Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series

by Rosemary A Johns

  I imagine that they taste nasty.

  So, Ruby and I reached the last room and discovered the young Rocker.

  We were already throbbing, pulsing with the fresh blood ripping through us. We were tripping like we hadn’t in years. The world was detonating in color and light; we were licking the walls and each other…tasting the universe.

  We were laughing — I know that — giggling at sodding nothing.

  The Rocker actually opened the door to us with this look of surprise, like we’d interrupted his kip and he intended to tell us to keep it down. Then his expression changed to a sort of incomprehension, when he saw the blood dribbled down our chins, since we were too high to even wipe it off.

  Before he could slam the door, we were in and like all the rest, we didn’t give him the chance to scream.

  Ruby snapped the bloke’s neck before we drank. Our fangs sank in deep, as Ruby held the Rocker between us like a fallen antelope. Then we let him drop to the carpet.

  I sighed, as his blood mingled with the others’. The magical mix was a blood rush overload. When I swayed, Ruby steadied me. Her head was on my chest, listening to the thundering beat of my heart.

  I glanced around the Rocker’s room: at the combs, keys, and Brylcreem on the dressing table and his clothes stuffed in a suitcase. I grabbed his still smoldering ciggie from the glass ash tray, taking a deep drag. As I flicked the ash off the tip, I noticed a ten-inch record sticking out underneath the Rocker’s body.

  When I disentangled myself from Ruby, I slipped the LP out. I wiped off the smears of blood with my fingertips; music should be treated with respect.

  “The Sound of Fury” by Billy Fury and THE FOUR JAYS.

  The bloke on the front was a cool Rocker with pompadour hair. I edged the LP out of its jacket, dropping it onto a record player, which balanced next to the messy bed. As soon as the needle touched the vinyl, Ruby and me were hit by a raw vocal and guitar, which only made the blood in us move the more, until we were ripping at each other’s clothes. We tripped over the corpse as we stumbled to the bed. Then we were rolling naked in its filth, lost in each other and the moment because that’s what it’s like: blood.

  Real blood: First Lifer.

  It’s everything, and you’re everything but in that second only. So, you’ve got to take it. Ride it. Live it…

  The music built its rhythm — our bodies’ rhythms against and inside each other — spun a web for our world, where nothing else existed. Ruby threw me on my back, holding me down as she snogged me.

  Bugger she was strong.

  I rolled onto her. Our thighs were hot, entangled, then we were feasting on each other. First came the sweet agony of Ruby’s bite on my chest, and then I suckled from her pure white throat.

  Our venom, perfect design in all things, heightens the pleasure; when taken natural in small doses it isn’t toxic to our own.

  Isn’t evolution a hell of a thing?

  Our blood makes yours seem as water is to wine. It’s like the world’s singing: a choir of dirty angels. To Ruby it’s close to Sacrament. That’s why I didn’t get to taste often but when I did, I achieved the only true moments in a whole century of Blood Life of total peace.

  Why? Because it makes you complete.

  Is that happiness…?

  I’ll tell you something, it’s not hell.

  At last, Ruby pushed me away, lapping the last blood from my wounds, up my chest, to my neck and then my mouth. Then she bit my lip and the feasting started all over again.

  In the morning, as Ruby and I lay sprawled naked in the silent hotel, the curtains firmly closed, we heard brawling again outside.

  Bollocks vampire myth… What am I even up to now? Look, we can be awake in the daytime, we’re simply exhausted because we’ve been up the entire night. You can pull an all-nighter if you have to, can’t you? That’s classic vampire prejudice seeped into public consciousness or culture. I’d say Blood Lifer but then First Lifers don’t even know we exist because we’re camouflaged.

  Between kips, Ruby and I had spent the day wandering the corridors of the now deserted hotel (no vacancies sign up, of course), whilst I messed around with my new camera, which really was a blinding piece of equipment. We’d been listening out for broadcasts on a transistor radio, which we’d discovered in the kitchen, once we’d stepped over the stiff corpse of the proprietor, about how the Mods and Rockers were still battling like a bad repeat.

