I’m writing this so that you’ll let me go and I can do what has to be done.
It’s been so long since I last cared for family that I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like.
You want honesty and truth? Yeah well, they’re for folks who reckon that they can control a black and white world, where transparency can save us all.
Sod. That.
There’s no such thing as an honest fact, statistic, or spoken word: everything is spin. Yet you want to know what I witnessed at Abona? The worst?
If I tell you, you’d bloody better let me rescue my own from their bonds.
Then I’ll bear witness.
The next time the dark oak doors opened after Sir had…hurt Hartford…at the inspection because of me, I’d scrambled to kneel, not yet knowing what I’d say to either Hartford or Donovan.
Donovan was easier. He’d lay into me: I could live with that.
Hartford…?
Sorry didn’t exactly cover it.
When instead a cold steel leash was slipped around my neck, I glanced up, startled.
It looked like my problem was solved: A Blood Lifer, who I’d never seen before, was wrenching off my ankle chain. I flinched, quailing back from the tall Ghanaian (a warrior queen with layered box braids that blazed with gilded thread). She regarded me fiercely as she clutched my leash.
“Where’s Hartford?” I whispered.
The warrior queen’s eyes narrowed: wrong question… “Don’t disturb!”
“I said, where’s…” The Blood Lifer yanked on the leash. Unprepared, with my wrists still crossed at my back, I fell on my face. I blinked back the pain. “I just want to know that Hartford’s—”
“Cupid be in slave quarters because of you, wicked boy, after the big man’s dirty blows.”
I braced myself with my hands. “Right, I get that. Is he…?”
“He’ll live.” Her lip curled. “Up, obroni.”
“Obroni — white man then, is it?” I pushed myself warily to my feet. The steel around my throat made it hard to swallow. “I prefer Light.”
“Your name be shadow.” The warrior queen’s gaze was assessing, but I saw a flash of fire in her eyes now too.
“The wankering First Lifers can tattoo shadow on my bleeding arse: I’m still Light.”
At last, the Ghanaian grinned: night transformed to day. “Maybe, you be fine.” When she slouched closer, I tensed, but she only loosened the collar; I’d known that she’d pulled it too tight. “They call me cocoa. If the white men in this time be not so ignorant, it could also be gold or kola nut.”
I laughed. “So, what do I call you then?”
“Ashanti. My house fought you obroni: men and women on the battlefields. My people will not be forgotten.”
“Good on you, love. Now,” I pulled at the metal collar, “what’s this all about?”
“You vexed big man, so he wants me to show you the truth.” I shivered, unable to hold back the tremors. Ashanti rolled her eyes, turning away. “Now we walka walka sharp sharp.”
Ashanti tugged on my leash, forcing me to trot after her.
When I reached those oak doors, however, I hesitated. Then I pulled back, with a shake of my head.
It should’ve been everything that I’d fantasized about: escape from that cell. But it was my cell. I knew it. Every inch. I’d counted the bricks, the blossoms of mould and whirls of dirt: I’d named them. I knew the feel of each patch of cold bare floor.
Inside, I’d only had Sir to brave. But outside…?
I had the whole of Abona House.
Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. My chest spasmed, as I clutched onto the doorframe.
Then Ashanti was holding me close, with her lips close to my ear. “Advise oneself, boy: you must not act as if not right,” she tapped her forehead, “out here in Abona. From today onward, you be an ashawo for the First Lifers. Are you a child to need slaps?”
“No,” I gasped.
Ashanti let go of me.
Ashawo — slut.
Ashanti was right: I had to pull myself together.
I forced myself after Ashanti down the corridor. It became clear that I’d been locked away in an adapted cellar; when we passed rows of identical doors to mine, I wondered how many other poor bastards were chained behind them. At last, we climbed a spiral staircase to a warren of rooms that must once have been servant quarters in this great house. And now, with no hint of awareness of irony, were the slaves’.
There was a kitchen, with Blood Lifers working like ants, who didn’t even spare me a glance.
I hoped that I’d see Donovan. But I didn’t.
