Page 26 of Cloak of the Vampire
“Have it your way, then,” he said, and then I could feel him right behind me, his body heat seeping into my back as he grabbed my waist, pulling me to him, shooting electric currents down my spine. For a moment, I was frozen, turning even tenser when his hands smoothed their way to my lower stomach, spreading against my shirt, making my heart kick loudly in my chest, and those horrible thoughts from before returned with a vengeance, shooting images of him bending me against the wall, tearing off my pants, taking down his.
I gasped, shut my eyes, and attempted to escape his maddening touch when his next words froze me in place.
“Tomorrow at six. Be in my office.”
CHAPTER 10
Before night breakfast the next day, I walked into the common room to find Zoey reading a book. But her face had an odd look to it, and it didn’t seem like her eyes were moving. It was as if her mind was somewhere else.
I plopped down on the sofa next to her. “Good morning,” I said quietly when she didn’t respond to my presence.
She jolted and whipped her head to me. “Oh,” she said, relaxing when she saw me. “Morning.”
Frowning, I debated whether I should poke my nose in or not. Seeing the dark bags under her eyes, I made my decision. “Are you all right?”
She tensed for a moment before she let out a deep sigh. “No, I’m not,” she whispered. “I’m not all right.”
Hesitantly, I took her hand in mine. “I’m here if you want to talk.”
Smiling grimly, she took a deep breath and said, “I just received a notice that my ...” She shook her head. “That someone in my family died.”
The first thing I wondered following her words was how she knew that. Our phones had been taken, and we had no way to contact the outside world—as long as we were newbies, that was. But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was the grief coating her voice.
Squeezing her hand, I said, “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“I think it’s better if I do,” she said, voice shaking. “I do not miss my old life, you see. I do, however, miss some of the people I used to know.”
She gently pulled away from me and put her arms around herself. “I’m from Brooklyn,” she suddenly said. “My family is extremely conservative. I ran away from home when I was fifteen.”
I listened silently, taking her words in.
“My relationship with my family is complicated, to say the least,” she said, chuckling bitterly. “But some of them—my sister, for instance ... some of them I miss like crazy.”
It begged the question why, then, she signed up to be a vampire in the first place. But I didn’t ask her anything. All I did was listen.
She raised her eyes to me. “Don’t you sometimes miss your old life, Aileen?”
Of course I did. More than she knew, considering I wasn’t here by choice. “Yeah, I do,” I said, and in the spirit of sharing, I told her some bits about myself too. “I was on the road to get promoted at my job, you see,” I said. “I was starting to get my life together, molding it into what I wanted. I even had this cute customer coming by sometimes.”
I paused, looking away when Zoey’s eyes filled with sympathy I couldn’t quite process. “There was freedom there. I could do anything. Absolutely anything. But now ...”my fate was out of my control. But I didn’t tell her that.
In the silence that followed, something told me Zoey and I were both wondering why we were here, then. But like me, it seemed Zoey was reluctant to share that info. I could relate. What would she think if she knew my circumstances?
“There’s another thing,” Zoey said, breaking the silence. I raised my eyes to hers and saw her grief was gone, replaced by pain. “Have you heard about the Auction?”
I frowned. “I think I heard someone mention it once. Why?”
“I learned of its existence just yesterday, at dinner,” Zoey said, shuddering. She was obviously shaken by whatever it meant. “One of theolder vamps came over to our table to look down at us. He said that we shouldn’t get too comfortable since the Auction would help our Lord get rid of us anyway. When we asked him what it meant, he didn’t bother to explain, but it left us all wondering. Gus found a chapter about it in a book he found during his shift at the Archives.”
A bad feeling crawled into my stomach, and I could only imagine what the Auction meant now. “Tell me.”
Zoey’s lips trembled as she explained. “Every few months, after each batch of new-vampire courses in all nine US Leagues is done, the Lords throw an Auction. They gather new Common vampires in one place, and they trade them for money and resources. It’s just like a regular auction, only instead of objects, us newbies are on the stage being sold off.”
This was disturbing on too many levels. “But what about thewaiting list?”
“Apparently, it’s worth shit,” she said, tears in her eyes. “Thewaiting list, according to the book, is just a general list of potential vampires who have agreed to receive the Imprint. They can’t give us the Imprint unless we agree to it. We’re randomly picked up by each Lord at random times throughout our lives, with no guarantee that we will ever amount to anything down here. Then, if we don’t prove to be useful to their League at any point up until the Auction, they can literally dispose of us by selling us off to another League.”
“What happens if no one wants to buy us at the Auction?” I asked despite a million other questions racing through my head.
