The Vampire Games: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance (4 page)

T
he hall leading
from the cell to the arena was narrow and dark. It felt like I was crawling through the air ducts again—or like I was crawling into a grave.

As we approached the arena, the ceiling shook with the roars of the crowd. They were excited for the fight to come.

I couldn’t even feel afraid anymore.

The door into the arena was a tall archway blocked by glass and iron. The glass was decorated with a bold logo in reverse—something clearly meant to be seen by the crowd, not by the competitors.

As cold vampire fingers secured a collar around my throat, I tried to imagine what that logo would look like the other way around. It was sort of like a blooming flower surrounded by beaming rays of light.

I wished that I had brought the sunflower with me.

Where was my blue-eyed hero now? That boy who had been strong enough to defeat all those vampires, and compassionate enough to feed me?

I had run from him. Rejected his kindness.

The collar locked tightly around my throat.

My eyes fell shut. They were no longer burning with tears.

This will be worth it to protect Marc
.

The vampires used the collar to lead me to the glass doors, which swung open.

The shouting of the audience reached a peak. They wanted to see me die, and they most likely would.

Or that’s what I thought until I walked out the door and saw the fragile old woman standing on the other side.

All thoughts of Marc fled from my mind.

The competitor I was being pitted against was shorter than me, and bone-thin. She had the same collar around her throat that I had around mine as well. While she was crouched kind of like the previous fight’s winner had, she made no move to come toward me.

I stared up at the bleachers surrounding the arena.

Hundreds of vampires looked back at me. They were as beautiful, pallid, and graceful as the others I’d seen in this dark world. They were still cheering, but I couldn’t hear it over the thudding of my heart anymore.

It didn’t occur to me that I should be fighting this old lady until waves of pain washed over me, and the crowd started to chant the word “fight” over and over.

I dug my heels in.

“No,” I said. “No!”

The pain intensified. It was coming from my collar.

A shock collar—another indignity, one more way to communicate that I was nothing more than a dog to these vampires.

When I still didn’t move, the pain just kept climbing. It hurt so much that my vision went white and I was barely aware of anything around me.

When the pain stopped, and my eyes cleared, the woman was rushing toward me, much faster than I would have thought she would be able to move. She might have been old, but she’d clearly survived to reach the Grinder for good reason.

I leaped out of the way before she could punch me. It didn’t look like she knew how to punch very hard, but I definitely didn’t want to take the chance.

She swung her fist and I pushed her aside. Not hard—it looked like I should have been able to break her hip, so I couldn’t bring myself to get violent.

The woman didn’t give up.

She threw herself at me again.

Bony, frail fingers dug into my shoulders. She shoved her face into mine. “Kill me,” she hissed.

“
What
?” There was no way I could have heard her right.

She kicked out wildly.

I pushed her off of me and backed away.

“Kill me,” she said again, almost too low to be heard over the roaring crowd. She didn’t sound particularly fierce or murderous. Her eyes welled with tears. “Please.”

My heart thudded harder still.

Digging my fingertips into the shock collar, I searched for a latch. If I could figure out how to open it, I could release both of us.

The collar responded with a powerful shock.

I dropped my hands.

“Kill me!” the woman cried.

“No!” I yelled back. “I won’t fight you!”

The white pain shocked through my body again. I could barely hear my own cries over the boos that resounded.

My audience was disappointed.

Good. I won’t perform for you
.

The pain stopped again, as though encouraging my head to clear enough for the fight. I was wobbly on my legs, barely aware of everything around me, and I thought of Marc. If he’d gone, would he have been alert enough to even choose whether or not to listen to the woman? I couldn’t believe he would kill her.

The old woman stumbled forward.

I couldn’t tell if she’d been shocked again as well or if she was tiring from the little fighting we’d done.

“You have to,” she said, clinging to my arm with one hand and swinging up with the other. I grabbed her arm and found myself struggling against her. “Just kill me.”

“No!”

We grappled. We fell to the ground.

The white light struck again, and it was the worst it had been yet.

I tasted coppery blood.

If I didn’t let this woman kill me—or if I didn’t kill her—then the vampire collar was going to kill me.

The injustice of it burned like fire through my veins.

Earlier that day, or the day before, I had been thinking about college. I had been worried that Marc had noticed my freckles and enjoying the sight of ants carrying potato chips ten times their size through the grass.

Who were the vampires to deny that to me?

I didn’t deserve this pain.

The collar shocked again and again, so painful that my back arched.

Everything was pain. Pain and rage and the wild shrieking of a wind during a hurricane.

My blood pounded through me, body thrashing.

Leering, screaming vampire faces whirled around me, pale as death but filled with excitement.

Blood lust.

My skin burned.

Stop. Stop. Stop!

I would have done anything to make the pain stop.

Kill me
, the woman had said.

Apparently she would have done anything to make the pain stop, too.

Who was I to deny that to her?

