Hero’s Story
As soon as they were out through the club entrance, Hero released Adrienne. Her friend straightened from Hero’s shoulders, pulled out a ring of keys, and started walking to the black sedan parked by the sidewalk. Her movements were perfectly coordinated, revealing none of the clumsiness she had pretended earlier.
As Hero climbed into the passenger seat, she complained, “You still owe me twenty bucks. I could have made that vampire kiss me and you know it. He was totally eating up that whole nice girl act.” She paused, thinking about Dante, before continuing, “I knew you liked to win, but I never figured you for a cheater—butting in like that was totally not part of our deal.”
Adrienne’s liquid green eyes were hard as they glanced at Hero. “Shut up. I’ll give you the twenty later. Your uncle called, said he had something. A list of things to hunt.”
“He’s in the City of Inis, isn’t he?” Hero asked grumpily.
“Yes,” Adrienne answered simply.
Hero’s only reply was a long, unhappy groan.
Adrienne was a safe driver—she was a rule-follower—so she only pulled her eyes away from the road for a fraction of a second to give Hero an eyebrows-arched look. “I don’t understand why you dislike Inis so much. Queen Latona has been nothing but generous with you. She sheltered you and your uncle all those years ago.”
“You think I don’t know that? That’s why my uncle and I have agreed to dive back into the Shadowworld. I was enjoying my perfectly normal, demon-free freshman year in college when Latona called about her missing daughter.”
Adrienne’s eyes tensed at Hero’s casual use of the hive queen’s name and the almost callous reference to the kidnapped Princess Luciana.
Hero noticed Adrienne’s discomfort and she apologized, “Sorry. I have to get used to the whole ‘Your Highness’ thing again.” She looked out the car window and sighed in a tone of voice thick with memories. “God, ten years in the real world has really made me forget some things.”
“Real world? As much as you’d like to believe that vampires and demons are just mere figments of the imagination, they are very real.”
Hero shrugged. “I know.” She smiled impishly and said, “You know, you should try lightening up a bit. You didn’t used to be so serious.”
“Ten years makes a big difference. You know that I have been training to join the Elite Guard. How could I not be serious? It’s a very big responsibility. In fact, you should try to be a little more serious yourself. Princess Luciana is no joking matter.”
Hero sighed. “I know. She was good to me.” She subsided into silence, thinking about memories of a different time. She looked at Adrienne, a sad smile on her lips. “It’s hard to believe we’re so different now. I mean, we’re both human, both nineteen, both girls. I guess living in the darkness with vamps makes a big difference, huh?”
Adrienne glanced at Hero again. “You make it sound like living with them is such a terrible thing. It isn’t dark in the City of Inis—there are lights are everywhere.”
Hero knew better than to argue. Adrienne’s family had been living in Inis with the hive for centuries, possibly even millennia. Since the Dark Ages, favored human families were allowed to live among hives unharmed, acting as servants and soldiers. Those in the Elite Guard and the Royal Guard were always humans turned from the old families, like Adrienne’s.
Since female vampires, being undead, could only give birth to stillborn babies, hives grew through the power of the bite. To maintain order, only hive queens—and occasionally, council members—were allowed to create more vampires, even though any vampire had the capability. In fact, some members of the hive willingly underwent a simple surgical process to have their two venomous canines removed.
Hero had only lived with the hive for a year and so she had only a rudimentary understanding of how hives worked. Still, she knew more than most outsiders did. And outsider she was. She and her uncle had not even known of the Shadowworld eleven years ago. Even now, she still couldn’t understand the queen’s kindness all those years ago—it wasn’t like hive queens deigned to take random human strangers in without good reason. Hero had yet to figure out Latona’s motivations.
Hero decided to change the topic, moving away from Inis and Latona and Luciana. “So, what did you tell Derek about our sudden disappearance?”
“I told him I heard about a vamp gang war a few blocks over and wanted to check it out.”
“And he didn’t demand that you go with the rest of the crew?”
“No. I told him the war was probably already over, said it was smarter for him to stick around Club Midnight and see if anything interesting happens.”
