Fading Darkness (Bloodmarked #1) Read Free Page A

winning the lottery a good thing, but I had
a slightly darker connotation for the word. I associated it with negative
thoughts and wake up every day thinking, “ Is today the lucky day? Is today
the day I die?”
    I didn’t need anyone to tell me how cruel
and unkind the world can be. Some would try to convince me that there was
balance in everything. I have witnessed cruelty first-hand, and all I have ever
asked for is that so-called balance. Everyone that was ever a significant part
of my life was taken from me, so if there was any balance to the universe then
why hasn’t it taken me too? Oh, right, because the whole “balance” theory was
bull shit. I’ve seen too much evil in the world and have yet to find the good.
    Why? Because I can’t die, literally. I have
always been this big freak of nature. I have bounced around from foster home to
foster home because no one could handle my strange abnormalities. They could
never understand why I developed physically and mentally ahead of all the other
kids and why I never got sick and why I healed instantly after getting hurt. I
didn’t blame them because I was more confused than anyone. It got even weirder
when the super senses started to kick in and it became increasingly difficult
to explain how I could overhear things I shouldn’t have heard and smelled
things that no one else picked up on. Once I realized these things weren’t
normal to everyone else, I shut up about my abilities. By that time though, I
had already been through countless homes and had been labeled a freak by all
the other kids my age, so I just accepted the label since I couldn’t argue it.
    The foster care system tried endlessly to
track down any living relatives but always came up empty handed. The only thing
they could conclude was that my dad and then 18-month old brother died in a car
accident and my mother died giving birth to me.
    I didn’t know why some people thought
offering up rational explanations for a person’s untimely death would help
others cope with that death, as if reasoning with it and knowing what happened
would explain why it happened. I had several people try to tell me my mother
was probably so stressed out and depressed about my father and brother that it
caused the premature labor and was ultimately responsible for her
complications.
    I have always felt responsible for my
mother’s death and in some way for my whole family’s demise. It was just too
big of a coincidence that they all died, and I ended up being impossible to
kill, as far as I knew anyway. There have been plenty of close calls to
convince me of that.
    I always tried searching for possible reasons
why I was such a freak, more of a way to prove myself wrong, that I wasn’t
responsible for their deaths. I came up with nothing that made sense until one
night walking home from the library when I was fifteen and saw something I
could never forget. I saw one of them for the first time that night, and
everything seemed to click. The day I stopped researching was the day I got my
first real dose of truth.
     I stopped researching because I had all the
answers I needed when I witnessed that vampire feeding on a woman in a dark
parking lot. Something in my stomach twisted at the sight, but it was more than
a reaction to the horror. I felt that innate alarm go off for the first time.
It was the first time I sensed a vampire and felt that unusual draw toward the
darkness. It wasn’t a yearning to be part of it but realization of the
connection I had to it. I didn’t question what I was seeing because something
inside me told me it was real.
    I didn’t waste time trying to rationalize
it. Suddenly, all the confusion I felt about myself over the years just turned
into rage. I went straight into action at lightning speed and ripped the
vampire away from the endangered girl with a newfound strength. I slammed both
hands against his chest sending him 20 feet away into the nearest building
leaving him crumpled on the