So they drank.
And drank, and drank, and drank.
“Is she a guest or a sale?” the guard asked, clicking his fingernails together disinterestedly.
“Sale,” Franklin said.
The guard’s bored sigh trailed into his words. “Twenty-fifth floor. They’ll process her before the party.”
Franklin dragged me toward the elevator. Once inside, he straightened his suit jacket. He looked a little absurd, like a pit bull dressed up in a tuxedo. It didn’t work on him at all, and his discomfort was laughably apparent.
With rough touches, he adjusted my sweater over my faded jeans. My clothes weren’t nearly nice enough for whatever we were about to walk into, but my attire wasn’t going to be the focus of the night, and Franklin knew that.
I twisted my hands in front of myself as the elevator rose through the building.
When it dinged and opened onto the twenty-fifth floor, I swallowed. We entered a nondescript lobby, with a female vampire at a reception desk. Gray sheath dress. Deep purple manicured nails painted to hide their unnatural color. Her sallow, veiny skin and dark eyes told me she hadn’t fed lately.
“Your name?” she asked crisply.
“Franklin Oberian,” he said, his hand tightening on my wrist painfully.
“Sale?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She looked me up and down. “Last door on the right for processing.”
The last door on the right opened into a large hotel room filled with a flurry of activity. At least ten other vampires crowded the room, each with a human. Two vampires sat at a table by the window. Their red and black uniforms told me they were part of Origin, the organization hosting this auction. Owned by vampire royalty, they were responsible for keeping vampire secrets hidden and well-guarded.
Franklin fidgeted as we waited our turn. When we got up to the table, the indifferent vampire didn’t say a word before taking my measurements and blood pressure. After that, he pushed up the arm of my sleeve and took my blood, filling several vials with it.
Finally, he dipped his thumb into a dish of blackish-red blood and placed a thumbprint on the back of each of my hands. With a whispered word in Estrerian, the vampire language, the blood lit with blue magic. These marks told everyone at the auction that I was a sale piece, not meant to be touched or harmed. They also gave Origin the ability to track me, not that I would be stupid enough to try to escape from a building full of vampires.
“Her name?” the vampire asked Franklin.
“Trixie.”
“I see here the minimum bid price is set to 22,500 dollars. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” Franklin said, and I could almost hear his eagerness.
I swallowed a laugh. That was all I was worth. That was higher than the cattle at the last auctions I’d attended, but it felt like a lame amount of money for an entire human life. If Franklin tried hard enough, he could stretch that sort of money into a year’s worth of blood. Or more, if I went for a higher price. He’d probably learned from the past year that dragging around a human was more trouble than it was worth.
His frustration with me was evident from the bruises on my body, but at least he was smart enough to think of selling me, rather than just killing me out of annoyance.
The vampire made notes on his laptop, tagged the vials with my name, and then waved us to the left. “Take the stairs up one level. The party has already started. The auction is in four hours,” he said, his eyes not even on us anymore as Franklin led me away.
I tugged my sleeves down over my hands because there was nothing else I could do to control anything about myself or my fate.
Chapter 3
Vampires were strange.
From what I could tell, they only seemed to share two things. They needed to drink blood to survive, and their society was governed by extensive rules. Rules for everything. Keeping their world a secret, making new vampires, interacting with each other…and probably a million things I had no idea about because Franklin didn’t spend a lot of time explaining things to me.
Beyond that, there was no telling what any given vampire I met would be like.
They possessed personalities of all kinds. Social statuses of all kinds. Races, genders, and sexual orientations of all kinds. Hobbies. Proclivities. Lifestyles of all kinds.
Some lived and hunted alone, while some were part of covens or “families.” Some never interacted with other vampires, while others hung out in bars or clubs owned and frequented by vampires—called “burrows”—and caused havoc in random humans’ lives.
Franklin had threatened to sell me to a horde once. A horde was a nasty thing, a group of vampires practically insane from the high of blood and power and magic. The older vampires kept them out of the big cities, but they would tear through small, unprotected towns and decimate them. Torture. Rape. Brutal deaths. I’d seen the aftermath of one in my first few weeks with Franklin, and he used the threat to scare me.
It did scare me.
But most vampires didn’t want chaos. They just wanted an easy life of blood and luxury. An auction like this would be filled with rich vampires looking to sate whatever need they had for humans in their lives.
Vampires didn’t care about humans. They seemed to lose their humanity pretty quickly after they turned. Maybe you couldn’t be kind or decent and drink blood. I didn’t know; I had never tried.
The staircase led up into a ballroom. Gold chandeliers, flower arrangements, a string quartet, candles and soft lighting, red-and-black-clothed staff gliding among well-dressed patrons. Like a fancy wedding or a party you’d see in a movie about rich people.
Of course there was an open bar, because the only thing vampires drank other than blood was alcohol.
This auction was bad news. How had Franklin even gotten into it? The vampires here were old and high class, and that was foreboding on its own.
Franklin was an average sort. He drank from me, but not too often. Not often enough to hurt me for real. He raped me, but he didn’t see it that way—he saw it as mercifully drugging me up once in a while and using me because he owned me and I was his to abuse. He hit me when I talked back, beat me when I did things he didn’t like. I had fantasized a million times about setting him on fire or opening the blinds to the sunlight or crushing his heart—the only things that would kill a vampire—but those feelings quickly sublimated into numb hopelessness.
A twinge of fear twisted my heart.
Tonight wasn’t likely to be a gore fest, where most of the humans ended up dead right after the party was over. The prices were all going to be too high for that. No. Tonight was for picking and choosing, and I didn’t want to be part of any of these creatures’ collections. The part of me that was a little fiery and a little rebellious peeked out, but I smothered it. As much as I might have wanted to fight, there wasn’t much I could do but pray I’d end up in the least bad situation.
A hundred people filled the ballroom, a mix of humans and vampires. Once out of the stairwell, we were escorted by a thin female vampire to the check-in desk.
The Origin staff member located Franklin’s file. She made a horizontal cut across Franklin’s index finger and pressed it onto a flat metal disk that then glowed green. An identity checker. Franklin’s finger healed as we waited for the check to go through. I watched the skin repair itself as we were told to seat ourselves at Table 15.