The Queen unfolded a napkin and rested it on her lap then grabbed a knife and fork. She checked to make sure they were clean and glinting, and then she started slicing the meat in front of her with delicate and accurate precision. She did it as if she were sculpting a masterpiece of meat then she started telling her tale.
“Once upon a time, about two centuries ago, a king called Angel Night von Sorrow was at war with the evil vampires threatening to take his daughter from him in an attempt to make her one of them,” Carmilla started, her eyes focused on cutting the food. “In his quest for recruiting the best warriors, and because he was loved by the Council of Fairy Heaven for rivaling his own kind, the Council sent him young warriors from Fairy Heaven; powerful warriors who had the gift of killing vampires in their dreams. They were called Dreamhunters, and they helped the king a great deal. He’d even ordered a few of them to protect the castle and the princess in his absence. Who better than angels to watch over his little chosen princess?” the Queen smirked at her own sentence, and then sank her knife into the meat again. “Only one of the Dreamhunters was different; he wasn’t pure like the rest. He had great darkness buried in him. The kind of beautiful darkness only the Queen was able to detect. She’d recently transformed into a vampire and killed young girls to preserve her beauty—she was horrid,” Carmilla rolled her eyes. “It turned out the boy’s father, a pure angel, had fallen in love with a demon woman who’d given birth to the boy about fifteen years earlier. The Queen liked that. She taught the boy the ways of darkness and let him lead an evil army for her own purposes. Although young, the boy became her scariest weapon in the kingdom.”
Loki moaned, wanting to talk. In his frustration, he kicked the table to get Carmilla’s attention. He wanted to dare her to look him in the eyes.
Carmilla raised her head and looked at him. “Ah, you want to talk?” she said. “Not unless I say so,” she poured herself a drink and cleaned the rim of the glass with the tips of her fingers. “One day, the Queen sent the Dreamhunter to kill her own daughter—she was a big threat to the Queen. To prove that he’d killed the princess, the Dreamhunter had to bring the Queen her daughter’s heart, which the Queen planned on eating,” Carmilla picked a ripe, heart shaped, piece of meat and placed it slowly on her tongue. Loki thought she’d show her forked tongue now, but she didn’t. She closed her eyes and moaned briefly as she chewed on the meat. “Disappointingly,” she opened her eyes slowly the way a theatre pulls its curtain open for the final act, “the Dreamhunter fell in love with the princess, although she was partially a demon herself. He refused to kill her, defying me and the Council of Fairy Heaven.”
Loki’s face was getting redder with every passing moment. He was about to explode, trying to destroy the spider web sealing his mouth.
“You know what else the Dreamhunter did?” Carmilla wiped her lips with the tip of the napkin, then folded it and placed it carefully back on the table. “Not only did he disobey the Queen’s orders, but he continued helping the runaway princess. Together, they were able to find the annoying Charmwill Glimmer to help them with an enchantment that split the princess’ heart into seven tiny hearts. She gave seven of her friends that she met in a cottage in the dark forest while running from her mother, each a piece of her heart. A nifty trick. This way the Queen not only had to find her escaping daughter, but she also had to find her daughter’s friends, whom she called the Lost Seven. Without finding the Lost Seven and collecting the pieces of Snow White’s heart from them, she couldn’t kill the princess—The Queen desperately wanted her daughter’s heart. It had been foretold that only one of them could live.”
Loki’s eyes moistened as his memories slowly returned to him.
“Although the Queen was never able to catch her daughter or the Dreamhunter, the Council of Heaven, was fooled into believing that the princess was the bad seed and shadowed the Dreamhunter as punishment for falling in love with her,” Carmilla loved every word coming out of her lips, and loved her voice. “Until that annoying Charmwill unshadowed the Dreamhunter. You know the story from there, right Loki?”
Loki felt like fainting as the shocking news sunk into his brain and he began having visions of the past. This time, it was an extremely vivid vision. He saw Snow White running scared from her pursuer, hiking up the bottom of her dress as she ran, so not to fall, trying to find a place to hide in. He saw her come upon a cottage and stop before it reluctantly, before she opened the door and walked in.
“It’s a well-known fairy tale, if you ask me, only some versions might differ a little,” Carmilla said, leaning forward toward Loki, “because some would call the Dreamhunter a Huntsman.”
“No!” Fable screamed, trying to free her tied hands. She knew were this conversation was going, but couldn’t believe it. “You’re lying. Loki is a good guy.”