We were all entitled to our own lives, and that meant we should have been entitled to dignified death as well. Not everyone was meant to fight and survive. We were masters of our own bodies, regardless of what the vampires thought.

It was hard to accept that with the shock collar clamped under my jaw.

I thought the pain would never end.

Eventually, it did stop. It wasn’t endless, but close. It felt like a thousand years before the collar stopped shocking me.

Even when the pain ended, it took a very long time for my vision to clear. So long that when I finally saw the arena again, I wasn’t entirely sure it was real or that I was even alive.

I touched my body with my hands. I felt intact. And then I looked down at the dirty ground by my feet.

The old woman was dead underneath me.

Vampires were cheering louder than ever before.

“No,” I whispered.

There was no responding shock of the collar this time because there was no reason to urge me to fight.

The fight was over.

I killed her
.

In the haze of the blood lust, wracked by agony, I had fought. My mind had railed against instinct and loss.

She’d asked me to kill her.

And I had.

Vampires emerged from the glass doors decorated with the flower and sunbeams. I lifted my fists instinctively, afraid of the pain they would inflict.

My hands were stained with blood.

Her
blood.

“No!” I cried.

The vampires dragged me out of the arena.

Once I started screaming, I couldn’t make myself stop.

When we were out of the arena, one of the men dragging me slapped me hard across the mouth. It didn’t hurt. Or maybe it did, but the collar had hurt so much more that I couldn’t feel the slap.

I did stop screaming. Instead, I cried as they dragged me through the halls and away from the Grinder—too late. Much too late.

T
he vampires shoved
me into a tiny room with half a dozen others. This room was even smaller than the cell where I’d been held until the fight. There was no space for mats, no room for sitting. Our shoulders bumped against each other with every slightest movement.

The other people smelled like body odor, so these humans must have been enslaved even longer than I had been.

These were definitely humans, though. Most of them had dried blood caked on their skin, and everyone looked bruised and dirty.

I even recognized the woman who had killed Lisa. She was staring at the wall like she couldn’t see anything else in the room.

I knew the feeling. I couldn’t even make myself speak to the others for fear I would start crying or screaming again.

This room was where they put the winners from the Grinder.

I was in a room of killers.

And I had just become one of them.

The old woman had begged me to kill her. I had been blinded with pain when it happened, but did that make any difference? Did it make me better than the others? Or had all of them done what they needed for similar reasons to mine: not just for our own survival, but to release the losers from bondage, and save our friends from certain death?

The thought of the friend I had been trying to save—Marc—was almost enough to give me strength.

Almost
.

I felt so weak with fear.

Another door opened.

The vampire who greeted us didn’t have to say a word. The others filed out, shuffling into the hallway as though they had been commanded by a voice I couldn’t hear.

I hesitated to follow. I didn’t want to be a sheep like these people. But hadn’t I made my bed? I’d been obedient despite my best efforts, without making a conscious decision to do so.

The vampire’s eyes narrowed, reminding me of the cost of disobedience.

I stumbled out with the rest.

The room on the other side of the door was dark, illuminated only by a crimson bulb. I couldn’t see beyond a few inches of floor in front of me.

“First human!” yelled the vampire who had let us out of the room.

I lifted my eyes to shade them from the red light, struggling to focus on my surroundings. We humans had been led out onto some kind of stage or a platform. The room was no arena, but it had space for an audience, too. There were approximately two dozen chairs. Every one of those chairs was occupied by a person.

If you could call vampires people.

Their eyes flared weirdly in the red light, staring at us intently. We all hung back against the wall, milling in a group.

Sheep being surveyed by the wolves.

That was me. A very deadly sheep riddled with regret.

A vampire grabbed the boy next to me. He was as ordinary as the rest of us with narrow shoulders and nervous eyes. When the vampire touched him, he started to cry. The boy was pushed to the front of the stage.

“He was selected for the Grinder after all sedatives failed on him,” the vampire said. “His Grinder fight was a draw against the opposition. They knocked each other out. We’ll start his bidding at five crowns.” The vampires in the audience murmured among themselves.

I swallowed down the taste of bile.
It’s a slave auction. We’re being sold.

The only question was…for what purpose?

One of the audience members lifted a finger. “I’ll take him for three.”

“Three crowns? Anyone else?” asked the announcer.

Nobody spoke.

“Three it is. Sold to the miner!”

The boy collapsed onto his knees. “No!” He was hauled off the stage, a mess of sobs.

“Miner?” I whispered.

The girl next to me whispered back. “Slave labor. They’re digging more caverns. They work the slaves until they can’t work anymore, and then…” She trailed off when the vampire announcer looked at us.

She didn’t have to finish speaking. I could only imagine how much work it must have taken to create caves the size of the one that Marc had been sedated in. If all the slaves had been similar in build to that boy, then they must have been carved with the blood of a thousand lives.

The announcer’s red eyes skimmed the winners, and he stopped on me.

“Second human!” he shouted.

And now I was pulled out of the flock.

