Vampire Romance: AMBER - The Grue Series (Vampire Romance, Paranormal, The Grue Series Book 1)

by Adams, Nancy

  When she caught up with us, I made her tell me where she’d gone and what she’d done. If I’d had time, I probably would have gone and finished the girl off right then, before she got far enough along in her change that it would be difficult to do, but the sun was about to rise, and before I could think of an answer, we were all dead again.

  As soon as it fell beneath the western horizon, however, I made Jen lead us to where she’d hidden the girl.

  Chapter Two

  Amber

  The next time I woke was because I was being lifted into arms again, and I opened my eyes expecting to see Jen—but it was the man, Horace. He didn’t speak, only gathered me up and backed out of the cave, where I saw that the sun was down. That surprised me, because I could still see quite well. I was weak, and still felt as though I had little angry bears raging around inside me, but the pain was low in my belly, and in my arms and legs and even my neck.

  Horace carried me as the five of them ran again, and there was something in his silence that made me frightened, something in the set of his jaw that said he was angry, and I was afraid he was angry with me. He said nothing as we ran, and I caught only glimpses of the faces of the others.

  We ran for what seemed like hours, or rather, they did—I merely lay there, weak and even more defenseless than I’d been when they’d taken me. I was in the strong arms of a vampire, a creature I’d thought only existed in books and movies and television. These vampires were not imaginary, nor were they the gentle, fangless variety of more recent popular novels. Despite the fact that one of them had shown me compassion and done what she could to keep me at least somewhat alive, I knew that these were the vampires of the oldest of the legends. These were the monsters that walked the night in search of blood to sustain them, the undead creatures written of by Bram Stoker, Anne Rice and many others.

  I slept again, and woke up still in Horace’s arms as they ran. When I opened my eyes, it was to a world as bright as day, and I thought at first that the sun must be up, but it was not so. I saw the moon, barely more than a fingernail, sinking low in the western sky; the sun I’d looked for wouldn’t be showing its face for a little while yet, a couple of hours at most.

  I felt stronger, too, my breathing less labored. I was able to raise my head a bit and look around, and I saw that the other man, Rudy, was not with us. I glanced up at Horace, and saw him look down at my face.

  “He’s gone ahead. There is an old hiding place, a dugout we used once long ago when we passed through here. Rudy went to open it up.” He smiled. “No, I didn’t read your thoughts; you looked at my companions, and then wrinkled your brow. It was not difficult to guess your confusion.”

  I tried to smile back, but I was still afraid. My earlier chain of logic was still in my mind, and smile or no smile, the man holding me like a baby was also the man who had given the order to drain me of life. It occurred to me that he might have taken me along the same way one of my own kind might have held onto a sandwich, as a snack for later.

  And yet, I felt better. That simple fact confused me, for I clearly remembered how Jen had waited while my heart was beating its last, beating so slowly that we both thought I was dead. I remembered the pain, some of which was still ripping through my extremities, and how I’d gasped, trying to pull in just one more breath—all these things I remembered, but they were all in the past.

  At that point, I could breathe almost normally, and was able to hold my head up. I flexed my arms and legs slightly, just to see if strength was returning to them, as well.

  “Just relax, little one. You’ll be on your feet soon enough.”

  It suddenly dawned on me that Horace spoke with an accent, at least then. He hadn’t seemed to have one when we were back at the Farm Supply, but he sounded—English, maybe?

  “Where are you from?” I asked, and was surprised at how strong my voice sounded. “Your accent, I mean—are you English?”

  “I am, yes. Born and raised in a little village not thirty miles from London, a village that isn’t a village anymore. It’s just a crossroads, now.”

  I licked my lips. “Can I ask—how old are you?”

  He smiled again. “Why is it, I wonder, that that is the first question every human who learns about us asks?” He chuckled then, a plain, old, everyday chuckle of amusement. “I can’t answer you precisely, I’m afraid, but I can tell you this: I was a grown man when Henry the First took the throne, and that was in the year eleven hundred, so I’ve been around a bit over nine hundred years. Fancy an older man, me lass?”

