Chapter 2: The Queen's New Slave

Just a little bit more… Masaaki leaned his head back to inspect the eye-bolt as his body twisted and spun. In three weeks, he thought he had made it spin two whole revolutions in the beam that held him. The swivel between the cuffs that held his hands and the eyebolt, however, had absorbed much of his contortions. Some days, those days when the despair won out, he wasn’t sure that the bolt wasn’t in the exact same place where they had left it.

But he had to believe. After what he guessed to be nearing his sixth century of captivity by demonic Third Landers, if he lost hope, he might as well die.

He kicked his legs again, twisting his body in its bonds, head tilted back to watch the eyebolt. The swivel caught his motion again and he spun freely, the bolt remaining securely in place.

It hasn’t moved. You’re just deluding yourself. It’s been three weeks and it hasn’t moved. Masaaki sucked in a breath to sob, but the sound was stopped in a slurry of spit that rolled out from under the ball-gag that the monsters had left strapped in his mouth.

Calm down, he told himself, as the aching throb in his shoulders once again almost drove him to another miserable sobbing-spree. For three weeks, the monsters had left him alone up here, and for three weeks, he’d had no idea what they meant to do with him. The house, for the most part, except for a few noises downstairs here and there, had been silent. He’d simply swung from his eye-bolt and watched the sun rise and fall without him.

Masaaki lowered his head, tears stinging his eyes. Saliva dribbled down his chest from where his lips were pried apart by the rubber ball. Realizing he was about to devolve into another wretched sobbing-fest, he closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. They meant to keep him alive, obviously. As much as it hurt to hang from his wrists, unable to ease the tension in his arms and shoulders, they wouldn’t have opened that window if they meant to kill him.

Then what? Why leave him alone up here? Why leave him alive, when they had so carefully killed all the others in front of him, down in the basement dungeon? Masaaki still remembered the blood, spilling from dozens of slit throats, the twisted mating-and-feeding frenzy that the two Third Landers had devolved into in those final hours, soaking up all the released energy of their victims in a wild, insane spree that would have left them with the strength and speed of even the strongest demonkin.

And yet they had left him live. They hadn’t touched him, despite the blood flowing all around him, despite their gruesome copulations at his feet. It had almost been as if they had been saving him for some greater, more sinister purpose, and in six hundred years feeding the Third Landers, that thought left his blood run cold. To keep Masaaki alive was a puzzle that he didn’t want to contemplate. He had seen so many things, so many horrible things…

Masaaki sucked in another shuddering breath, then let it out in a full-lunged, muffled scream of frustration, shaking his body in his bonds in his impotent misery. The scream ended in another sob, and he dropped his head again, trying to ignore the agony in his limbs. At least a cage didn’t hurt. The ache was making it difficult to breathe, to sleep, to even think. All he wanted, more than anything, now, was to make it end. Be that by twisting the eyebolt loose and dropping him to the floor, or a vampire coming in and cutting his throat, he didn’t care. He just couldn’t handle hanging anymore, suspended a good six inches from the ground, unable to support any of his weight with his legs.

Ancestors, please. If you’ve ever heard my prayers, listen to them now. I want to die. I can’t take this anymore. His soul was about to break, he could feel it. He was a warrior, yet for longer than he could remember, he had served as food for demons. Another day of this, and he would lose his mind.

If his ancestors heard him, they gave no sign.

Breathing deeply around the ball forced into his mouth, he took several deep breaths, then again glanced at the eyebolt in the ceiling. Had it moved? Looking straight-on from below, it was difficult to tell how far—if any—he had worked it out of the beam. He lifted his legs again—held spread apart by the bar, doubtlessly to hamper such things—and twisted his body as violently as he could. He heard the metal hook thump in the eye-bolt before the swivel squeaked again, relieving the pressure.

