Deadly Beautiful, Vivian Vargas [good books to read for 12 year olds TXT] 📗

strange, nearly painful rush of blood to my waiting veins. I clenched my fingers to help the blood flow, and the security guard with the broken nose jumped, as though he were thinking I was going to hit him. What a turd.
“Okay, boys, take me to the canner before I smear my crap on your shoes.”
They both grimaced. I wasn’t sorry for being rude to them at all.

****
Days have passed, and I swear on everything I was acting like a little angel. I treated the officials nice. I was even the sweetest thing towards the lunch lady, Alice, who liked me so much she often snuck tasty treats on my food trays. I even smiled at those batched security guards who always gripped their bloody batons as though they were dying to whack me with it.
I was charming and delightful on the outside of course, because in the inside of me I was still raging through complete hell. In my own personal world, the sky was black. Always dark and starless. The ground was non-existent. And I was falling in a pool of terrifying, agonizing withdrawal.
You think withdrawal is not so bad? Well, you are SADLY mistaken. Withdrawal is horrible. The heroin brought me a sensation of well-being, happiness, serenity. Without it, I felt like the weight of the most atrocious things in the universe was on my shoulders. I wanted support. I needed my strength. I needed leverage. It made me so disgusted of myself to know how much I became dependent on heroin, but a part of me didn’t care anymore. My body did not belong to me. It never did. My body belonged to the heroin. I was the Lady’s bitch. I was everyone’s bitch. The little lost girl who built a wall over herself, just to see who cared enough to break it down.
So far, no one did. The wall was still up there, embedded with barbed wire, and no one loved me enough to climb over it.

