Page 2 of Taste of Death

The figure spoke in a language that I’d never heard before, filled with rolling, harsh syllables. And yet I understood every word.

“You are not dead yet, human girl. My blood is in your veins and you are not finished.”

She brought a palm up as if to shove me, never making contact, but I felt the force of it all the same.

I fell backward as if I had mass, a body. The weight of muscle, bone, breath and life, came over me like I was shouldering a backpack. It all rushed back. Aches and pains, anxieties and fears.

My mouth opened to cry out, but the rush of air in my lungs was too overwhelming to make any sound. It felt like I hadn’t taken a breath in days.

I was no longer dead.

And I was no longer human.

Chapter 1

Amy

Two weeks later

Ihugged the pillow tighter to my stomach, as if more pressure would soothe the cramping and aching. It felt like my stomach was trying to fold itself into one of those little paper triangles Tavia and I used as kids to write notes to each other. Menstrual cramps times a hundred.

Not even crippling depression could make me ignore how hungry I was.

“Amy?” A gentle hand came to my shoulder. I knew without looking that Bea’s brow was furrowed with concern. “Amy, I don’t think we can put this off any longer.”

I ignored her and squeezed the pillow tighter, shutting my eyes against the waves of pain rolling through me. It didn’t matter if my eyes were open or not. I always saw myself in that mirror when I woke up.

My blue eyes were set in black, no whites to be seen. Fangs grew longer when I was most hungry, like now. There was an inhuman smoothness to my face, and I was never going to be able to see the sun at its peak brightness again.

And yet I couldn’t even call myself a vampire. Vampires were born, just like any other living creature. They were powerful and they ruled this world.

I was something else. Abrusang. A freshly dead human brought back to life with a vampire’s blood.

Tavia had done this to me, which was precisely why I’d barely spoken to her in the past two weeks.

“I’m going to get Tavia,” Bea said in her sweet, gentle voice before her hand lifted away.

Like me, Bea was a brusang. In the few moments I’d been lucid and not drowning under the surface of my depression, I learned that she’d been turned about twenty years ago. One vampire had attempted to murder her, and another had saved her life by giving her his blood.

It was apparently some heroic thing he did; I wasn’t entirely sure. The guy who saved her was now imprisoned by another vampire clan, serving a life sentence.

My situation was not anything nearly as romantic. A horde of vampires attacked Sapien, my home and the only all-human settlement in the vampire-ruled territory of Sanguine. It was broad daylight and the attacking vampires were hopped up on some drug that allowed them to be unharmed by the sun’s rays. And that wasn’t the only strange thing.

They didn’t just drink people’s blood—they mauled us like animals. Several people died, myself included. Why was I the unlucky one to be brought back?

The answer was Tavia, or more specifically, her vampire mate, Cyan. She was so overcome with grief at my death that she begged him to give me his blood. Apparently the turning process for a brusang had roughly 50-50 odds of being successful.

Lucky fucking me.

I heard Tavia’s heartbeat before her approaching footsteps. That was the weirdest thing, hearing heartbeats as clearly as any other noise people made. For the first few days, I thought heartbeatswerefootsteps.

“Ames?”

She stopped a few feet away. How pathetic I must have looked from her perspective, rotting on a couch, wrapped in blankets and pillows.

Not that it was anything new for me. Even when I was human, I felt pathetic. I had been born six weeks premature with an underdeveloped aortic valve that gave me a heart murmur. I also had lifelong asthma. What a combo.

As a result, I’d always been smaller and weaker than average. Tavia was three years younger than me, but at ages seven and ten, we’d been the exact same height. When we became adults, she grew tall and strong, while I remained kid-sized. On a good day, I was a whole five feet tall.

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