Damn it! his mind screamed, on the verge of panic again. Ever since the vampires had transferred him up here from the blood-soaked dungeon where he had watched their final, gruesome frenzy, he had gone through every incarnation of emotion, from hope to despair, relief to foreboding, gratitude to misery. Today, after watching the sun go down for the third straight week without a visitor, he was hovering somewhere close to dread. They hadn’t fed on him. That meant they had some other, horrible plans for him. And, with vampires, that meant it would be something meticulously crafted to break his mind and soul.

Yet, after six centuries, the thing that had come closest to breaking him was not knowing. Actually being left alone, unmolested and in pain, to wait. Their tortures, he could deal with. He had long ago learned to partition his mind, to tuck himself into a distant corner as they played with his body, removing himself from the actual horrors of what was happening to him. But left alone like this, after watching every one of his former companions slaughtered in a vicious mating ritual, the pain in his shoulders giving him no sleep…

Masaaki knew he was close. Much too close. He took another unsteady breath, felt saliva again dribbling down his front from where his jaw was pried painfully open, and lifted his knees to kick out again, refusing to give in. He was a warrior. A samurai who had been betrayed. Sold to the Third Landers by his master.

Again, he felt that wretched sob in his chest. A samurai was willing to die for his master, a thousand times over. He had given up his swords quietly at his lord’s command, knowing the man had gambling debts, that giving him to these people would somehow repay them.

Only after they had stripped him of his armor and collared him in ensorcelled steel had he realized just how he was meant to repay his master’s debts.

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That was what his generations of blind loyalty to the Heishi clan had gotten him. That had been his gift for his heartfelt fealty, his unquestioning servitude, his respect and counsel. He had been betrayed. Betrayed by the one he had served with every ounce of his being. He had known, on that breezy morning, listening to the wind as it dislodged the cherry blossoms, that he shouldn’t have told the latest clan head what he was, that it was a secret he should have carried to his grave, like the man’s esteemed ancestors before him. But not telling had felt like a lie, and after eight of his masters had come and gone from old age, their souls added to the family shrine, his secret guarded to their dying breaths, Masaaki had found could not lie to the latest man he served. It wasn’t in his nature. The trust went too deep.

So Masaaki had told the son who had become the latest head of the clan, sitting there in the rock garden, watching the blossoms roll on the wind in swirls of pink and lavender. He had spilled his secret, despite the nagging sense that the latest Heishi was a cheat and a swindler, and didn’t have the honor in even the pinkie-finger of either his father or grandfather. But Masaaki had told him anyway, trusting in Bushidō.

On that morning amidst the cherry blossoms, his new master had shown no more surprise than a single raised eyebrow, and Masaaki had thought, in that devastating moment of naïveté, that his secret had been safe, as it had been with the eight men before. He had gone to bed that night unhindered by fears or suspicions. He had believed in the way of the samurai, had felt such complete fealty to his master that it did not even cross his mind that the little raised eyebrow could hide something more.

And yet, three nights later, a group of warriors had arrived at the palace, escorting a black, curtain-shrouded palanquin. His master had ordered him to the soul-cutting shame of relinquishing his weapons, then had him stand still as they affixed a collar around his neck like an outlander slave. Masaaki could have stopped it, then. He could have killed those who reached for him, blasted the Third Lander into mindless screams, and escaped. But he had still not understood. His mind, deceived by Bushidō for so many decades, had not been conditioned to understand betrayal.

Now, six hundred years later, he understood all too well.

Masaaki sucked in another breath around the rubber ball and his own saliva, feeling the shuddering wracking of sobs beginning deep in his gut. They were breaking him. After so many years resisting their tortures, he could feel that final barrier cracking, leaving his soul exposed to their brutalities. All it had taken, in the end, had been being left alone to think.

With that realization came another threatening wave of tears, and, viciously stifling the impulse, he let out his rage in another insane kicking twist of his legs and torso.

The metal loop thunked in the eyebolt again, but was immediately followed with the twisting squeak of the swivel. Panting through rubber and spit, Masaaki dropped his chin to his chest and went still, feeling the silence pounding around him like the beats of a massive ōdaiko drum.

