Palace Of Flames (Book One of the Damnata Series)

Chapter One: When Love Met Destruction

London, Present Day

[Kristy]

Metal slices through flesh, and I hear the next scream, rattling through the walls and flying right into my ears, deafening and ear-splintering. The low laugh that follows was to be expected; people actually pay mass amounts of money for an hour or so with newly-collected bodies, and they bask in the feeling that killing gives them; murderers, these people are. Experienced, insane, deadly. They torture the humans on offer in such brutal, inhuman and unmentionable ways, its hard to call them human.

And most of the time, they aren't anyway. But then again, that's the point.

I hear the low growl, and then the choked scream that comes soon after: it's all over. I hold my breath, and then the tall, dark-skinned male strolls soundlessly and nonchalantly out of the room. I drop my gaze, and his red eyes glare menacingly. So he's a Vampiire. I try not to look at his inhuman eyes; Vampiires are renowned for taking anything as a threat. Meeting a blood-thirsty leech's gaze can only mean trouble, and more than just possibly death.

I slowly enter the room, ready to carry put my gruesome - and extremely morbid - clean-up job that follows after every murder. Most of the time, not a drop of blood is spilled. Vampiires hate to let their food go to waste. In fact, this time, only a pile of blood-slicked bones, and even the bones look almost picked-clean. Vampiires always kill the victim in the last five minutes or so. This one looked like a particularly skeletal, stick-thin figure when Seth brought him in; he wouldn't have been hard to kill at all. He didn't stand a chance to begin with, poor guy

"He left the bones." I sigh.

"He's not a Werrwulfe." Seth frowns. I roll my eyes at his obvious attempt at humour.

"I guess he didn't want to look like too much of a cannibal, huh? At least he saved us some clean-up."

Seth chuckles slightly, resting his arm on my shoulder. "Damn right." Then, leaning closer to mutter in my ear, "And just think, in a few hours, we can get out of here, and never come back."

"Escaping won't solve all our problems. They'll only hunt us down and-"

"No, Kristy, they won't." His almost-black eyes are narrowed, his light-brown hair falling thickly over his extremely pale face in emo-boy chunks, falling over his face and almost covering his eyes. It's a wonder he can even see, but perhaps that's why he wears those outrageous welder's goggles? Even so, guys like him think they're all that, especially Seth Coma himself, with his slim, high-cheek-boned, pale features, and said "irresistible" attitude. He's not actually anything special, believe it or not.

People know he's a Vampiire, even though he's more on the side of Mortals than the Damned. I don't particularly like him, not just because he's a Vampiire; I guess it's just because he acts so much like a filthy leech, drinking blood and eating raw Mortal. There's a whole new meaning to ripping someone's throat out when it comes to Seth. He usually has requests from human females, asking for him to suck their blood, but they're so stupid they don't know until it's actually happening that he'll do it, regardless of what Immortal Creature he really is.

...I just hope that one day he'll drink a girl's blood, and they turn out to have hepatitis. Talk about making your mark, but in a situation like that, I would love to see guy's face when he leaves with a little memoir...

"Shame they didn't leave any blood for you." I snort; he winces slightly.

"You know that's not fair-"

"Sure it is. I have to do this job because you let the Vampiires find me, you couldn't protect me well enough. I could've done something with my life, instead of cleaning up after the likes of Werrs and leeches."