Like an incantation, it was taken up around the room, ‘Our Light, Our Light, Our Light…’
Cold with panic, I stumbled backwards.
Christ in heaven, what had I done?
We weren’t heroes, myths or examples for First Lifers to copy in their rose-tinted berkdom. We’d simply been Blood Lifers seeking vengeance – justice for our enslavement. It’d been a warning for all other slavers.
Not a blueprint for baby terrorists.
But life has a way of biting you on the arse.
‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if Blood Sun dropped in too? Mistress and slave together. You know, it made me cry when--’
‘She’s not my mistress.’
That’s when I recognised them: the slogans on the workers’ t-shirts.
REBEL HERE, YEAH?
EVERYBODY KNOWS WORDS CAN NEVER HURT THEM…
I’M THE BLOODY SUPERHERO.
Buggering…bollocking…sodding hell.
‘Where. Is. It?’ I stalked towards Kallis.
She fiddled with her rings. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘The t-shirts..?’
‘Aren’t they awesome?’ Kallis struggled out of her baggy sweater – trapping her arms – before triumphantly thrusting her knockers at me, which were emblazoned with the words: YOU CAN’T FLAY A REBEL’S SOUL.
I hadn’t reckoned you could flay a rebel’s Soul.
I was wrong.
I twirled round, diving under the trestle table with a snarl. A bird shrieked; a bloke wailed.
They wanted a Blood Lifer? Our Light?
Then I’d let them have him.
A siren was spinning and wailing. Kallis was calling my name, but I wasn’t with her any longer. I was back in Primrose Hill, sitting in a dining room with a pastoral mural of gentle hills and rivers; there were my Manx cats to find and count and the sun to touch. Buttery cream pages were laid out before me, with the scent of Italian calf leather.
Then I was writing…
I didn’t notice the tears or Kallis and the other workers forming a barrier to hold back the security team, stopping them from shooting me. That was only after.
Instead? I was hunting, searching, ransacking the headquarters because I was certain Blake and his Renegades would’ve kept the book like a trophy, when they discovered it amongst my things.
The bloody bastard.
I caught a glimpse of the RE hologram, and just like that?
I knew.
I launched myself at the case, which was projecting the logo – bang – it sprang open.
There, like a holy relic, was The Slave Journal of Light.
My journal.
I rocked back on my heels, cradling the papers to my chest and smelling the leather.
For the first time in months everything was real.
The Grayse of these pages was dead, but I had Sun. This was all happening: Donovan was taken, pure death was a reality and Blake..?
We were his bleeding prisoners.
When I felt Kallis’ soft touch on my shoulder, I looked up. Only then did I realise my cheeks were wet, security were being held back by a bunch of office workers and headquarters was trashed.
‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered.
Kallis beamed. ‘That was epic! The journal is yours anyway. Blake should never have… We shouldn’t have taken it. In case you haven’t guessed? Every one of us would bleed out for you. You’re Our Light.’
And if that didn’t give me the collywobbles, nothing would.
‘I hear you destroyed headquarters?’
‘Turns out you had something of mine,’ I held up the journal.
Blake made to take it, but I snatched it back close to my heart. No way was Blake contaminating it again.
Kallis had led me into the second cone of the building, after a furious bark through the radio from Blake’s secretary.
Blake’s office was a barmy mix of extreme surreal and minimalism. The walls were warped science fiction, like we were stuck in a cosmic comic battle. There was no furniture, except a giant mahogany desk, which had something etched into its surface (even upside down the pattern looked uncomfortably familiar), and a black leather chair: Blake’s.
Keeping the other bloke standing? Classic trick to reduce him to sniveling schoolboy in front of the headmaster.
I wasn’t taking a caning.
Blake sprawled back in his chair; it creaked. ‘Some good reading in there. Really heart-wrenching.’
‘Sod off.’
‘My name is Light…my name is Light…my name is…’
‘Again, sod off.’
