Chapter 2

The trees were screaming.

I covered my ears as I ran to muffle the shrieks, but that barely did anything to lessen the noise. My ears were probably bleeding along with the trees.

My bare feet pounded the earth, pain shooting up my legs as I landed on rocks and tripped over roots. But I couldn’t stop, didn’t dare, because something was after me. I could hear its panting, feel the heat from its body as it drew closer. I wasn’t going to make it this time. Whatever was chasing me was too fast. The trees knew it. I knew it. And when something tangled in my hair and yanked, I began screaming, too.

I awoke with a start, my throat raw and my screams still echoing off my bedroom walls. My ears throbbed, and when I lifted a trembling hand to my face, my cheeks were wet with tears.

I needed to see a therapist. A psychiatrist. Who did I need to see about this? Uh, hi, hello, I need to make an appointment to talk to someone about my recurring bleeding tree dream where I’m convinced I’ll die in my sleep. I’m sure it’s nothing.

I rolled over with a groan and gulped down some water I kept on my nightstand. I lowered the glass, and right before I set it down, my skin flooded with goose bumps. I had that feeling again, the same one I’d had in the parking garage a week ago. Someone was watching me.

I set my water down and then didn’t move, paralyzed with fear. Was this my life now? Scary dreams and paranoid delusions I was being watched? Something had to give. I couldn’t live like this.

My shades on my bedroom windows were drawn, and my bathroom door was open with the nightlight on inside, just like always. Nothing lurked in the corners of my room, and there was nowhere to hide. My closet didn’t even have a door, and clothes, shoes, and other things were spilled out onto the floor as usual.

I drew back the covers and swung my legs to the floor, placing my bare feet on the cool, scarred hardwood. After taking a few deep breaths, I stood up and headed toward my bathroom. I’d investigate there, make sure nothing was hiding in the shower. Then maybe I could get back to bed.

I shuffled inside, then flicked on a light. My own face stared back at me in the mirror, dark circles under my eyes more pronounced than ever. Ugh, I was a train wreck—a twenty-eight-year-old who looked ten years older. These were times that I wish I knew my family history. Maybe mental illness ran in the family, because this had to be my brain chemistry fucking with me.

I yanked back the shower curtain, but the tub was empty. I exhaled and ran my hands over my face. “Get it together, Celia,” I muttered to myself.

I pulled the shower curtain back and left the bathroom, flicking the light off with a yawn. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but when they did, I was too damn shocked to scream.

A figure stood in my bedroom, and I registered pale skin, bald head, and eyes completely white except for small black pupils in the center. My panic was so extreme, I couldn’t move, couldn’t think. I apparently had zero self-defense instincts because all I could do was stare at this…this thing in my bedroom. This thing that was now moving its mouth, pulling its lips back into something that was maybe supposed to be a smile, revealing white teeth with sharp fangs. Fangs.

I tried to scream, to push the sound up from my diaphragm, but nothing was leaving my lips, no sound other than gasping, as if the presence of this creature in my room had rendered my vocal cords useless.

The thing raised an arm from its side, and clutched in a milk-white clawed hand was a knife. A hiss left its throat.

I had no weapon, and I was wearing nothing but a tank top and shorts. I stared at the creature. “You’re a dream,” I whispered, my voice finally working. “This is a dream. It has to be. Because you’re not real. You don’t exist.”

The figure reached out with its other hand and grabbed my hair, tugging me closer. As the pain lanced through my scalp, I waited to wake up. I always woke up when I was grabbed.

But nothing changed. I was still staring into the soulless eyes of this creature, and its hand was still locked in my hair. Then it raised the knife over my chest.

“No,” I gasped.

It hissed again, and the knife descended. I waited for the pain, for the smell of my blood to scent the air, for my heart to burst when the sharp point punctured it. This was it; this was how I died. Except the weapon never made it to its destination. I felt no steel blade plunge into my chest. Instead a whistling filled the air, and the creature shrieked as it pulled away, grasping at its wrist. Where its hand had been was now nothing but a severed limb spouting black liquid. The disembodied hand fell to the floor, landing on my foot while the knife clattered inches away from my toes.

I glanced up to see a second hulking figure surrounding the pale creature. A blade flashed, and the monster that held a knife to my throat seconds ago fell to the floor of my bedroom. His head? Oh, yeah, that was now rolling toward my door. What stood in its place was an even larger figure, shaped like a man, his head nearly touching my ceiling, holding a larger knife.

And now, now I finally opened my mouth and screamed.

