‘Your oaths are no use to us. Do you think we’ll trust you? You’re a chancer: I smelt it on you as soon as I met you.’ Aralt was breathing hard. When he stepped closer, Kira held me straighter. Now this is what you never found out; the moment I tried to explain as best as I could but which you never forgave. Not totally. Because it’s the one, which shattered your heart, and I’m so sodding sorry. ‘Break up with this skank. And make it good ‘cos then you’re never to see her again. Or else I’ll kill her slow, as you’re too nancy to do it yourself.’
‘Don’t bloody well touch her or I’ll--’
Aralt’s fingers shot out, crushing my larynx, until the stars burst. ‘You’ll..?’ I fought for breath, but that throttling hand was stopping every whisper of oxygen. I tried not to panic, whilst my body instinctively fought and clawed at Kira. Sharp shanks shot through my lungs. Aralt only let go, when blackness started to consume me, and I grew limp in Kira’s arms. As I gulped in air desperately through my sore throat, feeling like I was ascending again into consciousness, Aralt wiped the trickles of blood carefully out of my peepers. Then he moved his mug so close to mine it was all I could see. ‘You’re lucky this bitch brings in fierce amounts of cash for Advance, or else I’d have fed on her myself and made you watch.’ He smiled - long and slow. His sharp canine teeth glinted in the light. ‘Break up and don’t see her again. I don’t offer second chances: I’m not your Author.’
‘What’s happened? Your face? You’re right…’ 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 nut, 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 walk inside there with you, like nothing had happened.
I could hear Hendrix’s “Love or Confusion” drifting 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 ivory scarf, smelling of your own scent, which I’d know anywhere in the world and just…being you and everything I hungered for, desired and needed like…the blood.
No hearts and cupid but the truth - and that’s 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 I could figure to 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 peepers, which I daren’t look into because then I wouldn’t be able to get out the words. The rain pelted down harder, stinging my sore mush, but I welcomed the pain.
You were starting to fidget now. ‘Light, you’re fair 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 agonising stab on my tender body. Nevertheless it was your touch, and I never wanted you to stop. Every second we were close was one more I wasn’t alone, and you weren’t lost. At last you sagged, as if 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. But I bloody deserved it, so what could I say? Christ I burned to tell you, reckon I didn’t? 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 sagged against the wall. And yeah, I’ll admit it, I cried, the tears smarting my cuts.
That’s when 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 quickly 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 I never had since my death.
12
DECEMBER 1968 LONDON
‘You need blood. Truly you must feed,’ Ruby licked luxuriously up the First Lifer’s long 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 bird’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. You must trust me.’
Ruby kissed me in light flurries across the faded bruises, all the way down from my closed peepers 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 bint’s black lashes shuddered with the onset of paralysis, as Ruby sucked.
Ruby pushed the marked throat closer to me, until warm skin was touching my lips again, making them twitch with desire. I could taste my own blood cramping 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.
This 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 only taken me a century. Yet now I was awake to Ruby’s tricks and indoctrination - I was never one for cults.
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 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 nut again, staring at the gilt 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 a few sodding 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.
It was the only freedom I could see. I wouldn’t play by their rules. Not again. 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 them to bloody pieces.
So I refused to eat. Blood? It’s life for us. Without it? It’s game over.
Ruby let out a shriek, Christ in heaven, like I’d never heard before, ripping at her long red hair, as she swung round in circles. Like she was ready to annihilate the world.
I cringed, but I still only continued to lie there.
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 peepers. ‘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 gently 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 - what this Blood Life gave me. What I know I gifted you too. Freedom.’ I didn’t understand when 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 and fucked 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 this…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 cold 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. 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 peepers glinted: I even experienced a momentary flash of sympathy for the poor git, who’d married her. ‘I flaunted it. Toyed with him. And forsooth, it drove him into a near Abraham. I wear it now because it reminds me of my independence. That I will never be caged again.’
‘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 closed my peepers; I couldn’t continue to look at Ruby, not with that pleading expression on her mush. The one I’d never seen on her before. It twisted my gut, in a way 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 peepers. Bugger it, this was hard. Why was Ruby making it so difficult?
The ghost trail of Ruby’s palm lightly 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 I was alone. It was bleeding agony.
‘Are you quite well?’
Opening my peepers painfully, I sighed. ‘What do you want?’
Alessandro was peering in at me anxiously from the 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 finally said…’
Alessandro pottered closer. He gasped when he saw 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?’
‘Is it still kids play?’
I turned my nut away from Alessandro, shifting on my side with a grunt. ‘Put a sock in it; I’ve got a whole lot of nothing to get on with here.’
Alessandro frowned. ‘What’s going on?’
‘You wouldn’t… Just spit it out, whatever you came here for, all right?’
I heard Alessandro’s quick pace to the bed and then felt his light touch on my shoulder. I fought not to flinch. ‘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?’
‘I don’t--’
‘About the Komodo.’
Shocked out of my personal black dog, I twisted back to Alessandro, ignoring the pain, which was spearing through my chest and shoved myself up onto my elbows. ‘Nice one! You’re bloody blinding. Close the door.’ Alessandro rushed to push it shut, glancing at the chick’s corpse as he passed and then perched next to me. ‘So what the buggering hell are those tossers 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. 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 from Alessandro, which amidst my own grief at the loss of you, I’d forgotten he was even digging for, like it could call me back to life. It was as if I needed it for permission not to die. Amidst everything, screwing the twins and their dodgy plans for…whatever this was…sod it, was worth a thousand times more than the petty vengeance of taking my own life. ‘Ask me 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. 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. Reckon that sounds more like me? Give me a crisis every time. ‘The groupies?’
Alessandro nodded. ‘I’ve been poring over the delivery records, trying to unearth the ones, which don’t fit. There’s one that matches the pattern tomorrow night.’
‘Guess who’ll be catching that ride?’
‘But here’s the truly ingenious part,’ Alessandro edged closer. His peepers were lit by both an excitement and a fear, which I realised with a kick was for me. ‘Silverman’s lab? It’s on Radio Komodo.’
Right, so this is how it was. 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 one more passenger wouldn’t hurt.
First though, I found the card for the skanky bint, who plyed her trade in the tiny flat above the sex shop in Soho. I promised her five times her usual fee if I could see her right away. She was dead sweet, when she saw the state of me; I guess she felt an affinity because she recognised 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 sq
uirted 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 I’d yet seen; it was so brief, maybe I imagined it.
At twilight I spied the black van. It was just where Alessandro had said it would be: parked up the alley behind Advance. Good on the little bugger. A bit of barmy in the mix makes a blinding snowflake pattern.
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 manky, oil puddled van.
I crouched down next to Susan, examining her neck: no bite marks, which meant she was alive. For now. Unless the marks had healed over already…bloody evolution.
When I tweezed open Susan’s peepers, I saw her pupils were dilated, with the spaced look of the deeply sedated. She stank of her own tangy piss.
This whole setup sang of bloody Aralt tying up loose ends in a pretty bow. I realised I’d saved your cousin once, only to lay her open to this.
Are you?
It’s all Susan had asked that day in the damp alley, when I’d rumbled with the dandy over her honour and had been left limping and wounded. Yet it was 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…
I hadn’t let myself think about that because you mustn’t (not once you’re transmuted into Blood Life), or everything falls to pieces. This strange little First Lifer, however, 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.
Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) Page 18
