The Vampire Games: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance (3 page)

M
arc
and I weren’t killed, though.

Not immediately.

Instead, we were taken to an office overlooking the cave.

It was furnished in glossy dark wood with huge TV screens along the left-hand wall. The furniture was all black leather. The decorations were gleaming brass.

Security shoved us to the floor in front of the desk. The leather chair swiveled. “Is this the cause of the alarm?”

A man sat in that chair, wearing a tailored white suit with no tie. The collar gaped around the hollow of his throat. He was pale, as was everyone I had seen living in this creepy underground darkness, but he reminded me of a coyote for some reason. Maybe it was the way his nose sloped toward his mouth and narrow chin. Maybe it was the cruelty simmering in his gaze.

Maybe it was the fact he looked at me like I was edible.

“Yes, Lord Hector,” said one of the men who had brought us into the office. “They were trying to escape the Cistern.”

Lord? Cistern? Do these people think they’re from the Dark Ages or something?

Marc was limp beside me, sagging weakly against my side. I sat up straight and strong for both of us. “You’ll never get away with this,” I told the man in the chair. “People will notice we’ve gone missing. They’ll search for us. And when they find you, this whole creepy underground cult thing is going to get busted wide open.”

Amusement lingered on his thin lips. He looked over my head to speak to the guards. “Was anyone helping them?”

“No,” said the guard. “It seems that she broke herself free on her own, somehow. And she came back for this thing.” He nudged Marc.

Protectiveness surged within me and I tried to stand up. “Don’t touch him!”

They shoved me back to the floor. My knees struck glossy wood.

“Hold her upright,” said Lord Hector.

They lifted me. I thrashed, trying to summon memories of wrestling class again, but to no avail. These men knew I was a fighter, and now they were prepared for me.

Lord Hector strolled in a circle around me, analyzing my body with clinical detachment. He squeezed my biceps like loaves of bread at a supermarket. “Hmm.”

“Keep your paws off me,” I hissed.

He shoved my chin up and pushed my lips back to expose my teeth.

“Good condition,” he said. “Which one did she come from?”

He still wasn’t speaking directly to me. I wouldn’t be ignored like that. They had hurt me, they had hurt Marc, and who knew whom else they could have hurt? I wouldn’t take this indignity. “I came from Hidden Oaks!”

“Sector nine,” said the guard.

“Nine is one of Dawn Hold’s, isn’t it?” Lord Hector asked. “Did Phillip pick them for Harvest?”

“No, my lord. It was a random selection.”

They may as well have been speaking Latin for all I understood them.

“She’s feisty,” Lord Hector said, but he seemed to have lost interest in me. He sauntered back to his desk and sat down. “Send both of them to the Grinder.”

A chill rolled over my shoulders. “What’s the Grinder?”

But now Marc and I were being dragged away.

I kicked. I fought.

It didn’t matter.

We left that warm, comfortable office and were taken to a chilly hallway.

“I’ll find a way out, Marc,” I whispered to him. Our shoulders bumped together as we were walked down that concrete path into darkness. “I’m going to get us out of here. I just need your help. Okay?”

“Bianka,” he said, as though my name were the only thing left that he could say.

I understood how he felt.

Sanity had fled the both of us.

Security handed us off to a new group of people. They weren’t men in black suits like the ones that had taken me. They were wearing different uniforms in general, something more like jumpsuits. But they were as impossible to get away from as the men in the suits, and maybe even more impossible, considering I couldn’t move an inch and I wasn’t even chained.

Everyone in this creepy cave system was so strong.

“Where are you taking us?” I asked. “What’s happening?”

One of the jumpsuits sneered at me. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Someone had finally spoken to me. The fact I wasn’t being treated like an animal made my heart skip a beat, even though his words had been so cruel.

Better to be a hated human than a
product
.

“Let me go!” I demanded.

A hand slapped me in the back of the head hard enough that I staggered.

“Hey!” Marc protested. He tried to break free, but he had even worse luck with it than I did, considering he kept slumping. The drugs still hadn’t left his system.

How could they treat us like this? He was too weak. He needed time to recover.

We weren’t dogs.

“He’s hurt!” I said. “He needs a doctor!”