  It was as if they hadn’t learned a thing from yesterday. Or maybe like it’d been as much of a game to them, as it’d been to us.

  “Naughty boys are foolish indeed to behave so.” Ruby held the radio close to her cheek. Her nails clawed so tightly around it, I thought that she’d snap it. “See how lessons do not seed with First Lifers?”

  Ruby would narrate stories to me, in those difficult years after the Great War, when I’d lie shuddering in the grip of night terrors (reliving the boom of the guns, flash of the lights, and the stink of rot). She’d tell me of how she remembered a time when armies would agree to fight well after breakfast, with the steady march of two battle lines towards each other. How both sides followed chivalrous and honorable rules.

  But the whole rulebook’s blown to pieces now, isn’t it?

  After World War Two, it was nuked.

  Look, First Lifers fight, get it? It’s what you do. Kill. Rape. Destroy. It’s worming in your nature. Every day that you sit calmly at a desk and don’t rip out the heart of your bully of a boss, you’re simply suppressing it. You know it, even if you won’t admit it.

  First Lifers wail about butchering wars, rebellions, or massacres half way around the globe, yet you never stop to ask why they’re still happening. You just want them to stop.

  Bloody genius.

  Want to know something?

  They’re never going to stop. Not whilst you reckon that you’re the apex predators, stomping around this planet like the King of the Animals. If your boys don’t have a war to be sent to die in, they’ll make one at home. It’s skin deep, this twenty-first century lark.

  Us Blood Lifers? We’re merely more honest about it.

  In the afternoon, Ruby and I slept curled hot in each other’s arms until sundown. Then reluctantly, I relinquished the safety of our cocoon.

  Whilst Ruby was dressing, I strolled naked to the mirror, grabbing the Brylcreem and comb as I passed; I shaped my hair up with them into a pompadour. I twirled, grinning as I modeled my latest look for Ruby like a mannequin.

  “My own Billy Fury,” Ruby smiled, catching me close and hard against her, for one long moment.

  I loved this new age, freedom, music, and clothes…

  Our weekend had resurrected me once more into Blood Life. I needed a fragment of it to wear as a second skin, in case I forgot who I was again.

  I dragged out jeans and a black t-shirt from the dead bloke’s suitcase — just my size.

  Ruby was watching me with narrowed eyes.

  I wrenched the motorcycle boots off the Rocker, who’d started to soften down the path of decay; he’d already passed the rigor mortis, which had comically stiffened him all day. An arm at a time, I heaved off his motorcycle jacket, which was studded and decorated with a gold Ace of Spades on the back.

  “You’re a rebel now?” Ruby assessed me, transformed into head-to-toe Rocker.

  “I was always a rebel,” I lit up, striking the match against the wall with a smile, “just got me some new clothes.”

  Then I glanced down, noticing the motorbike keys on the dressing table: a bloody Triton. I caught Ruby’s eye. She shook her head, but I grabbed the keys anyway, before sauntering to the door.

  I looked back at Ruby over my shoulder. “Want to take a ride with me?”

  “Do you wish to take a ride with me?” Ruby snatched the keys from my fingers. Then suddenly serious, she traced down my cheek. “I’m glad we came back. I’m glad that you are back. Yet I sense something’s happening in the First Lifer world: a dangerous change
that I’ve witnessed before. This time, however, we need to be ready to play our part no matter the cost.”

  I shuddered. Ruby had never sounded so determined…or less like my Author.

  What did we care for the First Lifer world apart from as our crimson-soaked playground?

  I bit hard at my lip to stop the tumble of questions that Ruby would’ve sneered at because I’d always stand at her side, but the glint in her eye warned that I’d be the one paying the cost as the sacrifice.

  5

  “Change is always difficult for everyone involved.” Wednesday pursed her lips. “Sometimes, however, we need to have a long, hard think about what’s best and accept—”

  “I’m not sodding accepting anything,” I snarled.

  Wednesday sighed, straightening out her uniform in quick, frustrated motions. “Try to be more open, yes? You need to seriously consider, well, what we talked about earlier.”

