'Look at you, all dressed up,' Tamsin smirked from behind the bars.

  'Do you like it?' Laurel asked, twirling around in her dress playfully. One of the many conditions for her return to courtly life was that she should wear clothes. This dress was black and red, with long sleeves, a ruffled skirt and a bow.

  'I love it,' Tamsin lied, 'we should go dancing together!'

  Laurel didn't let the vampire spoil her mood. 'Soon,' she said. Since they were both immortal, four years possibly counted as being sooner rather later. 'I'll buy you a dress.'

  'Oh, you're buying things, now?' The girl laughed, wickedly.

  'Yes,' she returned, with a smile, 'I am a respectable young lady, once again.' It struck her, then, that they were both monsters pretending to be human beings. 'That will be you one day, as well.'

  Tamsin said something then that gave her a flicker of hope. 'I was never a lady,' she said, spending the barest moment in blissful nostalgia. She'd remember what it felt like to be a human being, her humble upbringing, her eccentric father, her loving mother and protective brother. The feeling did not last, however. 'You should bring a lovely lady from court to teach me how,' she said, imagining herself brutalising and murdering a young woman.

  Laurel didn't let her disgust show on her face, 'you still have a long way to go, I suppose.' She realised, of course, that Tamsin had actually killed far fewer people than she had. 'Anyway, I can't stay long. I'll fetch you some dinner.' Her targets were less carefully selected now, being generic outlaws and other wanted men. Trawling the cities for murderers was now forbidden to her. That was another condition. Her father permitted her to kill people but only those at the very fringe of society.

  She returned home shortly after. Her father did not want her to be seen flying, though he did not ban the activity outright, so she made sure to be careful as she approached the capital, entering the city as though she were on the hunt. She did not begrudge the pretended affection her father's new wife gave her. Indeed, she much preferred it to the bare hatred her step-mother had shown her. Nor did she begrudge her new false friends, who were secretly terrified of her. Their fear sated her and she returned their polite performance with courtly grace. 'Tasha has been wondering where you go at lunch time,' one of them said, upon her arrival.

  Amelia was a beautiful girl, and the least fearful member of her coterie, with very dark skin and golden brown eyes. Her comment was more of a tease than anything, since they all assumed she went to kill and eat vagabonds and paupers. They were half-right, she supposed. 'I go to visit a friend of mine. Her condition means that she cannot attend court, and she is a commoner besides.' She read their minds as they heard her response, Amelia believed it was a darkly humorous reference to some poor girl she'd killed, Natasha barely even heard the words because she was too focused on maintaining her composure, Tiffany dared to take her words at face value and Selene just assumed they were a polite lie.

  'That is so decent of you,' Amelia said with a smile and the other girls nodded their heads, nervously, in agreement. The black girl eyed her friends, deciding which one to pick on next. 'Oh,' she said, as though she'd just remembered something, 'did you hear that Arthur Silverwood has been courting our Tiffany? She's been keeping it a secret for almost three days now.' In reality, Amelia had known almost as soon as it had started.

  'I hadn't heard,' Laurel said, though she'd known from reading the girl's mind long before that the two had eyes for one another. 'You must tell us everything, Tiff,' she said, trying to make her smile seem warm and genuine.

  The girl blushed from the attention, as all eyes turned to her. She was sat on the settee between Natasha and Selene, whereas Amelia had taken her usual place in a chair angled beside them. 'Well, it's nothing so formal or official or anything,' she said, 'there's talk, of course, of perhaps, something.' Her voiced petered out after that and she looked to her friends for support.

  She found it in Selene, who plucked up the courage to turn the tables. 'And what about you, Emi? I heard that Will Hart kissed you at the ball last week.'

  Amelia smirked at that, 'oh, that is very old news, Selene. I want to hear more about what Tiff's been up to. Has Arthur tried to kiss you yet? You know there's a rumour he has a bastard son?' Laurel read the girl's mind as she tried to come up with an answer.

  'I don't put any stock in rumours like that,' in fact, Tiffany knew that he had a bastard son and had even met the infant, whose mother was being quietly provided for, 'and no, he hasn't kissed me,' she said, trying to sound scandalised. In fact, the two had slept together, something she'd confided to Selene.

  Laurel enjoyed it when the girls needled each other but knew that it was expected of her to keep the peace. She diverted them with parlour games, though none too dramatic or involved, and worked her way through benign but tedious conversations about fashion and food. At the end of the day, her friends would compete in a difficult game of etiquette where they tried to nominate each other to be the one that had to sleep over without seeming not to want to themselves. They had not yet caught on to the fact that she usually just picked whoever seemed the most fearful. Tonight, that was Natasha.

  In a sense, she was torturing herself by lying next to a pretty girl every night, whose neck she wasn't allowed to bite but it was expected of her. It was how the game was played. The girls surrounding her sisters, for example, would got to rather extreme lengths just to be the one to brush one of the princesses' hair. At the very least, the fear and fitful dreams sated her and, technically, the friend in her bed was safer than the ones in their own bedrooms, since Laurel was awake the whole time and ready to crush any nightmare that emerged. 'I didn't actually wonder about, you know, where you go for lunch,' Tash eventually plucked up the courage to say as they got ready.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  'I know,' Laurel said with a smile, 'Emi just likes to tease you.' She didn't admit that it was one of the things she actually enjoyed about having fake friends. 'You shouldn't be so worried. I assure you, I am not very easy to offend.'

