"Bye, Rick!" I shouted through the door between the back room and the bar. "See you tomorrow!"

"Bye, kid!" he shouted back.

I rolled my eyes. Rick had called me kid for as long as I had known him, and I had known him a long, long time, from way back when I actually was a kid and had to come get my parents from the bar to walk them home. It was ridiculous, really, since our trailer was down a street that was directly across a busy main road. But there was no way they could be trusted to make it safely across that road as drunk as they were.

See, my parents had been in a really bad car accident a few years before, and they were both so injured in the accident that they'd had to go on disability because they honestly couldn't work anymore. They were just too broken. Initially, they tried to keep up with the bills: the payments on the trailer, food, electricity, water, and then all the things that Tessa and me needed as growing kids. There was no extra money ever and sometimes, even with food stamps, we would run out of food and it was off to the food bank for us. When we couldn't manage that, I'd steal some small, cheap things, like rice and beans, to stretch the food until the next disability check or food stamps came.

Between my parents' disabilities and their depression over their own helplessness, they couldn't even keep up with the housekeeping or taking care of my sister. Slowly I started taking over, first cooking, then cleaning, then making sure my sister was doing her homework and staying out of trouble. I even started taking care of my parents, making sure they ate and took their medication. Making sure they remembered and made it to their doctors' appointments. Dad could still drive, but sometimes he'd panic, so then we had to spend money we didn't have to spare to send them in a taxi because I couldn't drive.

Thankfully the grocery store was in the same strip mall as the bar, so my sister and I would go shopping and haul the food back to our house in a borrowed grocery cart, which I always returned after we unloaded the groceries.

Sometimes how we were living just got too much for my parents to handle, so about twice a month, they'd go to the bar and just get drunk. Self-medication they called it. I never blamed them for it, even though it was money we didn't have to spend. I just didn't have it in me to be angry at them, not with what they'd been through.

That went on for about a year before I realized that they needed help, but nowhere in walking distance was hiring, or at least nowhere that would hire a 16 year old. Lost, alone, and helpless, I unloaded my woes onto Rick one time when I went to get my parents.

"Hell, kid, I'll give you a job," he'd said. "It'll have to be under the table though. You're way too young to work here legally."

I'd cried in relief and hugged him so tight I almost choked him. I started the next day, working from the time I got out of school until 2 or 3 in the morning. Rick couldn't pay me much but I got to keep all the tips. I learned how to handle the patrons and avoid their grabbing hands. It helped that some of the regular patrons protected me from the unwanted overtures too.

The only problem was that I couldn't go to school and do this job. Getting home at 3 in the morning when you have to get up at 6:30 in the morning to go to school was just impossible, so after a huge argument with my parents, I dropped out. It wasn't like I had been doing great in school even before that, skating through my classes with mostly straight Ds since the accident that had disabled my parents.

Even after I quit school, I couldn't keep up with the pace. I had to take care of my parents during the day and work my shift at night. I was averaging five to six hours of sleep at the most. The other girls at the bar smoked and told me that it helped them keep up. I knew I couldn't afford cigarettes, but I also couldn't live without them the way I was going and going all the time. After the girls gave me a few and they helped, I started stealing those too, which was harder. One of the girls told me that if the cigarettes didn't help, she could hook me up with some meth or coke. I'd turned her down. If cigarettes were too expensive for me, drugs were definitely out of my price range, no matter how tired I was.

Shortly after that, Rick had called me into his office. Even though he'd never yelled at me or criticized my work, I'd gone in nervously, hoping he wasn't going to fire me for some reason, despite the fact that I was the most popular server at the bar.

Instead he'd handed me a card with a gruff, "Here, kid, this should help keep both you and me out of trouble."

I looked at the card. It was a drivers license with my name and address on it, but my birth date was wrong. It said I was 19, not 16. I looked up at him.

"Just in case," he'd said, not meeting my eyes. "And so you can take care of your baby sis better."

I blinked back the tears that came to my eyes. "Thanks, Rick. Really, thank you."

Things were better after I started working for Rick. Since I was being paid under the table, there were no taxes on it. With the disability checks and the money I was making, I could afford food and even some clothes for my sister and me, if we shopped in thrift stores. That was the year we even had enough money for Christmas and Tessa had given me Merry. My parents' drinking trips weren't as disastrous to our finances, especially since Rick started cutting them off sooner now that he knew our situation.

