Gathering Darkness: A Paranormal Romance Collection

by Anna Zaires

  “Almost,” I lied. It didn’t hurt anymore. But he didn’t know that, did he?

  He smiled again and kept his hands on my perfectly uncramped leg. “You know, Daniel Mansell’s having a party tonight. You should come.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I shrugged casually. “I’ll see what Evie’s doing.”

  He stood and offered me his hand. “He’s got a pool. A heated one, don’t worry.”

  He flashed those incredible teeth at me once more and wandered off to do his buoy dive on the other side of the pool.

  I could barely wait until Evie had finished her laps and we were back at the bleachers to ask her about her swim team partner.

  “Why didn’t you tell me hair–puller had turned into such a hottie?”

  She smiled knowingly. “I told you to come along to swim practice, but you didn’t listen.”

  “We’re going to that party tonight,” I said, grinning from ear to ear. I made a mental note to myself to raid my mother’s alcohol stash and find some whisky so I could take full advantage of one Jared Cohen.

  Where did you meet your first love? I met mine when I was five years old, on the playground, when he yanked on my hair. And when I was seventeen, I fell in love with him at a party on the first night of summer, and wondered why the universe had kept us apart for all those years.

  The first time I kissed Jared Cohen, it was like little fireflies had landed all over my body, and butterflies swam in my belly. That night we didn’t do anything more than talk and land soft, gentle kisses on each other, and it was the most perfect night of my simple little life. If I had known what lay ahead, what we would become, what would happen to the world because of the virus that poisoned our love, would I still have let myself fall in love with him?

  I could say no, but we would both know that it was a lie.

  NINE

  “Hey.”

  I woke up from a heavy sleep, startled by the voice in the room.

  “Oh,” I said, struggling to sit up as fresh pain shot up my dislocated arm. “It’s you. Here to break the other one?”

  Ryan smiled coldly. “I’m hungry. Thought I’d hit you up for a pint.”

  Well, I didn’t know what to say to that.

  He snickered. “Your face!” He slapped his thigh and laughed some more while I glared at him. “Well, be afraid. Someone is going to be eating you, little girl. But not me.”

  “Eat shit, asshole,” I said quietly. “That’s what you should be eating.”

  I put on my best blank face and stared at the wall opposite me. I was tired of games, and my shoulder was hurting too much for me to maintain much of a conversation anyway.

  “Here.” He crouched down in front of me and pointed at my arm. “I’ve come to fix that.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Come on,” he said, and gestured for me to scoot forward. I did, reluctantly, and braced myself for a lot of pain as my bones were seconds away from more grating on each other. Ryan put one hand on the front of my shoulder, and the other on my back. I held my breath and squeezed my eyes shut.

  “Okay, on the count of three. Ready?”

  I nodded mutely.

  “One –” A white-hot poker stabbed into my shoulder as he reset it.

  “JESUS!” I screamed. I looked at him, shaking my head. “What happened to three?!”

  “It’s like a Band–Aid. You shouldn’t hesitate.”

  I had been dreaming about Jared before he came in, but before that I’d been wondering something.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I enquired through gritted teeth.

  Ryan shrugged, offering me a hand up. “If I say no, will you ask me anyway?”

  I accepted his hand, and he hauled me up to my shaky feet. I stared at his flat brown eyes and his ridiculous smirk and shuddered inwardly.

  “She wanted to die,” I said, pointing at the body in the corner that had finally stopped bleeding. “But she kept saying no, no, no. What did he really say to her to scare her before he killed her? Did he do something else to her? Why today?”

  Ryan raised his eyebrows petulantly. “You just asked three questions. Do you want to know why he killed her, why today was a good day to kill her, or what else we did to her?”

  “We?”

  “Well, I do have to eat,” he replied, grinning wickedly.

  “You’re disgusting” I said, rolling my eyes. “She was a kid, for God’s sake.”

  “I’ve had younger.”

  “You’re a fucking pervert, you know that?”