“And he listened?”
“You forget that I’ve been in with the hunters for quite some time now.”
Hero shook her head incredulously, “I still can’t believe your training requires you to go undercover with hunters. They hate vamps. If they found out who you really are, you’d be so dead.”
Adrienne raised her eyebrows. “Give me some more credit. I can take them all.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an entire crew of hunters. I mean, don’t they usually work in pairs or by themselves?”
“Yes. That’s why the War Council’s Subcommittee on Hunter Activities was interested in the Young Bloods. They may be overeager, but they are surprisingly efficient. Strength in numbers, I suppose.”
“So, it’s the whole ‘know thy enemy’ deal?”
“Yes. I’ll be handing my report in by the end of this week. The Young Bloods are pretty harmless, in fact, they may be quite beneficial. They know nothing of the underground hives. They hunt the city’s loners, many of which are rogue and don’t follow hive rules anyway.” Adrienne shook her head. “This is why only the queen and council members should be able to bite humans. The slums of aboveground human cities are being ravaged by hordes of thirsty, barbaric vampires with no allegiances.”
Hero shrugged and said, “Dante seemed pretty nice.”
Adrienne rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me you actually like him.”
Hero replied carelessly, “Well, he is kind of cute. Not to mention, he’s quite the gentleman.”
“I suppose there are exceptions to every rule,” Adrienne conceded, but then said, “But none of that matters. You’re probably never going to see him again. For the next few weeks, we’ll be concentrating on getting the princess back. Once that happens, you’re leaving the Shadowworld behind for good and I’m getting my initiation bite.”
“Initiation bite.” Hero shook her head. “Do you know how cultish and freakishly dirty that sounds? I’d never let someone bite me, not in a million years.”
“It’s an honor. Besides, I’m not sure anyone in the hive would want to bite you. Who knows, given your strange abilities, your blood is probably poisonous.”
“Oh, gee, thanks,” Hero answered sarcastically.
Adrienne ignored her sarcasm and said, “Here we are.”
She parked the rental and the two girls got out.
Adrienne said, “The aftermath of the gang war should be right around the corner.”
“I thought you were making stuff up when you told Derek we were going to investigate a gang war.”
“I don’t just make stuff up. I’m thorough. Derek’s going to want some evidence, some interesting piece of information about the gang war. I called Taylor”—Taylor was Adrienne’s older brother and a member of the Elite Guard—“and he told me the battle between the Reds and the Shadows was the newest deal on the street.”
Of course, the Peace Council’s Subcommittee on the Affairs of Non-Hive Vampires always kept tabs on vamp gangs in human cities.
The two girls rounded the corner and were hit by the stench of burning flesh before anything else. Small fires were burning all over the street. Someone had gotten here before them and had set the bodies on fire to dispose of them. Vamp flesh burned faster than human flesh did—a lot faster. There was hardly anything left.
Adrienne asked, “Why would they burn the bodies? When the sun comes up in a few hours, they’ll all turn to ash anyways.”
Hero bent down to examine a corpse that was still relatively intact. On the neck was a nickel-sized hole—the body had been drained of blood through the use of a purifying machine.
“I know why the bodies were burned. A vamp’s been here to drain the bodies with a purifier.”
Adrienne’s nose crinkled in disgust.
Among vampires, draining other vamps, even dead ones, for blood was looked down upon. Vampire blood, more commonly known as V juice or VJ on the street, was worth its weight in gold. To vampires, blood of their own kind made them heal faster and generally more powerful. However, the VJ that was peddled on the street was hardly enough to be worth anything to vampires. When bloodsuckers wanted a taste of vampire blood, they usually drank from friends or lovers.
So, the million dollar question: why would vampires risk dishonor to sell something that was worthless to their own kind? The answer: VJ wasn’t peddled to vamps, it was sold to humans. With the rising numbers of vamps and demons in human cities, it wasn’t surprising that there were a good number of people who were aware of the supernatural. To humans, VJ gave them vampire powers for a short period of time—strength, speed, night vision, more sensitive hearing and smell, etc. And more importantly to some, VJ gave humans an incredible high. It was a drug like any other, only much more powerful.
