A Bead of Blood by R.E. Butler

Author:R.E. Butler [Butler, R.E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

I didn’t dream while I slept. I tended to relive my past as an observer, seeing images from my life pop up like sections of a DVD that’s been scratched, jumping randomly.

Today, I felt the heaviness of Griegs’ arm around me and the gentle motion of him breathing deeply in sleep as I was taken back to my first real memory.

It was dark outside, and I was hungry. I could smell something sweet and delicious on the air, and I followed it to the source — the child of one of our servants. I snatched his arm in my hand and sank my teeth into his wrist while he shouted and pushed at me. He was strong, but I was stronger, and I didn’t let him go. Minutes passed as I drank the sweet tasting liquid from his body before I was pulled away from his twitching body by my father.

Inside our large home with the shiny white marble floors and colorful tapestries on the walls, my father sat me on his knee and asked, “Why did you bite that boy, my darling?”

“He smelled like juice,” I replied.

He growled and looked over my head at my mother. I looked at her. She was nervous, afraid. “I told you trying to mask what she needs to survive by hiding it in a lidded cup and calling it ‘juice’ was a ridiculous idea. Now look what’s happened. The pack will want retribution.”

My mother sniffed and frowned. “I did what I thought was best.”

“Well done, Mina, we may have a war on our hands. That was the son of the alpha.”

She blanched and sat down, one of her ladies in waiting attending her with a fan. My father brought my attention back to him. “You are a vampire, Sabrina. You are not like the servants in this house who move about in the daylight — they are wolves. We drink blood to live, we stay inside out of the sunlight, and we don’t feed from shifters. They can’t be tricked into giving us their blood willingly and made to forget what we are. I’ll teach you to hunt humans, little lovely, and you’ll never be hungry again.”

The scene shifted and I was standing with the jar of Lara’s ashes, placing it reverently in her family mausoleum.

It’s not fair, I thought bitterly, that her boyfriend can get away with this. I closed the cabinet where she would be kept safe forever and walked out into the frigid winter night. I was in the airport an hour later, on my way to the headquarters of the North American Vampire Council. I waited all night for someone to meet with me, and no one came. I went to a hotel for the day and repeated the process for five more nights before someone finally came to see why I wouldn’t go away.

“We’re overloaded with cases,” the prim assistant said dismissively. “We’ll get to your friend’s death when we have the time and resources.”

“That’s not acceptable,” I yelled, standing up and stalking over to her.

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