The Vampire Games: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance (6 page)

There was no alternative. Even if I went home, the vampires owned Hidden Oaks. They owned my parents, my school.

I was never going to college.

But I might be able to go back to the surface and start a war.

“I’ll work,” I said grimly.

W
eeks passed
, and I made good on my promise.

I worked. I worked harder than ever before in my entire life.

The exercises weren’t beyond me in terms of stamina, but I didn’t know how to use my body like a weapon, so we started out with drills to sharpen my movements. Most of it was barehanded stuff. Fists and feet and knees and elbows.

It must have been a week before Alisyn announced it was time for me to try a weapon.

“I thought that weapons weren’t allowed in the Coliseum,” I said. “It’s all fistfights.”

“That’s why they made these,” Alisyn said. She wiggled her fingers into a crimson glove with black pads on the palm. “This is what you’ll be facing in there.”

Alisyn seized my wrist. My hand went numb.

I yelped and jumped back. All sensation had disappeared in an instant. It would have been impossible to know my hand was there if I couldn’t still see it.

“It’s not exactly a weapon, and you’re still basically in a fistfight. But the charge makes you clumsier.” Alisyn handed me a glove of my own. “Easier to kill. If it helps, I’ve heard it makes fatal injuries hurt less, too. I wouldn’t know. I never lose.”

“What sadist designed these?” I asked, gingerly sliding my hand into the glove.

“Lord Hector. Shadow Keep.”

The coyote-faced vampire who had sent me into the Grinder.

It was easy to imagine him seeking loopholes to make nasty little surprises for the fights like the shock gloves.

I wondered how the shock gloves would work against vampires like Lord Hector.

Thoughts like that made me throw myself into the training. I wasn’t eager to fight in the arena, not exactly, but I still wasn’t holding anything back. Because if I had my way, the arena fights weren’t the only ones in my future.

This was training all right.

Not just training so I could survive until they offered to Create me. But training for what would come afterward.

What would happen once I got home.

I threw myself into learning.

According to Alisyn, that was part of my problem. The way I threw myself into things without thinking. That was, she said, the reason I kept losing to her so badly. “Count to five in your head,” she said after she introduced the gloves, “and look around before you decide on a move.”

I barked a laugh. “Five seconds? You’ll kick my butt in five seconds.”

“You’ll lose if you don’t take it,” Alisyn said.

So I took five seconds.

And yeah, I got my butt kicked a lot.

At first, I didn’t entirely see the point. When I counted, I lost the element of surprise by pausing.

But I also did things a little differently when I took time to think.

The world slowed down in those five seconds. I could feel the beating of my heart in my palms, squeezed gently by the shock gloves. I felt air enter my expanding lungs. My vision became clearer, and my thoughts followed along.

I noticed when Alisyn was mimicking an injury in a subtle way. I’d pick an alternate direction when it seemed more useful. Things like that.

Terror wasn’t propelling me, and that made a difference.

It also reaped unexpected rewards. Like when I scanned the room on the third or fourth day and saw a figure lurking in the shadows.

He was in the back corner opposite the fake window, where the shadows were deepest. Wearing all black, he blended into the darkness.

Except for his bright-blue eyes.

I would have been able to see those eyes through the darkest night and deepest fog.

“Ignore Phillip,” Alisyn said when she noticed I was staring at him instead of doing the run she’d requested. “He’s going to be in and out a lot.”

Easier said than done.

I hadn’t seen Phillip ever since he’d sent Alisyn in to talk to me that first day. Either he hadn’t been coming back to his rooms, or he had another entrance at the top of the stairs that I hadn’t yet dared to climb. If it hadn’t been for the fact I was only alive because of the sixty crowns he’d spent on me, I might have been able to pretend he had never been more than a dream.

But I slowed down, I took five seconds, I breathed and thought.

And I started noticing Prince Phillip coming around a lot more often.

He always came in alone, and he was always gone by the time Alisyn and I had finished our drills for the day.

Phillip never spoke or interfered.

I thought he must have been giving Alisyn feedback, though. She often changed her techniques with me after a visit from Phillip.

He also started showing up in other places.

In the mornings, when I was eating the breakfast that was anonymously delivered outside my bedroom door, he was watching from the top of the stairs.

When I sat in the entryway to read books while waiting for Alisyn, sometimes he stood on the other side of the arch, shoulder against the wall, blue eyes slicing through the silence of the room.

Before I went to bed at night, he was there, too.

