Copyright 2018 by Rachel E Rice

“To Kill A Vampire”

Book 1 Published soon at all vendors for 0.99 for one day when book 2 is available. 1st book “To Kill A Vampire” is available now only on Google. Below is an excerpt for your enjoyment!

To Kill A Vampire Book1

Chapter One

Dakota

 

My eyes are heavy, and the pillow my head is resting on is hard. My hands feel as if something is holding them down. I glance around the room. I don’t recognize anything. Not the small bed with crisp white sheets binding me where I can’t move my feet. I try to kick at the tucked sheets, but my legs feel as if they are weighted down by dumbbells.

This room is empty. Where is my bookcase which holds all my books? Where are my books? I need to read. Reading makes me happy. Reading takes me away into someone’s mind besides my own. I feel different when I’m reading. I feel alive, and I don’t worry about much. I don’t think about the students who look at me as if I’m a freak for wanting to make A’s.

This can’t be school, I have to go to school, I tell myself.  How am I to keep my grade point average up if I’m lying here, doing nothing and not studying?

I’m not at home. I’m not in school. Where am I?

And what am I doing in a room that looks like a jail cell? Not that I’ve ever seen the inside of one, but this could be one. Where are my parents? I know that I have parents and why would they leave me here?

This doesn’t make sense. I shut my eyes tight hoping when I open them this will have been a dream. I take a long breath and open my eyes, and nothing has changed except I hear a noise coming from somewhere and I don’t know exactly where. It sounds like someone is stirring. Maybe now I can get some answers. I hear the shuffling of feet. However, I don’t have the energy to raise up and see who’s coming close to me.

All I remember was taking a shower in my restroom and waking up inside this room. I yell because I need answers, but my voice is fragile and fades with each word. “Where am I? Where are my parents? I know you’re there. Say something.”

“You’re in a hospital in the mental ward.” It’s the voice of a young man.

“What am I doing in this place?” I ask.

“You must have tried to kill yourself,” the voice said. The sound is coming from somewhere in the next cell or room across from mine.

“But I wouldn’t do that, would I?” I try hard to remember things and I can’t. At this point, I can’t remember my name.

“How the fuck should I know,” the boy says to me. It jars me, and I try to sit up and see who’s using that gross word. “I’m not a doctor. I’m here just like you. All I know about this place is that this is where they bring you if you tried to kill yourself.  I tried the same thing but it didn’t work, and here I am.”

Maybe I’m dead, I thought. I don’t know if I want to be around this boy. He sounds so cynical. But this place doesn’t look like anything I’ve heard or read about if I were dead.

“I can’t move,” I said to the young critical voice coming from the other room.

“They probably heavily medicated you. The nurses will be in shortly to check on you, give you some food, watch you take a shower, and then they’ll send you to be tested and then to counseling and then more pills until…”

Listening to him is painful, so I interrupt him because I can’t stand to hear more. I’m still not convinced that I where he says I am. “Then can I go home?”

“How the fuck should I know? Like I said, I’m no doctor.” The boy’s voice cracked with a tone of annoyance. The kind of voice you hear when teenage boys are turning into men. One minute their voices are high and the next day you talk to them it has deepened.

“How long have you been in here?” I ask him.

A few moments of silence pass as if he’s trying to remember but gives up and says, “I don’t know.” I hear the sadness in his voice, and I wonder if that’s the fate that’s waiting for me. Being in an institution long enough to forget the days and months and maybe years.

“How old are you and what’s your name?” I ask him because I need more information to determine if this is real or in my imagination.

“I’m eighteen. My name is Elliot. That’s all I can tell you. They don’t want us to discuss our personal information with anyone.” As I listened, I thought about how old I am. I’m eighteen and I will soon be nineteen. I will graduate from high school if I can get back there.

I’m his age, maybe older but my mother kept me back because she said I wasn’t matured enough to start school and she couldn’t bear to have me leave her so early. She homed schooled me and then sent me to elementary school. I remember some things now. I wondered how many more teens were in this place.

“Elliot, do you always follow the staff’s and doctors’ rules?”

“No. I don’t follow anyone’s rules. Maybe that’s why I’m still in here.”

“But it’s more than that isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I guess so. I tried to kill myself three times before and didn’t succeed. I think they put me in this facility to prevent me from doing that again. But if you want to do something you’ll find a way.” His voice trails off as if he’s still considering that option.

“What was wrong with you?” I asked him.

“Don’t you mean what is wrong with me?” He pauses and then says, “Nothing is wrong with me,” as if he’s not sure if there’s something wrong with him. “Except,” he breathes out hard and pauses again as if he’s thinking about why he should reveal to a stranger his innermost secret.

“I made the mistake of telling my parents that I was gay and that I was seeing visions at night. I said people were coming into my room at night. Big mistake. They took me for counseling.”

“Oh,” I said. My voice rises.

“I’m not gay, I just wanted to get their attention. The gay part didn’t upset them, they took that calm enough. It was when I said I was seeing vampires that my parents freaked out. The vampires were coming into my room at night and sucking my blood especially that female. I can’t remember her name, but she was beautiful and sexy. For a teenage boy, you know how that can be.”

“No, I don’t know,” I said to him because honestly, I didn’t have a clue.

His voice, conversational, as if he believed what he was saying and that I would understand since I was in the same place maybe for the same reason. But we weren’t the same. I didn’t try to kill myself because of vampires. And everyone who’s sane knows that there are no such things as vampires. That convinced me that I wasn’t dead and there is no way I should be here in this hospital at least not in a mental ward.

