Chapter Text
When Kell awoke, it was slowly and with great effort. A dripping candle whispered a weak flame on the small table beside the bed to which he was tied.
A sigh of relief flowed out of him as the magic flowed in. Setting fire to the binds on his wrists, he pushed himself up until a wave of dizziness crashed over him again. For the second time that day, he slumped back against a wall. This time, it wasn’t the wound.
He could feel the stiff bandages constricting his torso—not wound as well as he would have, he noted, but he’d take what he could get. His shirt had been changed for one slightly too big, loose at the collar. Rolling up his sleeves, he looked around.
The room was small. One in an inn, he suspected. The bed he was sat on, a worn wardrobe, the bedside table was all there was.
But in the centre of the room, a lithe figure perched on the floor, was that woman.
“Impressive,” she murmured condescendingly.
“What are you doing ?” Kell groaned, gesturing.
The woman’s mouth pricked up in a smirk. Her one pupil was still huge despite being right next to the candle. She looked less pale in this light.
“I do a great many things. You will have to be more specific.”
Kell glared the best he could with his fluttering eyes. “With the glass.”
The woman looked down to the glass in front of her lap. She was wringing out what Kell recognised to be his shirt over a cup, a pinkish mixture of his blood and water running out of the fabric.
“I know you’re not cleaning it so don’t try that,” he continued.
“Didn’t say I was.” She bared her teeth in something between a threat and a grin. “When I catch a specimen as fine as you, why wouldn’t I get every drop?” She looked purposefully towards his neck.
Frowning, he tapped at the razor-burned skin just below his jaw. Twin puncture marks. That explained the dizziness.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
“Lila, you?”
“Not what I meant.” Kell said, teeth gritted. “What do you want with me?”
Lila gestured at the cup. “You’d make a wonderful detective.”
Having regained some of his strength, Kell stretched up, angling himself towards the door. “Look: I’m not going to talk about this. No point in arguing with such a—“
Before he knew it, she was across the room. The wood of the wardrobe whined under his weight as she shoved him against it, dagger somehow at his throat.
A white wave of dizziness hit him again and he struggled to stay upright—he didn’t even know if he was upright.
“I may have healed that wound cross your stomach,” she whispered, sliding a pale finger across the still raw flesh, “but I could make another just as easily.”
“How— how did you fix it?” Kell panted. Surely no one here had access to magic? Had she found the stone?
She guided his gaze to a half-healed wound at her wrist.
“My blood,” she said bluntly, “it’s special like that.”
“So I can’t leave. You’re simply going to hold me hostage. Why?” Kell’s mind had only just caught up with his body.
Lila shrugged. “Not a hostage. A pet, perhaps.”
“A pet ? I am no pet. I could—“
“Yes, yes. I know about the magic. I’ve seen you about—well, smelled you, really. Your blood is easy to recognise. And I enjoyed the trick with the binds, I must admit.”
“What’s stopping me from leaving then?” he hissed.
She rolled her eyes at his persistence. “God, take a hint. I’m drinking your blood for fuck’s sake. Your bigger spells require blood, yes? Well, I just won’t leave enough in you for you to do the spell and get away. You may’ve been able to escape those binds, but I know for a fact that you don’t have enough energy to run from me now.”
“I won’t use magic then. Next time, I’ll just walk out.”
“Not likely, I’m afraid. We’re in the cellar; I warded the stairway down to here with that metal that stops people like you using their magic. And it’s locked,” she added when he tried to interject.
“How did you get ahold of that, then?”
“Some crank sold it to me in the pub.”
Fuck, I smuggled that in to sell last week , Kell thought. There was probably a lesson in there somewhere.
“But how did you heal my wound then? How did I set that rope alight?”
Lila huffed like a teacher growing exasperated with an inept student.
“I said the metal was there, not here . Set whatever you like alight down here.”
Kell gasped as she released him in favour of sitting back down on the floor, fiddling with her daggers now, the point pressed into the water-warped floorboards as she spun it rhythmically. Despite his protesting muscles, Kell stayed standing.
“What advantage could that possibly pose to you, letting me roam about? I’ll find a way out.”
There was that smug smile again. One fang poked out over her thin bottom lip. “Free range tastes better.”
The lack of blood in Kell’s body didn’t stop him from blushing. He gulped.
“And what of when you sleep? Don’t your kind hang from the ceiling?” he spat.
Lila flopped back against the wall—legs out—like some twisted sort of bloodthirsty porcelain doll. “Someone likes their questions.”
“If you let me go, you wouldn’t hear my questions anymore.”
“Begging already? No, if you must know, I sleep elsewhere. Make sense?”
In an awful way, it did.