  I think I blushed, but I’m not sure if I had enough blood left in me for that. Either way, I felt it—because as bad as I hurt, as weak as I was, I’d noticed that he was—well—attractive. Goodness, he gave a whole new meaning to the phrase, “tall, dark and handsome.”

  Before I could ask anything else we arrived at their hiding place, and he set me down on the cool dirt floor with my back against the dugout’s wall. Rudy and the women were inside when we got there, all sitting Indian-style, and they all seemed nervous or tense.

  Horace sat down across from me, and asked, “What’s your name, lass?”

  “Um—It—it’s Amber...”

  He nodded. “Well, Amber, my own name is Horace; this fellow is Rudy. The ladies are Madeline, Simone and Jennifer, and to satisfy your curiosity, Rudy is somewhere around four hundred years old, Mad and Simone were both around when you bloody yanks broke free of England’s yoke, and Jen—how old are you again, luv?”

  Jen looked at him nervously, confirming what I’d sensed before. “I’m only thirty-eight,” she said, and returned her eyes to the ground in front of her.

  “Just a baby, she is,” Horace said, “and like a lot of infants, she thinks herself capable of doing the things that her seniors dread even to attempt! And now, dear little Amber, it is unfortunately you who has become the object of her attentions, and myself who must try to decide what can and should be done about it.”

  Horace leaned forward. “First, I shall tell you exactly why I am so displeased with our Jen. When I have done so, then we—you and I—must decide a few matters, not least among them your own fate. Are you ready, then?”

  I looked around at all of them; first at Horace, then at Jen, and then I just scanned the faces of the other vampires seated around the small, musty place. Jen looked—scared, I guess; Rudy seemed to be worried, and Madeline almost hateful in the way she glared at me. Simone was watching me, too, but if I read anything in her face, I’d have to call it simply a look of curiosity. I looked Horace in the eye, and wondered if he could tell how terrified I was.

  “I’m ready, I guess,” was all I could say.

  “Very good, then, I’ll give it to you without the sugar! Our Jen is young, and when she was alive, she had a girl not far off your age. Since she joined us, we’ve had bloody fits from her anytime we’ve been forced to take a young one, the way we had to take you. When you had the misfortune to run up on us, you see, we’d not fed in near a week, and if we’d pushed it any further, the thirst would have brought on a madness. That sort of madness is what’s behind the legends you hear, the ones about villages where the whole populations disappear without a trace, things of that nature. We do our best to avoid it, of course, simply because we don’t need the bloody publicity, but it sometimes forces us to take whatever is available—including one like you. Understand?”

  I nodded that I did, and he went on.

  “So we took the man at the store and planned to move on, let his blood tide us over for another day or so until we reached a place where we can live as we prefer, without killing anyone. More on that later, if you’re still with us, but for now let’s get back to you. You drove in, and we just stood there like idiots, a-lickin’ our chops and drooling, still thirsting—and here’s a walking, talking mug of our favorite beverage, comes right to us!

  “You’ll recall that I tried to let you get away. If Maddie hadn’t whined, you might have made it out the door, but once she
spoke up, I couldn’t risk what you might remember about us. Seems we might be wanted, here and there, y’see, and we’re trying to stay out of sight until we get to a new home. To be safe, I decided to top off our tanks on you, which would silence you as well. Cold, yes, but from our point of view it was absolutely logical.

  “But Jen—and incidentally, Miss Compassionate Jen fed on you, too; once you were bit, and we smelled the blood, none of us could have resisted—Jen felt sorry for you, she did, and wanted me to heal you, you remember? And when I refused, she decided to take matters into her own hands, as it were.”

