Blood Series (Book 1.5)
Urban Fantasy
Date Published: 30.11.2020
Cross my heart, and hope to die… You should be careful what you wish for.
Danielle Renaud would have never wished for this life of endless hunting
and isolation, but it’s the only one she’s ever known. But while her second
cousin, Heather Ryan, is off to single-handedly rid the world of Vampires,
she is stuck on the side-lines.
Frustrated and concerned when Heather hasn’t checked in for over a
fortnight, she decides it’s time to take matters into her own hands. What
she doesn’t expect is to learn her childhood friend, Nathan, is also
missing, or to discover him half-naked and shackled, lurking around their
old hangout. And he needs her help, because to her horror, he is now one of
the undead. Although she is trained to kill his kind, something about his
creation and the circumstances surrounding it just don’t add up.
Promises should not be broken, but no one ever expects to die if one is.
Nathan Kennedy was warned that Vampires existed, but he always believed his
childhood friend just suffered from an overactive imagination. Boy was he
wrong. Dragged into a world he once made fun of and “turned” against his
will, he will soon discover he has a role to play that even his Slayer
Bestie couldn’t have cooked up.
Nothing is a coincidence.
Though the circumstances are extreme, fate has brought them back together,
and they need to find Heather, the first born Infected, to make sense of
what’s going on. But neither of them could have predicted the path that lies
before them, or how much their lives were truly about to change … for the
worse…
This title contains explicit language and some scenes with violence.
Excerpt
The dream darkened. The images disintegrated to ash as something deep inside me stirred. That unusual, invisible tug I had quickly learnt was my new alarm clock, my body telling me that I now had to be awake, and therefore, without my consent, it pulled me into the realm of semi-consciousness. The innocent dream got lost in darkness.
No, not a dream. I didn’t have the luxury of dreaming anymore. It was just a memory, and one that kept replaying in my mind every time I closed my eyes—my subconscious telling me that I owed an old friend one big, fat apology; an apology that would surely get me an ‘I told you so’ as a reply, and that was presuming I ever got to see her again.
It was the truth. Everything she’d ever told me … It’s all real.
The past seemed like a pleasant place to live, but then again, anything was better than my current predicament, which proved nothing short of a nightmare. A cold, dark, twisted nightmare.
“I told you t’be careful what you wish for.”
Her voice rang in a soft and sweet whisper that I could feel dance across my skin, the usual taunting tone accompanying her words.
“Go away, Elle.”
“Make me.”
A lock clicked. Hinges whined as heavy, rusted metal scraped against concrete. Light briefly touched my face, only to be overtaken by an unfamiliar presence that filled my door frame. My eyeballs hurt behind my lids, but I didn’t bother opening my eyes and indulging in the mild curiosity that involuntary tickled the back of my mind. Truth be told, I didn’t have the bloody energy to even try to look. Then again, if I had learnt one thing during my time in purgatory, it was that nothing ever good happened when you opened your eyes and that the things you did see weren’t always real.
A crinkle of plastic accompanied the odd squeak and shuffle of clumsy feet. My visitor moved into the room, allowing the overhead lighting from the outer corridor to slither into my cell. Not as good as daylight, nowhere near, and yet being locked in the dark for such long periods of time had made my skin super-sensitive. That horrid illumination was all I had, all I could use to delude myself into pretending that I was really lay on a rock-hard stretcher in my back garden, and not some dank room in a strange facility in God only knows where the hell I could be. The light was cold and pale, not like the warmth from the sun, but regardless, I could feel it on my skin, feel its energy in a way I couldn’t before.
Iron clamped around my jaw, breaking my momentary delusion. Not to mention the impact was so sudden, my lids snapped open, and my eyeballs practically bulged from their sockets. Jesus, talk about a wakeup call.
The left side of my friend’s face remained in the shadows of the room, but the right … The light barely touched him as if almost afraid to. His jaw was square, and from the patch of skin that was illuminated, he was as pale as every other Vampire I’d had the pleasure of meeting during my time here. His hair seemed dark, and he looked to be wearing black—the meatier fellows all seemed to wear black and have the role of ‘the muscle’ in this joint. Clearly, they were prison guards, and one other thing I had learnt during my stay? These guards didn’t have patience, not that human bouncers or security guards rarely did, but then again, humans couldn’t go around biting or beating the crap out of the people they were responsible for.
He raised his left hand, and the red, opaque silhouette of my feeding tube caught the corner of my eye, a droplet ready to fall from the slit. The scent of blood touched my nostrils … Jesus … how I hated that I even knew that smell.
“I’m not thirsty.”
The words didn’t quite make it past my lips. Instead, they remained locked between my throat and teeth, but my new friend seemed to understand—this was made obvious by the tick in the visible side of his neck. Not that he gave a shite, which he proved by digging his ice-cold fingertips into my cheeks, pushing my flesh into my teeth so violently that I was sure they would have shattered, but being a compromising soul, I obliged and opened my mouth. Although I doubted anyone would class my mouth as being opened since my lips were vertical and the top lip was stuck in the opposite direction of the bottom. I no doubt looked like a fish mid-breath.
“More like a fish with a botched lip job, mid-breath.”