It was hard, and I had a lot of responsibility, but I was handling it. Rick had said that once I turned 21 for real, he'd hire me on the books so I could get some benefits. Everything was going to be okay.

And then it wasn't.

One night I came home from working and the porch light was out, which was weird because my mom always left it on for me. I figured the light bulb went out and made a mental note to change it the next day. I went to unlock the door and it was already unlocked, which was also weird. Our neighborhood wasn't dangerous or anything, but we always locked the door at night. I couldn't remember a time where it had been unlocked, but maybe my sister had forgotten to lock it when she got back from a friend's house or something.

I was exhausted, so I pushed all of it out of my mind, figuring I'd talk to Tessa about it the next day. I went through the dark living room, into my room, and went to bed.

The next morning, I woke up to silence and sat straight up in alarm. There was always noise in the house when I woke up. My parents always had the TV on in the living room or my sister would be playing music or my family would just be talking to each other. But there was no noise, absolute silence.

I flung myself out of bed and rushed from room to room in the trailer. No one was there and nothing was missing. Nothing, not clothes, not the cash I kept stashed in the potato chip can in the cupboard, not sentimental items that my parents loved, nothing. I split the blinds on the window to see if the old blue car was still there. It was gone.

I freaked out then. It was Saturday. My parents and sister should be home. Even if my sister had gone to a friend's house, the car should still be here. My parents didn't just take the car for a drive. And all of them knew the house rule of leaving a note if they left. I searched everywhere for a note. I called Tessa's friends. I checked the front door again and noticed that the metal by the lock had been pulled back a little, something that was not hard to do. I'd done it myself a few times back before my parents got hurt so I could use a stick to push in the bolt and open the door, but I'd always pushed it back in place afterward.

I called the police, but it did no good. They found no sign of foul play, and when I showed them the bent back metal on the front door, they said that was common damage on trailers as old as ours. Frustrated, I explained that they had no money, that they would have left a note, that the couldn't live long without someone to take care of them, and that they hadn't taken their meds with them. They just shook their heads at me and told me they would file an official missing persons report, especially since the car was gone.

I begged them, crying, to look into it further, but they said there wasn't anything they could do, not without something more. Once they left, I stared at the closed door in shock before I collapsed on the couch in tears. I called Rick and told him I wasn't coming in that night and why. It was the first time I'd called out since I'd started working for him. I just couldn't handle the dance of taking care of the customers, not with my parents missing.

I had no leads on my parents and no other real options, so after that one night off, I just kept working for the bar, hoping that at some point my parents and my sister would come home. My expenses dropped significantly but without my parents' disability checks and the food stamps, I was struggling.

I managed for about a year and a half that way, but then shortly after my actual 21st birthday, it happened. I was walking home from my shift at the bar when someone grabbed me from behind, covering my mouth with one hand. I tried to fight them, but it did no good. In fact, it was almost like I was helping them get a better grip on me.

"Quiet, little one," a female voice crooned in my ear. "Wouldn't want to wake the neighbors so they have to die too." I froze then. Like I've said before, trailers are not great at blocking sound and I really didn't want anyone else hurt, not at my expense, not when I had nothing left.

She took me back to my trailer, like she knew it was mine, opened the door and threw me into the house. I hit the wall on the other side of the trailer hard and landed on the ground with a groan, the breath knocked out of me. When I finally managed to look up, there were four people looking at me: two men and two women.

The woman who had grabbed me was still standing by the door. She was medium height, black, and thin, but I saw wiry muscles in her biceps. Her nails were red, long and pointed, her hair black and curly, and her eyes brown. The other woman, who was sitting on my dilapidated couch, had a larger frame, not fat but like her bones were larger. She was tall, blond, and pale with icy blue eyes. Even sitting, she was taller than the men sitting next to her. The man on her left was Asian with dyed blue hair, medium height, and brown eyes. His nails were long and pointed too, painted black. The man on her right had dark, tight hair and a swarthy complexion like he descended from the Mediterranean area, Greece, maybe, or Italy. He was taller than the Asian guy but shorter than the blond woman. They all watched me.

