Dinner With a Vampire Read Free Page A

lights.
    ‘Bloody police,’ Kaspar snarled. ‘Wait here,’ he ordered. He thrust me forward, straight into the chest of one of the other men. ‘Fabian, look after Girly here.’
    For the second time that night I hit something rigid. He too was cold and I sprung back like I had been stung, toppling over into the gutter beside the pavement. But I never reached the ground. I looked down at my arm, caught in midair by a hand almost as pale as my own.
    ‘Don’t fall,’ a soft voice said. I followed the arm up, dazed, to find the smiling face of the boy who had jumped over me in Trafalgar Square, sky-blue eyes twinkling down at me with some sort of amusement. For a brief, ludicrous moment I admired his fair, untidy hair and muscled chest, just visible beneath the unbuttoned collar of his shirt, before my mind caught up and I pulled my hand away, horrified at my thoughts. Unperturbed, however, he carried on.
    ‘I’m Fabian,’ he said, holding the same hand back out.
    I shrunk away, rubbing my hands and wrists on my coat where his blood-tainted hands had touched me. He frowned, eyeing me as I backed away, his hand left hanging in the air.
    ‘We won’t hurt you, you know.’
    Four other pairs of eyes watched, tensed and waiting for me to run. But I had given up hope of that. Instead, I was relying on the fact that this Kaspar would be gone long enough for a passing police car to spot us.
    ‘That back there’ – he gestured along the street – ‘was necessary. I know it doesn’t look that way but you have to believe me when I say it needed to be done.’
    I stopped. ‘Necessary? It’s not necessary, it’s wrong. Don’t patronize me, I’m not a child.’
    The words were out of my mouth before I had time to think about anything beyond wanting to buy myself time. My hands tightened around my wrists and I stopped rubbing. They seemed shocked that I had found my voice and Fabian’s eyes darted behind me every now and then.
    ‘Then how old are you, one who knows so much about morality?’ He cocked his head to one side and I closed my mouth, hesitant about whether to tell them but glad they had ignored the rest of my outburst. ‘Well?’
    I bit on my lip. ‘Seventeen,’ I murmured.
    ‘I didn’t know seventeen-year old girls wore such short dresses these days.’
    Jumping at the sound of a conceited voice behind me, I spun around, my dark hair whipping behind me, heavy fringe settling over my eyes. Kaspar was leaning against a lamppost with his fingers in his pockets and his thumbs sticking out, a grotesque smirk tugging at his lips again. His eyes raked my form and I wrapped the coat tightly around myself to try to cover the flimsy dress.
    His smirk widened. ‘Blushing really clashes with those purple eyes of yours, Girly.’
    I flinched at his reference to my eyes – an odd shade of blue and the reason behind my name. I should have been used to the mockery. Between having freak eyes, a matching name and being a devout vegetarian, I had my work cut out dodging jokes. I opened and closed my mouth several times. But as my eyes naturally averted, his smirk vanished.
    ‘Go!’
    The others had already disappeared, swallowed by the darkness of an alley, whilst I was thrown violently sideways, landing behind a line of bins. I looked around, dazed. The only light came from a seedy bar further down the alleyway, tucked between a fire escape and an overflowing skip. Heaving for breath, winded, I began to clamber to my feet, but a hand clamped down on my mouth, the other yanking me fully up as I was half-dragged, half-carried along the alleyway, feet coated in grime from the paving.
    Just as we rounded the corner at the end of the alley, blue lights illuminated the brick walls. A drunkard, slumped against the skip, shirked away, moaning loudly and muttering curses even I reddened at. But his groans could not drown out the growing sound of sirens, rising to a crescendo just a few streets away.
    ‘You have to run