Heartthrob

Judas was pissed all weekend. Not just pissed, she was - for the first time in decades - beating herself up about her own decisions. Her own failures. Her own objective mistakes, far removed from the mistakes of subordinates, from the failings of her underlings, from the weakness of those around her. Her mind kept going back to that night in the manse, to the videos on her phone that now weighed upon her like a lead block. The remembrance of her quarry's drunken motions and the unexpected transition into a hungry beast made the vampire's cold heart burn hot like a ball of silver in her chest.

She had been stupid. There was no avoiding it. She had been so drunken with power, so intoxicated by her own greed, her own lust, her own desire to exert and extend control that she had pushed Esper James far past her breaking point. Ghouls were unusual, and while they were nearly vampires in many ways, they exhibited certain behaviors that needed to be accounted for. While the hungriest of the three mainline groups of second-living (Ghasts aside, those being closer to a genetic failure than a medical one), they were also the most naturally volatile. That brought her to a serious contemplation of strategy.

Zombies were basic. Straightforward. Slow metabolism, slowed reaction times, slower mental processes, but durable and easily able to withstand everything they were given. They took the longest to cremate, their bodies continued to function for a notable period of time after being exorcised (the working name for a silver-bladed vivisection, meant to help study the actual anatomy of the product), and they could last the longest without going feral. They were the ideal worker: ambition was culled, physical and mental processes were slowed to negotiable rates, and they were the most durable in industrial accidents. OSHA didn't exist in Vitus.

And then, vampires. Smarter. Faster. Stronger. Insatiable for blood, their own physiology neglecting the process of blood-blackening that stripped one's vital fluid of all nutrients except the required oxygen so that other processes could disseminate those things. They recycled the blood that they consumed, rendering the old blood down into a base form that was then repurposed by a remolded appendix to form into the vampiric pheromones so ubiquitous to the blood-suckers. They were the creme de la creme of the intellectual world, neurons firing in such a way as to rival some of the best computational devices of the East, if trained.

And then? Ghouls. Ghouls were an unfamiliar familiarity in Vitus - people knew they existed, but actually meeting one was a rare chance. Where vampires were the perfection of the mental and interpersonal, the truth was that ghouls had the potential to run things in a more physical society. Might made right in some scenarios, and those were ones where ghouls ruled: hunger drove their body to a perpetual state of heightened consumption to gather the requisite nutrients for the furnace in their gut, zero repurposing of byproducts, all of it liquified down into a usable state by stomach acid that could make the alkahest of old green with envy.

They were the most prone towards going feral, they needed their suppressive pills the most regularly, and they were the most energetic. They were also the most susceptible to the pheromone impulses of vampires, which was one of the many reasons Judas had wanted one as her secretary in the first place. Easier to control, easier to manipulate in a day-to-day scenario... easier to bend to one's own will, and train into the desired result. Esper James had been the first ghoul she had managed to snag as a secretary, and it had been excellent.

Everything had been exactly to expectations or surpassing it. A subservient little bitch with all semblance of self-interest culled to a bare minimum, and every mote of independence and ambition wasted to withered nubs - she had been the ideal subordinate, easy to direct, easy to control. A ghoul's resilience and energy exploited in the form of an office worker who never took smoke breaks, never took longer than was necessary to perform her tasks... For fear of beatings, perhaps. It only took a year into their shared employment for Judas to strike her for the first time, a dizzying backhand that left EJ's head spinning.

HR hadn't given a damn, of course. What were they gonna say? That Judas was in the right, and that Esper James should've just been a little fucking better at her job? That little ghoul bitches didn't get to speak back to their mistresses? Either way, the answer was the same. Judas got what she wanted, and EJ learned her god damn place. Bending whelps like her was what Judas excelled at - after all, it was her entire job description, pretty much.

Or, at least, so Judas had thought. So it had always felt. So why did EJ get away from her? Why did this otherwise perfectly subservient, perfectly obedient little bitch slip through her fingers, kill her cat, and disappear somewhere into the city's disgusting, worm-ridden underbelly? How did she, even? The readings had all indicated EJ was nice and ready to get dragged in, to get locked down and brought in for further usage. Bagged and tagged, as it were.

Over the past few days since EJ and that Wayward whore got away from her, Judas had been wringing her brain dry over the whole ordeal. It had been her that slipped up; it had to have been. There was no way those two would have gotten away if she had just played it right, if she had just held herself back and let them be, at least for a bit. At least long enough for her security detail to roll in and get eyes on them, get them loaded up into a van to get taken back to Tsang HQ.

Get them locked up in their respective cells, like the classic, stereotypical birds in gilded cages.

She was fond of that metaphor - it was appropriate to more than just they. Vitus as a whole was a cage-once-gilded, now horribly grime-lined and choked by a constant layer of smog. There had been beauty in it, at least in the idea of it - she was old enough to remember it like it had been, back before the demands of industry had truly settled on their little patch of grave dirt.