  “You talked. Did you hear me yammering on?”

  I edged further away from the bedroom window, wincing as my back began to smolder.

  Wednesday had been late this morning (of course she had), because reducing stress for carers was so buggering important in our care plan. I knew that because they’d kindly written it down. If it was on a piece of paper, it had to be true, right?

  Black ice on the road, Wednesday had moaned, you’re so isolated here on the moors.

  Another complaint and mark against my name.

  So, now my best mate the sun was smoking over the horizon; slivers of light scorched around the corners of the blind.

  One toasted Blood Lifer: not the best start to my day. If I melted much more, I wouldn’t be able to hide my humanity deficiency. Still, Wednesday was ripe for a heart attack…

  All right, I’m just pissing about: I’m not that predator anymore. Especially not when you were lying there with your thin fingers clutching the bedclothes and then tap, tap, tap, like you were trying to pass on a message because you couldn’t talk to me. You couldn’t tell me what you really wanted to say. I scanned your face desperate to understand but — tap, tap, tap — I couldn’t. Not anymore.

  Your mouth twisted in frustration.

  “They did leave the leaflets with you yesterday?” Wednesday arched her brow.

  “I binned them.”

  “No, you didn’t.” Wednesday smirked. “Read them.”

  Tap, tap, tap. That desperate wringing of the covers. Tap, tap, tap.

  “I don’t need to.” I stormed towards the door, flinging it open. The band of light from the window scorched my cheek. But only for a moment.

  When Wednesday grabbed my arm, I stared down at her wrinkled hand in surprise. “Whether you want to admit it or not, it is going to get to a stage when your…grandma needs a higher level of care than you can provide. Or than we can. The local care home’s excellent. They’re specialists with her type of—”

  I shook Wednesday off my arm. “No one’s bloody taking her, got it?”

  Wednesday’s gaze gave me the once over. Then she shrugged, as if having done her duty she could now wash her hands of us.

  “Advance,” you muttered between clenched teeth, as your back arched. “Advance.” Your eyelids flickered.

  I dropped to my knees beside you, stroking your candy floss hair, but I knew that you couldn’t see me. Worse, there was sod all that I could do about it.

  “Always wanting to advance this one,” Wednesday stared down at you perplexed, “but never says where to.”

  I could explain it to her: what your splintered mind was drawn to at the end. What it couldn’t forget, when it had obliterated all else.

  Why you weren’t at peace.

  Yet even I didn’t know what Advance meant before the summer of 1968.

  Everything comes back to that summer. And before…?

  Before came the decades of lies and my beautifully gilded cage.

  It wasn’t until that glorious summer that my world expanded to more than an orgy of blood, thrills, and discovery. They were my buttons, which Ruby knew how to push and in what order. I was caught up in her tempest.

  It wasn’t until then that my eyes were opened to the consuming darkness: how each kill inexorably pushes you into the shadows. Until you don’t even know where you end and the gaping dirt mouth of the earth begins. Until you don’t know what tiny shard of what you once were is left.

  I thought that in death I’d shed fear and sin. That’s the refrain we Blood Lifers hold aloft like a bloody standard.

  What I didn’t understand was that my Soul would claw at me to be saved, not by a god but through my own graft, bottle, and the ball of squirming terrors tight in my gut.

  I only started to taste the truth of that, when Ruby finally brought me to Advance.

  JULY 1968 LONDON

  The Who’s “My Generation” — a tribal howl of Mod rebellion and youth’s hymn of raging, stuttering disgust at humanity’s inevitable aging decay — blazed up the wide staircase of Advance Record Company, as I descended. I was already sweating patches through my t-shirt in the muggy heat. I jumped the last three steps. Then I pressed my ear to the closed double doors. All I could hear, however, was the twang of guitars and the same pounding two chords, overlaying the clash of drums.

  “Don’t sulk in here all night, dearest prince,” Ruby had insisted, curling her hand down my chest, in the way she knew made my blood roar. “Come join the twins and me.”

