Was that another smile? Your blue eyes were wide.
“Your hair was…” How could I go on, when I could see the dandelion fluff puffed over the pillow beside me? “…bloody gorgeous. Just growing long again. It’d tickle me when you did that thing you liked to…” It didn’t feel right going into details. Not if you weren’t with me. Not truly with me. Christ, I ached for you. “Well, yeah, that thing you love. Of course, there was the danger and the thrill. You told me I was a junkie for it. You were right. There’s nothing like the hunt and also nothing like being the prey. I grew out of it or maybe I did.” I looked down.
You were whining again. Your gaze was unsteady.
“It was a rush. What they’d do if they ever… It heightened those moonlit shags. Ranks them in our top ever, and we’re, well, thoroughbreds, at least in that department. But you know what I never told you? It was the moments after, when we were naked, yet in no hurry to dress, when I’d share the night and the beauty of the stars with you, whilst you’d share the day and the sun with me, all those details of your life that I couldn’t live with you, which I loved the most. Did you ever get how sodding jealous I was of every daylight hour? You’d say how tasty the blackberries were, or how yellow the spikes of the Bog Asphodel. Or you’d tell me about the flutter of the Green Harstreak butterflies, the bark of frogs, or whirr of Red Grouse over the heather. You brought a world to life that I’d died to. Day and night united, darling, that’s us.”
I grinned, but you snatched your hand away from me with a deep growl.
You were lost in the darkness again, and I was lost to you.
You didn’t know who I was; I frightened you, some kid in a studded leather jacket murmuring about day and night.
Just leave out the poetry? Well, all right then.
3
Sometimes Blood Lifers come back wrong.
We never talk about it, as if pretending it doesn’t happen makes the nasties of the world puff in a cloud of smoke. But it does, all right?
During the Cuban Revolution, I had a run in with this one Blood Lifer, who didn’t like me much on his territory. He drained a dozen First Lifers a night but he was mad because after…? He washed, not only his hands but also his whole body, head-to-toe — scrub, scrub, scrub — with these stiff wire brushes and bleach, until he scraped the skin from his muscles. But then he killed and washed and healed and killed and…
See what I’m fixing at? Mad.
Blessing for him really when I staked the poor sod.
Disappointing bollocks vampire myth two: we can be staked.
In this particular Blood Lifer’s case, I shanked him. Anything pointy, however, does the trick. Wood doesn’t figure: sword, knife, spoon (if you’re twisted), it just has to stop the heart.
Everything comes down to the heart. It always does.
Here’s the thing, this bloke was always tooled up, apart from when he was naked in the bath washing away his bloody sins: that’s what gave me my chance to kill him, before he indulged in all the nasties, which he spent his nights bragging around town he intended to visit on me.
It’s kill or be killed in this world.
There used to be this Order of Electors, who made sure that no one came back addled. You’d be executed, if you failed their tests, which were doggy jumps through bloody hoops to prove that you weren’t crazy. Ruby told me about them. I reckon that she had to go through those trials back in the day.
But now…? They’re long gone.
So, we come back any old how. Then we whisper behind closed doors about whether a fragment of Soul’s been screwed up in the transmutation, or the wiring’s simply different, as if in some buggered up universe, we’re experts in mental health. But know what I reckon? The problem was already there, deep inside that person’s Soul in the dark places that folks don’t talk about. The hidden demons, to which we don’t admit.
Blood Life simply lets them come out and play.
The thing is, we’re not big on self-control. It’s not like we give in-depth interviews or move in together for a year first, in case things don’t work out, before we choose who we’re going to elect.
We go on heart and gut alone, you know? A few months of stalking, or nowadays maybe throw in a search engine or two. There’s no psychological screening.
Not even a pop quiz.
Psychopaths? Sociopaths? The mentally unstable? That worm was already eating the apple from the inside out, but the Author only saw the fruit’s glossy red surface, until after they’d gorged. Every emotion amplified, remember? The bad right along with the good. Even love curdles into obsession.