The idea had been... Had been a city that never slept, because it never died. A utopia. People could live forever, constantly able to be surrounded by their loved ones, by their favorite places and favorite things, never touched by the ravages of time. Freed of their desire for eternal life, that intrinsic fear of finality, because it was reversible. That had been the idea, at least, or at least it had been when Judas thought back on it. When Tsang first came to her, pitched the idea of it all to her, it had sounded too good to be true, but seeing the results firsthand had convinced her.

She sat up in her bed and swung her feet out from beneath the plush comforter, the duvet barely wrinkling as she exited. Such were the perks of luxury - a bed of such specially-designed synthetic materials that it rarely wrinkled. She took a moment to breathe in deep, to gather herself, to steel herself as she had done a thousand times before. Oh, God, it still smelled like them - like her. Fuck.

No. Nope. Not a chance. She couldn't let herself get weird about this. She had a problem to solve, and her own fuck-up to fix, in that order and in many ways simultaneously. Esper James wasn't the only candidate, sure, that was true - but at the same time, she was the best option because Judas knew how to make her squeal, knew what made her tick. And, as they say, knowing is half the battle, isn't it? But just knowing about her wouldn't bring her back. Wouldn't bring her in for what she was needed for.

Ugh. She hopped up out of bed, walking to her closet and stepping in. It had been deep-cleaned of all of her cat's blood since Saturday, but now, here, on Monday evening, she swore she could still smell that deep, red scent in the air. It was as deliciously satisfying as it was repulsive to her. Recently, she had found her love of blood waning, even if that was a core part of her physiology. She wished, in a way, that it wasn't so necessary. She really wished she could eat a normal fucking meal, not the lab-grown meat slurry that got pushed out of almost every butchery across town.

And yes, she could get a real, genuine steak any and every night of the week she wanted to, but that was work. She was overworked enough as it was. It was no easy feat, running Tsang's genetic development division, watching expies get born from their cold-wombs just to be tested, fail the trials, and get exorcised on the spot. Exorcism. That was the business word for second-living euthanasia, in the medical sense. Didn't get rid of the body like crematories, but it got rid of whatever scrap of soul clung to those horrid, misshapen husks.

Picking out a suit for the evening, she slipped it on with practiced ease and grace - not that anyone was watching, but if she let herself slip on such a basic ritual, she'd really know she was ruined. All these years clawing her way to the top, crushing friends and foes alike under the heel of her expensive, designer boots, just to fuck herself over so explicitly. And in such a stupid, fat-headed way! Judas's slim fingers balled into a fist, her arm winding like a spring before releasing her own self-loathing onto a nearby wall. A new hole blossomed from where her knuckles touched town like a blooming flower in the days before wilt.

Whatever. She'd let a contractor know and it'd be done before she got home this morning. She had the money and the pull for such pleasures as a same-day wall repair, even on the fourth floor of her manse. Or was it fifth? Fuck it. She forgot. Other things to worry about. And so, now donning her evening attire, she headed down the stairs to the main floor.

As she proceeded to the landing, her aforementioned designer boots clip-clopping against the genuine hardwood stairs with every step, she heard something subtle. A buzzing. Something was vibrating, somewhere in the house. Somewhere on this floor. Judas's curiosity got the better of her, and she delayed heading out so that she could look for whatever was causing the disturbance. It was near the doorway... whatever it was hadn't been buzzing over the weekend, that was for sure. And no one had come into her house recently, except the cleaners on Saturday.

Buzz. Buzz. Something plastic vibrated with a percussive drumbeat in the foyer, and vampiric senses had yet to fail Judas, so it wasn't much of an issue to track down. Behind a decorative vase Judas had had imported in from China, the vibrating object buzzed and brrr'd in rhythmic repetition without ever truly seeming like it was consistent. Shoddy tech. She took to her knees to kneel down beside the vase, getting on all fours in a position she'd never let another person see so that she might peer behind the exotic decor.

Aha! She nearly exclaimed aloud. A little plastic-and-metal rectangle, plastered with a flimsy case depicting some kind of bizarre anime girl. Boxing gloves? Rainbow hair? What was she supposed to be, a lesbian fighter who fought for yuri justice near and far? Judas almost found herself laughing at how preposterous the thought was. But then... it clicked. She grinned, though it was wry, and tinged with annoyance at herself.

EJ's fucking phone. She had dropped it when she came home drunk with her last week, and in the heat of the escape, some of the meatheads on Judas's security detail had probably kicked it behind something. Dumb fuckers. But, now she had it... And it was buzzing? Judas reached out and veritably snatched it from where it lay, flipping it over in her hand in an instant so that she might see what all the figurative buzz was about. Ha-ha.