  He furrowed his brows, as if he was not only genuinely hurt by my remark, but utterly confused by it. “It’s nothing sexual,” he replied defensively. “I have to feed, or I die. Do you think about Daisy the cow before you chow down on a piece of filet mignon?”

  “Do I LOOK like Daisy the cow to you?!” I shot back, my voice steadily rising.

  “No,” he replied flicking his gaze from my face down to my chest and back again. “With you, it would most certainly be sexual, Mia Blake.”

  Well. I didn’t know what to say to that. I just shook my head incredulously and felt my cheeks burn with equal parts anger and embarrassment.

  “Somebody raped her, asshole,” I said softly. “It’s not a joke. She is—was—a person. Big difference.”

  Ryan pressed his lips together tightly. “Nobody is getting raped.”

  “Why would I believe anything you say!?” I demanded, pushing him away furiously. “Go fuck yourself!”

  “Forget about that,” he hissed, grabbing my wrist. “Caleb’s going to call for you in the next few hours. I want you to be prepared so ... well, so that doesn’t happen to you.” We both continued to stare at the dead girl who had ceased to frighten me, and who was now just a part of the furniture… or lack thereof.

  “Why?” I asked. “You’re such an asshole to me, I think you’d like it if I died.”

  “I’m serious,” he snapped, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me for good measure.

  “My arm!” I shrieked.

  “Sorry.” He let go of me and appeared to try and calm himself. “Listen, please. Don’t upset him, or he will kill you. There is another way. If you’re good, and you do what he says, then he’ll spare you and you can be free one day.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What’s the catch?”

  He glanced at Kate’s body, then at me. “Does it matter?”

  “Yes!” I insisted.

  “Just do what I told you,” he said. “Unless you want to end up dead like this.” He bent down and picked Kate up, throwing her over his shoulder like she was a sack of potatoes.

  I narrowed my eyes at him as he left the room. Yeah, fucking right, I thought bitterly. Either way, I’m not walking out of here.

  For as long as I can remember, the sight of blood and the thought of any kind of unnecessary pain has grossed me out. So as soon as I was frogmarched back into Caleb’s den/office/torture chamber, I wanted to throw up. The leather couches and coffee table had been pushed into the corner of the room, and in front of the huge bay window was a metal hospital gurney that I was half pushed, half thrown onto by Ryan. There were leather straps for my wrists and ankles and I realized I was about to be strapped down. Panicking, I drew my fist back and hit Ryan as hard as I could in the jaw. I was surprised when his head snapped back from the force of my blow. Clearly, I was getting better at my right hook.

  Two other guys who’d followed us into the room sprang into action, holding my arms as I kicked and screamed, jerking around like a slippery eel. I felt a sharp prick in my forearm and groaned as my head spun and my limbs went heavy and loose.

  “You guys never play fair,” I mumbled, slumping back on the cold metal, trying to remember how to move my mouth to form words. Whatever they’d just given me hadn’t affected my thinking at all, but physically I felt like I weighed a hundred tons. Even moving my fingers was so much effort, it hurt.

  Things were happening very efficiently around me. I struggled in vain as one
of them wrapped a makeshift tourniquet – a gray scarf – around my right arm and started tapping for a vein.

  “What are you doing?” I asked the room. “What are you doing to me?!”

  Nobody answered. I cried out as Ford stuck me in the arm with an IV line, missed the vein, and did it again. Fucking butcher, I thought angrily. My veins were bright blue and purple and right on the surface of my goddamn arms – a nurse’s dream, I’d been told before. This guy was a hack.

  My heart must have been hammering along at a million miles an hour. As soon as Ford got the needle in my arm, bright red blood sprayed out of the plastic tubing on the end, splattering me, him and the floor. I stared at the red stuff, horrified. Was it like dangling a piece of meat in front of a hungry dog? Or four hungry dogs, in my case? I thought about Daisy the cow and shuddered.

  I looked to Ryan for – what? Familiarity? I knew I wasn’t going to get any help from him, but somehow his presence made things less scary. Which was completely fucking insane thinking on my part. The guy had almost killed me, like, five times now.

