Beyond The Walls (NOW ON AMAZON!!!)

The Cabin

Hadley couldn't believe her bad luck! She hadn't made it more than five hundred meters away from the Compound walls before getting lost – she'd been marking her trail with broken branches and had walked up to one of her trail marks after half an hour of traipsing through challenging terrain. Then, after thinking she was finally making progress, she'd ran into a vampire. And on its own, that had been fine. She'd used her carving knife coated in dead rabbit and cow's blood, as Aunt Zee had instructed her, and it had worked like a charm. She'd disarmed the vampire.

Only to find out that it was a Venom vamp!

Aunt Zee had assured Hadley that Venoms weren't anything to worry about. They were created on extremely rare occasions during a vampire Turning. No one knew why, but when they appeared, they were killed immediately after the Turn, before they fed, when they were at their weakest. They were never allowed to exist because that would be bad for everyone. Venom vamps were supposed to be ghost stories told to keep Wildling children well behaved! Although this wasn't a Venom vamp as Aunt Zee had described, with two neon blue eyes when blood starved and an insatiable, barely controlled thirst even when fully fed. But there was a part of it that was. Like a hybrid.

Aunt Zee had never mentioned vampire hybrids before!

Hadley could barely open her eyes. She was on a bed. It was soft. Fuzzy. Smelt amazing. She was lightheaded and confused. In shock. She recognised the symptoms and knew the cause. Excessive blood loss. She wasn't in the forest anymore. Wherever she was, it was warm, with a heavy scent of wood and earth and something else she couldn't quite place. Something dark. Dark and delicious. She was in a room of some kind. Hadley heard a rustling sound on the far side of the room.

"I'm giving you a Hb shot."

Hadley's eyes shot open. She backed away from the vampire, who was suddenly sitting right next to her, even though she had clearly been on the other end of the room just a second before. The vampire gave her a sheepish grin.

"Sorry about that. Hyper speed. It works best after a good feeding, but it's difficult to maintain. Drains you too fast." the vampire rambled.

Hadley's mind was straining to decipher words, her body sluggish and out of it. Her eyes lazily followed the vampire's movement as she took Hadley's hand in her own and gently administered a haemoglobin shot. That was good. It would help Hadley recover from the blood loss. But this was all too strange. Especially the uncharacteristic tenderness with which the vampire was treating her after what had happened in the forest. Hadley pulled her hand away from the vampire, unnerved by the emotional whiplash.

"What do you want?" Hadley whispered. She tried to keep her face stoic despite the storm of emotions inside her. She could barely focus enough to push the emotions into the darkness.

The vampire stood and stretched, revealing the flawless pale white skin of an impressively toned torso under the jungle green t-shirt. In the slight delirium caused by her blood loss, Hadley felt a rush into every sensitive part of her body as she watched the vampire move, and her stomach exploded into a fluttering kaleidoscope of butterflies, her heart racing. After the vampire stretched, she ran a hand through her hair, pulling it back from her face, which Hadley decided was an action she could watch her do for hours. That's until the vampire began to pull off that jungle green tee.

Everything seemed to slow down.

The vampire's jeans hang low on her waist, a deep V etched into her skin pointing down to where Hadley very much wanted to explore. As the shirt lifted higher, Hadley almost sighed at the revelation of a full, exquisite chest to go with that perfectly etched torso. Hadley was starting to wonder if this was what dying felt like. Because none of this made sense. This vampire threatened Hadley's life! Hadley didn't need Aunt Zee to tell her this one thing. Vampires and humans didn't mix. Couldn't mix. It was the one thing every human and vampire intrinsically agreed on.