What Lies Inside (A Blood Bound Novel, Book 1) (41 page)

“The Pit is ready, my Lord.”

The bouncer’s deep voice caused my body to jolt. Total trepidation overrode my internal torment.
The Pit?

“You may leave,” Marcus said with a nod to the bouncer. He pulled back the velvet robe and smiled impressively. “After you, Lady Lamont.”

With caution, I stepped past the barrier, pausing to let my vision adapt to the darkness. A wide hallway spanned ahead. At its end was a stairwell that led beneath the ground. Marcus’s hand found mine, directing me down the blacked-out stairs. “Where are we going?”

A fanged smile tugged at his lips. “You’ll see.”

The stairs’ landing opened onto a circular room. Kerosene wall lanterns offered minimal lighting to the stone-walled and wood-braced chamber. Humidity thickened the air, elevating a scent I couldn’t confuse. Human blood. It was the same scent I’d detected upstairs with only one slight difference. This blood, I could tell, was fresh.

My mouth watered and my eyes darted around the room. Partitions were set at intervals, each with two chairs facing toward each other. Chairs that supported slumped over people, humans. Their quiet breathing reached my ears. “T-they’re human,” I said, my voice shaking. A lump crawled up my throat and I swallowed it back down. “What are they doing here?”

Marcus’s fangs glinted through parted, smiling lips. “They’re lunch.”

At first I almost choked on his words. Then I reigned in my startled reaction as I remembered something Kendrick had said.

“I’m sick of dead blood.”
Around the parking lot students had been scurrying to get out of the rain. Kendrick had watched them as though they were cattle.
“But your mom was quite clear on the conditions pertaining to my visit. No human victims.”

Back then my stomach had dropped, churning with predatory instinct and seething disgust. But my fear had been unwarranted, at least when it came to Kendrick. He didn’t have to kill to feed. The humans were merely a meal, not a sacrifice. “You don’t kill them, do you?”

Marcus laughed. It was a short-lived but amused sound. “No, we don’t kill these humans. It’s purely their choice to donate.”

Despite the humidity, Marcus’s words made me shiver. What human would willingly subject themselves to a life like this? Waiting in the pit of a club to be drained day in and day out by monsters?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Marcus said. “And in answer, in payment for their…
services
, these humans are offered the chance at a longer life as a vampire.”

They
wanted
to become vampires? How could anyone if given the choice want to become a bloodthirsty monster? To live in the shadows as only turned vampires could? To never live a normal life and have a family that they could grow old with?

I stared down at my free hand. Blue veins were visible through my pasty and almost transparent flesh. Those veins would darken, becoming more prominent if I refrained from what my body needed most. Blood. “How could anyone want this?”

“Would you trade knowing Kendrick or even me, and the superior world you could live in to be
just human?
” Marcus snapped with contempt. He glared over the slumped and almost unmoving forms. “To be a weak, dwindling flame without a cause?” With tense hands he gripped my shoulders and shook. His teal-blue eyes were lasers through spikes of blond hair. “Amelia, you belong here, with me, with all of us.”

His harshness stunned me, but it also made me think. When I had first discovered the monster lurking beneath my flesh, I would have given anything to be normal, to believe I was
just human
. But so much had happened since then. I wasn’t a killer as I had dreaded. I
could
control it. And within these walls I was accepted. Not a freak. This was where I belonged. I shook my head. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

~

Marcus and I walked hand in hand from
Bite
. Fresh, warm blood swarmed my veins, fueling excitement at my accomplishment. There had been no struggle to pull away from the blood donor. I had been in complete control.

Now humming Skillet’s song ‘
Awake and alive
’, I felt alive in a way I had only experienced twice before. Except this time there was nothing catastrophic to taint the high. Every inch of my skin tingled and my pulse was noticeably elevated. My mind felt sharper, like I was seeing the world through brand new eyes. Even with a thick cloud cover now across the night sky, the lamp-lit streets seemed brighter. I could hear individual footsteps and entire conversations. There was the sound of a door opening and closing with the chime of a bell. They were all things that surrounded us, but were out of sight.

“I feel like I could literally run across the country.”
Or
, I thought,
nick a motorbike and take off, feeling the wind like fingers through my hair.