******
I had such a shocker the other day. It was even a bigger surprise then when Sasha came to visit me (she hasn’t visited me since then). I have seen a werewolf on the corner of a street, standing there like any other normal person standing on the street. A vampire once came to our high school class to give us a grisly, self-glorifying recollections. I have seen Druids shoot blue fire out of there mouths and floating without any support. But this was something else entirely. I never came so close to a creature of a Night Clan. Well, a Night Clan creature that wasn’t considered human. The vampire who taught us about world war two didn’t pay much attention to me, or anyone else in that classroom for that matter, so that doesn’t count.
Who knew that my new counselor was a fucking vampire?
When I walked in the room, dressed in jeans and wrinkled shirt, my checkered sneakers stained and torn, I had to double back. I was frozen in amazement. Wow, I was actually in close proximity with a blood sucker, and her creepy, remarkable red eyes were blaring directly at me. I broke out in a nervous sweat, scratching at my wrist, a habit I developed in this damned place. I could not break the stare that had slowly developed into a stupid gawk –I was so looking at her wonderful features.
She was so goddamned pretty. What was it about those immortal leeches that were so perfect-looking? God, did I feel inferior in her presence. She was sitting in a comfy armchair, her amazing pearl-white legs crossed elegantly at the knees. She was wearing a black pencil skirt and a white collared shirt, modest enough to not make you feel that uncomfortable, but yet tight and short enough to make any person’s heart race. She was certainly a fox, with her shockingly pale smooth skin, her lush, full mouth nearly as red and shining as her eyes, her long, voluptuous black hair, and that adorable cleft on her chin. When she saw me staring, she smiled. My heart raced a little when I caught sight of her large, sharp fangs. Fangs that could easily rip through my flesh as though I were made of butter.
“Don’t be afraid. Sit down, please.” She said. Her voice was throaty, seductive. Chillingly persuasive. It had the strangest pull on me, a pull that seemed to come directly from my midsection. I found myself unconsciously following her request, and I took a step forward. For some reason, taking that small step felt like I was walking on hot coals. She is dangerous, my mind screamed, I should turn and get the hell out of there. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Her uncannily unblinking red eyes were like magnets. My body wanted to sit next to her while my thoughts shrieked peril. I wanted to take a lock of her rich, vibrant black hair and bring it to my nose and sniff it. I wanted to do the weirdest things right now, things that never came across my mind, especially with a vampire chick.
I finally sat down. I had an overwhelming urge to ask her to blink, simply because she was creeping me the fuck out, but the sly smile that curled the corners of her perfect lips startled me into silence. Her fangs looked menacing, the expression on her face was that of a hungry cat eyeing a fat mouse.
“Its nice of you to come by, Whitney Stellar. My name is Morgan Blackwood.” She said. She adjusted the clipboard on her lap, keeping me from seeing the contents of it. “How are you feeling?”
“How am I feeling?” I answered, “Do you really give a fuck?”
She grinned even wider. My pulse quickened when she actually purred. Not a simple little housecat purr; it was more of a big tiger purr, a sound so unsettling it sent a ripple of uneasiness down my spine.
“Frankly, no.” she replied smugly, “But its my vocation to seem interested, unless you don’t want me to.”
I was kind of shocked. I never heard a counselor say such a thing to me before. In fact, I wasn’t very sure if counselors were allowed to say those things. Still, I had a sickening feeling that no one could really do anything about it. What can the head of this institute do when presented with such a problem? If anything, this vampire bitch before me could easily be the administrator on the down-low, and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. Vampires are one heck of a force to reckon with. They were the voyeurs of the Night Clan, mainly because they are the only known race who are actually truly immortal. Werewolves are second in line, but all they do is age very, very slowly. Eventually they do age, and can die of natural causes. Druids have only slighter longer life spans than humans. Some Night Worlders, like Shape- Shifters, have very short life spans. Vampires don’t die easily. They have to be killed to die –torched in a fire, head chopped off, stake through the heart (which is the most effective means of vampire murder). There is no natural cause of death for them.
But I could not help but wonder how many tried and failed attempts to kill this gorgeous creature before me. She was very small (she could not have been taller than five feet two), but there was something about her poise than made me think she was very dangerous. She definitely did not look disgusting, but the sinewy muscles that lined every inch of her body were toned and glossy. Her manicured hands looked like they could rip my head off as easily as I can rip the head off a doll.
“Um, I dunno.” I whispered a little timidly, shuffling my checkered sneakers. She eyed me with pity, her head tilting to the side, her lustrous black hair draping over her left shoulder.
“Do you want the truth Whitney? I am here to help you get better. I might not seem to understand what you are going through, but believe me, seeing enough of your kind has led me to understand your pain. And a proper understanding of pain is what leads me here to you.”
There was a pause of a heartbeat –well, my heartbeat, since her heart was basically dead- and I stared at my feet again. I was finding it kind of hard to stare at her directly now that I was so close. It was like she was her own personal sun and she was blinding me.
“Do vampires know pain like humans do?” I asked her. It was a strange question to come out of my mouth, but I had no restrain over it. I internally kicked myself.
She was quiet for a moment. For a moment, I was deathly afraid that I had offended her, but I could not bring myself to look at her again. I was afraid to see her fuming.
“Yes, I know the prospect of pain, Whitney. I definitely know.”
Her voice was slow, crackled, like saying them hurt her inside. I was slightly taken-aback. Not that I hadn’t already knew that vampires had their own set of emotions. I knew they vampires are very intense creatures. And I can imagine how pain feels like to her.
“Have you ever been heartbroken?” I asked her.
“By a man? Not particularly no. I married the man that sired me and I am still married to him today.”
I finally looked at her. For a moment I saw the little twinge of delight upon talking about her husband. She was probably totally contented with him. I swear I can actually see her fluff up like a happy monkey eating a banana. For a moment, I could not help but feel insanely jealous. She found love. I never did.
“You are so lucky.” I told her.
She smiled.
“Were you heartbroken?” she asked me. I started to nod, but then shrugged half-way. How can I be heartbroken when I was never truly in love with him? He only played on my sympathies and I fell for that. I was an idiot, and that led me to this.
“Do you think that taking this heroin was a defense mechanism to deal with the pain of your heartbreak?” she inquired. Her red eyes were darting all over my face. I’m sure that if I lied to her, her expert eyes could see it.
“When I took it, all the bad memories went away. All the pain disappeared. Without it now, I feel it all coming back. And its bad.”
I drew my sweater tighter around myself and suppressed tears.
“Your eyes are watering. Your heart is beating in a thick, uneven motion. You hold yourself like you are trying to protect yourself.” She observed, writing them down on her clipboard. Her actions annoyed me, but I held it in.
“…and your heroin hungry mind is still trying to convince your body that it is needed through the notion of pain. This you must learn to suppress.”
“But how? I living my life here in this hellhole and all I can think about is that.” I replied. The tears finally fell. In my mind, I saw the Lady taunting me with her evil, enticing grin.
“Heroin is a relaxant stimulant. It creates the feelings of ease and well being. You have to find other ways to create those feelings, and train your mind and body to accept the fact that whatever you do to forget it, it wont be as instantaneous as heroin.”
I gulped. That did not sound easy. How can I, when it was already so hard to deal with in the first place?