Blessed by Night

At first, Nadine was understandably confused.

She wasn’t feeling sick at all. She never even got those… what do humans call them again..? The sniffles.

By any real metric, she was the perfect picture of vampire health and there wasn’t a thing wrong with her.

So when she started to connect the dots a bit, she realized that Malachi could only be talking about one particular ailment of hers.

And she was immediately mortified.

She looked past him at Aisha who was still trying not to throw up as she floated around in the dark void.

"Y-You told her..?" Nadine’s brittle voice was reminiscent of her spirit. Her eyes were already watering.

"H-How could you tell her, you promised me that you wouldn’t tell any-"

"I didn’t tell her anything." Malachi insisted. "I just told her that you needed help, and it was the only thing I wanted for a birthday gift."

Nadine had calmed down, but not my much.

"M-Malachi, I don’t think I want this. I-I just want to go home, please."

Malachi would have given Nadine anything. She was the sweetest woman he had ever met in his entire life and seeing her this emotional rended his heart in a way he never wanted to feel again.

But he also wanted what was beast for her. He couldn’t let Nadine keep living with this weight on her shoulder.

Maybe it could’ve been argued that he shouldn’t have sprung this on her so suddenly.

But Malachi had come up with this idea so suddenly that he neglected the proper planning.

He and Nadine were both woefully underprepared for this.

"Are you saying that because you think you don’t deserve to move on..?"

"I don’t deserve to move on, Malachi! Why don’t you get that?! I-I couldn’t…"

Nadine choked on her words once again, and her tears flowed without signs of stopping.

Malachi held her in earnest as she sobbed within his grasp.

-

Nadine Willow Alacera was the sixteenth daughter of the noble house of Alacera on the planet Pluto.

Her family maintained a strong grip on a dukedom that was neither too powerful or too insignificant.

But Nadine’s mother was hoping to change that.

Her goal was to ship off her simple and least talented daughter to the vampire king to become a concubine.

Then, their status would rise above the other vampire duchies on the continent, and be placed right underneath the ruling monarchy.

But Nadine didn’t actually want to get married.

At roughly 200 years of age, she was still an airhead. She spent all of her time stargazing or daydreaming.

It was no surprise that she was completely lacking in the attention span needed to focus on any of her lessons.

Her mother considered it a miracle that she was able to drill some form of etiquette into her at the very least. And hopefully that would be enough for Nadine to charm the king.

Nadine heard gossip from the maids on the day her mother made the arrangement. Her future husband would be paying them a visit.

They had branded her lucky. The Vampire King was a handsome man with as many admirers as there are blades of grass.

But Nadine was an airheaded woman. Not a boy-crazed one.

Even less so when it came to someone she hadn’t met and knew only through dreadful reputation.

So Nadine fled.

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Getting out of her mansion was easy, since no one expected her actually leave.

Their territory wasn’t exactly a nice place to be by human standards. All of the wealth and resources were concentrated within the monarchy- with the absolute bare minimum being given to those beneath them just to keep them from revolting.

When Nadine left, her plan was to take a sufficient amount of magical jewelry and other things worth more than their weight in gold.

This way, she would earn enough money to buy her way to somewhere her family wouldn’t look for her. Maybe a fairy forest or an elven village!

But what do you think happened when an innocent, airheaded, beautiful baby vampire showed up to a seedy monster pawn shop run by a cheap and irritable girtablilu?

…

Exactly.

Nadine was poisoned, robbed, and thrown into a cage so fast that her head spun.

She didn’t know it at the time, but the owner of the shop also ran a fairly profitable black market slavery operation.

A two-hundred year old pure vampire would fetch a disgusting amount of money. In human terms, she was barely legal. Her being untouched had only added another zero to the price tag.

Nadine must’ve rotted in that cell for days while she waited to be sold.

The entire time she was hungry, dirty, and frightened out of her mind. She couldn’t break out, and even if she could, what would she do then?

Nadine had never had a single fighting lesson in her life. Or if she did, she just didn’t remember it…

Besides, scorpion man venom wasn’t anything to sneeze at. It took exactly four days before Nadine could even feel her toes again.

When she finally got the hang of herself, she realized that her captor had found a new piece of merchandise to obsess over, and placed it in a cage right next to hers.

One bright blue, infant dragon. No bigger than a human child.

Pluto has but one universal law.

Dragons are to be left alone.

They are temperamental. And extremely protective of their own.

A scratch on just one of them means that at least 2,000 uninvolved monsters die a very violent and fiery death.

Leaving them alone is practically common sense.

However, when one lives in a society with demons and other walks of humanity’s worst impulses, citizens kind of do things that they aren’t supposed to.

There were many who were drawn to the allure of owning or befriending a dragon.

Treat it properly, and you have all the power and prestige that comes with being a dragon without actually having to do any heavy lifting.

A body guard, a beautiful lover, a mount, it can be whatever you want it to be.

He who pretends to be kind to a dragon can get anything they want from a dragon.

Wherever this child had come from, it was worth even more than Nadine.

And it would undoubtedly bring twice as much calamity.

Nadine tried to talk to the child while they were in captivity.

Since she read a fair bit, she knew a faint bit of dragon dialect.

Her skills left much to be desired, but she could communicate at the very least.

Although she introduced herself as Pancake instead of Nadine. But that was a small price to pay.

The dragon introduced itself as Cyrule. A young water dragon approximately five years old- making her a virtual toddler.

Apparently she had wandered too far away in the middle of the night and been tricked into a trap by a rather nefarious water spirit.

She was also quite fearful of her surroundings. It took all of Nadine’s people skills just to stop her from crying.

That was probably the first time in Nadine’s entire life that she made a genuine promise to another being.

A promise that she would see them both freed and back to their families, or die trying.