  He looked at Jen, and scowled. “Amber, my kind have the ability to reproduce only by converting a human into a vampire, and the method involves feeding a fair quantity of our blood to someone, but it must be done after we’ve bled them near dry, as they are actually dying. A young vampire, like our Jen, can’t do it; it takes the blood of one who has been undead for at least a century, and sometimes even then that blood is too weak. Likewise healing—my old blood, or Rudy’s, our blood in small doses can heal almost anything. If I had made you drink only a few ounces of my blood, you would have fully recovered over a couple of days—but then, you would have been able to tell all you’d seen, and I could not allow that, so I refused.

  “But the blood of any vampire, even one as young as Jen, can do other things. I’ve told my friends here about some of those things, and it seems I was foolish to do so, for Jen used one of them to try to preserve you—not aware that she was condemning you to a fate far worse than you already faced.”

  “Worse?” I blurted out. “Worse than death?”

  He nodded grimly. “Some would certainly think so, at least at first. Bear in mind that many of those who become as I am hate themselves at first, hate the thirst that makes them hunt and kill creatures no different than their own loved ones. Many do not survive that self-loathing, but take their own lives in order to try to atone for the deaths they cause. The rest of us come to accept it, and even embrace our natures.

  “Now, what Jen did to you—her blood cannot heal you, nor turn you to one of us, but there are other kinds of undead than our own. Sometimes, in places like this one, when we’ve fed or are merely waiting for the dawn, I have shared a few tales of such creatures with my friends, and since some of them can be made even by the youngest, newest vampire—and since any of them are almost immortal—Jen chose to turn you to one of them. She chose to turn you into a ghoul.”

  “A ghoul?” I shrieked. “Like a zombie? I don’t want to be a zombie!"

  “No, dear, not a zombie. A zombie is merely an animated corpse that has no intellect of any kind. It has only one purpose—to feed, and it will eat anything that comes within reach. A ghoul, on the other hand is an animated corpse that still retains the functions of its brain, and it’s made by placing a few drops of vampire blood into the heart of a person newly dead. If it’s done properly, and quickly after death occurs, the ghoul will have all the memories and personality of the original human, and this seems to be a form of immortality. Wait too long, and the brain is dead, beyond anything resembling thought or memory, and this is what makes a zombie. Jen chose a ghoul for you, in her own way trying to bestow a kindness, but in error. Had she succeeded in doing it properly, you would be a ghoul, and would from now on feed on carrion—the dead, decaying flesh of any animal—if she had done it right.

  “But she didn’t. She should have waited until you were dead, your heart fully stilled, your thoughts ceased, your mortal life ended, and then plunged her pierced finger into your heart. You would have wakened a day later, and begun your new existence—but would you have truly been you? No. You would have been only a walking corpse that thought of itself as the person you had been; but your new nature would not have upset you, for you would no longer be human at all.

  “You could pass for human; many ghouls do, with care, good hygiene and lots of mouthwash, but you would not be human. You would answer to the name Amber, and would even be able to mimic the emotions and actions of humanity. You would laugh and cry, but only as part of that mimicry, and while any human would be disgusted if he came upon you at your dinner, you would feel not a thing—no disgust, no aversion—to you, it would be only meat, no matter how it stank. If she had done it right.”

  He made a sound that was suspiciously like a sigh of frustration. “But she wanted to spare your fears, so she wanted to turn you as soon as possible. She waited until she thought your heart had beaten its last, and then she put her blood into it, but as she did so, it beat again. You were not dead, so you cannot become undead. Even when we make a new vampire, when they have drunk enough of our blood to make the transformation when they die, they still have to die! If we have misjudged, and not fed them enough, then they are dead indeed, and will not rise again to become as we are.

  “You were not dead. When the blood of a vampire, even a very young vampire, is inserted into the heart of a living human, it makes an entirely different creature, one that is both human and inhuman at once, and therein lies my concern.”

  He looked at me, then, really looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time. “Amber, sometime today your own transformation will be complete, and you will never be able to return to your former life. When it is done, you will be hungry and will need to feed—Jen and Rudy will go out as soon as night falls to procure your first meal and bring it to you here, and at that point you will have to decide whether you want to live or not.”

