Escaping from the Vampire Rogue- Chapter 7
Published: February 23, 2020
7
KAYLA
“Dad!” Kayla raced into the house.
Inside of her living room, an uneasiness settled between
her clavicles and forced a knot to form in her throat. Something was wrong, but
looking around her ancestral home, she couldn’t tell what it was. Everything looked
the same.
Same oversized mustard couch with the one well-loved cushion that sank when anyone sat in it. The same frayed rug that her father had been mending since her toe caught in its frays when she’d just started walking. The same television neither of them watched. This room hadn’t changed in over 20 years. Yet, something was different.
She shook herself from the thought. It was probably the magic
threatening to explode from her fingertips at any minute. Her fire palms were eager
for destruction ever since she crawled around the vampire to get into the house.
Reflexively, she glanced down at them then at the bite mark on her arm.
Strange.
Fresh skin healed over where the vampire’s fangs
penetrated her. The mark was gone. And so were the purple veins protruding from
it. Her palms stopped glowing, the heat in them vanished.
She hadn’t imagined what happened between her and the vampire.
Had she?
A rustling at the back corner of the house caught her attention. It was late, but her father wasn’t a stranger to staying up in the wee hours of the morning to pour over the old texts.
“Hey,” she said a bit louder from the living room. “It’s
me. I…”
The words jammed in her throat at a loss for words.
Nerves that were impossible to swallow gathered at the
back of her throat when more rumbling came from his office and he hadn’t
responded.
“Dad?”
Kayla stumbled through the house. Her feet felt like there
were hot coals underneath them. The adrenaline was starting to wear off and the
pain was starting to seep in.
The hallway was dark, which was not unlike her father to
keep the entire house that way while he poured-over old manuscripts late into
the night. But steeped in shadows, it gave her the creeps.
Gingerly, she moved to the short distance it took to get
to the hallway that housed the back room that was once her bedroom. At 16 she
moved down into their finished basement for more privacy and her father converted
her old bedroom into his new office.
“Dad?”
Rounding the corner, she relaxed a little. A dim light
glowed under the closed door. He must have been deep in concentration and didn’t
hear her. There was comfort in knowing that everything was okay with him even
though she was in shambles. She put on a brave face and finished her trek down
the hall.
“Hey,” she called again now that she was a bit closer.
“I’m home.”
Just outside of his office door, any relief she may have had vanished. The rustling she thought she’d heard from the front room sounded like books were being thrown across the room hitting each and every corner before being hurtled back across.
“Dad?” She shook as she placed the hand on the doorknob
then frantically pushed it open.
Inside, nothing made sense.
What could only be described as a cross between a funhouse
and a werewolf horror film greeted her eyes. Deep purple swirls ricocheted
across the walls, pulling books and papers into a tight tornado around two
figures in the center.
She recognized her father’s flash of midnight black hair
blowing in the vortex, but the thing he was fighting was the stuff of
nightmares. She’d seen her fair share that night, but compared to the half-man
half-wolf in front of her, even the vampire she’d shared a car with seemed like
a baby bunny in comparison.
The creature monopolized a fair amount of the available
space around her father’s heaping stacks of books. Dwarfing her father who
stood at over six feet tall, its gnarled body hunched. If it stood to its full
height, its head would have been scalped by the ceiling. Its claws, sharp like thick
fishing hooks, swiped at her father.
Another book careened across the room but bounced off the creature like he was made of rubber.
Swirls of purple scattered up her father’s body, when the werewolf attacked again. Its sharp claws tried to dig at his stomach. But like a slip and slide, his claws seemed to glide away unable to catch. It bared its teeth in frustration, growling menacingly at her father, then swiped wildly until, by chance, its hook-like claws caught the back of her father’s neck.
She gasped.
Big mistake.
The monster’s face whipped toward her. Its eyes glowed gold, recognizing her presence hovering the doorframe.
Ice raced through her veins, freezing her solid. Her lungs seized. The color of the werewolf’s eyes morphed into a deep bone-chilling blood-red.
“Kayla?” Her father’s question snatched her attention
from the creature.
It let her father go and prowled toward her. The purple
light that had been wrapped around her father’s body dropped like a coil of
heavy rope and slithered across the floor. It coiled around the beast’s ankles
causing it to collapse with a thud. It clawed at the floor, digging its
hook-like nails into the hardwoods trying to get to her.
Kayla jumped back. Two steps brought her flush against
someone else. She yelped at the sudden unwelcomed hardness she felt. When she
tried to turn around a large rough hand squeezed over her face covering her
nose and her mouth making it hard for her to breathe.
Oh no, it’s happening again.
Flashes from earlier that night clouded her vision. She
was going to be taken from her own home. The place that’d been her sanctuary
since she was born.
She tried to scream for her father but was cut off as a man dragged her down the hall. The last thing she saw was the werewolf, half-man half-beast, rising to his feet again and cornering her father in his office.
She contorted her body, flailing to break free.
At that moment, a mutinous thought crept up in her mind.
If she hadn’t suppressed her magic, she could’ve helped. She could’ve helped
everyone. Even Breanne. She’d give anything to have it explode from her, make
an uncontrollable wildfire so that whoever was dragging her wouldn’t take her
again.
He yanked her into the kitchen just as something broke through the window. Crawling over the chrome faucet, a wolf that barely fit in through the windowpane, growled at her.
She fought harder.
How did they catch up so fast?