All right then, here’s a thought: maybe none of us come back right. Maybe I didn’t, but then maybe there’s no such thing as right. Who gets to judge?
It’s you First Lifers who divide and categorize. Abnormal, normal. Sane, insane. Gay, straight. The in-crowd and the out. Good and bloody bad…
So many labels that I can’t keep them sticky in my mind. Even when you shade to gray, you call things spectrums: rainbow arcs that everyone’s to be charted on. Sharp pins along a curve to mark our bleeding place.
The Lost? So, there’s something wrong with us, but there’s nothing wrong with that because I slashed the chart up to confetti, fluttering pieces like paper snowflakes, until no one pattern’s the same. And there’s nothing so pure as snow.
What First Lifer can see the snowflake patterns and not the black and white divides or the rainbow?
You could. And you loved me because of it…eventually.
Yeah, maybe I did come back wrong but buggered if I’d go back to how I was; I prefer the pretty patterns in my brain.
I’ve lived a rebel and I’ll die a rebel.
Your snowy hair laced eerie beauty across my fingers, as I lay with you in the cold of dawn. The sun peeped around the blind, searing brands to mark me.
You were stroking your ivory silk scarf again — that sexy little thing as I call it — up and down. It was as if the sensory touch of it could snap you back to me and wake you up to yourself. I’d sprayed it with Chanel No. 5 and now your scent clouded the air at each caress.
I breathed in deeply…breathed you in…bloody well wanted to devour you.
My Kathy.
But you weren’t here this morning. Where’d you gone to? A point back in your timeline with me or when you were some kid and I was...? All right, the same as I am now, of course. Different coat though.
You’d have bleeding loved my coat.
You were so still this morning, corpse-like (and I should know). Your eyes were wide open but there was no response in them. Not a glimmer.
If you were truly dead — not Blood Life and not this living death — but six feet under, worm-food dead, I’d understand, grieve, and move into the blackness, which hovers on the horizon. This twilight, however, where the body lives on but the mind…? It’s like you’re being sucked into an oblivion that obliterates everything you are.
I won’t sodding well let that happen.
So, I reminded you, in the only way left to me, when I was a stranger in your eyes.
“How about some music, love?” I slipped off the bed, dragging my vinyl collection out from underneath it.
I flicked through the jackets: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Marty Wilde, Eddie Cochrane, Chuck Berry, The Animals, Them and Billy Fury and THE FOUR JAYS: now that’s my man.
I bowed “The Sound of Fury” open, holding it against my chest and letting the LP slip first out of its inner sleeve and then slide between my fingers. You never appreciated the first wave of rock ‘n’ roll pioneers. Instead, you developed a taste for the wild electric magic of Hendrix and the later anarchy of The Sex Pistols. But this song? It brought back memories of 1968.
The year that we met and the first time we danced.
The Dansette record player was out of shape, but when I placed the needle down midway, it still played. “Since You’ve Been Gone” crackled to life. As soon as the first bluesy piano chord
s riffed, shivers trembled through me the same as always.
When the raw voice started up with its ravenous caged passion and the hunger under the surface, the same one that we’d listened to at night under the covers and swayed to in this house when you’d been young but not innocent, I was suddenly back there… I never wanted to surface from the memory of my arms tight around you, whilst your fingers curled in mine… Then the fast, slapped bass kicked in, igniting the song bam.
I strutted towards you, grasping your hand and swinging it in time to the rhythm.
Still not a flicker. But maybe deep under the layers, beneath the crust and the magma in that red-hot core, you knew.
Something stirred and all of a sudden, you did. Your fingers twitched and then clutched mine.
Bloody hell, I could’ve burst and never stopped dancing.
