and I'm the devil with the black dress on Who: Tanith When: Late night Where: Seedy motel bar in detroit NSFW/Disturbing content.
A woman with short black hair and piercing hazel eyes sat at a motel bar in Detroit. She wore a little black dress that hugged every curve, and she was watching the door at her back through a small compact mirror in her hand. Her good hand, that was. Her right arm was in both a cast and sling. It was all out of place on her, but didn’t detract much from her beauty. It was a seedy little place; generally the sort of place people only came of when they were in search of that one thing, and they usually didn’t dress to the nines to get it.
When Tanith saw the door open and her mark walk in, she clicked the compact shut and placed it in her clutch. She’d picked this one well. A young vampire, he’d come to Ad Gustum once. Went through all his money in a couple of days and was kicked out to the streets when he had nothing left to play with. Tanith had heard endless gossip about that one. He’d been an awkward teenager, turned at 19 in hopes of becoming ‘cool.’ He hadn’t known what to do with the girls at first, but once he found his stride, he liked to be treated like a god amongst his harem. Apparently fangs weren’t enough to make you ‘cool,’ and they certainly didn’t get you a paycheck on your own. When Tanith had tracked him down he had a reputation for feeding on the homeless, and sometimes selling his blood at seedy little motel bars.
He did not approach Tanith, but she had known he wouldn’t. He didn’t have the confidence for it. He sat at the far end of the bar, and Tanith made a show of getting up to sit next to him. She turned her body in towards his. “Buy me a drink?”
He stared at her. For a moment, his brain was probably trying to convince itself that she was somehow talking to someone else. “Why me?” he blurted out.
Tanith was good at her glamours, and she’d chosen this dress for a reason. It was low cut and strapless, and when she lowered the glamours specific to her torso for just a moment, every scarred bite mark from her youth was clearly visible. “You feed me and I feed you,” she said. “Fae-blooded, water elemental. I like the way it feels.” Her skin crawled, but he bought her that drink. Tanith barely even noticed what it was, she simply downed it and hoped it wasn’t too watered down. She needed the boost for what she was about to do.
Tentatively, the vampire placed a hand on her thigh. The woman with black hair grinned. “Not here,” she said. “I’ve got a room upstairs.” She stood and walked off, not bothering to check to see if he would follow. He did. He grew closer to her with every step. In the elevator he came to her from behind, inhaling deeply in the scent of her hair. Tanith just reminded herself to breathe. He was nuzzling the side of her neck by the time she was unlocking the door to her room. Once inside, he turned her swiftly to face him, and pressed his lips to hers. It was a testament to Tanith’s commitment that she didn’t recoil at the feel of fangs. She didn’t bolt. She didn’t even tense. She grinned, and gently pushed him away. “Ah ah ah,” she said, shaking her finger at him. “We play, we play by my rules.”
He grinned. “Will I like this game?”
“Honey, it’s to die for.”
Tanith took his hand in hers and lead him to the bed. The second the door fell closed her wards clicked into place, effectively soundproofing the room she’d already spent hours preparing. She pushed him back onto the bed and climbed on top of him, allowing him to kiss her throat as she did so. “Stretch your arms,” she commanded, and he listened. It was slow going with only one good hand, but she clicked each handcuff in place.
The vampire’s eyes were sparkling with delight, and she felt his desire beneath her. “This kind of game,” he said. “I like it. Why do the cuffs feel… tingly?”
Tanith didn’t actually bother telling him that the cuffs were ‘tingly’ because they had a silver core. As soon as she had him locked in place, she had him. He was just too dumb to know it. She ripped open his shirt, and used her fingernails to begin carving runes into his chest.
The vampire started to realize that something was off, then. He began to see through his lust-soaked haze, and notice the similar runes that had been chalked all along the walls, in a perfect circle around the bed. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, what are you doing?” He pulled once at the cuffs, and realized they didn’t give. Tanith had reinforced the bedposts with a good twelve spells to hold once he did that. Real worry started to show in his eyes then. He was stupid, but he knew the cuffs shouldn’t have held. He knew the bedposts should have collapsed under his strength. And as he put two and two together, he realized his body was feeling heavier and heavier with every rune Tanith carved. Then she grabbed the silver dagger off of the bedpost.
“No, please, no-“ One final rune and he could speak no longer. Gritting her teeth, Tanith ripped off the sling and forced her broken hand to grip around the hilt of the blade. Alistair had broken three bones in her arm, two in her hand, and her thumb. This hurt, but it was about to get so much worse. Tanith had seen this spell at work before. It was not a pleasant experience for anyone involved.
She lifted the blade above her head, and said the final words. The runes on the wall glowed red, the ones carved in his chest turned black. And with every bit of force and strength Tanith had left in her body, she drove the dagger into his heart with her injured arm.
It was agony. She grit her teeth and grunted through it, and felt the dagger glow hot in her hands. She tightened her grip. She felt the health of the thing beneath her slowly leaching through her, a white hot lance of liquid torment as it flowed up her arm, slowly knitting the bones together. All the color drained out of the corpse beneath her. Tanith managed to stay still until the flow of magic reached down even to her toe-tips, and then she dropped all glamours, collapsed, and fell off the bed. She fell in a crumpled heap, and was panting too hard to even try and correct that.
Eztli pawed open the half-closed bathroom door and walked into the room. He looked over Tanith a moment, then hopped onto the bed to inspect her victim. ”I think it’s dead,” he said.
Tanith managed to roll onto her back. The spell was still within her, fixing every ailment and leaving a terrible burning sensation in its wake. She lifted her right arm in the air for inspection and watched as the marks where Alistair’s teeth had pierced her skin slowly began to disappear. For some reason, she began to laugh. A truly exhausted but triumphant sound. It also occurred to her that this felt a bit like justice. Maybe Treat was dead, but she’d evened things up just a little.