Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series

by Rosemary A Johns

  “I didn’t exactly stay dead.” I pushed away from the fireplace, jumping up to sit on the arm of the leather sofa close to you. I scrutinized your serious features and those intent gray eyes. “You truly don’t know anything about us Blood Lifers, do you? How we evolved or—”

  “I know enough.”

  Surprised, I drew back from your retort. “As in, only good Blood Lifer’s a dead Blood Lifer?”

  You shot me a sharp look. “You wouldn’t be here, if that’s what I thought.”

  “Alright then, as in, only good Blood Lifer’s one in shackles?”

  Your mouth tightened into a thin line. “And what about humans? Do we come in small, medium, or large?”

  “In America you can supersize.” I grinned, but you didn’t return it and the way that you examined me like… Christ in heaven, that reminded me of what I’d been desperate since I’d woken this morning, fretting about yesterday’s entry, to tell you. It’s not as if you’d even believe me. Why would you after what I’d written and after the lies your family have spun to justify our enslavement? To you, I’m no different to a serial killer, am I? “Look, that’s not who I am now. I’ve been on blood abstention for fifty years.”

  Your voice was so cold it could’ve given frost bite. “Good for you.”

  “I’m not asking for a medal, sweetheart. I just wanted you to know that I don’t kill or drink from First Lifers. I haven’t for a long time.”

  You lips pursed. “It makes no difference to me.”

  I clasped my arms around my middle as I murmured, “It does to me. You’ve no idea how much.”

  “OK.” You turned back to your laptop, opening it with an air of indifference. Then there was that blasted clack clacking.

  I listened for a moment in silence. Then I couldn’t hack it any longer. “What does?”

  “What?” You didn’t stop typing or look away from the screen.

  “Make a difference to you?”

  You didn’t even pause. “The profit margin.”

  My hands tightened to fists, as I battled not to spring up and do something that I’d regret. You were a Cain, and no matter what I had to atone for, my enslavement was nothing but business to you.

  Do you think of me as your property…an investment…the same as your designer rug and furniture?

  I shoved myself to my feet, trembling with rage. Except, that’s when the nicotine craving kicked in: an unexpected powerful wave hit me, which made me want to punch something. Preferably my own face. At least it’d give me something to do with my hands.

  “Bugger it, I need a ciggie,” I mumbled.

  “No way.” You didn’t look up.

  I could see the crown of your head bent over your laptop. If I still had my fangs, I could sink them in… “Just one. I’m desperate.”

  A small shake of your head.

  “Do you know how long I’ve been smoking?” I was pacing now. Once I’d thought of holding the ciggie between my fingers and lighting it (not with my beautiful gold lighter because they’d taken that, but with the matches that you kept for the scented candles), I couldn’t shake the image. I craved the nicotine hit. Yeah, pathetic addict here. “Please, you want to see a bloke beg?”

  You hesitated, tapping your chin. “Hmm, tempting. You’re still not smoking.”

  “You don’t get it,” I pointed at you with an accusing finger, “you’re not a smoker.”

  At last, you looked at me. If ever there was a determined face, you had it. “And now, neither are you.”

  “I want a sodding ciggie.” Something flashed in your eyes; I was walking a dangerous bloody line. “You know smoking can’t hurt me, right?”

  “And how about me? I’m human, not…a monster like you. You know what?” You slammed shut the laptop with such force that the glass table trembled. A monster? I shrank back, flushing. “I’ve about had enough.” I backed against the wall; the brocade wallpaper was soft under my fingers. “I’ve papers to write and research and accounts to go over for Marlane… Wait.”

  To my surprise, you snapped the order at me like I was your trained pup, before striding out of the sitting room. A moment later, I heard the front door bang.

  Bollocks.

  I didn’t move a muscle. I could take most punishments, only you might as well throw the blinds and candle-like melt me, if you intended to take back my jacket. I hugged the leather to me protectively.

  You wouldn’t return me to Abona House...?

