This is Not How I Envisioned a Semi-Afterlife

This is Not How I Envisioned a Semi-Afterlife

It is the fifth day of my imprisonment.

I am a half-witch, half-vampire. I have slipped through the streams of time to study slaughter under the likes of Van Helsing, Summers, Belmont, Frost, and Blake. I survived the Burning Times though I can still feel the blazes blistering my feet and smell the scent of my sisters being burnt to ash.

I owe Lady Aevalle my life. My debt to her mother, the Fae Queen, is an old one and goes as deep as blood. It was Aevalle, herself, as a child, who stood boldly in her mother’s Court and demanded that the followers of the Olde Ways be spared from the flames.

But our pact did not cover this.

When the air on the Caledon Firth began to change, Aevalle called me up to her metal fortress in the sky. The kittlings had discovered that it was faire season and had not only read up for themselves, but had informed their sisters about the festivities and goings-on across the land. The Lady seemed all too eager to get rid of them.

I took the position as Governess as a favor, to pay back my life being spared. I knew Aevalle as a child. She was inquisitive and learned much too quickly, but she was controllable. Her brood must take after their father.

  

Three perfectly good dresses have been ruined so far. The brood have sampled everything from crystalized sugar strands to fried whats-it surprise, then insisted upon climbing aboard mechanized vehicles that thrashed them about—on water, in the air, in tunnels. Yet somehow, they hold their stomachs while being whirled. They save it for my precious taffeta and lace. 

My training did not prepare me for this.

When I hear the carnie cursing Oreo for five generations due to her “improving” his contraption, or I spend hours screaming Luna’s name only to find that she’s “made friends” with a family and wandered off to visit for a while, or am “treated” to stereophonic skull shattering squeals for what seems like forever because Moggie and Minnie spotted a Desmond Shang poster—my first impulse is to kill, to feel sinews snapping under my claws and warm blood coursing down my throat. And then I look down into those eternal pools of innocence in their eyes. 

And I know.

I am doomed.

It is the fifth and one-quarter day of my imprisonment…