After a quick exchange of nods, they left so quickly and quietly it was like a soft breeze had exited the house instead of three ferocious vampires. My shoulders relaxed, but the others remained tense until they heard the car safely drive out of the driveway and away from the house.
It occurred to me that those three must have been extraordinarily dangerous to put all of these strong vampires on edge like this. Cat turned to Anna.
“I hope you know what you are doing, Anna. I don’t trust her or Jackson and Bridgette.”
“I know a little more about Lea than you guys do. Out of all of us, Lea is the strongest and best fighter. I would rather go into this with eight instead of just five for our own safety. True, I don’t completely trust her, but I do trust she doesn’t want that prison open and running any more than we do. The money is just her way of taking some power back from me.”
“And your conditions?”
“Are my way of protecting the innocent,” Anna answered as she looked at me across the room with genuine concern.
Chapter Fifteen
Grant
“Absolutely not!”
“But, Anna, please listen to me,” I pleaded as I followed her around the room.
The others just stood in silence, watching me follow the tiny blond girl as she paced back and forth, agitated by my proposition. It was an odd sight for anyone who might have been spying on us, like watching a group of vampires following a tennis match.
“I won’t hear any more of this, Grant.”
“Please just hear me out.”
“I heard you. You want to stay here and help us instead of going back home to college where you’ll be safe. You have no idea what danger you are placing yourself in. I won’t allow it.”
“Anna, it’s my life and my choice. Please, I want to help.”
In all honesty, that was the truth but it wasn’t the entire truth. I was drawn to Anna, and even though this new world I had fallen into terrified me, she made me feel safe and secure under her protection. I didn’t want to leave. It was raw and dangerous, but I felt alive. No cookie-cutter world with white Christmases. No perfect TV family with the Norman Rockwell home. This was adventure and horror, and for the first time, those words didn’t just label the type of book I was reading or the movie I had watched. These things were really happening to me. To me of all people. How could I go back to my school knowing what I knew? How could I possibly go back to writing essays and attending study groups when I worried about Anna and these vampires fighting to the death in some prison in the middle of Texas?
“It is out of the question. I can’t believe you would even consider this. How many times do you need to be near death before you just go home?”
“I don’t want to go home, Anna. I want to stay and help you. It’s my choice.”
“Yes, but it will be your blood on my hands when it’s over.”
I saw she was getting frustrated and I saw the pain draw itself to the very surface of her face as her patience visibly waned. Not since she had told me her story had I seen the anguish and regret she showed me now. Those people she had killed had died needlessly in her eyes, and she would never forgive herself for what she had done even though she would have starved had she done otherwise.
“I will go write about you and tell the world if you don’t let me stay.”
I don’t know why I said it. I guess it was my last-ditch effort to trap her into letting me stay with her. Maybe my lily-white upbringing had made me more trusting and stupid than I realized, because I soon found myself standing in a room with five black-eyed, growling vampires staring back at me.
Instant regret filled my mind when I turned to see them all with their fangs extended past their lips and their haunting eyes boring deep into my soul. The term looking right through you took on a whole new meaning, and I began to panic. My heart fluttered wildly.
“I didn’t mean it, everyone. I’m s-s-sorry.”
“Watch what you say next time, boy,” warned Marshall through his clenched fangs. “We may not eat you, but we have plenty of ways to keep you from talking.”
He was terrifying, and I tried desperately to shrink in acknowledgment. It wasn’t hard because I was so completely horrified at that moment. Man, I was stupid. When Anna touched my shoulder, I jumped and stepped away quickly like a frightened mouse. A loud round of laughter broke out among the other vampires. I was relieved to see all of their eyes return to their abnormal hues, and the tense air was lifted like a cloud as they laughed at my expense. Even Cat couldn’t help but laugh. I managed a tense breath of a chuckle, and when I looked at the girl with her hand on my shoulder, I saw that Anna was the only one not laughing.
“We need to talk in private,” she practically whispered to me. It was no use whispering. I knew the others could probably hear us, but I agreed in a hushed whisper back to her all the same.
She led me down one of the long, dark hallways past several closed doors until we reached one door that was slightly ajar at the end. Most of the house was poorly lit, and I deduced it had something to do with the vampire’s night-time vision and not that they were trying to save on the electric bill.
We walked through the door to find an elegantly simple room dimly lit by a single lamp on a bedside table. It was painted dark blue, which caused the stark-white crown molding to contrast in a very designer way. There were a few pieces of well-framed art on the walls, and the furniture looked antique or at least faux antique. It reminded me a little of the hotel room we had stayed in, and that’s when it hit me. I turned to see Anna standing like a perfect accessory in the room that fit her so perfectly. She fit perfectly in this room because this was her room. She had brought me to her room.
“I brought you here to show you something,” she said softly, and that bell of a voice of hers chimed in my ear and sent my heart racing with possibilities. Nerves took over, and I trembled internally as she stepped closer to me.
It happened in a flash. It was so quick I never had time to process what happened to me. One minute, I was standing in the room as she walked over to me, and the next, I was soaring through the air and landing hard on my back on her antique bed. She had grabbed me and flung me across the room and onto her bed, and the sturdy bed had barely flinched upon impact. I felt no pain, only shock. Suddenly, she was on top of me with both of her knees pinning my arms down and one hand over my throat. Her eyes were black and she was baring her fangs in a menacing sneer just inches from my face.
