Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 85029 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85029 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
“I’m sorry, Little Baby. That’s just not possible.”
“Stop calling me that! And you’re gonna be in so much trouble! Paul will come back. He’ll come back and he’ll be looking for me! I’m the loyal one! I’m the one he loves now! And he will look for me! And when he finds out that you kidnapped me—”
I put up a hand and her mouth goes silent. She’s still moving her lips, but the mute button has been pressed. Once she realizes this, she starts grabbing at her throat, freaking out.
I reach out, snatch both her hands in mine, and then look her in the eyes. “Well, you’re right about one thing. You are Paul’s favorite. But let me be clear. Paul is the one who chose you, Little Baby. You endeared yourself to him. To get noticed. To get fed. To be the special one in the house. Isn’t that right?”
She can’t answer me and doesn’t even try to mouth words of agreement. She just stares at me in shock.
“Well, you did such an excellent job—you were such a good little slave, such a good little halfbreed slave—that he decided to give you to the Darkness. You’re a present, you see. A gift. An offering. Oh, let’s be real, shall we? You’re a sacrifice, Little Baby.”
She opens her mouth in a silent scream.
“And now it’s time for your reward, dear girl. You’re about to witness something rare, and powerful, and life-changing.”
She has given up on the screaming. Now she’s motionless. Eyes open, mouth open, still shocked, but under a spell.
I lean into her neck, nipping the skin right over her jugular. Teasing it open, little by little. Exposing the vein without tearing it. Little Baby squirms, trying to unbalance me as I continue to pin her to the ground. “Shhhhhhhh.” I say this right into her ear. “You’ll be OK again, eventually. It won’t last long. And no matter what happens next, you won’t remember it.”
She chokes on air, trying to inhale. And when I pull back so I can see her face, her eyes are going wide in a panic. This is what it looks like. This is what the end looks like. This girl right here. So young, and sweet, and filled with plans for the future that will never be realized.
I stroke her cheek and gaze lovingly into her eyes, willing her to calm down.
Little Baby has no power here. She was never given a choice. Lucia presented her with an opportunity, as she did all her halfbreeds. ‘Live bigger, better, unconventionally.’ That was her favorite phrase back when I was still paying attention to what she was doing. That’s how she convinced the humans to shorten their natural lifespans by decades and join her.
Lucia was never a loner. It was always the main thing that set her apart from Paul and I. And while I am a much lesser vampire than Paul because I was made so long ago—long before the definition of vampire started to change—compared to Lucia, I’m a textbook example.
She has always needed humans. But witches come in family groups. Covens, or clans, or whatever they call themselves these days. Black witches included. They all come from somewhere. Though the Black witches are cast out at birth, of course. In one way or another. Killed for their magic or given as a blood gift to the vampire who made them.
Lucia was not a Black witch, but she was not an ordinary witch, either. She was something in between. A pet to one of the Obscurati masters in Rome back in the ancient days. She was older than Paul by a couple hundred years, even though she looked like a child when she joined our small group and took the trip across the ocean with us.
A pet to be experimented on. Much magic was done to her in the name of progress back in the Old World. She was not a witch but she was not a vampire, either. She was a mongrel? Or, if one is poetic and sees the glass as half full, a hybrid. The first and last of her kind.
A mistake, actually.
But I prefer to call her a fortunate turn of events.
And she served her purpose with us. We used her blood, after all, to make Syrsee. Well, we did that experiment hundreds of times before Syrsee came along. All of them failures until that glorious day when she was born and her grandmother killed her mother, took her power, and gave it to the little girl.
That was the part we were missing in the other attempts to make the perfect symbiotic feeder for our perfect new line of American Vampires.
You need evil to make new evil. And what that grandmother did—sacrificed her own daughter, more than once, just so she could do it all over again with her granddaughter—that is one of the ultimate evils. Of course, all black magic acts done against children are evil. But what the Black witches do to their offspring is a whole other level of evil.