She took a deep breath, "Last chance. Are you in need of rescuing?" His expression turned very strange, almost as if she'd struck him, "Yes," he said finally.

Little mouse," a voice said through the keyhole. "Don't you know the more you wriggle, the greater the cat's delight?

He must have been handsome when he was alive and was handsome still, although made monstrous by his pallor and her awareness of what he was. His mouth looked soft, his cheekbones as sharp as blades, and his jaw curved, giving him an off-kilter beauty. His black hair a mad forest of dirty curls.

Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but she wasn't going to.

I'm going to take off your gag. And if you try to bite me or grab me or anything, I'll hit you with this thing as hard as I can as many times as I can. Understood?

I don't want to be a vampire' she told herself. But in her dreams, she kind of did.

Keep going' she told herself, 'Don't look back.' But she looked anyways.

That was seven years ago. The doctors told her father the memory would fade, like the big messy scar on her arm, but neither ever did.

Be careful," Aidan called from the bed. "You don't know what he might do." "We all know what you'd do, though, don't we?