Free The Dark Proposal (The Claire McCormick Trilogy) by Megan Cashman Page A

wanted to look for a way out, but the approaching Daniel held her gaze.
    He stopped a foot away from her. A moment passed with Claire’s quick gasps filling the room.
    “Did-did you…put something i-in my drink?” she managed to say.
    He snickered without opening his mouth.
    He paused and opened his mouth wide, baring especially the top teeth. He flexed his upper lip, and suddenly his two triangular eye teeth shot out into two long fangs.
    Her heart froze and her gasps stopped before she managed to let out a weak yelp. “No, no. What is…this? Is this a kind of joke?”
    “You know what this is,” Daniel said in a quiet voice, in a tone that matched his sinister gleaming eyes.
    “I-I don’t,” she whispered.
    Taking her hand, he guided her trembling fingers to his teeth. He let go right before they reached his mouth. On her own, Claire slowly reached out and ran her middle finger down one tooth before poking at the other. The teeth were solidly in his mouth.
    Pressing against the second tooth, her middle finger went against it’s pointed ends and pricked her finger. Withdrawing quickly, she saw she had drew some blood.
    Daniel noticed too. He looked at the bloody finger tip as intensely as he did at Claire with wide eyes. Then his turquoise eyes seemed to change color. The hue suddenly became fluorescent and seemed to dance away as the blood ran down her finger.
    He reached for her finger and slowly brought it up to his mouth, where the two eye teeth still stuck out.
    She was completely frozen in fright and confusion. She wanted to blink repeatedly but couldn’t. She wanted to breathe but couldn’t. All she could do was watch as the man she thought she knew took her finger to his lips, his eyes fixed on her.
    He wrapped his lips around the bleeding finger and roughly sucked on it, spilling her blood into him.
    “No,” Claire whispered. Then she got louder. “No, stop! Don’t do this! What are you doing? Dan, stop!”
    Just as suddenly as the whole scenario began, Daniel dropped her finger, ran his tongue across his blood-stained teeth, flexed his upper lip again and the two elongated eye teeth pulled back to their former size.
    “No,” he echoed. “Not tonight. Not like this.” He looked at her as though she was a piece of meat, something he was thinking about feasting on, just not right away. “Besides, I already fed.”
    Claire was clutching her finger to her chest, pressed tightly against the wall, her mouth still hanging open. She didn’t know what to say or do.
    As he casually began to walk away, she managed to sputter out, “This is fake. This can’t be real. What is going on?”
    He spun around to her. “Fake? Not real? You think I was just putting on a show for fun?”   He approached her again.
    “Don’t come near me!” Claire gasped. She was slowly finding her breath again.
    “I won’t do anything to you. But I don’t understand how you could think this is all fake,” he was inches away from her, placing his right arm next to her, against the wall, like he was preventing her from running away. He examined her. “You look frightened enough, so how could what I’ve done not be real?”
    “It’s just…just…” she couldn’t bring herself to say the word.
    “What?” he pressed her.
    “You’re a vampire,” she finally whispered. How weird it was to say the word. She felt both silly and shaken at the same time. Silly because vampires didn’t exist. Shaken because somehow, they did.
    “Exactly,” a slow smile spread across Daniel’s face and he removed his hand from the wall. Backing away, he continued, “Crazy as it sounds, it is true. Especially when you think about it.” He turned and went to the MP3 player and put it on. Soft alternative music began to play as he languidly sat on the couch, put one ankle on the opposite knee, put his hands behind his head and tilted it against the wall, closing his eyes.
    Watching him wide-eyed, Claire slowly detached herself from