Hunted

Chapter 30

... Elizabeth ...

Numb pain washes through me, followed by beats of excruciating pain. I vaguely remember Mr. Toliver once said that Vampires never feel pain unless they are starving or being staked. I have proved him wrong on so many accounts.

"Waking up from Batalia poisoning is quiet painful, am I correct?" Aiden's mocking voice stirs up anger inside of me. Batalia poisoning? Out of all ways of poisoning, he chooses the most painful? Of course.

Batalia poisoning stops the heart from beating over one beat per thirty seconds. It would kill the average person, but Vampires are sort of dead already, so we could live off of it, even though it's extremely painful. It almost automatically puts you to sleep in a coma.

"You need to open your eyes." He growls and I hiss silently back. He can't tell me what to do. That's one right I still have, and I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of being obeyed.

"Come on, dude, she's in a lot of pain right now. Just let her sleep for a while longer." Is that Brad? I don't get to find out, because darkness washes over me again.

"She's been asleep for a month! We need her to wake up! Without her as live bait, we can't use her!" Aiden's beyond frustrated voice almost yells.

"You should have known Batalia would have long term effects! This is your own fault!" Another voice argues back.

"I didn't think that far ahead." Aiden grumbles and I feel satisfaction come off the other girl. Pain strangles me and I involuntarily groan. "And look, I think she's waking up."

I slowly open my eyes, but only darkness greets me. Where am I? "Sorry we have you blindfolded."

"We can take it off now." A girls annoyed voice cuts through the darkness like a knife. I feel something loosen around my head, and light blinds me. "There we go."

"What do you want with me?" I blink away tears and my eyes adjust to see Aiden and Tracy staring back at me.

"You're going to be the downfall of everything. You need to be eliminated." Aiden snarls in my face, which I kindly do back. A spark of anger was thrown inside of me, and now it's steadily growing.

"Maybe you need to be eliminated. I don't know about you, but I feel like I am a useful member of society, so if I die, you have no idea what's going to happen." I shrug and pain flares in my heart. My heartbeat must still be pretty slow.

"Why isn't she upset or anything?" He turns to Tracy.

"Well I don't know! She may think that this is all a game for all I know!" She yells back and he just sighs angrily.

I finally take this as a chance to look around. I know, I should be devising a plan, but I need to know where to run and stuff like that. I'm chained to a pole, which probably won't hold me if I try to attack any of them. There's a door in the far left of the room, which is deeply shadowed by the only fluorescent light in the middle of the room. The floors are wooden, so I must still be at the club. These people really must be dense to hide me in a place I could find my way out of.

"Excuse me, can I leave now?" I interrupt Tracy's and Aiden's bickering and they turn angrily towards me.

"No, we're going to kill you. Then you can leave." Tracy smiles evilly, but I just brush it off.

"As you can see I'm already dead, and I'm an extremely busy person, so I guess I'm able to leave when?" It is so much fun messing with people who don't think things through. Even though in my position, it's extremely dangerous.

"No! You can't leave, until you have a stake sticking out of your heart, got it?!" He practically screams in my face.

"Just get on with it so she can stop yapping." Tracy sits down against the wall.

Without a word, Aiden walks behind me and I hear a rustling of metal instruments. Oh. My. God. Is he going to torture me? For the first time, I'm scared. He comes back around and I see him holding a syringe.

"All right, I just want to take some of your blood and insert it into me. Then I'll be able to do my transformation." He steps towards me and I cringe. He just laughs.

A sudden pain flares in my shoulder and I almost scream. He stuck that needle in deep. Now my life is being sucked out of me, even though I'm not really living. I'm already short on blood, but now it's depleting even more. Pain circles my body as it runs low on blood, and I groan. Aiden pulls the syringe out of my shoulder with a sharp pain, but I don't care anymore.

"Thank you, Lizzy." He smiles and I growl softly. I try to contact Blaise, but the connections fuzzy and I can't hear what he's saying. Great. There goes that.

Aiden sticks the syringe in his own shoulder and pushes in all of my foreign blood. He sighs deeply and I wrinkle my nose in disgust. It's one thing to drink a humans blood for survival, but drinking your own kinds blood just for fun, is disturbing.

Before my eyes can adjust, Aiden's skin starts to peel away. I mean like peel off of him in little slivers. It falls to the floor and I almost puke. The little bitty pieces of Aiden drift to the floor in a disgusting show of either power or weakness. Distracted by all the repulsive skin cells, I don't bother to look at Aiden. Before me, stands the burly man that killed Isaac.

Fury flares up inside of me and I try to leap at him. In my anger, my fox has started to take over, and now I'm guessing my face looks disgustingly bestial, but I don't care. How dare he show his hideous face in front of me when he knows that I know that he will kill Isaac!

"Thank you very much now, Lizzy. You can go now. I much enjoy tracking down and killing my prey rather than kill them while they're locked up. Makes them think they have a chance." Aiden - whoever he is - smirks and walks out the door in the shadow. Tracy doesn't follow.

As soon as he's gone, she rushes over to me. She lifts up my shirt to see the scar where she staked me. She hisses a sharp intake of breath. "I'm so sorry." I can totally attack her right now, but I'm so confused, I don't know what to do. "You have to get out of here and as far away as possible." She steps back and looks into my face, her blue eyes full of concern and stress.

"Why are you helping me now? You staked me." I ask in disbelief.

"That was only so he didn't come after you. He wants the chase to be fair, and with you hurt, it wouldn't be. I needed you to develop more powers before he came after you." She shakes her head. "He planted the story about another school here."

"What does want with me?" I beg.

"What doesn't he want is the real question. Your blood is full of powers that even you don't know of. He was originally after the Vampire that bit you, but since you're more powerful than even Ethan, your Sire." Who the heck is Ethan?

"Who's Ethan?"

"The Vampire that prophesized that he would only create one female heir. No males. He said he would only choose the female that was just right. And he chose you." She looks gravely into my eyes and if I could sink any lower to the floor, I'd be down there. "His name was King Ethan."

Oh. My. God. I am the Vampire Queen.