Page 23 of Little Doll

As soon as we shut the door and left the vulgar place behind us, the unsettling quiet of the black alley disturbed my soul. I was sure that it was left over bad tidings from the night I tasted the blood of the little pauper. Yet, I hurried through the dark to keep up with Carmilla as she headed in the direction she’d sent the carriage earlier.

Soon, we passed into the small light of a dim gas streetlamp and that’s when we heard the other footsteps. Carmilla stopped and reached an arm in front of me and across my waist.

Six men stepped out of the shadows and into the murky light.

Six disheveled, dirty men with dead and empty eyes.

How had she not known we were being followed? How had I not known? My heart pounded so hard that it caused a headache to bloom across my skull. I winced, and even as I did, one of the dirty men grabbed me and shoved me into the brick wall behind me.

Carmilla spun to me and smiled darkly. “Lesson three, Little Doll,” she said, even as the man pressed his forearm into my throat. “Feed until they die.”

She swirled into her magical black smoky state and, in an instant; it surrounded the man who held me on the wall. Then she was vampiress again, and she yanked his head back so savagely that he didn’t even make a sound when his neck snapped, and she sank her teeth into it with a violent crunch.

Another of the men charged and the fog of sexual binging and terror lifted, and a storm of fury rushed in. I brushed past my cousin and lifted the man off his feet, jerking him into my mouth and ripping out his jugular. His bloodmingled with the cum on the front of my dress and I shivered with delight as I lapped at his blood. But I dropped him into the dirt, fearing I’d done it wrong. He was most certainly dead, but I wasn’t sure it was supposed to be such a mess.

In a matter of seconds, all six men were dead in pools of their own blood; that which we hadn’t feasted upon, anyway. We were very safe while they were very dead. But the alley was an absolute bloody mess.

I looked at Carmilla. Like me, her chin and front of her dress were soaked and wet with blood.

“Well, this is an awful mess, Cousin,” I remarked.

Carmilla chuckled. “Lesson four, Little Doll,” she quipped merrily. “Clean up. Watch this.”

She turned once more to address the dead men. She didn’t say a word, simply looked at them and then the most peculiar thing happened.

The dirty dead men and their sticky puddles of blood all swirled like Carmilla’s smoke and then dissolved into thousands of tiny, fluttering, black moths. They flitted up into the moats of dingy light and then passed that into the dark night sky. I laughed and spun about as the wings of the black moths tickled my skin and disappeared into the night.

Carmilla grabbed me and drew me into a playful hug, spinning with me. “Isn’t itwonderful?” she cried. Together, we laughed and spun.

“And now, let’s just go home. We don’t have to wait for the carriage if we don’t want to,” Carmilla whispered into my ear sleepily.

Her black smoke swirled around us like a warm and comfortable embrace. Once again, I had the sensation that I had dissolved into nothingness and just like that, Carmilla and I became black moths ourselves, fluttering home in the night wind.

Chapter 10

Nova

I returned tomy stone room at Blackmoth House before the sun, but Carmilla was gone. Flitted away as a moth on the night winds, back to where she came from, I supposed. I discarded my soiled clothing in a heap on the floor and fell into bed, naked and exhausted. Sleep came hard and fast, and I sank into a place that felt more like a grave than a bed.

It was another sleep full of vivid and wonderful dreams. But in every dream, there was the soft little girl’s voice in the background, calling my name. By the end of my sleep, from having endured her mournful whisperings, I woke with an ache in my chest like a chasm of sadness.

My eyes blinked open, and I still heard her calling. At first, I thought it was the last remnants of my dreams bleeding away from reality.

“Nova! Noooooovaaaaa,” sighed the youthful voice mysteriously.

Fane had arranged an armoire in my room and filled it with brand new clothing and night clothes for me while I’d been out with Cousin Carmilla. I scampered across the cold floor and threw open the heavy doors of the thing. I looked forward to examining the clothing my brother had selected for me, but just then, I reached in and extracted a long silky black robe which I slipped into and tied around my body.

The material felt like moth wings brushing my skin.

This time, when I stepped out my bedroom door, I was in a tower hallway made of stone, with one small window letting in the moonlight. I drifted to the window and had to step onto my toes to peer out. I was high over the garden where the black roses tipped their buds down as though to escape the light of the moon. Mist snaked over the grass like a living thing. I saw bats dipping and swerving in the sky and heard the call of an owl somewhere nearby. There was also a rather vocal frog down there somewhere, whose song reached all the way up to me in my little tower.

The space was small and led to the top of a set of stone steps that spiraled down and out of view.

“Nooooovvvvvaaaa…”

The eerie sound of the little voice sent shivers down my spine. I no longer believed it to be from my dreams or a figment of my imagination. I was… Sensing someone. Someone nearby. Someone’s thumping heart. Who was she?

I placed my toes on the top stair and stepped down… Only to find myself on a new set of stairs.

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