Amelie sat and glared.

 

She didn’t have much of a choice, of course. Well, she could choose not to glare, but the shackles were most definitely not her idea. They stung - though not as much as they should - but she made a show of hissing when they touched her skin. She liked to keep people on their toes when it came to superstition. She did some more glaring. 

 

Amelie had an excellent glare. It was a glare that looked into your soul, that looked at your heart of hearts and went “tsk”. It made you feel like you had to apologize to your mother. She glared at the woman opposite her, who tried to look self-assured. She put her hands on the oak table in front of her, but the only impression it gave was of someone holding onto a raft. She was, all in all, in over her head. 

 

“What is your name, demon.”

 

Amelie interrupted her glare to roll her eyes.

 

“Can we please refrain from name-calling? If you want me to cooperate, at least have some basic courtesy.”

 

The woman was slightly taken aback. It seemed that what she’d expected was some combination of snarling, hissing and possibly a solid helping of speaking-in-tongues. Not back-talk. 

 

“I… I am not to consort with your kind, foul monster.”

 

Amelie frowned.

 

“We are not consorting, woman. You haven’t even bought me dinner.”

 

The woman took her time to blush, but when she did, it hit her full-force. Her head turned beet red, and she tried to regain control by coughing. It didn’t work. It didn’t even make her feel better.

 

“No fraternizing with the enemy,” she mumbled to herself. “Foul demon.” she added.

 

“Ughhh, fine. Ask your questions, then.”

 

Pretending, possibly to herself, that she’d just come out the victor in this interaction, the woman triumphantly unfurled the scroll and gently flattened it on the table. 

 

“On the eighteenth of December, in the year of our Lord fourteen-hundred-and-twenty-three, I, Katherine of Cornwall, take the sworn oath and statement--...”

 

“I swear nothing, lady,” Amelie interrupted.

 

“...-- of the Vampiress and Consort of the Devil…”

 

“Hey now, there’s no need for that.”

 

They sat opposite from each other. Katherine looked at her expectantly. Amelie cocked her head in confusion.

 

“I… never met the devil?” Amelie hazarded. “Never met the woman. Or man. I wouldn’t know. Because I haven’t met them. Definitely no consorting. None.”

 

“Your name, demon.”

 

“Oh. Amelie Josephine of Ardent-On-Tyne, the third.”

 

“... of… ardent… on… tyne…” Katherine mumbled as she wrote. Then she cleared her throat, and continued.

 

“You will tell me, in full, why and how you got to this place, and as such ensure the integrity of our holy archives.”

 

“What?”

 

Katherine sighed.

 

“Where do you come from, Demon? Your story?”

 

“Oh! Could have just bought me a drink and gotten the same thing, if I’m honest. There was no need for,” she jingled her restraints, “these. Besides,” she added with a wink, “I’m a sucker for a cute girl in uniform.”

 

“Hum,” Katherine said.

 

“Fine, if it’ll make all of you happy.”

 

---

 

I was born in the coldest, darkest winter of the late twelve-hundreds. I was twenty-one at the time, and entirely lost. Back then I used a different name, but I’ll die a dozen times over before I’ll tell any of you. I was a young idiot, looking for her place in the world, and entirely out of place in the one I’d found myself in. Even my body had felt like a prison, disgusting and imperfect as it was. 

 

I had spent many a night in the company of my friend… Elbrecht, a nobleman’s son from across the county. He’d been a friend of mine for a year or two at that time, and we had found common ground in our distaste of the trappings and pitfalls of what we considered to be “modern” society. Not that we wished to go back to the old days, God forbid, but rather that we felt that things could be better. 

 

I remember distinctly the fact that it was a Sunday, though I can’t now recall the date. I had arrived at the inn where we usually met up, but could not immediately find Elbrecht’s face in the crowd. I went up to the innkeep, who helpfully told me that a room had been rented in our name, though I did not appreciate his judgmental sneer. There was, I remember thinking at the time, no reason to suspect two grown men of wrongdoing in the privacy of one-another’s company. This was, after all, the thirteenth century. 

 

Regardless, I took off his hands some bottles of a rare vintage, from my own stash which I had left in the inn’s care, wine I’d pilfered from my parents’ cellar. They would, and indeed never did, find out. Regardless, the bottles in hand, I made my way upstairs and knocked on the door. Inside, I found my friend, and we greeted one another people who had known each other for decades might, despite our fairly short acquaintance. 

