The Vampire Games: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance (7 page)

O
nce I left
the glassblowing stall, I continued to wander, but all interest had been drained out of me. There was so much to see, and all of it was impressive.

I couldn’t enjoy myself knowing what was to come.

Strangely, I felt very safe wandering throughout Dawn Hold. Everyone seemed to know who I was. My fight in the Grinder and the now-infamous auction had turned me into a celebrity.

No one would say more than a few gracious words about Phillip, though. I didn’t push. There was a peaceful air to Dawn Hold, and I didn’t want to shatter it.

After a couple hours looking around, just as I was starting to get bored, I exited a stall and found a dark figure waiting for me.

He stood just on the other side of one of the glowing craters filled with those shining blossoms. It cast a dim blue glow on his slacks and kept his face in darkness. But even without being able to see details, I knew exactly who it was.

“Did you find the shadow on purpose?” I asked Phillip. “Is that part of your image? No direct light?”

He didn’t answer. I wasn’t surprised.

A faint smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. “Does this mean I’m done looking around for today, or does it mean you’re going to be my stalker?”

Silence.

“How long have you been following me?” I asked.

“I’m here to take you back to the rooms whenever you’re ready to go.”

Well, that seemed pretty telling. Good thing I was done anyway. “Lead the way.”

Phillip being Phillip, he took me into a hallway directly behind the market. We could have gone the way Alisyn had brought me, but that would have involved being visible in the middle of the hold. He really seemed big on that dark mystery business.

“You know, just because you’re a vampire doesn’t mean you have to be Dracula’s biggest fan,” I said, shoving my hands into my pockets.

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

Then he looked away.

“What is your deal, anyway? You seem really into having me around and me not being dead or whatever, but you don’t want to talk. You disappear every time I try to approach. Considering you’re supposed to own me, you just seem like you don’t want anything to do with me. What gives?”

“I’ve never heard you say that much before.”

A sentence from Phillip. It wasn’t a bad start. “Not to you,” I said. “It’s hard to say much when you keep pulling the disappearing act. But this is good. This is an actual conversation with two sides.”

He made a wordless noise that sounded like agreement. Was I really starting to understand his noises?

One-sided or not, it felt good to talk to Phillip’s back. For the first time, I had his attention. I wasn’t going to let it go.

“What was that first place you took me, anyway? It’s not connected to my rooms in your apartment. So why does a prince have some hidden cave bedroom thing?” I asked. “Is that your dungeon?”

He paused to glance around a stall, as though making sure that nobody could see us. “It’s not a dungeon.”

“Dungeon, prison, whatever word you want to use for it.”

“It’s a safe haven. It’s where I put the precious things.”

My jaw dropped.

But before I could speak, he reached back and put a hand on my arm. “Wait.”

Phillip was looking down the street. His fingers were electric on my exposed skin. He was so cool, as though he had just emerged from swimming in an icy lake.

The reaction his touch had on my body was far from icy, though.

And my shiver had nothing to do with the cold.

Phillip pushed me behind one of the stalls. He kept me pinned to the wall.

“What—?” I started to ask.

He put a finger to my lips and shook his head.

A familiar voice spoke on the other side of the stall. “Have you seen the Candidate?” It was Lord Hector.

The glassblower I had chatted with earlier responded. “No, my lord. I’ve just been working. I haven’t been paying attention.”

Lord Hector made an impatient noise. “Put the word out. Let me know if you see her.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The vampire lord moved on. I glimpsed him through the space between a couple of stalls. He was wearing a white suit marked with Shadow Keep’s logo on the breast, and was accompanied by some kind of human slave. I didn’t see very much. I was too busy trying to melt into the shadows the way Phillip did so that Hector wouldn’t spot me.

I didn’t understand why he was looking for me, but it couldn’t be for anything good.

Yet the glassblower had lied for me.

Why?

It was hard to think when I was pressed against Phillip’s long, lean body. I had never been so close to him before. He smelled musky—not that fresh sweat-and-grass scent I’d always gotten off of Marc, but something far more alien. Something exotic.

I couldn’t help but inhale his smell, eyes falling shut.

Phillip tensed against me.

I opened my eyes to see him looking down at me from just inches away. He had heard me smelling him. My cheeks flushed with heat.

The finger he’d used to cover my lips trailed along my jawline. He touched the soft skin under my ear.

