Akim Postoyko, the other resident of the flat Trix and I shared, had parents from Pakistan but had been born in Toronto Canada before moving to England. He had lived in Central all his life so therefore his accent was a typical London one. It got on my nerves when he played up the cockney aspect, like Danny Dyer on speed. He also had an oddly spiced scent, it wasn’t unpleasant just different.
He leant against the doorframe as I clutched the banisters and walked up the flight of stairs.
“How many pints did you pull Taylor?” Akim asked in his most flirtatious voice.
“Just a smidge. Fucking wore off by the time I got home.” I replied simply. He smirked and leant back, putting his hand over his mouth to magnify his voice.
“Get me any?” Akim asked. I rolled my eyes.
“Stop panting like a puppy, it’s not a good look for you.” I snapped.
He chuckled and shrugged before leaning forward from the wood and walking with me to the living room.
“I’m beginning to think it’s love,” Akim said, trailing his hands over my shoulders.
“Tongue in your head…and mop your drool off the floor,” I said with a smile. I walked into the living room and knelt on the floor. Trix sat cross-legged, against the brick fireplace that hadn’t been used in years. The furniture pointed at the television that we never watched unless we were coming down and the sofas we never sat on surrounded us. Akim and I sat on the floor, on the opposite side to Trix. I reached forward and picked up the bag of blood the daemon had provided.
I could feel the cool liquid through the plastic. It called to me.
Trix took off her belt in a fluid movement and secured it around her elbow using her teeth. Akim took the bag and balanced it on his hand.
“I don’t know how you can fucking drink that stuff,” Trix murmured as she grabbed the needle and prepped herself by slapping her arm for a vein. Beatrix was an ex-junkie. I swallowed the lump in my throat—thinking about what she could have been injecting. Not that daemon blood was harmless, it wasn’t but blackened skin…heroin… was…worse.
“I have to drink it,” I told her.
“I know,” she said, rolling her eyes as she looked at her arm intently. “But it makes you less human every time you do, it makes you a biter.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Akim argued. “Does injecting anything in your body make you human?” he argued without looking at me as my face flushed. “She can eat it if she wants—and I’ll eat it if I want.”
“Lasts longer if you inject,” Trix said in a singsong voice before sinking the needle into her arm and moaning gently. We watched her, the ritual. She’d inject, curl into a ball, before flying into the dosing frenzy.
“That’s a lie,” Akim argued. Akim and I poured our share in silent and drain the blood, our teeth stained red. I got up and threw the discarded clear plastic bag into the bin. It dropped from my hands limp and lifeless.
“Not going to fight us?” Akim asked, his voice took on such bell-like qualities. We’d often punch each other until we bled and watch the wounds knit back together.
“No,” I replied; my voice was like wind chimes. I walked slowly to my bedroom and shut the door. I grabbed my pencil from the side and stabbed it through my hand, I looked at the wound and the small ring of grey around it from the lead.
I used my blood to draw the only thing I could remember when I drank daemon blood—I drew Henry, over and over. My skin healed and the wound closed. I opened it again and again but I didn’t feel it. The only thing I felt was the buzz I got from drawing Henry’s round doe-like pale blue eyes. The only time I could remember him so vividly was when I dosed.
I looked around at my empty room, a futon in the middle, dirty sheets, and thousands of loose-leaf pages tacked to my walls.
Henry Blaire’s face and nothing else.
The blood was mundane but the quantity allowed us the buzz that we craved. The closer the lineage to a pureblood, the more potent the blood. A pureblood was a monster that looked human but never had been one. I had met a Pureblood for only a second and it had chilled me to the core. Akim had a book that his father had given him, his family had been bleeding for generations. It merely stated that a Pureblood was hard to come by, that they were the closest things to nightmares that anyone had ever seen.
Normal daemons were almost indestructible but a Pureblood could never die, not even by shooting it in the head or removing the head altogether.
