She led me down a narrow hallway with walls a glowing shade of gold. Between the lit candles hanging from the walls were old picture frames with faces seemingly from hundreds of years ago. One was a painting of a woman during the Victorian era, her face sad and stoic. Another was a black and white photo of a man in western attire leaning against a horse in a pose. These were people he knew from his long life. I was sure of it.
Molly pulled open a two-door entrance with both hands and I was escorted into a large chapel. The floors had the same velvet red carpet as the rest of the house, and the walls were draped with oversized crimson curtains bundled together and tied with a golden ribbon. An assortment of candles clustered inside, working as the only light inside the dank, gothic-looking room. The chapel seats remained empty and undecorated.
How peculiar for a vampire to have his own chapel.
My eyes pulled toward the end of the room and realized there was a white freestanding bathtub set at the altar. A pale body was submerged in water as Veronica knelt on the outside, running a washcloth up and down their dangling arms. At first, I thought it was a woman based on how thin and feminine their arms were, until the head turned to face me and I saw a man staring back. His eyes were black as coal, his lips a blistered pink, and blue veins trailed along the skin on his temple and across his forehead. His skin was so translucent and flimsy-looking, I thought Veronica would tear it apart just by washing him.
He gestured dismissively to Veronica and she dropped the washcloth into the bathwater and then walked away from the tub. She retrieved a black robe that was hanging nearby and opened it wide and waited for him. The man slowly rose from the tub completely nude, unbothered by my seeing him. My eyes darted to the carpet beneath me in an attempt not to stare, but I had already seen too much. The sheer quality to his skin wasn’t just on his face but on every inch of him. But that wasn’t the worst part of what I had seen. As he stepped out of the bath, a red liquid dripped down his chest and legs, and I realized that it wasn’t water he was bathing in, but blood.
Veronica slipped the robe over his arms and he tied it loosely at his waist, but left his hard chest exposed. His pitch-black hair was like silk and it draped over his shoulders like a shawl. As he inched his way closer to me, Molly shoved me to the ground, forcing me on my knees. “Melanie’s cousin,” she said. It was like she was finishing a conversation that they were mentally in the middle of.
His long index finger extended and reached out, placing his cold touch to my chin and gently lifting it till my eyes met his. His gaze wasn’t remotely human, as his pupils took up ninety percent of his eyes. I could barely see the whites.
“You have her complexion,” he spoke softly. “Your cousin’s, that is. Fair and without a single blemish. There is one difference, though.” He stroked the apple of my cheek so very slowly with his knuckles, smearing the blood he had bathed in across my skin. “The warmth. It radiates from you. I can smell it, even.” He bent his body forward and pressed the side of his face to mine. He was clammy and cold like a corpse, and I began to shake. “You can call me Master,” he whispered into my ear.
Between my nerves and still recovering from the weather outside, my body was convulsing with how bad I was shaking. He noticed and pulled back his head so we were no longer touching. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he began. “It’s so rare that I’m able to stand face-to-face with a human and…interact. Are you the one they call Cora?”
I nodded.
“You may speak if it pleases you.”
My not speaking had little to do with wondering if the hypnosis wore off, and all to do with being too afraid to form a sentence. I swallowed deeply and answered with, “Yes.”
“Yes?” He waited for me to finish the sentence.
I swallowed again. “I’m Cora.”
Master smirked. “I’m going to assume you’re intelligent enough to know why you’re here.”
“You want Melanie.”
“She’s mine, yes.”
Under normal circumstances, I’d never let anyone talk about Melanie that way, but in this instance, I had no choice.
“Melanie didn’t keep her end of the bargain. I tried to be fair and let her come to this decision on her own, to let her feel some bit of power and grace in her final hours, but her emotions are not to be trusted, it seems. And you, my dear, will suffer because of it.”
I looked to Molly, and with my eyes pleaded for her to come to her senses, for her to be the woman she used to be, but her demeanor was frigid and her gaze disconnected. She didn’t care one bit.
“Until Melanie returns, you will stay here and be my pet. Only when she walks through my front door and rightfully surrenders will I consider letting you go. You will do what I say and when I say to do so, and if at any point you so much as look at me in a way that I find offensive, I will bleed you dry and hang you from the ceiling.”
I was going to die tonight. I knew it.
“Hold her down,” he instructed. Molly and Veronica