I laughed. “Now you’re getting it.” A spark in your eyes, before your brow furrowed. Then your back jerked. “All right, darling, don’t get too excited.” Now your entire body, however, was thrashing in a paroxysm. I couldn’t tear away my hand without hurting you. Your nails dug in; blood dripped onto the covers, staining them in fat blossoming drops. The core was now awakened, exploding in fiery volcano. “It’s me…it’s only… I’m not going to…”
Then you screamed in high-pitched terror — your eyes were wide with it — as you let go of me to claw at them like you wanted to put them out.
I trapped your bird-like body under me.
Christ, what were the carers going to write in their paperwork, when they saw the bruises?
“You’re all right. You’re safe,” I murmured.
But you weren’t seeing me. When did you now?
You were hallucinating some past horror and thanks to sodding me, you had more real horrors in that beautiful mind of yours than most. You were weeping, quivering like a cornered animal.
Then you said, clear as day, “Ruby.” I stared down at you, pretending — wishing — that I hadn’t heard. Those lies we tell ourselves, right? Because I was a wanker. I’d conjured up that nasty with my own selfish wander down memory lane. When I’d been trying to remind you of love, I’d invited in the devil, instead. “Ruby,” you repeated and then screeched, over and over, “Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby…”
JULY 1866 LONDON DOCKS
“It has been many weeks, my darling Light, and you have grown weak.” Ruby drew me further down the London Docks, by the low lodging houses, lusheries and bordellos, through streets swarming with laborers, sack-makers and all the poor, who clung onto the stinking river, which swept away both the City’s filth and delivered up the world’s riches.
I was shaking but I struggled hard to hide it.
Ruby’s red hair swung loose like a bawd. She dressed, however, as if she was a queen, although not one that our Victorian age had ever seen. She floated above humanity in her own world, where she was without question sovereign.
Here’s the thing, Blood Lifers don’t follow trends. When you live as long as us, it’d be a waste of our second life. Instead we choose our favorite and we stick (at least for a century or so), until something new comes along, which takes our fancy. Then we add it in, eclectic-like.
Life is all dressing up, isn’t it, the whole bloody thing?
The women don’t go in for makeup because they don’t need it; night lighting’s not exactly harsh on the skin, and the blood gives us a glow. Ruby shone brighter than anyone I’d ever laid eyes on.
Ruby was still a mystery to me, however, because all she’d told me, since she’d elected me into Blood Life, was that she’d been Authored in the reign of Elizabeth the First, which made her one of the powerful Long-liveds. There was something about the crimson silk of her dress and the way she moved, as if she was an aristocrat and I was a servant on her Estate, which whispered of the world she’d died to.
“Dearest prince, if you do not eat, you will not live,” Ruby insisted.
I shrugged. “Then I won’t live.”
The back of my head banged against the sail maker’s window. Ruby’s long-nailed fingers were hard against my chest, crushing me, as she twisted the choker at my neck until it bit.
The tar from the lines stank. I couldn’t control it, these new nocturnal senses: seeing in the dark, smelling the stench, hearing the cacophony of sailors’ shanties, goats bleating from some ship’s hold in the basin, a rope splashing in the water and the feel…like my skin was being grated down to the eyeballs. It was as if I’d been surrounded by a bubble, which had separated me from the real world, and now everything was touching me for the first time and all at once.
“You will live. You will obey me. And you will feast most heartily.” Ruby’s lips were close to mine; I couldn’t move. Ruby stroked my cheek with a tenderness that I’d never experienced in my First Life.
I remembered waking only a couple of hours before, tumbling naked with Ruby and without a word, making love; Ruby had done things to me, which I’d never known had even been possible.
When Ruby released the pressure on my chest, I gulped for air. “I can’t do this.”
“I am your Author, muse, and liberator. Put away First Lifer thoughts; death is a human companion. We are simply the agents, no different to smallpox or a tempest. God created those too, did he not?”
Ruby nibbled my lower lip; her bite was hard enough to draw blood. When she pulled back, she stroked the hair out of my eyes in careful, molding motions.
“God created us?”
