The Vampire Games: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance (5 page)

M
y blue-eyed savior
, the one who had gifted flowers to me, was a vampire prince.

“You!” I cried when my voice came back to me. I stepped forward and grabbed the bars of my cage. “What is—”

“Silence, human.” His voice came out in a cruel hiss, nothing like the way he had spoken to me before. His tone hurt to hear. My heart contracted, withering into a hard little knot at the center of my breast.

“She’s a feisty one.” Another vampire stepped out from behind him. It was Lord Hector, the man who had doomed Marc and me to the Grinder in the first place. “I’m surprised, considering that she came out of one of
your
Feeder villages. Maybe I should take her for myself? I could use another blood source.”

“If you’d like,” the prince said. There was something…distant about it. Unfamiliar.

That was what was so hurtful about his tone. Not the aggressiveness, but how little he seemed to care about me. He’d gone to all that trouble to save me from being drained like Marc before, yet now I didn’t even rank a familiar glance. It was like he hadn’t seen me before and wouldn’t care if he had.

Lord Hector seemed disappointed at the lack of reaction from the prince. “My stock is full right now.”

I couldn’t remain quiet any longer. “We’re not stock. We’re
people
, you sick—”

He slammed his hand against the bars in front of my face. I jerked back.

“Good reflexes,” Lord Hector said with a cruel laugh, waggling his finger at me. “This one’s a fighter all right. Good way to start with the Coliseum, I think. Are you sure you’re up for to breaking her, though?”

The prince shrugged with one shoulder. “I suppose.”

He was so cold.

“Well, let me know if she gives you too much trouble. I’d be happy to help you train. Wouldn’t want to waste all those crowns by losing such an expensive asset in the first fight.”

“I guess she was a pretty significant investment.”

“Yes, what about that? Why would you spend so much if you would just hand her off to me?”

The prince was leaning one shoulder against the wall now, inspecting his cufflinks. His hair fell over his piercing eyes in a sleek wave. “Did you see their faces when I cast the highest bid? They’ll be talking about me for weeks.”

“Hmm.” It came out as an agreeing hum. “Well, thank you for letting me see her. I suppose you have a lot to start with.”

Lord Hector turned to leave.

I grabbed the bars again. “Marc. My friend that I was trying to free. What have you done with him?”

A smile grew on his lips. “It keeps talking at me,” he said to the prince. “It thinks it’s people. How cute.” His smile froze. “Train it well. I don’t want it to speak to me again.”

He left.

It looked like the vampire prince was going to follow him.

“Wait,” I whispered, pressing my face to the gap between the bars. “Did I dream the sunflower?”

He faltered.

A veil fell away from his eyes when he looked at me. Really looked at me. There was tension between us—a hint of that connection that I had sensed when he brought food to me.

His hand lifted an inch, like he was going to touch me. Not with the violence that Lord Hector barely contained within his skin, but something much gentler, more familiar. A hint of the boy who had rescued me.

Then he dropped it.

The prince turned to the other guards. “Send her to my rooms.” His voice was as cold as ever.

He swept off after Hector without giving me a last look.

I
expected
to be taken back to the room the vampire had hidden me before—the sparse room with the gold-lit bathroom and the comfortable bed. But the rooms I was taken to were nothing like that little cave.

First of all, they were
rooms
, plural. The entryway alone was probably the size of the house where I lived. Well, where I had lived before today. And I glimpsed other rooms through the arched doorways that seemed just as large.

All of the furniture was wooden and solid and looked very, very expensive. The couches had clawed feet. Even the paintings had fancy wooden frames. I’d never seen anything like it in Hidden Oaks. We weren’t exactly paupers back home, but our furniture had still been bought at a store down the street. This stuff had the weighty presence of objects meant to be used for generations.

The walls were decorated with frosted glass panels that seemed like windows, but the light on the other side glowed too dimly. Just like in the room with the settee.

I wasn’t the only one to notice how bright it was compared to the other rooms within the cave system. One of the guards behind me winced.

