Blood Debt Read online

  Blood Debt

  Changed

  Book One

  Heather MacKinnon

  Blood Debt

  Copyright Ⓒ 2020 by Heather MacKinnon

  Book cover: Fiverr.com/GermanCreative

  Editor: Karen Sanders Editing

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, actual events, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my loving husband, Ryan. Without your constant love and belief in me, none of this would have been possible.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Blood Claimed

  More from Heather MacKinnon

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  I stepped outside and flipped the collar of my coat up against the brisk New York City air. My warm breath expelled from my mouth in small white puffs as I debated walking or calling an Uber to get back to my dorm. The weather was chilly, especially for May, but after leaving the overly warm interior of my friend’s apartment, the cool air was a welcome reprieve. I turned right and started making my way back to my place.

  As I walked, my mind was on the final exam I had to take in the morning. It was my senior year at NYU and I was this close to graduating with a degree in English. Just one test away, to be precise. Why English? Because I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do with my life. I picked something I didn’t hate and went with it. It was the story of my life. Adrienne Wilkinson: just doing what she needed to get by.

  I quickly scanned through my mental list of what I needed to review tonight. I glanced at the time on my phone and figured I could study for about an hour before I went to sleep. That gave me a solid six hours of sleep and an extra hour in the morning to study.

  With my eyes on the ground and my head in the clouds, I didn’t see my attacker until I ran head-first into him.

  The man towered above me at well over six feet, with eyes as black as night, and blond hair that brushed the tops of his shoulders. His plain black pants fit his muscular legs like a second skin, and his white shirt had a multi-tiered ruffle that sat right below his Adam’s apple. I swallowed hard while the hair on my arms stood on end.

  Over all of that, he wore a dark-colored trench coat that almost touched the asphalt below where he stood in shiny black boots. His clothing struck me as odd, but I didn’t think too much of it–this was New York City, after all, and it attracted all types.

  The moment my eyes met his, I knew I’d bumped into the wrong person. Perhaps my last. With movements too fast for my eyes to follow, the man grabbed me around the waist with one hand and covered my mouth with the other. All I could hear was my heart thumping in my chest.

  I hadn’t even thought to scream before my window of opportunity closed. With lightning speed, he dragged me to a nearby alley as I struggled against his iron grip.

  The man squeezed my waist hard, and my breath whooshed out of me. I did my best to draw a lungful of air into my abused lungs, but it left just as quickly when my head was jerked to the side, and I felt a sharp sting on the side of my neck. Was he biting me? God, only in New York would I be assaulted by being bitten. That wry thought was punctuated by a shrill scream stifled by his hand as his teeth dug further into the tender flesh of my neck. My stomach turned.

  I did my best to struggle out of his grasp, but I might as well have been fighting a metal vice wrapped around my body. I clawed at the hand clamped against my mouth and screamed as best I could, but my words were muffled and swallowed up by the sounds of the city. Sweat trickled down my brow from more than the struggle. His mouth was still pressed against me, and only then did I realize he was… gulping. Sipping and swallowing, it seemed like he was drinking my blood. Ugh, gross!

  As the man continued to slurp on my neck, my body began to weaken, and my vision narrowed. Close to losing consciousness, I fought the blackness with every ounce of willpower I possessed. It was one thing to be sucked on in an alleyway by some weirdo in a Halloween costume, but it was entirely another thing to black out so he could do who-knows-what to me. I wasn’t going down like that. With renewed vigor, I fought against the man’s grip, and to my astonishment, he suddenly released me.

  Sinking to my knees, my hands scraped against the rough, wet pavement. I felt a tickling sensation on the side of my neck, and when I swatted at it, my fingers came back covered in blood. I put my hand back up against my neck, hoping to staunch the flow. The sight of the blood increased my panic, and I searched the alley for something, anything that could help me out of this situation. My eyes skimmed over the dark brick walls and damp asphalt, but nothing stood out as a weapon. Without both hands to hold me up, I collapsed face-first onto the cold ground.

  With a heave, I rolled onto my back and stared up at the man who’d been sucking blood out of my neck just a moment ago. He was pacing and talking to himself in a language I couldn’t understand. His long coat snapped and swayed with his back-and-forth movements.

  Please, don’t kill me.

  Let me go.

  I’ll do something good with my life.

  I promise.

  I struggled to move, to scream, but found any movement sent pain like a wildfire through my veins. I lay there, unable to do anything but watch the man who’d just assaulted me. Why did my limbs feel so heavy? If I couldn’t move, how could I escape? Forget escaping, if he left me alive, how long before someone found me in the dark alleyway? That was assuming I didn’t bleed to death first.

  By lying down, I’d bought myself a few more minutes of consciousness, and I fervently hoped for more. The moon wasn’t visible from my position, but its beams reflected off a broken window’s jagged pieces and made the black paint on the fire escape gleam. The alleyway was unoriginal by New York standards, and I was lying in a puddle I desperately didn’t want to identify.

