Dahlia raised her knife. She could stab one, but my fists probably wouldn’t do much damage to the second.
Would it hurt when teeth sharp as blades ripped into our necks?Of course it’ll hurt,I decided.
My tombstone wouldn’t read: Killed by creatures thought to be myth. No, it would say: Died in an accident, aged 22 years. Maybe someone might place a few flowers each year on the anniversary of my death, left to wilt and die under the hot sun.
A crippling crater hollowed out my heart. My temperature dropped to below zero. I stood in numb, dazed terror, staring at creatures I knew I couldn’t fight.
Then, abruptly, they were no longer moving toward us; they flew in the other direction. The vampires landed with tremendous cracking thuds against the right wall, splintering the wood behind them.
Dahlia put her knife back in her belt.
The tossed vampires sprang effortlessly to their feet. Their surprised gazes flickering between us and Karson.
“What the bloody hell are you doing here?” Karson roared, tearing my attention back to him. His eyes were not green, but black bottomless pits of doom, and they drilled holes into mine.
The fan hit us again. I just glimpsed a white-shirted vampire out of the corner of my eye as he ran, like a speeding spirit, toward us. What I saw next was just a blur of white, red, and black, nothing discernible. But the noise was sickening. I heard a sharp crack, like a tree branch snapping, then a ripping sound, but not dry like fabric tearing. No, this tearing sound was wet, and thick, and chunky. A thud. Then silence. Deathly silence.
The body of a vampire, minus his head, was sprawled on the floor. From the base of his neck where his head should have been, bright-red ribbons of raw meat oozed like a waterfall. A stump of bone poked through, sickeningly pale against all the red. A torn artery spurted blood with each pump of his heart, which, incredulously, still beat. It streaked out in a thin line and splashed onto the wooden floor, branching off like rivulets of a hellish stream. From his windpipe, red liquid gurgled, wheezed, bubbled, and popped. His detached head lay across the room to the right, his eyes frozen on a point in the distance, forever paralyzed in stunned terror.
Karson stood like a statue of fury behind the fallen body; his black shirt streaked with blood and his left hand splashed with crimson.
“If anyone else dares to even twitch a muscle in their direction, I will paint the walls in your blood.” His growled words trembled my bones.
It wasn’t an empty threat. Clearly.
Fear and shock filled the eyes of the other vampires, and they darted away.
To see him move, to see him kill without any regard for life, played havoc with my humanity. The jagged claws of reality dug deep, twisting, turning, tearing against my soul. Trauma disabled my senses; for a moment the world was faded. There were no voices, no music. All I could hear was the beat of my heart booming in my own head. All I was aware of was blood and death. My eyes fell back to the decapitated head of the vampire.
He blinked.He blinked.
The room spun, and my stomach lurched. I gagged and choked on bile. I spotted a restroom to the right. My legs shook as I ran, shoving the door open and slamming it against the wall. White tiles swirled before my blurred eyes. I rushed to the toilet, dropped to my knees, and heaved.
Karson just ripped the head off a man with his bare hands.
My mind struggled to process the incomprehensible—what Karson was. What did that mean Ethan was? Even though I’d held suspicions they were something different, I never expected this.
I heaved again, emptying the contents of my stomach until nothing came up but bile. I wiped the corners of my mouth, lowered myself to the cold, hard floor, drew my knees up to my chest, and hugged them as I tried to regain some kind of sanity, some small grasp on reality. Head pounding, heart racing, throat burning.
Karson is a vampire.
I closed my eyes against the madness.It has to be some kind of sick trick,I tried to tell myself.
But there was no magician’s trick effective enough to explain away what I’d seen and heard. Tears slipped from the corners of my eyes.
“Are you okay, honey?”
I pulled my eyes open to see a slim, attractive brunette peering down with two fang marks on her neck. Blood dribbled from them like melted ice cream down a cone.
Suddenly angry, I hauled myself off the floor. “No. No, I’m not fucking okay, and you have bite marks on your fucking neck.”
“Oh, these?” she said, her fingers brushing through the blood, then she popped them in her mouth and sucked the blood off. “They’ll be gone by the time I leave. It’s your first time, isn’t it? I was the same. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it—I love it now.” She smiled, turning back to the mirror and reapplying her lipstick.
“Love it?Love having yourblood sucked?”
“Oh yes, it makes me feel so good—unless they take a little too much, then I get a bit tired for a few days. Plus, the sex is amazing, there’s nothing better than fucking a man with decades of practice!” She giggled. “I’ll catch you out there.”
I watched her walk out in a surreal haze, wondering if I’d just entered the twilight zone.
