"I wonder if you can explain this," said the notorious vampire, the Burgrave Chevoy Vesh.
The skeleton shrugged.
"No?" prompted the vampire again. He wasn't entirely sure how to interact with his skeletal servitors. It had been centuries since he'd animated them, and since then they hadn't needed much direct supervision. They just got on nicely with dusting, cleaning the moat and driving stagecoaches. Sometimes you needed to tell them where to drive the stagecoach to, or to direct their attention to a particular stain that the lesbians had left somewhere on the upholstery, but there was never a need to hold a conversation with one. So Vesh couldn't remember... had he given them speech? And how much cognition had he bestowed?
"Bones disinterred by Robber's Spade/Hath served and toiled as They were Bade," said the skeleton.
Oh, so it's like that is it? Vesh realised he must have set their speech patterns to this kind of Mirror Mirror drama. Fine, fine.
"Have you though? Have you? Because I think I sent you out to retrieve a priest and my boyfriend. And what you've brought back..." He gestured at the other two figures in the castle's chapel, "Doesn't seem to be that. They seem to be a frothy-mouthed vagrant who's been shitting in his pants for days... and some sort of hentai catgirl."
"Fragments of Man, Aspects haphazard/These pieces hath this Servant gathered/Constancy doth the self Abjure/Heed this corpse; no form endures"
"Okay, so I think I can explain this," said the Catgirl.
"Nikola?" gasped Vesh. Now the catgirl was talking, the vampire could recognise his victim's voice. The pitch was different, but the other prosodic features were consistent. This kitty-cat was his boyfriend transformed? Incredible! I Can't Believe The Teenage Peasant I Groomed Into My Cumdump and Bloodbank Has Been Reborn as a Purple Futanari Catgirl with Tentacles and an Expensive Quasi-French Haircut, he thought, providing what the title of this novel would be if he were the central character.
The lesbians entered the Chapel at that point. Joining the Burgrave, the Catgirl, the Skeleton, and the Priest in the Jesus Factory.
"Ahegao!" shouted Laura.
This wasn't an order. It was the name of her missing cat. The skeleton tried to do an ahegao face anyway.
"What's that meant to be?" asked the Catgirl.
"Eyes may not roll where eyes are not/I do my best with what I got"
"Ahegao!" shouted Evangelina.
The skeleton tried again. It was kind of wiggling one of its bony fingers in front of its gaping jaw to indicate where a hypothetical tongue would be protruding.
Vesh was confused. Now that his dark Sapphic spouses mentioned it... yeah, this Catgirl did look a lot like their missing Christmas Kitten.
"You've come back to us!" cooed the lesbians. They were very drunk and very high. "As a cute girl!"
"Okay, look. Here's the thing. My name's Nikki," said Nikki, "I'm a gestalt entity created from the fusion of Nikola Lever and Ahegao the Christmas Kitten."
"Plausible," admitted Vesh, "But how is this wretched beggar here a priest?"
"Oh, that's Parson Ivermectin. He had a mental breakdown after the Minotaur severed his wife's spinal column while faceraping her."
The Minotaur again, Vesh thought. Of course. After all, everything went back to the Minotaur. Everything that brought those six individuals together in that Chapel that day all went back to the Minotaur. To the Minotaur, and to Laura's prophesied besthole.
He made a little gesture of acknowledgement at the skeleton. Not a gesture of apology, but just a little flourish of the hand to grant that the servitor had indeed followed its instructions. It had brought him, to the best of its abilities, Nikola and a Priest.
"Nicky..."
"Nikki," she corrected him.
"Nikki, I have some follow up questions." Things weren't going exactly as the vampire wanted. He had married enough bitches for the aesthetic. Even though his whole motivation behind marrying Nikola had been to protect his bloodline from the Minotaur, a fun perk would have been marrying someone he was sexually attracted to for once. But now she was a fucking girlie too! Fuck's sake. Still, so long as a few details remained in place, his diabolical schemes should still work.
The lesbians were stroking Nikki. Not because she was a lovely furry kitty, but because they'd been doing Molly and that's how you get.
"I mean, I've got questions too... we're getting married? As Nikola, I'd resigned myself to thinking you'd dump me when I aged out of my teens, and as Nikki I thought you'd lose interest in me straight away. So, gotta say, this wedding is kind of a twist?"
"Who are your family, Nikki?"
"Huh?"
"Your family," the vampire repeated. "Who is your blood?"
Nikki had never thought about it.
Because Nikki had never doubted it.
"Tatiana," she said, "I may be a new person, but I'm one made of the brother she raised. She is my sister, my mother, my comfort and my shelter. Now and forever, Tatiana Lever is my family. Oh, and my dad's okay too I guess. Just a bit of a downer."
Then the plan would still work.
The wedding was still on.
Vesh looked at the pornographic naked body of the purple tentacled Catgirl. Why'd she gotta be so lewd? Why couldn't she be human too? Why couldn't she be a dude? He was gonna marry her anyway.
He put his hands on the forehead of the broken priest. All that was needed now was to patch up the mind of this feeble ruin. No true repair was possible, but with any luck the Vampire's preternatural gifts could jumpstart Ivermectin's consciousness enough for him to be able to splutter out the wedding vows.
"Dearly beloved," said the Parson. His first words since seeing his wife's epitaph.
"I'm so confused," said Nikki. "Why... why are we getting married?"
"Insurance," said the Vampire. "Or perhaps I should say, mutually assured destruction."
"And, do I get any choice in this?"
"Obviously not."
Silly creature.
Five years ago, Nikola Lever had chosen to let Vesh in through his window. As far as Vesh was concerned, that was the last free choice the peasant had ever made.
