Bleeding Royalty (Revamped)

Chapter 8: He Bites Me, He Bites Me Not

        I started to back away from the room, when suddenly, I could have sworn I felt the brush of a hand on my shoulder, and a silky voice whisper huskily in my ear, “Here, kitty, kitty,” and I swung around sharply, my hand ready to unleash a stake from my dress, but there was nobody there.

        Once again, I no longer felt in control. I looked down at my drink, sniffed it, and then tossed it sharply to the side. I couldn’t remember if I had taken a sip by accident or not, since I had been pretending to drink since the moment I had arrived at the club.

        Had Dmitri and Emilia spiked my drink with something?

        I started to check myself for any signs of being drugged. My mouth wasn’t dry. My equilibrium was balanced. I took a deep breath, let it out, then adventured further into the feeding room, pushing past a thick black curtain into another dimmer, colder room. In a brief moment of frustration, I became tangled in the thick curtain, my hands shoving against the smooth, silken velvet material.

        I was alone in the room, so I took out two long, silver stakes from my thigh straps. If anyone saw me with them, from here on out, I would kill them without thinking twice.

        “Here, kitty, kitty.”

            I inclined my head to the side, moving quietly around the room, brushing against the walls with my back, checking for a light switch. I couldn’t turn my back to any corner of the room because it was too dark. It wasn’t my imagination. That was surely V’s voice, and he was talking to me inside of my head. I chose not to reply to it. If I replied, he would think of the situation as even more of a game.

            “Mmmm!”

            Startled, my eyes darted to a particular spot of the room where there was a shadow darker than the rest of the room. It was muffled, but the voice had been Anna’s. There was no light switch in the room. The music in the club pounded against the walls. My hands slightly shook as I turned on my night vision sunglasses.

        Why was I afraid? My body was surely betraying me.

        The room was practically empty with a TV, and dark carpet. It was certainly some sort of lounge that was rarely used. I said the room was practically empty, but there was Anna, sitting on the floor by the window with her ankles and wrists tied together like a pretzel. There was Anna, a mere twenty feet away from me. There was Anna, with her eyes wide in horror and her body shaking in fear. She virtually couldn’t move any part of her body but her head, locked in a fettle position. It was a cruel, almost dominating position to leave anyone in, but there she was, and I just couldn’t bring myself to come any closer to her.

        I finally found a light switch in the room and flicked it on, and that’s when I realized Anna had been staring at something in particular in the room. I moved my gaze over to the entrance of the room, my body naturally moving into a defensive position. The black curtain I had felt entering the room hadn’t been a curtain at all. It had been a cape, of sorts, and it had been tied around an upside down villain, who was hanging like a bat from the ceiling.

        “Found me," a voice announced playfully.

        He dropped down from the ceiling in one fluid motion, feet silently hitting the floor next to a decapitated vampire body. Vampire's only exploded into ashes if their heart was invovled in their death. My mind instantly started to calculate ways to take this vampire down. He must have been at least six foot six and twice my weight in muscle, and somehow, those were the least intimidating qualities about him. His hair was a shade of chestnut and a perfect mix of wavy and curly, with a few strands twirled over his forehead and around his ears. Avoiding those eyes was close to impossible. They were a glacier blue and shaped a bit exotically, drawing you in with an attraction stronger than the sun’s pull in our solar system. My photographic memory recognized those eyes as the eyes of the stranger with the glasses who had stared at me quickly over a computer monitor in the library.