Uncontained

By Zoe Cannon

I spent my life fighting vampires for the Agency. Now I'm one of them.

 

I learned the wrong people's secrets, and they put me in a shallow grave. They didn't expect me to rise from it. Now I've got a second chance to find out who's behind the conspiracy that got me killed.

 

If I can control the bloodlust long enough.

 

This short story is 9400 words long. It is also available in The Fire Inside, a fantasy short story collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zoe Cannon
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215157664

Book preview

Uncontained

Zoe Cannon

© 2023 Zoe Cannon

http://www.zoecannon.com

All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Uncontained

I opened my eyes to darkness. Grit immediately cascaded down onto my eyeballs. No matter how hard I tried to blink it away, it just kept coming. For the first few seconds, that was the only thing that made it into my consciousness—the constant feeling of something in my eye, and the impenetrable darkness. Then, slowly, my awareness expanded, and I realized something was pressing on my chest. No, pressing on every inch of my skin, all around me, tightening, suffocating. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.

I tried to suck in a breath, and inhaled dirt instead. It was when I was trying to cough it out, only to have more dirt pour into my mouth with every attempt, that I realized it was the first breath I had taken since I had opened my eyes.

I still wasn’t breathing. Just coughing, and coughing, and coughing. And yet I didn’t feel the lack.

That, finally, was what switched on my panic. My hands tore at the dirt, like I was trying to do the breaststroke while lying on my back. The dirt moved aside easily, but more always poured in to take its place. I tightened all my muscles at once, and kicked out, and surged up—

My hands met something hard. My fingers tightened around it. A shovel, maybe. My arm flailed back and forth, sweeping dirt in all directions as I strained for the surface. If there was a surface.

My head broke free. I blinked the dirt away, and could finally see. Shadowed figures all around, dark shapes stretching for the sky, each with a hundred hands reaching down toward me. I blinked again. Trees. And above, barely visible through the leaves, a full moon.

I sucked in a grateful breath as I pulled the rest of my body free from the dirt. Again, the realization didn’t come until a couple of seconds later—I hadn’t breathed out of reflex. I had done it because I knew it was what I was supposed to do. Experimentally, I emptied my lungs, and didn’t fill them again. I counted the seconds, one two three, taking refuge in the numbers.

Somewhere between fifty and one hundred, the numbers stopped being a refuge. I could hold my breath for three minutes underwater—it had been part of my training. I still remembered the burning in my lungs as I stared up at the surface, trying to stay still but reflexively kicking out against the chain Melina had used to anchor