“I was kept in a cage for about a week. It could have been longer, or maybe it was less. Time became a foreign concept after a while. And then, they turned us loose and told us to run. The humans were given a bit of a head start over the caged vampires, but not much of one.”
She’d never forget the sound of her labored, panicked breathing as she plunged through the woods with Dylan’s hand in hers. They’d run as fast as they could with branches and trees whipping and tearing at them.
“I don’t know how I got away that first day, but somehow I survived. I spent that night in a tree,” she said.
She and Dylan climbed high into a pine. Sap and pine needles covered them by the time they finished climbing, and she used her belt to tie them to the tree, but it hadn’t been necessary. No matter how exhausted Charlie was, she couldn’t sleep. She’d spent the entire night trying not to cry, sure they would never survive while Dylan slept.
The hopelessness of having no idea how they could survive damn near choked her to death.
“The next day, I climbed down and started walking. I couldn’t stay in the tree without food and water, but I needed somewhere to hide. That was when I found a small copse of trees and crawled inside. Halfway into the center, the earth gave way, and I plunged ten feet into the pit.”
“The same pit as me?” Jack asked.
“Yes.”
“Then what happened?”
“Unprepared for the fall, I broke my leg and arm when I landed. The arm wasn’t bad, but the leg was a compound fracture, and I found myself staring at my bone while lying there.”
Dylan had jumped into the hole after her and, using her belt, he made a tourniquet for her leg, but it would only delay the inevitable. Dylan sat at her side and held her hand as he rocked back and forth while crying. She recalled his tears hitting her face while her heart broke.
Without her, he wouldn’t survive, and they had most likely fallen into a trap set by their enemy. Bleeding to death was not the way she wanted to go, but it was far preferable to what they would do to her son when they came.
She couldn’t let that happen, but she couldn’t stop her blood and life from seeping out to stain the ground while Dylan pleaded with her not to leave him.
“It wasn’t the hunters who came for us,” she said. “It was Mal. By the time he arrived, his blood wouldn’t have been enough to heal me, so he gave me a choice to become a vampire or die.”
“And you chose vampire.” For some reason, the idea of someone else’s blood in her, turning her, made his fangs tingle and his blood pressure rise. If it hadn’t happened, she would be dead, but another’s blood flowed through her veins when it should behis.
The thought astonished him, but before he could think on it too much, she continued.
“Yes,” she said. “I chose to live.”
But she never had a choice. One way or another, monster or not, she had to live for Dylan. Charlie never would have made the same choice if she were on her own, but she’d never regret what she’d done. She would die for her son, and she’d certainly live for him.
“And do you regret it?” he asked.
“No.”
“How often does this hunt happen?” he asked.
“The big hunt, which I was a part of and that they captured you for, occurs once a year. The ones who run this island sometimes bring other prey here to occupy themselves throughout the year.”
“How many other survivors are with you?”
“You’ll learn that when we get there.”
She wasn’t trying to be bitchy this time; she simply couldn’t reveal many of their secrets until Mal had a chance to meet Jack. She felt he was trustworthy, but in the end, it wasn’t her decision to make.
Jack recalled what she told him about her turning. “Who is Mal?”
Charlie contemplated if she should answer this or not, but she didn’t have to give away details about Mal himself or how many survivors there were. “He saved most of those in our group. I discovered one of them.” She’d found the last human who came to them, Sheila, wandering in one of the side tunnels.
“Mal was the first survivor. I’m sure, before Mal, there were others who evaded the hunt, but they were eventually found and killed off.”
“But Mal figured out a way to go underground,” Jack said.
Charlie hesitated, but he already knew the answer to this. “Yes.”
