The Vampire Games: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance Read Online Free PDF

Grinder?”
    We turned into another hallway, and they shoved me. Hard.
    Before I could so much as catch my breath, I was falling.
    I screamed.
    My stomach lifted into my throat.
    I landed on something soft.
    A moment later, Marc thudded next to me. We were unhurt.
    Something clanged shut above us. Metal against metal. It echoed against concrete.
    “Look,” someone nearby said. It was dark in whatever pit we were in, but now that I heard a voice, I could hear breathing, too. “They brought more into the Grinder. They’re still getting newbies.”
    “Yeah. Too bad for them.”
    We weren’t alone.
    Before I could panic, dim lights flickered on in the pit. Marc and I were in a small, unremarkable concrete box. The floor was covered in mats. Marc and I had landed on a stack of them, which had obviously been situated to catch people dumped into the room.
    All of the other mats had people lolling on top of them. They looked as weak and fatigued as Marc. A few of them looked almost as angry as I felt. And some of them were tan, as though they had seen sunlight as recently as I had.
    These weren’t volunteers. They were captives, just like me.
    And none were chained or unconscious.
    There were a dozen of us in here. They would have been free longer than Marc—which meant fewer sedatives in their system. For the first time, I thought there was a chance that we could escape.
    A woman who must have been my age nodded at me from her own mat. “So what did you do?” she asked as Marc and I climbed off the pile.
    Marc responded. “Tried to run.” His voice was hoarse, and he cleared his throat. “She tried to save me.” His hand slipped into mine. I tightened my fingers around his, clutching his arm. Marc and I had never been terribly touchy-feely, but right now, I needed that human contact.
    The woman tucked some of her messy red hair behind her ear. She was so greasy, I doubted that she’d showered in weeks. “Were you sedated?”
    “Yeah,” Marc said, sitting beside her.
    She handed him a bottle of water. “You too, girly girl?”
    I didn’t know if it was a good idea to bring up the man who had saved me. I still didn’t know what to make of that. I was still wearing the dress he put me in, and it was torn and dirty at this point, nearly as messy as the outfits the others were wearing.
    “I escaped when I first got here,” I said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. I thrust my hand toward her. “My name is Bianka. You?”
    “Lisa,” she said. We shook. It was a weird, formal gesture—not something that I would have done with anyone from my school. What teenagers shook hands? But it seemed important now. I needed friends. Allies. The handshake sealed our amicable new relationship.
    “Have you been here very long, Lisa?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s no light. I can’t tell day or night. I could have been in here for days or months. And these other people have been in this place even longer.” She gestured to the others lying on the mats around us. They were wisps of humans, barely more than skeletons, dirty and fatigued. It scared me how many appeared to be my age, too. Teenagers—not products, but people —who had been stolen from their lives, stripped of their dignities, and abandoned to darkness.
    “But what is ‘this place’?” I asked. “Who are these people? Not the people in this cell, but the people who captured us. They’re a cult or something, right?”
    “People?” Lisa snorted. “Don’t know that I would call vampires people.”

6
    M y mouth was so dry that it hurt.
    The word Lisa had spoken resonated through my whole body.
    Vampires .
    It was impossible.
    I lived in a boring, ordinary world. I went to high school. I did extracurriculars. I had applied to colleges in nearby towns. My plan was to get a degree in general studies, and then decide what I wanted to do for real in graduate school.
    There wasn’t anything supernatural in a world like that.
    I stuttered.