My pulse leaped at his touch.

Phillip’s gaze was fixed on my throat, and the blood that flowed underneath the surface.

Then he was moving.

He pulled me away from the stall, across the street, and through a doorway. We left Dawn Hold behind us. We were back in the network of halls outside of his apartments.

Somehow I remembered how to breathe.

“Is Hector out to get me?” I asked.

“He’s out to get me,” Phillip said without looking back. “But he knows you’re important to me.” His voice was gravelly, hoarse.

I stopped walking. My hand slipped out of his grip. “That’s too bad,” I said faintly. “Since, you know, I’ll probably die tomorrow. I should make it fast and do the ritual surrender thing. Then at least I know I’ll be Harvested fast instead of getting beaten to death.”

“Don’t say that.”

“What?” I said. “That I’m going to die? What are you afraid of, that you’ll lose your investment?”

“I have never feared anything in my life,” Phillip said. His finger skimmed along my throat again. I shivered. “Not until I met you.”

He started walking again.

I didn’t have a choice but to follow him.

“If it makes you feel better, I’m too annoying to surrender,” I said softly.

I don’t know if it did make him feel better or not. He dropped me at his rooms and left again without saying another word.

I
had
no plans of sleeping away my final night alive.

But I did.

There were so many thoughts swimming through my head that I just didn’t have room to worry about the fight. Whenever I closed my eyes, I could only see the swaying, luminescent plants that had dimly illuminated Dawn Hold, and Phillip standing in the shadows.

And I also thought about the glassblower lying for me as Hector attempted to hunt me down.

But mostly I thought about Phillip.

All those thoughts came with a hearty dose of guilt. I felt like I should have been worrying about Marc, that I should be figuring a way for him to escape even if I died in the Coliseum.

Still, by the time I reached that part in my train of thought, I was exhausted, and everything came fuzzy and partially through dreams.

My brain must have given up at that point because I stopped remembering what I was thinking or dreaming.

I woke up to the ringing of a chime.

Morning.

I was up and drinking from the glass of water I kept by my bed when I heard a quiet knocking at my door.

“Hello?” I called.

The door opened a crack. “I’m here to help.”

My heart was in my throat. “Phillip?” I stared at the sliver of him I could see through the door for a minute before I realized he was waiting for me to say something. “Uh, come in.”

He did, a garment bag on his arm. He placed it on the foot of the bed and then drew back toward the door again. “You’ll be wearing this today.”

“What…what about Alisyn?” I asked. “I thought she’d be helping me with my uniform for the fight.” He muttered something. “Sorry?”

“I wanted to see you before the fight.” His face betrayed nothing but his intense stare.

My cheeks heated. “Well, uh. You’re seeing me. But you’re not seeing me change clothes.”

Smooth, Bianka. Very smooth.

But he stopped on the way to the door. Phillip loomed at the foot of the bed, gazing down at me as though he might set the sheets of the bed on fire with his bright-blue eyes.

I was in bed.

He was at the foot of my bed.

There was nothing between us except the bed sheets and my nightgown. Had Phillip even seen me in a nightgown yet?

I drew my knees to my chest and the blankets to my chin.

“Thank you,” I said. “For the uniform.”

“Bianka, when you’re in the Coliseum today…”

My mouth dried out. “Yes?”

“Remember your training.” He turned on his heel and swept out of the room.

“Great,” I muttered, kicking out of the sheets. “‘Good luck, Bianka. Hope you don’t die.’ Perfect way to start the day.”

I changed into the outfit Phillip had left, which was the same shade of blue-green as the glowing plants I had seen down by the market. There was also a large sun on the chest to indicate the Dawn Hold logo. It was the exact opposite of what I thought vampires would wear: shadowy-black and blood-red.

I emerged from my bedroom. The usual quiet serenity of Phillip’s rooms had been broken. The prince himself was waiting with the company of a few guards, who were dressed in more subtle versions of the outfit I was wearing. It looked more like an honor guard than a group meant to keep me imprisoned, but then, I suspected they would turn on me in an instant if I gave them the slightest reason.

The thought didn’t scare me. If anything, I felt ready to handle it.

I expected Phillip to pull the cold detachment thing again, like he always did when others were around. But the way that he looked at me now that I was wearing his uniform—I wasn’t sure if it was pride or worry or what.

All I knew was that I had his full attention.

“Here,” Phillip said. “You forgot something.”

