Bleeding Royalty (Revamped)

Chapter 8: He Bites Me, He Bites Me Not

             Anna was gone.

            I was trained to handle situations like this. And this was an extremely fragile situation, where one more wrong move would cost me my best friend’s life. As Dmitri and Emilia approached me with drinks, I kept my cool, calmly analyzing my surroundings and beginning to show a little bit of concern on my features. Soon, they would get the hint that something was wrong, and assume that it had to do with Anna, but what they wouldn’t assume was that I knew who had taken her.

            “Did Blondie go to the bathroom?” Dmitri asked, laughing a little. That nickname struck a nerve in me, but my expression remained flat. V had called Anna Blondie. Now he had her.

         Calm. Collective.

        I was in control, not V.

        “Yeah, she wanted to fix her makeup,” I finally said with an innocent shrug, nonchalantly sipping one of the drinks Emilia held out to me. Dmitri and Emilia both looked concerned now. I wasn’t sure if either of them worked for V, but I would find out soon enough. Luckily, I tended to lie a hell of a lot better than every other human. “I actually need to use the bathroom as well. Please, excuse me.”

            And just like that, I turned and walked away from the two oddly friendly vampires, but even with my back turned, I was aware of every gaze on me in that club, every slip of their leechy tongues over their leechy lips, admiring the human walking past them. I was normally this aware. I always had control over my environment.

            And just like that, V had momentarily taken that control of the situation. Now Anna was in the hands of a possible psychopath.

            If only I had won that game of rock, paper, and scissors with her, she would have never been taken.

        Vampires had an incredible sense of smell and sight. Not only that, but they could see perfectly in the dark club, to the point that I was sure any vampire, from every corner of the room, could see the steady rhythm of a vein on the side of my neck slowly and regularly pulsing in alignment with my heartbeat.

        I scanned my surroundings once I was on higher ground. Dmitri and Emlia were conversing with a couple on a couch. They didn’t follow me.

        Where they pawns in V’s set up for me, or did they know about it all along?

Then it hit me.

        V was the one who was watching me. That’s exactly what someone of his kind would do in a situation like this: the enigmatic, dangerous kind of vampire. Watch me from afar, like an experiment, while Anna was stored somewhere safe. He wouldn’t kill her. If he killed her, he wouldn’t have any leverage. Leverage. That’s exactly what he wanted. He wanted me to come to him, like a good little kitten, and then I would get my treat. This was a game to a vampire like V. Vampires were to sadistic to do anything less but watch a human suffer.

        But I wasn’t any ordinary human.

        He had my best friend. Never in my life was I so mad. Still, I calmly pretended to sip my drink, weaving between people in the club, taking in faces. Memorizing them.

        Where are you, V? I thought.

        On the inside, my heartbeat was steady but my mind was racing and my hands were beginning to get clammy. The strobe lights above me were becoming disorienting. It was too hot, too. I started to picture Anna and wondered if she was afraid and screaming for me to help her, or worse, dead. Now the room was closing in on me. I threw myself into a back room of the club, where there was a wall of stalls with curtains. I assumed this was a feeding area and swallowed a lump the size of a cantaloupe in my throat as a handsome vampire with brown eyes entered the room, brushing his arm against me and giving me a long, heated once over, before entering one of the stalls.