Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1)
Read Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) Online
Authors: Rosemary A Johns
REBEL VAMPIRES 2: BLOOD SHACKLES
BLOOD DRAGONS
ROSEMARY A JOHNS
Ruby and I swaggered through the shadowed streets, towards the promenade and Palace Pier - her in crimson silk, me in military Great Coat - two creatures from another world and time, unnoticed by these petty First Lifers because we weren’t painted in the colours of their tribe. We twirled each other round, dancing in the carnage and the flames.
FANTASY REBEL
Copyright © 2016 Rosemary A Johns
First Edition 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters, places and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED:
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.
Cover design by JD Smith
Fantasy Rebel Limited
rosemaryajohns.com
King James Bible – Leviticus 17:14
‘For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life thereof; therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh; for the life of all flesh
is
the blood thereof; whosoever eateth it shall be cutoff.’
1
You know those vampire myths? Holy water, entry by invitation only and sodding crucifixes?
Bollocks
to them.
Because you know what? There are no monsters and no immortals. There’s just us: the Lost.
Somewhere deep inside, you know it’s true.
I can see a glimmer Kathy - give me something - the slightest flicker in those glazed blue peepers.
You remember me today, don’t you, love? At least you
used
to and wouldn’t need me raking it up. If I can just get this down, or if you can just remember, I won’t lose my last thread of humanity. Sanity. Otherwise there’s no one with the pretty pictures in their mind but me. Of what I’ve seen. Or what I’ve done.
Do you even remember my name?
Your Light
?
You laughed when we first met and said my parents must be
right
hippies
. You were direct like that: I loved it. But I couldn’t explain. Not then.
How many months since you’ve looked at me and said my name? Looked at me and known me?
After all these decades, you’re lost. And I’m alone.
Ilkley Moor’s bleak when you look out at it under the crisp snow of winter; sod it, it’s bleak when the sun beats down in the broiling heat of summer too.
Not that I’ve seen more than photos of the daytime. I don’t fancy bubbling to a stinking pool.
Yet now, when I can’t even see the heather, just rolling mounds of snow, which cast blue shadows and make burial mounds of the hills (the boulders the gravestones), it’s bloody bleak. So the tourists, dog walkers, day-trippers and climbers, don’t come out here in the freeze of the dead months.
Except we’re here because I wanted to bring you somewhere familiar, which you’d recognize: for the end. For
your
end.
The docs say – oh, you know, so much bollocks. They’re wankers, the quackmongering lot of them.
This last decade, as you’ve slipped, and I’ve had to watch, useless as a…
Dementia
they call it. They always have a pretty label, don’t they?
Dementia
.
Box it in. Mask the nasties with their lists and tick boxes. I reckon the physicians of this age figure themselves dead brainy fellows.
So I brought you back here to Ilkley Moor, in the howling wind roar of December, because I wanted you to feel at home. I hoped you’d remember one last time.
Only now I realise all it’s done is haunt. And we’ve a hell of a lot of ghosts clamouring on our backs.
I’ve a Soul to haunt, the same as you. Of course I died (hollering, I don’t mind admitting). Yet when I was reborn into my second life, my Soul was stuck to me. They’re fat, mewling consciences, until we choose to carve them away, slice by crimson slice, with every First Lifer we slaughter. But others? We tend to our Souls’ shreds, chaining the pulsing migraine hunger.
We’re individuals, get what I’m fixing at? More so, because after election, every emotion is amplified: the good, along with the bad.
It’s not as if freewill is your headline act alone. We Blood Lifers decide the body count, how fast the tune plays and how deep the darkness bites. Because little by little – year by year – it consumes us all eventually.
It was you who taught me that.
I stand most nights in the damp of our whitewashed stone farmhouse, where everything has been changed from when it was first our home. The shell, however, remains. No one can gut the core of a house. Its beams. Walls.
Soul.
I can taste our life still throbbing warm.
I stare out at the rugged wilderness, which is shrouded in the haze of mists that threaten to swallow us, because I don’t have the balls to turn and watch you.
