A Dance at Midnight

the second promise

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A/N: We're past the halfway point, folks! Let me know what you're thinking of the story so far ~

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They circled each other, their fists up and ready. Dane cracked his neck. Adrian flexed his fingers. Dane lunged forward, but it was a feint; Adrian easily dodged the blow. Twisting his body, he raised his leg and struck the side of the old vampire's head. Dane stumbled. 

Got you. 

Taking the few milliseconds Dane took to recover, Adrian pounced. Dane deflected just in time and immediately lobbed a hit that would've cracked a human's nose in three; Adrian merely rolled his shoulders and sent an uppercut to Dane's chin; Dane spit out a tooth, which flew and landed somewhere on the lawn. 

Their bodies became a blur of motion as the two vampires ducked, spun, jabbed, and kicked. One minute and forty-two seconds later, they fell onto the grass with a heavy thunk. Adrian's arm tightened around Dane's windpipe, and his legs squeezed Dane's midriff. 

"Adrian is the winner!" As soon as he heard Senar's voice, Adrian unwound himself from Dane. He stood up, offering a hand to the other vampire. 

Dane grasped it. Adrian hefted him up and thumped him on the back. "Good fight," he said. Dane grunted.

They let go and stood side by side. Senar strode over to them and addressed the audience. "Please give our two competitors another round of applause!" 

Adrian raised his fists in the air in a victor's stance before bending at the waist in a low bow. He hadn't fought like a human in a while, and he found that he had missed it. 

Margaret had wanted to commemorate the way vampires struggled when they first turned: fresh vamplings were nothing more than slightly stronger humans, and this fight memorialized that. 

The rules were simple: the older vampires picked whom they wanted to fight against, and the one chosen could not refuse. Once within the circle, they had to let go of their vampiric powers and fight as if they were humans. The one who became incapacitated first lost.

Although Adrian always won during these fights, the memories of being a human never failed to make his head hurt a little. One memory in particular, the day he was turned...

...She was known as Bbalgan Gwisin, or The Red Ghost. At that time in Joseon, "she" had been believed to be a "he" because there was absolutely no way a woman could've done what she did. 

But a woman could. She did. Worse, he had been an adult when it had happened. Thirty years old, to be exact: he had been a full grown man, and he had still been dumb enough to be tricked by someone like The Red Ghost. She seduced him with her charisma and kindness. The next thing he knew, he was chained to the wall of an underground cave where he met other humans who had been stupid like he had been. 

She drank from them all, treating them like nothing more than lumps of flesh because that was what they were. His neck quickly became a watercolor of bruises and was constantly swollen and hot to the touch. The rest of his mind and body, too, began to weaken. 

He stayed in that cave for ten years; how he hadn't died or escaped long before then was a question he had yet to answer. Granted, they'd tried to escape, many times, but she lived in the middle of nowhere and despite her blooddrunkenness, she was faster and stronger than all of them combined...