“Glad I’m not keeping any humans,” she said. “I’d have a headache all the time.”

She slammed the door shut, leaving me alone in the room.

I jiggled the handle.

Locked. Of course it was locked.

I could hear the guards’ voices just beyond it. Even if I had been able to find a way to unlock the door, I would have faced multiple vampires waiting to shove me back inside. A half-baked escape attempt wouldn’t be a smart use of my limited energy.

Resting my back against the door, I studied the entryway again.

Windows. Couches. Paintings. Bookshelves.

It was hardly the worst place I’d found myself today. The last couple days? I was exhausted like I’d been running a week nonstop without rest, but I had no idea how long it had actually been. But I was wound up, heart racing in my chest, so I paced the room, looking around for some kind of way to get out. The windows wouldn’t open, and there were no vents within sight.

I still hadn’t found anything when the door opened again.

I froze as the man—the vampire—who had bought me walked in. The door slid shut behind him.

He looked at me, eyes as intense as they’d ever been, and I couldn’t look away. I didn’t know whether to run toward him or away. I didn’t know if he was going to kill me.

A moment passed like that, my beating heart roaring in my ears.

And then the vampire simply broke my gaze, walked past me, and went into another room.

I was in motion before I could decide if it was even a good idea.

The prince and I entered a room with a super-modern office, the lighting even brighter than it had been in the main room. The vampire was hovering over a desk, disinterestedly poking at a glowing computer screen with his finger.

The brightness of the room—and the way the prince completely ignored me—gave me ample opportunity to study my captor.

The vampire who now owned me.

He wore all black, including a high-collared jacket that brushed the underside of his chiseled jaw. The darkness of his clothes offset the brilliant paleness of his eyes and sucked all color from his flesh. But it didn’t manage to conceal the feline liquidity of his movements. His motions were so smooth, his body strong.

A prince.

I should have seen it when I’d first met him. Everything about his noble stature said royalty.

I’d just never have expected to meet a prince so close to home.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why am I here?” The vampire didn’t answer, focused intently on whatever was going on with his screen. “Why did you save me?”

The vampire’s gaze flickered my way for the briefest instant. He pressed a couple more buttons on the screen, and it went dark.

His spine straightened. He tugged on his jacket.

“You’re my new champion. I’m bringing in a trainer to hone your…raw talent.” He turned on his heel. The glow from the fake windows slid over the carved lines of his cheekbones. “Follow me.”

I did.

What else could I have done?

“This is your bedroom.” He took me to a room with a small four-poster bed and a fluffy down comforter. “There are clothes in the armoire.” His eyes skimmed my body, but he didn’t meet my gaze. His eyes remained below my chin. “They should be in your size. Change out of the dress and wash yourself in the bathroom.” He gestured to another doorway.

“What about you?” I asked. “Where do you sleep?”

He didn’t respond, but he glanced at the spiral staircase behind him.

There was another floor to these rooms. The prince’s area must have been up there.

If this was how nice the slave quarters were, I wondered how lush his space would be.

I itched to see it.

“So I’m your slave now…
Prince
.” I couldn’t keep a bite out of the title.

I’d thought he was trying to save me, and he sort of had been, but not for the altruistic reasons I’d hoped. He wasn’t a human trying to help a fellow escapee from the vampires. He was one of the bad guys trying to save me for the fights.

For blood.

His face was stony-smooth, unreadable. He still wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Strip, bathe, put on the uniform,” the prince said. “Your trainer will be here soon.”

He started walking my way. I took an involuntary step backward, but he brushed past me like I wasn’t there and headed to the main room.

I followed.

“What?” I said. “I thought…”

“You don’t think anything.” The vampire stopped in his tracks, a few feet shy of the door. “You do what I tell you, and maybe you won’t be killed the next time you go in the arena.”

He swept out, and “next time” seemed to hang in the air behind him.

I
stripped
, I bathed, I changed into a uniform.

What a good slave I was proving to be.

The outfit the prince described as a uniform was snug fitting and black, made out of some kind of lycra that breathed well. It had a low neck that exposed my throat and collarbones. I felt vulnerable in it.

