Free The Vampire Games: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance by Stephanie Archer Page A

hadn’t seen Phillip ever since he’d sent Alisyn in to talk to me that first day. Either he hadn’t been coming back to his rooms, or he had another entrance at the top of the stairs that I hadn’t yet dared to climb. If it hadn’t been for the fact I was only alive because of the sixty crowns he’d spent on me, I might have been able to pretend he had never been more than a dream.
    But I slowed down, I took five seconds, I breathed and thought.
    And I started noticing Prince Phillip coming around a lot more often.
    He always came in alone, and he was always gone by the time Alisyn and I had finished our drills for the day.
    Phillip never spoke or interfered.
    I thought he must have been giving Alisyn feedback, though. She often changed her techniques with me after a visit from Phillip.
    He also started showing up in other places.
    In the mornings, when I was eating the breakfast that was anonymously delivered outside my bedroom door, he was watching from the top of the stairs.
    When I sat in the entryway to read books while waiting for Alisyn, sometimes he stood on the other side of the arch, shoulder against the wall, blue eyes slicing through the silence of the room.
    Before I went to bed at night, he was there, too.
    I wondered if he was there when I slept.
    It wasn’t like I could ask him. The one time I tried to chase him down to speak, he vanished before I even reached the bottom of the stairs.
    Yet he was always there.
    The way that he hung around ensured I never had time to look for an escape. If Phillip wasn’t lurking in some murky corner, then Alisyn was there to help me train, or there were the guards waiting in the hallway to make sure I couldn’t head out through the most obvious exits.
    I was trapped.
    Phillip was haunting me.
    The more fleeting his visits, the harder it was to ignore him.
    Before long, I couldn’t think of anything else.
    It didn’t escape Alisyn’s notice.
    “Where is your head today?” she asked one day, leaning over to talk to me on the ground. She’d knocked me down particularly hard because I hadn’t been paying attention. Even with the soft floor, I knew it would bruise. “One slip like this in the Games, and that’s it.”
    “I’m not distracted,” I said.
    I had always been a bad liar. After a few weeks training me, Alisyn wasn’t fooled.
    “Sure,” she said. “Sure you’re not distracted.”
    And she boxed my left ear.
    I cried out, gripping the side of my head as the eardrum rang like a bell.
    If I’d been paying attention, I would have been able to deflect that.
    “You’re thinking about something,” Alisyn said.
    She was right. I was thinking about a lot of things.
    I was thinking about using the fighting moves she taught me against Lord Hector. I was wondering what was up with Prince Phillip, and why he wouldn’t let me speak to him. And I was worrying about Marc.
    The last of them was the least likely to damn me if I shared it.
    “There was a man with me,” I said. “Marc. We were separated right before the Grinder.”
    “Marc.” Alisyn pondered the name, fists drooping at her sides. She didn’t seem to recognize it. To be fair, she probably didn’t know any of the humans other than me—I didn’t, either. My entire world had been diminished to my bedroom, the library, and the place where Alisyn trained me.
    “Do…do you know where he might be?” I asked tremulously.
    “Besides the obvious?” Alisyn asked.
    She didn’t even say the word “dead,” and it hurt.
    I swallowed hard. “I just need to know. How can I find out where he’s gone?”
    “There are worse things in this place than uncertainty,” she said. “Now hands up, and try to numb my leg with the shock gloves again.”
    I was pretty sure that was the end of the conversation.
    To my credit, I really did try to forget about it.
    But I couldn’t.
    Marc was the reason I’d thrown myself into the Grinder in the first place. He was also the reason that I had left Prince