"S...stop," I grumbled, feeling my head loll around for a second before I gained control of it again.
Another minute after that, I managed to force my eyelids to open, revealing a sun-streaked space, finally allowing me to see where I was being held.
It had smelled earthy to me when Drex had brought me in. And it had felt like packed dirt against my hands and back. But that was the first moment I realized that he'd stored me away in a root cellar.
I didn't even know such things existed anymore. Yet there I was.
"Here," Drex said, moving forward with a bag, then kneeling down in front of me to reach inside, pulling out the contents.
Slivered almonds.
Pumpkin seeds.
Dried fruit.
A small box of the healthy kind of cereal.
And raw broccoli.
It was the strangest assortment of foods I'd ever seen in one place.
"S...s...strange," I mumbled, slow blinking at the man who'd brought them to me.
"Asked some woman at the store what foods have iron in them. Aside from meat, which I'm reasonably sure you humans aren't supposed to eat raw, this is what I ended up with. Eat. We have a long drive ahead of us," he said as he pulled open all the containers for me.
"D...drive?" I asked, trying to shake off the daze of the drugs, but only managing to make myself dizzy.
"Yeah. Did some research. Seems like if I take you as far as possible while keeping the pain at bay, the enthrallment shit will snap. And you'll be free."
Free.
Actually free? Without pain?
The idea sounded like a pipe dream.
But maybe I only thought so because I'd been told that there was no way out once I'd agreed. You know, by the people who'd coerced me into the agreement in the first place. Of course they would have a vested interest in not telling me there was an out clause in the fine print.
"How?" I said, finding the word easier to say. Maybe the drugs were letting up a bit. Which could be a terrible thing, but it was nice to be able to say words without too much effort again.
"Have a friend. He said there was an account of it a long time back. Church guy's kid. Took her across the country. The thread to the bloodsuckers snapped. Here," he grumbled.
I'd been attempting to grab a couple slivers of almonds and raise them to my mouth. But my motor skills weren't exactly up to par yet. So I dropped all but one down my front.
Drex moved out of the shadows, giving me my first full view of him as the light streamed in from the open door.
I mean, if you were going to have a savior, I would highly recommend a demon biker with a death wish. Because, damn.
I thought I was into the vampires with their timeless elegance. Their suits and fancy jewelry. Their impeccable manners. You know, aside from the drinking of blood and slaughtering of enemies—both proven and presumptive.
I'd been so enamored with them all at first sight. I guess they represented all the wealth and elegance that my upbringing so severely lacked.
At first, being with them had finally quieted the niggling taunts that had been thrown to me as a child.
Trailer trash.
That was one of their favorites.
To be fair, the kids were assholes, but not overly incorrect, as much as I hated to admit that. That was probably why the insult stung so badly.
Plenty of people lived in trailers and had nice, normal families with good, stable grown-ups. They worked and paid bills and had family game nights and cared about each other and their friends and the world as a whole.
Not me.
Not my family.
They were the definition of trash.
Unwashed and underfed with far too many people living in one trailer with smoke always billowing out—cigarette, pot, meth. My parents' "friends" were their dealers. And while I never told a single soul this, my mom used to do favors in trade for the drugs that kept her and my father going.
We were the trailer with the trash piled high in the backyard, with old, discarded couches in the front, getting pissed on by all the neighborhood cats and burrowed inside by the local opossums or rats.
We were the house that the police got called to every couple of weeks. For disturbing the peace, for domestic violence calls, or to look for one of my parents' friends who had warrants out on them.
And it killed me that everyone else knew that, and would never let me live it down. They'd found every single opportunity to remind me of my cheap clothes, my choppy kitchen table haircuts, my shoes full of holes.
I dreamed of suits and fancy dresses, of food in the fridge and cabinets, of going out to eat, of—and this was my most coveted dream of all—going on vacation, seeing a city somewhere, experiencing something other than my small-town life.