I didn't move. I didn't know what to do. It's not like I could get past the black lady. She'd just grab me again, and who knew what would happen after that. I didn't want to sit up, afraid of sparking some action out of them, so I just lay there on my side, my back pressed against the trailer wall and watched them back.

Finally, the swarthy guy spoke. "This the last one?" he asked with a Greek accent.

Black lady's eyes narrowed. "According to the chart and the little one."

Asian guy's face lit up. "I can't wait to taste her." He licked his lips. "Sweet blood."

The icy blond lady stood up then. "I'm first," she said with an accent I had never heard before and strode towards me. It wasn't a long walk and my eyes widened the closer she got. She reached down and grabbed my hair at the back of my head, pulling me to my feet. Then she bent my head and licked the side of my neck.

"Mmmmm," she moaned quietly and struck. Piercing pain burst from my neck, made worse when she started sucking. I whimpered and tried to pull away from her, but she shook me like a ragdoll, without interrupting the feeding.

"Quiet, little sweet blood," black lady cautioned me. "Be very still and very quiet. Remember what I told you."

I started crying then, and blond lady let me go and slapped me across the face, hard. I gasped with pain. "Stop your pitiful mewling," she said to me. "No one here cares or wants to hear it."

She turned to the others then, holding me there by my hair, up on my toes, practically dangling like a prize fish. "Who's next?"

They all took turns with me, each handing me off to the next when they were done with me. The last was swarthy guy and he sucked longer at my neck than any of the others had until blond lady snapped. "Enough! We don't want to drain her!"

He stopped at her order and let me go. I tried to stay standing but my legs wouldn't support me. I dropped to my knees on the floor, shaking and weak.

"Put her in the front bedroom," blond lady ordered. "There's a bathroom in there."

Swarthy guy grabbed my arm and pulled me to my bedroom. I struggled to get to my feet, but failed, so he just dragged me along behind him. He tossed me into the room like I weighed nothing and I landed hard on the floor again. He grinned at me. "We're going to enjoy you, little sweet blood."

The days kind of blended together after that. I slept a lot mostly, eating when they brought me food and bottles of water. They kept my door locked from the outside. One of them had installed one of those sliding door locks and while the door was flimsy as hell, breaking through it would make too much noise. There was always one of them awake.

I learned their hierarchy too, but not their names. They were careful not to let me know that. I don't know why. It's not like I could do anything with them. Blond lady was clearly in charge, followed by black lady, then Asian guy, then swarthy guy. When they shared me, that was the order they did it in, and everyone obeyed blond lady's orders.

They didn't feed on me every day. Clearly they didn't want to kill me. That wasn't the case for other people though. I guess it was about a week after they'd taken me when I was woken out of my stupor at the sound of the bedroom door crashing into the wall. Black lady dumped a guy into the room with me and shut the door.

I waited for a moment, nervous that she would come back in, but then I climbed off the bed to check on the guy. He was lying on his face, his long black hair matted with blood on one side. I gently shook him.

"Hey. Hey, mister. You okay?" He didn't respond so I rolled him over. His face was the palest white, his eyes were rolled up into his head, showing just the whites, and there were four puncture marks on his neck. He was very much dead.

I think something in my brain snapped then. I screamed, loud and long and over and over. The bedroom door burst open and Asian guy was there. I paid no attention to him, my eyes locked on the poor dead man's body, on his white, white eyes.

Asian man backhanded me and I fell backwards, but I didn't stop screaming. I couldn't stop screaming. Tears streamed down my face and each breath began a new scream.

"Shut her up!" blond lady ordered from the other room.

Asian guy put his hand over my mouth but he didn't do it right. I bit down hard and went back to screaming, my eyes still locked with the dead man's eyes. Asian man let me go, swearing.

Blond lady grumbled, "I have to do everything myself." Then something hit the top of my head and everything went dark.

I woke in my sister's room, my head pounding. A quick, gentle touch to the spot it hurt the most revealed a large bump. I tried the door but I had no luck. They had locked me in my sister's room just like they had locked me in my own room. I flopped down on the bed and went back to sleep.

Things continued the way they had. Sometimes I could hear the vampires arguing, but not about what. Sometimes I heard the scuffle of a fight and I knew they had brought home a new victim to prey on, to add to the dead man with the white eyes in my room.