My hand moved frantically across the page, I couldn’t control it. I didn’t need to eat and I didn’t need to sleep, my eyes moved so rapidly everything seemed to ghost and meld into itself. The colours, the red sketches, rough-edged lines collected together to form Henry’s face. I spurred myself into a frenzy as I held my bloody hands up to my face and licked the red liquid.
How hard is it to say goodbye?
He could have said anything—he could have told me that he was leaving, why he was leaving. Was I not good enough for him? If you don’t have a chance to say goodbye…It’s as troublesome as mourning death. I concluded. It was as if he had died…like I died.
Without the ability to dream—life continued, there is no break, the tiredness was always there. Not from lack of sleep but merely because of lack of an end. There was no climax. Daemon blood meant I didn’t sleep, ergo if I didn’t sleep then I didn’t dream of my sister. Somehow, no matter how much I cursed my numb state I still hid from humanity because the pain scared me.
Life scared me. Death, the great unknown, the relief and the parting of life, that silly climax that I feared so much seemed to disappear over the horizon with every fix.
I was powerful when I dosed.
But why did I continue to do the same old shit when if I dosed I couldn’t eat and sleep for three days. I pushed myself off the floor and was by the door in the blink of an eye, the pages on my walls ruffled with my speed. I smirked to myself.
Walking down the hallway, holding onto both walls with my arms stretched wide, I stroked my fingers across the yellowing paint that was once an ivory white.
I heard Akim and Trix talking in the kitchen, it was quite interesting in itself because they didn’t like each other much, but still were ‘friends’… sacrifices for odd activities I’d venture.
“I’m sick of doing fucking…topped up humans,” I heard Trix exclaim. I leant against the wall and listened. I knew that they would hear me—dosing enhanced the senses, but they would probably only notice me if they were inclined to. Topped up humans, the most derogatory term for a daemon—a non-Elite. A normal daemon.
“Right,” Akim snorted. “An Elite, Trix? You want an Elite?”
“What I want is a Pureblood,” she said without emotion.
“And I want to see your organs in my hands,” I said in the most blasé voice I could muster, “which one it more realistic?”
“Come on, we could take more blood—even from the topped-up humans. Why do we keep doing the small time?” Trix moaned. “I swear; we could make tons of money—now we are doing it to satisfy our needs if we got more we would never have to work again.”
“We don’t work anyway,” I reminded her. “It doesn’t matter to me. I’d drain every one of the life-sucking leeches. All they ever do is take everything.”
“Hear, hear.” Trix agreed.
Akim put his hands up as if he was halting traffic. “You know I don’t do this because of hatred of daemons like you two. But I say that this is enough.”
“It’s fucking small time. Before you came along, Taylor and me were bleeding almost every day,” Beatrix said proudly.
I cocked my eyebrow and smirked at her. When I caught her eye, she rolled her eyes at me as if to say that I shouldn’t expect any more compliments.
“You were foolish,” Akim snorted.
“Then why did you join us?” I queried. Akim blinked a few times as if I had stunned him.
He cleared his throat. “You two bleeding every day was probably why all the daemons moved on from
central London.” He licked his lips, “I swear, any place that falls under the congestion charge doesn’t have a daemon in that area for fear of you two.”
“We’re fucking infamous,” Trix declared proudly. “Besides the police should love us, every time we moved to an area the murder and death rates went right down.”
“I gave you the information,” Akim reminded us. “I gave you my family’s journals, we were bleeding for generations and no one ever became suspicious. I even gave you the recipe for the secret tranquilizer for those pellets you use—no daemons ever became suspicious…” he corrected. “Now, daemons know. Or they know something is coming after them.”
“So, what does it matter if the biters know?” Trix laughed.
“Slow down Buffy,” I laughed. Akim looked at us both in disbelief.
“I swear—both of you,” his slight Asian accent that he gained from his parents came through as his irritation rose. “If you bled every day, then eventually the source will run dry.” Akim shook his head, “as well as the fact that corpses would keep popping up.”