  The breath caught in my throat. I imagined Sir’s expression, as he pushed his glasses up his nose, when I was redelivered — rejected goods — in that sodding pine crate. He’d pretend disappointment and disgust in my poor performance. But secretly…? He’d be delighted because it’d justify doing…anything he’d ever wet dreamed to me.

  All because I wasn’t human but a monster.

  I began to pant; my nails scored the wallpaper.

  Or had you gone to fetch your sister: the older daughter of Cain with her slave books and helpful tips...?

  Or instead, had you decided to contact your dad on the Estate...?

  I screwed closed my eyes, willing away the waking nightmares, as the panic built. “It’s not real,” I breathed, grasping onto reality by my nails, which clawed into the wall, “not real, not real, not…”

  I didn’t even know that you’d come back, until I heard your voice and by then, I wasn’t certain that you were real. “Light, Light… What the frig are you doing?”

  I struggled to focus on you. “I wasn’t… I’m sorry… Please, don’t…”

  When you thrust a plastic bag at me, I recoiled. You shook the bag at me again. I gingerly took it.

  I pulled out a packet containing…one ciggie?

  Confused, I ripped it open. Except, when I was actually holding the ciggie, it was nothing more than an illusion: it was too long and smooth.

  Artificial.

  Dumbfounded, I stared first at the fake cigarette and then at you. “What might this be?”

  “Compromise,” you offered, settling back onto the sofa and starting up your laptop. “It’s an e-cig. No smell or risk to me but the same…whatever, to you. What’s the problem? I thought that you were good at adapting?”

  You raised your eyebrow as you met my gaze.

  After the terrors that I’d conjured, the fact that you’d thought up a solution, as if my comfort mattered (even if only because my whining had stopped you working), wrong-footed me.

  Twice in one day you’d given me back something that had been stolen, despite considering me a monster: my coat and now a way to calm the cravings.

  I just don’t understand why.

  10

  MAY 17

  My name is Light, my name is Light, my name is…

  When you came home earlier in the afternoon than normal because one of your seminars had been canceled, you discovered…

  Look, all I remember was pulling on those pink Marigolds, as per instruction seven on your Post-it note: CLEAN BATH: WEAR GLOVES — I’M SERIOUS.

  The next thing, I was coming round, scrunched in the corner by the toilet. My arms were wrapped over my face. My knees were drawn up under me. My head hurt at the back like I’d been smashing it against said toilet, and I was shaking, as if I had no control over my own body.

  Yet here’s what gave me true pause: you were kneeling in front of me, hugging me to your chest. There was the scent of gorse and sunlight, safe and cocooning. The beat of your heart, even if it was hammering like a steam train. You were tall enough for your arms to wrap all the way around me; strange, I’d never figured on liking that in a woman.

  The unexpectedness of your sudden closeness stilled me.

  Carefully, I lowered my arms from my eyes. Your hair brushed backwards and forwards against my cheeks, as you rocked me; I’d been right about its softness.

  Reluctantly, I drew back.

  “Light? Can you...? Are you...?” You lifted my chin, studying me with intense concern. To my shock, I
realized that you’d been crying.

  You were still waiting for an answer. I hardly knew where I was but I gave a nod.

  “Let’s see if we can’t get you cleaned up.” My head was hurting worse now; blood trickled down my neck. You helped me to my feet, before wiping the back of your hands across your eyes, blurring the mascara and leaving snail-trails across your hands. You looked so…distressed. Then your expression brightened. “I bought coffee. Do you want regular?”

  I could only nod again, numbly.

  When I was sunk in the leather sofa next to you, nursing my coffee, with no light in the sitting room but the sea of fig-scented candles, my slave ring was suddenly too bloody heavy.

  “What the frig was that about?” You spoke quietly, but I still flinched.

  I shrugged, taking a sip of my coffee: too much cream. I hoped that by the time I glanced back over the rim, you’d have looked away.

  But you hadn’t.

  “So?” You nudged my shoulder.

  “I don’t remember. It’s like I live it but I don’t…after.”

  Your gaze was cool. “Huh. You mean relive it?”

