She didn't have to teach Alistar very hard for he was a natural born blue blood. Shayla, on the other hand, was too submissive, easily flustered, and easily offended to survive long as a noble. Yes, it's ironic that being easily offended is a bad characteristic for a noble, but most of them have enough power to remain as one even with such dreadful personalities, so those who don't, either swallow their pride or abandon the title.
It wasn't that she was too proud of herself, Shayla just found her anger difficult to control whenever Alistar was disrespected, and with her awakening powers, anger and other powerful emotions quickly turned her into a fearsome monster. Useful to intimidate the common people, less so when the intimidated person would have you assassinated while you slept, and Shayla wasn't fully immune to sleep yet.
"If my role is to be a silent servant, so be it," she admitted solemnly.
"You're supposed to be the
first wife
," Countessa pointed out through gritted teeth.
But the first slave shrugged. "I can have the title and still remain silent, can't I?"
"The first wife has the most power, so she's expected to lead the other wives and represent her husband when necessary."
"I can do that from my silent seat," Shayla insisted with a cute pout that made Alistar crave to kiss her little nose.
And Narcisa groaned as she clutched her head in exasperation. She was aware that she herself wasn't any more reasonable than Shayla, but the frustration of dealing with this kind of person was undeniable.
She wasn't allowed to just quit as she was a slave, and since her master wasn't even trying to make it easier, it was all on her to extract a pearl from fish guts. "Fine, I'll just take leadership myself. It'll be annoying to explain how nonstandard our relationship is, but it's the life I've been forced to live!"
"Why do people care if it's 'nonstandard'?" Alistar curiously asked, though his eyes were more interested in Shayla's twitching cat ears.
"It's because there might be someone in our family receiving more or less respect than they deserve, and seeing injustice is a quick way to propel our people into action!"
Shayla's ear shot up, making Alistar hum in surprise as the catwoman suddenly got incensed. "'
Injustice
'?! How dare you. What you just said has less worth than the shit at the bottom of the Fingers."
Yes, Narcisa knew exactly why the cat girl was hissing angrily at her, so she didn't mince words with her reply, "The nobility are what brings progress and new eras for the people. Without us, you'd be headless cockroaches, barely scraping by while corruption spread and consumed whatever was left."
But the cat was pious. "There are no nobles among the Reclaimers. Your kind just sucks us dry while hoarding all of the wealth. You may be wiser, but you never share it with us."
The red woman snorted. "You wouldn't understand even if we tried."
Alistar thought Shayla looked very cute when angry. "You just admitted you never
did
try! How do you know we wouldn't understand?!"
"I can't answer for all of nobility. This is just known."
"And to us, it's known that no nobles ever extends their hand to us."
But Narcisa grunted in frustration and verbally fled. "Useless discussion. You're not fit to debate sociology with me."
Alistar didn't even know what "sociology" meant, but the woman was just using a fancy word to shut Shayla up.
"I'll force you two to fuck if you keep at it," the Master calmly set down a law, but the hearts of the girls were so chaotic they didn't know if that was punishment or reward.
--
Aside from regularly abusing Narcisa to the point she got bruises (that quickly healed due to vampirism), they lived quietly in the mansion, occasionally going out to hunt a random gang member to satisfy their needs, but Shayla and even Alistar found that something had to improve, and fast.
"We need a maid to clean the mansion," Shayla remarked after a sneeze while the three walked down a corridor, Alistar carrying their latest victim on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
"No, we don't," Narcisa dismissed it instantly without even glancing at them.
The meal was easily carried by one hand, so he slapped her with the other. "Yes, we do. That's an order. The mansion is getting dusty, and we can't receive visitors like this."
The reclusive and eccentric woman groaned in anger as the pair had stepped on a very sore and pus-filled wound of her personality. Narcisa was a messy person, and she disliked having servants touch her things, but she would at least tolerate one if all they did was remove the dust. But the "receive guests" part was very important, so she contacted her contacts and arranged for a meeting with a maids' guild.
"Thank you for contacting our guild, Countessa Narcisa. I'm sure we'll find a maid perfect for your home today," the representative amiably greeted. She was small and surprisingly thin impure woman with mouse characteristics, but she carried herself like someone who'd smile at a noble screaming at her while shitting themselves then anxiously chain-smoke in silence while cleaning the shit they left on the ground.
But they didn't find the perfect maid, at least not after a few hours of interviews. Yes, there were plenty that had the qualifications to work at that mansion by themselves, but the trio of vampires wanted a very specific kind of maid to work for them. The maid would have to keep her head on her shoulder (or recover it after losing it) once it became known to her that the diet of the vampires consisted mostly of the flesh and blood from the freshly-murdered humans.
And the powers of the trio told them that none of the maids could handle it.
Describing what they wanted without being explicit was incredibly difficult, so Alistar took some liberties with the words used. "We're… looking for a very specific kind of maid. We're a very sanguine and eccentric kind of people, so we seek someone that'd make us want to sink our fangs into them. A person that can live in the shade of our wings, one whose body can make our blood pump, loyal to the point they'd bleed for us… and I don't mean that sexually."
Now that was a type of client the representative had never had to deal with before, so the gears in her brain spun so fast they started to overheat. "I-I… I think I have someone that might fit. She doesn't have the impeccable etiquette as the more prestigious maids, but… somehow, she matches your… colorful… blood-red colorful…
needs
."
