Prologue
In his head, Trevor Descansos was screaming, but no sound escaped from his raw, parched throat. He’d lost his voice sometime in the early days of his captivity, and now he had no outlet for the agony that tore at the anchors of his sanity.
Distantly, he heard the voracious suckling of the vampires feeding on him. They chewed on his veins, piercing and gnawing. The pain was like nothing he could ever have imagined. All the times he’d asked a patient to rate their pain on a scale of one to ten seemed so cruel now, and lifetimes away.
Had he once been a hotshot paramedic working toward his medical degree?
He remembered that guy like something he’d seen in a movie once, but then, even movies felt like something he had conjured in his maddened mind.
His reality had dwindled to a room so dark he couldn’t make out shapes or shadows.
Only eyes. Dozens of glowing amber irises, flitting around his body like fireflies as they drank from him.
He’d been in a void for weeks. Or was it months? Dear God… Perhaps it’d been years. His wrists were shackled, and the iron links securing him to the cement block wall were impossibly heavy.
When he’d first been restrained, he could drag the length of chain around, but he hadn’t the strength any longer. An IV line in his arm—steadily pumping fluids and an occasional shot of something that burned like acid in his veins—kept him alive, but it wasn’t enough to keep him strong.
The former Army Ranger medic from the movie in his head was a strapping guy, 6’2” and a solid two hundred and twenty pounds, capable of carrying clinically obese bodies down endless flights of stairs and performing chest compressions for hours.
He had a lot of friends and was popular with women.
He had an older sister who was happily married with three gorgeous kids and one more on the way—
Fangs sank into his femoral artery, making him writhe in torment. He didn’t know what was worse: the creatures who got off on his pain or the ones who got off on his humiliation.
The bites didn’t have to hurt. They could, in fact, deliver unspeakable pleasure.
Some of the creatures weren’t satisfied with simply feeding on him. It wasn’t enough of a kick to smell his fear and hear the panicked beat of his heart. No, they wanted him to suffer in other ways.
Their hands and mouths stroked over his body in a sick semblance of a lover’s caresses, tormenting him mercilessly.
Their fangs injected a fast-acting aphrodisiac into his bloodstream, hardening his cock until it throbbed like an open wound, and he begged for relief, too mindless in his unnatural need to feel any shame. Females mounted him…raped him…laughing…
A low sound escaped him as the memories violated him all over again.
It was a mournful, animalistic sound of utter anguish, and it incited the creatures feeding on him into an even greater frenzy.
His head tilted back, his face uplifted toward the heavens.
He prayed for death. Then he prayed for oblivion in case he was already dead in the bowels of hell and just didn’t know it.
But time passed, and his prayers went unanswered.
If there was a God, he or she had long since forgotten about Trevor Descansos.