Blood Triumphant: The Shattered, #3

By A.C. Sneyd

Love. Danger. And heartache.

Caught and caged by Richard, Aimee has to escape his trap before she goes mad. But her rescue comes at a terrible cost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: A.C. Sneyd
• Release date: Dec 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201860547

A.C. Sneyd

Mother and daughter writing duo. YA fantasy. Love triangles. Magic. A writing duo comprised of long-time published romance author Cathy and her YA novelist daughter, Alice, they've banded together to create exciting young adult stories that centre around strong women characters overcoming life’s challenges, often set in fantasy-essque settings or inspired by fantasy worlds. Cathy lives in the middle of native New Zealand bush and, when she isn’t writing, you can find her drinking tea, mucking about in her vege garden, or chasing after her escaped chickens. (Free range eggs sometimes means going on nature walks to find the latest nesting spot!) Alice spends an inordinate amount of time at her mother’s house and when she is not writing, you can find her chasing waves at the local surf beaches, drawing, dancing and sometimes helping to recapture her mother’s escaped chickens. Cathy and Alice love spending time writing together, and Alice only bosses her mother around occasionally. Writing is a means of expressing themselves, and they consider themselves extremely blessed to get along so well and to have each other to motivate, to bounce ideas off, and to push boundaries in their writing.   Sign up to our newsletter at https://BookHip.com/GJLZRA and receive a FREE copy of The Boy Who Could Fly – the prequel to the exciting new Marlowe Phoenix series, soon to be released.

Book preview

Chapter One

Zane

When I was a young buy, scarcely more than a baby, Cook warned me not to touch the stove. It was hot and would burn me. And burns, she told me, hurt very badly.

It was not that I didn’t believe her. It was simply that even at that age, when I was barely old enough to toddle around on my own two legs, I wanted to be sure that she was telling the truth. I needed to find out for myself. Was the stove actually hot? Would that heat burn me? And did burns really hurt?

So, when Cook’s back was turned, I touched the stove with the flat of my hand.

I didn’t feel anything for a moment, but the smell of burned meat filled the air. It smelled a bit like pork being roasted in the oven for Sunday dinner.

Cook screamed and pulled my hand away, scolding me furiously.

The flesh was charred and blistered. I looked at it with some interest. I had never seen a burn up close before.

And then the pain started.

Eventually my burns had blistered over, and new, pink skin started to form in thick welts. 

By the time I had healed sufficiently to be allowed out of my bedchamber, Cook was gone. In her place was a scowling woman with thick, red hands and a hard stare. There were no more warm sweetmeats for me fresh out of the oven. No more sitting by the stove on a cold day and toasting my feet by the warmth of the fire. 

The new Cook shut the door firmly in my face, ignoring my plaintive wails, and did not let me in.

That was my first lesson: that every action carries with it a natural consequence. My hand eventually healed, and I regained almost full use of it, except that my pinky finger never curled up as tightly as the others. But Cook never returned.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT you would die from hunger? Not the faint gnawing of hunger that has you eyeing up the packets of M&Ms at the gas station checkout even though you know they will make your face break out. Not even that hangry feeling that makes you insanely grumpy and causes you to snap at your mother when she asks you to do the dishes. 

I mean real hunger. 

The actual physical pain, like a hot poker has been stabbed through your torso. The sort of pain that makes you cry out in agony and clutch at your stomach in a wild attempt to get relief.

Then there is the weakness that goes along with it. You try to stand, to walk, to move, to get your mind off that hot poker that is twisting through your stomach. Your legs tremble and every breath comes short and shallow. The pain spreads until you can’t move without agony. It even hurts to breathe.

Nothing can take your mind off your hunger. Your entire body is consumed with the desire to feed.

The hunger aches and gnaws at you, as if your stomach had a mind of its own. As if it were eating you from the inside. As if you are cannibalizing yourself.

That is how I felt, locked in an underground room below Richard’s house, in his parents' modified wine cellar. Richard had designed it himself; modified it from a cool storage room for expensive wine into a prison cell for a vampire. 

Hunger.

Blood.

I pounded on the concrete walls to no avail. My arms were weaker than they were three days ago, when he had first locked me down here. The silver wires Richard had set into the cement weakened me still further. It hurt to get too close to them, and they burned me like fire whenever I accidentally touched one.

My capture had been laughably easy. He’d told me he wanted to hang out, as friends again. Like we were before I was changed. Before I had become not quite human. Before I had turned into a monster.

I should have known from his strange behavior that he didn’t really want to be my friend, but I had so desperately wanted to believe in his good intentions that I had ignored every warning sign. Our mutual friend India had tried to tell me that he still feared and hated me, but I had brushed off her words of caution, not wanting to hear them.

How I wished now that I had listened to her. India did not know I was a vampire, but she had sensed my change, and had drawn away from me. My presence made her uncomfortable; her instincts told her that I was a predator, and she was my prey. I hoped she had been exaggerating Richard’s hatred of me; I hoped maybe that she was warning me away from him out of jealousy because she didn’t want me to get close to him again. He had been half in love with me once, before he started dating India. It seemed like such a long time ago.

Now I knew the horrifying truth. He had never wanted to be my friend.

Instead, he’d tricked me down here and locked me in, behind concrete walls laced with silver, that no kicking or punching would get through. I had spent the last three days trying, but all I had done was hurt my knuckles until they were scraped raw and bruise my feet until I could barely walk.

For the first two days, I thought I’d get through my imprisonment. I’d thought that Richard would turn up and apologize and let me free when he saw the reality of what he was doing to me. 

