Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) (6 page)

Ruby decided the first thing on our list, after we’d sampled the delights of London, was to have a gander at Potter’s Museum in Bramber. We broke in one night, when the well-to-do tourists had already gone home.

We strolled in the silence, between tableaux of dead kitties with ribbons tied around their fluffy necks, as they posed on hind legs, like miniature First Lifers at the altar: bride, bridegroom and vicar. Others modelled frilly costumes, as they sedately supped at a tea party: a polite society of corpses.

That was Ruby’s number one lesson, and it didn’t take me long to get it: it’s not us Blood Lifers, who dream of death - it’s you First Lifers.

It fascinates, possesses and
excites
you. So you hold it close, precious for those quiet moments. You fear it. Yet you still seek it out vicarious. Even though you always know it’s coming, you still love the shadows.

Blood Lifer’s aren’t death; they’re merely part of something bigger.

‘See how they play games too?’ Ruby had whispered.

After, we travelled by night to Dover, crossing the English Channel to Le Havre, by coach again and then a trip by boat up the Seine to Paris.

When Ruby spoke French it was beautiful, mesmerising – and perfect. I foolishly reckoned she’d be impressed with my mimicked attempts.

Ruby, however, only laughed, dragging me away. ‘Do not frown so. We will find you a tutor. A good tutor. A
proper
tutor.’

‘But I…Wasn’t it right?’

‘There’s a difference between right and the feel of it coursing through your blood. You must learn to listen and feel. Not parrot.’
Tutors
? It was like being a kid again. Every evening I awoke to Ruby’s naked outline pressed to mine, in the crisp Parisian air, with her long, red hair spread like curtains, over the white of the sheets. Yet when I’d roll over in the four-poster (a new luxury indeed), and slip my hand to Ruby’s knockers, her emerald peepers would snap open, cold and hard as hell. ‘If you wish your trinkets not to be rent or be-torn, I would remove your hand and concentrate on your lessons instead.’

Fencing, riding, dancing… Ruby said all men must have these accomplishments. Even Blood Lifers.

When at last Ruby was satisfied (and she was bloody hard to satisfy), we hired a carriage and flew on to Italy.

It wasn’t until we arrived in Turin that Ruby finally rewarded me for
my patience
in my lessons, teaching me new ones as she did so, which I never wanted to end.

We didn’t surface for several months from the ecstasy of each other, except to hunt in the ancient streets.

From there we rode to Florence, where Ruby became my Cicerone, guide and tutor; it was a revelation. I was walking in this vast world, which I’d once enviously watched gliding by on the Thames. Now the earth was revealed, spread before us like a sodding banquet; the greatest works of First Lifers, were as if ours alone.

In the blackest night, we’d wander the deserted piazzas, staring up at the Duomo’s terracotta and white dome;
Brunelleschi
,
fifteenth century
, Ruby would murmur and then point across the piazza at a Gothic bell tower, which soared into the star-lit, Tuscan sky:
Giotto’s Campanile
, she’d add.

Or we’d perch on a crumbling wall high over the city. Ruby would rest her nut on my shoulder, as we were serenaded by the haunting Gregorian chants of San Miniato’s Benedictine monks, during vespers.

We ate two of the monks after; they tasted sweet, like nectar.

You’d expect monks to be peaceful, but one duffed me right up, before I bit. I guess it was the outfit, which caused me to hesitate - all that black - or maybe the chanting had made me sleepy. Yet after the first taste, I fumbled, and he legged it, his skinny shins kicking, like a long-legged hare.

Ruby laughed at me; I hated it when she did that. ‘After him then, my brave hero.’

‘In this heat?’ I leant against the cool stone, probing the swelling around my purpling peeper. ‘Lost my appetite.’

I watched Ruby guzzle at the neck of her fat prize; it hadn’t been a fair contest between our two - hers wobbled with too much lard to fight back. She gazed at me over his sweaty neck. ‘Eat. We can share.’

‘I don’t need charity.’ Churlishly, I turned to watch my monk’s stumbling collapse. He’d only fled halfway down the hill, before he’d staggered, clutching at his chest, with a comical strained look.

All right then, here’s where I come clean: how it really works. The truth is we don’t drain dry, that’s the bollocks. Blood is pure and powerful, even the smallest drop. One pint is more than enough to satisfy us. It’s our secret, which is deadly.

It’s not the loss of blood that does you in, not when we’re taking so much less than the half, which causes a First Lifer to cop it. It’s what’s invisible on the tips of our fangs.

You can beat us off, or escape entirely. It won’t matter. If you’ve been bit, you’re dead.

The heart –
bam
– explodes. The blood flow is blocked. The heart’s starved of oxygen. And then it’s all over. I believe the quacks, who reckon they’re dead clever men in this modern age, call it
myocardial infarction
.

In autopsy reports across the world, low blood levels are only minor footnotes, where the primary cause of death is… You guessed it.
Not us
.

We’re the perfect camouflaged predator.

It’d be a bleeding crime, except in case you’re not getting the through line here, this is about survival, and I’m all for that. In the past, the only thing we left was a pale but peaceful corpse, before the wailing began.

Now
that’s
evolution.

A First Lifer’s heart, who lives an average life, beats 100,000 times a day, 35 million in a year, two and a half billion in a lifetime. All that thudding and squeezing simply to pump the blood round because it always comes back to… Yeah, you know what.

You reckon every single weak heart gave out on its own? There must be part of you, which finds it reassuring that some were helped along?

You used to hate it when I talked like that; you’d get so shirty with me.

Yet the memory of blood is the only thing I have left now I’m on the pig gruel.

One night we slipped into La Specola, a museum next to the Pitti Palace, which stank of something sweet but rotten. When Ruby gripped my hand tight, I realised I’d never felt this radiating from her before: it was something alike to fear but not. It was revulsion.