Donovan had always chatted about the other Blood Lifers who helped him run Abona. Before it’d felt like a dream: now I was confronted with the reality.
And it was terrifying.
I had the sudden urge to hide under the huge oak kitchen table. Then I remembered Ashanti’s slaps and resisted.
Ashanti pulled me on, passing bedrooms with stained mattresses. There were no blankets or privacy. It was still a step up from my cell. The rooms, however, were empty.
It wasn’t hard to work out where the remaining Blood Lifers were.
“Am I…?” I couldn’t quite get out the words.
It wasn’t easy to ask some Blood Lifer you’d just met, if you were about to be buggered by some sweaty sex tourist.
Still, Ashanti got it by the horror in my eyes, when she continued to lead me upwards towards the main house. “You be trained slowly slowly. At first, you watch. Then you help with appointments. Then…”
Yeah, then…
When I stepped off the spiral staircase out of the slave quarters and into the front of house for the First Lifer johns, it was like I’d traveled to another world.
Creepy-crawly motifs swarmed over the embossed wallpaper and chaise longues were richly upholstered with orchids. Butterflies and moths alighted in felt, wool, and satins on patterned neo-baroque floor lights and brocade sofas. A golden chandelier was suspended from the high ceiling like a burning sun.
These First Lifers had recreated a slice of the daytime world amidst the night, like fish and chips served on the Costa del Sol. Yet it was a fake, just like whatever they reckoned they were getting from us. Nothing but smoke and mirrors: in here we were no longer the Lost.
I peered down the stairs, which swept from this floor to a vast entrance hall. It was typical of First Lifer drama, where members could gather on the chessboard marble floor and look up, the better to enjoy what was on offer, before they made their choice.
I could also see the high front door.
My heart bloody hammered. I’d never been this close to escape before. The upper floor of the house was empty apart from Ashanti and me. If I could just get her to let go of the leash…
Ashanti, however, hauled me to the first door on the corridor. She slipped aside a discrete peephole. When she gestured with her hand, I bent down and squinted.
Purple — walls, ceilings, and floor. Lights inlaid into the deep purple velvet, like night-time stars and they — a paunchy First Lifer and a Chinese Blood Lifer, who was so tiny that she was almost buried underneath the man’s folds — were floating amongst them.
I drew back sharply.
When Ashanti tugged me on to the next door, I shook my head.
Ashanti sighed. “At least you can do this. Big big trouble, if you don’t. Big man says—”
“No chance.”
Ashanti dropped my leash and walloped me across the cheek with her open hand: I guess that she had warned me about those slaps.
When Ashanti didn’t pick up the chain again, however, my fingers curled into fists, as I tried not to draw attention to it.
“My elected be through that door with an American man. Don’t you think that I want to finish him? But Master, he be mighty.” Ashanti glanced nervously up and down the hall. “You will make big big palaver here.”
“I’m sorry your girl’s—”
“Pshaaa! You are seriou
s, boy. What do you know about the bond of house? Have you authored? Got a life born from your fangs?” Ashamed, I looked down. Where had the Plantagenets been for the last five decades? Yeah, that’s right: I’d murdered two of them. Then I’d hidden, to live out the span of my lover’s human, frail life. I didn’t regret it. But Ashanti was right. Who was I to speak of family? “You be moons older than I. But where be your elected? To my mind, the First Lifers use your house against you: behave or they retaliate with dirty blows to your elected.”
…Or the one you love…
I understood now why Sir had such control over both Hartford and Donovan. For once, my loneliness gave me an edge.
You’re only as strong as the weakest link in your chain. Even if Donovan and Hartford were now bonded to me, Sir didn’t know it. I was still a chain of one link.
A chain that was still not being held.
I risked a glance at Ashanti, who appeared lost in her thoughts, and then back at the stairs. I didn’t know when I’d get another chance.
So, I took it.
I was surprised that I had so much strength left in me, but I was aided by terror and a bubbling sublime excitement, which I always get from a caper, as I launched myself down those stairs.
I couldn’t even feel Ashanti behind me.
