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Meghan

From the other side of the room, I heard the other captive girls giggling. Shoving the pillow over my ears, I tried to drown them out.

“Junmin is so dreamy.”

“I like Carson better. I could drown in those baby blue eyes.”

The pillow was no use. I could still hear them as they flipped through a magazine and oohed and ahhed over how dreamy whatever insipid boy band member was mentioned in the pages.

How quickly things changed. When the vampires captured us from the humans who sold us out, the girls were scared and cowering in their own piss. It took less than a week for them to transform into a bunch of giggly teenage girls.

All it took was a couple magazines, some nice clothes, and some snacks from our vampire captors. The vampires would drop off a box of stuff for us every week after they went to the city to scavenge for supplies. Even though they brought us supplies, it didn’t mean they were going to let us out of our dingy room that resembled a prison cell.

“Leo’s even dreamier. He would fit right in with the rest of the band.”

They giggled again. This time, one of them let out an undignified snort as they laughed. I rolled my eyes. The way they swooned over the tall blond vampire who guarded our room was even more vomit inducing than their obsession with some pop band that ceased to exist years ago.

I would bet every last piece of chocolate I had hidden under my mattress that Jun and Carson were already dead, turned into bloody human juice boxes for some gang of vamps. There was nothing much left from the before times after the vampires brought about permanent night and took over the world.

“Hey, Meghan, which member of Five-O do you think is the hottest?”

I groaned. “The one with a wart on his ass.”

“What?”

“Oh, leave her alone, you two. Meghan’s too sophisticated to care about Five-O,” said one of the other girls.

“What a bitch.”

“Hey, we should do a Five-O theme for Christmas this year.”

The giggling resumed as they resumed flipping through the magazine. Turning on my side, I stared at the concrete wall and ignored them. The metal of the bed frame dug into my hips through the flimsy mattress. I pulled the scratchy blanket over my shoulders and closed my eyes.

Though the girls tried to cheer the place up with some string lights and magazine cutouts taped to the walls, there was no denying that we were here to be servants for the vampires. Nothing more. We weren’t going to be pampered like the human women who chose to betray their own people and sleep with the vampires.

It didn’t take very long for the vampires to put all of us to work once they captured us from the human men who betrayed us. We spent our days working in the kitchens, cleaning and cooking meals for the vampires’ female consorts. We were also made to donate blood every week to help replenish the vampires’ food supplies.

This strange group of vampires who captured us preferred to drink blood from a tap rather than fresh from a warm living body like most other vamps I’ve encountered. Perhaps the world was running out of humans, and they needed to squeeze every last drop out of us. Something like not slaughtering the goose while it was laying golden eggs for you.

While I didn’t like being forced to donate blood, it meant that the vamps made sure we got to eat fresh meat and vegetables, whatever was leftover from cooking for the human consorts. We had to replenish our lost blood cells, after all. Still, it was real food, not whatever canned stuff and stale crackers we could scavenge from the remaining grocery stores that hadn’t already been looted.

Before our capture, the last time I ate food that didn’t come from a can was when I was backpacking across Europe. I met another girl on the trains and together, Amanda and I ate our way across Paris in the weeks before the vampires attacked. Those were some of the happiest weeks of my life. Whatever happened to Amanda after we were separated, I prayed that it was painless and that she didn’t suffer too long. My chest ached for the best friend I only knew for a short while.

I closed my eyes, holding back the tears that threatened to leak out. Back when I was living with my parents in Michigan, I wanted nothing more than to escape and see the world. Now, there was nothing I wanted more than my mother’s arms around me and the smell of her perfume.

I guess I shouldn’t complain. The vampires here were nice enough, and one of their human consorts, Rose, stopped by regularly with treats and luxuries like fancy soaps and clothes for us.

Compared to the humans who abused and sold us to the vamps, the bloodsuckers were practically saints. There was nothing more I wanted than to forget about those dark days in the human settlement. What was supposed to be a sanctuary from the vampires turned into a prison of nightmares. The men there ruled the compound like tyrants. The women there were raped and abused, then when they were empty husks of themselves, sold to the vampires as walking blood bags.

The men left me alone once I taught one of them a lesson he would never forget. I could still smell his sour, fetid breath in my face when he climbed on top of me. It was amazing how easily my teeth sank through human flesh. Without modern medicine to attach his lips, the asshole remained a drooling lipless freak. Good thing human women were worth so much on the market, or they would have killed me on the spot. I became known as the crazy bitch, and none of them dared to touch me after the lip incident.

Not surprisingly, the other girls didn’t seem too displeased with the current arrangement. Of course, the sickly sweet calming potion the vampires forced us to drink every week may have had something to do with that. At first, I couldn’t believe that they had witches in their group. The witches who were willing to work with the vampires should have been working with the covens to banish the monsters from existence. But in this dark new world, some people were willing to compromise on their morals in order to survive.

Nobody had to know that I dumped every bottle handed to me down the toilet. There was no way I was going to drink some mind control potion. I would rather die than turn into an obedient zombie servant for the blood suckers.

Keys jangled and the lock on our door turned. I rolled over and faced the door.

Leo, our jailer and keeper, stepped into the room. The light from the hallway gave his golden hair an ethereal glow. He reminded me of that blond elf from the Lord of the Rings movies. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was an angel descended from the heavens to save us. But I knew better. An evil vampire like him was anything but heaven sent.

He paused and looked down at us. The girls stopped giggling for once, but it was only to comb their fingers through their hair and push out their chests to show off their boobs. The simpering smiles and fluttering eyelashes they batted in his direction were enough to make me want to throw up.

“Hey, Leo. We’ve missed you,” cooed the girl with brown hair that resembled a bird’s nest.

