Excerpt of Fangs For Freaks by Serena Robar

Chapter 1

A body launched from the bushes, straight at me, before I had time to register who or what it was. The force of the impact alone was enough to knock the breath from my lungs-that is, if I breathed. Instead of crushing me, I rolled with his momentum and neatly turned over once, then used my feet to send him flying over my head, crashing into crates of recycling awaiting pickup on the sidewalk.

Doing a quick flip from my back onto my feet, I, Colby Blanchard, moved toward my would-be assailant without trepidation.

“Are you okay, Cyrus?” I questioned, looking for signs of injury as he lay sprawled among the old newspapers and empty soda cans.

“Mmmph,” came his muffled reply as he disentangled himself from the bins, “…finish me?” He stood and I was relieved to find him relatively unharmed.

“What did you say?” I asked, a bit dubious of his reply. His left pant leg was ripped at the knee and I could see the scraped skin starting to bleed.

The scent of fresh blood filled my senses and I had to take a step back. A familiar ache in the roof of my mouth and loud rumbling from my stomach reminded me I hadn’t fed last night. My treacherous hand involuntarily reached for the pocket housing specialized orthodontic headgear embedded with stainless-steel fangs. What? Just because I’m fang-handicapped doesn’t make me a freak or anything. I can still get the job done, ya know. Just not right now. Now it was a battle of wills, between my true self and the inner demon who demanded to feed.

I took a Zen moment and subdued my hunger. It was so not getting the upper hand here. The first rule of thumb was no feeding on friends, and I wasn’t about to break it because I was feeling a bit peckish.

“I said, why didn’t you finish me off? You stood there like some clueless victim waiting for me to find a weapon to take you down.”

“Uh, I knew it was you?” It was an obvious answer, but Cyrus was always all business.

For the last eight months, Cyrus spent two hours a day teaching me how to fight and protect myself. I met him on a routine visit to see my Great-Aunt Chloe at her condo in Providence Point. Her neighbor, Bits Walker, was bragging about her grandson, a self-defense instructor and former special operative in the military. Like anything Bits said, I took it with a grain of salt. After all, she’d been married four times but on last count, she mentioned seven husbands. I wondered if perhaps she wasn’t all there.

But one day, there was Cyrus, holding Bits’s yarn as she knitted and listening attentively to her stories. He was smaller than I imagined, with craggy skin and a wicked-looking scar across his chin to his left ear, which appeared to be partially missing. He was wiry and muscular. I doubted he had an ounce of fat on his frame.

My thoughts were interrupted by Cyrus digging around the refuse. “What are you looking for?” I asked skeptically. Cyrus was, well, let’s just say he and his grandmother were very alike in the sanity department.

“Aha!” he shouted triumphantly, brandishing what appeared to be a sharpened piece of wood.

“You had a stake?!” I gasped incredulously.

“It’s like I’m having a conversation with Jello?,” he muttered to himself. “Of course. Did you think I was going to continue attacking you with just my bare hands? You are far too advanced for those tactics. At least, I thought you were. I thought you had achieved the black zone.”

Oh crap, not the zones again.

When he first started training me, I was in the white zone, which meant I was completely oblivious to my surroundings. Then came the blue zone or was it the green? I could never keep them straight. Anyway, I quickly raced up the zones to the black zone, which meant I was in ninja-like awareness all the time. Personally, I liked being in the white zone, but when you’re the most unpopular half-blood Undead in the neighborhood, you couldn’t afford to be in the white zone anymore.

Ever since I was attacked and turned into a vampire-oh, excuse me, that would be half-blood vampire-I’d become persona nongrata in the Undead community. I think I might have been able to live out my days in relative peace and solitude if I hadn’t petitioned for half-blood rights and emancipated an entire species. That move made me a little less than popular with the full-blood population.

Well, excuse me for fighting injustice.

I did such a good job at freeing my people, I was elevated to being their Protector, which I am sure was the Tribunal’s way of getting rid of all of us. I imagine they were still kicking themselves that not only was I Undead and around, I was becoming a pretty kick-ass Protector in the process.

Today was the day I would meet the rest of my half-blood family. Yep, we were going to show those bigoted full-bloods that we’re every bit as useful and viable a species and deserve to exist. At least, I hoped so. I hadn’t met any other half-bloods yet, but I held out high hopes for our success.

“Colby? Hello? Colby Blanchard? Are you even listening to me?” Cyrus asked impatiently.

“Uh, sorry. What were you saying about the zone?”

He sighed in exasperation (he did that a lot with me) and repeated, “Since you refuse to allow me to test your skills in the evening, you have to be in the zone all the time.”

I held up a hand to stop him. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’m sorry. It’s just today is the day I meet my new sorority sisters and I?m really nervous.”

“Oh well then, that’s fine. I’m sure no one will be out to get you today…”

“Ha, ha,” I retorted sarcastically.

“Today of all days you need to be most aware.”