I wondered if he was there when I slept.

It wasn’t like I could ask him. The one time I tried to chase him down to speak, he vanished before I even reached the bottom of the stairs.

Yet he was
always
there.

The way that he hung around ensured I never had time to look for an escape. If Phillip wasn’t lurking in some murky corner, then Alisyn was there to help me train, or there were the guards waiting in the hallway to make sure I couldn’t head out through the most obvious exits.

I was trapped.

Phillip was haunting me.

The more fleeting his visits, the harder it was to ignore him.

Before long, I couldn’t think of anything else.

It didn’t escape Alisyn’s notice.

“Where is your head today?” she asked one day, leaning over to talk to me on the ground. She’d knocked me down particularly hard because I hadn’t been paying attention. Even with the soft floor, I knew it would bruise. “One slip like this in the Games, and that’s it.”

“I’m not distracted,” I said.

I had always been a bad liar. After a few weeks training me, Alisyn wasn’t fooled.

“Sure,” she said. “Sure you’re not distracted.”

And she boxed my left ear.

I cried out, gripping the side of my head as the eardrum rang like a bell.

If I’d been paying attention, I would have been able to deflect that.

“You’re thinking about something,” Alisyn said.

She was right. I was thinking about a lot of things.

I was thinking about using the fighting moves she taught me against Lord Hector. I was wondering what was up with Prince Phillip, and why he wouldn’t let me speak to him. And I was worrying about Marc.

The last of them was the least likely to damn me if I shared it.

“There was a man with me,” I said. “Marc. We were separated right before the Grinder.”

“Marc.” Alisyn pondered the name, fists drooping at her sides. She didn’t seem to recognize it. To be fair, she probably didn’t know any of the humans other than me—I didn’t, either. My entire world had been diminished to my bedroom, the library, and the place where Alisyn trained me.

“Do…do you know where he might be?” I asked tremulously.

“Besides the obvious?” Alisyn asked.

She didn’t even say the word “dead,” and it hurt.

I swallowed hard. “I just need to know. How can I find out where he’s gone?”

“There are worse things in this place than uncertainty,” she said. “Now hands up, and try to numb my leg with the shock gloves again.”

I was pretty sure that was the end of the conversation.

To my credit, I really did try to forget about it.

But I couldn’t.

Marc was the reason I’d thrown myself into the Grinder in the first place. He was also the reason that I had left Prince Phillip’s initial safe haven.

No matter how I mentally framed it, Marc was the whole reason I was there.

Everything I did was infused with his spirit.

How was I supposed to forget about that?

T
he days wore on
.

I was alone, haunted, determined.

My body grew lean. I was fed well, but not in overabundance. When I was awake, I was training, even if Alisyn wasn’t there. I battled invisible enemies and imagined that all of them looked like Lord Hector, while the ghost of the old slave woman watched, judgmental and angry.

There was no day or night. Sometimes I was asleep. And when I wasn’t, I was fighting.

One day—one night?—I was alone in the training room, slamming my fists into the wall. My heart pounded. My lungs strained.

I should have been alone.

But then I felt a breeze. The air stirred my hair, like a soft breath gusting across the sweaty back of my neck.

I whirled, fists lifted.

And he was there.

Prince Phillip.

He hung back against the opposite wall, as he always did, with his eyes fixed on my feet. Just like the first time we had met. There was no lack of confidence in his posture, though. He was fierce and tall, shoulders thrown back, every inch the predator. He was just a predator doing his best to control himself in front of his prey. Trying not to kill me.

How long had he been watching?

My fists wavered. The tension drained from my muscles. When Phillip was around, there was no fight within me—nothing but the urge to move toward him, sucked into his gravity, like a black hole waiting to crush me into an atom.

So many questions lingered on my lips.

He spoke before I did.

“He’s in training.”

Phillip may as well have spoken Latin for all that I understood the statement. My brain had been so focused on training that I simply couldn’t wrap my brain around the total shift in atmosphere.

“What? Who’s in training?” I asked.

“Marc. He’s been bought by a Sponsor, and he’s in training like you are.” His face betrayed some emotion for a minute, something like discomfort, and then it was blank again.

Phillip left, and I was left gaping at the place where he had been standing.

Marc was alive.

And Phillip had found it out for me.

H
ow long did
I spend honing myself into a weapon?

There was no way to know.

Time was no longer measured in days and nights. It was measured in the growth of my muscles, the loss of body fat from my thighs, and how quickly I stopped caring about the surface.

