“You made a choice,” came a deep voice to my right, and I looked up. The vampire loomed over me, tall and solemn. A flickering candle sat behind him on an end table—the light that had blinded me earlier. It was still painfully bright, and I turned away. “You wanted to survive, to become one of us.” He looked to the torn blood bag, lying a few feet away. “You chose this.”
I covered my mouth with a shaking hand, trying to remember, to recall what I’d said. All I could see was blood, and me in an animal rage, tearing at it, ripping it open. My hand dropped to my lips and jaw, probing my teeth where the ache had been. I drew in a quick breath.
There they were. Fangs. Very long and very, very sharp.
I snatched my hand back. It was true, then. I really had done the unthinkable. I’d become that which I hated most in the world. A vampire. A monster.
I slumped against the wall, trembling. Looking down at myself, I blinked in surprise. My old clothes were gone. Instead of my thin, faded patchwork shirt and pants, I wore black jeans and a dark shirt without a single hole or tear. The filthy, torn and probably bloodstained jacket had been replaced with a long black coat that looked almost new.
“What … what happened to my clothes?” I asked, touching the sleeve of the coat, blinking at how thick it was. Frowning suddenly, I looked up at the vampire. “Did you dress me?”
“Your clothes were torn to pieces when the rabids attacked you,” the vampire informed me, still not moving from where he stood. “I found you some new ones. Black is the best color for us—it hides the bloodstains rather well. Do not worry.” His deep, low voice held the faintest hint of amusement. “I did not see anything.”
My mind spun. “I—I have to go,” I said shakily, getting to my feet. “I have to … find my friends, see if they made it back to the hideout. Stick is probably—”
“Your friends are dead,” the vampire said calmly. “And I would abandon all attachments to your life before. You are not part of that world any longer. It is better to simply forget about it.”
Dead. Images flashed through my mind—of rain and blood and pale, screeching things, hands pulling someone over a fence. With a hiss, I shied away from those thoughts, refusing to remember. “No,” I choked out, shuddering. “You’re lying.”
“Let them go,” the vampire insisted quietly. “They’re gone.”
I had the sudden, crazy urge to snarl and bare my fangs at him. I stifled it in horror, keeping a wary eye on the stranger, who watched me impassively. “You can’t keep me here.”
“If you want to leave, you may go.” He didn’t move, except to nod to a door on the other side of the small room. “I will not stop you. Though you will be dead within a day, if it takes that long. You have no idea how to survive as a vampire, how to feed, how to avoid detection, and if the vampires of this city discover you, they will most likely kill you. Alternatively, you could remain here, with me, and have a chance of surviving this life you have chosen.”
I glared at him. “Stay here? With you? Why? What do you care?”
The stranger narrowed his eyes. “Bringing a new vampire into the world is something I do not take lightly,” he said. “Turning a human only to abandon it without the skills it needs to survive would be irresponsible and dangerous. If you stay here, I will teach you what you need to know to live as one of us. Or—” he turned slightly, gesturing to the door “—you can leave and try to survive on your own, but I wash my hands of you and whatever blood comes after.”
I slumped back to the wall, my mind racing. Rat was dead. Lucas was dead. I’d seen them, pulled under by rabids in the old city, torn apart before my eyes. My throat closed up. Stick, much as I hated to admit it, was most likely dead as well; he couldn’t survive the trek back to the city on his own. It was just me now. Alone. A vampire.
My chest felt tight, and I bit my lip, imagining the faces of my friends staring at me, pale and accusing. My eyes burned, but I swallowed hard and forced back the tears. I could cry and scream and curse the world and the rabids and the vampires later. But I would not show weakness in front of this stranger, this bloodsucker who might have saved me, but about whom I knew nothing. When I was alone, I would cry for Rat and Lucas and Stick, the family I’d lost. Right now, I had larger issues to deal with.
I was a vampire. And, despite everything, I still wanted to live.
The stranger waited, as unmoving as a wall. He might be a bloodsucker, but he was the only familiar thing I had left. “So,” I said softly without looking up. Resentment boiled, an old, familiar hate, but I shoved it down. “Do I call you ‘master’ or ‘teacher’ or something else?”
The vampire paused, then said, “You may call me Kanin.”
“Kanin? Is that your name?”
“I did not say it was my name.” He turned as if to leave, but crossed the room and sank into a rusty folding chair on the other side. “I said it was what you could call me.”
Great, not only was my new teacher a vampire, he was one of those cryptic, mysterious ones, too. I crossed my arms and eyed him warily. “Where are we?”
Kanin considered this. “Before I disclose anything about myself,” he said, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees, “I would like to know a bit more about you. I will be teaching you, after all, and that means we will be spending a great deal of time together. I want to know what I am up against. Are you amenable to this?”
I shrugged. “What do you want to know?”
“Your name, first off.”
“Allie,” I said, then elaborated. “Allison Sekemoto.”
“Interesting.” Kanin straightened, watching me with intense black eyes. “You know your full name. Not many humans do, anymore.”
“My mom taught me.”
“Your mother?” Kanin leaned back, crossing his arms. “Did she teach you anything else?”
I bristled. I suddenly didn’t want to discuss my mom with this bloodsucker. “Yeah,” I said evasively.
He drummed his fingers on his biceps. “Such as?”
“Why do you want to know?”
He ignored the question. “If you wish for me to help you, you will answer me.”
“Reading, writing and a little math,” I snapped at him. “Anything else?”
“Where is your mother now?”
“Dead.”
Kanin didn’t seem surprised, or shocked at my bluntness. “And your father?”
“I never knew him.”
“Siblings?”
I shook my head.
“So you have nothing on that side to go back to.” Kanin nodded. “Good. That will make things easier. How did she die?”
I narrowed my eyes, about fed up with this interrogation. “That’s none of your business, vampire,” I snapped, wanting some emotion to cross his impassive face. Except for a raised eyebrow, his expression remained the same. “Besides, what’s it to you? Why should you care about the lives of a couple humans, anyway?”
“I don’t,” the vampire said and shrugged. “Like I said before, I want to evaluate my chances of success. Humans have a tendency to cling to the past, which can make teaching them difficult. The more attachments a person has, the harder it is to learn to let go when becoming a vampire.”
I clenched my hands, trying to calm the sudden rage. I would have been tempted to leap up and punch him, ungrateful as that was,