Blake smiled around those perfect white teeth. ‘It made my workers’ – lives - to read that. Be generous. We’re fighting to stop your extinction. This is a crusade for them.’
‘That’s what I’m frightened of.’
Blake assessed me. ‘Did you know us humans aren’t unique? Once there were four others, just as advanced? Yet they died out. It was luck alone that allowed our survival. We may even have made contact with these others; maybe we’ve made contact many times with Blood Lifers too?’
‘And your point?’
‘Listen, then maybe you’ll learn something, like how only one percent of DNA divides humans and chimps.’
‘Bleeding important one percent.’
Blake’s laugh set my teeth on edge. ‘It makes you wonder: by how much are First and Blood truly divided? You see, before they died out, we’d already interbred with those four species. We’d adopted their babies, raided and raped their women. There’s no such thing as pure blood: we’re all mongrels.’
‘And this has to do with me..?’
‘We’ve been running tests on Plantagenet; I want your blood and venom too. I intend to see if there’s a genetic connection between some ancient ancestor, or if we interbred--’
‘Now hang on a tick,’ I thumped down on the desk; I hadn’t noticed how fast my heart was thundering, until I couldn’t catch my breath, ‘I’ve seen where this type of science leads, and it’s not anywhere good.’
‘The world’s moved on.’
‘Don’t fool yourself. Folks are just as hysterical, fearful and tribal as they ever were. Plus I’m nobody’s lab rat.’ My gaze hardened. ‘Plantagenet? He’s a Magnificoe. Maybe that doesn’t mean much to you, but if you want to study us? Start there, not sticking us with needles and reducing us to spiraling strands of DNA.’
‘Everything comes down to evolution,’ Blake stroked the etched surface of his desk.
‘You know what? We’ve evolved beyond the need to interbreed; we’re a life born of fangs. It’s in the venom. Death and life – it’s all the same to us.’
I followed Blake’s finger, as it traced the tangled web of a…branching tree.
Everything blurred.
Strapped to a cold medical examining table: starkers, starving and with a snaking crimson IV…the stand stamped with a black tree logo.
I grasped onto the edge of the desk, willing myself to keep my big gob shut.
Blake, however, had noticed my gaze.
‘True evolution,’ he crowed, ‘isn’t linear. It has unequal survival, extinction and an unpredictable end.’ He rapped on the table. ‘So a branching tree for my personal logo – private deals only. It’s merely a little joke.’
But I wasn’t bloody laughing.
Sun laughed. ‘Blood Sun? Am I, like, in The Matrix?’
‘Missing the point. That tosser’s private logo was all over the research lab where I was sliced and diced. The one that’s developing pure death.’ I pulled Sun closer into the Wiccan circle with Hartford and me, until all our foreheads were touching. Our breaths dragon misted in the cold air.
I’d called them up to the flat roof, amongst the yellow flowers, casual as if I’d been arranging a picnic, rather than a war summit. The wind stole our words, masking them from the CCTV.
I hoped.
‘I told you we should blow this joint,’ Hartford whispered fiercely, ‘this who
le empire business is all wet.’
‘Na-ah, there’s a whole notha side to RE you just don’t get on account of you’ve been Blood Lifers so long you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be human.’
I couldn’t fault Sun’s brutal honesty, or the way it shanked me right through the sodding heart.
‘And you?’ Hartford held out his hand, and I took it tenderly. But Sun? She kept her mitts at her side. ‘Beat your gums about bushwa because you ain’t been a Blood Lifer long enough to know what it is to live as the Lost.’
I had a gander beyond the roof at the laced ivy heart, which webbed over the pale white moon face.
We were in gaol but since when did we have to act like prisoners?
‘We’re the Blood Three: we started this. We didn’t mean to but we did. We have to stay and figure it out: stop Blake or help the Renegades…I don’t bleeding well know, do I? But we do it together. Family.’
I reached for Sun’s hand, but she pulled back.
Then Sun wrenched away, breaking the Wiccan circle.
Breaking us.
Breaking.