And they were quite surprised yes at the maid that was called. She was a highly impure snake woman. Unlike the non-human race of lamias, this maid still had proper legs, but she also had snake scales all over her back and arms, a jaw that could unhinge, cheeks that unfolded and stretched, a forked tongue, folded fangs, a shiny, pale, purple skin, dark-purple hair, long and straight like a sheet, and yellow eyes with a stare as intense as Alistar's. While those features were impressive, what made her so fitting for Alistar's poetry was the air she carried with her.
This woman was dead inside.
Spiky necklace and wristbands like what you'd put on a violent guard dog, black eye shadows to cover the eye bags and black lipstick that only made her look more like a corpse, an aggressively bored expression, thorny black rose stockings, a very short skirt, an unbuttoned shirt, and a hostile demeanor where you felt that if you failed to entertain her, she'd give you a tongue lashing for wasting her time.
"Harriet, please wear the uniform properly," the little mouse woman requested with tone as thorny as the stockings.
But Alistar interjected, his heart pausing in awe at the maid, not that it had to beat a lot lately, "No, she's perfect. I can smell the air coming from her-…"
"You can smell my breath?" the maid grunted with a frown.
"No-, well, yes, I can, but that isn't what I meant, though you do have a lovely breath." Then his tone turned so dark and heavy they felt it with their vision and eyelids. It was toxic and intoxicating. " I can smell the
death
around you, the darkness coming from your heart… and I wish to grab a hold of it."
Harriet simply raised an eyebrow as her curiosity rose, but the representative lady felt like she needed to run from the room as fast as possible. Though, she wanted to drag Harriet with her, and that was clearly only going to make the monster chase after her, too.
Then Alistar turned to the small, scared woman and requested imperiously, "Leave us alone, please. I must have a private talk with her."
The mouse wanted to cower away from the large feline beast, but her pride in her job made her keep her little butt firmly against her seat. "S-s-s-sir.. w-w-we don't allow private talks t-t-to protect our maids from coercion. P-p-please understand that our position is d-delicate."
Shayla whispered to her master that the mouse was concerned he'd sexually assault the maid, but he didn't plan to do it… right now, that is.
"We need to make sure she can handle our eccentricities. If any of us even so much as rise from our seat, I think it's fair for dear Harriet to run as fast as she can," he reassured her.
"Well…" the small lady started to give in to the somewhat reasonable reply, so she turned to the maid. "If you wish for it, then I'll allow, but you have a right to decline."
But the dead snake started to show signs of life. "I'm curious what he has to say."
"V-very well…" the mouse eagerly accepted and stood up.
She was extremely glad to be free of that room and be able to scurry away for the call of the toilet was beginning to grow loud in her head. A part of her believed that wetting herself in front of that handsome man would've been a liberating experience, but the other was self aware to recognize she was getting infected with toxoplasmosis.
With the intruder gone, Alistar relaxed, and his esoteric powers began to bloom even more strongly. It was time to seduce her by letting her gently take a sip of the ambrosia of darkness.
"Make no mistake, Harriet, the three of us are horrible people. We may thread the line of The Balance, but only so that we're allowed to indulge in our dark desires with minimal consequences… and that's exactly what you crave for, isn't it? But unlike us, you're too scared to truly follow your calling, so you perform these empty acts, styling yourself as prickly black rose to soothe your heart.
"You're a poor, miserable soul, but we can turn it into a beautiful source of darkness like you always dreamed of."
"I… don't know what to think," she mumbled like a deer seeing the sun shining upon their face when a second ago they were in the complete darkness.
Did what he say just make sense to her? Not really. It wasn't like Alistar had become a clairvoyant or a mind-reader. He could feel something from her that tickled his new-found vampiric senses, but what he was good at was going with the flow and following his instincts. His level of confidence had always been at an unreasonably high level no matter what situation he was currently trudging through.
Yes, he was a happy fool, but add magic to the mix and he gains a dangerous level of charisma.
"You went too hard, Alistar," Shayla whispered to her Master, concerned that the maid remained silent for an uncomfortably long time.
Narcisa was never patient, so she loudly sighed in frustration to call attention to herself, then verbally grabbed the maid's shoulders and shook her lightly, "Girl, your heart is screaming to surrender to him, right?"
Harriet didn't answer, but it seemed like she was about to come out of her frozen state.
So Shayla swooped in to smoothen things before either of her companions made things worse, "We have no plans of harming you… on the contrary…" -and she started to take on an intoxicatingly sultry tone- "you'll be part of a very…
very
bloody party." She almost moaned the words, as if it just speaking them caused her to orgasm in her seat.
Well, she tried to be gentle, but it was almost like Harriet was slapped on the face with a cock and told to suck it, or a massive pair of breasts, whichever you prefer. Still, it
was
gentler than Alistar's sweet insanity or Narcisa's energetic forwardness.
"The price is just your loyalty, and your soul," Alistar added as the cherry on top of the abyss cake.
The tenebrific maid could hear her heart pump, and her body started to twitch, edging the precipice of a decision. Their words started to make sense to them, but she was starting to feel as if she had been forcefully denuded before an audience, and instead of feeling shame, she wanted to bare her fangs and bite those who jeered. She had a grudge against nobody in particular, but also everybody who merely lived their humble lives. She didn't wish harm upon them, specifically, but she wanted to lit a fire to warm her cold heart, even if she ended up getting consumed by it.
That's what Alistar had sensed in her.
"Make it worth it," she demanded with a heavy breath.
--
--
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