Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) (9 page)

‘Always wanting to advance this one,’ Wednesday stared down at you perplexed, ‘but never says where to.’

Here’s the thing, I could explain it to her. What your splintered mind’s drawn to at the end: what it can’t forget, when it’s obliterated all else.

Why it’s not at peace.

Yet even I didn’t know what
Advance
meant before the summer of 1968.

Everything comes back to then.

And before?

Before came the decades of lies and my beautifully gilded cage.

It wasn’t until that glorious summer that my world expanded to more than an orgy of blood, thrills and discovery. They were my buttons, which Ruby knew how to push and in what order. I was caught up in her tempest.

It wasn’t until then, that my peepers were opened to the consuming darkness: how each kill inexorably pushes you into the shadows. Until you don’t even know where you end and the gaping dirt mouth of the earth begins. Until you don’t know what tiny shard of what you once were is left.

All right, so here’s the truth of it: I thought in death I’d shed fear and sin. That’s the refrain we Blood Lifers hold aloft, like a bloody standard.

What I didn’t understand was that my Soul would claw at me to be saved. Not by a god but through my own graft, bottle and the ball of squirming terrors tight in my gut.

I only started to taste the truth of that, when Ruby finally brought me to Advance.

JULY 1968 LONDON

The Who’s “My Generation” – a tribal bloody howl of Mod rebellion and youth’s hymn of raging, stuttering disgust at humanity’s inevitable, ageing decay - blazed up the wide staircase of Advance Record Company, as I descended. I was already sweating patches through my t-shirt in the muggy heat. I jumped the last two steps.

Then I pressed my ear to the closed double doors. All I could hear, however, was the twang of guitars and the same pounding two chords, overlaying the clash of drums.

‘Don’t sulk in here all night, dearest prince,’ Ruby had insisted, curling her hand down my chest, in the way she knew made my blood roar. ‘Come join us, the twins and me.’

Yeah, see there’s the lie. The darkness wormed in our crimson bed for so many decades, ones in which I’d done nothing but follow Ruby: my Author, muse, liberator and love. The reason I’d known there was something Ruby was hiding about our coming back to England. Something more than the need to resurrect me into Blood Life. And what was behind those doors was it: the sodding twins… Ruby’s
brothers
.

We’d set up our crib in Liverpool, behind the Mersey docks in the shadow of the cranes, hulking ships and the whiff of general decline. I’d salvaged what we needed from boneyards.

When Ruby had returned one night, however, from her lone wanderings, which had become frequent now, she’d told me that we were moving back to London.

I’d just been out and nicked Ruby a pair of blinding ruby earrings to go with her pendant. I’d noticed a few weeks back that this dead posh jewellers had opened in the city centre. I’d been secretly planning a lay to surprise Ruby. I couldn’t wait for her peepers to light with fire, as she put them on for me.

Yet when I’d passed the earrings to Ruby with a smile, she’d tossed the box aside, like I’d picked them up at the market. ‘We need to make haste and put away this idleness. They want us at their side. There are…important undertakings of our kind. We must go; after all, they are our cater-cousins.’

Confused, I’d collected the earrings from the floor, fidgeting with the box. ‘Who are, luv?’

Ruby had turned away. ‘Pack up.’

I’d grabbed Ruby by the shoulder. ‘Who are these pillocks? What’s going on?’

‘Fie, remove your hand or by heaven…’

I’d hurriedly snatched away my fingers. Ruby had looked at me, as if calculating my reaction. ‘My brothers. The twins.’

‘What?’ I’d stared at her.

Ruby had
family
? Decades of life lived together as one, but not a single word she had blood relatives?

Our connection had been beyond words or blood, in the trembling of the world and our lives’ fever. Yet now I’d wondered, in one cracking jolt, if all I’d been to Ruby was a distraction. Nothing but a toy to while away the decades or her
idleness
..?

Was that all any Blood Lifer could be to each other?

‘We were elected by the same fellow, one of the Magnificoes. The Magnificoes have the purest bloodlines, which reach back further than any other. Days were when they reigned over every Blood Lifer.’

‘You were elected at the same time?’

Ruby had shaken her nut. ‘My brothers much later.’

A new suspicion had gripped me by the goolies. I had that itching sensation, which comes when you’re desperate to start bawling. I held it in, however, because Ruby hated it when I acted nancy. ‘After you elected me?’

Ruby had nodded, stretching out on a pile of shipping crates, which we’d set up as seating.

‘And you…never mentioned them?’

‘Nay, I did not.’

‘I thought…You know I always reckoned we were the same: alone apart from each other. You know that’s what I thought.’

Ruby had just shrugged.

I’d jittered, not knowing what to do with my bloody hands, so I’d flipped a fag into my mouth and struck a match, raising it shakily to my lips. The haunting wail of a ship’s horn had broken across the dock. ‘That’s where you went then? To see them?’

Ruby had uncurled to her full haughty height, her scarlet locks pure fire in the dark. ‘Have I taught you no better than this? These are not your affairs. Like no better than a First Lifer, did the lesson not seed?’

‘Oh it did darlin’,’ I’d flicked the burning ciggie down, grinding it sharply with my heel, ‘so well I stopped asking. Stopped bloody thinking. All those times you just left. Days? Weeks? Months? And that one time..? And
me
..?’ I’d raged towards Ruby (although damned if I’d known what I was going to do) but then had found myself slamming my fist clean through a shipping crate instead –
crash
– tiny splinters embedding in my gashed knuckles. ‘Not once even a message or… You know what?
I’m
the one buggering off now, all right? Maybe you’ll understand what…’

Ruby’s move towards me had been so fast, I’d felt her hand crushing my throat before I’d seen her, as she’d slammed me against the damp wall. Ruby’s sharp nails had torn through my skin.