“He’s got a point, Trix,” I agreed. “A daemon that’s bled dry leaves a locked-in corpse. I know we can’t stop but heck, we got enough money from the black market trading we did back in the day.” I winked. “How much more money could you possibly need?”
“It’s not the money,” Trix said quietly, she twiddled an artificially coloured purple lock of hair around her finger. “I want to do more; I want to see how much my body can take to... get the best hit.”
“Hence the nonsense involving the monsters—the purebloods!” Akim snorted. I shrugged.
“Besides—,” Akim said pointing to me. “We can’t leave locked in corpses because you’re still on police records.”
“Not for any crimes,” I reminded them both.
The reason I was not behind bars for the murders I committed—regardless of who did what—was because the police believed that Henry Blaire was completely responsible. He had a strange record with the police; who believed that it was his father on the file because Henry was too young to have gone on record in the sixties.
Apparently, he had told some doctors that he was a monster, they thought he was insane. They believed that my Henry was the son of said mentally unstable ‘daemon from the sixties’. When I told the police, I had no idea what was happening, somehow it became about my strange new boyfriend whom I had only known a few weeks thinking that if he killed the two people involved in my sister’s death then I would love him.
They got part of the story correct, but at that time it hurt too much. I couldn’t argue with anything because I couldn’t speak. I shut down. I saw nothing, felt nothing. I was nothing. I came to believe that I would gradually get smaller and more insignificant until I would eventually become a dot. Another of my greatest fears, apart from dying.
Henry, as the file said, convinced himself that he needed to kill these men. Henry Blaire hadn’t been seen since.
I tried to search for Henry Blaire, Andrew Eaton, or Mr. Lavender…the various names that I had heard him use but nothing came from it. The cheque that I received went into a savings account, along with the money I received after I sold the house I used to live in.
The account was from the Cayman Islands—Mr. Henry Blaire, but apparently, the bank said that he set up the account recently for his wife. I bit my life as I remembered this, staring into the faces of my friends in my gritty living room. I blinked a few times as I came back to reality.
“You’re never going to share that story, are you?” Akim asked sadly.
“If you stop trying to fuck me because I’ve had my secret garden invaded by the undead—then maybe I would be more inclined to share my secrets.” I snapped, “seriously Akim. You talk about Trix and I having issues with the way we think about daemons. They are fucking takers! Biters! They are parasites, but you—,” I jabbed a finger in his direction. “Just want to fuck one,” I hissed. “You want to fuck an incubus or succubus; you think that fucking me will bring you closer.”
My legs moved on their own accord and with unnatural speed, I was in his face. Akim appeared to be boiling over, his mocha complexion darkened and flushed. I had had enough of Akim, he pushed his holier than thou logic on us.
Beatrix and I knew we had an addiction. We knew that we were obsessed with D+ blood but Akim…he was addicted sure…but he was so obsessed with his cock. I placed my hands against his chest and walked him to the wall until his back pressed upon it, it was like leading a tango but there was no music. His lips pulled into a thin line.
“Come on Taylor—you’re my friend…” he smirked. “Who I want to fuck…admittedly, but I won’t take your bullshit when you’re dosed, you’re so hostile.”
With the hands against his chest, I could feel his ribs as I pressed down harder. He winced and I heard a snap. I kept my hands in place, wedging him between the wall and my body. I heard another snap and blood blossomed on his shirt. He cried out in pain but it was orgasmic. We were different people when we dosed and bled.
“You like that,” I asked gently. I pressed harder and he screamed.
“Stop please!” he begged.
I released him and he fell to the ground, whimpering. I hadn’t realised that I had suspended him in the air until I let him go. I turned on my heel and walked to the doorway, my movements a blur.
“If you didn’t like that…then stop trying to fuck a biter,” I snarled before going back to my room to purge my stomach.
I heard a laugh behind my closed door.
