plan as I’d gotten my feet under me had been to run into a store and beg a shopkeeper to call the police for me.
As I began to run, I was taken by surprise all over again.
Running was easy now.
The ground seemed to fly by beneath my feet. My ankles,
which usually ached with the repeated pounding, felt strong and
durable. My feet seemed to fly off the ground with every step.
And I was fast.
I reached the end of the block in record time, rounded the
corner, and came face to face with a fire escape. Without thinking, I began to climb. Maybe if I went up, I could lose the man who had
68
Fight for Blood
been attacking me. Maybe he would think I’d continued straight
down the street after turning.
I made it to the top of the roof and paused, looking down on
the street below, waiting to see what would happen.
My attacker rounded the corner and without looking up,
began to climb.
Okay. So, he must be a vampire too. That was the only thing
that made sense. He had followed me by my scent. I scrambled back
from the edge of the roof. I had stranded myself by coming up here,
I realized. There was nowhere to go. We were going to have to fight.
My attacker reached the rooftop and came at me. I lashed a
kick at his midsection without thinking and was stunned when I
connected. I hadn’t ever thought of hand to hand combat as
something I might be capable of.
As the man staggered backward, he tried to catch my ankle
and jerk me off balance, but I’d drawn my foot back in too quickly. I spun around, gaining momentum, and kicked him again. Then I
lashed out with a hand, jabbing him in the throat.
I was winning.
He hadn’t so much as landed a blow, and I’d hit him three
times. I had the upper hand. I was going to be able to beat him.
Pride and pleasure at how well I was doing surged through
me, and I lashed out with a couple more hits. The man stumbled
backward and fell.
“Who are you?” he hissed, looking up at me.
“I’m the girl you should never have attacked,” I told him,
feeling like a badass. On some level, I knew this was all a
simulation, that the power I was using to fight this man off had been given to me by an injection, by a serum, and that it was all part of my trials. But was this how the world would be like for me when I’d
completed my transition? When I was a full vampire, would I be
able to fight like this all the time?
Would I have a reason to fight like this?
I pushed that unsettling question aside as my opponent
scrambled to his feet. He was watching me fearfully now, and as I
waited for his next attack to come, he turned and sprinted away from 69
Fight for Blood
me instead.
Across the roof.
Toward the edge.
What the hell was he doing?
I got my answer in a matter of seconds. He reached the edge
of the roof and jumped, landing on the next building over. He
stopped and turned back to look at me.
The distance was too far for me to jump. I knew that. I could
never jump that far.
At least, I couldn’t when I was human.
Could I do it now?
It’s part of the test, I told myself. It isn’t just about fighting this guy. I have to beat him. That means I have to follow him.
And that meant I was going to have to make that jump.
Oh, God.
I backed away from the rooftop’s edge, took a deep breath,
and sprinted toward the edge.
It’s just a simulation. But it didn’t feel like one. It felt real.
The rooftop was real beneath my feet. My hands and knees still
stung from falling over earlier. If I missed this jump, if I didn’t make it across and fell between the buildings—
There was no more time to think. I reached the edge and
leapt. And then I was flying.
It was a jump like no other I’d made in my life. I shouldn’t
have been able to go this far in a single leap. I shouldn’t have been capable of it. And yet, here I was, sailing through the air. It was
miraculous. It was bizarre. It was—
The rooftop of the other building came rushing up to meet
me, and I stumbled a bit as I landed. My fingertips went down to
help catch me—
My hand curled around a piece of broken pipe.
My opponent had begun to run again, and I could see that he
was heading for the far side of the roof, ready to attempt another
jump. I chucked the pipe after him and struck him between the
shoulder blades, sending him sprawling forward.
70
Fight for Blood
And then I was on him.
I hurled myself at his back and knelt on top of him, driving
one knee down into his sacrum and holding his shoulders down with
my hands. He bucked beneath me, and I knew he should have been
able to throw me off. He was bigger than I was. But, to my surprise, I found that he wasn’t stronger than me. Maybe he wasn’t a vampire.
Maybe he was just a human guy. A tough guy, but a human guy.
“What do you want?” I demanded. “Why were you chasing
me? Why did you attack me on the sidewalk? I wasn’t doing
anything to you.”
The man just chuckled.
I had the urge to shake him, or to smash his face against the
rough stone of the rooftop, but I didn’t want unnecessary violence.
He had stopped struggling now, so I contented myself with simply
holding him down. “Tell me what you want,” I insisted.
