Roses for Rachel

Chapter 1.

I was ten years old the day I was kidnapped.        

I was young and stupid when I asked my beautiful, perfect, and loving mother if I could please go look at the toy section of the store while she finished up getting together the groceries. It was something I'd done a thousand times over, and shouldn't have been a problem, but this time, there was a man. I usually wouldn't speak to strangers, but he told me that he knew where they were keeping the newest toy shipment, and I very stupidly followed him around the backside of an aisle where I found myself with his hands and a dirty old rag over my face. Everything went black and when I woke up I was in the dark with the muffled sounds of other girls crying just like me.

Eight years later and waking up here still freaking sucks.

Drighten Boarding School, home of the stolen girls. It sounds fancy and all, but it really isn't. Drighten is nothing but a stone fortress nestled on the top of a grassy hill in the middle of nowhere some place in Ireland. I'm sure to onlookers, it's beautiful, or it would be, if there were ever any onlookers to speak of. In eight years I've never seen another person who wasn't either a prisoner here, or one of our keepers.

When I first arrived I was put into a room with the other newest girls. They gave us a few days to cry it out and to get used to the idea of our lives changing, and then they dropped the bomb.

The vampire bomb.

Apparently those vampires that we always thought were just stories made up to scare us, were not just stories, but real. Really real. Our keepers explained to us that a few weeks ago, the government was slowly being overpowered by the vampires who no longer wanted to exist only in the shadows, but in the real world. We get the speech every week now in our chapel meetings. Life as we knew it is over, the vampires have taken over, and we have been brought here for our protection and to preserve human lives. Our keepers love to remind us that we should be thankful to them for saving us because humans are now the minority, and all of our families are dead. They constantly nag about how we would be dead too if we hadn't been saved. Somewhere, we're told there is a school just like this one, but for boys.

All of the other girls love to sit around and gossip and daydream about the boy's school and what it will be like to go there and find their true loves. I always smile and nod along with them.

"Rachel," They'll say. "Don't you want to meet a boy and fall in love?" They ask me. "I bet it's just like Romeo and Juliet."

I find it completely amusing that that is the story that they choose to obsess over. I don't have the heart to point out to them that they both died in the end. Plus, I don't think finding true love is really in the cards for us anymore. Our duty now is to grow up, marry, and have babies so that the human race continues.

There are girls here of all ages and races. Every month they find and rescue new girls from the outside world and bring them here. Our groups that we came in with are the groups that we stay in during our entire stay at Drighten. When we turn eighteen, we will finally get to leave here and we will be merged into the mixed school with both boys and girls.

Today is my eighteenth birthday. The day that all of this monotony finally ends for me. I'm finally going to get out of this depressing and oppressive place. Eight years here sure has tried it's hardest to drive me insane, but knowing I'm going to be leaving soon did give me a little homesick feeling. I looked around the room and smiled to myself, just a little, memorizing it.

I've had three rooms in my time here, but this one was by far the nicest. The room was long and narrow, with cobblestoned walls and floors, and bunk beds lining both sides. Really it's no different from my other two rooms except that this one has windows and it's on the third floor. The light in this room is what makes me like it so much. Even though it has a slight smell of mildew, the bright abundance of sunlight that dances in through the three big windows makes it a perfect place to sit and read. I was 16 when I got to move into this room and I used to sit in the window and imagine I saw a prince coming to rescue me in the distance. Standing in front of the window, looking out at the rolling green hills, I know now that it was a silly dream.