“Well, that’s an option,” Marcus said. We rounded a bend that opened onto what appeared to be the town’s center. “But, I did have something a bit more exciting in mind.”

A vast fountain centered the cobblestone path, spouting water from the hands of a winged angel. Cafes lined one side. Most were packed with vampires enjoying what I could tell was re-heated blood. The other side opened onto a park with lush grass spanning out to bordering snow-capped cedars.

I felt like kicking off my Vans to run through the park, feeling the tickle of grass and ice under my bare feet. “More exciting?”

Marcus released my hand and circled the fountain. He lowered himself down onto the curved edge and patted the space beside him. As I sat, he began rummaging through his messenger bag. A moment later he had retrieved a very old, green, leather-bound book.

A loud groan vibrated up my throat. “Not more study…”

“Hardly…” The teal-blue of Marcus’s eyes shimmered. He thrust the book into my hands. The title was embossed with gold onto the cover.
Elemental Magic and Compulsion.
“Have you heard of elemental powers?”

When I shook my head, fully intrigued by his words, Marcus continued. “Most Pure Bloods will develop an affinity for one of the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Which means,” he said catching sight of my befuddled expression. “We can harness energy that gives us the aptitude to manipulate the essence of that element.”

My frown deepened at Marcus’s gibberish-jargon. “Huh?”

“Here,” he said collecting a piece of paper from his bag. He scrunched it up before balancing it on his upturned palm. “Watch this.”

Marcus’s fingers strained, cradling the air around the ball of paper. His teal-flecked eyes focused with intensity. A quiet crackling reached my ears and a plume of smoke lifted from the crumpled paper. Then it instantaneously burst into flames.

My eyes widened as flames swallowed the ball, dying only after the paper had turned to ash in the middle of Marcus’s palm. I grabbed for his fingers, staring, studying. There was no scorched flesh or bleeding. No indication the flames had penetrated even a single layer of his skin in any way. “That’s amazing!”

Marcus shrugged. “
That
was a party trick.”

He flicked open the book in front of me to an illustration inside the cover. Four quarters split the page with an eye joining them in the center. Each quarter displayed a different image, a portrayal of one of the four elements. The first showed three hurricanes dancing in curves around each other and decimating everything they touched. Second was a surging wall of water that rose in a wave to crush anything in its path. In the third, fire raged even below a thick blanket of rainfall. The last had rampant growing vines that looked like they wanted to crawl off the page.

My awestruck gaze returned to the eye connecting the four elements. “What’s that?”

“The
Fifth
Element.” Marcus eyed me while brushing the ash from his hands. “As with the other elements, only royals can harness its power, the affinity for spirit.”

A sudden fear I didn’t understand caused my heart to patter and my hands to shake. “Spirit?”

“The rarest of abilities,” Marcus said, flicking to another illustration. This one had ghostly shadows quaking across the page. Their mouths gaped, and their arms reached as though they were trying to escape the yellowing parchment.

Ice-cold fingers gripped my spine, causing my entire body to shudder. I had a sudden urge to slam the book shut and throw it into the fountain, drowning it.

Marcus’s eyes remained set on the illustration. “Those gifted possess the aptitude to see and speak with the dead. A rare few hold the ability to create a blood bond with another vampire. Even rarer than that is an ability called The Sight, allowing the gifted to glimpse into the past, present and future.”

The Sight? Memories slipped in and out of focus causing my brain to push against my skull. It almost felt like a warning to stop probing into my subconscious. Why does that feel so familiar? I raised my eyes to Marcus. He was now watching me with a look of contemplation. “You said only Pure Bloods, royals, can possess these gifts?”

“Yes.” Marcus narrowed his eyes. “Why do you ask?”

Why
did
I ask him that? It was like the words had been spoken to me, like they weren’t of my own volition. My brain pulsed again, jagged pain rippling through my skull. I bit my lip to stop myself from crying out and shrugged. “No reason. Just curious, I guess.”

~

Nausea crippled me as I climbed the stairs to my room. My legs suddenly weighed as much as solid concrete pillars. I clutched the wooden railing and took a deep breath. Then I forced my pin-tingling limbs to move. An uneasy sensation tightened within my stomach. I wasn’t alone. My eyes darted back down the stone stairwell. Shadows seemed to move with the flicker of wall lanterns. But there wasn’t anyone there. Like Dorian would say,
you’re just being paranoid
.

