The Eternity Cure Read Free Page B

meant you had to donate blood on a regular basis. If you were Unregistered, you were left to fend for yourself in a city with no food and no supplies except the ones the masters allotted; but at least the vamps couldn’t take your blood unless they caught you themselves.
    Of course, you still had to worry about starving to death.
    Back when I was human, I’d struggled with hunger every day. My life had revolved around finding food and little else. There had been four of us in my small gang—me, Lucas, Rat and Stick. We had all been Unregistered; street rats, beggars and thieves, living together in an abandoned school and barely scraping by. Until one stormy night when we’d ventured beyond the Outer Wall to find food…and became the hunted ourselves. It had been stupid to step outside the protection of New Covington, but I’d insisted, and my stubbornness had cost us everything. Lucas and Rat had been killed, and I’d been pulled down and torn apart by a pack of rabids. My life should’ve ended that night in the rain.
    In a way, I guess it had. I’d died that night in Kanin’s arms. And now that I was a monster, I could never go back to the life I’d known. I’d tried, once, to contact a friend from my old life, the boy named Stick whom I’d looked after for years. But Stick, seeing what I’d become, had screamed and fled from me in terror, confirming what Kanin had always told me. There was no going back. Not to New Covington, not to my old life, not to anything that was human. Kanin had been right all along. He was always right.
    I thought of him often, of the nights we’d spent in the secret lab beneath the vampire city where I was born. His lessons, teaching me what it meant to be a vampire, how to hunt and fight and kill. The humans I’d preyed on, their screams, the warm blood in my mouth, intoxicating and terrible. And Kanin himself, who’d taught me, in no uncertain terms, what I was—a vampire and a demon—but also that my path was my own; that I had a choice.
    You are a monster. His voice was always so clear in my head, as if he was standing right next to me, his dark eyes boring into my skull. You will always be a monster—there is no turning back from it. But what kind of monster you become is entirely up to you. That was the lesson I clung to most, the one I swore I’d never forget.
    But Kanin had another rule as well, one I hadn’t remembered so clearly as the first. The one about humans, and becoming attached…
    And just like that, my traitor mind shifted to a lean figure with jagged blond hair and solemn blue eyes. I remembered his smile, that lopsided grin meant only for me. I remembered his touch, the heat that radiated from him when we were close. His fingers sliding over my skin, the warmth of his lips on mine…
    I shook my head. Ezekiel Crosse was human. I was a vampire. No matter what I felt, no matter how strong my feelings, I could never separate the urge to kiss Zeke from the desire to sink my fangs into his throat. That was another reason I’d left Eden without saying goodbye, without letting anyone know where I was going. I couldn’t be near Zeke without putting his life in danger. Eventually, I would kill him.
    It was better to be alone. Vampires were predators; the Hunger was always with us, the craving for human blood that could take over at any time. Lose yourself to the Hunger, and the people around you died. It had been a hard lesson for me to learn, and one that I did not ever want to repeat. It was always there—that fear that I would slip, that the Hunger would take over again and when I came back to myself I would have killed someone I knew. Even the men I preyed on—bandits, raiders, marauders, murderers—they were all still human. They were living beings, and I killed them to feed myself. To keep myself from attacking others. I could choose what kind of people I preyed on, but in the end, I had to prey on someone. The lesser of the two evils was still