He barely paid her any attention as he set down the box in his arms. I noticed that there were bottles of the calming potion included among the supplies. As usual, we were expected to drug ourselves into obedient little servants in exchange for the small luxuries he offered.

His eyes coasted over the others before landing on me. The intensity of his gaze was frightening. His icy blue eyes seemed to glow, but his lack of breathing gave nothing away about what he was thinking. What did he want from me?

“You. Come with me.” Without another word or even a glance to see if I was going to follow his order, he turned and stepped out into the hall.

My heart skipped a beat. Did he know that I poured every bottle handed to me down the toilet? Was he going to punish me for my disobedience?

Stay calm, I repeated in my head. Vampires can smell fear, I reminded myself. There’s no way he could possibly know. Not even the other girls knew that I faked drinking each bottle and snuck it out of the room in my bra.

At my hesitation, one of the girls walked seductively over to him. “You don’t want her, Leo. Pick me instead.”

“No.You’re still needed in the kitchen. I only want Meghan. Come with me. Now.” The look on his face dared me to disobey.

While a part of me didn’t want him to think I was at his beck and call, I had to admit that despite my fear, I was curious. It didn’t seem like he was picking me for punishment. I wasn’t going to turn down an opportunity to escape the walls of our tiny room. I got up and glanced at the girls. The hatred in their eyes could have burned me alive. Too bad none of them were witches, I bet they would have set me ablaze if they had the ability.

I scurried out of the room. I was willing to take my chances with a vampire over a bunch of jealous, vengeful women.

As I stepped past the doorway, Leo reached over my head. My breath caught in my chest. Was he going to grab my hair and snap my neck? He leaned towards me until I could feel him let out a puff of air against the top of my head. I let out a small sigh of relief when he reached behind me to close the door.

“Don’t worry, I don’t bite.” His tongue peeked out, licking his bottom lip as he looked down at me like I was a perfectly cooked steak. “That is, unless you’re offering? I would never turn down a sip of O positive.”

“Nope! Definitely not.” My hand flew up to cover my neck, as if I could keep him from sinking his fangs in if he wanted to do so. I gulped. How did he know my blood type? Did vampires have some kind of blood type radar? I ignored how pink and lusciously full his lips looked as he teased it with his tongue.

He smirked before heading down the hall.

I practically had to jog to keep up with him. “Hey, wait a minute. I felt you breathing. I thought you were a vampire, the undead don’t breathe.”

We walked down the dingy corridor until we reached a set of rusty steel stairs. Going up, we made our way to a heavy steel door, which he unlocked and held open for me.

“Ladies first.”

Such impeccable manners, I thought as I stepped past him. In another life, he totally would have been my type. Too bad he was one of the bad guys, it would have made things so much easier if he was a jerk.

Leo closed the door behind us with a clang and locked it. “Well, some of the undead can breathe. I’m half human, too.” He continued walking.

To my relief, he slowed his pace to match mine, so I didn’t have to run after him. “Wait. How is that possible. You’re either undead or alive.” In my mind, there was no such thing as being both human and vampire. It was like good or evil, you either were one or you were the other. Nothing in between existed.

His lips quirked as he glanced down at me, as if he could read my thoughts. “Not everything in this world is black and white. The line between living and undead isn’t as defined as the living would like to think. My mother, Gisele, is a vampire, sister of the Master of our clan. My father was human, just like you.”

“So, how old are you anyway? I mean, not that you’re old looking or anything.” My cheeks heated, and I cringed even as the words slipped past my lips. Smooth, Meghan, real smooth.

“I’m not immortal, but half-breeds like me have a lifespan that’s multiple times as long as mortal humans. Let’s just say that I’m old enough to be your father.”

He sure didn’t look like it to me, none of my friends’ dads were hot like him. Not that I had a thing for daddy types. It must have been those vampire genes. Leo looked no older than twenty-five at most.

“And before you ask, because I know you will, I do drink blood, but I also like food, just like you. Unlike full-blooded vampires, I can go out into the sun. I sunburn quickly, like a pale redhead, but worse.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad, you’re like a regular person, but you get to stay young for decades.”

Leo scoffed. “Living for so long isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Right.” I guess it must suck to watch the world change and people die while you stayed the same. “I’m sorry. You said earlier that your father was human, so he must have passed away.”

Leo nodded. “He died last year while out on a mission for the clan. My father was getting too old for fieldwork, but telling him he couldn’t do something only made him more determined to prove that he could do it.”

As we made our way through the compound, I checked out our new surroundings. Unlike the dirty industrial quarters where I was being held captive with the girls, Leo was now leading us down a luxuriously decorated hallway with plush carpets and expensive paintings. The crystal lamps on the walls bathed the hall in a warm golden glow.

Suddenly, he stopped in front of a set of intricately carved wooden doors.

“We’re here.”

“What is this? I don’t get it.”

“You’ve been promoted.”

The fancy, expensive decor started to make sense. I was in the vampires’ living area.

My stomach dropped. This wasn’t good. I was in deep shit. My eyes darted in the direction we came from. There was no way I could outrun him.

I swallowed. “A vampire lives here, I’m assuming.”

“You would be correct. This is our Master’s bedroom.”

Oh, gods. I was about to be vamp chow. There was no other explanation. Leo just hand-delivered me to his boss like I was a takeaway order from a fast food joint. As if he sensed my rising panic, Leo placed a firm hand on the small of my back. A shiver ran up my spine. I wasn’t sure if the gesture was an attempt to calm me or to keep me from running for the hills.

He rapped his knuckles on the door. The seconds felt like hours as we waited. Finally, I heard footsteps approach from the other side before the door knob turned.

The door swung open.

The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them. “You bitch!”