Hero knew just how powerful. She had been hooked on the stuff eleven years ago before Latona had saved her from herself. And that was why she was here now, working on getting the princess back—she owed the queen that much.
Adrienne didn’t mention her past addiction and neither did Hero. Instead, the guard-in-training said, “Well, at least now I have something interesting to report back to Derek. Judging by how many bodies there are, the Young Bloods will probably spend the next few days scouring the city for VJ.”
“We should go to Inis now. There’s nothing we can do here.”
They headed back to the rental in silence.
Adrienne started the car as soon as Hero was in the passenger seat and began driving to the Red Cross station a few blocks away. It was owned by the Chicago hive and served as both a food source and one of the many entrances to the underground city of Inis.
While Adrienne drove, Hero thought about her darker days, about Mom and Dad and how they had died. She still couldn’t quite believe that she had told Dante, a mere stranger at a bar, the truth about her past. Still, what she had said to him—those were only the bare essentials. She was adopted and her parents did indeed die when she was eight. However, they didn’t die in accident. They were murdered.
They were murdered right in front of her eyes.
It was cold. Freezing. Hero wasn’t a fan of the Chicago winter. She had hated the idea of moving to the city. She liked Oakland, their old town, much better. It was a much smaller and quieter place. But she was smiling tonight because her parents had just taken her ice skating.
Dad was giving her a piggyback ride. Mom was laughing at something he had said. Hero was thinking about the movie they were going to watch tomorrow.
Everything was perfect.
But because they were new to the city and because her parents were too busy talking to notice that they had passed a turn they should have taken, the family of three soon became lost. There wasn’t a soul in sight, so they couldn’t ask for directions. Hero wasn’t too worried though. Dad would get them home. He always knew what to do.
But after quite a while, it became apparent that her dad didn’t know what to do. They were truly lost.
Mom started talking faster, her voice rising higher and higher. She was scared, Hero could tell that much. Dad tried to comfort her, tried to convince his wife that he had things under control.
Hero was getting sleepy—she was eight and it was nearing eleven o’clock at night. She laid her head on her dad’s shoulder, looking off to one side. It was dark, but the bright moon cast frightening shadows all around them. She gave a scared yelp when she saw something move in the shadows.
Immediately, her dad and mom asked what was wrong.
But she never got to tell them because next thing she knew, everything was pitch black.
She woke up in total darkness.
A dark void stretched before her and she couldn’t see anything. But she could hear. The drip-drip of water against concrete. She could smell. The musty air that marked an enclosed space. She could feel. It was cold. Like they were in a freezer or something. Her pink snow parka had been removed and her sweater seemed all too thin of a defense against the wintry chill.
Her skin burned and her bones ached. She twisted around and realized she was somehow suspended in thin air by a rope net. She squirmed, and when the rope chaffed against her soft skin, she whimpered.
Her entire body went taut when she heard a hair-raising, bone-chilling, soul-piercing scream. She had never heard someone that scared before, but even so, she knew that voice. It was her mom’s.
She thrashed faster, more desperately, against her bonds—her mom was in pain. But it was useless.
“Mom! Dad!” She screamed. Her shrill, eight-year-old voice echoed against cold walls.
An unfamiliar voice drawled some distance off, “I see the little tyke is awake. I think I should see how she’s doing.”
Through the darkness came her mom’s voice in a broken sob, “No, don’t hurt my baby.”
The fear, the defeat in her mom’s voice scared her more than anything. Where was Dad? Why wasn’t he protecting her from that stranger in the dark with the oily voice? She couldn’t see, but she instinctively knew that the stranger was the one hurting her mom. There was something in his tone of voice…
A slow, lazy laugh. “Well, if I go and hurt her, I’ll stop hurting you. Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to stop hurting?”
“No.” Hero heard some small spark of determination in her mom’s voice as she said, “No, hurt me instead.”
Another scream. And then another. And another.
