Chapter 34 #2
She chomped down on his palm, but her teeth vanished straight through it, like a bite from a phantom.
And a phantom was exactly what she was, she realized, when she saw a small girl, no older than six, run down the corridor, little leather shoes pockmarking the grand red carpet.
The little girl was holding a doll, and giggling to herself.
That’s me, Sylvia realized with an eerie sense of deja vu. Because she didn’t remember this day. Or that doll. Or even the outfit she was wearing. And she had only owned so many clothes when she was younger—the only outfits she had plenty of were ballgowns.
“You did a really good job, Elisabeth,” her younger self said reverently, petting the doll’s raven hair.
“You did such a good job hiding in the chest with me like we practiced. You didn’t breathe too loud.
You were as quiet as a little mouse.” She sank down onto the carpet, and began to dance the doll along it. “Even with all the dust.”
Sylvia’s stomach clenched.
She didn’t remember this, but she did remember the chest. The one all the way in the back of the attic.
She’d hide in there when she’d done something bad, and her mother was looking for her.
It was never a foolproof solution—punishment always found her eventually—but it gave her a feeling of control, to be able to delay it.
As for the choice of name, Elisabeth had been their maid.
The wife of their doorman, Nicholas. Like him, she was a thrall, but an even less obedient one.
She fought Catrina’s commands in secret, interpreted them in ways that only benefited Sylvia.
Delivered milk and cookies to Sylvia’s room in the night. Took her to town when Catrina was away.
She’d died early in Sylvia’s life. Sylvia could never remember why. Or when.
“I don’t see why this is important,” Sylvia muttered against Vey’s hand. “Yes, my mother was terrible. That’s been historically established. But I’m over it. She’s dead.”
At the very same moment, a small light shone from the doorway at the end of the corridor, and quiet footsteps echoed through the hallway. Young Sylvia was too consumed in her play to notice at first, singing softly to herself as she paraded Elisabeth the doll back and forth on the carpet.
But Sylvia, real Sylvia, in all her hundreds of years of being over it, still felt the dread and the fear so powerfully that it almost dropped her to her knees.
Her body acted without her input—her lungs constricted; her breaths came short and scattered in her chest; she began to scratch at the wall, shake her head furiously back and forth.
“No. No fucking way. I don’t want to see her again. I’m not seeing her again.”
“It’s only a memory, Sylvia. It can’t hurt you,” Vey said. “It’s part of the process.”
“Fuck your process,” Sylvia snarled at him.
She stepped over her oblivious child self and ran toward the other end of the hallway. The door there was closed, and she yanked it hard, but it refused to open.
“Open, you stupid, useless piece of bark! Let me out!”
She propped her heel on it and pulled with her whole bodyweight, screaming and shouting. When nothing worked, she punched a hole straight through the wood, relief momentarily filling her chest when her fist emerged on the other side—before she saw what was awaiting her.
Nothingness. Void.
She blinked. Her lungs tightened.
“No,” she said hoarsely.
She was trapped.
Vey’s voice echoed from behind her.
“It’s okay, Sylvia,” he said calmly. “All you have to do is witness it, and then you can be free of it.”
Sylvia blinked again. Everything took on a hazy, de-personalized feeling as the weight of her reality crushed her. She wasn’t leaving. There were no exits.
She turned just in time to see her mother lording over the child’s back.
And there was a moment, a naive, crushing moment, where Sylvia thought she could save herself.
But even in her own mind she was powerless.
Powerless to watch Catrina yank that child by the hair, throw her at the wall, then take the doll into her hand, and begin using it like a puppet.
“Oh, so you think Elisabeth is your real mother, is that right?” Catrina hissed, waving the doll around, dropping into a cruel, mocking tone. “I love you, Sylvia. You’re my real daughter, Sylvia. A lowly human peasant just like me. That’s what you want to hear, is it?”
Catrina slapped her hard so that the wall shook, and Sylvia could feel the phantom pain on her own cheek.
“Here’s a very simple lesson. Greedy children don’t get told those kind of things.
You can’t avoid all your responsibilities to the court, untie the laces on Count Wilhem’s boots, break free Lady Gladimir’s thralls, fraternize with the visiting human children as if they’re your friends, and seriously expect love in exchange. Love is not earned by disobedience.”
Younger Sylvia shook her bruised head over and over, tears streaking down red, too-young cheeks.
