In Plain Sight (A Hunted Rose)

Prologue

 Some girls have to worry about things like if their shirts match their shoes, or if the cute boy they have a crush on likes them back.  Others have to worry about the grade they got on last week’s test.  Me?  I’m not those girls.  I have to make sure I don't get killed by the people chasing me.  My name is Rose Michaels, I’m seventeen, and I’m not human.  I’m a vampire.  And when I say I’m seventeen, I don’t mean the Edward Cullen type seventeen where I’m actually like, one hundred.  I have only been on this earth for seventeen years; I was turned less than a year ago.  This is my story… and trust me when I say that it is nowhere near normal. 

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I was changed into a vampire against my will at the age of seventeen and left on my own by the undead being that attacked me.  Some other vampire found me on the street and helped me through the transition phase.  You know – the time where I crave blood so badly that I cannot be around people or I will rip out a throat.  Anyway, after I got the bloodlust under control, I may or may not have become an assassin.  A killer for hire.  A hit man.  They’re all the same thing.  With the new skills I had gotten from my transformation I was able to get the job done quick and easy.  That was, until I killed the head honcho of some cult-type thing and pissed off the wrong people.  Now I'm running for my life, living in the middle of nowhere, and have to drink blood to survive.  Great. 

 When I went through my transition, I found out that almost everything that pop culture believes to be true about vampires is wrong.  We do not sparkle or spontaneously combust in the sunlight.  We cannot be killed by wood stakes, only decapitation.  One thing I wished was true but isn't: vampires cannot survive on animal blood.  It has to be the real deal human blood.  We can drink from blood bags, but in all honesty they taste really bad. They taste stale; it’s because the blood is stagnant, it is not being pumped around a body.  Now, back to the sun issue.  When we go out into the sun, it irritates our skin, and if we stay out too long we get a rash that looks like a painful sunburn.  Vampires can get injured, but we heal almost instantly – which was nice for the line of work I chose to go into.  The older a vampire becomes, the more powerful he or she gets, which must be nice.  Our blood, in small quantities, also has healing properties for humans.

 The transition from human to vampire is extremely painful, or at least, what I remember of mine was.  It feels as if your body is rebelling against you, turning into something that is fighting against you every move you make.  You cannot move; you cannot even blink without pain screeching throughout your body, causing you to want to curl up into a ball and beg for the entire experience to be over.  With the way the transition feels, I do not understand why anyone willingly makes the choice to become a vampire.  I finally woke up from a week long “nap” where my entire genetic code was rewritten, and the first thing I felt was the insane burning in my throat that symbolized thirst.  I couldn’t breathe without the air scratching at my bone-dry throat, which was begging me to provide it with the thing it needed most – blood.

When I became a hit man (or hit girl, or hit vamp, or whatever), I only took out contracts where it was proven that the person I was hired to kill was not a good person (had a record, etc.), and did things against the law or morally wrong.  Then, I would do my own recon and see if I wanted to take the job.  I took most of them, but one or two I decided not to.  The job paid surprisingly well, but when you're killing people I guess you need some incentive.  I now have over three million dollars in a bank account.  The last job I took – the reason I have people after me, paid a little over one million dollars.  I should have known that there was a reason the reward was so great.  All I saw was a bad guy who didn't get his sentence for his crimes.  He was the leader of a large drug ring, and had his hands in all sorts of dirty things that I do not want to list.  Suffice to say, he was an evil man that deserved what he got – a bullet to the head.  In all honesty, he should have gotten worse, but at least he was dead.  The only thing that tripped up my entire operation was one stupid maid that had come back to his hotel room to check on the room itself.  I had planned for literally everything else, but of course, the lady saw me – standing next to the dead body – screamed, alerting the guy’s goons that I had killed him, and blah, blah, blah, I was on the run.

After all of that stuff went down, I hopped my butt on a plane to the middle of nowhere, Iowa, and then bought a car and drove to a small town named Winston Heights in Kansas.  Now, I was unloading the CRV I bought of the few things I gathered in Iowa before I left, and putting them in the small two bedroom house I purchased under a fake name.  It's amazing what you can do when you set your mind to it.  And use vampire compulsion, of course.