With a snap

Halloween. The time of goblins, ghouls and everything else that goes bump in the night. A time when monsters can roam freely without fear.

It is almost a cliché then that she was snatched from the street one Halloween night to be forced into the world of blood sucking monsters.

Some of the details are hazy, but she will always remember the main story beats. She’s walking back to halls with a friend. She’s hoping that maybe they can be more than friends at some point. They take a shortcut between some houses to get to the bus stop. The street light was out, but neither of them cared. Strong arms grabbing them both by the neck. No chance to scream. The wet sound of a spine snapping.

Then darkness.

A pit.

Her friend’s body, the only other thing down there.

Doing what she has to survive, starving in the dark.

A nightmarish face that looms above her and smiles with too many teeth.

“If you want out, you’ll have to beg, my little monster.”

She’s not proud that she does so quickly.

After, she wishes she had stayed in the pit.

It tried to mould her, make her like it. Made her aware that she was a small, insignificant worm in a ‘grand’ society. Expendable. Would need to prove herself to be anything more than that.

She did when she burnt down that hateful warren where it had kept her captive.

Apparently, it was against the rules to murder your sire. Even when it had challenged her to ‘do her worst’. Even when it had kidnapped her and kept her in the dark with the dead body of her friend and forced her to–
That didn’t matter to the Powers that Be. She had broken their rules, and it didn’t matter that she barely knew them. She was nothing more than an irritating mud stain on their pristine edifice of grandeur.
She was too tired to protest their shadowy ruling. They had made it clear how expendable she was and that they were doing her a great service by allowing her to live (she later learnt how much of a lie their claims of benevolence were). So she did what she was told.

After all, those powers made clear, who would care what happened to an insignificant germ?