****EXCLUSIVE****
Chapter 1
“I have her now and she is mine. You’ll never find her.” The male spoke angrily into the phone before slamming it down on the table. He looked at me and I couldn’t stop from trembling. That had been my cell phone. I had it in my back pocket, hoping to use it to call for help, but he’d found it. I could feel his anger from across the room.
The man—vampire—would never let me go without a fight. I was scared, really scared and knew there would be no one around to save me. I had to face this on my own. I couldn’t call out for help because he had tape on my face, over my dry and cracked lips. I had bruises all over my body and the ropes on my wrists had rubbed my skin raw.
Why had I fallen for Simon’s lies and ignored all the warnings from my parents? I’d refused to listen to them. I wanted to prove to everyone that I was a grown-up, not the child that they kept treating me as.
I turned fifteen a few months ago and started to spend time with boys my own age. My parents were picky in who they allowed me to date, trying to protect me and keep me safe. As a typical teenager, I rebelled against them and went for the ultimate bad boy—a rogue vampire named Simon Staton.
I met Simon at a high school nighttime football game that I had been allowed to attend with my girlfriends. He approached me and flirted outrageously. I liked his confidence and how he looked at me like I was a grown woman.
At first our contact had been kept in secret and limited, only meeting at nighttime events. Unfortunately, my parents found out and all hell broke out in our home. Alex, my stepfather, had used his position as a master vampire to force Simon to leave town.
That should have been it, but Simon wasn’t going to just let me go. He showed up at my school, wanting me to run off with him. I felt uneasy about the whole thing and refused to go with him. Simon didn’t take the rejection well at all. I was pulled into the shadows and a damp cloth was placed over my nose and mouth.
“Let…me go!” I had tried to scream into the suffocating cloth. I scratched at his wrists, wanting to get him to let me loose. My struggles were pointless as I lost consciousness soon after.
I remembered waking a few times in the trunk of a car with my hands tied behind my back and my mouth stuffed with some type of cloth or rag. I managed to get the rag out of my mouth and yelled for help. All that did was make Simon put duct tape on my mouth and use the cloth that had been in my mouth to cover my eyes. He also did something that made me lose consciousness again.
We must have crossed several state lines because I was in the back of that car for what seemed like hours. I fell asleep and when I woke up again I was tied to a chair in a dirty motel. I had never felt more alone in all my life.
I knew my parents would be looking for me. Alex would go ballistic when I didn’t come home from school and would not rest until he found me again. I had no doubt the vampire clan would send trackers out to look for me. I threatened Simon with that but he didn’t seem at all worried about being caught. I felt foolish for not listening to all the warnings.
When he heard my cell phone ringing, he answered it and then smashed it against the table. I had to face facts: no one would find me before Simon did what he wanted with me. The question was whether I lived through it all or if he would leave me for dead.
“Mackenzie, look what I found while you were sleeping and brought in for us to play with,” Simon said, dragging something from the bathroom.
It was a woman in her twenties with long red hair. The color was a little darker than my own and looked like it came from a bottle. She had a gag in her mouth and her wrists and ankles were bound with zip ties. She had on a pink slip that barely covered her body. Her eyes would stay with me for the rest of my life. Those dark blue eyes filled with fear, pain, and desperation. She pleaded silently for me to help her but I sat there tied up and helpless. I couldn’t even scream out for help.
The woman tried to crawl to the door but Simon just laughed, grabbed her by the hair, and dragged her to the bed. “You can’t leave yet. I need you to help turn my mate.”
Mate? What did he mean by that? I looked around for something I could use to cut through the rope on my hands but found nothing. I felt his eyes on me and lifted my head to face him.
“I want to assure you that I didn’t bring this girl here to use sexually. I mean, if you want us to share her I would be up for that. No, she is here for you. I want you to have pure, clean blood for your first feeding.”
Feeding? What the hell was he talking about? I had to do something but the ropes on my wrists were too tight. I swallowed hard when he came toward me all of a sudden. I hated being at his mercy. His breath felt uncomfortably hot and foul. He didn’t kiss me but gripped my long hair that he’d braided back so he had access to my neck. I watched in horror as his fangs distended slowly from his mouth.
No! I screamed in my mind, but no sound escaped me. The look in his eyes told me that he would not have stopped. I grew up around vampires and it had never before bothered me, but right at that moment I was terrified.
