Chapter 1

Preface

Humans could be so naïve when it came to the truth of the world—the horrors they only thought existed in nightmares.  They had absolutely no clue.

The Boogeyman was real.

He munched on bloody limbs right across the table from Dracula, while the Wolfman picked splinters of bone from his teeth.

Sort of.

Only in this world, there were hundreds of ‘Boogeymen’ and thousands of ‘Draculas’ and twice as many ‘Wolfmen’ running around.

All of them fighting and bleeding and dying for just a little bit of power.

Eliot figured that you couldn't blame the mortals for writing it off as make-believe; who would want to believe it?

He hadn't.  He had fought back against the truth—tried to ignore it, push it away to the depths of his mind.  Deny it.

Until it was too late.

He could still remember what it had felt like—finally believing that all the monsters and fairytales he'd been told his whole life didn’t exist really were real.

Earth shattering.

Most mortals could barely get past the idea that their planet was just one of many in an unfathomable universe.  How were they supposed to understand that they weren't even the dominant creatures at the top of the food chain?

That the darkness hid a world more terrifying than they could ever imagine?

After all, they only had their ‘police’ to protect them from whatever lurked in the shadows…

Ha!

He nearly laughed out loud at that—as if a car or a gun could protect someone from something like him.

Though, to be fair, the humans had no idea just what waited outside the boundaries of their houses at night. If they had even the slightest inkling, Eliot figured they might have appreciated things like instinct and fear a little more.

It was almost funny the more he thought about it.  For creatures that had survived centuries purely on instinct, mortal seemed to despise the feeling.

Ignorance was bliss, after all.

When that little warning voice of instinct cropped up at the back of their minds as they walked down a brightly lit street in the middle of the day, who could blame them for ignoring it?

For writing it off the unease as just the product of an overactive imagination?

After all what kinds of bad things could possibly happen in broad daylight?

The mortal girl two paces ahead of him should have listened to her little voice.

She should have given in to the whispers at the back of her mind that warned of danger as she walked along the sidewalk with a pink backpack.

Pink, Eliot thought darkly.

It was his favorite color actually, right next to red.

Black was a close second.  Black like…his soul, if he wanted to be morbid about it.

But pink would always be his favorite.

Funnily enough, it was a color that mortals underestimated the most.

They just didn’t get it.  Compared with red and black, pink was the most dangerous color of all.

It was the color of flesh as the blood drained dry; the alarming color of tissues as they lost the healthy warmth that marked life.

As long as there was still a faint pink left on a victim’s cheeks, there was still hope.

Hope that they might live.

Hope that everything might be okay again.

And hope, Eliot knew, could be the most evil thing of all.

Though, he doubted that was why the girl in front of him had chosen such a color for her backpack.

Most likely to her, pink was just…pretty.

To be honest, the color was the only thing remotely ‘pretty’ about her.

She was too small.

Too slender.

From this distance, as he trailed behind her in the tinted safety of his car, he could have mistaken her for a child.

Almost.

There was a confidence to the way she held herself, however—he could sense the maturity on her.

She had to be sixteen, at least.

And, despite the plain appearance…she smelled good.

The sweet scent of her blood taunted him even with the windows rolled firmly up. It was soft and delicate, almost like the faint sweetness of wild roses.

A feminine aroma that seemed out of place in the middle of winter.

Tilting his head back, he took in the rest of her: the light brown hair that hung in limp curls down her shoulders, as if she had spent the morning brushing the life from them.  The colorless, gray clothing.  Even her skin seemed a lifelessly pale.

She looked like a speck of a shadow on a monochromatic world.

Eliot hadn’t a clue what had drawn him to her.  In another time, he might have assumed that it was merely hunger.

Blood was blood, after all—the packaging didn’t really matter.

But…he had given up the life of a predator a long time ago.  Now a days, he kept those dark instincts reigned in on a tight leash.

Though, to be on the safe side, he still kept a cooler of blood in the trunk—in case of emergencies…but she didn’t seem to appeal to him, at least not in the feeding sense.

His fangs weren’t even throbbing with the hint of bloodlust.

Besides, hunger didn’t explain why the sight of her—this unassuming human—had literally stopped him dead in the middle of the street of this ridiculous small town.

He had been on his way to a nearby hospital, on his way to visit a person he hadn’t seen in years…

This little town had been just a detour to stall for time.

A way to put off a meeting he dreaded.

In fact, if he had followed the correct road a few miles back, he realized that he would have never come across her at all…

Maybe it was just her naivety that stopped him?

He had been following her, unnoticed, for a block after all—like a snake stalking a mouse through the weeds—and she hadn’t even noticed.

She just faced forward; shoulders back with her hands on the straps of her backpack, walking so carefully that he wondered if she was keeping track of every step in her mind.

Left foot, right foot, left foot…

He couldn’t help thinking that if had been inclined to snatch her up for a meal, it would have been easy.  All he had to do was inch up the car beside her, lie about being lost, needing directions, and she would come close, driven by an innocent desire to help and then…

It would have been almost too easy.

A dark part of him took pleasure in that fact.  His thumbs tightened over the steering wheel, and he had to physically bite back the urge to give into the predator instincts just to show that silly girl first-hand how idiotic it was to walk down a darkened street alone.

But he wasn’t that person anymore, he admitted with a sigh.

Those days were gone.  He was past that now, and it had been way too long since he'd given into that side of himself, anyway.

One little mortal wouldn’t be enough to make him slip.

So, he let up his foot on the gas until the car idled at little more than five miles an hour, giving her the chance to pull ahead on a pair of white sneakers.

And she just kept on walking, blissfully unaware of the danger watching her float away unharmed.

He waited until she turned the corner before picking up speed and finally turning onto the main road.

Now that the distraction was cleared away, he could be honest with himself about the true dilemma itching at the back of his skull.

He didn’t know what had dragged him back here; back to this horrible spot in the universe—a place he thought he’d left behind for good ages ago.

It even looked the same.

Sure, they had painted over the old signs.  Shamelessly changed the town's name, and even demolished the ancient buildings—but that heavy stale air would always be the same.

That sense of despair that made the occupants feel trapped—suffocated.  That made a person want to run to the furthest corner of the universe just to get away.

Eliot didn’t know what made him come back. Hell, even the person he had come to see didn’t seem worth the risk of being trapped again.

He shouldn’t have come back.

With a frown, he turned the wheel onto the road that led to the town’s only hospital and silently hoped this little trip would be worth the damn memories that threatened to swallow him whole.

Still…

He couldn’t help but picture a delicate shade of pink as he hurtled down the highway, and his fangs—consciously or not—dropped down to pierce through his bottom lip.