  Embarrassed, I dropped my gaze. “Yeah, semantics.”

  “My name is Light, my name is Light, my name is—”

  “Bollocks.” I’d startled back, spilling my coffee in a boiling patch on my balls. “I mean,” I patted my hand at my crotch, as if this could draw out the heat, “yeah, I guess I do mean bollocks. So, what else did I say?” It was you this time who dropped your gaze. “That bad?”

  “Pretty leech,” you answered softly. I stiffened. I’d that guessed it’d been another funfair ride courtesy of Abona. You must know too because Sir had called me that when you’d been choosing me, like a new puppy in the window of a pet shop. “Look, it was about your time at Bristol, huh…? When you were trained—”

  My shoulders hunched. “Trained, is it?”

  You nodded curtly. “Cain Company has divisions: Acquisitions, Accounts, Marketing…and then there’s Training. At Abona in Bristol or the Estate. It ensures that Blood Lifers are…ready for clients. I’m meant to know this; I should know the details of my own family’s business.”

  “Why?” I clutched the mug harder. “Because you’ve got to know your product?”

  “Yah…I mean…naw, that’s not it.” You reached over, taking my mug from me, before I cracked it. You carefully placed the mug on the table and then grasped my hands between yours, massaging their stiffness. It felt…blinding. Unexpectedly your fingers were tracing over my silver ring — S.L.A.V.E — as if discovering something dark beneath bright waters. Your expression tightened. “I’ve just spent the last… In there with you, freaking out, bawling, and begging: please…please don’t…please Sir. Tell me. I have to know.”

  So, you want to know what that meant?

  I’m not explaining tonight. I don’t care how impatient you are to learn your family’s business.

  You’ve asked though, so I’ll tell. But I don’t guarantee that you’ll like what you hear about your Training Department. If you dig deeper beneath the façade, there’s always darkness: corruption, exploitation, and greed for the profit margin.

  And most dangerous of all…?

  An apathetic indifference. It bleeds into everything. Atrocities are committed because of it, rather than a make-believe evil, which is scapegoat blamed for the world’s ills. All anyone has to do is open their eyes…then get off their lazy arses and do something about it.

  After all, you saw the lash marks lacerating my skin: was it that easy to explain them away as motivation?

  But I can’t write the memories tonight. I can’t relive them, in case… Twice in one day would be too much — for both of us.

  Maybe we’ll save the eye opening for tomorrow.

  Tomorrow, I’ll show you true darkness.

  11

  MAY 19

  I know that I promised to write the darkness yesterday, but it was too hard.

  I was all set to write: I had the buttery cream of these pages spread open on the dining room table. I’d touched the sun and gone through the daily ritual of counting the Manx, which were hiding in the valleys. I’d sat squarely at the table. Yet, fountain pen in hand, I couldn’t put down a buggering word.

  I didn’t want to remember. Instead, the only thing I felt was numbness. Like death.

  But today…bollocks to it.

  A memory can’t hurt…if only I sodding believed that.

  Cold. Black. Silence. I was blind, deaf, and dumb.

  I drew in panicked breaths through my nostrils: no smell but the stink of leather. I struggled but I couldn’t move.

  I flexed my fingers: metal was cutting off the circulation around my wrists, dragging them behind my back so tightly that my shoulders were wrenched. My legs were bent back, tied by the ankles to my wrists.

  Naked, chained, gagged, and in a leather sensory deprivation hood.

  I was royally buggered.

  Every sensation was amplified because my senses had been stolen: the pain, hunger for food (but above all else blood), raging tempest-warring in every cell, dehydration, waves of dizziness, thundering of my heart, and nicotine cravings. I was sweating from them — sick with them.

  I didn’t know who’d captured me or why, only that they were First Lifers and had taken my fangs like bloody trophies. That was the first time that First Lifers made me bawl like a kid; it wasn’t the last. Blood Lifer fangs aren’t simply the method by which we feed. They’re our strength — defence — our very evolutionary uniqueness.

  Our personhood.

  Steal them and you steal our Soul.