Simon bent his head to my neck, and I felt his fangs slowly and painfully pierce my flesh—the worst thing I had ever experienced. My mother told me once that a vampire’s bite wasn’t painful unless the vampire meant it to be. Usually the vampire licked the spot they wished to bite. The saliva acted as both a numbing agent and an aphrodisiac, letting the bite become more arousing, the pain from the bite barely detectable.
Simon didn’t prepare me with his saliva. Instead he punished me with the pain of the bite for having turned my back on him. I didn’t know whether he planned to kill me right there or not.
I grew weaker and weaker as he sucked the blood and life out of me. I could barely lift my head and felt like a floppy noodle. Finally, he stopped sucking and withdrew his fangs. He raised his head and smiled down at me with satisfaction and a wicked gleam in his eyes.
“Perfect. Now you will drink of me. I will replenish the blood using our friend over there and continue over and over until your transition begins. After a few hours of the transition, you will awaken to a new life. You can drain the rest of the blood from the girl then I will teach you how to please me sexually. We will be tied together forever and no one will ever tear us apart.”
Oh my God. He planned to turn me into a vampire against my will. A forced turning wasn’t done in the vampire world anymore and was considered one of the worst crimes a vampire could commit. There were rules and laws heavily enforced. A person turned had to give consent, or it had to be done in a life and death situation. I didn’t give my consent.
When Simon bit into his own wrist and tried to place his blood at my mouth, I turned away the best I could, considering I was still tied up. He was stronger and I couldn’t fight him any longer. I choked on the blood flowing down my throat. He purred in pleasure.
“We’re almost there, love. Let me replenish and then I will feed you more of my blood. Come on, my special girl, take what I give you.” He forced more blood into me before letting me go.
My eyelids seemed so heavy, too heavy to open. I heard the other woman scream as Simon sank his fangs into her. Then he returned to me, tilting my head back and filling my mouth with more of his coppery blood. I tried to spit it out but he wouldn’t let me, replacing whatever I emitted with more.
I couldn’t be sure how long or how many times we repeated the same routine over and over, with him feeding from the girl, then him feeding me. All I remembered was feeling weird, like I floated above my body looking down at the whole event, detached.
I heard my name in a song from a distance. The voice seemed familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The words I made out were, “Mackenzie love, light of my heart, come to me and never we part.” Who sang it? I didn’t know. I just kept floating high above, watching the scene below.
“Damn it! Transition already!” Simon yelled at my prone unconscious body. He paced back and forth then kicked the girl on the floor who lay motionless. She wasn’t breathing.
“I have to go out and find us a new blood source.” He kissed my lips and left the motel room, leaving my motionless body still tied to the chair.
I wondered if I would die then. I wished I’d had another chance to tell my parents how sorry I was and how much I loved them. Would they find my dead body here? I didn’t want them to see me like that. I wanted to live. But when the voice sang my name, it felt welcoming at first, then it changed. The voice wanted me to go back to where the pain lived.
“Mackenzie love, it’s not your time to depart. Go back now and find your heart,” the voice whispered to me. I felt a gentle push and my spirit or whatever floated back to my poor bruised body. As soon as I came into myself, fully seated in my body, I coughed and spat the blood out. Then I screamed at the top of my lungs. I heard footsteps shuffling and the door shoved open. Two men in leather biker clothes came in and stared horrified at the scene.
One man knelt on the floor next to the woman Simon had used mercilessly. “Dead. Someone killed them.”
I wasn’t dead. I needed to get their attention, let them know. “Help me,” I managed to whisper with a hoarse voice.
“My God, this one is still alive.”
I opened my eyes and looked into big brown eyes full of worry for me. He was human, not a vampire. Thank God for that. I heard more people coming through the door but I kept my eyes on the man with brown eyes. He looked kind. I wanted to tell him what happened but I couldn’t get the words out.
“Easy, honey. We’re here to help you. Someone please call for an ambulance!”
“I’m on it, Jim,” the other man said, pulling out his phone.
“Let me undo the ropes. It’s going to hurt. Do you understand?” the one named Jim asked.
“Yes,” I answered. All that mattered was that I was still alive and Simon had not managed to turn me into a vampire.
These strangers helped me when they didn’t have to. I knew in that moment what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to help people, protect them, and save them as I had been saved. Who better to fight the monsters than someone who had experienced the worst at their hands?
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