House of Night (House of Night #1)
Chapter 1
1
Recovered Journal of Dr. Georgia Clark
May 2, Year 1, Emergence Era
Forgetting can be a mercy. I think that’s something I remember hearing in the past. The long past—before the plague and the monsters in the night.
M y eyes have been open so long they start to tear up. But I can’t close them. Not when someone might be coming. No, someone is coming. I feel it in the way my skin prickles in warning, the way the bodies around me begin to shiver, low, fearful moans escaping their throats.
“Don’t.” Someone to my left whimpers, her pale skin almost glowing under fluorescent bars bolted and caged to the stone ceiling high above us. Her eyes are sunken as her gaze strays to the door. She stares just as I do. Waiting. Black bruises mar her neck, and her shirt has long since been torn to shreds. Her small breasts bear similar bruises, puncture wounds that never fully heal. She makes no move to cover herself. We are far past modesty here in this pit. I think she was a senator. Maybe from one of the Western states. I remember my sister holding up a Christmas card with the woman and her family, all of them grinning while brandishing aggressive-looking guns. Not that those did them much good in the end.
The man closest to the door scrambles backwards, knocking the woman over as he tries to find someplace to hide among the dead or dying farther back in the cage. He’s still strong enough to move at decent speed, fresh enough to draw the monster’s attention. That’s our only hope—that we’ll be skipped over for a nicer meal.
I have nowhere to go, no dark corner where I’ll be safe. My back is already to the stone at the side of the cell. It’s twenty feet across and about fifteen deep. I counted out the measurements when I first got here, only a couple of other prisoners cowering against the wall as I searched for some way out, some sort of meaning, some way to make order from the chaos of this horrific new world. I did none of those things. I simply measured out the exact size of our doom. Of our coffin. Of the last place in this hell where our souls will remain.
Someone in the haze of bodies mumbles a prayer. I don’t have faith in anything, and I’m certain her words don’t rise any farther than the ceiling, perhaps falling back down onto us like ash. If I were to pray, it wouldn’t be for salvation or even for survival. It would be for vengeance, the only burning ember left inside my hollow shell.
A whisper in the long hallway sends another shiver through the remaining bodies, even the unconscious ones somehow sensing a predator.
Seventy-two steps. That’s the average of how long the hall is from the door to our prison to some outer door that I’ve never seen. I’ve counted it when a new prisoner is brought, though often they’re dragged by our captors. The jailors barely make a sound as they move, the same as the rest of their brethren, so from them I learn nothing. There are other cells, too, ones filled with the same stew of human suffering and horror. Their screams are nothing but white noise now. I can only assume my screams are the same to them.
Still, I wonder where the hall leads. I know I’ll never find out. I’ve been here longer than most. A month? Perhaps more. I don’t remember exactly. In any case, it’s borrowed time. I lost count like everyone else who tried to keep up by drawing marks on the wall with our own blood. That commodity quickly became far too precious to waste.
Every new arrival comes in bloody and beaten, their eyes empty and haunted. Horrific stories spill from their lips if they’re able to speak. DC is gone. I know that much. Wiped out by the vampires. The newcomers speak of someone they call the “Specter,” the leader of the vampire legions. Merciless, he kills and kills—no human survives in his presence.
Fewer and fewer humans arrive. The other political prisoners brought in with me were drained one by one, picked out and finished off. Only a handful remain. Secretary Shaw, Vince, and Sheila—a page from the White House—are still alive. Sheila doesn’t speak any more, hasn’t said a word since she was brought here a few days after I first woke on this concrete floor. She lies beside me, her body curled into a ball. Vince, once the head of my sister’s security, is awake, but his labored breathing evidences a body ravaged by violence. He should’ve died weeks ago, but he holds on, his eyes opening only when I try to force a morsel of food or a sip of water into his mouth.
A flash of movement outside the bars draws a gasp from several of us. I stare, doggedly intent on meeting my fate with my eyes open. I won’t look away from the creatures who turned our world to a graveyard, who took everything from me.
“Here.” A voice like the first dusting of snow on violets, soft and fragile. I know it well now. “These are the ones.” The vampire stops outside our cell, her long, straight white hair and smooth skin so perfect that the very idea of it defies nature. Before, when I’d see images of friends or even celebrities using too many filters to cover their plague marks, they’d look like this. Unearthly and smooth, devoid of anything that suggests age or breath or frailty. She’s that perfection at all times. A doll’s face to cover a demon’s soul. “He wants three to give as gifts. High ranking, preferably. Do we have any left worth offering?”
