“Tell me, pet, do you have anything hiding in there?”
She knew his name was Stephan since that’s what his followers called him. Prying open her mouth he peered inside as if looking for something. Wanting to shake her head and free her chin of his hold, she knew better than to try that twice.
All she could do was glare daggers at him, which earned his amusement. With a laugh he petted her head like she was a goddamned dog. And maybe by now she was, reduced to the name he liked so much to call her.
Pet. Dog. Both the same meaning though different words.
Hungrier and thirstier than she’d ever been in her life, she thought she was going to go insane from it. Mostly though, she was afraid, trapped in a nightmare she couldn’t wake from.
At first she tried to count the days since she was kidnapped and brought here, but had given up. Three, she believed, though she couldn’t be sure since there were no windows and no clocks. Only her captors’
comings and goings marked the passing of time.
Not knowing how she lasted this long, she had moments when she felt more dead than alive. Given the things he’d done to her she wondered why her body wouldn’t give up, especially since she knew her mind had.
She wanted to go home and see her mom and dad. She’d give anything to be back with her family, though she knew she was never going to see them again.
Home was a million miles away and so far, God wasn’t listening to her prayers to rescue her.
Why the expression “shit in one hand, wish in another” came to mind, she couldn’t say, but it did fit the situation. The shit was definitely filling up fast and her wishes of making it out of this alive lessened with each passing moment.
Her father’s greatest fear was his only daughter would go out with friends and never come home. Her dead in a ditch, was what he told her kept him awake at night. Looking around the disgusting room, she wondered if being dead in a ditch wouldn’t have been a better fate. A nice, quick death, over and done with before she even knew what hit her.
Instead, she was beaten, bitten, and drained of blood until too weak to fight.
Coming out of work, she had been dragged into a van and restrained by two vampires who tormented her relentlessly during the long ride to where she was being held captive.
She knew she was in the mountains due to the popping of her ears.
For someone who’d been born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains, she had to be awfully high for her ears to pop. High enough not to be found before the vampire killed her.
The house was filthy, with flies buzzing all around her. Bugs crawled the floor and walls, coming in to feed on the mounds of old trash decomposing throughout the rooms. Thick, repugnant odors of rotting garbage, blood, and sweat still made her gag.
When she thought of Hell, this was what she imagined it to be. Not a place with lakes of fire and a pitchfork-wielding devil with a forked tail and horns. That was the hell of make-believe. Real Hell was here in this house.
The devil didn’t have horns and red skin. No, his skin was as pale as death and his razor-sharp fangs the stuff of nightmares and horror movies.
When their leader wasn’t around, Stephan’s henchmen took turns torturing her, each bringing his own twisted style of torment. A vicious bunch of vampires who took genuine delight in each and every whimper and scream they pulled from her, they were careful not to hurt her too badly. After all, they had to save something for their leader.
She was taken for a reason, though she didn’t know why they’d targeted her. Stephan believed she might have something he needed and no matter how many times she told him he was wrong he refused to listen. Instead, he played mind games with her, until she felt herself slipping into the abyss of insanity, her only escape from the things he did to her.
Over the last days she found herself contemplating the wildest things, like maybe after she was dead coming back as a ghost to visit her family one last time—or haunt the vampire who killed her. Crazy Allie believed in ghosts, so maybe there was a chance it might be possible, not that she ever held much faith in the things Allison Parker believed in before now.
Maybe Allie wasn’t so crazy after all.
Facing Stephan, it boggled her mind that he looked no older than her own twenty-three years. Since he liked to scare her with what he was, he reminded her more than once that he’d been around since the medieval age. Almost seven hundred years to be exact. Needless to say, it was a chilling concept to know this—thing—had seen nearly a thousand years go by.
He’d had a long time to perfect his methods of torture and murder.
“Please,” she begged, though for her life or a quick death she didn’t know anymore.
Regarding her curiously, he tilted his head to the side, his glowing silver eyes cutting through her. Strikingly handsome, his looks were deceiving. He looked like a guy she would be attracted to had she met him on the street.
His face wasn’t that of a cold-blooded killer, nor the face of a demon.
Yet beneath the guise of handsome young man lay a soul which belonged in the deepest recesses of Hell.
“Please, what?” His voice was a low, almost seductive purr. When he spoke she could see his fangs.
She doubted she’d ever get used to feeling those fangs biting her. Nor would the sensation of him pulling at her blood ever fail to stir her revulsion.
“Please kill me already.”
Her words passed through a throat raw from screams and damage done by his fangs.
He ran his hand over her dirty and knotted blonde hair. “Where’s the fun in that, love?” His English accent lent him an air of sophistication.
Too tired to fight back her tears, she shivered with disgust when he tenderly wiped them from her face. She knew better than to pull away.
She dared that once. On God she swore she’d never do it again. The pain he inflicted upon her was too much to bear a second time.
“Don’t do this. I don’t have what you want.”
Over the past days he asked her if she had “it”, though he never said what it was he thought she had.
Knowing he could take whatever it was he wanted from her whenever he wanted, she knew he refrained solely because he found sick delight in tormenting her.
“I think you do.”
Shaking, she shifted on the dirty mattress. The rope tied around her wrists and ankles cut deeper into her torn flesh. “I don’t have anything,”
she wept.
He pushed her back on the mattress. She lay trembling violently as he slowly untied the rope around her ankles. When he nudged her legs apart she thought she was going to be sick all over herself. Behind him, standing in the doorway, were four other vampires watching and snickering.
“Oh, you have something I want.”
He crawled up her body, fangs bared. She couldn’t stop the scream rising from deep inside of her. Only his hard slap shut her up when she released it.
He took hold of the rope around her wrists with one hand, pinning her hands over her head. His other hand settled on her throat in a crushing grip. “Now we play, pet.”
She slid her eyes closed and willed herself to another place and time, back to when she was a young girl and her parents took her and her brother to Disneyland. What a fun time they’d had, enough to make
lasting memories. She always wished she could go back to that place again…
Even if only in her mind, she took herself out of the dirty hovel of a house, away from the evil touch of the vampire. She lost herself in the memory of her family as the vampire took her body and robbed her sanity.
The last sight Amanda Driver saw was of his fangs lowering to her throat.
The sweet oblivion of madness took her then, finally giving her peace as a monster invaded her body.