“He’s fine. They don’t send anyone to the Grinder unless they can put on a good show,” the same jumpsuit said. They walked us through a doorway into a new hallway. It was lightless except for a dim red glow. The crimson bulbs reduced everything around me to black and crimson images so stark that it hurt my eyes.

Another one of the guys in jumpsuits groaned. “Ignore her. It’s not worth it.”

“Please,” I said again. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s happening. Something—
anything
. What’s the Grinder?”

We turned into another hallway, and they shoved me. Hard.

Before I could so much as catch my breath, I was falling.

I screamed.

My stomach lifted into my throat.

I landed on something soft.

A moment later, Marc thudded next to me. We were unhurt.

Something clanged shut above us. Metal against metal. It echoed against concrete.

“Look,” someone nearby said. It was dark in whatever pit we were in, but now that I heard a voice, I could hear breathing, too. “They brought more into the Grinder. They’re still getting newbies.”

“Yeah. Too bad for them.”

We weren’t alone.

Before I could panic, dim lights flickered on in the pit. Marc and I were in a small, unremarkable concrete box. The floor was covered in mats. Marc and I had landed on a stack of them, which had obviously been situated to catch people dumped into the room.

All of the other mats had people lolling on top of them. They looked as weak and fatigued as Marc. A few of them looked almost as angry as I felt. And some of them were tan, as though they had seen sunlight as recently as I had.

These weren’t volunteers. They were captives, just like me.

And none were chained or unconscious.

There were a dozen of us in here. They would have been free longer than Marc—which meant fewer sedatives in their system. For the first time, I thought there was a chance that we could escape.

A woman who must have been my age nodded at me from her own mat. “So what did you do?” she asked as Marc and I climbed off the pile.

Marc responded. “Tried to run.” His voice was hoarse, and he cleared his throat. “She tried to save me.” His hand slipped into mine. I tightened my fingers around his, clutching his arm. Marc and I had never been terribly touchy-feely, but right now, I needed that human contact.

The woman tucked some of her messy red hair behind her ear. She was so greasy, I doubted that she’d showered in weeks. “Were you sedated?”

“Yeah,” Marc said, sitting beside her.

She handed him a bottle of water. “You too, girly girl?”

I didn’t know if it was a good idea to bring up the man who had saved me. I still didn’t know what to make of that. I was still wearing the dress he put me in, and it was torn and dirty at this point, nearly as messy as the outfits the others were wearing.

“I escaped when I first got here,” I said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. I thrust my hand toward her. “My name is Bianka. You?”

“Lisa,” she said. We shook. It was a weird, formal gesture—not something that I would have done with anyone from my school. What teenagers shook hands? But it seemed important now. I needed friends. Allies. The handshake sealed our amicable new relationship.

“Have you been here very long, Lisa?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s no light. I can’t tell day or night. I could have been in here for days or months. And these other people have been in this place even longer.” She gestured to the others lying on the mats around us. They were wisps of humans, barely more than skeletons, dirty and fatigued. It scared me how many appeared to be my age, too. Teenagers—not products, but
people
—who had been stolen from their lives, stripped of their dignities, and abandoned to darkness.

“But what is ‘this place’?” I asked. “Who are these people? Not the people in this cell, but the people who captured us. They’re a cult or something, right?”

“People?” Lisa snorted. “Don’t know that I would call vampires people.”

M
y mouth was so
dry that it hurt.

The word Lisa had spoken resonated through my whole body.

Vampires
.

It was impossible.

I lived in a boring, ordinary world. I went to high school. I did extracurriculars. I had applied to colleges in nearby towns. My plan was to get a degree in general studies, and then decide what I wanted to do for real in graduate school.

There wasn’t anything supernatural in a world like that.

I stuttered. “V-vampires?”

Lisa looked like she felt sad for me. “What, you think they were taking blood for kicks?”

My mind traveled back to the hidden room with the sunflower. The way that the boy had looked at my bleeding thumb…

No. He didn’t want to drink my blood.

He had brought me flowers.

“They took me from my home,” I said. “They were at my school.”

“Yeah, that’s how they work.” The woman waved her hands, indicating the pit around us. “You think this would exist if the people who counted didn’t know about it? They take you when you’re young, seventeen or eighteen, and they suck you dry over the years. Our blood keeps them from aging.”

My mind was whirling.

