Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) (25 page)

With a boxer’s precision, Aralt worked my bare chest down to my gut and he knew it hurt - he got off on it - pausing between belts, whilst he considered the reddening skin that was deepening to purple, before moving on and then back and working the same area over again.

I groaned and then bit my teeth hard together. I wouldn’t give Aralt the bloody satisfaction.

It wasn’t a good move, however, because Aralt seemed to sense my defiance. That’s when he dragged my arms above my nut and started in on my mug: right cheek, left cheek, right cheek…

I started hollering then because a bloke can only be so much of a stoic and I never pretended to be a hero.

I felt my cheekbone
crunch
and
smash
. I could taste the tang of blood, trickling from my broken nose. Christ in heaven, broken noses were the bleeding worst - the pain’s like nothing else.

My peepers were closing; I knew they’d be purple and black. Aralt was only a shadow now above the slits of my swollen peepers. At each swing of his fist, I could see my blood spattered on his pristine white cuff in a pretty crimson pattern. I had the sudden memory of how I’d stained Erwood’s cravat: do bastards like him and Aralt always paint themselves in the blood of nobodies like me?

I saw the shadow’s arm pulled back, readying for a right old belt and braced myself the best I could. Then someone was grabbing hold of Aralt’s fist and heaving him off me, like a crushing stone had been lifted from my broken ribs.

Then I heard Donovan’s voice, ‘Cool it, man; he gets the message. Don’t freak out.’

Followed by Aralt’s cold tone, ‘When are you gonna think with your head and not your langer, for once in your fecking life?’

‘When that’s more of a gas.’

I heard Aralt sigh but I didn’t have the strength to raise my nut. Then someone lugged me up under my arms and I realised it was Kira, holding me like a doll, as blood spilled from every gash: my teeth, mouth, nostrils, peepers…

I was bloody black and blue and couldn’t move without the tightness of pain. Ruby was examining me, as if I was an interesting exhibit: a nice little show put on for her benefit.

I guess the instinct for protection didn’t cut both ways.

Aralt asked, ‘You still won’t elect this bird? But she doesn’t know what you are?’

I swallowed a mouthful of my own blood, before I managed to spit out, ‘Not a clue, I swear.’

‘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.’