  I pitifully stared up at the starless sky, trying to understand how I landed in this predicament. I chastised myself for not being more aware of my surroundings–something you should never let happen in this city.

  I knew that.

  Yet there I was, bleeding from the neck and just hanging on to consciousness. I took a deep breath and winced as the motion sent a sharp pain to my midsection.

  At that point, I didn’t know if I’d make it out alive, and I tried to think of what I’d miss and who’d miss me. The list was depressingly short. With a weak smile, I realized I might get to see the two people I loved the most sooner than I’d ever hoped. Tears ran down my cheeks that I wasn’t strong enough to wipe away.

  My body was immobile, but my mind was still whipping between the possibilities of fighting with whatever strength I had left, o
r giving in to what felt like the inevitable. Whatever was going to happen to me wasn’t that far off now, and I knew I had to choose. Would I slip away or try to fight? My chest filled with a warm sensation as my parents’ loving faces flashed behind my eyes. I knew my answer.

  “Please,” I begged. “Don’t do this. I promise, if you let me go, I won’t tell anyone.”

  He stopped pacing and turned to me, his face a mask I couldn’t read. I gulped, my mouth dry. As the man stalked closer, I noted his thin lips were twisted into a sneer, and his large, crooked nose looked as if he’d broken it a time or two.

  Who was this man? What kind of person assaulted people by sucking blood from their necks? Vampire, my mind whispered, but I mentally shook that thought out of my head. Vampires weren’t real.

  My attacker knelt beside me and swiped a lock of brown hair off my forehead. I fought back a cringe, his tenderness scaring me worse than his brutality had. Why was he suddenly being so gentle?

  He opened his mouth to speak, but I couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in my ears. I studied the way his mouth moved and formed words I couldn’t make out. How his eyes flashed as they scanned down my body, raising goosebumps along my flesh.

  My vision was darkening around the edges, but I watched the man bring his unnaturally pale wrist to his mouth with a gleam in his fathomless eyes. When he pulled his arm back and extended it toward my face, I saw two puncture holes along his vein. Thick, crimson blood was slowly seeping from the wounds.

  I had seconds left of consciousness. I tried to twist my head away from his bloody appendage, but my body was too weak to move far.

  My thoughts turned frantic. This couldn’t be how I died, alone and cold in a dark alley in New York City. I’d fought too hard, overcome too much for it to all end like this. Regardless of what I’d been through, it was becoming painfully obvious that this was the end of the line for me. I slowly turned, gritting my teeth against the pain, to see a crimson drop of blood drip off his wrist and head straight for my mouth. The thick liquid landed on my tongue, making me gag and heave as more blood dripped into my mouth.

  His deep, gravelly voice rang out in the still of the night. “Ci vediamo presto moglie.”

  I lost the fight to stay conscious, and blackness consumed me.

  Chapter 2

  My eyes opened to a pitch-black room and a collection of pipes and exposed beams. It was a strange sensation. One moment my eyes were closed, and I was unconscious, and the next they were open, and I was once again present. Gone was the slow process of waking up. The only reason I knew I’d been sleeping and not simply blinking was that I found myself in a room I’d never seen before.

  I’d just finished thinking I should sit up and survey my surroundings when I found myself upright. There was no time between the thought and the action. Just to make sure I hadn’t imagined the ease with which I’d changed positions, I laid down again and sat back up, only to find the action as easy as before.

  “Maybe my time at the gym is finally paying off,” I mumbled, although I didn’t actually believe that. It was the closest thing to a logical explanation I could come up with and I clung to it.

  Where was I and how did I get there? I knew I hadn’t had enough alcohol to explain a blackout of this magnitude. Running through the series of events I remembered from the previous night, I found nothing that explained my whereabouts. I remembered leaving my friend’s party early because I had an exam in the morning, but not much after that.

  Did I walk home, or did I call for a ride? I thought I vaguely remembered the crisp night air, so that must have meant I had walked. Did I make it home before coming here? Where was here anyway?

  Looking around the room again, I took in far more detail than I should have been able to in the darkness. I’d been lying behind a stack of large white plastic sacks that had a vaguely familiar scent I couldn’t quite place.

  Using my index finger, I gave one of the bags a poke and it shot right through the plastic and into the cool interior. Wiggling my finger around inside, I tried to make sense of what was in the bag. Before long, a steady stream of what I now recognized as uncooked rice fell from the hole I’d made with a quiet hiss. How did they haul these flimsy bags around without ripping them open all the time?

  I left the rice to continue to pile up on the floor and stood to get a better look around. Again, as with sitting up, I found myself on my feet before I’d even thought it through. I crouched down and straightened again, marveling at the ease with which my body obeyed my commands.