I was so afraid from all my time in the caves that I couldn’t manage to feel more fear now. My heart couldn’t beat any faster. If it did, I thought that it might just erupt within my chest.

His cruel hand was so tight on my wrist.

But I wouldn’t cry like the boy had. I wouldn’t give any of them the satisfaction of showing fear if I could avoid it.

The vampire grabbed my hair and pulled my head back, baring my throat. I made a gurgling noise.

“This one won her fight against a seasoned escape artist, a wily old human who had made three attempts to break out of the Waiting Room.
This
human was first spotted when she escaped before sedation. Rather than trying to return to the surface, she attempted to free another human. Today was her first day in the Grinder. She killed her first opponent within five minutes.”

Five minutes?
How was that possible? It had felt like we had been fighting for an entire lifetime.

My knees wobbled. I clenched my jaw and forced myself to stand upright.

“We’ll start with twenty crowns,” the announcer said.

Was I really worth seven times as much as the boy? What were they basing that worth upon?

The idea that I could be more desirable simply because I was deadlier made some horrible kind of sense. These were nightmarish creatures, and I had proven that I could fit into the dreamscape with them.

I tried to peer through the red light to see the faces of the audience.

Who else was buying us, and why? Was I about to end up in the mines, performing physical labor until I dropped dead?

“Thirty crowns!” someone yelled, and the crowd murmured as the vampire onstage let go of my hair.

I wavered, tempted to run. But where would I run? There was a cage behind me and a group of eager buyers in the crowd.

Everyone was looking at me.

“Do I have thirty-one?” the announcer replied.

“Thirty-five!” one voice yelled.

“Thirty-six!” a second said.

It went like that for several minutes. As the numbers climbed higher, generally without prompting from the auctioneer, the crowd began to shout with excitement.

The number approached forty-five crowns.

I had no reference for the currency. Crowns could have been pennies, or dollars, or thousands, and I never would have known. But the excitement made me think it was a lot. I didn’t feel proud. I didn’t feel pleased. Numb horror had taken up permanent residence in my soul.

“Forty-six!” the auctioneer yelled at the peak. “Going once, going twice…”

“Sixty,” a voice called, loud and clear.

The voice sounded familiar.

I tried to peer into the red light to see who had just claimed me for sixty crowns, but a lot of the vampires jumped to their feet, shrieking so loud it hurt my ears.

Sixty must have been a lot.

The auctioneer didn’t seem like he wanted to calm the crowd. He simply called, “Sold!”

Another vampire seized me.

I was dragged offstage, and even the humans I’d been with, who I had barely noticed during all the commotion, were staring at me as I was taken away.

A
nother hallway
. Another room.

It was all a blur to me.

My captors didn’t take me very far. This new cave was small and roughly hewn, obviously not a place meant to be seen by important people. It was filled with several human-sized cages, each of which had naked iron bars, with nothing to make them comfortable for the prisoners.

The first boy—the one who had sold for three crowns—was in the one nearest the door. He had stopped crying.

They threw me in a second cage.

The vampires stared at me for a moment, almost like they were waiting for something. I didn’t know what. Did they want me to react the way that the boy did? Were they such sadists that they hoped to see me dissolve into tears? I was breathing hard from all the adrenaline and fear, but I wasn’t shrinking away from their grip as he had, and I also wasn’t curling into a ball on the floor.

If I had to guess, I probably looked…blank. Too overwhelmed to look scared, too scared to look threatening.

Finally, one of them snorted. “Overpriced.”

“You don’t know,” the other said. “It’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?”

The first didn’t look convinced. “Well, he wants her pronto. No waiting period. She’s going into training immediately. And what the little prince wants…” She said “little prince” in a nasal voice with a sneer. Her opinion of my buyer was not positive.

She pushed on the side of my cage, and it rolled. I hadn’t realized it was on wheels until it moved smoothly with only the slightest creaking.

My cage passed the one with the boy in it. He looked at me with pleading eyes.

I turned my head away.

The vampires pushed my cage out into a room that was shockingly well lit and sort of beautiful. The floor was white tile. There were windows on each wall, and the yellow glow of sunlight filtered through the frosted glass, which was imprinted with more of those flower-and-starburst symbols I’d seen in the arena. I wondered if the sunlight was real. It couldn’t be—not so deep underground, and not when the light was so dim. It was the wistful reenactment of sunlight, just like the plastic potted plants in the corners were the wistful reenactment of nature.

Even if the decorations were fake, my cage was ugly in comparison to all of it.

The only other furniture in the room was a settee. The cushion was dark red. I couldn’t help but think it was meant to hide blood stains.

Was this where the “prince” who had purchased me would drink my blood? That was what vampires did, right? They wanted blood.

They positioned my cage a few feet in front of the couch and then left me.

I wasn’t alone for long.

The door behind the settee opened and another vampire stepped in.

“No,” I whispered.

Standing in front of me was the man—no, the vampire—who had rescued me earlier, blue eyes as intense as they had ever been.