Vampires. In my town.

I had thought we’d be fine if we got out of the mountain. I thought we’d be able to go home, hug our families, go to college.

But they all knew.

My parents knew.

The school knew.

I’d suspected that had to be the case, but having it confirmed made me queasy.

Was there anywhere I could be safe?

Marc’s hand slipped into mine again. He shared his water bottle with me but I only took a sip. I’d had a little something to tide me over while in that bedroom, so he needed it a lot more than I did.

“We can’t go home,” Marc whispered to me. Desperation aged him a good decade or two. I wondered if I looked as haunted.

“There’s a way out of this,” I said.

My mind was still whirling, but I’d quickly shifted gears from shock to planning.

There were a lot of people in Hidden Oaks. Thousands of us. Even if the vampires were stronger than we were, I suspected we had numbers on our side.

I needed to learn what my parents knew.

And we needed to rally to fight back.

My hand tightened on Marc’s. “We’ll find a way out of this,” I said, firmer than before. I caught his eye. I forced him to look at me. “I promise.”

“You’re good, Bianka,” he said, “but even you aren’t that good.”

I started to respond when a part of the wall opened.

Only two people—vampires, probably—came inside, and I half expected the prisoners in the room to rush them. There were enough of us to overcome that pair. I stood up so that I could fight back.

But when the vampires walked in, all the humans shrank back. They looked like dogs that had been kicked too many times.

I still was not a dog.

Never.

My hands were shaking again. I clasped them together to stop the trembling.

The vampires stopped in front of Marc, Lisa, and me. Marc kept staring at the ground like he still wasn’t entirely awake, blinking hard.

If they took Marc, he wouldn’t have a chance. I prepared myself to fight for him.

But they grabbed Lisa.

It surprised me for some reason. She didn’t seem surprised; she threw her elbows in their faces and kicked out with both feet. They just grabbed her arms and twisted them behind her until she cried out.

“Bad move,” one of them said. “You’ll need everything you can get.”

“For what?” I asked, leaping forward.

The other vampire barred me. “Sit down, blood bag.”

Blood bag?
That was the specific kind of product they intended us to be: livestock that held food for the vampires. He’d dared to call me something so undignified.

I wanted to punch him for it, but I swallowed down my violent urge. Without assistance, numbers weren’t on my side.

They dragged Lisa out of the pit.

A screen flickered to life in the wall. It was a TV, very much like the ones in Lord Hector’s office.

When it turned on, everyone in the pit came to life. They herded nearer to me, clumping as close as they could to get a good view of the television. Not everyone did—Marc, for one, stayed exactly where he was—but there were people brushing my arms and sitting on the mats nearby.

They looked like they were hunkering down to watch a must-see TV event.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Shut up,” one person said beside me. “It’s starting.”

The screen showed a deep pit ringed with seats. The sound of roaring approval came in from…somewhere. I didn’t see any speakers, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

None of the humans around me cheered.

The camera zoomed in on the pit.

A door opened, and the woman I had just been talking to was dragged out and tossed onto the dirt. Lisa got to her feet and brushed her hands on her clothes, getting dust off.

Nothing about the situation seemed to surprise her. Grim determination carved her face into hard lines.

Her mouth moved. She was yelling at the people sitting in the bleachers around this pit—this thing that Lord Hector had called the Grinder—but I couldn’t hear anything she was saying. It looked foul, though. Lisa was probably using every single bad word that she had ever heard and making up a few to add spice.

The camera cut to another door.

Another woman came inside. She wasn’t dragged, like Lisa had been. Her jaw was set and her hands were balled into fists.

A sickening idea came over me.

The Grinder looked a lot like an old Roman coliseum to me.

But there were no lions in this coliseum.

I didn’t know if I wanted to watch what was going to happen between Lisa and her opponent. But I couldn’t look away.

A bell rang, the crowd cheered, and the second woman went after the first.

They both fought, and I don’t know if I expected spears or what, but I was shocked when the first fist connected with a nose. Maybe it was the sight of bright-red blood.

The crowd sounded hungry.

“Lisa doesn’t have a chance,” someone murmured beside me.

That was the only thing anyone said during the fight.

I wish it hadn’t been true.