A gloved hand clapped over my mouth, silencing me, and a strong arm wrapped around my middle, fingers digging into my bare skin. I began to thrash. If this man holding me now had beheaded…whatever that had been, then I was toast. This wasn’t a dream. This was real. My bare feet were slipping on the blood on the floor, and my toes kicked the lifeless body. I was out of my mind with terror.

A voice penetrated the fog of fear. A deep rumble coming from the man holding me. “You need to stop. That Quellen was certainly not alone, and if we don’t get out of here now, a whole bunch of them will be on our heads.”

Quellen? What the fuck was a Quellen? I tried to screech around his hand, but he wasn’t letting up. He shook me a little. “Do you understand me, Celia? I’m going to drop my hand. I need you to be silent and come with me.”

How did he know my name? The dream with the screaming trees was paradise compared to this. Slowly, his hand dropped.

I began to scream again.

“Goddamnit!” He clapped his hand over my mouth again and began to pull me toward my door. No! He was taking me to a second location. All the crime shows said to never let your attacker take you to a second location. This was bad, so so bad….

A rattling sounded from outside my window, and his head went up. I caught a glimpse of dark eyes. Facial hair on his jaw. Straight nose and full lips. He looked down at me. “They’re coming. We need to move now.”

I moved my lips and he loosened his hold on my mouth. “What are they going to do to me?”

“Pretty sure that one wasn’t going to ask you on a date.”

Oh, he had jokes? For real? “What about you? Are you going to hurt me?”

His lips curled back into a grimace, and his eyes darkened. “Whatever I’d do to you, they’d do a million times worse.”

And that was when I saw it. His fangs. He had goddamn fangs. I opened my mouth, but before I could make a single sound, he swore and passed his wrist in front of my face. My vision blurred, and then the world went black.

---

I slept a dreamless sleep. It was when I woke up that the nightmare started.

I inhaled damp, stale air and blinked at a concrete ceiling. I was lying down, in a bed, and while I was still wearing my thin tank top and boy shorts, a blanket lay over me, pulled up to my chest.

Someone was in the room with me—I could hear breathing along with a soft scraping sound. The sense of being watched was overpowering now. All the hair on my body was on end, my skin a sea of oversensitive nerves.

I turned my head to the side to find a large man sitting in a chair, sharpening a large knife on a stone.

Sharpening. A. Knife.

So to recap. I was in a windowless concrete room, lying nearly naked on a bed next to a man, three times my size, who was currently honing a weapon. Good. Great. Everything was fantastic.

I thought about screaming, but what the fuck would that do? The walls were goddamn concrete, and the one door in the room was steel. There was also the giant man with a knife to consider.

The man turned his head, and dark eyes met mine. My mind flashed back to my bedroom. That pale thing with a knife above my chest. Then his head rolling on the floor. That hadn’t been a dream, because I wasn’t in my bedroom and this man in the room with me…this man was the one who’d saved me from being stabbed.

And then I remembered his fangs.

“Who are you?” My throat felt like it’d been scrubbed with sandpaper.

He laid his tools carefully on the table in front of him, then stood up. Christ, he was tall. Over six-five for sure. Massive torso with broad shoulders, and hands like grizzly bear paws. Half of his face was hidden behind a short beard, but I could see a square jaw, straight nose.

He handed me a glass of water and motioned for me to sit up. I didn’t want anything from him, but I was dying of thirst, so I raised myself to sitting slowly, not wanting to startle him with sudden movements, then gulped down the offered water.

He took the empty glass from me, then moved his chair so he sat down beside the bed, facing me.

I couldn’t control my trembling. I wasn’t cold, but my teeth were chattering. I was used to blending into the background. It’d been how I got through foster care, nursing school, and my job with minimal confrontation and drama. I kept attention off myself, and I was damn good at it. But I had nowhere to run here. The man didn’t take his eyes off me, and I couldn’t figure out if he was planning to kill me, rape me, or just stare.

I was fine with staring; the other two were not my top choices for my future. I glanced at the knife lying on the table behind him, but when I met his gaze again, I realized that had been futile.

“You will not reach that before me, understand? Don’t try.”

I swallowed, and nodded. His words were not a threat, but a promise.

“So, you’re Celia.” He leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees.

I nodded, my head bobbing on my neck like a chicken. Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me, I chanted in my head.

“When’s the last time you talked to your father?”

I jerked my head back. What the hell? He kidnapped me to talk about my father? “I don’t understand what’s going on.” My voice was on the verge of a breakdown, high and shaking. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it together. I just wanted to go home. “Look, I think you have the wrong woman. I’m just an emergency room nurse. Please let me go home.”