  The girl steeled herself, on the verge of tears. 'Alright, then, what do you do, really?' She regretted asking almost immediately but took a deep breath and maintained her composure.

  'I hunt,' she replied, before feeling the need to elaborate. 'I really do go to see a friend of mine but I do, obviously, need to eat and I can't keep normal food down. I kill bad people, violent criminals and the like, and drink their blood.'

  The girl's fear exploded and she began to cry.

  'Hey,' Laurel said, closing the distance and trying to comfort her. 'It's alright, I won't ever hurt you.'

  'I hate this,' she said, almost not known what she was thinking, 'I can't stand it. The pretence, the stupid parlour games.' Her thoughts had become clearer, she hated being in the presence of a monster and having to pretend she was human.

  A childish part of her wanted to lash out but she restrained herself. 'If you want to leave, you can. Or you can sleep in a different room.'

  Natasha looked up at her with teary-eyes, desperately wanting to speak, but she couldn't find the words. She was the prettiest of the girls, with dark blonde hair and deep blue eyes, effortlessly beautiful. Seeing the young lady so vulnerable and fearful made her hungry but she let none of her nightmarish feelings show. Her red eyes were enough, of course, and the girl turned away. 'No,' she finally said, 'I have to be strong. I have to play my part.' Or else, she thought, her parents would be very angry. They wanted someone at court. She was their only child and too old, at twenty-three, to play with the King's other daughters.

  Laurel kept her distance that night, not that she ever crossed boundaries, and got up once the girl was asleep. She read by candlelight until the morning hours, when she slipped back into bed to maintain the barest pretence.

  'I'm sorry about those things I said last night.' The girl said, waking up with a headache. 'We're still friends, aren't we?' She was afraid, again, but less of being randomly attacked by the nightmare in the room and more of getting herself demoted.

  'We are still the best of friends,' Laurel said, sweetly, as if they ever even had been friends. 'I hope you don't mind if I ask Amelia to sleep over tonight, though?'

  'Of course not,' the girl said, letting relief wash over her.

  Amelia never gave her much fear to eat, though she occasionally had bad dreams, but Laurel never found herself terribly annoyed by that. Her affections were, in effect, the most sincere, since they were only really as fake as those she showed to all of her friends. 'Tasha is worried she offended you last night,' the girl said, after the day had come and gone.

  'She needn't be worried. I am quite thick-skinned.'

  'Care to test that?' Amelia said, with a grin.

  'Alright,' Laurel said, knowing from her immediate thoughts that she wasn't about to break down crying about how horrible it was to play pretend with a dhampir.

  'Who's Sarah Frostgood?' The question hit Laurel harder than she'd expected, though her telepathy had given her forewarning. She suspected that it was the use of the woman's horrible married name.

  'She was a servant of mine, whilst I was growing up.'

  Amelia gave her a wry look, 'she was much more than a servant though, wasn't she? In fact, the two of you were very good friends, weren't you?'

  'Yes,' Laurel said, her composure finally returning.

  'That made it all the stranger when you spoke against the very advantageous marriage that her parents secured for her.'

  'I was jealous,' Lauel admitted, hoping she would misunderstand.

  'Indeed you were,' it seemed that she understand completely, 'how scandalous.' She giggled. 'So, now that we're on the same page, I have proposition for you.' Laurel wondered if she was about to be blackmailed but the girl's thoughts didn't head in that direction. 'You and I could have an arrangement. I'll be your favourite at court, and play kissing games with you when we're alone, maybe going a little further if you ply me with wine, and we'll be pretend lovers as much as pretend friends. In return, you'll speak well of me to your father and beg him to do favours for my family.'

  Aila's words echoed through her mind, as she realised that the temptation was too great to resist. She'd lost her Sarah, gained and lost another and was waiting for her to return, found another then had to kill her, had the briefest tryst with yet another and now the fifth had presented herself. She wondered if her hopeless fixation was her most human trait. 'I agree,' she said. Her pretended sleep was lovelier that night, as they held one another. She found no fear to feed on but didn't care at all.

  Amelia surprised her over the following weeks by being much more publicly affectionate that she'd expected her to be. They would often be entangled in one another's arms whilst lounging, they would hold hands during walks and she would always lean in much closer than necessary when speaking to her. The whole thing played out very well for Amelia's family, who found themselves envied regulars at court. Within six months, a cousin of hers had his wedding hosted at the palace. All such fortunes were attributed to the great friendship the two girls shared and something closely approaching the truth was even alluded to by some of the more notorious gossips.

  It didn't last long enough, however, and, by the end of the year, Amelia had achieved her primary objective.

  The wedding of Laurel's pretend best friend to her favourite uncle's favourite son wouldn't be held at the palace but she would be the maid of honour. She refused to let anyone see how much it broke her heart, least of all Amelia herself, who immediately began to wind down her level of physical involvement. By winter's end, she was gone from court and Laurel was left with four friends who feared and loathed her, much as she loathed herself.

  'Miss me?' Tamsin asked, one day, when she was feeling particularly sad.

  'I miss you all the time,' she said, though, in truth, she had thought very little of her prisoner whilst falling pointlessly in love with Emi.

  'Run away with me,' she said, and part of her wanted to, 'and we can be together all the time.' Laurel wondered whether she'd be willing to let the murderous monster out if it weren't for the fact that she planned to give her the slip.

  'I wish that were true,' she said, forlorn, 'and I really hope this ends up working.' Sarah was gone, in more ways than one.