An alarm. Set extra early, so EJ wouldn't be late for work on Monday. So she wouldn't make Judas pissed. The vampire's smile faltered for but a moment as she considered it. EJ, late little EJ... always doing as she was told. Always trying her hardest to impress her vampiric boss, trying to keep herself out of danger but also, even after decades of abuse, trying to put a smile on Judas's face. Trying to be graced with the good fortune of goodwill from her beloved, beloathed superior. Fuck.

She nearly pitched the phone through a window, but instead settled for just switching the alarm off. Tsang fingerprint-recognition was designed so that, while it was individualized to the owner, it came pre-loaded with any high-ranking Tsang executive's fingerprints, too... For security reasons, if any journo got too inquisitive about it. Judas unlocked it without a second thought, and began poring through.

To Hell with work. She had earned a day off, and frankly, this counted as work-from-home anyways. She was doing work, in a sense, tracking down her little escapee so that... So that what? So that the deadline could be avoided? So that she could save her own ass? A bit of both, truth be told. Camera roll showed plenty of lame pictures and internet memes mingled with some genuinely deviant, sometimes obscene pornography, almost entirely of the drawn variety. If she still had a firm grip on the blonde, she would've used that to barb at her, tease her till she cried about the abundance of fetish art her phone held.

"Oh? You're a latex sort of girl, are you?" Judas said it anyways, entirely for her own benefit, even chuckling wryly just to complete the one-sided interaction with a ghoul no longer there. Pushing herself to a stand, she brushed off her pantlegs before continuing to probe. Reminders to buy more FixAte, notes about bands she likes, some saved links to more pornography and a few different webcomics... And then, Judas struck gold. A tAsT account? Jackpot. She began to rifle through every inch of Esper James's digital privacy, thinking it far less of an intrusion than the other sorts of privacy she had personally stolen from the girl.

Purity's Princesses? And there it was. A tAsT feed dedicated to all of Purity's little whores, regular gene donors, and... Oh? Judas wasn't stupid. She could put the pieces together, or so she'd like to think. Seemed like Purity, that catty little fuck-doll, had some kind of connection to get real human meat. She was pimping these women in the server out, in a way, in exchange for a FixAte-free fix. They fuck her, or at the very least give her their fluids, and in return? She keeps them on a new sort of leash - one made of velvet, but still just as restrictive.

Regardless of material, it would choke you all the same.

Judas almost admired the thought process behind it. Tsang was working her over for gene samples, and by cycling through a list of regular donors that was long enough to get past any sort of oversight from the low-level techs studying the stuff for repeat sampling, Purity spent a little cash to get human meat from some kind of insider supplier, and in turn kept her cashflow steady and as low-trauma as she could. It was clever, the vampire had to admit.

But who was her hookup? There was only one answer, Judas knew. The exact same rat bastard with the snakelike grin that had introduced the pair of them in the first place. Alex. That stupid asshole ran a whole IRE site, he could get plenty of human meat if he wanted, and knowing a buyer personally to such a degree that he could be sure she wouldn't fuck him over? Vitus made a business of business, and these two had apparently been doing quite well in those regards.

Time for a stop to that. She'd get to Alex first, get her claws in him, then work her way down the line till she had the pinkette and the ghoulette at her disposal all over again. And who knew? Maybe the Wayward would be with them, too. That would be icing on the cake, if she was being honest. Tie up all her loose ends in one single, sweeping movement. Help quash the rising trend of underground cannibalism in Vitus, acquire her blonde haired candidate once and for all, reclaim one of her top-performing field assets and remind her who was in charge... And maybe get a white-haired head to mount on the wall.

Or, if she was feeling really cruel towards that half-metal dyke who had tried to kill her, maybe she'd just rip her synthetic limbs off and keep her around as a pathetic little plaything. Bloodbags were more fun when they whined and begged when you bit them - and while Est's whimpers would be from agony, not the usual ecstasy, she had spent long enough reviewing and editing that home video of the Easterner taking it from the ghoul that she was getting used to those sounds...

But it'd be good to be the reason for it in a more direct sense, this time, wouldn't it? Earlier, Judas had chuckled but it had been fake, only done for the bit she was playing for herself. Now, feeling laughter bubble up through her chest like scalding water boiling through a geyser, it was as fresh and real as it got. She couldn't help but cackle to herself, deeply and from her chest, as she considered her future actions.

All it took was a message to one of the other people on the server, asking for a hookup. She told the stranger that Purity was looking for a 'group activity', and wanted the unknown element to meet up with them. They agreed quickly and without much fuss - after all, cannibalism was on the line, wasn't it? And when cannibalism was an option presented to a cannibal, well, it would have been more shocking if she had denied the woman masquerading as EJ.

Oh, it was all too easy. Fuck. Judas felt renewed already... And soon? She'd be satisfied, too. Whatever it took.