His gaze flickered a moment before a muscle in his temple pulsed. “When did you talk to your father last?”

This was hopeless. “I have no idea who my father is.” My voice cracked, and I felt the beginning of hot tears forming in my eyes. “I grew up in foster care.”

“Foster care?” His head tilted.

“Yeah.”

“What is foster care?”

Was he serious? I stared at him, but he didn’t elaborate, so I went ahead and explained. “The state assigns us guardians until we’re eighteen. I’d been in foster care since I was born. Left at the hospital by…my parents, I guess.”

His eyes narrowed, and heat rose in his cheeks before he snarled. “Let’s get one thing straight. You will not lie to me.”

The force of his anger hit me like a slap. The tears were falling from my eyes now, wetting the blanket in my lap. “You think I’m lying? Why would I lie to you about that? I don’t even know who you are, or what’s going on!” My terror was switching to anger now. Anger at almost dying last night. Anger about being locked in this room. Anger at my whole damn life because what had I ever done to deserve this? I surged forward, intent on clawing his damn eyes out, but before I could even raise my arms, he had me pinned to the bed, his weight settling over me like a damn elephant.

I arched my back and screeched. Screams ripped up my throat, noises I never made, because keeping quiet was how I lived my life. I kicked my legs until he pinned them down, too, and I raged until I was panting, sweating, and out of breath.

I went slack in his arms, my hair in my eyes, my chest heaving against his. He didn’t even have to use his knife to calm me down. I was barely a fly to him.

I closed my eyes as the coarse hair of his beard rasped along my cheek. His body was heavy and hot, and I cursed myself for getting in this position with this…fanged human on top of me.

I cracked my eyes open to find him brushing the hair from my face and staring down at me. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“Is this where you tell me not to fight, not to do something that will make you hurt me?” I’d heard that on crime shows, too. Sometimes attackers would try to justify their crimes by blaming the victim for struggling or trying to escape.

His brows turned in for a brief moment. “No. I’m stating I don’t want to hurt you. Am I hurting you now?”

“It’s…a bit hard to breathe.”

“I’ll get up, and I want you to stay on the bed. Understand?”

Why did I have to stay on the bed? “Are you worried I’ll try to get the knife and hurt you?”

“More worried you’ll hurt yourself,” he muttered before moving off me.

I was once again struck by his size. His thighs severely tested the seams of those jeans. He sat in the chair again and I sat up, crossing my legs in front of me, and draping the blanket over my shoulders.

“I can get you more clothes,” he said.

More clothes meant…“How long will I be here that I need more clothes?”

He didn’t answer that question. “I’m Idris.”

Idris. A name, well that was a start. “Okay.” I bit my lip and his nostrils flared. He looked away, but not before I caught another glimpse of his fangs. Something in me found the sight of them familiar, and I couldn’t figure out why. Had I dreamed of fangs? “What are you?”

He looked back at me sharply. “What do you think I am?”

The word on the tip of my tongue sounded crazy. Absolutely crazy. But I wasn’t sure it was any more crazy than what had happened in my room last night.

“I think you’re something I’ve only seen in movies.”

He eyed me, all suspicion, and I wanted to know what the hell I’d done to warrant that. “Go ahead and say the word,” he challenged.

I couldn’t. I couldn’t get the word out. Like maybe if I didn’t say it, it wasn’t true. “Do you drink blood?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Are you allergic to the sun?”

He flinched, and then nodded.

I instinctively brought my hand up to my throat. “I think you’re a”—I swallowed, my throat constricting —“a vampire.” The last word was a whisper.

He curled back his lips, and his fangs elongated even more. “You’d be right,” he said.

My heart beat against my rib cage, banging to get out. So either what he said was true, or I was stuck down here with a complete loon. But I didn’t believe the latter. My gut was telling me this was true, because now that I got a good look at him, he didn’t look human. His eyes, while dark, glowed unnaturally. His jaw was larger, and his sheer size spoke of something that was altogether paranormal.

My vision blurred, and my head swam as my breath came in short, fast bursts. I was going to have a panic attack. Right here, in front of this—vampire man—my body was going to attack itself. Wow, I was amazing at self-defense.

I clutched the sheet, blinking rapidly as I tried to talk, but my throat closed up. I gasped for breath, and then went into a secondary panic about not being able to breathe. What weird irony was it that this vampire probably brought me down here to feed from me, and I was going to croak before he could? Maybe my blood would still be warm for him after my heart gave out.