She tried to look up, look over, to do anything but the
hand over her mouth and the man vice grip around her body made it impossible.
“Let her go,” the most welcomed voice she’d ever heard warned behind her. She thought she’d left him at the truck, but by divine luck, he came back for her.
The wolf snarled, then leaped from her countertop directly at her.
She recoiled, but its rough fur grazed her arm as it sailed
past her and to the vampire behind her.
The figure holding her yanked her around to face the
vampire who’d dared provide them resistance. Two wolves darted up the front
steps behind Garrick, who seemed much more massive in her living room than he
had been at the truck. Tall and thick muscled, he stood like a wrestler ready
for a grudge match. Albeit, a very much outnumbered grudge match.
He didn’t seem worried. Garrick didn’t play defense this
time, he didn’t run.
The wolf from the kitchen window pounce on him, clawing up his body before sinking his teeth into his arm, gouging a piece of it. With a groan of pain, Garrick jerked free of them wolf then grabbed its muzzle and squeezed until she heard a sickening crunch.
Her stomach squeezed.
The wolf yelped, then cowered away tail between its legs. The man holding her mouth released her and stepped toward the vampire in her living room. In the same beat, the twin grey wolves on her front porch slipped inside.
“You have a choice,” Garrick said when the others drew
closer. “You can leave now and this will be forgotten.”
The words didn’t match his demeanor. Everything from the
look on his face to the way his body seemed to mirror the wolves circling him
said he didn’t plan on letting anyone leave alive.
The man responded to Garrick with a growl that came from
deep within his throat, warning him to back off.
The match seemed set, opponents on their mats, but
suddenly a thunderous boom came from her father’s office.
“Oh my god. Dad!” She screamed. Thoughts of how
dangerous it was to go back there didn’t even enter her mind as she raced down
the hallway and back into her father’s office.
A thick cloud of dark smoke billowed from the room. Fire crept up the walls, stemming from the creature her father pinned against a stack of books with his magic. Embers burned inside of the werewolf’s chest, sparking and igniting as her father pressed his magic inside of it. The creature’s jaw gnawed and snapped at her father, trying to get away. It swiped its claws, but it was out of reach. Standing a few feet from the creature, her father was out of harm’s ways and okay.
Her father’s deep brown eyes found hers.
“Kayla!”
The fire burst in a plume. The heat of the flames
pressed her into the wall outside of the door.
“Just step through,” he said. “We need to go.”
On the other side of the hall, she could hear Garrick
fighting the wolves. From the sound of furniture being thrown and bodies colliding,
it sounded dirty. The lunch brawls she’d witnessed had nothing on the gauntlet that
had become her living room.
She looked over her shoulder down the hall. Shadows jumbled
against the wall in a mess of commotion.
“Kayla, let’s go!” Her father ordered.
She couldn’t leave the vampire behind.
“What do you mean no?” Her father roared. “Get over here
now. I can’t break the circle.”
Her eyes danced around the room. There was no circle. The fire burst causing her to slam into the sidewall outside of her father’s office. There was no way she was going to ever get through that to her father’s hand.
“Come on,” he encouraged. “Your magic will protect you.”
That was the thing. She wasn’t sure she still had her
magic. The tonic should have worn off by now, but her magic hadn’t come back. She
thought it did back in the car when the vampire bit her, but any sign of its
presence vanished the moment she walked into her father’s house.
“I-I can’t,” the tears stung in her eyes. This was the
moment, she told him. This entire night had been her fault. If she hadn’t taken
that damn tonic none of this would be happening. She could’ve broken out of the
warehouse. She wouldn’t have been abducted in the first place. But the words wouldn’t
form.
The brawl in her living room spilled into the hallway.
“Garrick!” she screamed when a jumble of bodies eclipsed
the entrance.
For a moment, she saw his angular face look up to her
before he ripped through the mass of wolves attacking him and sprinted to her.
The beast under her father’s magic shifted, seemingly gaining strength.
“We’re running out of time. Come on, give me your hand.”
In an instant, Garrick’s dress shirt was off of his body
and covering her face and arms as he pressed through the flames threatening to overtake
the doorway and to her father.
Her palms were sweaty, but her father’s grasp was
strong. For a moment, nothing but stillness filled the room like time suddenly ceased
to exist and everyone was frozen.
The werewolf beast scrambling to his feet, the wolves racing down the hallway, the books and papers hovering in midair, all put on pause, stuck in stasis.
Then, ice-cold blackness consumed her and they were gone.
I’m on a roll this week!
A New Chapter will be available Wednesday, February 26
Author’s Note: I am on a roll this week! This will be a 2-parter for sure. I’m half-way through chapter 8 and you wanted answers and answers you’ll get, that’s for sure! No voting this week, but I’m hoping to make it up to you with a dual update!
Chapter 8 will go live on Wednesday
Chapter 9 will go up on Sunday
See you then!
-Sabrina
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Post Note: Did ya’ll see that Amazon is giving away 2 free months of Kindle Unlimited?! Yo, if I didn’t already have KU, I would be snatching that all the way up. (BTW I tried, they wouldn’t let me.) I’m not sure how long they’re going to have this promotion. So, if you’re interested, you can get *2-Months of Kindle Unlimited Free Here.
*Affiliate Link- Full disclosure, if you sign up for KU through my link, I make a small commission from Amazon. (It’s the Zon, they’re cheapskates, it’s not that much $) But it will help pay for the production costs for Rogue including the cover design and editing if you do decide to join.
