Her ears strained. She thought she heard the softest of whispers coming from the shadows. What the hell was this?

Her insides shriveled with a new fear. Why couldn’t she move? What in the world was happening? She tried to speak but couldn’t utter a word, as if her vocal cords were frozen. Frantically, she looked around, her eyes able to shift in their sockets, but her head unable to swivel.

Her heart pounded and, despite the chill in the air, she began to sweat.

This was a dream, right? A freakin’ nightmare, where she, immobile, was positioned on a velvet lounge and naked as the day she was born. The chaise was slightly raised, it seemed, as if she were on a weird stage or dais of some kind, and surrounding her was an unseen audience, people hiding in the shadows.

Her throat closed in terror.

Panic swept through her.

It’s only a dream, remember that. You can’t speak, you can’t move, all classic signs of a nightmare. Calm down, shut this out of your mind. You’ll wake up in the morning….

But she didn’t heed the suggestions running through her mind, because something was off here. This whole scene was very, very wrong. Never before when she’d been terrorized by a nightmare had she had the insight to think she might be dreaming. And there was a realness to this, a substance that made her second-guess her rationale.

What did she remember…oh, God, had it been last night…or just a few hours earlier? She’d been out drinking with her new friends from college, some kind of clique that was into the whole Goth-vampire thing…no, no…they insisted it was a vampyre thing. That old-fashioned spelling was supposed to make it more real or something. There had been whispers and dares and blood-red martinis that the others had insisted were stained with real human blood. It had been some kind of “rite of initiation.”

Rylee hadn’t believed them, but had wanted to be a part of their group, had taken them up on their dares, had indulged…and now…and now she was tripping. They’d laced the drink, not with blood, but with some weird psychedelic drug that was causing her to hallucinate—that was it! Hadn’t she witnessed the hint of hesitation in them when she’d been handed the blood-red martini and twirled the stem in her fingers? Hadn’t she sensed their fascination, even fear, as she’d not just sipped the drink but tossed it back with a flourish?

Oh, God….