There was also a symbol of a flower backed by rays of sunlight on the breast.

I was marked.

The trainer hadn’t arrived by the time that I finished dressing, so there only seemed to be one thing to do: sleep. I was still exhausted. It seemed like a bad idea to let my guard down enough to sleep, but I didn’t know what else to do with myself. It wasn’t as though I was any less helpless awake.

I studied my little bedroom again. It was mostly taken up by the bed itself, and between the black sheets and the size, I couldn’t imagine sleeping in it. It looked like everything else in this place. Like it would swallow me alive if given a chance.

I found a sofa instead. It was stiff, obviously meant more for looks than comfort. I stretched out and closed my eyes, not expecting more than fitful sleep.

But I didn’t stir until a hand shook me.

My eyes snapped open right away.

“I’m not here to hurt you.” This came from the person attached to the hand, a dark-skinned woman with hard features framed by ringlets. “I’m your new trainer. Alisyn.”

How was I supposed to react to a woman whose job was to teach me to kill people? “Uh, hi.” I sat up and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. I felt stiff but rested, though it was impossible to tell how much time had passed. The fake light coming through the fake windows hadn’t changed.

Alisyn was a black woman a few years older than me, her body tight with lean muscle. She wore an outfit similar to mine. Her insignia was different, though. It was a flower backed by a crescent moon. We belonged to different vampires.

“Get up,” she said.

Alisyn led me into an empty room. One entire wall was frosted glass inlaid with the flower-and-sun symbol. The bamboo mats on the floor were springy under my feet.

A training room.

I felt queasy thinking about how many times the prince must have lured helpless young women in here to teach them to kill.

Since I was the only one getting trained, I had to suspect that all past competitors would have died.

“Ready?” Alisyn asked.

I clenched my hands into fists. I didn’t raise them to my face or anything, though. I was mostly trying to keep them from shaking.

Alisyn circled me. “Do you have any experience fighting?” she asked. “Your muscle tone’s good.”

I shook my head. “I did wrestling in school. Some track too.”

“Endurance and grappling. Well, Phillip might not have been a complete bonehead about his first Candidate, even if he spent bonehead amounts of money on you.”

Phillip
.

My prince had a name, and it would be forever carved into my mind, entwined in memory with the sapphire shards of his eyes.

“I’m his first…Candidate?” I asked. I’d heard Lord Hector and Prince Phillip talking about me like I was one of a kind, but I’d somehow doubted that I could be the prince’s first. If I knew anything about the vampires who had captured me, it was that they were hideously cruel, surely sadists. I didn’t understand why he would have resisted having a Candidate until now. “If I’m his first…thing…then why does he have a training room?”

“Personal use.”

“And I’m a Candidate for what, exactly?”

“For Creation,” she said, like that should have been obvious. Alisyn crossed her arms. “I saw your fight. The next Game won’t be like that, where your opponent throws herself on you and falls over dead. None of the ones I’ve ever fought were that easy.”

I blinked. “You fought?”

She fluffed her curls. “I didn’t get to be a trainer because of my good looks. There aren’t many territories here that go for pretty over useful, even if Dawn Hold is a little more…forgiving than some of the others.”

Dawn Hold.

Candidate.

Phillip
.

So many new names I wanted to absorb and memorize. So many things I needed to remember.

I gathered the scraps of information to myself. There was no way to know which of them might prove useful—which of them might function as future ammunition in the fight to free myself and Marc.

Because I
was
going to free us.

“Dawn Hold,” I said. “That’s a territory. What’s a territory?”

“They’re like kingdoms or fiefdoms or whatever you wanna call them,” Alisyn said. “Different clusters of vamps within the whole society. You’ve been bought by the Prince of Dawn Hold.” She jerked her thumb at the flower-and-sun insignia. “I’m owned by Maximus, the Lord of Crescent Hall.”

Another slave, like me. Someone who was a Candidate as well as a trainer.

Maximus was a vampire lord like Hector.

