Chapter 1

When Gavin died, it was peaceful. The sun was shining bright and the river had completely iced over. December 15th and the cold had finally given up just enough to let light snowfall. Gavin begged me to drag him outside. I refused at first, telling him the cold wouldn’t be good for him and I wasn’t going to let my best friend die that way, but when he reached up, grabbed my chin and looked me square in the eyes saying, “Tillie Diane McGuire, if you don’t take me outside to die the way I want to, I swear to the goddess I will haunt you through Broadway show tunes in your dreams for the rest of your life!,” I knew I had better grant him his final wish.

I laid beside him making snow angels until I looked over and saw that his arms had stopped moving. His face was tilted up towards the sun and a smile splayed across his lips. I knew he was gone and I envied him. He didn’t have to run anymore, didn’t have to live afraid. He didn’t have to wake up every day wondering if he was going to eat, be killed, or ever see his family again. He no longer had to wonder if they were even still alive. Dying was the only way to be truly at peace in this world.

*****

Three days passed since I left Gavin in the snow. Three days passed since I ate or drank. I was ready to die too. I had been laying in the shipping container for hours, numb now to the hunger pains and cold, when the bright light finally descended on me. I smiled and shut my eyes, took one last breath, and let go.

“Hey! Girl! You alive?”

My eyes tried to flutter open. The hunger pains and thirst returned immediately. If there had been any water left in my body, I would’ve cried. The peace I thought I was melting into eluded me. The frigid wind whipping through the shipping container hurt my bones.

Frigid wind? The doors are open?

“She’s not responding, just grab her, she’s probably fresh still, the only thing I smell in here is piss.”

Rough hands gripped under my arms and suddenly I was in the air, landing roughly on someone’s shoulder. Then, everything was dark.

*****

Just a few miles from where Carlos, the leader of CAV had found me, was a CAV outpost. The Coalition Against Vampires. They were scouting the port authority offices for new hideouts and a way to utilize the river without vampires, or the humans helping them, finding out. I could’ve gotten help for Gavin. Of all the times we had ventured into the city looking for food, and we never found CAV.

I supposed I was lucky that Carlos found me, and CAV took me in. People, like me, who were hiding usually ended up dead regardless of whether a vampire got them or not. I didn’t have any skills to offer. I was barely a college graduate and my major had been investigative journalism. I could help with growing food once spring rolled around since I had some farming experience, but right now, I was useless to CAV.

The only people that had spoken to me since I was brought in had been Carlos when he dropped me off at the infirmary inside the hideout and an old nurse named Bev who had been taking care of me. The room was large and draped in plastic. Cots lined up and down the room formed paths and a row of IV supplies and stands were along one side of the room.

I was sitting on a cot reading Fifty Shades of Grey for the 10th time when Carlos came barreling through the infirmary doors. For someone who was only 21 years old, he commanded the room and his very presence demanded respect. Rumor had it, Carlos was the CAV golden boy and would be taking over the New York City outposts eventually.

“Is she ready? Healthy enough?”

Carlos asked Bev who had been folding bed sheets and abruptly stopped when he spoke.

“She’s been here less than a week sir. She hadn’t eaten in almost a week before then and she has dealt with a lot of…emotional… trauma. I suppose she is healthy enough to get her job assignment though, depending on what it is.” The nurse glanced my way and shrugged her shoulders.

Carlos strode towards me looking me up and down as though he was sizing me up for a fight. I was 5’2 and before the world went to shit, I weighed 135 pounds. The nurse wrote 102 on my chart yesterday and I believed her. I sure hoped that Carlos didn’t plan to make me a fighter or vampire hunter. If Carlos was looking for a recruit with physical prowess—that wasn’t me.

“It’s Christmas Eve,” Carlos stated matter of factly.

“So?” I picked my novel back up and the nurse smacked it out of my hands onto the floor.

I looked at her shocked, not knowing what to say or how to react.

“Show some respect!” She hissed. Carlos wasn’t the leader of CAV but he was revered as the prodigal son, an expert vampire killer and genius tactical planner. If Jason was the President of CAV, Carlos was the war general.

Carlos bent down to pick up the book and handed it back to me with a cockeyed smile.

“Don’t worry about Bev. She’s just an old grump.” He straightened and held his hand out to me. I grabbed it and stood up, facing him directly. He towered over me and dwarfed my small frame.

“I can’t fight.”

“I don’t need you to fight.”

“I don’t like kids.”

“We don’t need any babysitters.”

“I don’t cook, clean, or do anything else very well either.”

I bit my lip and looked down at the floor, sure that Carlos was about to tell me that he would be taking me back to the shipping container.

“You have a very special skill that we plan to make very good use of Tillie.” Carlos tilted my chin up. “Follow me.”