The guard unlocks the cage door. He’s Blood Dragonis. How do I know that? My head throbs when I focus on the knowledge, the thought disappearing like a snake slithering off into pitch black.
The guard swings the door open. I’ve seen him before, his pale eyes boring into me as he’s killed others. I feel like I knew him before my time in this cage, but I can’t quite place him. There’s a lot I lost when I was captured and interrogated, my thoughts scraped out of me by torture or pulled from my veins by another of the Blood Dragonis. By Whitbine, the interrogator. Bile rises in my throat at the thought of him.
The white-haired one walks into the cell, her crisp black suit tailored perfectly to her long, elegant limbs. She steps daintily across a small pool of vomit, her silver heels barely clicking as she surveys the room.
Pointing a long finger tipped with a sharp nail, her eyes narrow on Vince. “This one. He was with the president. Close to her.”
Her words hit me like a gut punch, grief and rage rising and swirling until I have to take a deep breath just to stay lucid, to stay here . Not back on the night it happened. The night the entire world fell apart. The night I can’t remember despite weeks of trying. The torture was absolute, my memory stolen and gone.
I can’t let her take Vince. The last vestige of my old life.
“He’ll do.” She twirls a finger. “Bring him.”
I lean toward Vince, shielding him with my thin body as best I can. Black spots swim in my vision at the simple act of sudden movement, my heart pounding and sweat breaking out across my brow as I lift a shaking arm to bar the guard from touching him.
The guard knocks me back, my head cracking against the wall sharply as he lifts Vince with one hand and carries him from the cell. Vince moans, his eyes opening and finding mine as I push myself back to a sitting position. Breathing hard, I don’t have the strength to do anything more. He disappears down the hall. Seventy-two steps and he’ll be gone forever. Tears prick behind my eyes, but none come.
The ethereal monster toes the body of a woman still wearing bits of military fatigues. “It’s still alive. Take it.”
The guard is already back, and he grabs the woman and leaves again. No one protests. No one does anything except try to survive.
“One more.” She clucks her tongue and turns toward me again, her gaze going to Sheila.
“Hmm.” She steps across a few more bodies and kneels with a grace any cat would envy. She gives the slightest sniff, her eyes narrowing. “Already dead.” She rises with a perturbed sigh.
“No.” My voice barely makes it past my lips in an ugly rasp. I press my palm to Sheila’s forehead. She’s cold. She must’ve passed in the last few hours. I’d given her my share of water only yesterday. Or was it two days ago? I don’t know, but she’s cold now, her body curled in on itself yet unable to find comfort. She couldn’t have been more than 20.
A sob catches in my chest, but I bite it back.
The monster turns, her gaze finally fixing on mine. “And who is this?”
“Me.” A weak voice carries from the back of the cage. “Take me.”
Her head snaps toward the sound, and she moves quickly to it. A spider picking its way across its web.
“I remember you.” The man coughs, a wheezing sound seesawing from his lungs as he sits up. That’s when I realize it’s Secretary Shaw speaking. His voice is cracked and hoarse, but I know his sharp tone.
“Do you?” She lifts him from the floor, dangling him in the air. His brown skin is faded, and one side of his face is deeply clawed and infected, swollen and oozing. The mark of Blood Tantun. “And what is it you think you know about me, dog?” she asks softly. A voice of beauty. A voice of pain.
He smiles, his lips bloody. “You’re one of your boss’s least favorite whores.” He spits in her face.
She throws him against the back wall in a blur, the spittle missing her as she moves like a ghost, so fast it sends alarm bells blaring in my human mind, warning of a danger so visceral I feel myself freeze.
Catching him by the throat again, she squeezes until his eyes bulge and several cracks reverberate from his twitching, struggling body. With nothing but the faintest effort, her hand closes, severing his head in a burst of blood. Again, she steps away so quickly that not a drop touches her. Then she’s standing in the cell’s doorway, her hair still a silken waterfall, her suit unblemished. There’s not a mark of temper on her—no color in her icy cheeks or dead eyes. There’s nothing there.
Then she turns her gaze on me again, and with a tone as cold as Sheila’s body, she says, “I suppose this one will have to do.”