The Board Short Story Series:
Sanaa's Scar
Dorothy Darrow
Copyright 2012 by Dorothy Darrow
Smashwords Edition
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Written in the U.S.A.
She knew that place. She had been there before, but she couldn't remember when. A man dressed in shadow waited for her on a bright red couch. She knew him, too, though she didn't remember how. She floated to him, her legs moving independently, not controlled by her brain, but by the man and what he could give her. What he had given her. She sat beside the man, her eyes straining to perceive his features, but no light would touch him. How did she know him? If only she could see his face...
"I know what you want," he purred. It was true--she felt it all over her skin. Every hair follicle on her body stood erect in anticipation. "I can give it to you," he promised.
She lay back, stretching her neck, turning her head left, granting the man clear access to her carotid artery. She caught a glimpse of his pearly fangs as he placed his weight on top of her body so she couldn't run away. Not that she would. The fangs were so sharp they slid right into her skin, opening her to his lust. Intense, throbbing pain erupted from her neck. His mouth pressed hard into her skin, his other teeth grating into her flesh. She squeezed her fists against the excruciating pierce, refusing to show weakness. Refusing to give the man doubt that she was ready for her transformation.
Blood drained out of her body into his mouth. Hot queasiness shot through her. Her muscles wanted to escape, her fingers tried to reach for freedom, but she wouldn't let them move. Her head felt empty and light, her lungs deflated and expanded in nauseating waves. Her muscles turned to lead as the man drank her life away.
He stopped.
She didn't know how much blood he had taken. She tried to sit up, but her head felt like it was spinning like a top. She fell back into a recline on the couch.
"Don't move, Sanaa," the man said.
"Is it done?" she asked, her voice weak but eager.
"You'll have to earn it."
The man abandoned her on the couch. He left her all alone.
Sanaa crushed her eyelids together. Her sapped body seethed with fury. He had promised to make her like him. He had said she would live forever. He had said she would be beautiful.
Sanaa suddenly remembered his face. Slick, white skin blemished only by dark purple circles under his eyes. Those eyes with the fiery red pupils were how Sanaa had known she had found what she was looking for. She had found a vampire to turn her.
An explosion.
Sanaa bolted upright, awoken from her dream with such sudden force she nearly vomited. Her eyes raked the room for the source of the blast, but the room was undisturbed. Her frantic breathing slowed as she realized the explosion had occurred in her dream.
Sanaa's boss moved around in the adjoining room. Sanaa wasn't surprised. Board members rarely slept.
Sanaa laid back, her right hand hugging the two-prong scar on her neck. The heavy drapes over her window refused to close completely--the reason Sanaa had gotten the big bedroom in the opulent, gilded hotel suite--and a sliver of sunlight caressed her face. She abhorred the warmth it offered.
The seething hate from her dream still consumed her. She thought about Jax, the creature of the night she had once thought was so beautiful. Until he bit her and she saw him for the manipulative, controlling, evil crook he truly was. When he bit her, he became the only vampire who could turn her without killing her and any other vampire who tried to bite her. He used this power to force her into servitude, into being his "pet." Sanaa recalled those days with shudders. She had been so naïve, fooling herself into believing Jax would someday fulfill his promise to her. Then the New Order of Slayers had killed him in one of their bombings, and any chance she had of becoming a vampire vanished. No one would touch her. Jax's poisoned bite, his cursed gift, warned them all away.
Still, if not for Jax, she would have never learned of the Board: the strongest, most powerful vampires in the world, and her current employers. The Board kept the vampire race in check, especially now since they had come out of the shadows to coexist with humans. The Board enforced the laws their absent Queen had created countless lifetimes ago, along with the vampire race itself--the world's superior species that Sanaa ached to join.
She rubbed her scar until her skin burned.
Sanaa loved her job with the Board, but working for them meant working almost exclusively with vampires, constant reminders she could never have what they had. She watched them night after night, their liquid movements, their polished demeanors. None of them had aged a day since she met them, but Sanaa kept getting older. She had been sixteen when Jax betrayed her with his bite. That was six years ago.
Sanaa lay back against her pillow and thought about the Queen, Sanaa's final hope. One day the Queen would return from her extended vacation, and Sanaa would tell her her story, and the Queen would grant Sanaa the transformation she so greatly desired and deserved. Sanaa's bosses tried to convince her that she was wrong, that not even the Queen's blood could surmount the unique poison that lived in Sanaa's veins. But she argued that if the Queen had created the vampire race, and had been the source of Jax's poison, then it couldn't stop her from turning anyone of her choosing. Right?
At least once a day Sanaa found herself imagining her body morphing from that of a lowly human pretending to live as a vampire to a genuine vampire existing forever as a glorious immortal. Only the Queen could do that, if she took pity on Sanaa, which Sanaa knew in her heart she would. And every day that Sanaa fell asleep and woke again, she knew she was one night closer to finally facing the Queen. And then, all her dreams would finally come true.
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About the Author
Dorothy Darrow is a writer from the United States. She has degrees in many creative pursuits, including writing. She likes to write supernatural fiction, such as vampire novels. That is all she wants you to know. For now.
Connect With Dorothy Darrow Online:
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Look for the second novel in the Vampire Queen series, When the Moon Tires of the Night, a prequel to These Flowers Have a Taste for Blood that partly explains how the Queen's prophecy formed, out in late 2013.