Pitch Read Online Free Page A

swung the horse shoe without pause, striking her head again and again and again until blood splattered up and coated my face and chest. She tried to fight back but surprise and a healthy fear of not dying had given me the advantage.
    I straddled her waist, pinning her down beneath me. With a strength that defied logic she managed to flip herself over and her nails, filed to points, raked out and whipped across my cheek. The cuts burned like someone had poured acid in them and I screamed, but didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Instinct had taken over, and I was more animal than human as I fought for my life.
    Her nose shattered, then her jaw. Her eyes bulged and I jammed my thumb to the hilt in the left one, just like Mrs. Hamilton had taught us to do in self defense.  
    The girl howled like a wild animal and bucked her hips, trying to throw me off, but I clung to her with the knowledge that if I didn’t knock her out – or worse – I wouldn’t be leaving this backyard alive.
    “I will kill you for this,” she snarled, glaring daggers at me with her one good eye. Her teeth snapped an inch from my face and caught my hair. She ripped a chunk of it out by the roots and spat it in the grass beside her.
    “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I kept repeating the same words over and over, not realizing until they come out all choked up that I was crying. I brought the horse shoe down again. And again. And again. So many times I lost count. When the girl went limp and her head fell back, mouth open, eye closed, I leaped to my feet, ready to run. But something stopped me. Something pulled at me.
    I stared down at the girl I had beaten with a kind of horrified fascination. With her mouth open I could see her fangs. Like the man’s they were silver and looked like daggers, slightly curved and deadly sharp. I wondered if they were natural, if they were real, or if the girl was just part of some crazy cult that had decided to attack the entire town.
    The horse shoe dropped to the lawn with a soft thump. Slowly I knelt down beside the girl’s head and reached out with one trembling hand. If I could just touch the fangs… If I could just feel them… They really were quite beautiful. The way they glistened in the moonlight… It was unlike anything I had ever seen before.
    My fingertips brushed against one fang and it happened in an instant. One second the girl was motionless and the next she had her teeth clamped down on my hand and was shaking her head back and forth like a dog worrying a bone.
    I screamed and fell back. She released my hand and I clutched it to my chest, expecting to see it ravaged beyond repair, but the only visible damage were two small pinpricks of blood where her fangs had entered the skin. Yet it burned. Oh, God, my entire arm was burning and I was screaming and the girl was laughing.
    She sprang to her feet, nimble as a cat, and sauntered over to where I was rolling in the dirt, frantically trying to put out the invisible fire that was consuming my body inch by inch.
    “Peek a boo, I got you,” she giggled before her lips curled into a deadly snarl and she crouched over me, a predator covering it’s prey. I stared into her eyes, glittering with malice. I looked at her face, a face that had healed itself in a matter of seconds. 
    And I knew I was going to die.

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
    The Pet That Ran Away
     
    You know how they say right before you die your life flashes in front of your eyes? Yeah. That didn’t happen for me.
    I held perfectly still as the girl traced a single fingernail down across my cheek and hooked it under my jaw, poking until I felt a drop of blood slide down my neck, warm and sticky. She poked again, harder this time, puncturing another hole in my skin as if I was some sort of human piñata and my blood was the candy.
    “Aren’t you going to scream?” Her lips pushed out in a childish pout. “The other one screamed. You’re no fun. I want a new toy.”
    That did it. The pain in my arm