I said go away, Elle. I slanted my gaze to the right corner of the room, watching as the shadows solidified.
“And I said, make me.”
The tube was pushed between my teeth, the tip grazing along my tongue and pushed farther, until it was stuck halfway down my gullet. Blood, cold and thick, coated my throat, slithering into my system. My throat flexed, more from the slight discomfort than the need to drink or even to retch. Retching would be the right thing to do when someone force-fed you blood, but since I’d woken up, it was all I could eat—well, drink. Even though my mind was still plagued with disgust and the madness of the situation, a part of me had accepted the inevitable and ridiculous truth … I was a Vampire.
Excerpt 2:
Unease set in my stomach along with fear and relief, a jumble of emotions that even made my heart feel woozy. “Than, what happened t’you?”
“I, erm—” He lifted his head and looked toward me … no, not toward me, past me, and he shook his head.
The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. My grip on the hilt of my sword tightened as I cautiously turned, half-worried I was going to find another half-naked person standing behind me, but as I moved my phone torch around the space, I could see nothing, just gravestones.
When I moved the light back to him, he was sat on the grass, his head pressed against the wall, staring off into space.
“Than?” I took a step toward him.
“Truth is I-I do actually need your help, Elle.”
“You need my help?”
“I had no one else I could turn to.” He looked past me again, giving empty space a pointed look. His brow furrowed, and he shook his head once more. “No, scratch that, you’re the only person I could come to like—” he flicked his hands up and down his chest. “—like this.”
“And how exactly did you get like this? A casual hook-up gone wrong? Or perhaps you joined a travelling renaissance fair?”
“What? No.” His gaze was firmly fixed on me. “I-I was attacked, Elle. Me and my friend Freddie, we were attacked in London. I-I woke up in this place, in this dark room and, well, we were—” His jaw was trembling; he couldn’t get the words out fast enough or without tripping over his own tongue. “—we were fucking kidnapped, fucking experimented on, and now, Freddie’s dead—”
“What?”
His eyes grew wide. His words held too much weight, too much clarity, as if he was not only trying to convince me but himself.
“Freddie’s dead. He’s really dead, like dead-dead.” His face fell into his hands, his words muffled. “Shit. Shit, fuck, shit. I’ve spent the last six weeks locked in a cell in some fucking facility in the middle of a goddamn forest—”
His words became a jumble of curses and broken information beyond comprehensible. My head hurt, my eyes riveted on this mess of a man crumbled on the ground in front of me. This wreck of a man was Nathan. He was safe—well, at least he was now, but he had been locked up for six weeks? What? Why? His friend was dead due to experiments?
I suddenly felt like the scrap of caffeine-fuelled energy that had been circulating in my body the last half an hour had been absorbed. My legs felt like dead weight as exhaustion hit me right in the face. My temples were hurting, and I felt sick as all the built-up worry and frustration I’d had for the last couple weeks dropped to the pit of my stomach.
None of this made any sense. Nathan was no longer missing, but who would have kidnapped him? Why would they lock him up? Did he have enemies? Was he mixed up in something bad, drugs, or maybe he owed someone money? Why hadn’t he gone straight to the police? Why had he come here? Why to me? Why—
My thoughts ground to a halted as his hands dropped to his lap.
“That’s why Ma hasn’t heard from me, why no one has.” Black blood streaked his pale skin, seeping from the corners of his dark eyes.
The blood in my own veins froze. I couldn’t move. I could hardly breathe. “You’re … you’re crying—”
“Grown men can cry under times of stress, Elle. It’s not that unusual.”
I wasn’t sure if I was about to throw-up or pass out. I felt like I had a typhoon in my stomach, and my head had grown light. Maybe it was due to the early hour. Maybe it was the five-hour nap I’d had—short bouts of sleep often made people feel funny, didn’t they? And I really was freaking exhausted right now. Maybe it was the unexpected shock of seeing an old friend for the first time in a decade, or more how he had approached me after apparently being missing—naked, ill, and rambling like a mad man.
God, if only it could have been any of those reasons, but it wasn’t, and without having to think about it, I’d already tightened the grip on the hilt in my grasp. Despite the tension seizing my muscles, I had already dropped down to one knee, my left arm held high so that the white light of my camera coated his upper body and face.
“Blood.” The words were acid on my tongue, the tip of my sword a mere two inches from the Vampire’s jugular. “You. Are. Crying. Blood.”
About the Author
Elizabeth Morgan is a multi-published author of urban fantasy, paranormal,
erotic horror, f/f, and contemporary; all with a degree of romance, a dose
of action and a hit of sarcasm, sizzle or blood, but you can be sure that no
matter what the genre, Elizabeth always manages to give a unique and often
humorous spin to her stories.
Like her tagline says; A pick ‘n’ mix genre author. “I’m not greedy. I just
like variety.”
And that she does, so look out for more information on her upcoming
releases at her website: www.e-morgan.com
Away from the computer, Elizabeth can be found in the garden trying hard
not to kill her plants, dancing around her little cottage with the radio on
while she cleans, watching movies or good television programmes or curled up
with her three cats reading a book.
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Start the series for FREE. She-Wolf (Blood Series: Prequel) is FREE to
download from most online retailers.