“I can see how that would unnerve them because there are no vampires,” I said to Elliot. I was trying to do what his parents and counselors couldn’t accomplish. Teenagers see things different from parents and adults. Our brains function differently and maybe if I told him that he would believe me, but he appeared confident that they did exist.

“That’s what you think.” He gave a small laugh. “They’re all over. Everywhere. Even here in this hospital, and I want to get out of this place before they kill me.”

“I thought you wanted to die?”

“I did. But when I was tested for schizophrenia and other things, the doctors said nothing was wrong with me, and they sent me home, and that’s when I realized that I wasn’t nuts and what was coming into my room at night was real. I tried to kill myself once more because I don’t want to become one of those undead things. I would rather die.” There was a brief silence. “And you, what’s your story. What’s your name and how old are you?”

“My name’s Dakota, and I’m eighteen just like you. A senior in high school. But I’m turning nineteen in June. Mother held me back because of maturity issues, and I don’t have a story.  I can’t remember any more than that, now. Maybe it will come back to me, but I don’t remember trying to commit suicide.”

“When we get out of here how about you and me hooking up and go to the movies or something,” Elliot said. “But you can’t tell the counselors because we aren’t allowed to make connections in or out of this place. Don’t tell your parents either.”

And that’s when I remembered that I didn’t tell my parents what was going on with me. I didn’t eat much or sleep well. Now I vaguely remember taking my mother’s meds and waking up in here.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself, I was trying to sleep at night,” I said. And like Elliot, I saw things too. There were some things familiar between us. People coming into my room at night and standing over my bed. I thought it was hallucinations because I couldn’t sleep.

“Did you have bruises on your body and were you sleeping at night?” I asked Elliot.

“How could I sleep? I had bruises and cuts like I was cutting myself. I wasn’t cutting myself, the vampires were doing that to extract blood and then sucking it from my arms, legs, and wrists. When the doctors examined me, I tried to tell them that I didn’t cut myself that the vampires did that.” If I were Elliot’s parents, and he told me that far-fetched story, I would probably send him away, too. I could see why he was here but me, I didn’t understand yet.

Looking up at the lights, I began to feel the medication wear off and feelings coming back to my hands and legs. And my memory returning slowly with the help of Elliot talking to me.

“I remember something now, Elliot. I think the same things were happening to me, but I had small bruises on my neck, and there was this handsome man who came to me at night. I thought it was a sexual dream. You know the kind when you are teens, and you don’t know what’s happening to your body. He told me that I had to do something and I can’t remember what it was.”

“Don’t worry after you get out of here and stop with the medication everything will be clear. It happened to me. Because I hid my meds and didn’t take them, I saw what was making a nightly visit. That time I caught the female vampire cutting me, and I ran to wake my parents, and they dismissed my accusations as delusions brought on by the medicine. I told them that I wasn’t taking my medication. And that’s when my mother began hiding the knives and razor blades. Isn’t that stupid. If I wanted to get a knife or razor, I could easily get one without them knowing. All I wanted was for them to believe me and take me away where the vampires couldn’t find me.”

“When I get out of here and if you’re out, we’re going to find those vampires, and we’re going to kill them,” I said to Elliot. It was the only thing I could think of to say to calm him.

I didn’t know why I said that, but it sounds as if it was something I could do. Not only was Elliot being tormented by vampires, I realized that I was being plagued by them as well to the point where we were willing to kill ourselves to get away from them. I had finally found a reason or excuse for my torment. But in the back of my mind, I thought the thing about vampires was an outrageous idea, but I had bought into it with the help of Elliot. He appeared convinced that they existed.

Maybe we were both mental cases.

It became clear to me and then I thought, we really have to kill some vampires if we are to live, whether it was true or not, we had to rid ourselves of our demons whether real or imaginary.

There was a long silence between us. I sat up in bed, put my feet on the cold hard floor and crouched down and rested my back against the bed and wrapped my arms around my legs. “What school do you attend?” I asked Elliot.

“Holy Cross.”

“That’s my school. Holy shit. Imagine that,” I said and placed my hands over my mouth.

“There are a few more students here from Holy Cross. They’re seeing things at night, and no one believes them. And they’re trying to commit suicide just like us and probably for the same reasons, but they don’t talk to me. They’re in another ward. You and I are the only ones here for some reason. Those kids in the other wards follow the rules. Sometimes you have to break the rules to survive. You’ve made me want to survive, Dakota. Do you think we can really kill those vampires?”

I didn’t have any answers yet. Elliot held on to my words as if they were gold.

“Yes. Do everything your parents and the doctors ask of you, and I’ll see you at school. It’s our last year. We can meet up and make plans.” And I laid back and relaxed and waited. My blood had been tainted with the pills I had taken, maybe that’s why the vampires left me alone, I soon realized. “Take your meds. That will keep the vampires at bay. They want pureblood.”

“How do you know all these things?”

I hunched my shoulders, “I don’t know. I just know.”

“I think someone is coming. I have to go and talk to the counselor. Today my parents are coming for a visit, and I have to convince them that I’m not going to try to do anything to harm myself. Wish me luck.”

Hearing a key open his door, I lay in that bed and tried to figure out how I knew about the medicine in the blood. Then I remembered that I read about how medication which when taken can cause different reactions in some people, and because of my small, undernourished body, medicine will enter the bloodstream quickly.