I ran my hands carefully over the rug’s outline: one body fully drained, if you guzzled it all.
I pushed myself away, sickened and ashamed by my reaction.
You reckon you know me? Who I am. What I am. A killer?
But for many years now I’ve lived as something different. Even when I was new to Blood Life, I killed to live. It was survival. At least that’s what I reckoned. A quirk of evolution had elevated me above the moral quagmire.
But then I met someone, who changed me.
Still, it’s you First Lifers, who are obsessed with death. We need blood to live but First Lifers create fake baubles, which obsess on death for the sake of art, narrative or because it matches the décor. Death fascinates you. You spend your short lives dancing towards it - sod it, inviting it.
You shouldn’t be surprised there exist in the shadows those who are ready to welcome you.
That evening when I’d finished the chores, I settled in the sitting room in a brown Fjord relax chair, which was lopsided like a baseball glove, with my arms linked behind my nut, for a little kip.
I was just resting my eyes, when I felt someone watching me. I slowly opened my peepers.
You were standing over me, your ash blonde hair plastered to your nut. It was raining again then.
‘Comfortable?’
I wriggled my arse further down into the seat. ‘Yeah, not bad. It’s better than the rest of your tat.’
Your eyebrows rose. After a day running around after the Nazi of the Post-it world, which was now (and with exultant joy), torn into tiny pieces and tossed into the rubbish, it was a treat to see. ‘Tat?’
‘You can’t tell me you’ve ever actually sat on that tree trunk thingy?’ You chucked your tote against the fireplace – bang – something definitely broke that time. ‘And what’s with that… On the floor in your bedroom?’
‘Why were you in my bedroom?’
‘Why do you have a grisly murder as a rug?’
You frowned. ‘It’s art – Heartbreak.’
‘Right. Real romantic.’
‘It means--’
‘It means you First Lifers are nothing but blood bags. You’ll get no arguments from me. Who knows, maybe these bigwig artists of yours are Blood Lifers themselves? We’re everywhere you know: in business, the music scene, nightclubs, entertainment… The world’s 24/7 now. And that suits us just fine. If you reckon we’re only slaves, you’ve got it dead confused.’
You paled and turned away. ‘Where’s the chores list?’
I sprang up. I don’t know why I was so buggering close to having a strop. ‘Why? Checking up, are we?’
‘I just figure I can’t have set you enough to do on account of you having time to lounge around - on my tat…’
I blinked. ‘Now hold on a minute; you do realise daytime is upstairs to Bedfordshire time for Blood Lifers? Bit of credit here.’
You, however, only tiredly shook your nut.
All right, I’m a daft pillock.
There were longer and more detailed pink bloody Post-it notes after that. Also an increase in prescribed exercise to three hours a day.
I always make sure I look the good slave when you come back through the door now.
Wearing Marigolds, whilst on my knees and scrubbing is a look, which mollifies you.
This evening I’d been ordered to dust the dining room.
You were out. As always.
The dining room’s high-ceilinged, with a fireplace at one end, with low relief carving and inlaid coloured marble. Every wall - floor to ceiling - is frescoed, with a pastoral scene of gentle rivers, oak trees and rolling hills.
When I’d first scrutinized the fresco, which is original to the house, I’d discovered the black outline of stumpy tailed Manx hidden behind tufts of grass and snaking streams. I’d wondered whether you’d had them added. I’d traced each one, counting the technicolour bursts. A splendid parade of numbers. They’d risen to a crescendo, when I’d spied the last one behind a holly bush.
Every time I touch the orange sun, I’m astounded it doesn’t melt my skin. The joy is pure.
The last time I experienced such happiness in the sun I was a kid, under the weeping willow behind our Watford house.
I’d been teaching my sisters a trick of the light with silver halfcrowns. That was before mama had stumbled down the steps to tell us… Before everything had been lost for good. Childhood. The sun. My freedom.
And now it’s lost for well and good yet again.
