Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series

by Rosemary A Johns

Tomorrow, I had to break your heart, or it’d be stopped by Blood Lifer venom.

  “What’s happened? Your face? You’re…” You reached out your hand to my bruised cheek, but I pulled back like it’d burn me…or I’d burn you. Surprised, you frowned. “Well, come in then; don’t stop out there.”

  I shook my head, whilst clutching my jacket tighter against the cold shower of rain.

  You stared out at me from the warmth of your flat. It’d take so little — one step — to stroll inside with you like nothing had happened.

  Hendrix’s “Love or Confusion” drifted from your record player; it tasted of every time we’d held each other close without moving, cocooned in the music… And there was you in your scarf, smelling of your own scent, which I’d know anywhere in the world and just…being you and everything that I hungered for, desired, and needed like…the blood.

  No hearts and cupid but the truth, which is more than anyone else offers cradle to the grave.

  You were my blood. Inside me. My Soul. Yet I’d have to rip you out because it was the only way that I could save you.

  That’s when I finally understood that love wasn’t owning or possessing; you’d been right.

  It was freedom.

  I couldn’t hold onto you forever. I had to free you from this desperate brutal world, which I’d found myself in…even if I couldn’t free myself. Yet to do that I had to break your bleeding heart, and with it, my own.

  You were just standing there with those blue eyes, which I didn’t dare look into because then I wouldn’t be able to get out the words. The rain pelted down harder, stinging my sore cheeks, but I welcomed the pain.

  You fidgeted. “Light, you’re frightening me.”

  “I can’t.” Still I couldn’t look at you, as I spat out the words mechanically. “This. You. I’m sorry.”

  The silence drew on, as I shivered in the dark.

  Then you flew at me in a flurry of fists and tears, each blow an agonizing stab on my tender body. Nevertheless, it was your touch, and I never wanted you to stop. Every second that we were close was one more that I wasn’t alone, and you weren’t lost. At last you sagged, drained of even the energy to belt me. We stood slumped, the rain driving down on us.

  “I knew,” you said flatly, looking up at me, “what you were. A freak. So, why am I surprised? What else should I’ve expected from a man like you? I should never have listened to you. Never have let you in.”

  You cut me then, deep enough to bleed.

  I bloody deserved it, however, so what could I say? Christ, I burned to tell you the truth.

  You never wanted rescuing. For once, however, I had to save you by hurting you.

  Yet it felt so wrong.

  You turned away without glancing at me again. You marched back into your flat, slamming the door behind you. Hendrix was cut off mid-sentence and that was it. I was alone in the dark and rain, with only my thoughts and sodding regrets.

  I collapsed against the wall. And yeah, I’ll admit it, I cried; the tears smarted my cuts.

  Ruby stepped out of the shadows. “Faith, dearest prince, that was well done. Now you’re free again. Come, do not be melancholic; things can be as they were between us. I will help you. You have a new home with your family.”

  I wiped the wetness roughly from my cheeks. I didn’t want Ruby to see the tears or share my grief with her; I’d be damned if she’d be the one to comfort me.

  As Ruby tucked her arm snugly around me, supporting me back down the alley through Soho, I felt truly dead inside in a way that I never had since my death.

  The Plantagenets had trapped me as they had Alessandro.

  How could I escape?

  12

  DECEMBER 1968 LONDON

  “You need blood. Truly, you must feed.” Ruby licked luxuriously up the First Lifer’s neck, before pressing it towards my dry lips, as I lay stretched out — unmoving — on our bed. “That way you’ll heal more quickly. Then we can hunt and play together like we used to. Will that not be fun?” Ruby stroked down my cheek.

  I didn’t reply.

  “Nay, turn not your head from me. Eat.” Ruby gripped my chin, twisting my mouth back to the First Lifer’s jugular. I could smell the powerful aroma of the blood. It was thick and vital, pulsing fast: thud, thud, thud… “Faith, let us share blood. Then we can be one again: Trust me.”

  Ruby kissed me in light flurries across the faded bruises, all the way down from my cheeks to my chest and up again.

