The Vampire Games: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance by Stephanie Archer Page A

held loosely in front of her. I didn’t try to grab her, like I normally would have. I waited for her to move, and when she did, I blocked her.
    Not easily, though. She was so much faster than me.
    She grazed my arm, one of the only places bared by my outfit, and the skin went numb right away. I struck back, using the closeness to land a punch on Alisyn’s stomach. She probably would recover faster from a blow like that than I would, but she still staggered.
    I felt a brief rush. Maybe I could pull this out.
    Of course, that was when Alisyn stopped holding back.
    I didn’t give up or anything, but Alisyn was fast . She grabbed me in a couple special holds that made best use of the gloves, disabling both my legs and one of my arms before I could so much as blink.
    She had shown me those moves in training. I should have seen them coming.
    But vampires were so fast.
    I only managed to land a couple of punches—nothing on bare skin—before she grabbed my hair, yanked it aside, and left my neck bare.
    Alisyn hadn’t said anything about my neck in training, but in that brief moment, I knew that was the last thing I wanted.
    I hit her and rolled away, wincing at the tugging of my hair against my scalp.
    It wasn’t enough.
    Alisyn grabbed my neck with one of her gloves.
    It was the last thing I remember before everything went dark.

15
    A s finishing moves went , the glove to the neck was a terrible one.
    I was in and out of consciousness for a while after that. I wasn’t sure I was awake for more than five minutes at a time for days on end, which was probably its own mercy considering how my entire body screamed with pain whenever I was awake.
    Everything hurts .
    It wasn’t just my body. Alisyn’s betrayal stung like nothing I’d felt before. She had kept secrets from me, lied to my face, let me care about her.
    I’d been trained by a vampire.
    And then I had lost in a fight against her.
    Struggling to open my eyelids felt as difficult, and as painful, as scrubbing my face with sandpaper.
    When I managed to look around myself one time—for only a moment—I realized I was in some kind of hospital. I rested on starched white sheets in a gloomy, red-lit cave with glass accents. My wrists were bound to the railings with leather straps. Even disabled, the vampires didn’t trust me to hold still for very long.
    They were right not to trust me.
    The next time my eyes opened, I tried to break free. Tried to escape by rolling out of bed.
    Needless to say, it didn’t work.
    I drifted, I dozed. When I opened my eyes again, I wasn’t alone.
    Phillip sat beside my bed.
    “Bianka,” he murmured.
    I twisted my wrists within the leather straps. “Let me go.”
    “You’re thrashing too much. You’ll hurt yourself.”
    “I hurt anyway,” I said.
    His chilly fingers stroked along my arms. Under his touch, my body grew still. Calm radiated over me.
    “You didn’t tell me Alisyn’s a blood sucker,” I said.
    “She’s not,” he said.
    “She’s a vampire.”
    “But not a blood sucker,” he said. He was meeting my eyes for once, as though the haze of pain medication was all the armor he needed to put distance between us. I wished that I could have remained awake long enough to bask in the intensity of those eyes. It felt like I could have all secrets revealed to me if I could just sit up and look into his face.
    “I thought Alisyn was my friend,” I whispered.
    “She let you live,” Phillip said.
    I wasn’t sure that meant we were friends, either.
    He wouldn’t tell me why he didn’t tell me about her, but he did say that she let me live.
    “The crowd was voting for death,” he said, “although it wasn’t unanimous. You were vicious enough that you earned points for the fight, but we have to see the results later. We’ll have to see if you move ahead in the Games.”
    I hadn’t thought about it in terms of brutality during the fight, or even really known much about points.
    I had just been trying to stay