Killing Softly ✞ (gxg)

2 | chains

Lily choked on her desperate gasps for breath, gripping wildly at the ice-cold hand wrapped around her neck and nearly crushing her windpipe.

Her feet thrashed about, trying to find some ground beneath her, but there was none. Her eyes squeezed shut from the pressure on her neck that was building in her head, and she could feel her face begin to burn red at her lack of oxygen. She could hear the sound of muffled shouts and feet scuffling in the pine straw.

As her slowing heartbeat began to pound more ominously in her head, as if she had been squeezed so hard that her heart popped up inside her skull, her wild thrashing began to slow and her muscles grew heavier. Still gripping at the hand around her neck that felt like a rope made of ice hanging her mercilessly, she made an effort to open her eyes even though it made her feel like her head was going to pop like a balloon.

Through her squinted lashes and blurred vision, she tried to make out what she saw. She could only see darkness with a smudge of something pale and the shine of something sharp glinting under the full moon. When she could discern a pair of dull red eyes, she felt her heart drop through the fallaway in her brain and down to her stomach, hitting the floor of her abdomen with a sickening sludge. The sympathetic part of her nervous system finally kicked in, and it was like she could feel the acidic adrenaline sizzling in her veins and the toxic fear suffocating her even more the hand was.

"Your kind is even more ignorant than your general status implies," a vile voice hissed, echoing in her ears. Her eyes closed again as her heartbeat slowed even further; she was slipping from consciousness. "Or maybe these ones are just dumb runts."

She could faintly hear the chuckle from another vile voice, and as she slowly struggled to open her eyes again, she shifted her focus to her left and could see the blur of another pale figure and the tan blur of Jasmine's face moving around violently, like she was struggling. There was also a pale hand slapped around her mouth which was the reason her cries were muffled.

"Looks like you're about to kill that one, Owen," the voice of the figure restraining Jasmine spoke, sounding like a female. "You know we gotta have permission first."

Even though her eyes were open, all Lily could see was black. Even in her blindness, it was as if she was looking up at the dark night sky and admiring all the pretty stars. She could no longer feel the pain of the hand gripping her throat, her arms becoming numb and falling away, hanging from her lifted body along with her limp legs.

She heard a faint grunt before suddenly she felt herself falling for half a second, then she felt the jolting feeling of her body hitting the hard ground without warning. Her jaw flew open as she inhaled a deep breath, her lungs melting with the relief of oxygen flooding them. She coughed, rolling over so that she was on her stomach and slowly lifting her upper body off the ground so she could get better air flow. As her consciousness began to return to her, she winced, for her neck was throbbing painfully with the indented memory of the man's hand around it.

But as she slowly turned around to look at the creature that had nearly killed her, she saw that it was no man. He was male, yes, but his fangs hanging over his bottom teeth as he sickeningly grinned, and his red eyes that burned a bit brighter now that her vision was clear, told her that he could not be a mere man because he was not human. He was a vampire.

Her hands began to shake as she realized she was staring into the eyes of death itself. The human part of her told her that she might as well say her prayers right then and there, because this was the encounter of death that she had been warned about her whole life. But the logical side of her that was truly illogical to be so hopeful in a chase after survival immediately tried to think of some way out.