All he wanted was the one thing I could not give him. He wanted me to be human. He wanted me to eat potato chips and pizza and coffee and chocolate and other human food that I had once loved, and to give up drinking human blood.

Unfortunately for both of us, I couldn’t do it.

Human food no longer nourished me. I needed blood, and that need would not go away, whatever Richard did to me.

On the third day I’d given up on the fantasy that Richard would accept the truth about me and let me out of this prison cell. He hadn’t even come to check on me, let alone had a change of heart to free me. 

And each day I got hungrier and hungrier until my mind started to wander.

On day four I bit my own arm. I thought perhaps I would bleed. Perhaps I could drink my own blood. Perhaps it would be enough to stop me going crazy.

I bit myself and it hurt. A lot. I bit down into my arm until my fangs pierced the skin and my blood flowed freely out. It looked like normal blood, red and thick. But when I went to drink it, the smell revolted me. I licked at my wound and gagged at the taste of my own blood. It tasted like meat that had gone off. 

I thought I’d been hungry before, when I was still a human. 

Once, mom couldn’t afford to buy us groceries because her car had broken down miles from our house and she had to get it towed home. It was shopping day but after getting a tow truck she didn’t have money for our groceries. We had to wait until the next day when she could go into town to get a few emergency supplies with the last of her food stamps. 

That night Simon had the last of the bread and butter and mom and I didn’t eat. I’d never had to go without dinner before, and I’d been so hungry I wanted to cry. 

I could see Simon’s face if I closed my eyes. His eyes screwed up tight as he bites into that last piece of bread. I used to remember that moment so well. My mouth had watered, and I had stared at the bread as it disappeared into his mouth.  Every last crumb.

When I closed my eyes now, I could see Simon biting into that last piece of bread. But when he bites into it, the bread turns red, and then it turns to blood; a fountain of it. Simon tilts his head and drinks. His eyes open and he looks at me, and in his eyes I see my own face reflected, pale and sunken and wrinkled. I’m a hundred years old.

I opened my eyes and slapped myself on the cheek, hard enough to sting. 

Wake up, I told myself. This isn’t real.

I stared around me. I was seated on the floor of packed earth, my back leaning against the locked door that led to the outside. My fingers reached down beside me, and I clawed my fingers into the dirt, leaving inch deep track marks. I felt the grit of the dirt under my nails and let the earth that I’d loosened slip between my fingers. It was grounding. I had to keep bringing myself back to where I was, or the nightmares would take over. 

The daydreams had started on the third day. If you could call them daydreams. They were more like nightmares, but I was awake. I could vividly see things that I knew weren’t really there. 

Spiders. Huge spiders with fangs as long as my arm and staring, red eyes. They hid in the dark corners of the cellar, stretching out a pair of thick, hairy legs like claws in my direction whenever I turned my back on them.

I screamed at them and batted them away, but my hands went right through them. They were not there. Not to touch. But in my mind they were there, lurking, waiting to devour me as soon as I went to sleep. Just as if I were a juicy fly.

The spiders faded but were soon replaced with maggots. White, eyeless, writhing maggots wriggling across the floor. The whole floor was covered in them. Deeper and deeper the swarm of maggots grew until they were up to my knees. 

I clambered on to the boxes of canned food that Richard had left for me, in his ridiculous hope that I would be able to eat human food, but the pile of maggots grew deeper, until it was up to my neck, and then higher. I gagged as I felt them crawl up my nose and down into my mouth. I could feel them burrowing into my eardrums, through my eyeballs. I didn’t dare to scream in case they flooded right down my throat and started to eat me from the inside out.

And through it all was that incessant hunger.

Blood.

I needed blood.

Without it, I would go mad.

Richard came on the fifth day. I think it was the fifth day. I hadn’t dared to turn my back on the spiders for long enough to sleep. 

I heard his heartbeat before anything else. That slow, steady pulse of blood within his veins, and the maggots faded for a moment. I could smell his life. Even stinking of garlic as he did, I could smell the richness of his blood and I wanted it. I needed it. I could devour all of it in an instant, if only I could reach it.

Blood. I craved his blood.

He drew near to the double-barred window. Aimee, are you in there? His voice was soft. Barely more than a whisper. 

Blood. So near. And I was so hungry. With a snarl, I launched myself at the bars, my fangs fully extended, and tried to rip them out of the wall. My own strength surprised me. 

The bars bent but did not break.

He staggered backwards as the bars bent in towards me, his face set in a rictus of horror. No, Aimee. No. You can control your unnatural cravings if you just try hard enough. I know you can.

Come, I ordered him. I’m not sure if I said it out aloud. Was I sane enough to talk still? The compulsion was clear though. Come inside. Come here to me. I want you.

Under the spell of my compulsion, he came closer then and shook the outer set of bars in a futile attempt to dislodge them. I can’t. he whimpered. The way is barred. I am not strong enough.

Through the door, I ordered.

As if he were sleepwalking, he stumbled over to the door and pulled on it. It won’t open, he cried in agony, the pressure of my compulsion hurting him beyond what he could bear. I don’t have the key.

Get the key.

He stumbled off again, the pressure to obey me too great for him to bear, but I knew he would not be back. I could not compel him when he was out of range.

He knew the limits of my power, too. That is why he had left the key behind when he came to visit me. So he could not be forced against his will to let me out.

My compulsion would fade, and he would come to himself again and he would hate me more than ever.

He would not come back with the key. He would never come back with the key. He would not let me out.

I had just proven to him yet again that I was a monster