NIGHT 10
I need not remind you that only four nights remain.
Then don’t. A counting clock of doom brings a bloke down.
A man cheating me makes me not care. Your secret – where was it yesterday?
And where’s my ciggie today?
Waiting on a missing secret.
Fun as your game is, Liberty, I don’t play games – not over love or death.
Then it appears you do break promises.
You broke yours first: how many days with Captain must I… After suffering with him, you reckon I’ll still dance to your tune? I can barely stand. Now don’t get all prissy, with your rustling papers and whatnot, as if I suddenly don’t exist.
If you can’t keep me safe, you don’t have a witness.
I can do anything--
As long as it’s ratified in triplicate first?
We can’t all be rebels.
Try it on for size sometime; I reckon it’d suit you.
Let me be sure I have this straight: if I do something about Captain, then you’ll bear witness?
It’s all about choices. We have as many as there are stars in the sky: if we’d only look up from the ground to see them.
The stars were accusing peepers, furious and cruel; in the clear night sky, just turning to spring, they burned.
Yet I was out of RE, free and away from Blake. In the fresh (all right polluted) London air, but it was my London, which was the only thing that counted.
I knew I was being tracked; I’d immediately spotted the two First Lifers tailing me.
It was out on the blood bathed London Bridge, however, my own turf, as the cabs coughed by and the Thames silver-licked underneath, that I realised a bloke needed distance.
When you’re caught in a trap, it’s hard to see the bastard who’s set it – or the way out.
Sun had pulled back.
When I ran my hand through my hair, there was my wrist – empty. No bracelet.
Breaking us.
I was a moron for reckoning I was free of any trap.
Blake’s First Lifers were waiting for me on the other side of the bridge.
And Will was dead.
Where was Mutt?
I was guilt-cramped, when I thought of her shaggy black-and-white mug and her growling, barmy bravery, as she’d leapt to Will’s defence against the world. Then I imagined Blake’s expression, if I brought an adopted dog into his pristine home of silk sheets and designer squeaking sofas.
I’d like to see Mr Darwin try to bully his new brother…
Mutt was also something of Will’s – I can admit that. Not him, but a memory. I needed that, at least.
Whistling to myself, I jumped down the side of the embankment in a crunching avalanche of sand. There was a holler on either side of me – Blake’s wankers hadn’t been expecting that.
I laughed, before I choked.
Barbed wire was looped around my throat, razor-sharp. I could feel it slicing through skin. One tug: I’d be headless.
‘What’s the drilly, cuz?’ Trinity’s lips were hot against my ear. When she twisted the wire, I gasped. ‘You come like a tourist to my ends, acting all guardian angel. Next ‘ting? My Will be missing. So where my Will, Mr Angel Man?’
I blinked back tears. ‘I only came to fetch Mutt.’
‘Why? ‘Cos you wanna eat him too? I knew you were gonna switch on us. This be ‘cos I made you drink my Will’s blood, innit?’
And just like that I was crying.
For Will: the life born of my fangs that never was.
I knew Trinity was going to do it. Pull that wire. She’d meant to the moment she’d wrapped it around my throat.
It turns out the myth about vampire hunters isn’t bollocks after all.
I was only still breathing because Trinity was desperate – terrified – I’d tell her Will was dead but she had to know for sure.
Although she was wrong I’d gone all Hollywood vampiric on him – she was also right. It was going to break her, the same as it had me.
The wire at my throat was proof of Trinity’s love.
So I knew I was going to cop it on the murky banks of the Thames, under London Bridge, to the curdled tang of brine and piss, as the stars watched without giving one bleeding sod because why should they?
I can be all Emo when I feel like it, and when you’re about to be done in..?
You feel like it.
The wire eased. Then it was whipped off, and I was kicked sprawling into the marshy mud.
I spluttered, holding my hand to the jagged slash. I hissed, as my blood trickled scarlet.
Trinity was scrutinizing me, her cheeks as wet as mine. ‘No one cares. A tear ain’t shed for one of ours.’
