Unleash The Moon (The Preternaturals Book 6) by Zoe Winters Read Free Book Online Page A

medical
examining table.
    “ Sit here and roll back your
sleeve. We’re just going to take some blood and a tissue
sample.”
    “ T-tissue sample?” Sydney’s mind
went straight to terrible things involving scalpels.
    “ Just a swab inside your cheek.”
The woman patted her on the arm and smiled kindly. Aside from
insisting on calling Sydney by a number and a letter instead of her
real name, she seemed non-threatening, nice even. But Sydney shook
the thought from her head. They were only being nice to try to gain
her trust. Just as Jacob had. There was no reason to think people
who would lock you in a cell and run experiments on you were “nice
people”.
    Sydney’s eyes went to the vein pulsing in the
woman’s throat. At least she couldn’t hear the blood rushing
through like a real vampire would have, or the heartbeat. It might
have driven her to do something stupid. Thankfully she could only
see the twitch of the vein.
    “ You’re hungry,” the woman said,
conversationally.
    Maybe if Sydney were a real vampire, that thought
would have struck some fear in the technician, but instead she went
for a cotton swab.
    “ Open.”
    Sydney opened her mouth and the woman took a sample
and put it into a plastic bag.
    “ I’ll tell you what,” she said,
“I’ll take your blood, then I’ll give you some blood in
return.”
    Sydney felt the glow come to her eyes, and she
nodded. Now that she was an adult, she preferred to drink from men.
It wasn’t like that for all vampires. Some women preferred other
women, and some men other men. It seemed tied directly into who
they were attracted to, but she was too hungry right now to care
much about that distinction.
    She winced and bit her lip as the needle went into
her arm and the woman drew a couple of vials of blood and put
labels on them.
    “ There. That wasn’t so bad was it?
It’s time to go back now.”
    “ But…” Were they lying to her
already?
    “ Your food will be waiting for you
when you return to your cell. You know the way. Don’t go exploring.
We’ll know.” The woman pressed a button and the door to the room
they were in opened. She went back to her clipboard jotting down
notes.
    Sydney wanted to run, but how? To where? And she was
so very tired suddenly. She could sleep for a million years and
yet, they’d just reached the night’s peak. Glowing arrows
illuminating the glass guided her back to her cell.
    When she reached the glass cube, the door opened and
a perky robotic voice said: “Welcome home, 5857B.”
    She winced. Home? Yeah right. This would never be
home. It would end up being her coffin, if anything.
    Inside the cube was a table with a few clear medical
bags filled with red fluid. What the hell was this? Bagged blood?
She couldn’t live on bagged blood. It was so weak, she’d probably
die of malnourishment if she drank it—if such a thing was possible
for a vampire.
    She circled the bag a couple of times, a grimace on
her face. This would be disgusting, like her mother’s stories of
old ladies eating canned cat food.
    She looked up to find the scary growly guy in the
cube next to hers watching her intently. She wished he would stop
that. It freaked her out.
    She picked up one of the bags and turned away from
him. There were glass cubes containing a preternatural on all four
sides of her—if you didn’t count the hallway outside the door—as
well as above and below her. It wasn’t as if she would get any
feeding privacy here, but the way he watched her was too intense.
The cubes were lined up and stacked on top of each other. She was
on one of the higher floors as there seemed to be far more cubes
below than above. It created an odd sense of vertigo, like somehow
the glass would stop holding her and she’d just fall. But maybe
that was the hunger talking.
    She allowed the glow to come to her eyes and her
fangs to descend, then she took a deep breath and bit into the bag.
She was right. It was disgusting. It was cold and dead.