And then the world around me began to fade to black.
I blinked.
I was back in the palace, looking up at Giorgia, lying in the
bed I’d been shown to for my trials.
And Giorgia was smiling at me.
“You did very well, Rena,” she said. “You passed the second
trial with flying colors.”
“Which—” It was hard to talk. I swallowed. “Which part of
that was the trial? Fighting that guy? The jump?”
“Both,” Giorgia said. “We wanted to see if you could
neutralize an opponent. You got extra points for doing it without
harming him.”
So, I had done well to avoid extra violence. I felt a surge of
satisfaction.
“All right,” Giorgia said. “You’ve passed the first and the
second trials, and we’ll be beginning the third one very shortly.
You’ve done wonderfully so far.”
But the third trial was the one I had really been afraid of. I
closed my eyes and tried to control my breathing, tried to keep
myself calm.
What was going to happen now?
71
Fight for Blood
Chapter Ten
“The third trial will be the longest,” Giorgia’s voice penetrated the darkness. “And it will be the most difficult. But we all have faith in you, Rena. You’re going to do wonderfully, we know it.”
I was glad to hear that someone was feeling confident,
because I wasn’t at all. I tried to steady my breathing, to keep from betraying any fear.
“All right,” Giorgia said. “Here comes the injection. We’ll
see you on the other side, Rena.”
This time I barely felt the prick of the needle I supposed my
system was too flooded with adrenaline to allow me to recognize it.
But I knew the trial had begun because I was suddenly sitting in the backseat of a car.
And my parents were in the front.
My parents.
I hadn’t seen them since I was a child. Since the day they had
died. I could have stared at them forever, drinking in the sight of their faces.
The fact that I was here to complete a trial seemed to fly
right out of my head. What did that matter anymore? Who cared that
Cryder was watching, that Giorgia and Samuele were sitting in
judgment? Hell, who cared if I went insane and was locked away
72
Fight for Blood
forever? Just let me stay here with them. Let me talk to them and hear them tell me they’re proud of me.
“Mom?” I said, my voice wavering. “Dad?”
They didn’t respond. Could they hear me? The man in the
last trial had been able to. What was going on? Had something gone
wrong with the serum?
Who cared if it had?
Rain continued to beat down against the car windows. My
father, in the driver’s seat, steered us slowly along the familiar roads toward the home I had once shared with them. My mother fiddled
with the radio knobs, bringing a song into focus, singing along even as she did so.
Now she turned around and grinned at me as she sang. What
must she be seeing? She didn’t act like a woman whose daughter
had suddenly appeared as a teenager. Was she seeing little girl me?
My father joined in the singalong. I had forgotten this, I
realized with a pang. I had forgotten how happy they so often were
together. I thought of them now only in terms of their relationships to me. I had forgotten how much they loved each other.
It was beautiful to see it now.
I felt more peaceful than I had in years.
What part of this was supposed to be a trial? The only thing I
could think of was that I had already failed somehow, and that this
was what it was like to be insane. Perhaps my brain was simply
showing me images that had nothing to do with reality on a loop
now. Maybe I was already institutionalized.
Poor Cryder. He had thought me capable of this. He must be
so embarrassed.
It was the thought of Cryder that jerked me back. I had to do
better. I had to fight my way through whatever was going on. I
didn’t know what was expected of me here, but I had to figure it out and face it.
The rain lashed the windshield.
A song came on. A familiar oldie, one that had seemed to
live in the back of my mind for years now, one I had never been able 73
Fight for Blood
to listen to. I always changed the radio station when it came on. I left rooms if someone tried to play it.
A chill ran through me.
This is the song that’s playing when they die.
This was the day my parents died.
No sooner had that realization gripped me than my mother
let out a scream— “He’s there!”
He’s there? Who was where? I remembered her screaming. I
remembered being jerked out of a daydream. But I didn’t remember
those words. Who was she talking about? What was happening?
Was this what had happened before? It must be, right?
The tires squealed. The car spun out of control.
The air was torn up by screams.
We were rolling—we were upside down—glass was
shattering, and my face was wet with tears or blood or rainwater. I
couldn’t be sure. I didn’t know what was going on.
But that was the crash.
That was how they died.
My heart was racing. I felt like I was going to be sick. How
dare Giorgia make me go through this again? What did it prove?
This was the worst thing that had ever happened to me in my life.
How was suffering it twice going to make me a better queen?
I wanted to go home. I wished I had never met any of them.