Ammunition.

“Why is Maximus a lord if Phillip is a prince?” I asked.

“The son of a king is always a prince.” Alisyn said that like she thought I was stupid. She narrowed her eyes. “But don’t think becoming a vampire will be easy. You won’t get special treatment because Phillip bought you. You have to work if you want to survive.”

“Wait, why would I want to be a vampire?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said becoming a vampire wouldn’t be easy. I don’t want to be a vampire.”

Alisyn’s eyes widened. “You don’t? But you’re a Candidate. The only reason people fight to win the Games is so they can be Created—which is what they call it when a human gets picked to become a vampire. I mean, that’s what the Games are for. That’s the entire purpose. To find new vampires to join the society.”

“No,” I said. “No way.” I felt light-headed.

“It’s the only way people can enter vampire society,” Alisyn said. “You have to win the Games. I’m surprised you don’t know.”

It wasn’t like I’d gotten to talk to anyone about it before now. I wondered if that meant that all the people in the Grinder had been willing—people who had been caught in an infraction, and given a choice between immediate death or a shot at being turned into a vampire.

Had Lisa, the girl who’d been kind to me, hoped to become a vampire?

“How does Creation work?” I asked.

“A vampire sucks your blood, you suck his blood. It’s gross.” She tapped a finger on her chin as she studied me thoughtfully. “There is another option with the Games. Nobody ever takes it, but you can ask for a prize other than being Created. You can ask to go back to your home on the surface.”

Adrenaline coursed through me. “That. I want that. I want to go back.”

“Nobody ever asks to go back,” Alisyn said. “Once everyone knows that the surface is little more than a cage filled with artificial life, they want reality. They want to be one of the captors, not a captive.”

“My family and friends are there,” I said savagely.

“So what, you’re going to run out of here at the first opportunity?” It was weird how that question didn’t sound as direct and cold as the others. It came off as…curious.

Still, I didn’t answer. I had no idea where anyone’s allegiances were at this point.

“You want to win,” Alisyn said. “Are you going to take this seriously? Or are you going to fight me the entire way? I don’t have much interest in someone who’s going to die right away.”

“No!” I said quickly. “No. I’m going to win. I…I
need
to win.”

For the first time, Alisyn smiled.

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” she said.

A
lisyn kicked
off her shoes and led me through some stretches. I dutifully did what she did, extending my limbs into every position that she demonstrated. I was bruised and sore from my fateful arena fight. I didn’t realize how badly I needed the stretching until I felt my bones pop and muscles creak.

“Get into a headstand,” she said. “Tighten your core. Hold your legs up straight.”

I hadn’t done a headstand since I was a kid, so it took me a few clumsy attempts to manage it.

While I kicked my feet off the bamboo floors, she went to a table by the wall. I watched upside down as Alisyn fiddled with a music player.

The blood rushed to my head.

“Why am I doing this?” I asked in a squeezed voice. “Am I going to need to confuse my opponents by flipping upside down?”

“Nah,” Alisyn said. “I just wanted to see you do it. Ha! New girl. You’re fun. I like you.”

She turned on loud dance music. It pumped from speakers set into the walls.

I dropped onto all fours, cheeks hot.

Alisyn moved to the middle of the room. I turned toward her, but I didn’t move closer. The butterflies in my stomach were like the ones I had on my first day of school every year.

“Attack me,” she said.

I laughed nervously. “Didn’t you watch me fight before?”

“Sure.” She beckoned me with her hands.

I rushed Alisyn.

It felt good for a minute. I knew how to run, if nothing else, and I figured I could use the momentum to push her over.

Alisyn was ready for me.

She grabbed me and leaned just a little bit into my space. I landed with a hard
thump
, breath rushing out of me. The soft floor took most of the fall, so it didn’t hurt, but both the sound of the impact and the feeling of it were startling.

“Try again,” Alisyn said, offering me a hand and helping me to my feet.

“Now? I don’t know how to fight.”

“You obviously know
something
, or you wouldn’t have come out alive. Even if your opponent had been suicidal.”