He handed a box to me.

I lifted the lid. There was a pair of bright-blue gloves with black finger pads inside. I had been hoping for a sunflower. This was likelier to save my life, though.

“So are we just going to wait around looking like gladiators?” I asked, fiddling with my gloves when no one spoke. “Is there some kind of fighter tradition here? Chanting? Hands in?”

“You’re not in the Grinder anymore,” Phillip said. “We leave when you say you’re ready.” He took the empty box away. For an instant, he was close enough that I could smell him again—that musky, masculine scent that I had picked up on out in the market the previous day. “Take all the time you need, Bianka. We don’t leave until you say you’re ready.”

Somehow I suspected that all the fighters didn’t get that treatment.

I also suspected that Phillip wanted me to tell him I wasn’t ready.

It was easy to imagine him beating up his own guards until they were unconscious and spiriting me away to his private little cave.

Crazy fantasy. He was a vampire prince, and I was a slave.

“Ready whenever you are,” I said.

Phillip turned from me, utterly expressionless.

“To the Coliseum,” he said.

P
hillip led
us on a different route than the one that had gone to the market. We walked for what could have been miles, winding through endless dark hallways with no chance of escape.

I could hear the thundering of the crowd in the Coliseum as we approached. There was a beat, almost like the crowd was stomping their feet in time. I could feel my heart synching up with it, like my body was on the same page as my head.

If I had to be a part of this, I was going all in. No holding back.

Phillip stopped with the guards right before a door.

“This is as far as I go,” he said.

I tried to smile again. “Can’t be seen with the slaves, right?”

Another emotion I couldn’t name flickered across his face. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but then he closed it again.

Phillip nodded curtly and then he turned away, leaving the guards behind.

“One day, I’m going to be the one to leave first,” I muttered, and then I spoke up so it was obvious I was talking to the guards. “So what, you’re following me out there?”

“To the entrance.” One of them nodded at a glowing red square on the wall. “Your hand goes there when you’re ready to go in.”

“How long could I stand out here, exactly?”

Neither of the guards answered. Apparently Phillip was the only one who got chatty with the humans, even if it was a quiet, sullen, broody kind of chatting.

I put my hand on the square. It flashed, and the door slid open to reveal another dark room.

I heard an announcer say something about human competitors through the walls. I couldn’t hear well, but the crowd roared, and the thumping lost its measured beat. They wanted blood.

My blood, probably.

Just as the door behind us slid closed, a much larger door opened to reveal the Coliseum. Alisyn had coached me on this part; I was supposed to walk to the middle of the pit and, since I was the “new guy,” wait for the more seasoned competitor to come out.

“They want to see a good fight. A challenging fight,” Alisyn had said toward the beginning of training. “They’ll try to create a match that drags it out as much as possible.”

I walked out to the middle like I was supposed to, a little breathless with adrenaline and an edge of fear.

Alisyn had suggested I wave to the crowd since it never hurt to have fans, but I couldn’t even make myself smile at this point.

The fans weren’t going to jump in the arena to save me in the fight. It didn’t matter if they liked me or not.

“And now our vampire competitor,” the announcer said, booming voice clear without cave walls getting in the way.

My pulse leaped.

Vampire competitor?

I had expected to fight another human. I knew vampires were an option, but Alisyn said that it was supposed to be a challenging fight. Not that I was going to get smeared across the Coliseum floor within moments.

The announcer went on.

“Our second competitor is formerly human and out for the blood she used to have flowing through her veins. Her Sponsor…is Maximus!”

I scowled. The competitors didn’t get their own names? Had I been announced under Phillip’s name?

The door opposite my entrance went up, revealing the vampire within, dressed in reds and black.

I froze as the vampire waved to the stands and walked toward me. I couldn’t make out her face right away, but I knew that posture even before a closer view confirmed the vampire’s identity.

Alisyn.

Alisyn is a vampire?

She didn’t have red eyes.

Neither does Prince Phillip
.

She wasn’t pasty-pale, like she’d been dead for weeks.

That’s because she’s a black woman!

She hadn’t told me that she was a vampire.

I had thought we were friends.

The minute I was within earshot, she said in a low voice, still smiling and waving at the crowd, “I couldn’t tell you.”

“Which part?” I snarled back. “The vampire part, or the fighting me part?”

All she said was, “I wasn’t allowed. I’m so sorry, Bianka.”