Watching with enough fury in her chest to kill an army, Sylvia clenched her jaw. “Don’t say sorry. Don’t you fucking say sorry to her.”
“I’m sorry, mother,” the child whimpered. Sylvia flinched. “Can I have my doll back?”
Catrina’s sickly sweet smile twitched.
“Of course you can, dear.”
Sylvia’s hands turned to fists; she clawed into her own palms so hard they bled. “Don’t listen to her,” she whispered at herself. “Don’t. She’s lying. She’s—”
Then, abruptly, like a slow motion sequence in a movie, the framerate in her memory dropped to a snail’s pace.
Catrina’s hands lowered slowly, centimeter by centimeter; and Sylvia—older now, but, she realized, no more over it than she was nine hundred years ago—began to remember, with a hollow emptiness in her chest, exactly what happened next.
It was something she’d been repressing for a very long time. Something she didn’t even realize was there. Like a nail sewn into the sole of a shoe.
“Hi, Sylvia,” the doll said, a far-away voice emerging from its tiny wooden chest.
Younger Sylvia startled, jumping slightly at the surprise, before looking to her mother—naively, innocently—to explain what she couldn’t understand.
“Did the doll just speak?” she asked quietly.
Her mother nodded. “I put a little spell on it,” she said, touching the back of the doll’s hair.
Faint red magic emanated from her fingertips.
“It can talk now. It can say whatever you want it to say. So go on. Give it some lines, my dear. You’re a good little actress.
Make it say whatever you want it to. All you have to do is use your Suggestion. ”
Younger Sylvia’s eyebrows screwed together.
Even at her young age, she was a skeptic. But she was also a child. And children, vampires or otherwise, always want to believe their mothers know best.
So she turned her glassy red eyes toward the doll.
“Hi, Elisabeth.”
The doll parroted back,“Hi, Elisabeth.”
Young Sylvia’s ears turned red in delight.
“Come on,” Catrina sing-songed, “You can do better than that. This doll is your thrall now, Sylvia. Did you know that thralls are the only thing in existence that can love us unconditionally?”
Young Sylvia frowned, confused.
“Really?”
“Yes. Really,” Catrina said, squatting down so she was eye-level with her child.
“As long as you let someone have their agency, they can always leave you, betray you, distrust you. Once you take that away, they’ll do anything for you.
Every whim, every desire. There is no love purer than complete obedience.
That is why I love my thralls very much. I love them dearly.”
Catrina pinched the doll’s head.
“So I’ve given you the perfect tool for practice.”
“Practice what?”
“Control. You want this doll to love you, don’t you? Then make sure it does.”
Processing what she’d learned, the child’s eyes slowly traveled from Catrina to the doll.
“Go on,” Catrina said, “Be a good girl. Tell her what to say.”
Preening under her mother’s praise, Sylvia nodded.
“Elisabeth,” she addressed the doll, blushing as she whispered, “Say… I love you, Sylvia. Please.”
The air went cold for a moment, the doll silent, before Catrina tapped the back of its head again, and the doll’s blue, glassy eyes turned abruptly red—and swirled.
“I love you, Sylvia,” the doll said. “Only a thrall ever could.”
***
Young Sylvia sat there for many minutes after, stock-still, eyes swirling, the Suggestion digesting into her system, perpetuating itself like a virus, bleeding into every cell. Catrina hummed to herself, snapped the doll in two, and left her in the hallway.
***
Sylvia, nine hundred years later in a villa in Iceland, found herself rocking back and forth on the floor, unable to think, to move, to cry.
The pain was too acute, like someone had slowly driven an icicle straight into her heart.
Only a thrall ever could. Only a thrall ever could. Only a thrall ever could.
All she was aware of was that she was still alive, her knees hugged to her chest. It was the only thing she could do—the only coping mechanism she’d had since she was small.
Vaguely, she was aware of Doctor Vey getting up off the floor, and brushing off his robes. He was holding a piece of parchment and a quill, and etching symbols into the paper.
“I must admit, Ms. Maroven, your mind is a fascinatingly depressing place to be. I thought my mother was harsh, but at the very least she didn’t have the vampiric skill of Puppetry.
Being able to direct Suggestions through the body of another…
. A frightening skill. No wonder she was able to develop the Mass Suggestion method,” he said, his eyes never once leaving the page.
“Anywho. I do thank you for letting me intrude for a bit. I hope it was as helpful to you as it was to me.”