Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 92612 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92612 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Trapped in an upside-down castle, Georgia is met at every turn by a creature as cruel and vicious as his vampire kin. Valen, the cursed lord of the manor, is the monstrous minotaur lurking at the center of Georgia’s maze. He stalks her steps, his gaze forever on her as she desperately searches for escape. He wants her memories, memories that are just as lost to her as she is to the outside world.
Valen has no intention of ever letting her go, not when she is the key to his ascendency to the vampire throne. He desires nothing more than her secrets. Not her entrancing eyes, her soft skin, her coursing blood. Once he breaks her apart and extracts her memories, he’ll be done with the mortal who haunts his days and nights, who dances just outside his grasp, who defies him at every turn.
But fate looks different in the light of day, and night can’t obscure the truth forever. . .
House of Night is a full-length dark gothic romance and is the first of the House of Night trilogy. This series is for readers who enjoy dark, atmospheric elements, horrormance, and an engrossing plot that drags you in and refuses to let you claw your way out
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
Recovered Journal of Dr. Georgia Clark
May 2, Year 1, Emergence Era
Forgetting can be a mercy. I think that’s something I remember hearing in the past. The long past—before the plague and the monsters in the night.
My eyes have been open so long they start to tear up. But I can’t close them. Not when someone might be coming. No, someone is coming. I feel it in the way my skin prickles in warning, the way the bodies around me begin to shiver, low, fearful moans escaping their throats.
“Don’t.” Someone to my left whimpers, her pale skin almost glowing under fluorescent bars bolted and caged to the stone ceiling high above us. Her eyes are sunken as her gaze strays to the door. She stares just as I do. Waiting. Black bruises mar her neck, and her shirt has long since been torn to shreds. Her small breasts bear similar bruises, puncture wounds that never fully heal. She makes no move to cover herself. We are far past modesty here in this pit. I think she was a senator. Maybe from one of the Western states. I remember my sister holding up a Christmas card with the woman and her family, all of them grinning while brandishing aggressive-looking guns. Not that those did them much good in the end.
The man closest to the door scrambles backwards, knocking the woman over as he tries to find someplace to hide among the dead or dying farther back in the cage. He’s still strong enough to move at decent speed, fresh enough to draw the monster’s attention. That’s our only hope—that we’ll be skipped over for a nicer meal.
I have nowhere to go, no dark corner where I’ll be safe. My back is already to the stone at the side of the cell. It’s twenty feet across and about fifteen deep. I counted out the measurements when I first got here, only a couple of other prisoners cowering against the wall as I searched for some way out, some sort of meaning, some way to make order from the chaos of this horrific new world. I did none of those things. I simply measured out the exact size of our doom. Of our coffin. Of the last place in this hell where our souls will remain.
Someone in the haze of bodies mumbles a prayer. I don’t have faith in anything, and I’m certain her words don’t rise any farther than the ceiling, perhaps falling back down onto us like ash. If I were to pray, it wouldn’t be for salvation or even for survival. It would be for vengeance, the only burning ember left inside my hollow shell.
A whisper in the long hallway sends another shiver through the remaining bodies, even the unconscious ones somehow sensing a predator.
Seventy-two steps. That’s the average of how long the hall is from the door to our prison to some outer door that I’ve never seen. I’ve counted it when a new prisoner is brought, though often they’re dragged by our captors. The jailors barely make a sound as they move, the same as the rest of their brethren, so from them I learn nothing. There are other cells, too, ones filled with the same stew of human suffering and horror. Their screams are nothing but white noise now. I can only assume my screams are the same to them.
Still, I wonder where the hall leads. I know I’ll never find out. I’ve been here longer than most. A month? Perhaps more. I don’t remember exactly. In any case, it’s borrowed time. I lost count like everyone else who tried to keep up by drawing marks on the wall with our own blood. That commodity quickly became far too precious to waste.
Every new arrival comes in bloody and beaten, their eyes empty and haunted. Horrific stories spill from their lips if they’re able to speak. DC is gone. I know that much. Wiped out by the vampires. The newcomers speak of someone they call the “Specter,” the leader of the vampire legions. Merciless, he kills and kills—no human survives in his presence.
Fewer and fewer humans arrive. The other political prisoners brought in with me were drained one by one, picked out and finished off. Only a handful remain. Secretary Shaw, Vince, and Sheila—a page from the White House—are still alive. Sheila doesn’t speak any more, hasn’t said a word since she was brought here a few days after I first woke on this concrete floor. She lies beside me, her body curled into a ball. Vince, once the head of my sister’s security, is awake, but his labored breathing evidences a body ravaged by violence. He should’ve died weeks ago, but he holds on, his eyes opening only when I try to force a morsel of food or a sip of water into his mouth.