Taken by a Vampire (Vampire Queen) - By Joey W. Hill Page 0,205

to us, where ye belong. Dinnae make me come after you.

Need . . . you . . . to do that. Help. Trying . . .

Try harder.

Arteries exploded, her heart galloping. She’d give anything for one touch from each of their hands. When she went to that abyss, they’d be lost to her forever.

Choice . . . she thought she’d given up choice, but Evan had proven that a lie. In a world where they gave up all other choices, servants retained a single significant decision.

Who they served.

She wanted to make that choice, but it was too late. I’m so sorry. She threw herself against that steel wall, again and again, bloodying herself, breaking bones. She’d lost, but they’d know she’d tried to obey. The walls closed in on all sides, a permanent, fearful coffin.

Evan . . . Niall . . . Masters . . . She went down screaming, fighting. Then her grip slipped, and the fall happened, plunging her into permanent oblivion.

It was utterly horrifying, what the spirit could bear. Hellfire, terror, pain, darkness, suffocation. As she spun through that endless morass of familiar nightmares, she discovered a known nightmare was far worse than a new one. Faced with the unfamiliar, hope could exist for a blink. She had died. This was the Hell Stephen had designed for her to share in their eternal afterlife, for she could feel his howling presence throughout all of it.

She was used to letting go, submitting, so she didn’t fight any longer. There was nothing left to fight for. She existed in that macabre world, in jerky motion under strobe lights. Screams and tears. A soul, cut apart from everything else and plunged into this, had no sense of death or life, Heaven or Hell.

“It may save her . . . she knows how to be empty . . .”

A voice she knew, here then gone. She marched with an army of stumbling, headless children, whose arms fell off and geysered black blood if she touched one of them. They became charred toys.

In a world of horrors, she saw everyone she knew. Adam was the worst, his corpse, his twisted spirit, his screams in the night as she lay wrapped in sharp barbs, unable to help him. But there was someone missing from the never-ending morbid show. She didn’t want to long for them, because the worst nightmare of all would be to have them here. But she couldn’t help it. She was a child in need of the only source of comfort she trusted. As the river of blood eddied and spun, taking her on and on, she needed them there, no matter in what terrible form they’d come. She struggled for anything about them. A scent . . . a touch . . . any memory at all. She needed one single scrap of memory. She couldn’t remember their names. Stephen had taken that from her.

After what seemed like centuries in the place of the eternally damned, she received the miracle of a single moment. Large hands on her face, a Scottish brogue soothing her, another long-fingered hand touching her arm, both holding her . . .

It was a memory, the past, yes, but she clung to it, made it hers, defended it with a futile savagery. She spun a cocoon around it and herself, letting the nightmares do everything else they wished, as long as they didn’t try to touch that cocoon. She could put faces with those hands. Brown eyes, gray eyes. Wanting something from her, demanding something from her.

Her world of fire, of death and decay, despair and pain, started to turn gray. Fiery color leached away, taking all substance and form with it. Before she was aware anything had changed, she was drifting in a storm, where there were lightning flashes and thunder, but she was in the colorless current, oscillating in the eddies. The nightmares boiled onward in the sky above, indifferent. Then everything became gray and still.

She lay there, blinking at the uniform solidity of it. She hadn’t been aware of herself as a body for some time, so it felt like working a puppet when she lifted her own hand. She pushed at the gray. It swirled around her hand, odorless smoke, its coolness clinging to her fingers. Her arm was bloody and thin. Bloody thin, someone might say. It gave her heart a twist, the memory of that voice.

Not just thin. Bone. She was a skeleton herself, her soul a monarch butterfly