‘Darling Light,’ Ruby had whispered, tightening her hold on my neck. I’d struggled to breathe. ‘You do not possess me. No man does. I am not yours; I’ll never be anyone’s again. What I tell you, I tell you but what I hold to my heart is private to me alone. Do
you
understand this now, my naughty lover?’

My eyelids had fluttered. A stabbing pain had pierced my lungs. A dark mist had descended.

Being throttled’s really not my cup of tea
.

I’d struggled to nod just a fraction.

Ruby had held my gaze, as she’d smiled. ‘I allowed you to follow me. But I will not be led. Never again.’

Then I’d been lost in the cruel green of her peepers, whilst I’d slowly blacked out.

I pressed my ear to the rosewood doors, taking a single breath. This was it then.

When I flung open the doors, before I could bottle it, I was hit by a tidal wave of light and sound. ‘Blimey…’

Everything was chrome and white, like stepping into one of those rockets, which they’d been promising to land on the moon, ever since Kennedy and the space race alpha male jostling
my
Johnny’ s bigger than yours.

Territory, that’s what it’s about. Planting the flag and making sure the rest of the world’s enviously watching because they didn’t get there first. Ruby witnessed centuries of such imperial expansionism before it shrivelled. Everything withers eventually. And yeah, that’s morbid, but I’m dead, right?

You First lifers don’t see the beauty in this transcendent world around you but you’re still greedy for another to bugger up. Or maybe you were just desperate to prove you had the balls to do it.

Science marches on and it drags us all in its wake.

White and silver Moon lights hung in clusters of iridescent mother of pearl discs, like satellites to the humongous chandelier, which illuminated the room brighter than day. The black and white paintings made me dizzy, fragmenting and distorting the world, as if I was on something.

I hadn’t fed, however, since I’d tonned it down here on the Triton, with Ruby clutching tight around my waist and my neck still purple with bruises. Not feeding was a form of silent protest.

Ruby, however, hadn’t even noticed.

And then there was
him
: brown velvet jacket despite the heat, blush of eye shadow and smudge of eyeliner and a dark mop top – head-to-toe the uber-Mod.

This Beau Brummell dandy, dancing in the eye of the whirlwind, jumping and twisting – he
was
the whirlwind - belting out the lyrics at the top of his tone deaf voice.

He
was my new family?

Christ help me
.

Whichever bloody twin he was - Donovan or Aralt - lost in the throb of the music and the blood high, he didn’t see me.

I’d been invisible to Ruby the moment we’d roared into London, or at least that’s how it’d felt. I could still touch her body. But underneath? Ruby wasn’t with me anymore.

When the Mod swung over to a lounge chair, which was translucent white plastic, I noticed the First Lifer cowering in its angular frame; she was nothing but legs in her pop-art micro-mini. The Mod dragged her up into the dance and then jived around the chair with her, like she was a doll. Her petrified peepers were focused on him, with a shuddering intensity.

He liked to play with his food
,
this one
.

I could see now where the Mod had necked her, just under her daisy clip-ons and the stiffness of her limbs, as the paralysis set in. His fingers played up and down her bob, through her thick fringe, like she was a bloody guitar. Then he hurled her back into the lounge chair, before straddling her. Her little feet twitched, when he tore at her in overexcited mouthfuls.

All right then, so remember I said sometimes we come back wrong? But there’s no wrong, only different?

This
berk?
He was off his bloody nut
.

Just take it from me that you learn quickly the ones whose Souls got butchered in the cross-over.

Or who choose to slash and burn them after.

I have lines right, ones I don’t cross?

I didn’t reckon this one’s lines were blurred: he wouldn’t have had them to start with.

Then over his nut, I saw Ruby.

And when I did, I wished I’d stayed upstairs sulking.

Ruby swivelled round, enwombed in the scarlet folds of a chair, which was like a space vehicle opening. She was half-submerged under the naked body of a First Lifer.

Why did he have to be such a bleeding hunk
?

Were First Lifers bred differently now, or after the end of rations and this sudden rash of peacock preening, had the muscles evolved like that?

Ruby was writhing. Touching. Snogging… Like she did with me.
Only
me, I’d thought. She was feasting too; the poor sod was nothing but a paralysed puppet to her desire. He couldn’t have got a stiffy if he’d tried. It didn’t matter; I was still alight with jealousy.

A century of love and loyalty and it’d only taken one night in this place for Ruby to cuckold me?

That’s the thing with passion - it curdles when you lose control. Yet I was beginning to realise I’d never had any control to start with.

The twin threw himself off the skirt. Blood stained his mouth like lipstick - just one more touch to his costume - as he boogied to the far corner.

I slouched back against the door frame. Into the shadows. I’d lost my appetite. I still watched, however, when the Mod dragged up this young bloke, who was all polo shirt and tight jeans and had been trying to make himself as small as possible in a quaking ball, as if somehow he’d be forgotten about that way: you’re never forgotten in the heat of a hunt. Once we’ve got your scent –
bam
– you’re in our blood, gut and Soul: we couldn’t forget you if we tried. It’s an obsession. A bloody addiction.

Ruby once told me not to feel guilt about feeding because we’re designed like this. In the same way every animal has its adaptations.

It took you to help me see we have something animals don’t – a conscience.

Remember that? I’m still not sure I get what it means; I try and grasp it, but it slides through my fingers.

How long will you be with me to make sure I remember?

The Mod caught the bloke around the neck, pulling him into the dance. He wasn’t bitten yet; he was still alive and squirming. He was swung out onto the virulent orange rug - back and forth. The twin’s fangs pressed the skin at his neck. But didn’t quite break it.