I should have known that no game would have worked that way, and I think that part of me did know and just wasn’t ready to believe it as I walked toward Athan. “How are we all inside the same version of the game together?” I asked.
The man next to me threw back his head and laughed as I walked past him. Even his laugh was intoxicating, and his voice slid over me as if I could feel it rubbing up against my skin. His hair was dark like Athan’s but longer and messier, and his pale features were so breathtaking that it was hard not to stop and stare.
“Come now, Cassius,” Athan scolded. “You might at least try to act the part of a gracious host.”
“Is that what we’re calling ourselves these days?” he replied, ceasing his laughter as he put a goblet to his lips to drink.
I continued to walk across the room toward Athan, who sat on top of a large stone, much like the one he was sitting on the last time I had seen him. I stopped as I passed the girl who I thought I recognized as she sat shuddering on the floor. She looked up at me as if she recognized me, too. Yep, she had been enrolled at Boston Conservatory—until she had disappeared.
What the hell is going on here?
When I reached Athan, he stood and walked close enough to stroke my cheek with the backside of his hand. He was dressed all in black, and his short, black hair was spiked in several different directions. The T-shirt he wore clung to his chest, and although I had seen how muscular he was at the studio on several occasions, he seemed even more ripped now.
“How are you enjoying Mystreuce so far?” Athan asked as he let his hand drop from my cheek to the top of my shoulder.
“I think I’m done with games for a while,” I answered.
“How daft are you not to realize you aren’t in a game anymore?” Cassius called from the other side of the room. “You’ve left your reality, and now you’re in ours. Mystreuce isn’t a game you twat; it’s a hidden world.”
Well, there it was…confirmation. I thought I was stuck inside a glitched-out virtual world, but instead, I was stuck inside some sort of alternate universe. I wasn’t sure if this was cool or scary as hell.
“I bet you think we’re all humans, too?” Cassius rolled his eyes dryly as he took another big sip from his goblet.
That made the decision for me —scary as hell.
I looked back over my shoulder at him and hoped to see him getting a rise off the joke he had just made. But instead, he grinned mischievously, with a half-open mouth that housed four very sharp and very long fangs. I tried to turn away from Cassius again, to look back at Athan and demand a rational explanation from my friend and teacher who I had come to know and respect, but before my head made it full-circle, everything went dark, and I felt as though I were falling into the air.
* * *
On the first blink of my opening eyes, I saw Greg, or Dregon, the guy who I knew to be the owner of the gaming den. I was lying on the ground and could feel dozens of eyes watching me. The floor of the chamber was every bit as cold as it had looked, and I shivered with my back pressed up against it.
“Dregon?” I asked him as I struggled to keep my eyelids from closing again.
“Good for you,” he answered snidely. “You remembered my name this time.”
“So was your name ever Greg?” It seemed like an irrelevant question, but I was too disoriented to ask anything heavy yet.
“Nope,” he answered. “Only a pseudonym for you mortals.”
“And you’re not a mortal,” I said as Dregon pulled me by my elbow to a seated position. “You’re the same thing that he is?”
Dregon laughed. “If you mean a vampire, then yes. But I’m not the same as Cassius. Not many of us are the same as Cassius.”
I had no idea what he meant by that, but I was too hung up on the notion of being in a chamber full of vampires to give the suggested distinction any further thought. I looked around at the room and all of the other people in it.
“Don’t worry,” Dregon said sarcastically. “You’re not the only human here.”
He pulled me up to a standing position, and when he let go of my arm, my legs started to give out from under me again. For a minute, I caught sight of Cassius, and it looked like he was going to lunge forward and grab me to break my fall. But he apparently thought better of it and stayed in his overly decadent chair while he watched me get my balance and avoid another embarrassing fall.
“These,” Dregon said as he motioned his hand toward the groups of people in the center of the room. “Are all humans, like yourself.”
There were about two dozen of them, and they looked as if they’d been there for hours, as was evident by the fatigue and worry in their eyes.
“I am the one who brought you here,” he continued.
“No, you weren’t,” I said obstinately. I didn’t care if I was in some supernatural death tank. I wasn’t going down without saying my peace. “I came into Inside Out on my own and came into what I thought was a game on my own. Granted, I didn’t realize it was an actual place.”
Dregon laughed again. I didn’t like the guy’s laugh. It reminded me of my uncle on my father’s side; he always had a gross smell of cigars on his breath and hugged me a little too long to be comfortable.
“I created the gaming den around the hidden entry point to Mystreuce and installed the illusion of the game to bring you here, as I did with all of these other people,” Dregon said.
“Well, you must be very proud of yourself then,” I said.
Cassius chortled in the background; I had a knack for letting my mouth get me into trouble.
“Actually,” Dregon said. “I am. And why wouldn’t I be? I am Athan’s second in command, and you would do well to respect me and my position here.”
My hair was still pulled back into a tight ponytail from when I had left the dance studio, and Dregon derived a sick pleasure in grabbing it in his fist to give it a sharp pull. When I tried to wrangle myself free from his grasp, he simply pushed me into the group of people on the floor and walked away to stand near Athan. I stayed on my knees with my hands pressed against the floor as I looked up at Athan. I got ready to stand and approach him again, but the girl from the dance studio put her hand on my forearm to stop me.