To see you rock backwards and forwards in the crumpled mess of our bed, wringing your hands until the nails rip the skin, like there’s something dirty you can’t clean off.
That should be me, love. It’s all on my hands. Not yours.
On those nights, I know you’re lost in the past - not with me - when you say one word, like a bloody mantra: ‘Advance, Advance, Advance…’
Why can’t I wash it clean for you? And I’m too much of a coward to turn round.
So this – here - is me turning round. This. Here. Now.
I can’t change the past. I never thought much about it before. I never had to. I was always the one, who lived in each fleeting second, high on its intoxicating splendour.
You never got that. Not like Ruby.
Sorry, that’s a jinx just there. The blood talking. Calling to me. But now I see the tracks left behind are more than the picture perfect moments in my brain; not clinically still, but blurred bloody lines.
I want to share them with you. Fully, unabridged and unedited. All the nasties and wankery. The truth (as far as that exists), before you no longer understand me. I’m writing it down because then I can cut it straight. How I want you to hear it.
If these are the last words I ever say to you, then I need them to be right, so let me get it in at the start: I love you.
From the moment I saw you…no scratch that…from the moment I
heard
you, I loved you.
All right, there was awhile I reckoned I hated you, and
you
thought I was a pillock and a bad boy Rocker too, let’s not leave that out. Have you forgotten what a hard time you gave me? But these last five decades..? Although of course to you our love was forever. Yet to me? It flamed brighter than the bloody sun, but it’s not forever because that’s so much longer than you’ll ever know.
Your First Lifer world doesn’t get that theirs is only the starter, not the main. None of us know what’s for dessert. I fear I haven’t been a good enough boy for that and I wager I’m most like to be sent to bed without any.
We tell ourselves lies, however, to maintain the pretence of safety, as if the folks in our civilized country wouldn’t burn the world around their ears if they missed just three square meals.
So you see, if anyone but you reads this book, then that instinct for self-deceiving self-preservation (along with every other fib in the web of status quo that bind First Lifers), will kick in.
Still reckon they’ll believe? Think this more than fiction?
You lived it. Breathed it. Bled it. I want this to bite to your Soul. But to them?
It’ll appear merely ink stains on a page. Not the howling of a vast new world opening up in the shadows.
2
Rough leather motorcycle jacket, studded and faded, decorated with a worn gold
Ace of Spades
, collar firmly turned up, over a black t-shirt, jeans and tall motorcycle boots, topped by a light brown pompadour, tamed with Brylcreem.
‘That’s what you kids are wearing now, is it?’ Your new carer for Wednesdays was studying me, like she’d just revealed a manky specimen in your bedpan. ‘Latest fashion?’ Her gaze curdled; you could tell it would’ve done, even when she was half a lifetime younger and not dried up with defeated dreams.
Karen
the little thingy on her blue overall read. But after years of an endless parade of day to night handovers, these birds blurred into a day of the week, rather than a name.
I grinned, as I slouched against the wall. ‘No, luv, these’ve been around awhile.’
Wednesday flinched at the
luv
. Babes to this world, you First Lifers bristle at words, which are deemed outdated, as if they had more power than echoes. I’m too old, however, to change more than I already have (and that’s more than most).
How about a bit of bloody
appreciation
?
Wednesday was shuffling around your bed, as if checking for hospital corners. Now I knew she was pissed because no carer ever does that. They stick to checking your pills, pressure sores and signing timesheets, before dashing out of the piss stink of this room as fast as they can.
I try to cover the old woman smell with your Chanel No. 5. You’d have bit my bloody head off for spraying that around mist-like, back when you could speak. But the sweet scent of you darling, it’s faded, as if you’re withering. I can’t even smell the blood in your veins. It’s like you’re being fossilised inside out, every day one drop less.
Are you still inside there?
As I watched Wednesday’s disapproving rearrangement of the sheets, I dragged out my pack of ciggies, clenching a fag between my teeth. Then I rummaged in my jean’s pocket, pulling out my gold lighter. I snapped open the smooth lid, flicking on the heady orange surge of flame: I’ve got to get my kicks somewhere and there’s nothing like looking into the fire.