Ruby smiled. It was child-like, yet ancient at the same time. “In that he created the world, and we’re of it. Should a wolf be begrudged its hunt or its kill because it too has to feed? There’s no sin in your new blood hunger; it’s as natural as the moon.” Ruby tipped my chin back, and we stared up together at the bloated satellite, which was suspended in the fug of black. Blood. The word had triggered clawing pangs, which hollowed me, until I was driven half crazed with pain. “Let us play a little game.”
Raising her eyebrow, Ruby pointed out into the bustling street at a satin-waistcoated mate, who was clasping an exotic bird that was trapped inside a cage. He was scrutinizing a shop window, which was stocked with bright brass sextants and mariners’ compasses: he must be about to set off on one of those huge ships. Soon he’d be swept far away from these stinking shores. Just like I’d always dreamed of, when I’d watched the ships sailing up and down the Thames. In one bite I could end his journey…forever.
I knew exactly why Ruby had chosen him.
Bugger this.
But still…I could smell the bloke’s blood from here, all their blood and its pulsating heat: he looked like a sodding feast.
I breathed deeply as I shook my head. I wasn’t yet ready: for what I was or what I could no longer be.
“That one?” Ruby whispered close in my ear as she singled out a sailor, who despite the heat, had a large fur cap pulled low.
There was something off about the sailor’s aroma, however, like it’d curdled. He was glancing at a covey of whores, who were already worn out with grinding the lads for pennies. I could taste the bitter scent of his clap even at that distance
I shook my head hurriedly again.
Next was a smart custom-house officer in brass-buttoned jacket, who was shoving his way through the crowd, whilst his piggy eyes sparked with contempt.
“Come now,” Ruby nuzzled down my cheek, “a customs officer? Who will weep for him?”
“I shan’t do it.”
I thought Ruby was going to belt me then.
Instead, she slipped her arm around my waist, dragging me close. “I’ll not let you die, when I have tasted your Soul. This…shyness is not curious for one so young to Blood Life but it must be mastered. See it for what it is: the dying of your old life. I have a gift, something to ease your too human guilt. The crossing from day to night.”
Hushing my questions, Ruby dragged me by the hand further into the labyrinthine docks. The ships on the jetties, which reached out into the four ba
sins, were a forest of masts; flags hung dead without the breeze between the fingers of chimneys. And the stench…
Every warehouse that I passed, as Ruby drew me further away from the crowds, I was hit by a different wave: first pungent tobacco, next sickening hides and bins of horns, then fragrant coffee and spices and finally overpowering rum. That last one I didn’t mind so much.
Ruby hauled me into the shadow of a titanic warehouse, snapping open the door as easily as if it’d been sugarcane. Inside the floor was sticky, like it’d been newly tarred. Now I could smell something mixed in with the rest… Blood… But there was a fast thud to it. A surge of some extra ingredient.
Fear: that’s what was making it so delicious.
Yeah, so I’m a bastard, right?
But is it a First Lifer’s fault that the lamb tastes better than its mama, or did nature choose to make it that way?
I could hardly stand for the hunger; Ruby had to wind her arms around me, heaving me down into the dark vaults. Gas lamps swung midway between each arch.
Shocked, I gazed at the colossal catacomb of precious vintages, which had been sent from vineyards across the globe: thousands of tiers of casks, pipes, barrels of French or Cap wine, brandy or rum. The powerful fumes mingled with the peculiar one of dry rot. It was like limping through a city of the dead, but instead of bones and skulls, there were barrels and casks. “Are you trying to get me drunk?”
“No, not that.”
That’s when I saw what the smell was: the blood and fear, which made me thirst to consume the world.
Who it was.
Grace: my first love and sweet torturer for the last three years. My tempter and betrayer. Destroyer of my heart.
Grace was strung in chains; her feet dangled helplessly above the ground, as if a frog stretched out for dissection. Her back arched against the barrels. She was gagged and when she saw us, she started up with these odd little squawking noises. She’d been stripped down to her corset; the stiff whalebone bulged her tits out like apples.
Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series Page 3