Tears streamed down Hero’s face as her thin body shook with silent sobs. She wanted the screaming to stop. She wanted the stranger to stop—to stop hurting her mom. An unfamiliar feeling came over her—rage, pure unfiltered rage rushed through her veins. A monster was hurting someone she loved. And she wanted to hurt that thing back.
Her mind seized upon that feeling through the haze of her fear and fed it with burning embers. And soon, that rage became hate. Something in her heart died and all she felt was hate. She hated the monster. She hated her prison. She hated the emptiness around her. She hated the darkness.
She hated the darkness more than anything. She wanted to see her mom and dad. She wanted to make sure they were okay.
But perhaps it was better that she couldn’t see. Because they obviously weren’t okay. And if there had been a light, she would have seen them, seen the blood everywhere, seen the monster in the darkness.
She didn’t need any more nightmares. The sound of her mom screaming was more than enough to last for all eternity. And eternity was exactly what it felt like. In the darkness, she had no way to keep track of time. The combination of the unnatural cold, starvation, thirst, cramped muscles, undiluted fear and hate—that unholy mix caused her to drift in and out of consciousness.
Then, something changed. Hero had no idea how long her family had been in captivity, but one day, there was a light. A small light. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the blind darkness everywhere, so it took her a while to realize that the light was coming from a wax candle. She wondered what was going on. So far, the monster had preferred to stay in the dark.
She heard whimpering, and before she knew it, her mom’s face swam into view. By this time, she was already half-dead with cold and starvation and thirst, and she thought was hallucinating. But it became apparent that she was not dreaming or seeing things soon enough, for the monster came into view.
In her mind, she had always imagined him to be grotesque, horrifying to the senses. But he looked so normal, attractive even. And it was his startling normalness—in terms of his physical features—that made her realize what she was seeing was very real. If this had been a dream, he would have looked like something from the fiery pits of hell.
He turned to say to Hero’s mom, “You’re useless. Spent. I’ve been waiting for this moment for quite a while now. I want your daughter to watch me kill you. I want to taste her fear. I want to see it in her eyes.”
Hero didn’t want to look at that man. Instead, she looked at her mom’s face, the ruined beauty of it, the dried blood and matted hair, and tears started to stream down her face again.
In a weak voice, her mom crooned, “Don’t cry, baby. Hush, look into my eyes. It’s going to be alright.”
The man said in unmasked glee, “Yes, tell her that. Feed her sweet lies. Nothing tastes better than disappointed hope.”
Her mom ignored her tormentor and continued to say nonsensical things. Hero gave into those sweet, sweet words and stared into her mom’s pretty hazel eyes, the only not-ruined thing about her face. The ugly wounds, the dirty blood—everything disappeared from her view except for her mom’s pretty hazel eyes. And when the man—the monster—began sucking her mom’s life away, Hero could only watch in hopeless desperation as the light left those pretty hazel eyes.
It was forever—it was too soon—her mom was dead, her eyes completely glazed over. The monster let her mom’s body slump to the floor. Hero was shell-shocked. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open in a silent scream. When would this nightmare end?
Before she could recover—how could she ever recover from something like this?—the monster dragged her dad into the circle of the weak candlelight. She mouthed a silent no and her body started shaking uncontrollably—she couldn’t bear to watch her dad die slowly, too.
But when she looked into his face, there wasn’t even a spark in his eyes. No fear. No comfort. Nothing. His eyes were already glazed over.
Hero gasped in shock—was he already dead?
The monster chuckled at her gasp. “Don’t worry. His heart is still beating. I can’t say much for the rest of him, though. Lucky bastard tried to fight back, knocked his head too hard against the floor. Can’t feel anything anymore. Catatonic. But of course, a sweet little thing like you wouldn’t know what that meant.”
And then he bent down to end what little life her dad still had in him.
A high, keening sound rocked through the eternal void. It was a while before Hero realized the sound was coming from her. She tried to stop, but she couldn’t. She had no control over her own voice, as broken and weak and nearly soundless as it was. And at the point, with her mom dead and her dad about to meet the same fate, she was beyond caring. She didn’t care that her voice wasn’t nearly loud enough to attract the attention of any people that might be around—if there were any people for that matter. She had tried calling for help eons ago, and that had done nothing to help. No one had come.