‘The First Lifers are proud of this…museum of death,’ Ruby breathed. ‘They call it science.’

‘We can go. Let’s find some piazza with music, drinking and dancing. The land of the living for once? Then we can…’

Ruby held her finger to my lips. ‘You need to see.’

Ruby’s hand curled tighter around mine. I glanced up. The walls of the museum were pinned with dead butterflies: every type, colour and size. They were neatly ordered, categorized and labelled. As my pulse quickened, Ruby caught my eye. She nodded.

Room after room was the same: display cases lining the walls, standing from floor to ceiling, or lying open, like glass coffins. Snow White in some twisted rendition of the tale. Rooms of stuffed birds, stilled forever on their perches, with predator next to natural prey: herbivores, carnivores, a huge hippo and a gallery of primates staring back blankly from their boxes.

We paced in silence, until we reached the primates. Then I rested my forehead on the glass, holding my palm up to touch the grasp of the chimpanzee on the other side.

Poor bugger
.

Death was so close it throttled me. I’d lived close with it, intimate-like, as a Blood Lifer.

But this?

I’d known science in my First Life or reckoned I had. Yet somehow I’d failed to see the darkness underneath.

‘All that’s missing is one of us,’ Ruby’s fingers were stroking the back of my nut. ‘Then they’d have the full collection. We’re the Lost species. Why do you think we hide?’ I twisted to Ruby, shocked. She raised her eyebrow. ‘Are we not superior? Evolution’s advancement? Yet we’re adapted for masking our true face, whilst relying on humans for sustenance. Just as we do the night for protection from the sun. Prithee tell me how beggarly is a divided world, in which half does not fathom the truth? And for it to be danger akin to heresy to reveal it? Consider what these First Lifers pay to see.’

With disgust Ruby led me around the exhibits. For a moment, I thought there were mutilated cadavers laid out in the glass cases (which gave me the willies I can tell you), but then I saw they were anatomical wax models, copied from real corpses.

All right then, so that wasn’t much better because on every side were these torture victims, with their guts out, their chests ripped back and lungs offered up, as if we were about to dig in, whilst twins curled around each other bonded in uterus. The skinned man was laid on his side, arching in agony.

When I paused at a man reduced to one large circulatory system, I felt Ruby’s arms snake around my waist. She rested her chin on my shoulder. Blue and red coils circled the corpse: First Lifer reduced to food and all it’d needed was a little flaying.

Here, laid bare, was the proof that man was created for our needs.

‘They want to be feasted upon, even if they do not know it. A First Lifer is our prey. We grant the death he seeks, so he no longer needs to fear it.’

I reckon Ruby experienced unexpected guilt for taking me to that place and giving me the collywobbles.

No, all right then, not guilt - whatever was closest to that emotion, which she was still capable of feeling. She was tenderer than usual for the next few days.

At least, she tied me up less often.

I’d wake to Ruby just lying there, watching me. She’d kiss my neb lightly over and over, as if dispelling something.

Then Ruby bought me a whole new set of close-fitting clobber: a double-breasted reefer with military stand-up collar in indigo check and a velvet trimmed overcoat. She twirled me round and round, clapping her hands in delight. Then she promenaded with me - all dolled up - in front of the fancy ladies and gentlemen in the piazza d’Azeglio, who were spilling out of the light and buzz of theatre performances, into the quiet of the night.

They’d always felt off, however, those threads. Maybe because Ruby had chosen them for me, as if I was her sodding Mary-Ann.

So later, when we were caught up in France during the First of the two bloody wars, I took the opportunity to filch a British Officer’s Great Coat. He didn’t need it, since he’d been shot through the head (poor sod). The coat, however, was fine.

We weren’t meant to even be there, shouldn’t have been within a thousand miles of those bleeding killing fields and that madness, where I truly learnt where the science I’d once worshipped could lead.

All the beauty and terrible splendour of this earth, yet First Lifers were racing to develop new ways to annihilate it?

Death, you see, that’s all right – natural - carnage raw in tooth and nail. But apocalyptic machines, which dealt it out with a twitch of a finger, chattering
ack-ack-ack
, whilst dying soldiers were entangled in aprons of barbed wire, like puppets shuddering on strings..? The
whomp
above your nut, before the whole world dove for cover, and the earth shook to dust; metal beasts lumbering through the heat and churning the world to nothing but mud and sleet, nothing but sodding mud and sleet, whilst the neat white crosses were erected between blood-red poppies..?

And the
boom
of those guns…

If you haven’t heard those guns, you’re not haunted by them. But me..?

We got trapped once for a full month between those lines of First Lifers. The blood of either side smelled exactly the same; the mound of rotting corpses, which we were forced to hide under, stunk just as badly. Yet they were still trying to mechanize slaughter each other, as if they weren’t the same species.

And
we’re
the monsters?

Boom, boom, boom
…

Those bloody guns bore into me, day and night. They drove Ruby half-crazed, buried as we were under the mud and the soft ooze of decaying soldiers, until she tore at herself with her nails. I had to hold onto her to stop her.

Then Ruby lashed out at me instead. Still, that was better because I could take a hiding but what I couldn’t bear was to see Ruby hurt herself.

Our extraordinary senses can be our weakness or our strength. Like all creatures, we have to adapt.

The light shows in that war? They burnt my peepers. I can still see them.

Hell came to earth in those days and not in the form of us Blood Lifers. Humanity invented it for themselves.

All that said, I did get a blinding coat out of it.

After that, we wandered the world seeking nothing but each other and solitude. Not that easy with my kind because if you don’t play by the rules, they’ll find some reason not to like your mush. Then they’ll bottle it, faster than First Lifers, after a curry and lager on a Saturday night.