Vicious (30 page)

As soon as a quarter of the blood was inside of him, he began to seize and convulse on the table underneath me. He didn’t wake up but his throat made pained sounds as his body flailed around in reaction to the blood. Marshall held his legs down as hard as he could, and Lulu gripped his shoulders, pinning him to the table. I struggled to stay on top of him as his pelvis kept bucking and trying to throw me about.

I had to remain as still as possible so that I could continue to ever so slowly inject the blood into his heart. Most of the effort went into maintaining a steady stream of injection without breaking off the needle in his chest as he convulsed up and down on the table. It was like riding a bull while trying to start an IV.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally managed to get all of the blood into him and tossed the first syringe to the floor. Grant continued to buck underneath me. I reached over to the table to grab the next one and I realized with horror I had to do that six more times.

Chapter Thirty Four

Grant

Burning and pain seared my body, but I was in darkness and couldn’t make out where the pain was coming from. It felt like fire was licking all over my body, but that could not be. If there was fire, it would have lit up this room, and I would have been able to see where I was.

Wherever I was, it was dark and I was paralyzed. I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids wouldn’t cooperate. What if I was unconscious in a burning building somewhere right now, and that was why everything burned me but my body was unable to move?

Just then, I felt a sudden kick to my chest like a mule or a horse had kicked me hard, but the pain seemed to linger even after the kick was over. In fact, it got stronger. The burning sensation gathered strength in my chest and spread like a wildfire of pain throughout my entire body. I tried to jerk and move my body in reaction to this, but I was still in response. I had to lie there helpless as the searing shock of it all ravaged my body relentlessly. Another kick to the chest sent a fresh bout of agony. I wailed inside my head as wave after wave crashed against my tortured body.

Oh God! Oh God! Make this all stop! Please make it stop. The pain! The fire! Please make it stop! Oh God!

It was a mercy of epic proportions when I finally passed out from sheer exhaustion. When I felt myself begin to drift away, I didn’t care if it meant I was dying or not, I was just relieved it was going to stop.

My awareness of the room came to me extremely slowly. The first thing I noticed was that I was not dead. I could think and feel my body beneath me. The second thing I noticed was that the burning sensation has ceased, and it was instead replaced by a dry ache in the back of my throat. This ache seemed to throb deeper and deeper the more conscious I became. Next, I took stock of my breathing. It was steady, which further confirmed my assessment that I was indeed alive.

Slowly and very deliberately, I tried to wiggle my fingers and toes. Much to my surprise, they worked. I felt them react to my mental command. I flexed and tensed the larger muscles in my legs and arms, and they too reacted. I slowly and cautiously opened my eyes to better take in my surroundings. They opened as a blurry vision of something dark appeared above me. I blinked a few times, and the sight came into focus. I was staring at a low black ceiling.

I squinted and looked around me a little, and I noticed I was surrounded by matching metal bars. Confused, I took stock of what I was lying on. It was a small mattress comfortably outfitted with sheets, a pillow and blankets. Where was I? For that matter, who was I? I felt I knew who I was, but the answer danced just out of my reach. What was happening to me?

I sluggishly grasped at a bloody bandage and pulled it off my shoulder, feeling no wound to accompany it. My probing touch found only smooth skin beneath. I was now able to take in the large open room that seemed to be lit only by lamps and candles. The windows clued me in to the fact that it was clearly nighttime outside.

“Anna? I think he’s awake,” said a cautious male voice only five feet away from me.

I jumped up in a panic, having realized I was sharing this space with other people, people who might wish me harm. I crouched in what I now realized was a cage and growled menacingly at the source of the voice I had heard. A teenage boy jumped up alarmed at the sight of my aggressive stance and backed away from me. I spat and snarled at him as a group of people entered the room quickly. My movements were outstandingly fast and intense, and I felt alien with new aggression.

They looked at me with an odd mixture of relief and shock that didn’t make sense to me. I stuck to growling and snapping at them from behind my bars. If these people were the ones who had imprisoned me, they must not be kind. Did I know them? Did they know me? A red-headed woman stepped forward to grab the boy and jerk him back behind her in a protective way. The others seemed to hold cautious positions while one blond woman slowly edged her way to the front of the crowd.

They were afraid of me? They were afraid of me. My growl diminished a little when I realized this. The blond woman began to move her slight figure closer and closer to my cage. I backed into the farthest corner from her and my growl deepened the closer she got to me.

“Hush now, Grant,” she crooned at me in a comforting voice. “We are not here to hurt you. Do you remember us?”

Grant? Was that my name? I thought it was. It sounded right. Maybe this woman did know me?

I stopped growling and stood upright cautiously as she slowly closed the gap between us. She put her hand on the door of the cage and gently turned a key that she had had in her hand. The door swung open with a creak. I ignored my initial urge to leap out and run as fast as I could away from this place. Something about this woman was so terribly familiar. The feeling I knew her held me firmly in place and gave me enough security to trust her.

She reached into the cage and grabbed my hand. The gesture was not violent or malevolent. The actual physical touch was quite pleasant, but the reaction it triggered in me reminded me of the kicks in the chest I had remembered earlier. Looking into her enormous blue eyes and feeling the touch of her soft hand forced all of the memories back into my skull with a jolt. I remembered everything. I saw everything. I could feel everything.

I gripped her small hand back, and in one swift movement, I had pulled her to me inside the cage and kissed her deeply and with a passion that matched the dry throbbing in my thirsty mouth. She tensed only for a second before she relaxed into me and kissed me back with a relief I could taste on her tongue. I didn’t want to let her go, so I didn’t. I felt the new strength in my muscles as I held her warm, solid frame to mine.