And just when she had sunken to the lowest point of despair, a loud crashing noise reverberated through the walls. She blinked furiously—she could hardly believe what she was seeing. A rectangle of light had appeared in the darkness. A door had been opened to the outside world.
The monster looked up from his feeding, his pupils dilating at the sight of the figure standing in the rectangle of light. He threw Hero’s father aside roughly, bringing a whimper to her lips. Could he still be alive? She hardly dared to entertain the hope that his heart might still be beating.
The figure in the doorway pulled out a scary-looking blade and charged at the monster. The two fought furiously, striking hard and violently at each other. Hero could only watch, the faint flutter of hope beating in her chest. Was this blade-wielding man a rescuer? He certainly didn’t look like a cop, but she wouldn’t have cared if he was a medieval knight from a fairytale at this point. All she wanted was for him to kill the monster that had hurt her parents.
At one point during the battle, the monster had thrown the knight against the table on which the lone candle burned. The candle fell off the table and onto the plastic jugs full of accelerant stashed underneath—the monster had been planning to torch the place once he had finished with his sick fun.
And then, the fight gained a new, more desperate edge. The monster and the knight were fighting against time. Soon, the entire warehouse—for now that there was light, Hero saw that her family’s cruel prison had been an abandoned warehouse—all of it would go up in flames.
As the battle drew to a close, the knight threw the monster through the rectangle of light. The monster writhed in pain as his flesh burned under the sun. Unfortunately, he rolled back into the darkness before the knight could finish him off—and then they were back at it.
But because the monster was hurt, the knight managed to draw his sword across the side of the monster’s neck. Crimson blood spurted out and still the monster fought. The knight thrust his blade forward and straight through the monster’s chest. The monster fell backwards with a satisfying thump as the knight drew out his sword.
The knight ran towards where Hero had been dangling forever. With one sure stroke, he cut the net and Hero fell into his arms. The short drop hurt worse than anything. She was brittle from hunger and her vision was blurry from dehydration. Still, she committed the knight’s face to memory—his short stubble, his determined blue eyes, his broad nose, his weathered face.
Holding her to him with one arm, he went over to the crumpled body of her father. He felt for a pulse and then shifted his eyes back to Hero. A sad, wearied look was in those dark blue eyes of his and he shook his head silently. Hero knew it already, but she hadn’t wanted to believe that her dad was dead, too.
The knight’s body suddenly stiffened and his face went slack-jawed. There was a look of surprise frozen in his eyes and then he slumped forward. Hero was too tired to scream, but somehow she managed to wriggle free from the dead man’s embrace. She saw that the monster had painfully crawled from the doorway of this hellhole to avenge himself on the knight.
A knife now protruded from the knight’s spine.
Something came over Hero. She didn’t know how she found the strength to pick up the dead man’s sword, but somehow she did. All she knew was hatred as she ran at the fallen monster, screaming like a wild banshee. She brought the sword down again and again, hacking at the hated monster’s neck until its head came rolling off.
And then she had collapsed onto the concrete floor, all energy spent and too weak to move. She watched as the dead monster’s blood flowed out in a mesmerizing rush. She was delirious and she hadn’t had anything to drink since the whole nightmarish ordeal had begun—which was days ago.
She was thirsty.
Even today, Hero couldn’t figure out what had possessed her to drink that vampire’s blood. All she knew was that his blood was the sweetest thing she had ever tasted. It was pure power.
And after she had drunken until the vampire was dry, she had no longer felt tired or weak. She was in control. She was stronger ever. She was alive for the first time in her life. Every sense zinged with electricity.
All fear and sorrow and hate had left her heart and mind. They had been replaced by a void of emotion and one single need—an unquenchable thirst.
All she had been able to think about was having another taste. And with that in mind, she had run towards that doorway of light—of a city full of possibility—with an insatiable hunger for something forbidden, never casting a glance backwards as her nightmare burned up in flames.