  When I glanced at Ruby cautiously, her fangs sprang out, before she sank them deep into one side of the First Lifer’s neck; the poor woman’s black lashes shuddered with the onset of paralysis, whilst Ruby sucked. Then Ruby pushed the marked throat closer to me, until warm skin was touching my lips again, making them twitch with desire. My own blood cramped through me.

  I knew how this was meant to play out: what my role was, dictated by biology, evolution, and training. This was the moment when I brought out my teeth, drained the other side of the First Lifer and united with Ruby in bloody communion. But you know what?

  Bollocks to that.

  Blood Life hadn’t transmuted the world from base metal to gold (like Ruby had promised), but to hot ash instead.

  And I’d been buried alive in it.

  It’d taken me a century, but now I was awake to Ruby’s tricks and indoctrination.

  What’s a second life, if you simply live it over? Another chance, if you don’t do anything different? The same controls, establishment, and fears, only they haunt the night, rather than the day? Don’t you reckon that’s bloody ironic?

  You’d told me that you wanted us both to be free. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Yet there was only one way I knew to do that: the only sure, eternal rest way.

  I could’ve run. But where would I’ve gone? This was all I knew. All I had. There was no sanctuary outside Advance’s walls. No family, friends, and now no lover either.

  Aralt had made sure of that.

  Ruby had noticed that I wasn’t drinking. She surfaced, wiping the crimson from her mouth. She stared at me for one long moment, before she hurled the First Lifer, in a pile of limp limbs, against the far wall. She hooked her fist back, but I was too weary to care. “By this hand you will drink and stop acting the wretch.”

  I simply turned my head again, staring at the Victorian mirror, which I’d nicked from a junk shop when we’d first arrived; I’d taken it because it’d reminded me of the one my mama would check her hair in, before she’d been lost to me. Time’s funny like that: you can live as long as us Blood Lifers and still be caught off guard by how much can change in only a few months.

  I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to say. I was waiting for second death, and Ruby knew it.

  That’s not an easy thing for a bloke to admit.

  Yet I wouldn’t play by the Plantagenets’ rules, and his life is sometimes all a bloke has left in his control. When everything’s been taken away from you, choosing to end this shell of existence is the lone act of defiance in your arsenal.

  And I wanted to blow the Plantagenets to bloody pieces.

  Ruby let out a shriek, Christ in heaven, like I’d never heard before, ripping at her hair, as she swung around in circles like she was ready to annihilate the world.

  I cringed but I still merely continued to lie motionless.

  Then Ruby fell quiet. Surprised, I saw that tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  Ruby dropped to her knees next to me, clutching her ruby pendant with sudden fierceness. She shoved it close in front of my eyes. “Have you never wondered why I wear this?”

  “Always. But why would you tell me?”

  The sound of her slap echoed for stinging seconds, after Ruby had marked me with her handprint. Her eyelashes were matted wet. “You will not just lie there and die.” Ruby traced down the pink of my cheek as if to soothe the hurt, before she glanced back down at the pendant. “I wear it because I want to remember — every moment — w
hat this Blood Life granted me. What I know I gifted you too. Freedom.” Ruby frowned. “My father was a powerful man at Court. As a daughter, I was his to be owned and traded to a foolish knave, who would have allowed his house and estate to fall to wrack and ruin, if I hadn’t run it for him, whilst he whored around with his mistresses.” I jolted at Ruby’s dispassionate tone. Yet her gaze was still fixed steadily on mine; she’d never spoken a word to me before about her First Life, and when I’d once tried to kiss and wheedle it out of her, I’d only got a hiding for my pains. “Then Plantagenet came to me and offered liberation from my slavery to men: father, brother, husband…every one of them…forever. I would no longer be their chattel or a womb to fill and breed hearty sons to be sent to fight and be slaughtered. And if I bore a daughter? Yet more chattel to be sold and bred from.”

  With tentative fingers, I reached out, stroking the surface of the pendant. I remembered how Ruby arched under my caress of that place beneath it, from collar bone to collar bone, which had been our secret shared intimacy…until I’d seen Aralt doing the same move.