He began walking towards the back of the infirmary to where the large double doors were. I scrambled to put on some slippers and followed him.

I stopped dead in my tracks as I surveyed the room. Tables full of beakers, test tubes, burners, flasks, plastic tubing, and men and women wearing white coats, gloves and goggles surrounded several different tables. No one looked up as we entered the room, each one too engrossed in their experiments to notice us.

Carlos was waiting at a table in the center of the room, chatting with a middle-aged bearded man who was holding up a medicine bottle full of pills. Carlos laughed loudly and patted the man on the back before taking the pills from him.

“Tillie! Come on. I want you to meet Lucca.” Carlos gestured to me and I quickly walked over to the table.

“I don’t understand what I am doing here. I barely passed chemistry in high school…” I began to trail off, mumbling words of discontent.

“You won’t be creating these pills Tillie, you’ll just be ingesting them.” Carlos beamed at me while the shock registered.

“I’m not taking any pills of any kind.” I huffed at Carlos and turned around, planning to make a very dramatic exit. Carlos grabbed my elbow and twisted me around.

“Everyone contributes Tillie. Everyone. We don’t always get to decide how we contribute here but contributing means you get to stay alive, so why don’t you just hold on a second and let me tell you what you’ll be doing to help CAV and then the good doctor Lucca can answer any questions you have about BL8.”

I didn’t respond to Carlos but sat down on a chair that Dr. Lucca had pulled out for me. Carlos came around the other side of the table and pulled up a chair next to me. He shook a pill from the bottle and held it up between his thumb and pointer finger. The pill looked brown when it was in the bottle but in the light, it glowed a deep red color.

“BL8. Blood Lust version 8 is going to be how we take down the vamps once and for all, and you Tillie, YOU get to be the person to test the drug and uncover the deepest, darkest secrets of the Hierarchy for your people, for CAV.”

Carlos was grinning at the pill as though it held all the secrets of the universe but I was terrified. He looked like a madman and wanted to use me as a guinea pig for some drug that would take down vampires.

“I don’t think I am right for what you are looking for.” I stammered and looked down at my feet, gripping the sides of the chair as Carlos’s eyes burned with rage. Dr. Lucca had a firm grip of Carlos’s shoulder which I knew was the only thing keeping him from knocking me straight out of my chair for not accepting my assignment. Dr. Lucca began to explain the purpose of the pill and Carlos seemed to relax a bit.

“Iron makes our blood taste metallic. We have been able to observe vampires going into a kind of frenzy when they are draining someone who is severely anemic. The blood is less metallic tasting, which means it tastes better for a vampire. When a vampire feeds on someone who is anemic and also diabetic, it creates a longing for that blood, much like a sugar addiction in a human. We took this idea and decided to create a drug that would inhibit the absorption of iron in a human’s blood while also making it sweeter and addictive to vampires.”

Dr. Lucca smiled smugly at the end of his explanation and held out the bottle of pills to me. “Go on, take the bottle.”

I reached out and took the pill bottle. “So, what exactly is in the pill?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know but I figured if I was going to end up forced to take these, I should at least be aware.

“Well, there are quite a few ingredients in the pills, but the active ingredients include cocoa, oxalic acid, phenolic acids, phytates, and calcium, which all block the absorption of iron, there is also a high amount of glucose to make the blood taste sweeter and tetrahydrocannabinol which has been observed to give vampires a euphoric and relaxed feeling when it enters their bloodstream. So far, tests have confirmed that the tetrahydrocannabinol and glucose, when iron absorption is completely blocked, has an addictive effect on vampires.”

I stared at Dr. Lucca blankly, trying to process everything he had just told me. He was so excited about his creation that he was bouncing from foot to foot like a little boy waiting to open presents on Christmas morning. I suppose the unveiling of BL8 is the closest thing to a Christmas these scientists are going to get this year though. I glanced at Carlos who was leaning forward on his knees, waiting for my response.

“So, what you are telling me is that you want to turn me into an anemic, diabetic, pothead so that vampires can become addicted to me? What the hell good is that going to do? I’m going to die! I just watched my friend die from untreated diabetes when you found me and now you want me to have the same fate!? You should’ve just left me in that shipping container to die!”

Carlos and Dr. Lucca just stared at me as I ranted. When I finally stopped Carlos scooted his chair closer to mine and lowered his voice,

“You will take these pills twice a day. You will be living at Denise’s Speakeasy as a blood donor. You will seduce a member of the hierarchy, get them addicted to you, and get information out of them regarding who they are, where they will be, and any plans they have to attack CAV, and really, any other helpful information you can get. Do you understand?”

Carlos gripped both my knees a little too tight and I nodded at him. He smiled, released my knees, and patted my legs.

“Good. Someone will escort you there tonight.”