’t – well, chicks dig scars. She propped up the chair next to the broken window, and leapt off it and into the sky.
Falling several stories when you were small and frail and human was fucking terrifying. But she grit her teeth and jammed her eyes shut so she couldn’t see the lawn coming up to meet her, the courtyard that during the day was full of geriatric patients. For all her attempts at stoic silence, she couldn’t stop a ragged, roar-like sound from escaping her when she landed, her leg breaking with an impressive crack.
This might impede her escape plans.
She didn’t bother trying to pull herself to her feet, pain radiating out from somewhere around mid-calf. Tears were in her eyes, and she didn’t bother trying to wipe them away: if she got caught, she could use those. She was still in the shitty school uniform, clothes something like forest green scrubs. With her shaved head and her BCGs, she looked astonishingly genderless.
Nadine was trying to pull herself with her arms over to the bushes, to somewhere less open so that she could try and hide, when an unnatural breeze passed over her. She still wasn’t used to feeling the breeze on her scalp. Some strange instinct told her to roll onto her side and look, and for this effort she was met with the sight of…
It’s motherfucking Dracula.
“Are you going to kill me?” Her voice had the decency not to waver, not to make her sound like a coward. Just a matter-of-fact question reasonable for the situation. The Dracula situation.
“You’re a little girl.” His voice was more feminine than she’d expected, but she didn’t know what she’d expected, a pale man with black sausage-curls and a cape. “I am not so monstrous.”
“There a lot of Draculas around here?”
“I am – I am not a Dracula, you insolent thing. I am a vampire. You may call me Archibald, if you wish.”
Who the fuck says ‘insolent’ that isn’t a movie villain? Archie the vampire, apparently. “Are there a lot of vampires around here, Archibald?”
“No. I am… alone,” he admitted mournfully. He turned his head from her, giving her a better look at his face in the moonlight. She couldn’t tell if he was posing intentionally, or if that was just something that happened when you were pretty. A single dark tear escaped one eye, and she couldn’t imagine he wasn’t doing it on purpose.
“You don’t have to be.” Offering herself up as a vampire’s sidekick wasn’t the dumbest idea she’d ever had, but it probably came close. She felt nervous and anxious and she had goosebumps from the pain, but Nadine quashed all that, lying in the grass in the dark with a broken leg. She’d fucked in exchange for protection, before. All she had to do was try to cheer this guy up, maybe let him chew on her a bit, and she’d be free. Out of here. She’d have entered the adult world for real, in a way. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t handsome, as if he didn’t look like someone she’d be perfectly willing to share a bedroom with. Then again, she couldn’t imagine she looked terribly alluring. She was just going to have to hope he’d be interested in anyone with a pulse.
He wiped the dark tear from his face with a gloved hand, looked at her with just a touch of horror. “Are you suggesting…? But, no! I couldn’t possibly! You are a mere child, girl, you know not what you ask.”
This ain’t no motherfucking Shakespeare, asshole, Jesus Christ.
Her disdain for his melodrama was tempered by a certain appreciation for his manner of speaking, of dress. He seemed refined. He seemed adult. He had the allure of someone who knew things that she didn’t. Nadine was still fourteen, after all. “I am asking you if you would like to feed on me,” she said patiently, trying to sound as poetic as he did. She was desperate to be seen as his equal. “I am asking if you would care to have a lover – or failing that, a companion and caterer.” She hadn’t actually used that word, lover, before. It made it sound so elegant, mashing two bodies together; he seemed like the sort of person that could make fucking into something elegant.
“You cannot imagine what it is you are asking. I am a monster, dear girl. I would feed not only on your blood, but on your very soul. You would be unable to deny my monstrous whims, my passions. Under my power, you would do things to which you would never agree, could never.” His gloved hand clenched into a fist at his words, as if it were her that he was crushing. He could not have looked more like a character in a play, but Nadine was not old enough to see this as a red flag.
“What’s the catch?” Still in pain and still terrified, Nadine nonetheless could not help but wonder what exactly these monstrous whims might be. She could only imagine so many ways to fit two bodies together, could not imagine anything more interesting, anything she might describe as monstrous. Was he suggesting he planned to cut her open and fuck the wound? She didn’t think that was it, with how sexy he made it sound, but her imagination only went so far. Perhaps he was suggesting the use of implements.
“If I take you with me,” he warned, kneeling down beside her in the grass, “there’ll be no turning back, for you. You shall be trapped in this life that you have chosen.”
It’s the choosing that’s the important part.
A scream sounded, and Nadine looked up to see a nurse peering out from the broken window. “Better hurry,” she suggested, reaching up an arm as if to wrap it around his shoulders. “And be careful with the leg. I think I broke it.”
Nadine Pascal-Said 