They continued to feed off me, small drinks, every few days. I knew even at the slow rate they were going that I didn't have long to live. I had to do something. I knew I couldn't escape through the door, but maybe through the window. They were jalousie windows, which meant that they had slats that you opened with a crank. The screen was on my side of the window. Jalousie windows were popular when the mobile home was built back in the '60s because air conditioning was not all that common and you could leave jalousie windows open when it was raining without the worry that the rain would come in the window.

Normally, unless you were a kid, you wouldn't be able to fit through the space where the slats were, but between blood loss and inadequate food, I had lost a lot of weight. And I hadn't weighed that much to begin with. Also, I was super short, only 5' 1", which meant at this point I could probably fit through the space between the slat and the bottom of the window without much trouble. Unfortunately, unlike regular windows, the screen on the windows in my trailer fastened on with screws.

There had to be something in the room that I could use as a screwdriver. I was going to have to force myself out of the stupor I had been in and find it. So, I started a slow, quiet, steady search through my sister's room, my ear always tuned to the sounds outside the room. I was not in good shape, though, so I had to rest a lot. It took me two days to find her pocket knife in the bottom of her school backpack.

When I pulled it out, my first thought was why did my baby sister need to carry a pocket knife to school, but then I remembered that didn't matter right now and I turned my attention to the screws.

A pocket knife is not the best tool to use to unscrew screws. It took time and patience that I just didn't have. I had to force myself to be slow and careful and not swear when the knife slipped yet again. I undid all the screws until they were just barely holding the screen in place. Then I shut the blinds to hide what I'd done, to wait until sunlight, hoping that the horror movies were right and that vampires couldn't go out in the sun.

They drank from me that night, all four of them. I was dessert, blond lady said, after a victorious hunt. When they left the room, I cried over the poor person who had died that night to feed them, sobbing into my pillow until I fell asleep.

When I woke the next day and opened the blinds, the sun was high in the sky. I shoved my sister's pocket knife into the pocket of my jeans and quickly unfastened the loose screws from the window before cranking it open. It squeaked a little, but not so loud that I thought the vampires would hear it.

Then I climbed onto my sister's dresser, which was right under the window, lay down on my belly and slid through the gap starting with my legs. I had a little trouble getting my chest through, but I managed, and then my head was through and I was dangling from the window from my hands. I let go and dropped to the ground with a soft thud.

I wanted to run away, but there was no way that was happening. I didn't have the strength. I did try, but my legs got wobbly immediately and I couldn't catch my breath. The bar was less than a mile away. If I could just get there before they noticed I was gone, maybe?

I didn't trust that they couldn't come out in daylight since they supposedly were also supposed to all sleep during the day and they didn't do that. And I hadn't had to invite them into my house, so that wasn't true either. I had to be smart. I had to be safe. I pulled my sister's pocket knife out of my pocket and opened it. It was the only weapon I had and it wasn't a wooden stake, but maybe it could buy me some time?

I was halfway up the dirt road towards the bar when I heard a sound behind me and whirled, making my head spin. It was black lady coming after me, dressed in a hoodie and gloves to block her from the sunlight. I swore and turned to run, calling upon any reserves of energy I had left.

I didn't have much, and about ten steps into my stumbling run, I tripped and fell, somehow managing to stab myself in the thigh with the knife. I tried to scream but black lady's hand was already over my mouth. She lifted me with the knife sticking out of my thigh, threw me over her shoulder, and carried me back to my trailer.

She didn't say anything to me. She just carried me into my sister's room and dumped me on the bed. Then she put her hand over my mouth and grabbed the pocket knife, cutting down my thigh as she pulled it out, leaving a five inch wound behind, deeper at one end. I screamed against her hand and she held it there until I stopped.

"That will keep you from trying to run again, sweet blood," she snarled at me. She cranked the window closed, then closed the knife and shoved it into her hoodie pocket before leaving the room.

I looked up at the window and saw a wrapped fast food sandwich there and two bottles of water. I'd been caught because they had decided to feed me. I looked down at my leg and saw the blood flowing from it, soaking my jeans. I ignored it, hoping I would bleed out, and fell asleep to the sound of one of them nailing a board over the window.

I thought it was probably a week after that when the Winchesters showed up, although I really couldn't be sure. Time had become endless.

But that's not what I told John Winchester when he asked. At least not all of it.