I undid my seatbelt and dropped from my seat, where I hung
suspended like a doll, to the roof of the car below. I hadn’t been able to do that in real life. I had been only a baby. Everything had been out of my control. But this was a simulation. Nothing could hurt me.
And I was angry.
I would be damned if I was going to stay here in this car with
my dead parents the way I had the first time. I didn’t need to go
through that horror again.
No, I realized suddenly, freezing where I sat.
That wasn’t correct.
I couldn’t go outside after all.
Because someone was out there.
It tickled at the back of my memory. My mother’s scream—
74
Fight for Blood
He’s there! —I had no memory of that. But I did remember some of this next part.
Heavy boots walking around the car.
Pale hands reaching in and closing around my father’s arms,
pulling him out of the vehicle.
When I’d seen this as a kid, I had thought the police, or the
ambulance must have arrived. I had thought the hands were working
to save my father. I had been relieved. Because at that point in my
life, I hadn’t understood that some adults just wanted to hurt you and take things from you.
I had still believed that adults were good people.
I knew better now. I knew more now. Adults weren’t always
good. Adults weren’t always even people. Sometimes they were
vampires, evil vampires who would cross oceans in search of your
blood. Bristol.
He would never stop haunting me.
Even here, safely locked in a memory that should have
nothing to do with him, I was haunted by the very thought of him. I
would never be free.
And I knew something else, too. I knew that a man who had
recently been through a terrible car accident, who currently lay
unconscious, should not be moved as if he were a sack of potatoes.
Dragged from the vehicle by his arms.
As I watched the mysterious hands pull my father away, I
saw blood trailing from his body, staining the car’s interior and the road beyond.
Had that blood always been there? Had that always been a
part of this memory? Or had I added it myself?
Why would I have done that?
But I couldn’t have just forgotten it, could I? That wasn’t the same as forgetting the exact words my mother had screamed before
the crash. This was my father bleeding out in the rain. I couldn’t
have forgotten about that.
Unless.
Unless it had just been too horrible to keep in my mind.
75
Fight for Blood
Unless I had blocked it out, not wanting to think about it anymore.
And speaking of what my mother had yelled... he’s there, she had said. But who had she meant?
Could it have been the owner of the mysterious hands?
I had been too shocked when this accident had happened in
real life to observe anything. But I was composed now. As difficult
as it was to live through all this again, I knew there was no changing what was inevitably going to happen here. My parents were going to
die. I was going to live. That was all there was to it.
So, I might as well use the time to try to learn something.
The hands reached into the car again. This part I
<
br /> remembered. This is the part where they drag my mother out and lay her on the road beside my father. By the time I get out, I’ll be expecting to see an ambulance, but I won’t. They’ll be side by side in the middle of the road.
But that wasn’t what happened.
Instead, the hands opened my mother’s door and lifted her
out as if she weighed nothing. There was no blood. And as my
mother was removed from the car, I saw her shift slightly in the
arms of her rescuer.
If indeed he was a rescuer. He looked more like a kidnapper
to me. But more to the point—she was still alive.
My father was dead when he had been removed from the car.
That had been clear. But my mother was still alive. And from the
looks of things, she was being captured, not killed.
What did that mean?
I remembered what happened next, suddenly and in a flash,
as a hand wrapped around my own arm.
I was being pulled from the car.
But it wasn’t the same pale hand as I’d seen before, I
realized, even as my body thrashed and I tried to resist. I was being rescued from the crash by someone else, someone other than the
person who had helped—or hurt—my parents. I was struggling
because I had struggled when this had happened in real life and
because I was, apparently, powerless to make any changes to these
76
Fight for Blood
circumstances. But I didn’t want to change things.
I just wanted to see.
I wanted to see who had pulled my father from the car, and
whether they had been responsible for his death.
I wanted to see if my mother was still here, or if she had
already gone, vanished, never to be seen again. How did I ever think she had died in the crash? Surely someone must have noticed that her body wasn’t found.
They must have assumed she was thrown from the car.
They must have assumed her body was in too bad a
condition to be identified.
And the decision must have been made not to tell me about
it.
But she had just been removed from the car. It had happened
moments before the hands had reached in to claim me. Which meant
that whoever had taken her out must still be around here somewhere.
I could find them. I could finally learn what had happened
that day.
But did I really want to know?
After all this time, it felt as though I had finally put it all
behind me. I had a new life now, in a new country, with a new
Fight for Blood (Blood Origins Book 2) Page 8