“I wouldn’t,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
“Because the man you and I both thought was our dance instructor happens to be an immortal vampire and the leader of the most powerful vampire clan in this entire world.”
“And by world,” I said, “you mean Mystreuce .”
She nodded. “It was never just a game.”
As I sat next to the girl, Athan and Cassius looked like they were playing a card game, each of them taking alternating turns as we made up the deck. Athan pointed at a man who was standing to my left, and Dregon came over to pull him toward the side of the room where Athan had gone back to sit down. Then Cassius waved a finger toward someone behind me, who was quickly escorted to his side of the room by a young, blond man with startling green eyes. Eventually, the girl next to me got ushered over near Athan, leaving only myself and one other girl remaining in the center of the room. It was Cassius’s turn to choose someone, and he chose me. As his blond-haired servant came to collect me, Athan made a grumbling noise under his breath, which Cassius heard.
“Something wrong?” Cassius said with his legs hanging over the side of his wing-backed chair as he balanced the goblet precariously in his hand.
“No,” Athan said stiffly. “Nothing at all.”
But something was definitely bothering Athan. I could tell as he flicked his wrist toward the last girl in the center of the room for Dregon to bring to him. Athan was disgruntled, and it was obvious to anyone with eyes.
I wasn’t sure what the separating into groups was about, and I wasn’t sure whether it was better or worse to have been chosen for Cassius’s group. I knew Athan, at least I thought I did, and maybe I could have talked to him privately and convinced him to let me out of here if I could have gotten him alone. Then again, he had lied to me all these years—about being a vampire no less. And I had to admit that there was something dangerously intriguing about Cassius. As soon as everyone had been shuttled to their side of the room, we were all ushered out of the chamber and down a long tunnel that seemed to stretch on forever.
I walked slowly at the back of the line and looked for any means of escape that I might happen to find. As we walked, the blond-haired man, who I noticed had ears that were way too tall and slender to be human, explained how the groups were sorted. Athan chose humans who would train as warriors. Cassius picked the humans who would serve best as either slaves or entertainers.
“Hmph,” I snorted under my breath. “Doesn’t surprise me.”
“What doesn’t surprise you?”
I whirled around when I heard the voice coming from behind me. I could have sworn I was the last one at the end of the line. I was face to face with Cassius. Even in the barely lit tunnels, I could see his black eyes shining like hollow orbs against his alabaster skin. He was eerily attractive in a way that made my heart feel like it was stuck in my throat.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I live here,” he said sarcastically.
I knew I should have been afraid of him, but instead, I was mostly just mad. Mad that I had been tricked and lied to and taken from my home to be brought into some unknown place to be used as a slave for an obviously arrogant mythical vampire. Literally, I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
“What is it that doesn’t surprise you?” Cassius asked again.
“It doesn’t surprise me that you would be the one in charge of slaves and entertainers and not the one in charge of warriors.” I meant it to sound hurtful. I meant it to overcompensate for my fear. But when I felt his breathe on the side of my neck as he walked next to me and felt him pause in his step for a moment, I almost wish I hadn’t said it.
“Well, Mara…thankfully, there’s a lot that will still surprise you here, I’m sure. Despite your obvious expertise in the affairs of vampires.”
“I never said—” but when I turned to look at him beside me, Cassius had disappeared.
I stood still in the dark tunnel, looking around until my eyes couldn’t see anything but the flitting stars of my vision fighting against itself as it struggled to see into the void. I thought that maybe if I stood there long enough in the dark that I might just disappear myself.
“Mara?” a new voice said. It was the guy who had been leading the group of us through the tunnel. His green eyes seemed as though they were backlit because I could still see them shining, even in the dark. “I thought you might have gotten lost,” he said. He had a much softer demeanor than either Athan or Cassius.
“Are you a vampire too?” I asked.
“No,” he chuckled. “I’m a fae.”
“A fae? Is that like a fairy?”
“Essentially.”
I got the feeling that he was dumbing down his answer to appease my obvious handicap of being human.
“I wouldn’t try to talk to him if I were you,” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Cassius. I’ve served him for more years than I can remember, and trust me when I say, it’s not a good idea.”
“Who is he?” I asked. “Are he and Athan some sort of ruling vampire friends?”
“Cassius is Athan’s half-brother,” he answered. “And the rightful ruler of the vampires.”
“Rightful? ”
“Athan is the current ruler of the largest and most powerful vampire clan in Mystreuce. But the only reason that he received the position was that Cassius refused it. Their father relinquished rule over the vampire clan to Cassius when he died, but Cassius refused the role.”
“Why?”
“Because Cassius doesn’t want to rule,” he said.
“Let me guess, he would prefer to drink wine from silver goblets?”
He looked thoughtful at my comment. “I believe the reason is a bit more substantial than that. You’re very inquisitive,” he said. “Most of the new recruits are just frightened and focused on finding a way back to the human world.”
“Trust me,” I said as I rolled my eyes. “I’ve done both of those things already. I guess I just tend to get over self-pity faster than most.”
I heard a small laugh, one that sounded almost impressed. “Well, let’s go get you settled with the rest of the group, Mara. There will be a lot for you to get used to in the morning.”