I opened the door with a bang, ready to confront my roommates, but as I looked out into the hallway I knew it wasn’t them. My Asian roommate was bent over wheezing, clucking his chest, he ripped open the buttons and pushed one of the ribs back through his skin, luckily he had dosed, and it healed in front of my very eyes. Trix was nowhere to be seen and I couldn’t place the laughing. It was a mixture of my own voice, and a deep melodic one.
“Can you guys hear that?” I asked my fellow bleeders. Akim looked at me like I was insane.
“Laughing? Yes? No?” I asked again urgently.
“Fuck off, Taylor.” Akim leant against the wall to catch his breath.
I nodded and turned slowly back to my room. Behind my roommate, in the hallway, stood Henry Blaire and my sister. It wasn’t my own laughter; it had been hers. Henry put his finger to his lips and when I blinked they were gone. I rubbed my hands over my eyes, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. My voice died before I even spoke.
When I shut the door to my bedroom, I quickly realised I wouldn’t be able to sleep for the next three days because of the amount of blood I consumed. Scrolling through my phone, I saw a voicemail. It was Chris Archer—He’d found me.
“Fia…Sophia… I miss you…I haven’t seen you in so long. I don’t know why but you disappeared—you fucking disappeared off the face of the planet. You just quit your job, just like that, you left us all in the lurch; I know you weren’t the same after Mel…you know…” he sighed into the phone and his breath caught on the speaker. “One year, it’s already been a year; I thought you were moving on, but…maybe you just needed to get away. You’ve been my best friend for ten years—I wanted to ask you a favour. It’s nothing big, well, it’s nothing bad anyway. You have my number now. Call me…Please.”
I placed my phone on the bedside cabinet. My heart ringing in my ears, and my face was warm even though ice ran through my veins. I had pins and needles, lacerating my fingers and toes.
It could have been Henry on the phone. Heaven forbid, I had just seen him, heard him. I placed my hand on my chest and let my lungs rise and fall with each breath. I couldn’t calm myself. You’re an idiot, Sophia Taylor, waiting for someone fickle and immortal. I didn’t realise I had spoken aloud but it didn’t matter.
I was embarrassed, alone in a room with my hands pressed to my cheeks. Every picture made me cringe when I realised that although Henry left me, for whatever reason, I would be wil
ling to jump into his arms the second he came back. That scared me.
I hated him, I hated the fact that right at that moment when I told myself I hated him, he could be making some other girl see stars and convincing her she had found her soul’s counterpart.
Maybe he and William had a scam going.
“Eat the fruit, and you will surely die.”
But I was alive. Even if the only way I could function was to pump someone else’s blood into my veins, I was alive. Numb…but…not dead. Not yet.
I hated him for making me feel. I also loved him, needed him, wanted him with reckless abandon more than I was willing to admit to myself. I told myself I hated him, all daemons, it was only when I said I hated him that I could hold myself together. Stop myself sliding between the chasm of nothingness and hysteria.
I hated Henry Blaire because I didn’t understand him. But I loved him for that same fact and I hated it. I hated that it was so hard and that he could hurt me so much.
I twisted my hands in front of me. They were pristine despite the fact I had been digging a pencil right through the palm just an hour ago. I turned my hand over and held it up in the silvery moonlight, appraising it as if it wasn’t my own.
My hands belonged to a murderer. Maylett and Parr killed my sister and I had killed them. It didn’t solve anything—it was pointless, I was going to hell for something pointless.
What would I do about Chris Archer? He had said something about a favour. Nothing bad? Just something big? I knew that despite the fact it was past midnight, he would probably be up. I hit the dial button and waited.
“Hello?” his voice rasped after the third ring, it sounded like he had been asleep.
I hung up and threw the phone across the room. I was a coward. It was a miracle my screen hadn’t cracked.
I couldn’t make a connection between the person I was now, and the person I was then. I even looked different; my violet eyes were cynical and hardened, rather than open and vulnerable as they were when I met Henry. My hair was shinier, longer, hanging below my waist—inside I was ugly but daemon blood had made me beautiful.
Daemons of London Boxset (Books 1-3) The Bleeders, The Human Herders, The Purebloods Page 18