  Yeah, see there’s the lie. The darkness wormed in our crimson bed for so many decades, ones in which I’d done nothing but follow Ruby: my Author, muse, liberator, and love. The reason I’d known that there was something Ruby was hiding about our coming back to England. Something more than the need to resurrect me into Blood Life.

  And what was behind those doors was it: the sodding twins… Ruby’s brothers.

  Ruby and I had set up our home in Liverpool, behind the Mersey docks in the shadow of the cranes, hulking ships, and the whiff of general decline. I’d salvaged what we needed from boneyards. When Ruby had returned one night, however, from her lone wanderings, which had become frequent now, she’d told me that we were moving back to London.

  I’d just been out to nick Ruby a pair of ruby earrings to go with her pendant. I’d noticed a few weeks back that this posh jewelers had opened in the city center. I’d been secretly planning to surprise Ruby. I couldn’t wait for her eyes to light with fire, as she put the earrings on for me.

  Yet when I’d passed the earrings to Ruby with a smile, she’d tossed the box aside, as if I’d picked them up at the market. “We need to make haste and put away this idleness. They’ve ordered us to return because our place is at their side. There are…important undertakings of our kind. We must go; after all, they are bonded to us by blood.”

  Confused, I’d collected the earrings from the floor, fidgeting with the box. “Who are, love?”

  Ruby had turned away. “Pack up.”

  I’d grabbed Ruby by the shoulder. “Who are these pillocks? What’s going on?”

  “Fie, remove your hand, or by heaven…”

  I’d hurriedly snatched away my fingers. Ruby had looked at me, as if calculating my reaction. “My brothers: The twins.”

  I’d gaped at her, shaking.

  Ruby had family? Decades of life lived together as one, but not a single word that she had blood relatives?

  Our connection had been beyond words or blood, in the trembling of the world and our lives’ fever. Yet now I’d wondered, in one cracking jolt, if all I’d been to Ruby was a distraction. Nothing but a toy to while away the decades or her idleness...?

  Was that all any Blood Lifer could be to each other?

  Ruby had studied me. “We were elected by the same fellow, one of the Magnificoes. The Magnificoes have the purest bloodlines, which reach back further than any other. Days were when they reigned over every Blood Lifer.”

  “You were elected at the same time?”

  “Nay, my brothers much later.”
>
  A new suspicion had gripped me by the bollocks. I had that itching sensation, which comes when you’re desperate to start bawling. I’d held in the tears, however, because Ruby always hated it when I cried. “After you elected me?”

  Ruby had nodded, stretching out on a pile of shipping crates that we’d set up as seating.

  “And you…never mentioned them?”

  “I did not.”

  “You know that I always reckoned we were the same: alone apart from each other. You know that’s what I thought.”

  Ruby had simply shrugged.

  I’d jittered, not knowing what to do with my hands, so I’d flipped a ciggie into my mouth and struck a match, raising it shakily to my lips. The haunting wail of a ship’s horn had broken across the dock. “That’s where you went then? All those times? To see them?”

  Ruby had uncurled to her full haughty height; her scarlet locks had been pure fire in the dark. “Have I taught you no better than this? These are not your affairs. Like no better than a First Lifer, did the lesson not seed?”

  “Oh, it did, darling,” I’d flicked the burning ciggie down, grinding it sharply with my heel, “so well that I stopped asking. Stopped bloody thinking. All those times that you just left for days…weeks…months… And me...?” I’d raged towards Ruby (although damned if I’d known what I was going to do), but then had found myself slamming my fist clean through a shipping crate instead — crash. Tiny splinters had embedded in my knuckles. “Not once even a message or… You know what? I’m the one buggering off now, all right? Maybe you’ll understand what it feels like…”

  Ruby’s move towards me had been so fast, I’d felt her hand crushing my throat before I’d seen her, as she’d slammed me against the wall. Ruby’s nails had torn through my skin.

  “Darling Light,” Ruby had whispered, tightening her hold on my neck. I’d struggled to breathe. “You do not possess me. No man does. I am not yours; I’ll never be anyone’s again. What I tell you, I tell you but what I hold to my heart is private to me alone. Do you understand this now, my naughty lover?”