The Burgrave Chevoy Vesh had just run into his favourite person. That surprised him. He hadn’t thought he had one.
Granted, for his ornamental wives and his mortal fuck-thralls he had a certain intermittent affection. Although they were all exploitable and disposable, he found them mildly charming and treated them accordingly; his wives with respect and his mortal fuck-thralls with the closest he could get to respect while still having fun. Sometimes one of them would say or do something that would endear him and he'd have a little moment of thinking "Aw, you."
Once, Nikola Lever had got really obsessed with detective novels and talked about them non-stop. Vesh had thought "Aw, Nikola."
Once, Laura had tried to give up cocaine for Lent and only lasted one night. Vesh had thought "Aw, Laura."
Because of the horrifying and despicable deeds he'd committed to become a vampire and a minion of the Serpent (deeds too dark and taboo for this nice book to ever describe them) Chevoy Vesh couldn't truly emotionally bond or connect with anyone... but there was nothing to stop him liking people. Liking people in a detached way, without the possibility of ever truly caring about them, but liking them nevertheless.
And he liked Tatiana Lever the best.
Weird. They’d only met once before, and had both spent most of that occasion focused on doing awesome sex stuff to Tatiana’s brother.
And now they were meeting a second time in the immediate aftermath of her boyfriend’s savage attack on the Burgrave’s Castle. Restored by the Serpent’s Gift from the visceral slayings and misogynistic mutilations the Minotaur had perpetrated upon them, the Dark Brides of Vesh had just helped him throw the unconscious brute off the top of the castle. Tatiana came strolling along the battlements while his body was still tumbling down towards the moat.
“Um...have any of you seen my boyfriend?" she asked.
“Young miss Lever,” said the vampire lord, turning smoothly from the precipice and hoping she wouldn’t hear the splash, “How pleasant to find you have visited. Come, let us retire to the parlour. My dark brides shall serve tea.”
"How the fuck do you 'serve tea?'"
"Babe, we've only been vampires three centuries, yeah? We remember what tea is, yeah?" said Evangelina, looking around the castle's main kitchen, desperately trying to remember what tea was.
The two lesbian vampiresses had gone straight to the kitchen to do their master's unholy bidding. The heterosexual vampiress had fucked off somewhere else, probably into Chapter 28. The lezzers were a bit salty about that and would give her shit for it later, but for now they had the tea situation to deal with.
"I think 'tea' means 'supper' or 'dinner' or whatever one calls the evening meal?" suggested Laura.
"Only to about a third of people, mostly working class northerners."
(Lots of quasi-medieval fantasy kingdoms have a north)
"How the fuck do you remember that statistic?"
"Some things just stay with you."
"It can't be recent."
"BABE, I JUST WATCHED YOU DIE!" Evangelina screamed. She'd been gathering objects from the around the kitchen that might, potentially, be 'tea things' and now she threw them to floor with a catastrophic clatter. It made a horrible noise but didn't set the project back overmuch as none of them were actually 'tea things'. Most of them were skewers and ladles. "I watched that vile beast drive a stake into your heart and reduce you to ashes!"
Laura embraced her.
"Hey...Hey... I'm here. I'm right here. That monster can't touch us, okay?" the trashy stoner bitch cradled her elegant lover's sobbing head tenderly in her arms, "He killed us, but we're still here, right? Still right here. It's you and me, okay? They can't touch that. They can't change that or stop that. It's you and me, Eva. It's you and me."
"For a moment it wasn't you and me though! I saw him kill you and, for the seconds before he killed me, it was just me. Just me in the world. Alone. And then I was dead and then I was back...and you were back and...We had to stand there in the chapel, gloating at the minotaur, being all badass and smug...putting on a show. But I don't feel badass or smug. Those seconds you were gone... those terrible seconds. I never want to feel like that again."
"You won't, babe...you won't..."
"Won't I?" demanded Evangelina, "All that monster has to do is put his willy in your magic bum and we're erased from reality, parted forever!"