  But he was gone, and in his place was Caleb with those freaky eyes again. I felt my eyes grow wide as he came closer. I tore my gaze from him and turned my attention back to my blood, and how it was spraying everywhere.

  “You’re being wasteful!” Caleb’s voice boomed.

  Ford hurriedly released the scarf that was wrapped around my bicep, and my blood stopped spraying across the room. Thank god for small miracles.

  The other guy – whose name I hadn’t caught yet – wheeled a stainless steel IV stand over to my butchered arm and connected a length of clear plastic tubing to the straw that jutted out of the inside of my elbow. The line began to fill instantly, my blood curling its way like a callisthenic ribbon to its new home. I followed its path with desperate eyes and gagged when I saw its final destination. Sitting atop an old wine barrel was a line of wine bottles, each sculpted from clear glass and labeled only with my name and the letters RC.

  RC? Ryan’s initials, maybe?

  I didn’t really care about the writing, only that the first bottle (which looked as if it could hold nearly a liter) was almost full already. When it reached the top, the unnamed guy pinched the plastic tubing, stopping the flow of my blood.

  My head spun. I watched in horror as Caleb stepped forward with an enormous red wine goblet in one hand. With the other hand he picked up the bottle and poured my blood into his glass, swirling it around the edges and watching it stick to the sides.

  “Look at that!” he marvelled, drinking half the glass down in one, open–throated gulp. “The French call them tears.” He motioned to the oily streaks of blood that clung to the inside of the glass, and I guessed that he was talking in wine terms.

  A wave of dizziness hit me, and I looked back to the wine bottles to see a second one was being filled with my blood. Two bottles would equal one–and–a–half–liters – any more than that and I suspected I might die. My mouth went dry and I started to shake. I was going into shock.

  “Too much,” I mouthed, staring at the blood–filled tube with a mixture of revulsion and wonder. “You’re taking too much.”

  Caleb laughed, his enormous wine glass freshly refilled. I sucked in as much air as I could, hyperventilating, and probably only bleeding faster because of it. How convenient for him.

  Unexpectedly, the flow of blood stopped, just as quickly as it had started. I felt rough hands yank the tubing from my arm and hold something soft against my skin, staunching the bleeding. My head lolled forwards so that my chin hit my chest, and real tears dripped down my face.

  “Delicious,” Caleb pronounced, and I couldn’t help but look. He was drinking more blood, from the enormous wine goblet. He poured it down his throat without pausing, his Adam’s apple bobbing with each gulp, and in a matter of seconds the glass was empty. He took two incredibly quick strides and erased the space between us, coming so close that I could smell the coppery scent of my blood in his mouth.

  I looked past him, focusing on the view outside. How badly I wanted to fly away, over those lush trees and clear lake, to anywhere. Home. That’s where I wanted to be. I thought of my dorm room, and my bedroom, and cruising in my car with Jared and Evie, and imagined a different morning where I could kill every vampire who shared that room with me.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Metallic words touched my face, made their way into my nasal cavity. I gagged again and leant over the side of the trolley, vomiting on the polished ground. I choked and retched as bile filled my throat and my nostrils.

  My vomit didn’t seem to faze Caleb in the slightest. A glass of water materialized in his hand, as if by magic, and he offered it to me.

  “I’m kind of fucking tied up here!” I snapped. “Not to mention drugged and bleeding.”

  He looked amused, a smirk forming at the corners of his mouth. He undid the leather restraint on my non–tapped arm silently and quickly, then placed the glass of water in my shaking hand. I took a sip, swishing the water around in my gross–tasting mouth.

  “I need to pee,” I announced.

  “Can you walk?”