In the dining room, however, surrounded by that fresco, I’m outside - even though I’m trapped inside.
When every day I sit cross-legged and stare at it, it’s as if I can feel the breeze. It flutters the leaves. I can smell the tangy grass. Hear the cold splash of the gently churning river, as the perch shift in shadowed patterns beneath the clear surface. I stare up at the indigo sky and the face of the sun - and I taste the freedom. In those moments, I fool myself at least.
It’s beautiful.
Then the front door bangs, and I startle, jumping back to my body again.
You’re home. And all I can taste is the ash of my captivity.
Tonight, when I traced the sun with the tips of my fingers, I couldn’t help my foolish grin. I tapped the first Manx I saw, which was sheltered underneath the arms of an oak. I avoided glancing out of the windows over Regent’s Park and the sea of the city, which I could no longer touch.
Instead, I dusted the sideboard in wide arcs. The sideboard was a patchwork of scrap timbre and salvaged planks polished to a brilliant shine.
You can appreciate the precious in the worthless when it comes to objects. Yet not the worth in a sentient being, when we fall short of your black and white morality.
Bloody hell, then we’re objectified. Just something else worthless to be transformed by the omnipotent Cain family (and their training process) into the newly precious.
You know, maybe I got it wrong. We are just like this poor sideboard.
I gave it a more rigorous rub with my fibre cloth.
The silence was getting to me more than usual.
Didn’t folks in the twenty-first century have entertainment blaring every minute of the day? You had the technology, but it sat there, like it was ornamental. I’d have found a way to use the internet to free myself - if I’d had anyone to contact on the outside. That’s the problem with not playing well with others: when you go missing, there’s no one to give a sod.
Backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards…
I could see the dust, like midges, rising before settling again.
There was a pile of well-thumbed books perched on the edge of the sideboard. I trailed my finger down their spines: Mistress and Slave Relations: The Beginner’s Handbook, Mistress and Slave: The Advanced Course, Protocol Handbook for Slaves…
I pulled my hand back, as if from the flames.
I guess you’d decided to do some swotting up. Life lived through academia, not raw in tooth and claw - bloody, thrilling and delicious.
Life’s not sanitised: the infantilised drip-feed of the Instagram generation, blended to the bland.
It’s dirty. Painful. And intoxicating.
The sensation of being trapped ballooned. The dining room warped.
I was a predator. I should be on the hunt.
Not defanged and playing house, whilst you bought me books on slave protocol.
I struggled to keep my hands from balling into fists, as I reluctantly worked further along the sideboard. To the item, which I feared most in the whole bloody apartment.
It hunkered at the end of the sideboard. A fruit bowl. Except there was no fruit in it, apart for one lone apple for artistic effect.
Nothing but display. The same as me.
Like a lump of shrapnel, the bowl was a deformed nightmare of limbs and weapons melded together from hundreds of toy soldiers: innocence and horror in a handy fruit bowl.
I shuddered as I fingered the contours of one melted soldier.
Only his head and right arm pushed up, as if from the fires of hell.
Boom, boom, boom… Trapped in a hole with Ruby during the Great War, under the rotting corpses. The bright lights searing my peepers. The guns so loud my eardrums bled…
My chest was suddenly tight. I was breathing too rapidly; I couldn’t get in the air. The disabled soldiers wept out of the bowl’s wounds, hopping one-leggedly from its sides and then determinedly across the sideboard’s shining surface towards me in a grotesque parade.
‘Go away! Go away! Go away!’ I howled, as I slid down into the shadow of the sideboard. I huddled close to the wall, with my knees to my chest. I screwed my peepers shut. But I could still hear them… Clack, clack, clack… ‘You’re not real,’ I whimpered. ‘Not real…not real…not…’ I didn’t dare take a shufti. I clutched onto the wall behind me.
With a roar, I threw myself up, swiping everything off the sideboard. Blinded in my panic, I couldn’t see the damage. But I heard the smashes, bangs and clangs.