  I was shivering, partly from the pain I could still feel in my feet and hands, but also because I was afraid to ask the question I knew I was about to ask.

  “Horace—if I’m not a vampire—then what am I? What’s so bad that I might rather be dead?”

  He smiled sadly. “Little Amber, when the transformation ends, you will be a creature not seen on the earth for over eight hundred years. The last one ran amok in Britain for decades, until we vampires were forced to hunt it down and destroy it completely.

  “Amber, you will be a grue. The word today means ‘to shiver with fear,’ but that was originally a fitting description of the creature it denotes, for if you cannot cope with your new existence, there will be nothing on earth more gruesome than you. You will have some powers and abilities that amaze even my kind, you will be even stronger than we and you will be almost indestructible. You will never age, never be sick, and never die unless you are utterly destroyed in the only possible way, which is to be burned in a fire hot enough to melt iron.” He grinned at me. “Doesn’t sound so bad, yet, does it? But as with anything, there is a price to be paid. In payment for such power and immortality, a grue must take its nourishment only from the living flesh of a human being.”

  I’m sure my eyes bugged out at this point. “Living flesh?” I cried. “Living?”

  He nodded again. “Yes. You will feed on living humans. No other food will give you any nourishment. You must feed at least every third day—you might be able to stretch that to four days, but by then the hunger will be so fierce that you will lose all connection to sanity until it is sated; you would attack and feed on the nearest person to you, even your most beloved family or friend.”

  He sighed again. “We must now sleep, for the sun is about to rise. You will probably sleep again yourself, and by the time you wake, I suspect your change will be complete. And tonight, we’ll see whether you can accept what Jen has done to you, whether you will feed when we give you the chance.” He reached out then, and laid one hand on my knee. “But Amber—if you do not feed—I will have no choice but to see that you are destroyed. Do you understand?”

  I swallowed, and nodded. I didn’t trust my voice to speak.

  And then the vampires all lay down on the dirt floor. I listened for their breathing to slow as they fell asleep, but instead it simply stopped, all of them at once. I sat there for a few minutes, going over all that Horace had said, but then weariness hit me, and I drifted off to sleep, myself.

  If I’d known it would be the last
time, I would have enjoyed it more.

  Chapter Three

  Simone

  Horace left me to watch our new girl, while him and Mad were talkin’ things over. He sent Rudy and Jen to get someone, to see what she’d do, and I was just sittin’ there with her in the cave. It was kinda weird, seeing her sleep. I hadn’t seen no one sleep normal-like for a long time, and she was just snoozin’ away.

  And she was so pretty. Not a lot bigger’n me, except she had bigger teats, and her hair was more blond than mine. Even with her blood all over her, the way it was, she was pretty, and I played with her hair a little bit, afore I woke her up.

  She was the first one we ever had with us was younger’n me—younger’n me when I died, I mean. I was hopin’ she’d make it, cause I always wanted a little sister of my own. And I could tell she’d be a good’n.

  Amber

  I woke to a gentle shaking, and opened my eyes to see Simone leaning over me.

  “Wake up, ducklin,” she said, in an accent I’d never heard before; not quite English, like Horace, but not what I’d call American, either. “The sun been down nigh two hours, and Horace says it’s time to see what’ll ya do.”

  “Oh—okay,” I mumbled, and then sat myself up against the earthy wall. “Thanks for waking me up.”

  She looked at me with a humorous expression on her face. “Don’t know that ya wanna be thankin’ me, ducklin; Horace and Rudy and Mad all think you’ll go to pieces. Me, I’m with Jenny on it, I think you’ll hold onto livin’ no matter what ya hafta do.”

  I pulled my knees up, and wrapped my arms around them. “You mean you think I’ll do it? Eat—people?” I was remembering all Horace had said—and worrying.

  “Yeh.” She was squatting flat-footed, like my littlest sister did.