Read The Vampire Games: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance for Free Online Page B

reached a peak. They wanted to see me die, and they most likely would.
    Or that’s what I thought until I walked out the door and saw the fragile old woman standing on the other side.
    All thoughts of Marc fled from my mind.
    The competitor I was being pitted against was shorter than me, and bone-thin. She had the same collar around her throat that I had around mine as well. While she was crouched kind of like the previous fight’s winner had, she made no move to come toward me.
    I stared up at the bleachers surrounding the arena.
    Hundreds of vampires looked back at me. They were as beautiful, pallid, and graceful as the others I’d seen in this dark world. They were still cheering, but I couldn’t hear it over the thudding of my heart anymore.
    It didn’t occur to me that I should be fighting this old lady until waves of pain washed over me, and the crowd started to chant the word “fight” over and over.
    I dug my heels in.
    “No,” I said. “No!”
    The pain intensified. It was coming from my collar.
    A shock collar—another indignity, one more way to communicate that I was nothing more than a dog to these vampires.
    When I still didn’t move, the pain just kept climbing. It hurt so much that my vision went white and I was barely aware of anything around me.
    When the pain stopped, and my eyes cleared, the woman was rushing toward me, much faster than I would have thought she would be able to move. She might have been old, but she’d clearly survived to reach the Grinder for good reason.
    I leaped out of the way before she could punch me. It didn’t look like she knew how to punch very hard, but I definitely didn’t want to take the chance.
    She swung her fist and I pushed her aside. Not hard—it looked like I should have been able to break her hip, so I couldn’t bring myself to get violent.
    The woman didn’t give up.
    She threw herself at me again.
    Bony, frail fingers dug into my shoulders. She shoved her face into mine. “Kill me,” she hissed.
    “ What ?” There was no way I could have heard her right.
    She kicked out wildly.
    I pushed her off of me and backed away.
    “Kill me,” she said again, almost too low to be heard over the roaring crowd. She didn’t sound particularly fierce or murderous. Her eyes welled with tears. “Please.”
    My heart thudded harder still.
    Digging my fingertips into the shock collar, I searched for a latch. If I could figure out how to open it, I could release both of us.
    The collar responded with a powerful shock.
    I dropped my hands.
    “Kill me!” the woman cried.
    “No!” I yelled back. “I won’t fight you!”
    The white pain shocked through my body again. I could barely hear my own cries over the boos that resounded.
    My audience was disappointed.
    Good. I won’t perform for you .
    The pain stopped again, as though encouraging my head to clear enough for the fight. I was wobbly on my legs, barely aware of everything around me, and I thought of Marc. If he’d gone, would he have been alert enough to even choose whether or not to listen to the woman? I couldn’t believe he would kill her.
    The old woman stumbled forward.
    I couldn’t tell if she’d been shocked again as well or if she was tiring from the little fighting we’d done.
    “You have to,” she said, clinging to my arm with one hand and swinging up with the other. I grabbed her arm and found myself struggling against her. “Just kill me.”
    “No!”
    We grappled. We fell to the ground.
    The white light struck again, and it was the worst it had been yet.
    I tasted coppery blood.
    If I didn’t let this woman kill me—or if I didn’t kill her—then the vampire collar was going to kill me.
    The injustice of it burned like fire through my veins.
    Earlier that day, or the day before, I had been thinking about college. I had been worried that Marc had noticed my freckles and enjoying the sight of ants carrying potato chips ten times their size through the grass.
    Who were the vampires