I pushed myself onto my knees. ‘He was one of mine. No different.’
A bark. Black-and-white in sudden blur. Then Mutt – in all her wagging glory – tumbled me back into the stinking mud. Her warm tongue licked my tears.
‘Mutts been missing my Will, same as all mandem. He stays with us; this is his yard.’
I stroked Mutt to hide the tremble in my hand. ‘I’d only have got peckish and noshed him anyway.’
Trinity flung down the wire, before shoving her hands into the pockets of her khaki jacket: definite shiv reaching territory. Then she scuffed at the embankment; the gravel wept down the dark sides. ‘Where be your crepes?’
I took a shufti down at the scarlet nicked soles of my bare feet. ‘Lost a lot lately.’
‘You ain’t gonna tell me where my Will at? But you be telling me he dead?’
‘I’m sorry.’ She was a bright bird: that was enough.
Trinity nodded. ‘Alright, blud,’ her peepers were black with cold rage, ‘now tell me who we shank.’
I wobbled to my feet, before edging towards her.
An enemy of my enemy was…
Still my psychotic, unstable, drug dealing enemy.
Yet we had a common goal and grief. Trinity could be my ears out into the world; First united with Blood.
Life consists of such crossroads: decisions that’ll save you from the flames or roast your goolies.
Maybe it was an unholy alliance.
But for Will?
I’d have worn lipstick for the devil.
‘If we work this right, you won’t need to shank – fun as that is - because we’ll make every bloody bastard care: about you, me and Will. We won’t be the Lost. You won’t be invisible. They’ll see us at last.’
The lounge was in blackness, when I crept in just before dawn; I’d reckoned to kip on the sofa to save myself from She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.
When in the silence Blake touched the light by that ratty designer chair of his, and Plantagenet sprang to life kneeling at his feet with Sun at his shoulder, like Blake was a medieval king at an execution, I couldn’t even convince myself I was surprised.
‘Like tha
t, is it?’ I glanced between them wearily. ‘You want me to tinkle the high notes on the Steinway, add some more dramatic tension?’
‘Come and chat. Or do I simply call security..?’
‘Those great elephants blundering after me around London?’ I slouched over to the sofa, throwing myself down with an eek of dying toys; I was too knackered to keep running. I smirked, when Blake grimaced at the snail trail of scarlet on his biscuit carpet; he’d know better to give me boots next time. If they wanted a barney, then they wouldn’t find me the rollover and take it sort anymore. Sun hid behind her veil of hair, as I pointed at her. ‘Dead classy, grassing on me to teacher. What did Blake promise? A shiny head girl badge?’
Blake patted the back of Sun’s hand.
My Sun Girl.
Not Blake’s or his Renegades’.
Mine.
Blake smiled. ‘Head of department, actually. She’s our star.’
I burst to my feet. No way, no bloody way. Then I caught a glimpse of Sun’s peepers: they were glistening. She looked as stricken as me. ‘Still, most stars are just dying suns from our pasts, right?’
Sun exploded at me then, as I’d hoped she would, because I hadn’t been able to see her standing there united with Blake against me. Not after what we’d fought for together. After all she’d lost and betrayed for me.
Not when she was my elected.
Sun bowled me onto my back, her arm pressed against my throat. It reminded me of how Plantagenet had pinned me under the curtain of his curls, as he’d wept for his lost family.
His legacy.
Sun’s lips pressed hard to mine, as if to prove she was still burning molten, even though wet was dripping from her peepers like an anointing.
‘Sun,’ I mouthed, ‘please…’
Sun was pulling away from me, however, leaving me alone on the floor.
It didn’t hurt less the second time.
When I forced myself to look up, Sun was a shadow again at Blake’s shoulder. Plantagenet was studying me tenderly – almost regretfully. ‘Is this where you take me down to that dungeon of yours and get happy with the rack again, or am I demoted to lab rat permanently?’
Blood Renegades (Rebel Vampires Book 3) Page 20
