Lord Maldrake Aloysius Orlando

Two vampires, on the run from a mob of angry villagers in the dead of night, find themselves trapped in a cottage with a glass wall facing eastward. Dawn approaches.

 

            Lord Maldrake Aloysius Orlando sulked in the north-east corner of the sheet-iron shack.  He kept his eyes on the floor, hoping to evade the eerie gaze of his teacher.

            “Al…” she whispered, trying very hard not to growl it.  “You can’t sul--”

            “It’s Lord Maldrake Aloysius Orlando!” the gaunt, curled man burst, tossing his head up to glare at her.  “You know that damn well!”  The woman sighed and leaned back into the south-east corner.

            “I wish…”  She cast her disturbingly almost-human eyes around the room, trying not to fixate on the single glass wall.  She sighed.  “I wish your generation would just take normal names.”

            “There’s nothing threatening about Dave or Suzie!”

            Suzie sighed again.  “But who wants to say Lord Moondrake Pretentious Fuckwad all the time?”  The younger vampire grunted in response and returned to staring at the ground.

            “Fiiiiine.”  Suzie growled.  “I’m tired of having this conversation with you anyway.”  She paused.  “Not that it matters now.”  She gazed through the single, west-facing glass-pane-wall, towards the too-distant forest.  Now that the damning glass had caught her eye, she was instead trying not to fixate on the slowly shortening shadow of the tiny shack.  She leaned back and let her hand rest on her stomach.  She looked down at her belly after a moment and pushed at its extraordinary softness.  She stared into her exposed navel and smiled gently at its ever so slight bulge before pushing on it again.

            “My stomach should not be as pressable as this,” she said with an exaggerated tragic tone, cocking her mouth to one side.  “I haven’t eaten in hours.”  Her student laughed tersely, prompting a cold and confused glare from Suzie.

            “That’s a surprise,” he grunted when he realized that she was waiting for an explanation.  “I don’t think I’ve seen you go two hours without eating.”  He removed his head from its place between his lengthy, bone-like legs and smirked at Suzie.  “I don’t know how you ever manage to seduce men with that figure!”  Suzie looked puzzled for a moment, then hurt for a very brief instant before bursting into laughter.

            “You’re calling me fat!” she howled between thunderous peals of laughter.  “The skinniest vampire in the nation is calling me fat!”

            “Well, you are!” Lord Maldrake Aloysius Orlando tittered, hoping her laughter was genuinely amused and not spiteful.

            “I am not!” she scooted closer to the boy, giggling and grinning genially.  “I merely do not expose my bones for all the world to see.”

            “Exactly.  How do you scare anyone?” he grinned a skeleton’s grin.  She grinned back at him, much more intimidating.

            “Kid, you gotta learn, this ‘life’ is not about scaring people.  If you didn’t go around scaring people, idiot vampire hunters wouldn’t go around chasing you into shacks of inescapable doom.”

            “Hey!  Blood tastes a lot better when it’s full of adrenaline!” His face tightened once more, though hers grew more amused with every word.

            “Adrenaline?”  she laughed, her condescension clear as crystal.  “Adrenaline is nothing compared to endorphins.  You have obviously never partook of a horny human.”

            “O-Of course I have!” Lord Maldrake Aloysius Orlando’s eyes darted left and right.  “I…  J-Just pref--”

            Suzie flipped her raven hair behind her ear as she interrupted her student.  “I suppose it’s because you’re so skinny.  The boys around here don’t go for skinny.”

            “Th…  I’m not gay!  The girls love skinn--”

            “Oh, shove it.  You’ve only frightened those young, nubile girls since you were turned, because you are bitter about them turning you down.”

            “Y…  You don’t know!  I’ve…  I’ve stuck it to lots of girls!  I swear it!”

            “No, you haven’t.  And you never will.”

            Lord Maldrake Aloysius Orlando was silent for a minute.  He watched the shadow creep closer to the glass door.  “You really think we’ll die here?” he whispered.

            “No,” Suzie said, whispering both for effect and because she was close enough to bite his ear.  He spun his head to stare at her, unsure whether he was surprised by her unnoticed approach or by the fact that she apparently had a plan.  Before he could figure it out, he found himself struggling not to fall into her too-human eyes.  They were so hypnotic…

            He snapped out of it.  “We’re not?” he could not steady his voice.

            “No,” she batted her eyebrows cruelly.  “I’m going to survive and get back to camp, and you’re probably going to die in the field.”

            “What?” Lord Maldrake Aloysius Orlando tried to ask, but either the collision of Suzie’s fist with his nose or the subsequent collision of the back of his head with the sheet-iron wall knocked him to a silent unconsciousness.  He crumpled and Suzie smiled at his body.

            “I never really liked you, Al.  Hell, I only bit you a month ago because Dave insisted.”  She lifted his unconscious body over her head with ease, and draped him over her shoulders as if giving him a piggyback ride.  She pulled her arms through his leather jacket alongside his, and then spent ten minutes adjusting him so that there was no exposed skin on her backside.  She took a deep and unnecessary breath, gritted her teeth against the pain in her future, and smashed through the glass wall as fast as she could.

            She was a quarter of the way to the forest when Lord Maldrake Aloysius Orlando was awakened by the burning heat on his skin.  He began to scream and writhe.  She managed to block out the screams inches from her ears and tightened her grip on the young vampire.

            Halfway across the field his screaming became unbearable and he began to bite into her hair, either to get vengeance or to numb the pain.  She didn’t care which; she was too busy wincing from that pain and the pain of the flaming body draped across her back.

            With a quarter of the field left to the forest, Lord Maldrake Aloysius Orlando’s screams were silenced. The temperature on Suzie’s back dropped, the weight on her shoulders lightened, and the leather jacket fell around her arms loosely.  She cursed and forced one final burst of speed into her dash. 

            Just as her skin was beginning to heat up, Suzie reached the shade of the forest.  She collapsed in the shadows beneath the tallest nearby tree and caught her proverbial breath.  She shut her eyes and bit her lip, waiting for the horrible burning on the back of her head, the back of her neck, and the small of her back to cool down.  What felt like agonizing ages later, but in actuality was only an agonizing half hour, it finally did.  She sighed in relief-a pure instinct-and began giggling.

            “Lord Moondrake Pretentious Fuckwad…  Oh, I wish I had called him that before!”  Her giggle began to slip into a cackle, but before it could complete the transformation she sat up frowning.  “D****t.”  She reached to the area of the back of her head that had been hot and there felt a large bald spot which her ex-student’s teeth must have created.  She rubbed it gently-it was still tender from being ripped and exposed to the sun-and whimpered. 

            “Dave had better have a lusty teenage virgin waiting for me at camp,” she muttered aloud as she stood up and got her bearings.  “I deserve a treat after all this.”  She frowned and limped into the deeper shadows of the forest, her partially baked backside paining her with every step.

Reviews

[TLK]

It's hard to get past 1) the long name and 2) the huge amounts of dialogue.