After all, my mother, the beautiful perfect housewife in pearls, had been the one to tell me I needed to leave with those men. The vampires that Alisyn told me were called “Harvestmen.” They had betrayed me. Instead of warning me what was to come, my very own mother had let me get dragged into the underworld.

My friends who had been going to college—they would end up here, too.

Everyone would.

That was the world that I had lived in, and I’d had no idea.

Now my life was training. Preparation.

I kept my eye on the goal.

Soon, I would be strong. Soon, I would be powerful.

Soon, I would break free of these dim caves underneath the world I had always known, and I would warn the people above so that we could fight back.

And, hopefully, I’d be able to take Marc with me.

That was the thought that made me get up every morning.

So time passed, just like that.

At the end of one session with Alisyn, Phillip approached me again. My trainer had already peeled off for the showers. I had my towel slung over my shoulder and was ready to find a shower of my own.

“No training tomorrow,” Phillip said. “You can look around the fief, if you want.”

“Dawn Hold?”

“No, Shadow Keep,” he said, totally straight-faced. He was making a joke. The vampire prince knew how to make jokes. “Yes, Dawn Hold,” Phillip said after a moment of gaping silence on my part.

According to Alisyn, Dawn Hold was Phillip’s kingdom. There were multiple fiefs throughout the entire system of caves, each of which was ruled by a head vampire. Lots of vampires lived in each of them. They had houses and jobs. It sounded a lot like the place I used to live, except that everything was underground and the people weren’t humans.

I’d have been lying if I said I wasn’t curious to see what it was all like.

How did vampires live? These creatures who kept humans in colonies like we were cows waiting for the slaughter.

I needed to see it.

“How many fiefs are there?” I asked.

“Five,” Phillip said. “Dawn Hold, Shadow Keep, Twilight Falls, Crescent Hall, and Fort Midnight. Together, these fiefs form the Society of Eternal Dusk.”

My lips twitched as I fought against a smile. The names were so dramatic, and so…vampiric. It was exactly what I would have expected from the culture that had produced a monster like Lord Hector. “Are they all identical to Dawn Hold?” I didn’t try to make it sound like an innocent question, because it wasn’t. I wanted all the intelligence possible.

“No. They’re each unique, sculpted by each fief’s unique specialty. Shadow Keep is the punitive fief. The whole thing is like a dungeon. Twilight Falls is somewhat agricultural; they grow resources for building, and also do quite a bit of mining. And so on.”

“What does Dawn Hold do?” I asked.

“We hold on to dawn,” Phillip said with a straight face. I was pretty sure he was pulling my leg, though.

“So tomorrow I get the day off to see Dawn Hold,” I said slowly, trying to wrap my mind around the conversation. “What happens to me the day after that?”

Phillip was silent. He gazed intensely at my shoes, like he was going to burn a hole through my toes with his eyes.

That was an answer all its own.

The reason he was giving me a day off was because I might not have another day after that.

All this training was for a reason, after all.

I’d be going back to the Coliseum soon.

I wasn’t sure I actually wanted a day off. Not once I realized that I had another fight waiting for me.

Yes, I had trained hard. Yes, I was confident in my skills. But if I only had a few hours left, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend that last day exploring a cave filled with evil vampires.

What would I want to do if it were my last day alive?

Phillip turned to leave.

“Hey,” I said softly.

He stopped in the doorway without looking back.

If I only had one day left, I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted to know who he was, and why he had picked me instead of anyone else. I wanted to know why he looked at me the way he did. And I wanted to know what I felt between us.

I didn’t ask any of those things.

Phillip left.

I
didn’t sleep well
that night.

It should have been easy to pass out. I hadn’t had any troubles sleeping at night yet, since Alisyn always worked me so hard. I had no choice but to succumb to utter exhaustion the instant that my head hit the pillow.

Fear was stronger than the exhaustion that night.

My bedroom seemed so small, and the walls separating my room from Phillip’s chamber above felt thinner than ever. I spent half the night standing at the bottom of those stairs, gazing up the spiral, wondering what Phillip would do if I reached the top.

Nothing he did to me could be worse than what was going to happen after I returned from visiting Dawn Hold.

But I didn’t go upstairs.

Morning came, which I only knew because the guards brought breakfast to me. I ate as much as I could tolerate.