  I nodded, taking little sips of the water. I had no idea if I could walk, but I could at least try. Whatever they’d injected me with earlier had worn off incredibly fast, and my dizziness was starting to dissipate a little. I waited with excruciating patience as he undid my other wrist restraint and then started on my ankle straps. The second my ankles were both free, I wriggled backwards on the cold bed and rolled off the side, landing on my toes. I took up a squatting position on the concrete floor, and smashed the water glass as hard as I could against the ground. It shattered, leaving me with wet feet and holding one big shard of jagged glass against four vampires.

  They all started laughing. Assholes.

  Caleb looked down at me with affection a father might show for his daughter plastered across his godforsaken face, and even he managed a laugh.

  “Ryan,” he said, “What have you been telling this girl?”

  Ryan appeared next to him, a thin smile plastered on his face that did not reach his worried eyes. “I’ve told her to behave herself,” he said, irritation in his tone. “Obviously, she didn’t listen.”

  “You never did have my power of persuasion, my boy.”

  “No, Sir, I didn’t.”

  “Get up,” Caleb commanded.

  “Go screw yourself,” I snapped back.

  He appeared taken aback, as if shocked that I hadn’t obeyed him immediately. He came closer and I rose to my feet, brandishing the shard of glass in front of me like a dagger.

  “You’re going to regret this,” he said, barely containing his anger. I raised my glass dagger higher.

  “Do what he says, Mia.” Ryan’s voice cut through the tense exchange.

  Caleb turned and gave Ryan a withering look, and that’s when I struck. I charged forward, my target Caleb’s neck, and used all of my forward momentum to bury the piece of glass straight into the side of his neck. He stared at me, incredulous, and touched his wound with long fingers.

  Now, let me say: that piece of glass was huge. It was, like, five inches long and I buried it pretty deep. I smiled at first, triumphant that I had kicked some vampire ass. He coughed once, twice, and pulled at the glass, gently sliding it out of his neck. He tossed the glass on the ground with such casual indifference I was dumbfounded.

  “Ouch,” he said, as Ryan and Ford grabbed my arms and effectively pinned me where I stood.

  I looked at his completely healed neck and felt my mouth fall open.

  “You’re a feisty girl,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  “I eat feisty girls like you for breakfast.”

  I rolled my eyes. I had nothing left except the power to be a smart mouth, and I was damned if I was going to go down without fighting with everything I had left in me.

  I lifted my chin stubbornly and stared into those milky eyes.

  “Take her,”
he ordered the others. “Finish the process.”

  Ryan and Ford began dragging me out of the room. I winced as I tried to avoid the broken glass and failed.

  “The process?” I cried as wet shards stabbed into my feet. “What’s the process?”

  “Shut up,” Ford ordered.

  “You just signed your own death warrant,” Ryan hissed in my ear. “You stupid girl.”

  TEN

  Okay. So I had thought the whole siphoning my blood thing was the worst, scariest thing I’d ever had to go through. Mostly because I had really believed they were going to take all of my blood until I passed out or died.

  I soon found out that there was something much worse.

  Ryan and Ford had taken me back to my room and tied me up with the thick rope that dangled from the ceiling – the exact same position I’d been stuck in when I first arrived. Only this time there was no Kate to help me down, and I was tired and drunk with blood loss and just absolutely out of ideas. My shoulder was still recovering from being dislocated only hours before, and I screamed when my arm was forced up and tied in place.

  The room I had been confined to was impossibly full with four people (or three vampires and a teenage girl) in it. Nameless–guy wheeled in a steel trolley covered in surgical equipment, and I looked away, not caring to imagine what horrific things were potentially about to happen.

  “Did you guys raid the props department of Grey’s Anatomy or something?”

  Nobody answered me.

  “What’s that?” I asked, looking at the huge motherfucking needle Ryan was handing to someone behind me. I had been ignored all the way back to my room, so I wasn’t surprised when nobody answered. But still, I panicked, because I couldn’t see the needle anymore.

  I screamed in absolute, horrific, agonizing pain as someone took that fat needle and jammed it into the back of my head. Something that felt like molten lava began to spread out around the base of my neck, up past my ears and right into my skull. Now that they had taken something out, they were putting something in. It felt like acid eating away at my brain.