They had taken his red hat, and, perhaps more inhumane still they had taken his cigarettes. Svlad Cjelli sat on the edge of his cot and stared at the far well, mouth twisting continuously in a low mutter. He'd spent a while being in shock, then frittered away some time with denial, and eventually descended into the depths of rage at the unfairness of the universe until it left him feeling drained and shaky.
That had eaten up a couple of hours, at least.
Now he was going over names, trying to come up with a new moniker to use as soon as he got out. It was already abundantly clear to him that no matter how innocent he truly was, no amount of investigation was likely to make it look that way. He was in for the long haul. The best he could do was behave himself. keep his head down, and wait. He'd never been good at keeping his head down, even if he was on the short side. Or more accurately he kept his head relatively low but the enormous red hat he perpetually wore tended to make it stand out anyway. He'd practically made a career out of being noticed precisely by pretending to act like he was trying not to be, but he wasn't quite sure how you were supposed to go about it for real.
It would have been easier without that snarky detective coming around to harass him periodically. The man's name was Gilks, and he looked, to Dirk, like a lamp post with a bottle brush taped onto the light. His comments aggravated Svlad precisely because they were the clever, sarcastic kind of retorts that he always wished he could come up with himself. He was also, strangely, the first person outside his own family he'd ever met who could actually pronounce 'Cjelli' properly. That infuriated him even more, that name coming accurately from that mouth. Under that mustache. What kind of a name was Cjelli anyway? Time to pick a new one and start over. His family didn't seem to want to have much to do with him now anyway. Not since his mother had visited the school at police request and found herself surrounded by student mutterings of 'psychosassic vampire'.
His private rantings were gradually interrupted by the awareness of a funny sound. From somewhere nearby there was a low, steady, monotone murmur. It seemed to be reading off stock market prices. Svlad stirred, and looked around for whoever or whatever was producing the noise, only to realize it was coming from him. He broke off with a groan and rolled over onto the cot, facing the wall.
The prison guard, just out of view at the edge of the bars, sighed and put away his pen. Oh well, if it turned out the rumors about the prisoner were false, nothing lost, and if they were actually true, there was a long sentence ahead of the boy and a fat profit to be made.