Facing my fear, I jumped up and down – stomp, stomp, stomp – I could feel the crunch of plastic under my feet.
At last, my breathing calmer, I wiped my arm over my mush. The sweet gangrene aroma had died away. I couldn’t hear the boom of the guns.
I could see, however, the fruit bowl smashed into tiny sodding pieces; hero that I am, I’d killed the little bastards. The apple was ground into pulp; the Mistress and slave books were sticky in the juices.
Bugger it, I was going to cop it.
That’s when the true panic set in. I don’t remember everything. All I know is, my body was set for escape.
I made it to the front door, wrenching at it. But you must’ve had it reinforced because there was no movement. Not a sodding thing.
I booted the door, until my leg ached.
My blood was up now. I was no longer weak from the starvation, which had dogged me since my capture. Predator energy sizzled in fury at becoming the prey.
I snatched an ugly monochrome vase from the sitting room’s fireplace and hurled it against a bay window. The vase smashed, but the window behind the blind didn’t even tremble.
Reinforced glass too then.
In 1964 I got this blinding Triton. On times like this, I’d take her out and tonne it down the motorway - a crimson ghost in the dark. That’d settle me.
But locked inside this silent apartment..?
I lobbed the Fjord chair over on its side, which was heavy, so…satisfying. Next went the soft blue Sponge chair, which was wrinkled, like an elephant’s hide, before I overturned the glass coffee table with a dull crash.
When I stood there in the middle of the destruction, which I’d wrought, I was shot through with sudden terror. But then as I spun on the spot and had a better gander at the devastation, I was filled with squirming pride too.
The place was trashed. I was back.
Unfortunately, that’s when I heard the key in the lock, because so were you.
You took one look at me standing frozen in the remains of your sitting room – and thank Christ you’d yet to discover your dining room – turned once on the spot, as if somehow you could’ve come into the wrong apartment and then trudged into the kitchen. ‘Just…go to bed,’ you muttered, without glancing round at me.
I didn’t need to be told twice.
So now I’m sitting here, writing this and hoping you’ll understand why…
Look, I haven’t caught a wink tonight, and the eerie glow from the ivy is already dimming. I guess I could’ve simply said sorry. But that’s not my style.
Are you sorry for enslaving me?
All right, I want to…
Yeah, sorry.
MAY 15
Stupid git, aren’t I? Because I guess ‘sorry’ doesn’t cut the mustard.
I stumbled out of my cell this morning, after only a few hours’ shut eye, at your call. You were standing in the centre of the sitting room, like an owner poised to shove a puppy’s nose in its naughty accident.
Anxiously, I twisted at my slave ring. ‘Look, can I just say--’
‘Naw, don’t think so. What the frig were you thinking?’
I shrugged.
You pointed at me. ‘You’re clearing this up.’
‘I didn’t doubt it.’
You clutched my arm with surprising strength and marched me into the dining room. I’d forgotten you hadn’t discovered this nice little surprise last night.
We both stared down at the shattered remains of the soldiers. At the books with their split spines.
I wondered which of us would break first.
‘You do get that was, like, an original?’ That’d be you then... ‘It was wicked valuable.’
I remembered the mutilated soldiers crawling along the sideboard. Then as they’d swarmed down my neck, before covering my entire body, until I was nothing but a plastic soldier too. ‘What’s money?’
This time - to my surprise - you tried unsuccessfully to smother a grin.
I reckon the bird trapped in those snaps on your bedroom wall isn’t totally dead.
I glanced around, with a shrug. ‘Anything else you want me to..?’
‘Naw,’ you snatched my arm again, dragging me until my back was pressed against the fresco, as if out of harm’s way. ‘So you witnessed the wars against that guy…Philip II, huh?’
‘What? I’m not that old.’
‘But I thought..?’
‘The Great War. 1914, yeah?’
‘Why were you even..? What did our war have to do with you on account of you being a Blood Lifer?’ For the first time, your shoulders had relaxed, as you leant next to me. Intrigued, you watched me, as if we were simply two mates having a chinwag.