  Who’d taught Aralt that?

  Ruby glanced down. “This jewel was part of my dowry: the price of my slavery. It was my mother’s and famous in its day. My toad of a husband did not wish me to wear it. Yet I still did, for I would have what was mine, though I needs must share his bed.” Ruby’s eyes glinted: a momentary flash of sympathy for the poor git who’d married her shot through me. “I flaunted it and toyed with him; I drove him into a near Abraham. I wear it now because it reminds me of my independence: that I will never be caged again.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Like Ruby wasn’t as caged in this building as me...?

  Ruby’s gaze darkened. “When I tasted your Soul, I knew that just as I had been, you were trapped and enslaved. So, I freed you. You were called to Blood Life because it’s where you belong.” I screwed shut my eyes; I couldn’t continue to look at Ruby, not with that pleading expression on her face, which I’d never seen on her before. It twisted my gut, in a way that I’d never have guessed at. “You will feed.”

  Still I said nothing, willing my body not to move.

  “Look at me.”

  I didn’t open my eyes. Bugger it, this was hard.

  Why was Ruby making it so difficult?

  The ghost of Ruby’s palm trailed over my eyelids. Then I heard the sweep of her silk away from me and the bang of the door, as she slammed out of the room.

  I thumped the covers, as waves of nausea wracked me. I allowed the effects of cold turkey to show now that I was alone. It was bleeding agony.

  “Are you quite well?” A soft voice that twisted my insides with its concern.

  Opening my eyes painfully, I sighed. “What do you want?”

  Alessandro peered in at me anxiously from the half-opened doorway. “I’ve been hoping to see you for weeks, but you never came to my room. Then when I asked where you were, Donovan got this funny look like he’d been crying and told me…”

  Alessandro pottered closer. Then he gasped, gaping at my half-healed cuts and bruising.

  We don’t heal so well without the blood, which is what regenerates, as much as gives us life.

  I tried to smile. “Pretty, aren’t I?”

  Alessandro glowered. “Is it still kids play?”

  I turned my head away from Alessandro, shifting onto my side with a grunt. “Put a sock in it; I’ve got a whole lot of nothing to get on with.”

  Alessandro tapped my shoulder. I fought not to flinch. “What’s going on?”

  “You wouldn’t… You can’t help. So, just spit it out, whatever you came here for, all right?”

  Alessandro hummed; his shoes squeaked as he rocked backwards and forwards. “I found out for you…well that is, not everything, of course, but some of what you wanted to know. I did my best. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “What…?”

  “About the Komodo.”

  Shocked out of my despair, I twisted back to Alessandro, ignoring the pain that speared through my chest and shoved myself up onto my elbows. “Better than good, you’re bloody blinding! Close the door.” Alessandro rushed to push it shut, glancing at the First Lifer’s corpse as he passed and then perched next to me. “So, what the buggering hell are the twins up to?”

  “Experimentation on First Lifers. It’s something to do with splitting our venom, like I believed. I can’t for the life of me, however, work out why they’d wish to do it.” Alessandro tentatively stroked across the back of my hand as he ducked his head. “I’m sorry but I couldn’t discover more than that I’m afraid.”

  I collapsed back onto the bed, deflated.

  All right then, so I’d been clutching at this unexpected information amidst my grief, like it could call me back to life: grant me permission not to die. If I could discover Advance’s secret and stop the Plantagenets’ plans for…whatever this was… it was worth more than the petty vengeance of taking my own life.

  Alessandro nudged me. “Ask me why.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why I couldn’t discover more.” Alessandro was grinning now.

  “All right, I’ll bite. Why?”

  “Because Silverman only has one of his labs here and it’s not his main one. His chief lab’s somewhere more private, where he can work uninterrupted. Select First Lifers are taken to him for…”

  I scrambled up, giving all thoughts of death or blood starvation the two-finger salute. Give me a crisis every time. “The groupies?”