I lunged into the hallway, my bare feet cold on the marble, as I sprinted for the front door. It was bloody big. And it was locked.
Letting out a hiss of frustration, I booted at the door; the slam echoed through the halls.
The high, blinded windows. If I could only…
In the moments, however, that it took me to turn, a dozen Blood Lifers had materialized, as if out of the creepy-crawly wallpaper. They began circling me, like sharks scenting blood. The funny thing was that they were wearing random clothes: tight shorts, bra and knickers, ripped jeans, and one had on just a stripy scarf. Each also clutched a weapon: cudgel, knuckleduster, baseball bat or strap curled around meaty fist.
The Enforcers.
It’d been a test. The whole bloody thing: the empty house, route to the front door, Ashanti leaving the leash loose, and the Enforcers being convenient-like to take me down.
I guess that I failed, by Sir’s reckoning. His lesson? That there was no escape. But Sir was wrong — no matter what he did to me now — and I’d prove it.
I expected one of the bruisers to get stuck into me but instead I heard footsteps on the stairs. The other Blood Lifers stilled deferentially, as if awaiting their Queen Bee. I glanced up, and there she was: this Blood Lifer in pale pink silk ball gown, with her strawberry blonde curls piled on top of her head in a pouffe: the detested marie antoinette.
When antoinette advanced towards me, a blindfold dangling in one hand, I backed against the wall.
Antoinette frowned, like you would at a lad who’d been caught stealing from his mama’s purse. “Where are you going, mon Ganymede? To make yourself a pair of running hands so?” Her light Parisian voice spoke of summers idling resplendent in the gardens of the Chateau de Versailles and nights fleeing from the masses and the guillotine. Antoinette was bloody making up for that social reversal now. “I hope that you understand how ignoble and impure a deed this was? Most evil and contemptible, when Monsieur put his trust in you, n’est-ce pas?”
I spluttered with laughter. “Sod off.”
I expected a clout.
Instead antoinette seemed saddened, before gesturing at her acolytes. “Monsieur furnishes us with fair reward for our obedience; every one of you will receive an additional ration of blood for your help with this wrongdoer.”
The Enforcers bowed their heads towards antoinette, as towards a god.
How long would I need to be shut up in this madhouse, before I too bowed to this aristocratic bitch in order to earn an extra mug of pigs’ blood?
“But you, catamite?” Antoinette poked me on the chest with a perfectly manicured finger. “You have yet to learn Monsieur’s lessons. Maybe you’re simply lacking in brains?” She arched her eyebrow.
“Again, sod off.”
“Mon dieu!” Marie antoinette clapped her hands together sharply. “That is it, you are done. Put this on and follow me.” She pressed the blindfold into my hands. I hesitated but when I read the challenge in antoinette’s amused gaze, I reckoned that the only two choices were to wear it or to take a hiding and then wear it. I chose the first option. I felt slim fingers clutch my bicep, before I was dragged across the marble floor. “Down. Steps. Stop. Turn.”
More doorways and steps, until finally I was pushed and manipulated (but this time by someone else’s hands, which felt strange, as if they were wearing latex medical gloves), onto my stomach on an examining table.
I started panting because nothing good ever comes of being strapped face down to an examining table.
When I felt a third pair of hands (and these I recognized as Sir’s), start tracing circles on the middle of my back, as if soothing an animal, I nearly bit my own tongue off to stop myself from whimpering apologies.
“I saved your life, little one,” Sir’s fingers were still tracing circles, but his nails were digging in now; held down as I was, I couldn’t flinch away, even when Sir gouged into the flesh, “but seeing as you’re still too stupid to show gratitude, I’ll have to teach you what happens to bad bitches who can’t be trusted. Now you’ll have to be tracked. You don’t realize how lucky you are, seeing as I’m personally paying for this. It’s only because you’ll be such a good whore that I don’t make an example of you, unlike other leeches…” His hands paused, as if suddenly aware of the bloody tracks that they’d flayed on my skin, before smoothing tenderly over them. As if regretful. “I tried to be gentle with you, my shadow. How’s it my fault if I give you a chance to prove yourself, and instead you disappoint?”
