My head was pounding.

I tried to open my eyes, but my eyelids wouldn’t cooperate. I rolled over and hugged my pillow, but my brain cells lurched with the movement, and I thought I was going to vomit. I swallowed. My throat felt like it was filled with sand. This must be a hangover, I thought, but I didn’t remember drinking any alcohol the previous night.

I tried to recall what I drank, but I couldn’t think through the relentless hammering inside my skull.

Try to think of something easier… what did I have for dinner?

My brain couldn’t even get a grip on that. Something was niggling away inside my head like an itch, something about Tilly. Was she ill? Did I feed her? No, Dad fed her because I was going out to meet someone… someone who wanted to tell me something. Something important, secretive.

My eyes flew open as memories of what had happened the previous night came smashing through the relentless hammering in my brain.

I wasn’t hugging my pillow because I wasn’t in my own bed. My forehead was pressed against red velvet. The gold embroidered cushion squeezed against my chest was damp where I’d been dribbling. I sat up too fast, then closed my eyes again and held my head still with both hands until the room stopped spinning.

When it was safe to open them again, I was relieved to see that I was still dressed in my own clothes, my jeans and trainers. I was on a chaise longue I didn’t recognise in a room I didn’t know, but I wasn’t tied up. 

Every nightmare abduction scenario came rushing into my mind.

It must have been Sebastian Kane. He brought me here, but how had he done this to me? 

Where the hell was I? And more importantly, how was I going to get out?

Kane must’ve drugged me somehow or switched my coffee for the one he’d already ordered for me. I’d felt dizzy, compliant, not able to control my own actions. 

I tried to stand, but my legs were too weak and I fell back onto the chaise-lounge with a gasp.

“Will that be all?” a voice behind me said.

Was someone speaking to me?

“What?” I mumbled, my swollen tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth.

A man was standing beside me, his face expressionless. He was wearing a black jacket and white-collared shirt with a red tartan bowtie around his neck. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he spoke, his neck seeming too wide for his narrow bony face. He wasn’t much taller than me.

“Your food,” he gestured to a silver tray on the floor at his feet. “Will that be all?”

“Food, what... who are you? How did I get here?”

“All in good time,” the man nodded. “The master will see you presently, but he wanted to make sure you were properly fed.”

The old man turned and walked away, towards the only door in the room. He smiled back at me with crooked front teeth when he reached the door, but I didn’t register the smile.

I was staring at his left wrist. A thick cut had left his whole left hand bloodied. Saliva filled my mouth at the sight of the rich red liquid.

I glanced down at the silver cup on the silver tray. The cup filled with the red stuff. Without thinking, I reached for the blood-filled goblet with a shaky hand, only to knock it over. I cried with frustration as the liquid splashed onto the carpet and started to sink into it. 

I couldn’t recall ever having craved something so badly.

Without wasting a second, I rolled off the chaise-lounge and onto my knees on the carpet. I started licking the blood from the thick pile, my tongue rasping and scraping as I tasted the tang of iron. Desperate to drink as much as the stuff before the carpet fibres absorbed it all.

Yeah. Gross, I know. I was doing it before I even realised.

As soon as I started to swallow the blood, my headache receded. Strength began to return to my limbs. The room stopped spinning, and I stopped feeling like I had the worst hangover in the world. My brain and senses came back into focus. I wasn’t just free from the hangover, though. It was much more than that.

The blood made me more alert and alive than I could ever recall feeling. 

A minor wave of dizziness passed over me as I guessed the implications of all of this.

I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.

I sensed movement in the room’s corner and spun around to see a man sitting in an overstuffed leather armchair, legs crossed so that one ankle rested on his knee.

Sebastian Kane.

He was watching me and smiling.

Had he been here this whole time? I couldn’t tell.

“I see you’re enjoying the little meal I had prepared for you.”

I glanced down at the blood on the carpet. I tasted it in the back of my throat and on my lips, and even as I ran my tongue across the back of my teeth, my fingers were creeping towards the next stain. I waited for my cheeks to flare with embarrassment, but they remained cold.

“What have you done to me?”

I already knew the answer, but I needed to hear it said out loud.

“Nothing you’ll be unhappy about in the long-term, I assure you,” he said.

I stare at the bloodstained carpet.

“You’re a vampire,” I said, “Aren’t you?”

Kane nods, as if he’s pleased with me. 

“And so, now, are you,” he adds

“I…” I shook my head. “No, I can’t be.”

“Do you often go around licking blood from carpets?”

He smiled his irritating, arrogant smile.

The idea refused to sink in. I was a vampire. Sebastian Kane had turned me into a vampire. Even though I’d spent months accessing and decoding files about the supernatural world, it had still never quite seemed real. The monsters and threats contained within the classified files and coded messages had been abstract data and information, not actual, concrete things.

I had still been, in the back of my mind, half convinced it was all a big hoax. Perhaps a practical joke, even.

It didn’t seem funny now.

I’m a vampire.

“Why??” I screamed at him.

I pounced on him, filled with confusion and anger, but he was impossibly fast. He dodged my punch and had my arms twisted behind my back before I realised that he’d even left the armchair.

I wriggled, trying to release my arms, but his grip was like cold steel. I let my arms go slack and then leaned forwards, throwing all my weight to the floor to catch him off-guard, but he didn’t budge, and I winced with the pain in my arms.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said. “And if I were you, I’d choose the easy way. It’ll save a lot of energy and you have little of it at the moment, anyway.”

I nodded once.

“Let me go. I’ll listen.”

He released the grip on my arms, and my shoulders sagged with relief. I swung my arms back and forth to stretch the muscles and sat back down on the chaise longue. Sebastian Kane was already back in the armchair, as if he had never moved. I’d never seen anything move so fast.

“As you must have gathered by now, I’ve been watching you for a while—”

“You’ve been stalking me,” I said, my voice flat.

Older male vampire stalking a young teenage girl whilst making out that its romantic is one of the oldest cliches in the book. 

This definitely wasn’t that.

“Stalking is a little harsh. Monitoring you,” he conceded, “Yes. I’ve been monitoring you for some time now, Alice…”