I pressed on. Then as I reached the top of the stairs a dizzy spell seized me. My limbs quaked and I fell. The wooden railing collected my ribs. I spat profanity through my lips while I struggled to regain my composure. Weight made my head feel heavy and haze littered my mind. I sucked in a number of deep breaths.
What the hell is wrong with me?

Slowly some of the feeling returned to my legs. I pushed off the wall, praying I’d make it to my room without collapsing. Prayers were useless, I realized. Just as I reached and unlocked my door, my vision blurred. My knees buckled. And then I was falling. My trembling legs refused to respond to basic motor instructions.

A millisecond before I hit the ground, a set of strong arms caught my weight. They lifted and cradled my body against a hard chest. “Amelia,” a familiar voice spoke. “What happened? Are you okay?”

I peered up into Kendrick’s concern-filled eyes. He was frowning intensely. Where had he come from? Inside I felt cold, a shell of death. Like a living, breathing creature that had lost almost all animation. “I think I’m just tired,” I downplayed, not wanting to worry him. “You can put me down now.”

Kendrick ignored my request with a doubtful grunt and carried me to my bed. “Just tired?”

The day’s events ran through my mind like watching a movie reel. Marcus had escorted me to
Bite
. There, the bartender had reacted on discovering who I was. The pit had followed, where I’d taken a woman’s delicious blood. Was I forgetting something? There seemed to be fragments of my time with Marcus that wouldn’t reassemble.

I glanced to the antique clock on my bedside. It was after 6
AM
, the end of a vampire day. But I had checked the time when leaving Marcus and it had only been 4
AM
. What had I done after? Where had I been, and with who? My brain throbbed against my prodding, feeling far from
awake and alive
like before. My brow creased. “I um, think so.”

Kendrick supported my weight with one arm and pulled the sequined quilt back. He was still frowning when he placed me down against the pillows. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”

“Thanks.” Still feeling confused and disorientated, I rubbed at my forehead. “I think I just need a good night’s rest.” Too dizzy and weak to undress, I pulled the covers over my fully clothed body. There was no way in hell I was about to ask for Kendrick’s help. My cheeks blushed. He had already seen me naked once, which was more than enough.

Seeming to read my thoughts, Kendrick pulled back the turquoise quilt, exposing my feet. “At least let me take off your shoes.” He removed my Vans then stood back, examining me. “You’re really pale.” With a click of his tongue he darted around the floral couch to rifle through the mini bar. A second later he returned with a bottle of blood. “Here, drink this.”

I pursed my lips. Although I knew I needed the blood, something had changed. This substitute wouldn’t even come close to the fresh source I’d tapped at
Bite
. Not that I was about to make live drinking a normal thing. Resigned, I took the bottle from Kendrick and chugged the contents. A loud burp bubbled up my throat. “Oops, I uh, guess I needed that.”

Looking less worried, Kendrick leaned in to kiss the crown of my hair. “Now, go to sleep.” With a tense smile, he edged away and strode toward the bathroom. With one last hesitant look he doused the lanterns then exited through the door to his room.

The sound of birdsong whistling from surrounding trees drew me awake. Beside me, a clear river swirled while the warm afternoon sun beat down against my icy skin. The sound and sight of babbling water over the rocky river bed relaxed my mind. A steady breeze blew, carrying with it dry russet leaves and the scent of a warm summer’s day.

“I thought you weren’t coming.” Ty’s sudden voice startled me. He jumped down from the branch of a large oak tree to stand before me. All he wore was a pair of black corduroy shorts. His scarred chest was bare and his lips were parted with anticipation. Sexuality oozed from every muscled inch of him.

It had completely slipped my mind that today was Friday, the day Ty had promised to visit my dreams. In fact the thought of Ty—bar his incessant phone calls and texts, none of which I’d answered—had been voided memory. The remainder of the week had flown by with all my spare time occupied. Kendrick and I had hung out watching my favorite TV shows in between his snowboarding excursions. Marcus had continued to reveal this whole new world to me during his lessons. Everything now seemed so much clearer. This world was where I belonged, and I wanted to remain part of it.