Terror choked any words I might have had in my throat, and I was only able to stare at her in horror. I clutched the black fabric that covered the bed in an effort to pull myself up, but I might as well have been struggling against steel. I felt the heat from the skin of her bare knees that were pressed into my arms pinning them down. The terror I had tasted only minutes ago swiftly returned.
Just as suddenly as it began, the attack ended. With little emotion on her face, Anna retracted her fangs, returned her eyes to their brilliant blue and released my arms from her knees. She still held her hand on my throat for a moment longer as she spoke, and I didn’t dare move.
“You see, Grant. This was a demonstration as to how easy it is for me or any other vampire. They engineered us too well. You would have no chance against one of us, and your strange curiosity puts you in even more danger because you trust us too readily. I brought you to my bedroom to prove a point. I would never hurt you, but don’t doubt that I or any other vampire could very easily. Lea and her crew would if given the opportunity, and they would do it with even more ease than I just showed you. You are no more than a meal to them, Grant. A walking, talking doggy bag. Now do you see why this is a dangerous place for you to be?”
She gently released my neck and allowed me to sit up on her bed and face her. At first, I thought the demonstration had been a little much, but when I checked myself over and found no bruises or sore spots, I realized she’d never meant it to hurt me. She was just trying to scare me to get me to go home.
“Look, Anna, I didn’t mean what I said out there. I just felt backed into a corner. I don’t want to go, even after your little demonstration.”
“Aren’t you worried for your own safety?”
“Yes, but you will protect me, and the others will too. I could be a real help, Anna. I mean, I’m a journalism major. I’m great at research. Besides, you might need someone who can be one hundred percent during the day. You know, a good human scout.”
“You are not my pet, Grant. Why are you so eager to get yourself killed?”
She sat next to me on the bed and gingerly put her hand on my knee. The intense heat from her hand transferred through my jeans and onto my knee, making me blush.
“I’m not. I’m just eager to help and to experience something else.”
“Something else?”
“Yes. How can you show me glimpses of this alternative world and then send me home to the college-dorm life to pretend it never happened? How can I go back knowing you all are going to risk your lives? I feel like I need to help, and I think I can. I can help you prepare. I can dig up as much as possible about this place. Please, Anna, let me stay. I can prove that I am useful.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose again with painful contemplation. I knew enough about her by now to know I had won her over and worn her down, and she was irritated about it. I wanted to say I couldn’t leave because I wanted to be near her. I wanted to tell her I felt oddly drawn to her and couldn’t imagine leaving now, no matter how many demonstrations she wanted to act out. She could’ve acted them all out because I knew she would never hurt me. Something about her made me trust this dangerous girl I barely knew.
But I didn’t say those things. The coward in me kept me silent while I waited for her to eventually raise those beautiful blues back up to me and give in to my persistence. When she finally did, I could have danced around the room.
“All right, Grant, but I have a few conditions.”
Chapter Sixteen
Grant
Anna and I both knew the nature of most college men. While I would have liked to tell her that my friends were different, in reality, we both knew they weren’t. So when I sent a message to Eric’s phone with an outlandish story about a drug-induced stupor with a blond that I didn’t want to come out of yet, the non-interfering guy in him didn’t begrudge me a bit of it. He said they were headed back tomorrow because Kyle wouldn’t stop puking and that if I changed my mind, I knew where to find him. He also said he was glad I was getting some good tail for once. No wonder this was so easy for vampires. Humans truly were dumb and trusting creatures.
It was one of Anna’s conditions that I tell Eric what day I would be home as sort of a reassurance that if I didn’t show back up, suspicion would arise and the authorities would be called. This was an added incentive for Lea and her crew to leave me alone since they wouldn’t want police sniffing around down here anymore than Anna did. Anna even had me give Eric Lea’s name just to give them a lead if I never came home on that day. It was a day we had both agreed to, and one she would share with Lea so that she would know the stakes involved in messing with me.
One week from today was the day. It was late night Wednesday or early morning Thursday depending on how you looked at it, so that meant I had to be back at LSU next Wednesday. I somehow convinced Anna it would take that long for us to complete this mission. She looked at me crossways when I said I wanted to go with them to the prison, and it took some convincing to get her to relax.
“Think about it, Anna, how are you going to get in looking the way you do? If they see your eyes, they will know what you are if this place truly is like the other one. You need a daytime person who is human to help you here.”
“I just don’t like putting you in that much danger.”
“I’ll be surrounded by vampires to protect me. How much safer can I be? Besides, we should probably go into the place as visitors first to scope out the layout and find where the others are kept.”
“I do have colored contacts.”
I looked at her and tried to imagine covering those brilliant-blue eyes with any other color. It seemed wrong.
“Do they work? Do your eyes look human with them?”
“No, not really, but they look less unusual. They are less noticeable. They will work for a short-term project.”
“Okay, but with a human with you, you will be less conspicuous, and we can get a good feel for the prison. Plus, before we go, I can go to the library here and research everything ever written about this place. That is assuming you guys don’t have a computer here.”
“No, we don’t. We didn’t have much use for one in the past.”
“Well, that’s okay. I’ll just use the library. I can also look up the inmates there, and maybe I can get a name of one that we can pretend to visit when we go to get a look at the place on the inside.”
“I hate when you make sense,” she said quietly and sighed. “I want to just send you home where you will be safe.”
I smiled, knowing I had a point that she couldn’t ignore, and her deep desire to eradicate this prison was overtaking her need to protect me.
“The truth is you would be very helpful in getting us into the prison, but once we are in there, it will be very dangerous for you.”