  As I coiled and stretched my muscles, I marveled at how good I felt. Better than good–I felt amazing. A night spent on a hard-stone floor should have left me sore, but that didn’t seem to be the case. And I definitely didn’t have a hangover, so the blackout theory was out the window.

  Speaking of windows, now I was standing, I saw a couple small rectangular ones near the ceiling and realized I must be in a basement. I walked closer to one of them, but from my vantage point, I couldn’t see much more than the night sky. If it was still dark, I must have only been out for a few hours. That made me feel a bit better. A few hours unaccounted for was better than a whole night.

  I explored the basement more thoroughly with the hopes it might explain where I was, or even why I was there. My search revealed a set of concrete stairs that must have led to the ground floor, a smaller set of stairs that led to double doors made of steel, two windows, a few pieces of old furniture, and countless spiders. That last discovery had me quickly ending my search.

  Returning to the space where I’d woken, I looked around more carefully, hoping to find something to explain how I’d ended up in this basement. I remembered I’d had my leather messenger bag with me the night before, but it was nowhere to be found.

  This was just great.

  Not only did I wake up in some random basement alone, but I’d also lost my bag, along with my ID and credit cards. There was some cash in there too, but that didn’t concern me as much.

  With a huff, I stood and dusted my hands off on my pants. Having seen all the basement had to offer, I decided to first try my luck with the doors that led outside. It would probably be in my best interest to avoid any potential occupants of the building. Especially considering I was trespassing. I wasn’t sure they’d care how unwilling a participant I was in this crime.

  Ascending the stairs with ease, I looked dubiously at the steel doors. They looked heavy as hell and I doubted my five-foot-two frame could open them.

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

  I took a deep breath, braced my palms against one door, and heaved with all my strength. To my utter shock, the door whipped open as though it had been blown away by an explosion and not simply pushed by a small woman. The door slammed against the pavement outside, making an ungodly sound that had me cringing where I stood on the steps.

  I waited there in the shadows until I was sure no one was coming to investigate the sound. I did not want to get caught crawling out of someone’s basement in the middle of the night. Releasing the breath I’d been holding, I continued my trek up the concrete stairs. Once I made it to the top, I surveyed my surroundings once more and relaxed when I confirmed I was alone.

  I took a deep breath and instantly regretted it when the various smells of the alley assaulted my senses. With my eyes closed, I lifted my nose in the air and took a smaller sniff, trying to identify everything I was smelling.

  The stench of rotting food was the most pungent scent, followed by urine. Another small sniff and I knew, without looking, that the rotting smell was coming from my right. I turned and opened my eyes to find a dark-colored dumpster that held the offending scent. The urine smell I wasn’t too keen to hunt down.

  I inhaled again, and underneath the offending odors I recognized the smell of fried rice and soy sauce. The large bags of rice now made sense; I must have been in the basement of a Chinese food restaurant. The once delicious scent now turned my stomach, and I was finished
with the smelling exercise.

  I made my way to the street, but my steps faltered as a strange sense of deja vu assaulted me. I stopped to take a second to look around, but saw nothing I recognized, nothing that stood out. Shrugging off the strange feeling, I continued to the street ahead, wanting to be far away from that place as soon as possible.

  I reached the street faster than should have been possible but didn’t dwell on it, too eager to be away from the place that was giving me the willies. Looking around, I tried to get my bearings and figure out where I was.

  To my left there wasn’t a lot to see besides a few closed storefronts and some shady-looking characters occupying a doorway not far from me. The three men were all dressed similarly in dirty t-shirts and jeans. In their hands was a glass pipe, and I watched as one of them brought it to their mouths and inhaled the clearly illegal substance. These men were about a block away, and it struck me as odd that I could make out so much of what they were doing from where I was.

  To my right, I could see a few blocks down there seemed to be a busy crossroad. The glowing streetlights illuminated the hustle and bustle of a typical street in the city that never sleeps. Yellow taxis glided through the intersection, their occupants clearly visible to me even as far away as I was.

  When the light changed to red, I watched a man dressed in a dark business suit in the back of a cab pick up his phone and tap out a text message. His fingers flew across the screen as he typed: I’m sorry I’m late honey, the meeting ran over and–

  I jerked my eyes away from the man and his apology. I should not have been able to see all that from where I stood.

  Taking another look at the men with the drugs, I realized I’d drawn their attention. Having had enough excitement for one night, I quickly made my way toward the mass of people in the other direction.

  I started off at a brisk walk, letting the cool air blow my dark brown hair off my face. It felt good after the stuffy confines of the basement I woke up in. The wind whipped through my tangled strands and I picked up my pace. Before I knew it, I was running, the freedom of my stride like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It felt so good to stretch and use my muscles, and surprisingly, I felt no exertion at all. It was as if I could run at that speed for hours and never tire.