I picked out clothes from the dresser that weren’t workout clothes for the first time. My hands were shaking as I sifted through the options. They were mostly dresses. I found the one pair of jeans and a loose white shirt. Both fit me perfectly.

Alisyn was waiting for me in the entryway when I emerged.

“I’m not training today,” I said. “I’ve got the day off.”

“I know; that’s why I’m here. I’m heading out into Dawn Hold too. Phillip asked me to walk you down. But I have an appointment, so you’ll be on your own.”

Freedom.

In a hold with vampires.

Every gift in this place seemed to have two sides to it.

Alisyn led me outside the rooms.

For the first time, there were no guards waiting to stop us. I didn’t see any vampires at all until we reached the end of the hallway, which opened into a much larger cave.

Alisyn led me out to Dawn Hold and said goodbye at its entrance.

I was too busy staring at my surroundings to respond.

She laughed and walked away.

I’d expected more of what I’d seen before: industrial caves with humans crushed underfoot, a sadistic torture room.

But Dawn Hold was a pristine village at the bottom of a massive cavern.

I stood high against the wall, at the top of a path leading down to the network of cobblestone roads. The buildings were built of bronze and polished brass, shutters opened and shut by slowly grinding cogs. The gabled roofs were almost cartoony in their steep slopes, like they had been built out of taffy and stretched tall.

All its light came from bioluminescent plants glowing in craters. Fireflies darted by my head as I followed Alisyn down the road, etching flaming spirals into the moist air. It was easy on my eyes and probably not offensive to the vampires, either.

“Oh my…” I whispered.

The village was full of life. I hadn’t expected that.

It was crowded with pale people drifting between the houses. Shockingly, they were dressed a lot like me. If they hadn’t been so pallid and crimson-eyed, I might have thought they were ordinary people from the surface.

But these people had never seen sunlight and they survived by drinking blood from that other cavern filled with unconscious humans.

So not people at all.

Evil or not, the vampires had incredible taste in architecture. I couldn’t help but gaze, slack-jawed, at the village as I wandered.

I knew I couldn’t be the only human in the area—I might have been able to dress like a local, but there was no concealing my eyes, and nobody reacted with surprise at seeing me. But I only picked out a couple other humans by the way they avoided my gaze and darted out of my way.

They didn’t look at me long enough to tell whether I was human or vampire. These were humans who had lived in submission for too long. They were afraid of everyone.

Not like I could have forgotten where I was or what monsters surrounded me, but the downtrodden humans were a constant reminder of what horror awaited me the next day.

I soon found myself in a market area, populated by open-walled stalls that sold all kinds of crafts. No food—it didn’t look like there were any vampire bakers. But the trinkets they made were just as beautiful as the brass buildings. This was Dawn Hold’s specialty: craftsmanship. They were the makers. It made my heart feel strange to know that vampires were capable of creating beautiful things instead of merely destroying everything.

I stopped at one stall decorated with glass bowls; there was even a little forge and someone blowing glass in the back.

“Excuse me,” I asked a man at the stall’s counter. “Do you make all this glass yourself?”

He averted his eyes and dropped his head.

A human. A slave.

“Don’t mind him. Some humans don’t feel like they have the stature to talk to Candidates.” This came from the woman blowing glass. She was hammering it into a shape. “To answer your earlier question, yes, we do blow all the glass you see.” Her eyes were black, not crimson. She must have been a human—just a much more confident human than the one who had remained silent.

“The glasswork is beautiful,” I said. “Is this your shop?” She nodded. “I didn’t know a vampire hold would be like this.”

Her smile faded. “Most of them aren’t.”

“What are the others like?” I asked.

“They don’t have glassblowers,” she said curtly. “They do a different kind of trade.”

A trade in humans.

What kind of vampire was Phillip if he ruled Dawn Hold in a way that was safe for humans, but owned a slave like me?

“What do you know about Phillip? The prince,” I corrected quickly. “Do you know why he bought me? What’s his story?”

The shopkeeper laughed. “I’m a shopkeeper, Candidate. I make a poor gossip. Does anything here catch your eye?”

There were a lot of things that caught my eye, but nothing more than a strand of delicate glass beads dangling from a hook. I traced my fingertip over them. Each bead had been blown so that it looked like there were colorful flowers inside. They reminded me of the white roses and sunflowers that Phillip had offered to me on that first day.

I didn’t have money, but even if I did, what would the point have been?

The next day, I was going into the Coliseum to fight.

I had no use for beautiful jewelry. I would never need beautiful jewelry ever again.