Sir stroked my spine all the way up to my neck.
Furious, I still couldn’t stop the traitor tears welling of hot shame. I can’t explain it, except that after so many months of babied dependence, all I wanted was for Sir to take me on his lap and comfort me. It shocked me how much Sir’s cold disappointment kicked me in the gut. How much I figured I deserved punishment, especially if it’d earn me Sir’s approval again.
“Has he been too bad a boy for anesthetic?” A second voice, which I reckoned belonged to the hands in the latex gloves.
“He’s a very bad boy, Doctor. No anesthetic.”
I didn’t care what they were talking about, I wanted the sodding anesthetic. “Sir—”
As soon as I opened my mouth to beg, however, a steel gag was thrust in and tied at the back. Then the Doctor examined with careful, light touches, the place on my spine, into which Sir had burrowed his nails.
When the scalpel sliced deep into my spinal cord and the bundle of nerves, which connected my brainstem to every other nerve in my body, I screamed.
Yeah, I sodding screamed.
At some point, I passed out.
I came to, with a jet of ice-cold pressurized water in my face. Gasping, I flopped around like a landed fish.
Music — a wild fairy tale of battling violin, cello, and piano — was playing somewhere. Hardly conscious, shivering as I was sprayed with freezing water, I remembered the winter that Ruby had played this record in Berlin — Piano Trio No. 3 in G Minor — twirling round and round in a blur of red, lost in its madness.
Suddenly, the water was switched off. Disorientated, I blinked.
I was on the soaking floor of a windowless wet room, which had examining tables alongside one wall (I reckoned that I’d been strapped onto one of them for my impromptu spinal surgery). There was orthodontic and surgical equipment on stainless steel trays and a record player.
My back shot branches of pain through the rest of me, whenever I tried to twist and see what had been done. I glared up at Sir.
Sir stood — jacketless — with his shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbow, holding nothing but a little touchscreen device. There was a black cat icon on it. When he s
aw that he had my attention, he smiled. “Welcome back, boyo. Look you here,” he shook the device, “I now control you.”
I glowered at the bastard and I didn’t reply.
Sir’s smile faded; there was a manic gleam again in his eyes. “A tracker’s been buried deep in your nervous system. Firstly, with this I’ll always know where you are.” I’d botched up any escape plan; I could never hide in the shadows again. Cornered, I crawled to the far side of the wet room, still dripping with the cold tears of water, cowering in pain and confusion. Sir laughed. “There’s a good boy, you’re understanding at last. And secondly?”
Sir swiped his finger over the device, and I howled.
Fire raged down every nerve in my body. Schumann’s wild carnival danced in my mind, as I curled up on myself, trying to escape something, which I no longer ever could: because it was inside me.
Impotent, I wept.
At last, the pain ended. Shakily, I looked at Sir.
“Secondly,” Sir repeated calmly over the music, “you can be disciplined without marking.” When Sir held up the device, I couldn’t help wincing, as his finger hovered over the screen. “Let’s start training.”
Then the agony exploded.
After, when I felt like my organs had been electrified, my bones charred, and I ached from thrashing in the throes of that wankering tracker, I was lifted by the traitor Enforcers back onto the examining table.
Then the Doctor — a tidy little man with forked silver beard — took far less care than I’d bloody have liked, waxing me head-to-toe. I yelped, when he did the small of my back and my pecs. When he got to my bollocks (weak as I was), I nearly scrambled off the table.
The Doctor pressed me back with a gloved hand. “There, there, be a good boy. You don’t want me to call Sir, do you now?”
I hurriedly shook my head. I was certain that I’d be fried to nothing, if Sir used the tracker on me again.
“Anyway,” the Doctor continued, whilst he applied the wax and — rip — buggering hell… I bit through my lower lip, sucking on the blood to stop myself hollering, whilst the Doctor pulled the skin taut on my privates as he worked on them, ‘You want to be all smooth and pretty for your clients, don’t you?”
Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series Page 43