Just let me die, he pleaded. Given the choice, he would have gladly taken a wakizashi and driven it into his belly, a thousand times over. But his master had not even given him the choice of seppuku. He had sold him. Like a slave.

The rage of that ancient betrayal bubbled forth once again, and Masaaki felt himself thrashing at the restraints with no clear goal, just powered by that deep, animal fury. Betrayed by the man he had sworn to serve. Betrayed by the one he would have died for, in an instant. Betrayed…to become a slave in a hellish, twisted nightmare that would never end.

Sometime during the angry, desperate contortions that followed, Masaaki heard the squeak of the attic staircase and froze, listening. He twisted as best he could to watch the entrance to his prison. Sure enough, a dark hole appeared in the carpet and he saw movement below. Instantly, his heart rate spiked, his terror becoming a pounding wet rush in his head as he strained to see.

This was it, he knew. It was time to discover why he had been spared.

Then he saw the porcelain face that emerged and his blood ran like ice.

A queen. The demons had birthed a queen.

There was no mistaking the combined features of the two vampires that had fed upon him for so long, framed in an elegant ebony mane of hair. She was young, probably in her late teens, but she carried the same timeless beauty as every other monster that had fed upon him, except more so. She was also disturbingly familiar, the striking combination of two faces that had tormented him for the last century.

It was the silver cast to her skin, however, her body all but glowing with Third-Lander power, that drove the stakes of horror through his gut.

The abominations produced a queen, he thought, horrified. He watched her glance around the room almost timidly, her too-big eyes flashing demonic black as the pupils opened all the way to take in the low light of the attic.

Then, in wretched horror, he realized why he had been spared. His two captors knew the value of the fiend they had created. They were passing the torch. Training the next generation.

Die, Masaaki wished her. Just die.

Then her eyes locked on him, and her amber eyes widened. He heard her whisper something under her breath, and it was clear she was stunned.

Masaaki would have shouted taunts and curses at the intruder, then, but the rubber ball that his captors had shoved into his mouth and lashed to the back of his head had long since left his jaw and tongue numb, leaving him only capable of the most rudimentary grunts and muffled snarls, instead speaking to her with his glare, wishing her abominable existence a death of a thousand cuts.

She stared at him, then slowly climbed the rest of the way into the attic, obviously staggered by the gift she had been given. A yatagarasu. A fitting gift for a queen. Masaaki’s kind were, after all, a vampire’s greatest prize. She held out her arms to him, then, like he were some sort of farm animal to be calmed. She spoke in the foreigner’s tongue, the one that Masaaki had come to learn at the end of a whip, murmuring soft platitudes to him as she circled him, inspecting him like a horse.

As she returned to his front and reached for his face, still babbling her useless lies, Masaaki lifted his knees, slammed his legs up and out, and caught her in the chin with the bar between his ankles. He was satisfied to watch her stagger and collapse against the dormer wall like a limp rag, though he was surprised at the way she continued to huddle there, as if he were the demon and she the innocent captive.

For a moment, he harbored the hope that perhaps this creature he’d been gifted to wasn’t a monster like her parents, but the hope was quickly lost when he saw her silvery fingers reach for her bruised throat. A queen. The vampires had birthed a queen. That which could make and command soldiers and thralls, and birth lords.

Ancestors help me, a tiny portion of his mind whimpered. Queens required more sustenance, more energy. Of course they had saved the yatagarasu for her. She would probably drink of him daily, would feed from both his soul and body, as had her mother, use his power to spawn more of her kind…

Yet the wide-eyed look she was giving him didn’t belong to that of a nest matron. It was not the poised look of one who had found her consort. She almost could have passed for a panicked kid. Masaaki quickly squashed that thought down. No, like mother, like daughter. And not three weeks ago, the mother had used his body in a disgusting frenzy of copulation, still covered in the blood of his fellow prisoners, as her husband made similar use of a corpse.

A queen, his stunned mind babbled. The abominations birthed a queen…