It was…nice.
‘Too bloody right. All that First Lifer mechanized slaughter? You reckon we gave two figs which side could massacre more of the other? But me and my Author, we got trapped for weeks, caught between both lines. We were going barmy with it. The boom of the guns…screams...lights…stink…’ I shook my nut, battling to clutch onto the present. ‘War’s not a toy…or a sodding fruit bowl.’ It was times like these I missed my ciggies: I needed something to do with my hands. I bit at my thumbnail. ‘Bloody stupid First Lifers.’
And just like that, our moment was over.
You booted at the banks of paper leafs. ‘These books? A whole notha matter to the bowl. My sis loaned them. And she’s gonna…’
Sister?
I’d heard whispers of an older Cain daughter, whilst I’d languished at Abona. With blinding clarity, I realised who the she was, who’d been giving you instructions on slave management.
I was buggered.
False bravado, however, seemed my best bet.
I slouched further against the wall. ‘What..? Box my ears?’
‘For starters.’
I straightened up. ‘Tell her the worm has turned.’
When you straightened too, you slipped your manicured fingers into the pocket of your flared shirtdress. ‘Thing is…all this…it’s only…things. But what I wanna know is why you tried to get out?’
When had you started caring about my motives? Or admitting you read this journal? Usually you pretended like I came with an instruction manual, rather than emotions.
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I get that. I do. But you tried to escape, like, for real.’
Frustrated, I pushed closer. ‘Look, you daft bint, if I hadn’t been so bloody starved, I’d have tried it long before now. The first chance I got.’
That’s when you pulled something out of your pocket, holding it up in front of me: a small touchscreen device, with a black Manx logo.
Shooting, spearing, white-hot agony. Lava snaking down my spine and then in sparking rivers down every nerve in my body. Paralysing. No escape, only suffering and enduring, as Schumann played in wild, hallucinogenic carnival.
The memory of all that was held within the one innocuous looking device, which you were now pointing right
at me.
Why had I been stupid enough to reckon sorry would be enough?
I fell to my face at your feet in submission. ‘Please…’
Horrified, you reached out your hand, as if to pet me but then curled your fingers closed. ‘I don’t..? It’s only your tracker. Light..? I just wanted to remind you that we always know where you are. That’s all. What’s..? You’d be soft to risk anything with how my daddy feels about his property. Plus I reckon you should know there are hidden cameras in each room.’ Even in my fear, I understood now how you’d known about my unsuccessful escape attempt. Once more, my world narrowed. ‘Our Retrieval Crew’’ll come get you in less than an hour, if I touch this button…’
I flinched, waiting for the pain.
As if shocked at my response, you stuffed the tracker back into your pocket. ‘What the frig?’
You didn’t know. You didn’t sodding know.
I could feel the manic laughter bubbling inside again but I held myself still. A fury was building. The owner’s daughter - rich on blood money - training to join the Management…
Yet you didn’t have a bloody clue.
Had you ever dirtied your lily-white hands?
You lowered yourself to your knees, before grasping my chin. ‘Tell me.’ When I simply stared at you, your mug hardened. ‘I don’t care about the… But you’ve gotta be honest with me. That’s non-negotiable - honesty.’
Alright, sweetheart, so that’s what you want? Because there’s a cost. To know what I am, underneath the labels. To see the Blood Lifer beneath the skin. You’re not ready yet to hear who your family are beneath their skin. Not without me being the one who pays for it.
I’ll tell you about the blood then, before my fifty years of abstention. That’ll give you an intensive course in honesty.
I won’t tell you about the woman, who blazed through me, until her death because you don’t deserve to know.
I’ll write about the other one - the Blood Lifer. The wonderful whirlwind of Elizabethan blood and death.
Ruby.
She’s snuffed it now, so you lot can’t get your mitts on her. But her and me?
Blood Shackles (Rebel Vampires Book 2) Page 4