7. Let the games begin

The day before the Ecliptics games. I look at myself in the mirror, I have bags under my eyes from all the blood-giving of the past days. I feel so tired from the days I didn't sleep from fear that Firius will be back in my room, the vision keeps on playing into my mind.

This morning I hadn't seen Xandros or anybody, it was so quiet inside the castle. Something is going on here. There is his pet standing with some kind of uniform in his hands. I try to look closer at it, but I hadn't had to try, he comes closer to me and gives me the uniform. I study the uniform, feeling first the fabric, where I see a half-black moon and one half of a red moon on it With a logo inside the circle. The rest of the uniform is midnight blue almost black, and it looked very tight.

In my room upstairs, I put it on and it is just my size. Into the mirror, I stare at myself in this uniform when I hear a voice at my back. Annoyed, I know it is Xandros.

"Do you ever knock? Never heard of boundaries?" I asked him with a sarcastic undertone.

When I turned around, he stares at what I am wearing and is stepping outside with a hard stride. I walk behind him and look at what he is doing. He hangs over the balustrade of stairs and yelled, "Grimore!"

And jumps over the balustrade just before his pet. He takes him by his neck and yelled something in another language to him, I thought I heard Italian, but I am not sure. I had lived all my life in this state and had never been away from here, who could we?

We lived here for years after the earth had died, and we had to flee to another planet to keep on living. Did we know there would be living also vampires, no we didn't? I hear again Xandros his voice but now in English:

"You knew I didn't want her to participate!" And he storms again the stairs up and takes me to my room.

"Take it off now!" He is again yelling but now to me, I don't know what had taken over him. But then I felt some feeling pulling on me and I take Xandros his arm in fear. He looked at me and takes me in his arms, but when I blinked my eyes I was standing in a room with all-woman standing in the same uniform as me.

I look around and this is only room to wait when I look at a clock that counts down from ten to zero. Still, I try to figure out what would happen.

And then it hit zero. The doors slam open, and we go to a big arena with a stage in front.

"Welcome humans to The Ecliptics games! We start with our first game." Told us a vampire with long black hair that is bound into his neck and is cloth all in black/reddish colors. He has the same logo on his T-shirt in the same colors as our uniform also he had big boots on his feet with studs on them.

I had hoped Xandros could tell me more about these games and what the purpose is of this?

We walk into a field where there are all things on the ground. This looks at the circuit they did on earth in the army. Ok, I didn't live that time, but I had seen it in books and on the television.

But when I look at the first woman that must go over the first obstacle, this is not what it looked like.

It's a sort of rack where you have to hang on and go to the other side only using the bars, but it is not without danger. I hear all laughter when the first woman burned her hands on the bars because she was too slow.

And then I see them. The arena was filled with vampires seated as some kind of sick show they wanted all to watch. At the top of the audience was Xandros seating on a black throne with gold and the logo that was on our uniform above on his chair. He looked not happy if I could see it good, with the dark eclipse above us, it was hard to see.

All the girls are almost at the other side, only we were standing here with three. Then there happened something, a girl fell and hit the ground. We hear her scream of pain and if that was not hard enough there came the officer who looked vampire from before and snapped her neck if she was a bag of dirt that didn't deserve to live.

At this point, I was scared for my own life if the blood parties weren't enough! Why couldn't he let me live with my husband in our little house in our tiny village.

Now it's my turn. Scared, I stood there looking at the first bar in front of me. Still deciding how I would make it to the other side. It was this of being killed by this officer that is standing next to me. He gets annoyed because I am still standing here looking at the bars.

"Go! Or I will break your neck." He said to me with the evil voice he had used before to tell the games had begun. I take the bar and feel a burning feeling on my hands. I go as fast as my body could but with my no sleeping of days now and the constant giving blood I felt weaker as I fell in my life.

Then I slipped, and I am holding only one hand to the bar hanging swinging into the air screaming of my left hand that burned like hell. All vampires in the audience are yelling with excitement, I hear even a couple of vampires screaming "fall!"

I regain my strength and push myself to the next bar and after a couple more I am standing with the other girls.

"Hello fellow vampires, we go further with the second assignment," the officer vampire screamed into the crowd.

He is so scary and even with him screaming made me shiver.

Then there is a kind of hole in the ground covered with barbed wire. But that was not all, there were vampires throwing knives at us. Scared, I let out a breath from my mouth, the woman before me is shaking on her feet.

"Why are they doing this to us?" I asked her still enough that the officer couldn't hear us.

"This is their sick game to look if we could survive. They like to see us suffer." She whispered back with a shaky voice.

If we could survive? If they keep on these games' nobody will survive, and what are they going to do? Take another wife and suck them almost dry to again do these games? When I asked further to her, I found out that this indeed is what they do. There were women in these games that did this also the year before. I could hardly believe they had survived.