The Vampire's Pet

The Vampire's Pet Chapter 1

1.

Of all the places in Briarvale that he could have ended up, he found himself at the shittiest little pet shop in existence.

The walls were painted lurid red, or had been about ten years ago. Someone had made some effort to patch over the rain damage and graffiti, but took no care to match the reds. The shutters and faux columns were deep yellow, which he suspected was meant to be gold. The sign was gold after all.

"JR's Pets" it proclaimed, in black and gold airbrushed type. The leering, cartoonishly-breasted woman leaning on the words left no question as to the type of 'pet' JR, if there was a JR, sold here.

Ten miles over was a shop that fed vampires rich bloodwine while they browsed gold-leaf, leather-bound books of their world class buffet of pets. Every color, ethnicity, and gender could be found in those pages, along with tasteful headshots and detailed lists of education, hobbies, and preferences. He knew. He'd drank the wine and looked through the books.

Eight miles west was a different kind of shop, where the pets were trained for darker pleasures, lines cultivated for beauty and wicked, knowing gleams in their eyes. But Jackson found himself here, on the muddy, litter-lined street, under a spastic light, considering buying a human to play with.

A grating buzz rang out when he opened the door. He felt the weight of eyes on him and smelled the presence of warm blood around him. Down two steps, lined with worn red carpet, a showroom of human flesh waited.

Closest to him a buxom, dark-skinned woman lounged on a red and gold chaise. She wore very little. A purple cloth, stamped with vague gold shapes that could have been Asian or Farsi-inspired glyphs hid her genitalia, but a split all the way to the waistband revealed the entire length of her dark legs. She wore nothing at all over her top half, save for gold medallion pasties over her nipples. A thin, probably fake, gold chain ran from the tips of each pastie to a chain around her waist then down to the chaise, to which she was bound. Her face was painted, thick dark red lips and winged, kohl eyes. But nothing shone out of those large, dark eyes.

To the woman's left a man stood on an actual pedestal. He was fair skinned, with long, dark hair falling around his face. He had a lean, artful build, the kind that kept muscle on with little effort, which was probably good because with how tightly his skin pulled against his abs and veins Jackson guessed he was weak and dehydrated. He wore only some kind of loincloth-Speedo combo, leaving his largest selling point plain to see.

He was also chained to the pillar he stood on, the length of the chain so short Jackson didn't see how the man could sit down.

Next was a young boy, probably eight or nine.

Jackson closed his eyes and counted slowly to twenty. At fifteen an overly cheerful male voice broke in. "Good day, my lord. See anything you like?"

He did not. He saw a room of dead eyes, of humans, alive, but not living, simply waiting out their hourglasses until death took them.

"Not really," he said, unable to keep a sneer from his face.

The shopkeeper's face fell. Jackson took the man's measure. He was in his late forties, perhaps. Very near to the rotund, graying image that sprang to mind when 'merchant' was said. He was likely intimidating to other humans. Muscular and tall, with a face that cracked with unconcealable anger when things didn't go his way.

Interesting.

"Perhaps we can find something more suitable for my lord." The man bowed. He'd pegged Jackson as a person he wanted to sell to. Or maybe he wanted to make a buck from anyone he could. Jackson suspected the act was a thinly-disguised farce, much like this shop itself.