A Shade of Vampire 28: A Touch of Truth Read Online Free

believe it. I refused to believe that one had managed to latch onto me. Escape was my only option. I would survive.
    As another hand gripped my right leg, however, there was no more denying it. And I had no weapon with which to reach them or fight them off. I attempted to manipulate the liquid I was immersed in, make it rise up, reveal the Bloodless beneath it, but it was so thickly polluted with other substances, it was hardly responsive to my powers. I managed to surge up a wave, but the liquid I’d displaced was immediately replaced with more slime, and I failed to scoop deep enough to reach my attackers.
    I struggled to keep my head above the surface as a second pair of fangs dug into me.
    Feeling myself being pulled under, I gazed hopelessly toward the exit. The ladder—it was so agonizingly close. I made one last attempt to reach it, even abandoning the fire in my left hand in order to get a hold of it. I lunged, my fingers clasping around the cold rusted metal. But I was still stuck, and now that my fire had diminished, more Bloodless lurched for me.
    As much as I had learned from my father about tenacity and the will to survive, I couldn’t help but think that maybe there came a time when you just had nothing left. When you had to give in. When fighting only prolonged the pain…
    A sudden chorus of screeching erupted from behind me and pierced through my desperate thoughts. Then I heard an odd sound… it sounded like the whirring of rotor blades, slicing air and liquid.
    Indeed, as I gazed into the darkness, I caught sight of a spinning wheel of blades levitating in the air. Rotor blades. They looked sharp as knives. I stared, stunned, as I realized that they were slashing through the crowd of Bloodless, severing their heads, limbs… rendering the sewer into Bloodless soup.
    The blades spun so fast, they spliced the entire crowd of Bloodless in under a minute, until it arrived within two feet of me—me and the Bloodless who were still beneath the slime and feasting on me.
    Dizziness was beginning to overtake me, but I just managed to keep my vision focused enough to witness the blades dip beneath the surface. I heard the sound of muffled screaming underwater. The gunk surrounding me churned wildly, and then the fangs withdrew from my flesh in quick succession. The blades started churning up pieces of pale limbs—bits of hands, arms, legs… heads.
    Then the deadly wheel lifted out of the slime, only a foot in front of me.
    Although my body was begging to just collapse, I finally launched onto the ladder and pulled myself above the liquid. I couldn’t yet bring myself to glance down at my legs to see what kind of a state they were in, much less consider what was about to happen to me next. My wounds were stinging so badly, I couldn’t help but feel that blood poisoning would end up killing me before turning ever did.
    “Hey!” A deep, female voice echoed abruptly down the tunnel.
    Then I caught sight of two figures—one short, one tall—wearing dark clothes, gloves, and gas masks covering their faces. Two people whom I could only assume in my dazed state had been my original saviors.
    They started wading through the sewage toward the ladder and as they arrived beneath me, I realized that one of them was a man. From what I could see of their faces through their masks—which wasn’t much, mainly their dark black-brown eyes—they were young, perhaps in their early twenties. From the similarity of their eye colors, maybe they were siblings.
    The girl swore as she looked at my leg.
    “Oh, great. They bit her!” she hissed to the man. She had a New York twang to her accent.
    Alarm flashed in their eyes and they began to retreat.
    “Wait!” I cried. “Please! Don’t leave me!”
    I realized that I still had a small spark of fire left in my right palm and I used all the energy left in my worn body to coax the spark into a blazing fire.
    “I’m not a human!” I exclaimed. “I am half fae. I may not be