I flinched away from her. It didn’t escape the notice of the crowd, who howled when I moved, delighted that I looked fearful.

They couldn’t wait to watch Alisyn slaughter me.

“I said I’m sorry,” she repeated. “Come on. It’s not my fault.”

I sealed my lips and didn’t speak.

As soon as we were given a go, we were going to have to try to kill each other. After all of that practice fighting, I would experience the real thing—and it would happen against the one friend I thought I had made in this horrible place.

Someone who hadn’t even told me she was one of the enemy.

I’d have been crazy not to contemplate surrender. Alisyn had taught me how to do it for a reason. I could surrender, deprive the vampires of their entertainment, and spare myself death at Alisyn’s hands.

But as I’d told Phillip, I was too stubborn for that.

“Competitors, shake hands!” the announcer said.

Alisyn had explained this during training, too. Shaking hands activated the numbing effects of the gloves.

I stuck my hand out right away, jaw clenched, and when Alisyn gripped my palm, I felt a slight tingle as the gloves started to buzz.

“I’m sorry,” Alisyn said again. She didn’t let go of me.

“I heard you the first time,” I hissed. “What do you want? Forgiveness?”

At that point, we were supposed to turn our backs to each other and walk ten paces the other way.

I clenched my jaw again and turned around.

“One!” the crowd yelled.

I took my first step.

“Two!”

I was dead. My trainer hadn’t told me she was fighting me, and she was a
vampire.

“Three!”

For a society where being a vampire was prized, vampires sure liked to keep that knowledge close to their chests.

“Four!”

Phillip had known about Alisyn, too. And he’d wanted to see me a lot before my fight.

“Five!”

Did he think I was going to lose?

“Six!”

Did he know I was going to
die
?

“Seven!”

Had he lied about Marc, too? Was he still actually alive?

“Eight!”

Why was I playing this game when it was so loaded against me, anyway?

“Nine!”

I clenched my slightly buzzing fists. If I was going to die, I was going to make sure Alisyn felt as much pain as I could dole out.

“Ten!”

I took my last step and whirled around. Alisyn was hovering a few feet away, crouched in a position I’d seen her take so often. It would be so much easier if I could tell myself this was just another training session.

And just like that, the numbers started again. But this time, it was me counting in my head, and it was the roar of the crowd fading away as I registered everything.

Alisyn was giving me the time to look, for one. She knew what I was doing, and she could have used her vampiric reflexes to evaluate and run in, but she was hanging back, holding a defensive position. Reading me, too?

No. She knew me like a book at this point.

I had to do something unexpected. It had to be something Alisyn had never seen me do before.

I smiled grimly to myself and assumed a defensive position. She had been the teacher. I had rushed her during most of our exercises. Maybe it was time that I learned a little about Alisyn too.

It had to be boring for the vampires watching. At least the first ten minutes of the fight was only Alisyn and me partially crouched and staring at each other.

After that, Alisyn shifted to the side, and I shifted to the other side, and we circled for another few minutes. A couple vampires in the stands booed loudly, to the point where I could hear it over the cheering and general talking, but I could wait it out.

Alisyn broke first. She didn’t rush me, exactly; she walked forward with a confident stride, hands held loosely in front of her. I didn’t try to grab her, like I normally would have. I waited for her to move, and when she did, I blocked her.

Not easily, though. She was so much faster than me.

She grazed my arm, one of the only places bared by my outfit, and the skin went numb right away. I struck back, using the closeness to land a punch on Alisyn’s stomach. She probably would recover faster from a blow like that than I would, but she still staggered.

I felt a brief rush. Maybe I could pull this out.

Of course, that was when Alisyn stopped holding back.

I didn’t give up or anything, but Alisyn was
fast
. She grabbed me in a couple special holds that made best use of the gloves, disabling both my legs and one of my arms before I could so much as blink.

She had shown me those moves in training. I should have seen them coming.

But vampires were so fast.

I only managed to land a couple of punches—nothing on bare skin—before she grabbed my hair, yanked it aside, and left my neck bare.

Alisyn hadn’t said anything about my neck in training, but in that brief moment, I knew that was the last thing I wanted.

I hit her and rolled away, wincing at the tugging of my hair against my scalp.

It wasn’t enough.

Alisyn grabbed my neck with one of her gloves.

It was the last thing I remember before everything went dark.