“Can I have a suggestion, maybe?”

Alisyn laughed. “Just give it another try.”

I sighed, but I balled up my fists. Maybe I wouldn’t humiliate myself as much if I could land a hit.

Alisyn dodged every punch I threw easily, but she didn’t throw me to the floor again. Her moves almost never touched me, even. She mimed elbowing me in the face once, and she pretended to give me an arm in the stomach a couple different times, mostly to show how I would lose or what setbacks I would face.

“Keep going,” Alisyn said encouragingly. “Watch me closely.”

“I am watching,” I panted. “I just suck at this.”

“You suck, but everyone sucks. Surviving the Grinder is mostly luck and how mean you are. All these people came from the surface like you did. Feeder villages.” She swung a fist at my face.

I stumbled backward clumsily. “I heard that before—Feeder villages. What does that mean?”

“Feeder.” Alisyn pointed at me. “Human. You don’t know anything, do you? Fresh off the surface.”

Her knee came within an inch of my belly. I leaped out of range.

“I’m learning,” I said.

She halfway smiled. “All of the surface villages are owned by the vampires. They’re like little petri dishes where scientists breed bacteria, except it’s vampires breeding people so that they can eventually use their blood.”

“Use it?”

“Drink it.”

The way that Phillip stared at my wounded thumb…

I was so distracted by the memory that I didn’t dodge Alisyn in time. And she didn’t retract her blow, either. She shoved me to the floor. My head bounced.

The bite of pain sent anger sweeping through my body.

Lashing out with a foot, I hooked her ankle and jerked.

Alisyn fell.

She made so much noise when she struck that I was afraid she’d broken something. My anger immediately turned to horror.

“Sorry!” I cried.

But she was laughing. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

I didn’t get up. I remained sprawled on the ground, too numb to want to move.

“What does that mean about my life? My home? My school?” I asked. I swallowed hard. “My friends?”

“All of it’s just part of the Feeder structure,” Alisyn said. “Any adults you see in the villages couldn’t be Harvested for some reason, or were better for breeding. Everyone else gets yanked down here when they hit maturity.”

“So people who leave for college…”

She waved at the flower-and-sun mark on the wall again. I knew she meant to indicate what was beyond that wall: the cavern where all the people slept, waiting to be Harvested.

“That’s why nobody asks to be returned to the surface,” Alisyn said. “Life up there isn’t real.
This
is reality.”

She kicked at my head.

I dodged. I didn’t even have to think about it—I just rolled completely on instinct and got out of the way.

“Okay. Then how do I win the Games?” I asked, breathing hard. “Do I have to kill people?”

“Usually that’s the smart thing to do,” Alisyn said. “You get more points if you kill your opponent.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you concede some portion of your points to them, depending on how well they fought. But you don’t want to give up any points. More points, fewer fights down the road. Less chance you’ll die.”

“What about surrender?” I’d asked, sweating from whatever we’d just done. “Sometimes it’s better to not fight, right? Strategically? Do I get points if I surrender?”

Alisyn shook her head. “Anyone who surrenders gets Harvested. Better to fight and lose than refuse to fight. You’ll definitely die if you give up, but you can always lean on your opponent’s mercy if you just lose to them.”

“Is there a ceremonial way to surrender?”

“Yeah.” Alisyn showed me. “You have to say the words with it, so people know what you’re doing is deliberate. It’s going to make a lot of people mad if you do it, though. No vampire likes their Games ruined.”

The idea pleased me. Making the vampires angry could be fun.

Of course, it would mean getting Harvested.

I stashed that knowledge in the back of my mind.

And then I attacked again.

It was so quick that I almost hit her—but Alisyn was ready for me. She leaped out of the way.

“You’re too impulsive,” she said. She tossed me a towel to wipe sweat off my face. “And it works sometimes because you’re in shape. But you need to learn how to plan and act instead of react. I’m gonna teach you that if you’re willing to work hard.”

Would I work hard and learn to fight? Turn myself into a warrior?