Page 21 of The Midnight Order
I tell myself all the voices I’m hearing and my kidnapping, which I vaguely remember, are all in my head, but someone wipes my mouth with a warm cloth, and my eyes fly open to see a man crouching in my vomit to clean me up.
“You’re alright now,” he tells me, and warmth spreads through my body, along with alarm and fear.
His eyes are red behind the partial mask on his face.
“It was you,” I whisper, not taking my gaze from his. “You were watching me.”
A throat clears. “Actually, that was me.”
My eyes flick to where another masked man has his hand up.
Red eyes are in his sockets, and the mask makes him indiscernible from the others, besides the two tattoo sleeves running the length of his arms and his muscular build.
The man in front of me is equally tall, but his body is more lithe than the man who admitted to stalking me.
“Who are you? Wait,” I sit up, “tell me I’m not in the creepy manor.”
There are two more men behind me.
One is in a suit and matching mask, and the other has no shirt on, and his muscles should be studied for their rigid perfection.
They, too, wear white partial masks and have red eyes.
“Hey, I’ll have you know we take pride in this manor, and it’s not creepy.”
I rub my temples and close my eyes.
I can’t do this right now.
“Lowell,” the one in the suit warns.
The one who was stalking me put his hands up. “Just saying.”
“What are you? Who are you? Where am I?”
Fear is becoming an odd bedfellow, and I’m sure that once my hangover fades, latent anxiety will be my best friend again.
“We are what’s left of the original vampiric lines, better known as the Midnight Order, and you are here to be tested,” the one who cleaned me tells me plainly, and I’m thankful for it.
My mind is whirring like a glitching computer. “Tested for what?”
“Tested to see if you’re the key,” he answers.
I leave him space to tell me what I might be the key to, raising my brows as if to coax him on.
“The key to our curse,” he finally sighs.
Vampires?
Chapter 7
Silver
Curses?Vampires?
Sitting up on the hospital bed, I look around the room. The men are enormous, even the one in the pristine Brioni suit. It smells like a hospital room in here. Not like I'm in the manor of death I've heard about from the locals.
My fingers coil into the starched blankets beneath me, and I shift on the bed.
