Bound to the Vampire Chapter 7

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CHAPTER 7

Kayla

“Dad!” Kayla raced into the house.

Inside of her living room, uneasiness settled between her clavicles and forced a knot to form in her throat. Something was wrong, but looking around her childhood 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. Same frayed rug that her father had been mending since her toe caught in its frays when she’d just started walking. Same television neither of them watched. This room hadn’t changed in over twenty years. Yet, something was different.

She shook off the thought. It was probably the magic threatening to explode from her at any minute. Her heated palms were eager for destruction ever since she’d 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?

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 when more rumbling came from his office and her father didn’t respond.

Nerves that were impossible to swallow gathered at the back of her mouth.

“Dad?”

Kayla stumbled through the house. Her feet felt like there were hot coals underneath them. The adrenaline was wearing off and the pain was starting to seep in.

The hallway was dark. It 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 the short distance it took to get to the hallway that housed the back room that was once her bedroom. At sixteen, 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 failed to hear her. There was comfort in knowing that he was okay 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 had, vanished. The rustling she thought she’d heard from the front room, now sounded like books were being thrown across the room hitting each and every wall before being hurtled back across.

“Dad?” She trembled as she gripped 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 around the room, 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 by comparison.

Dwarfing her father’s six-foot frame, a gnarled body monopolized a fair bit of the available space around his heaping stacks of books.

A book careened across the room, but bounced off the creature like he was made of rubber. It roared angrily, then swiped its thick fishing-hook like claws at her father.

Swirls of purple scattered up her father’s body preventing the werewolf’s attack. Its sharp claws tried to dig at his stomach but like a slip and slide, they glided away, unable to latch. It bared its teeth in frustration, growling 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, but once it recognized her presence hovering near the doorframe, they morphed into a deep bone-chilling blood-red.

Ice raced through her veins, freezing her solid.

“Kayla?” Her father’s voice snatched her attention from the creature.

It unhooked its claws from her father’s neck 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 twisted around the beast’s ankles, causing it to collapse with a thud. Another ferocious snarl erupted from the werewolf as it clawed at the hardwoods, splintering the floors with its hook-like nails in an effort to get to her.

Kayla jumped back. Two steps into the hallway brought her flush against someone else. She yelped at the sudden unwelcomed hardness she felt. When she tried to jerk away, 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. 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 window pane, growled at her.

How did they catch up so fast?

She fought harder.

She tried to look up, look over, to do anything, but the hand over her mouth and the man’s vice grip around her body made it impossible.

“Let her go,” the most welcomed voice she’d ever heard, said from behind her. She thought she’d left him at the truck, but by divine luck, the vampire came back for her.

The wolf snarled, then leapt from her countertop directly at her.

She recoiled, but its rough fur grazed her arm as it sailed past her and into the vampire behind her.

The figure holding her yanked her around to face the vampire who’d dared to put up a fight. Two wolves darted up the front porch behind Garrick, who seemed much more massive in her living room than inside the truck. Tall and 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.

The wolf from the kitchen window pounced on him, clawing up his body before sinking its teeth into his arm, gouging out a piece of it. Garrick groaned in pain, then jerked free of the wolf before grabbing its muzzle and squeezing it until she heard a sickening crunch.

Her stomach flipflopped.

The wolf yelped, then cowered away, tale between its legs. The man holding her mouth released her and stepped toward Garrick. In the same beat, the twin gray 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 chest, 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.

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.”

Down the hall, Garrick was still fighting off the wolves. Shadows jumbled against the wall in a mess of commotion. From the sound of furniture being thrown and bodies colliding, it sounded dirty. The brawls she’d seen on the old westerns her father liked to watch had nothing on the gauntlet that had become her living room.

“Kayla, let’s go!” her father ordered.

“No, I can’t.” She couldn’t leave Garrick behind.

“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 again, causing her to slam into the side wall outside of her father’s office. There was no way she was going to ever get through it 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 had worn off by now, but her magic hadn’t come back. She thought it had, back in the truck 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.” Tears stung in her eyes.

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.

Her father’s voice came from behind her. “Kayla, we’re running out of time. Come on, take my hand.”

The beast under her father’s magic shifted, fighting hard against the attack. And from the look of it, winning.

“Kayla. Come on. I can’t hold him for long.”

Her feet were stuck as though the floor had eaten them up to the ankle. One look at the beast made her fear worse. He roared again, clawing at the stacks of books until each of them scuttled across the floor. The fire engulfed them and spit another inferno in the room.

The heat sprayed her face like she’d been sitting tableside at a hibachi grill.

“I can’t—” Tears lined her face as she tried to breathe through the sudden pressure in her chest. “My magic—”

She didn’t get the chance to finish.

“We must go,” Garrick said close to her ear. In an instant, his dress shirt was off of his body and covering her face and arms as he pushed her through the flames.

At the same time, the werewolf found its footing, managing to break free of her father’s hold. The embers that had been shooting from its chest quickly fizzled out and the hole started to close.

“Come on,” her father fished for her attention with an outstretched hand, fingertips finding hers.

The wolf zoned in on them, then barreled its way toward them. Its hook-like claws rose just above her head. One swipe and she’d lose half her face.

Her father took hold of her hand. Her palms were so sweaty, she thought they might slip. But her father’s grasp was strong. She grabbed hold of Garrick.

Inches away from her face, the beast’s claws stilled like he’d been frozen. It was as if time had been stopped and nothing but stillness filled the room.

The werewolf beast, the wolves racing down the hallway, the books and papers hovering in midair were all put on pause, stuck in a stasis.

Her father’s magic weaved from the floor around her ankles, then up her body before twisting around her arm and finding its way to Garrick to cocoon him too.

One second, they were in the room. The next, icy blackness consumed them and they were gone.