Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) (30 page)

All because of me.

Because I caught Alessandro up in my spy games, vendettas and vengeance. Now instead of me, he’d been the one doing the dying. And I couldn’t take it back…couldn’t ever take it back.

When Aralt let go of Alessandro, his body slid down like a broken doll, crimson trickling from the corner of his mouth.

How could you murder someone you’d elected, who was twinned to you by blood?

My friend
.

The words swirled in my mind, heavier than any others. Neither in First or Blood Life had I ever had one of those before and Alessandro hadn’t either: sometimes it takes a loner to understand a loner.

But now Alessandro was gone.

Ruby was frozen, with an expression close to fear but more like the horror, which I remembered from when we’d edged, hand in hand, through the macabre La Specola, with its wax men flayed and gutted and our ape cousins stuffed on the other side of the glass.

That was when Aralt did something, which blew what tiny shreds remained of my reason, planning and thought to pieces: he wiped his hands together fastidiously, as if disgusted to have been dirtied by Alessandro’s blood.

Then the blood in my own ears was roaring and I was roaring too. Nothing existed but that moment. And that pain.

I was going to sodding kill the bastard.

I didn’t care if I went down with him because it was me, who got Alessandro done in. Just as I’d sacrificial offered myself up for slaughter at Erwood’s hands.

My choices. My decisions. And I bloody well knew it.

I hurled myself at Aralt, punching right at the throat. For a moment, he was caught off balance, struggling to breathe.

Shocked, Aralt stared at me but then he recovered, throwing me round and jabbing me in the ribs. I felt them break: one, two, three… I gritted my teeth, fighting through the agony. In the red blur of rage, nothing mattered anymore. Aralt grabbed hold of my arm, twisting it with a brawler’s dirty skill; he threw inverted punches with his palm on the weak underside, where the veins and arteries were. The wanker intended to enjoy this, he was making that clear.

I could feel Ruby’s hands, grasping down my back and trying to drag me away from her brother. I could see her pulling at Aralt too, but he wasn’t planning to give up his prize that easily.

‘Stop this madness.’ Ruby’s hair was soft against my mug, as she pressed herself between us. ‘Both of you desist. You
men
. Please, we can…’

That’s when Aralt hit her, backhanding Ruby hard enough to knock her away from us against the wall.

I managed to turn my nut to look at her, but Ruby was staring down at the ground; her cheek was red.

When had Ruby ever looked down?

When I turned back, Aralt noticed my expression and the wanker laughed.

And that laugh? That was the moment. The one when reason returned to me. I was ready.

I might never be a bleeding hero but I could keep my promises. Christ I hoped Alessandro was free now but it was time I freed you, Susan, Ruby and sod it, myself as well.

I would shut down for good that vision of a future world of factory blood without joy or life. And yeah, to hell with it, pay Aralt back for every belting and taunt, for Alessandro’s blood on his hands and for every tear you’d shed.

I let the force of Aralt’s next clout into my bruised ribs slam me back against the front doors because then the handle was in my hand again. When Aralt advanced on me for the next swing, I hooked my other arm around his waist, dragging him in close. As he decked me across the chin, I turned the handle, letting the force of the blow knock us both out into the sunlight.

I heard Ruby’s shocked scream and then saw Aralt scramble for the building’s safety. But I linked my arms tighter around the tosser’s waist, as I grappled him further into the light, away from the line of shadow cast by the oaks along the pavement.

My retinas were already scorched; it was too bright. A world aflame. I could feel my skin crisping. I held Aralt on top of me, like a shield.

Aralt’s howls were deafening. He was ripping at my hands to free himself but he was jerky in his agony and blinded.

Caught off guard, Aralt stumbled. I hurled him far out into the street under the hot sun and this world he’d thirsted to conquer –
let him have it
.

I staggered back under the shade of the oaks. Aralt was shrieking and giving these pathetic little yelps. His eyeballs were scorched out of their sockets; he was grasping the air with his fingers, as if he could somehow find a way out of the darkness. Then he collapsed to his knees, as the skin melted from his body, like a candle’s wax. The same as the anatomical man in Florence, with his inner workings on display bloody.

Finally Aralt was nothing but a shuddering mess. There wasn’t even that pitiful yelping anymore because his tongue was puddled too. There was nothing but a pool of blood left, like that vast vat in the hold of Radio Komodo, sucking the life from comatose First Lifers. The same stink too.

It’s not often you see your own future so vividly illustrated right in front of you.

Then there was no time for thought because I was melting too: there’s only so much a few branches can do against a savage sun. The first scream was wrenched from my reluctant throat.

I told you that you never forget the stench of melted skin fused to leather.

I staggered back through the oak’s shade to Advance’s entrance, banging against the doors. But they wouldn’t open. I wrenched on the handle, becoming increasingly frantic, when I realised Ruby had locked me out to face the sun with her brother. Choices and decisions, you see?

It seemed Ruby had made hers.

Ruby stepped closer to the darkened door. She placed her hand to the glass. As our eyes met, I slowly raised my seared palm to hers.

That’s when I knew there was no way out of it. I was going to cop it. Soon I’d be no more than a puddle in the sun too. You know what? It was better to be the flame, which burns out bright and fast because wasn’t that how I’d always lived?

I turned and fought to hold onto enough of myself just for the final few moments, so I’d go out as me; I didn’t want to die like Aralt had - reduced to animalistic terror. I swaggered towards the middle of the empty street, right under the rays of the sun and that pool of congealing blood.

It was agony - a pure and blinding burn - but I wasn’t het up. I was calm. It wasn’t as if everything was tickety-boo, but rather I was filled with this sense of completion.

