Excerpt from Vexed To Nightmare

As promised, here is the excerpt from the final draft of Vexed to Nightmare, my dark urban fantasy novel, due out later this year.





I have their blood on my hands.
It’s always the same. Every year, on the anniversary, I do not visit their graves and lay flowers. I do not return to the house we used to call our home, because it stopped being ours the day he took me and it stopped being a home the day I burned it to the ground.
They have probably built a new house there, filled with a new family making new memories. I wouldn’t know. I never went back.
Instead I spend this day trying not to self-destruct. Or perhaps you could say that I am trying to do exactly that, and failing. Because failing is what I do best, isn’t it? After nineteen years, I still have no answers to the questions that I carry with me, like stones sewn into my clothing, drawing me deeper into the dark waters of the unknown with every passing year.
I promised them, the day I came back, that I would find our truth and our vengeance, but almost two decades later, here I am. Still clutching at that bastard of buoys, hope. Hope that next year will be different. Next year I’ll find the vampire who destroyed us. Next year I’ll put an end to this, and I might finally be able to breathe.
That is how the anniversary feels, like a weight on my chest. It’s always there but on this particular day of the year its burden increases tenfold. Or maybe I just become too weak to bear its weight, just for twenty four small hours.
If I fold beneath it for just one day of the year, it’s ok, isn’t it? It’s not like there is anyone to see me fall. So fall I do, and sometimes it’s so quiet, no one hears. Sometimes, it’s a spectacular show, like the year I escaped the confines of the Academy and gave arson a go.
Since I graduated and moved to new London, I’ve learned to sublimate the energy into a different kind of violence.
This year, I tried to find a sparring partner at the agency complex, but no one would come near me. They aren’t as stupid as they look and my story is common knowledge. Everyone knows about the girl who was abducted as a child. The orphan who can’t remember what her abductor did to her. For a long time, I was the grain that fed the rumour mill, until I started breaking teeth in the smiles aimed down on me.
Now I don’t even need to threaten anyone. People, for the most part, just stay as far away from me as possible. Today that meant, in the absence of a co-worker to beat the shit out of, I had to look beyond the Complex limits.
It didn’t take too long. In New London, among the shiny people, the fangs are well concealed behind perfect needle-stung lips, but in the Old city, there are mouldering corners where the immortal skulk in predatory packs. Old London has a ravaged face but the worst of its depravity still hide between the lines. Human police have no hope. Even the agency doesn’t attempt to intercept every illegal blood exchange.
When I arrived, even in broad daylight, there were at least ten humans lying with their clients atop them, tick-like fixed to their throats, sweaty old paper money clutched in their limp, pallid hands.
It didn’t take long. I have never been beaten in hand to hand combat, and I have a way with blades.
On the other side, I know what I did was illegal. Exchanging blood for money is too, but that doesn’t give me the right to kill the vampires willing to pay that bit extra for their next meal straight from the vein instead of from a bottle. The fact that as a soljinn, I am literally born to hunt them is irrelevant. The law is the law. As an agent for the ASM, it’s supposed to be my job to uphold it.
Seeing the stark, languid faces of the blood whores after I gutted their clients, I’m not sure if what I did was wrong. I’m not sure about much anymore.
On the way back to the bunker I call home, no one notices me. In my hooded sleeveless robe, sweatshirt and gloves, my long blue hair is covered, my hands are hidden, and the blades are safely tucked back into their sheaths beneath.
It isn’t until I lock the door within and press my back to it that I feel it. The aftertaste of the rush. It feels like nineteen years of pain and a mouthful of battery acid. Trembling, I vomit copiously into the toilet until I’m empty. Afterwards, when I take off my gloves and wash my hands, the water runs red for a long time. Even with the leather, it always gets inside.
It’s not for me. I’ve told myself a thousand times. It’s for them, for the parents he took from me. I made a promise the day he gave me back to my people, unharmed, but not unchanged. I won’t give up searching for the truth, no matter what the cost.
But as I struggle to meet my own eyes in the shattered remains of the mirror, I have to wonder, what if I never find him? Next year will be the twentieth anniversary. Twenty years, and no answers. How much longer can I go on like this?