  Alessandro nodded. “I’ve been poring over the delivery records, trying to unearth the ones that don’t fit. There’s one that matches the pattern happening tomorrow night.”

  I smirked. “Guess who’ll be catching that ride?”

  “Here’s the truly ingenious part.” Alessandro edged closer. His eyes were lit by both an excitement and a fear, which I realized with a kick was for me. How dangerous was this experimentation? “Silverman’s lab? It’s on Radio Komodo.”

  The radio show was a front for the secret lab?

  Alessandro’s hand curled around mine; I startled at his unexpected touch like he thought that if he let go, he’d lose me the same as I’d lost you. Yet I was already lost: freeing Alessandro from Aralt and stopping Advance’s experiments might well be deadly.

  Without you, however, I was already dead.

  Alessandro had explained that there’d be a black van parked behind Advance’s offices at twilight, all ready to take its human cargo to Portsmouth. I figured that one more passenger wouldn’t hurt.

  First though, I’d found the card for the blood donor who plied her trade in the flat above the sex shop in Soho. Then I promised her five times her usual fee if I could see her right away. When she saw the state of me, she was dead sweet; maybe she recognized the signs of withdrawal.

  When the girl drew her blood for me, bugger it looked good sucked up thick and dark like that in the needle, as she dragged her cardigan closer around her against the cold: I wasn’t there for her other talents, after all. Her cool expression didn’t waver, even though I was panting as I squirted the blood down my throat in desperate gulps. Finally, the shaking subsided and I started to mend.

  When I gave her a quick nod of thanks, she acknowledged it with the first smile that I’d yet seen; it was so brief that I could’ve imagined it.

  At twilight, I spied the van. It was just where Alessandro had said it would be: parked up the alley behind Advance.

  I scanned up and down the street. The Plantagenet siblings were nowhere to be seen. I darted for the back of the van, wrenching at the doors. Thank Christ, they weren’t locked. I swung them open, diving inside, before edging them silently shut behind me. Covert ops could get to be my thing.

  When I backed up, I stepped on something warm and soft.

  Buggering hell, Susan.

  Susan was hogtied like a pig for slaughter. She seemed tiny and lost, in a red and purple jersey dress, in the dark of that oil puddled
van.

  I crouched next to her, examining her neck: no bite marks, which meant that she was alive. For now. Unless the marks had healed over already…bloody evolution. I tweezed open her eyes; her pupils were dilated, with the spaced look of the deeply sedated. She stank of her own piss.

  This whole setup sang of Aralt tying up loose ends in a pretty bow. I’d saved your cousin once, only to lay her open to this.

  When Susan had asked if I was all right as well, after I’d battled with the dandy over her honor and had been left limping and wounded, it’d been the first time anyone had asked if I was all right, for over a hundred years. And meant it.

  It was the first time since my parents…

  Susan had wrapped her arms around my broken body and supported me back to her home, like I wasn’t a… Like I was no different to her. As if I had a place there.

  You’d wanted nothing to do with me; I don’t blame you. It was Susan, however, who’d trusted a stranger enough to insist that I was allowed into your home. Then she’d patched me up with her gentle hands, as you’d watched. All because I’d saved her.

  Yeah, I was a sodding hero.

  I stared down at Susan’s motionless body that was bound on the floor of the van: all because I wasn’t the hero that she’d reckoned.

  In that moment, I decided that I’d rescue Susan for real this time, even if I had to burn Aralt, Advance, and the whole Blood Lifer world around my ears to do it. She’d cared if I was all right or not, and that made me feel like I should care too.

  I reached under Susan’s arms. “Let’s get you sodding well…”

  I started to lift Susan up. Then, however, I carefully dropped her back down again. I patted her mop top head as I huddled close to her for warmth, whilst I waited for the van to pull out.

  All right then, so I was going to save Susan. But if I’d done that, then what would I’ve used as…bait’s too strong a word.

  Me turning round?

  Bait, yeah, I needed a First Lifer, the same as they were expecting. Susan was my passport onto Radio Komodo. I didn’t know if I’d get another chance at this…whatever this would be.