Laura considered explaining that neither of them would feel anything under such circumstances. Okay, initially Laura would feel the pain of being anally raped by a minotaur with a cock bigger than most siege engines, but then the prophecy would kick in, they'd be excised from linear time and the Lands of Lust and Pain, and neither of them would ever feel anything again.
But that didn't strike Laura as the best way to help her wife avoid the panic attack she was headed for.
Perhaps, like, a grounding technique or something?
"Name four tiddies you can see!" she commanded.
"Your left boob, your right boob, my left boob, your right boob."
Interesting. Laura would have gone in the other direction. Perhaps because she mostly read manga.
"Did that help?"
"Kind of, yeah," said Evangelina, "Let's get back on with our master's unholy bidding."
Along with the ladies not being clear on what tea is, and them having both very recently been violently murdered, this was another source of tension in the kitchen. This "unholy bidding" business.
The Burgrave Chevoy Vesh had never ordered his Dark Brides to do anything before. They had always been purely ornamental sluts up until now. Just there to hiss, and writhe and lezz up and free to work out the specifics of that themselves.
This "Come, let us retire to the parlour. My dark brides shall serve tea” shit? This was new.
What did it mean to be given tasks? How much pressure was there to get them right?
"Okay, now I'm calmer... I think I remember enough about tea to know that the Burgrave is expecting one of two things," Evangelina said, "It's either boiled water with leaves in it..."
"That sounds right! It's that!"
"Yeah, okay. Or... it's that...plus like a little plate of treats."
"Treats?" said Laura.
"Yeah, like...little cakes and sandwiches and pastries and things."
"Okay, yeah. It's that. It's that for sure. Boiled water with leaves in it and a little plate of treats."
"We can do this!" said Evangelina happily.
"Fuck yeah, we can!" echoed Laura, "Behold as we work the wicked wiles of our malevolent lord's profane behest! Behold as we bend the nature of the world unto his teneborous will! Behold as we serve boiled leaf water and a little plate of treats to him and that smokeshow milkmaid he's entertaining!"
"Babe, did you see her slutbags?"
"Fucking incredible."
Boiling water was easy. They started a fire by burning a random book from the library. You can probably guess which one, but it's okay, it has fully served its purpose in the plot. Leaves weren't hard to find either. They had plenty of marijuana.
Then for the little plate of treats.
"We don't really have human food here, do we?"
"There's dead babies," pointed out Laura.
"I mean, they're human... and they were food when they were alive...but I think we're thinking along the wrong lines? What about Christmas stuff?"
"Oh yeah!"
The only time Castle Vesh regularly admitted human visitors was at Christmas, when carollers were very welcome so long as they did the Burgrave's favourite. The larder usually held some festive fare with which to reward them. Christmas cake, mince pies, stolen, candy canes, figgy pudding and so forth.
By now there was mould on most of it, but the mince pies and candy canes looked okay.
"It's kind of real Christmas themed now though, isn't it?" reflected Evangelina looking at the tea and the treats, "Like... if it isn't Christmas and someone asks for tea, are they gonna be expecting just a festive platter?"
"We could put a few lines of coke on the plate! That's a nice treat. Or does that look too much like snow?"
"No, no, that's good. Any other ideas?"
"I still think there's something we can do with the dead babies."
"Babe, they're drained of blood and a day old. What could we possibly do with...wait!"
In the parlour, the Burgrave and the Milkmaid sat and chatted.
They had much they needed to discuss, since they shared one lover and since a lover they did not share had just gone on a killing spree around the castle.
They didn't discuss any of that stuff. Vesh found Tatiana easy company because she charmed him like no other. Tatiana found Vesh easy company because there were clear social rules to follow when paying respect to a feudal lord so the whole conversation for her was just effortlessly following a script of deference and genuflection.
So they just shot the shit.
It was a nice time.
Then the lesbian whores glided in with mugs of boiled marijuana, and plates of mince pies, candy canes and cocaine.
Sprinkled all over these victuals were the tiny, bloodless and withered, severed fingers and toes of an armful of dead babies.
The milkmaid screamed.
"You don't have to eat the baby fingers," explained Evangelina, "They're garnish."