With my first death, I’d botched the whole idealistic bollocks, leaving everything behind me in the same bloody mess. I’d lost my life in a stupid, meaningless way. Of course that’s the way it goes down for many people. When you’re dead, however, it’s too late to obsess over it. But if you’re elected into Blood Life? You try having centuries of something like that weighing on you. The problem for me, however, was it wasn’t a one off. I’d screwed up in the same way regular as clockwork.

This time, however, I’d taken Advance down with me. I’d saved the world. And the biggest surprise of all was I actually gave a damn.

So what if I fried? I’d had a good innings and I’d got to see the sun for the first time in over a hundred years. So I stood there, with my arms out and my peepers turned towards the flaming face of the sun.

And I waited to be burned alive.

See, I still didn’t know you well enough, did I? Because then there you were, charging around the corner in your red Mini Cooper. You threw open the side door and then grabbed me by the jacket, dragging me inside.

After everything, it turns out it was you doing the saving.

You didn’t need rescuing. I did.

I don’t know what you must’ve thought about the bloody thrashed state of me, the way I huddled instantly under my jacket away from the light, or dragged the picnic rug off the floor and over my nut for protection. You’ve never told me.

You didn’t say anything at all, you simply drove.

It was only when we were out of central London, somewhere north, when city had transformed to suburbs and then fields, hedges and the ridges of countryside, that you pulled off into a rutted lane and turned to me.

That’s when I dared to shift my agonised body enough to peer out from my shielding (everything still blurry through my damaged peepers) and realised your stuffed suitcases were crammed onto the backseats: your whole life packed up because you’d known that I’d need you…yet also it’d mean you couldn’t go back. Because of me.

At last I built up the bottle to break the final decree - the big one: I told you what I was.

I tore up the rule book into confetti pieces because I was never going to leave you again, which meant you had to know the truth. I trusted you with my secret. And my life.

You might’ve run from me. Called me
monster
. Kicked me out there and then to melt on the roadside. Yet if we were to spend our lives together, there could be no more masks.

Afterwards, I braced myself, my knuckles white around the rug. I had no right to expect anything but rejection.

The strange thing was, you didn’t do any of those things. You merely nodded with a type of detached curiosity, like it was only one more freakish characteristic to add to my long list.

I managed to smile at you tentatively. You looked cute in your sexy scarf, with your new Twiggy cut, which I now appreciated lit up your peepers and lengthened your beautiful neck. ‘Have I told you that’s a blinding hair do?’

At last you grinned, stroking your bare neck, as if surprised by the feel of it. ‘Fancied a change.’

Then you leant over and kissed me dead gentle on my tender lips.

Christ had I missed
that
.

‘You and me both.’

You revved the Mini Cooper. Then we roared off into the light of day. Together.

14

MAY 1855 WATFORD

You had to stand still for a bloody long time if you didn’t want the photograph to come out blurred. If you moved, it’d look like you were a ghost, hazy at the edges. Sometimes whole families turned out that way. But not often because papa was one of the best at his art.

Papa employed every trick of the photographers’ trade: hidden props to tuck behind folk’s necks or covers to stick over a mama’s head to render them invisible, whilst at the same time stopping their babes from kicking up a shine because they feared they’d been abandoned.

If you know what you’re looking for, you can make out these spooks in the pictures.

Papa was always inventing some better process, lens or plate. His excitement was like a little kid’s. It was bloody infectious. Mama would sigh and leave us to the dark room, my sisters clinging to her apron, because I was of the same kidney: there was nothing more blinding than this weird new science.

I was obsessed by the way you could capture one moment. I knew it wasn’t forever. Photographs faded. Yet it was still someone’s squirming Soul laid in the palm of your hand. Power over the natural world, without trickery or magic. I understood it and (young as I was), papa respected me enough to share the voyage of discovery.

‘Photography’s derived from the Greek for light and writing,’ papa once told me. ‘We write with light.’

Mama and papa arrived in Watford along with the whistling squeal of the London and Birmingham Railway in 1837, as part of the influx from the inner city, which transformed the old shops with their tiny windows and dim interiors, into bright new stores - like papa’s photographic studio.

See, here’s the thing, where there’d been just one long street with foul alleyways rising from the River Colne to Cassiobury Park, it transformed around me as I grew too, into a new world of the printing industry and shops as good as any in the City (and that’s not simply my pride speaking). Then there was Cassiobury House: a romantic, gothic pile, to which posh birds and famous bleeders gallivanted back and forth from London - and had their portraits taken by papa.

We also returned to London on quests for supplies, equipment or to hang out with other photographers in studios or coffeehouses. Bloody hell, the powerful aroma of coffee was like something exploding right on the back of my tongue. It was the smell of
adventure
. It always will be for me. Very quickly, I came to be viewed as papa’s partner in crime.

And London? Christ it was alive, expanding ever further and busier every time we visited, bustling like a banjo, as much with death as with life, both cheek by jowl: a chimneysweep’s boy (younger than me), choking up blood, as he staggered by us, black head to foot, a crawler in the shadow of a doorway, twitching under scarlet rags, nothing but a bag of bones, a blue-smocked butcher whistling, laden with a tray, which groaned under fresh joints of lamb and an abandoned newborn, grey and alien, rotting on a dungheap, ignored by everything but the flies that teemed over it.

Before we’d head back to the hiss and screech of the train, papa would take me to stand on the western parapet of London Bridge, amidst sailors in red and blue flannel shirts or nor’westers and the stink of smoke, to peer over at the tugboats, steamers and paddleboats, which were sailing in and out, on the great silver tongue of the Thames.