 

We sat down and talked, and we soon found ourselves enjoying the golden glow of… 

 

This might ring hollow if you’ve never enjoyed the nectar of the gods that is a twelve-twenty-two vintage, but sometimes insobriety is preferable to cognition, if you catch my drift. This was… not that. The golden glow I referenced here was a heightened state of being. 

 

For hours, we spoke with fervour of ways in which we would improve society, where we had grand plans. We would argue furiously and tempestuously against opposition that was not present in the room with us. We would laugh and cry at experiences real or imagined and, as we often did, found ourselves in each other’s arms. 

 

I rested my forehead against my friends’ and it was then that he confessed to me his distaste for his mortal form. At the time I shared it, of course, but not only did I not know how to verbalize this, but I feared retribution from my environment if I ever dared utter something so unheard of. I regret now how I responded to him. Though previously we had been so close to one another we could taste the wine on each other’s breath, I recoiled, not knowing how to handle this information. He cried, and mentioned to me how he hated his name, hated his form, and wanted desperately to be different. 

 

I was shocked, and did not know how to respond, so I am sorry to say that I ran. I ran downstairs, I ran outside, I ran to my horse and I rode into the night, their words haunting me as I went. I did not only feel like my friend had lied to me, but that a terrible truth, a possibility I had never considered, had been revealed to me, something so horrible that, to this day, its existence fills me with pain and dread. 

 

Anyway, some twenty, perhaps thirty minutes later, I died. 

 

I was riding on the outskirts of town when a black shade flew over me, and grabbed me by the collar. There was no time to react, and I feared I had entered a state of delirium tremens, that the world was falling down beneath me, until the sound of cloth in the air made me realize that it was me who was falling up. I saw the township stretch out underneath me until I found myself dragged into the belltower of the local church. We crashed through wooden pews and I found myself splayed across the floor, my clothing tattered, my skin marked by splintered wood. The woman who stood before me was unharmed, and to this day I remember her ethereal beauty. Her long hair was auburn, her eyes hazel. Her face was that of… I can not impress on you the sight she struck. It was the face that the greatest artists of our world have been trying to create and failed, because a face like this could only be made by God.

 

She was a creature of divinity, I remembered thinking, but there was a darkness to her. Even under the wintered light of the moon that shone through the broken roof, she seemed to be cloaked in darkness, and she had a smile on her face that promised nothing good. 

 

“You are beautiful,” she told me, and while I looked nothing like I do now, and I vehemently disagreed with her at the time, in looking back I can agree that I was a handsome young man. 

 

“You will grow old, you will grow ugly, and you will die.”

 

All I could do was whimper, you understand. Her voice had a commanding quality to it that I could not resist, and her words struck hard and true. I did not want to grow old, for my face to do that thing that old men’s faces do, for it to grow gray and weary, for the only semblance of dignity preserved to be the growing of repulsive facial hair. Most of all, I did not want to grow uglier, and die and be remembered as old and ugly. The thought itself struck me with abject terror.

 

“Say yes and you’ll have none of these.”

 

I want to say I resisted, that my will was stronger, but I was not, and I could not. I said yes, pleaded, even. In my state of drunkenness and confusion I was unable to resist even my basest impulses. And so, she stepped closer, and she killed me.

 

---

 

“What do you mean, she killed you?”

 

“Just like I said it, lady Inquisitor. She killed me and I died in that clocktower.”

 

Katherine rubbed her temples.

 

“You are impossible, demon.”

 

“Improbable, perhaps,” Amelie grinned.

 

“A lot of what you have said already makes no sense. This friend of yours… Elbrecht?”

 

“It ended up being Elisabeth, if I recall correctly. She had it changed later in life.”

 

“That still doesn’t explain…”

 

“Perhaps these things would come easier if you don’t interrupt me, girl.”

 

That last word cut through the air like a blade, and Katherine found her breath stuck in her throat. Amelie giggled a laugh like sleigh bells. “I’m sorry, Inquisitor. I didn’t mean to fluster you.”

 

“You did not fluster me. Demon.”

 

“If you say so, Katherine of Cornwall.”

 

“This interview is concluded for today, Hellspawn.”

 

Katherine stood up from her chair and exited the cell. She closed and triple locked the door. She shot Amelie a last withering glance through the bars, and left.

 

Amelie sighed in her chair and dropped her head onto the table. 

 

She was so. Very. Bored. 

 

She mumbled to herself as she tried to stop herself from counting the seconds as they went by.

 

“She needs to get laid.”