  To begin with, I dreamed up everything I’d do to the wankers who’d kidnapped me. Then, as time passed and I grew weaker and more exhausted, all I could think about was who’d come and release me. I was still worried about these First Lifers wanted, but the fear I’d been forgotten and left to rot was greater.

  Daft git, right? What did I know of Cain Company training?

  I don’t know how long I lay there in that hood. I wept, until the wetness stiffened the leather, making it scratchy over my eyes. Time had no meaning. I had no existence. I was floating in a dislocated world.

  I lost myself somewhere then.

  I left any hold on the thread of reality. I was visited sometimes by my dead papa, who’d hold up a photographic plate to examine as he praised…you are a miracle. A human camera. My little Light…sometimes by my 1960s Blood Lifer family: Aralt, Donovan, Alessandro…or by Kathy. My beautiful Kathy. I never wanted her to leave me, but she faded too.

  The hood would always be scratchy after that.

  One time, when Kathy had been out on the moors under the moon, holding my hand and whispering…never you mind what…but had begun to melt back into the endless void of black, something cold and metal suddenly touched my leg.

  I startled in terror.

  The chain slid down my calf. I screamed at the shock of it, but the yell was swallowed by the gag.

  I was shaking. I’d never felt so vulnerable.

  The slide of the freezing chain, snake-like over my ankles, sawed to the bone, as it was removed.

  Then there were fingers at my throat…

  Bloody, buggering, sodding hell.

  When my hood was wrenched off, the light was so bright in the small cell that I reckoned my retinas had been scorched.

  I screwed my eyes shut; tears leaked down their sides.

  The smell hit me as hard: an assault of mould, oak floorboards, dust, and an intense citrus, underlined with cedarwood — aftershave…?

  I felt the gag being loosened and taken out; my jaw muscles had been held open for so long that I almost begged for the gag to be put back in. I warily moved my jaw from side to side, before opening my eyes again.

  For a moment, I still couldn’t see. But I could feel a man’s hand caressing my cheek.

  I flinched back.

  When I squinted through the painful haze, I barely st
opped myself from laughing: a First Lifer crouched in front of me and with his black framed glasses and tailored gray suit, seeing my captor was like discovering that I’d been kidnapped by Mr Corporate himself, rather than the beasts that I’d nightmared in the long blackness. Until he spoke. “How’s it going, leech? You’ll make a pretty little whore.”

  …Whore…?

  My insides curdled. My dry throat had tightened, but I forced my swollen tongue to throw back at the wanker, “There’s nothing little about me, mate.”

  Instinctively, I ducked.

  Mr Corporate, however, merely pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled; his mouth only curled up at the left, as if only half of him shared the joke. “I’m not your mate; you’re nobody’s mate, seeing as you’re a slave. And me? To you, I’m Sir.”

  “I’m not a slave. And I never will be — mate.” I’d barely finished the sentence, however, before I saw Sir reaching for the black leather hood. I could see it looming, like so many more days of torture, towards me. My heart pounded, and I was giving these quick, frightened gasps. Sir had only just started to pull the hood over my eyes, when I heard my own tear-filled voice beg, “Please…please don’t…please Sir…”

  The descent of the hood paused, leaving me in excruciating blackness. Disgusted with myself, I felt shamed. Then the hood was lifted, and I was blinking in the light again.

  Just as fast, Sir forced open my mouth, pushing the gag back in to my muffled screams, as my jaw bruised. “Until you learn some obedience, little leech.”

  Yet mixed in with the rage, fear, and humiliation…?

  Gratitude.

  Because Sir hadn’t put the hood on me again: he hadn’t left me in the dark.

  After that, Sir abandoned me.

  I wasn’t trussed up at least, except for my arms. I could sit up and rest against the decaying wall of the…cellar…? There was nothing in it, not even a mattress. I had to lie on the freezing floor, with my sore, atrophying muscles. I took to only turning my head by the minutest of degrees, so that I could count the mould spores, which blossomed black across the ceiling, to play rainbow number games.