Lisa got her hits in. She might have broken the other woman’s arm at one point, and she definitely bruised her eye. But the other woman had several inches of height on Lisa, and that alone should have given her the edge.

When Lisa fell to the ground, the other woman took her opportunity, straddled her, and wrapped her long fingers around the fallen woman’s throat.

I didn’t hear the choking sounds.

But my imagination was good enough to fill in the blanks.

That was the end of the fight for me. I turned away, shaking with tears as I stumbled back to Marc.

For the first time since I had been taken from my parents, I sobbed.

L
isa was dead
.

It didn’t take me long to realize that.

Even though I was trying not to look at the TV screen, the reactions of the people in the cell with us said enough about her fate.

A frisson of disappointment ran through our fellow prisoners. They returned to their mats, sinking to the floor to languish in the gloom again.

For a few electric minutes, they had been alive. Awake. And they had wasted that energy by watching the battle instead of trying to gather themselves to turn their violence where it mattered.

By the time I lifted my head, enough people had moved away from the TV that I could see the screen. The woman who had killed Lisa was being taken away by vampires. She wasn’t reacting to anything: the crowd above her, the men rushing her out, the woman lying behind her. She looked blank. Like there was nothing happening within her skull.

I couldn’t imagine what that must feel like, killing someone for a bloodthirsty audience.

Lord Hector had called it the Grinder.

I understood now that meant we were all waiting for our turn to fight.

“Marc,” I said, clutching my best friend’s arm. “We have to do something.”

“Just tell me what to do,” he said, voice still rough. His eyes were still foggy. “I can’t think, Bianka. All the sedatives… I still feel like I’m dreaming.” He tried to focus on me. “Am I dreaming?”

My eyes burned. “I wouldn’t dream anything like this in my worst nightmares.”

Voices echoed through the cell.

“Another! Another!” The vampires kept chanting that again and again.

Another. Another. Another.

I got a lump in my throat. Someone else was going to die.

The door opened again. Two more vampires entered.

I could see them as vampires now; they had a sharper look than any of the humans around me, even the ones who had been drained of blood. It wasn’t even that they were leaner. It was just like they were walking weapons. Predators. Supernaturally strong and fast and capable of smelling blood on the air.

And they wanted to watch us fight.

We could have easily overwhelmed them if we’d worked together, but the people on the mats didn’t move. Nobody thought about rebellion except me.

“Get on your feet!” I urged, dragging Marc to his feet. “They’re not going to take another one of us!” I linked my arms with him and extended my hand to the others on the mats. “Come on! Get up!”

But they weren’t moving.

Marc was still staring at me, blinking heavily.

The vampires ignored my attempts at rallying the others.

“This one,” said a female vampire. She pointed at Marc. “Him.”

Their hands reached out to grab my best friend.

I thought I’d felt scared before, at so many points. When I’d left my home. When I had been dragged into the darkness under the mountain. When I’d been chased and put in the cell.

But the second I saw them come for Marc, I knew he would die. He could barely talk to me. He would never survive a fight.

It had been bad enough seeing Lisa fall during the competition. If Marc went out there, I would get to watch him fall next.

The idea was torture far surpassing anything else the vampires could do to me.

There was only one thing to do about it. I didn’t have to think about the options, because there were none, as far as I was concerned.

Marc didn’t stand a chance in a fight.

I did.

“Take me!” I pushed him behind my back. “I’ll fight!” The words fell from my numb lips. It was easy to say them as long as I didn’t think about what I was volunteering to do.

They tried to shove me aside to reach Marc.

I shoved back.

“Take me, you monsters!”

Arms wrapped around my shoulders, and I flipped the female the way that I had flipped a vampire earlier. The movement came more smoothly. I had found that fire that my wrestling coach had longed for again. When the second vampire attacked, I jabbed elbows and knees at his gut, clumsily going for his stomach, his face.

He easily slapped my hands aside, even as he laughed at the woman on the floor.

“Feisty,” he said. “They’ll love her.”

“She did volunteer,” the female vampire said, glaring hatred at me.

I had volunteered to fight.

To die.

For Marc.

They marched me toward the door.

I let them take me, but I snuck one more look at Marc over my shoulder. Marc, who was still obviously hazy and sick, but was looking at me as they carried me off.

He was the last thing I saw as the door closed.