I wasn’t sure what had happened to me, and I didn’t know why I felt so strange. How we made it back to New Orleans and where the pain had come from was still a mystery to my foggy mind. Miraculously, I knew I was Grant and this was Anna. My Anna. No one could take that from me. Not now, not ever.

About the Author

Olivia Rivard was born and partially raised in Abilene, Texas, a small town about three hours west of Dallas. She moved to the Dallas–Fort Worth area when she was eight years old, where she spent the rest of her formative years reading, writing, painting and sculpting. After a year at UNT, Michelle moved to Florida to attend the Ringling College of Art and Design. In 2004, she graduated from Ringling with a BFA in Illustration and moved back to Texas.

Olivia worked in the art industry professionally for over a decade in various capacities. Her jobs have been both studio and freelance in nature. She has been writing novels for years under the names Olivia Rivard and Michelle Rene, her two favorite alter egos. Olivia lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband and son.

Love might stand a chance…if they can keep from killing each other.

Hunger

© 2009 Barbara J. Hancock

Holly Spinnaker is a monster. Really. Fangs and all. Never mind the petite figure. Pay no attention to the once-bouncy blonde mane. When Jarvis Winters first encounters
…it…
he prepares to exterminate freak number one hundred thirty two without a flinch.

Mistake number one: following it back to its lair. Mistake number two: watching and listening to her
…it…
replay voice mail messages from loving, clueless parents again and again and again. Mistake number three: having an actual conversation with a bloodthirsty fiend.

“Make them see you as a person.” Holly remembers the advice from a self-defense class her mother made her take her freshmen year. She couldn’t save her own sister, who ended up a pile of ashes at her feet only one month ago. The night they both found out monsters were real. The night her sister embraced the change. And Holly began to fight it.

“Make them see you as a person.”
Kind of hard when you aren’t even sure if you
are
a person anymore.

Warning: This title is not vampire-lite. There is blood. Sometimes sexy. Sometimes, well, not. There are fangs, fights and even a zombie or two. But most of all there’s yearning and burning and aching and angst… It is called Hunger after all.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Hunger:

The man sagged to the ground like every bone in his body had dissolved when the
girl
let him go. If she hadn’t been less than half the man’s size, Jarvis Winters might have been fooled. He might have thought drugs or alcohol had gotten the better of one of the partiers along Belmont Street. He might have thought a little groping in a back alley had ended with someone passing out.

Jarvis wasn’t fooled.

He’d had the dance club under surveillance for hours. Long enough to stiffen his shoulders and dim his sight. Still, when the waif exited, followed soon after by a gorilla in jeans, he had known. He’d seen this set up before. Little Miss Victim luring a big bad predator to his turn-about-is-fair-play demise. He wasn’t impressed. A killer was a killer. It didn’t matter who they chose to kill—or feed upon—as the case may be.

Winters wanted to wait until she moved on before opening the squeaky door of his ancient Ford Fairlane. It took longer than he expected. His hand was frozen on the door handle as she leaned back against the brick wall for a long moment. At more than a hundred yards away, he couldn’t see the expression on her face. He didn’t need to. He’d seen that satiated look countless times before. Her body would be in an unresponsive swoon. Her face would be slack, way past satisfied. The kind of look every man dreamed his lover would have after a tumble in bed…except, of course, for the fangs.

Finally, she staggered around the corpse at her feet and made her way out of the alley and down the dark street. Too many busted streetlights made her tiny figure seem hunched and grotesque as it stumbled in and out of shadows. A fitting aura for a monster.

Jarvis tightened his fingers and wrenched the handle harder than even the stubborn forty-year-old mechanism warranted. The rusty shriek was followed by a thud as he headed after his prey. He hadn’t been able to see her face, but he knew what it had looked like. Pure, drunken ecstasy. She would die happy.

The woman who was once Holly Spinnaker pulled her feet away from the unconscious man and shuddered against the warm zing arching through her flesh. She wasn’t ready to let go, but dying had to be preferable to this mini-death, this loathing of the “life” she now led.

She wiped her hands on the hips of her jeans as she slid along the wall and away from the would-be rapist without so much as tapping him with the toe of her sneaker. The awkwardness of the maneuver caused one elbow to knock and drag against rough brick, but she didn’t care. She was as tainted as she needed to be. His blood was
in
her for God’s sake. She wouldn’t touch him again.

She stumbled when she was finally in the clear. The blood had gone straight to her head like too many glasses of sparkling champagne on New Year’s Eve. The memory of that cool, bubbly sweetness mocked her. She pushed it away, but she knew the analogy would stay with her. When she finally made it home and her bed spun beneath her, she would think of it. When she woke tomorrow night with a head-thumping, soul-splitting hangover, the sick analogy would be there to haunt her.

She didn’t know she might not live to see tomorrow. She was too new. Too inexperienced. As she made her way across town, dizzy and weaving, she didn’t notice a man following her. She didn’t realize she’d been zeroed in on as prey for the second time that night.

The voice mail light was blinking when she finally managed to get the key in the lock and open the door to her loft. She walked by the phone, straight to the kitchen where she doused her hands with orange antibacterial dishwashing liquid and scrubbed her face and hair and arms and hands in a disinfecting frenzy. Suds-filled water splattered the floor and the countertop and dripped into her eyes.

She pushed her hair back and stood dripping and shivering and quaking in the dim shadows of a home that had seen happier times.

The light still blinked. It beckoned her and she moved away from the sink toward it. Habit, despair, longing—all propelled her forward. Her shoes left damp footprints all along the deep rose-colored carpet that was actually a pale shade of mauve when the sun gleamed through the bank of high windows above her. She hadn’t seen that bright pastel hue in over a month.