How many nights had I wasted alone, wanking over the glimpse of ankle that Grace had flashed me with a coy smile as she’d climb into her carriage?
Now her pale body…this weak First Lifer flesh…that was laid out like it was in a butcher’s window, repulsed me.
Ruby was watching me intently, as she nudged me closer. “My gift, darling Light, do you wish to unlace it?”
I wasn’t shaking now. There were no more doubts or qualms. Nothing holding back the predator inside. There was just this tiny sliver, which watched with horror, at how right this felt.
So, this is how it went down: I stripped Grace, grinning because you know what? Grace was chicken-breasted under that corset: just another First Lifer lie. It was strange, all Grace’s thin body did was remind me how much I’d relished Ruby’s curves, tipping the velvet, until I saw nothing but red. I still smelled of Ruby; she was on my lips.
This blonde beauty had made me weak but now I was strong.
When Ruby propelled me closer, there was safety in her touch because she was united with me in the kill.
“Blood is our birthright,” Ruby’s voice was low; it swallowed the darkness, until the vaults echoed with it. “It’s the natural order. We would never have existed on this fair earth, if it was not. We would not have these,” as Ruby’s two thin canines extended, Grace squirmed frantically, “or our venom, which paralyzes and stops their weak hearts, as if they were clocks. We are so perfectly designed for their blood, as they are so perfectly designed for us. Blood Life is not hunger. It’s fulfilment. Freedom.” Ruby’s hands caressed around me, naughty as before, to those places that had never been touched before my death and election. “Dearest prince,” she breathed, “free yourself.”
I edged the gag out of Grace’s mouth.
Grace gasped, panting, and then stared between Ruby and me, whose hands were still wandering wherever they fancied.
I knew what Grace was thinking: how could some nobody, like me, have done this to her? Her little plaything turned around to bite her?
When I saw the tears glistening in Grace’s eyes, it was like being booted in the gut. The death throes of my First Life.
Then it was over.
“Thomas, please—”
“My name is Light.” The fangs shot from my teeth; I sank them into the milky white of Grace’s neck. It was pure bloody instinct.
Grace screamed, but I was lost by then, engulfed in the blood.
Grace shuddered to paralysis, as I drained her. I was bursting with Ruby’s gift of new life. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced or imagined. I wanted everything the world could bleeding well throw at me.
When at last I fell back from Grace’s still body, I was laughing with excitement, shock…mania. I draped my arms around Ruby’s neck. “My thanks for your most perfect gift. It was…” I laughed again.
My head was ready to explode — boom — with the rush and roar of the blood and the beat of my own heart, powerful in my chest.
Ruby glanced at Grace, whose eyelids were twitching feebly. “It’s the river for this wretch; let it carry her away with the rest of the filth. Then you’ll be free of her most completely. Free of all First Lifer ladies. Do you not feel it? That roaring call? It’s the world unfolding before you. The next step into the light, even though we dwell in the dark. Are you ready now, dearest prince?”
I gripped Ruby hard by the shoulders, as she traced the blood from my lips, slowly sucking it from her fingers. Then we were kissing.
All the nasties and wankery? Yeah, that first kill was the most complete moment I’ve ever experienced in First Life or in Blood.
I’m not going to lie to you, not one word when this is the last time…
Well, you know, right? And git that I am, less or more than human that I am, it was bloody perfect.
When Ruby held up her lips to be kissed — it’s true — I loved her. And I was turned on because I wanted her, the same as I wanted the blood. I’d have done anything for her. The two of us could do whatever we pleased.
It was intoxicating.
When I pushed my hand down towards Ruby’s quim, however, she caught my wrist with a laugh. “Just the blood heat. It will pass.”
“What if I don’t want it to?”
“You are young, and this is new. When it fades—”
“I won’t let it.”
Ruby’s expression changed. For the first time, there was a mixture of confusion and doubt, rather than contented control. Ruby stepped back. “I know a place we could… Where our own kind…”
“Others?”
Ruby frowned. On her brow it was terrible. “You do not want that?”
I slipped away from Grace’s naked body, noticing with surprise that no blood had leaked from the tiny puncture wounds at her neck, as if something in my venom had sealed the holes, after my teeth had withdrawn. It was a marvel of evolution.
Grace was still alive — just — her gaze seeming to follow me around the vault.
I leant against the caskets; the wine fumes were making me heady. “I don’t play nicely with others, or at least they don’t with me. I never was much part of the world, even when I walked in it.”
“But we play very well, do we not?” Ruby was at my side, even before I’d seen her move. Her fingers teased my cock with long strokes.
“You’re different.” As the rhythm of Ruby’s hand increased on my cock, I struggled to stay still. “You’re my Author, muse, liberator…”
“Love?”
I caught Ruby’s fingers before I climaxed, raising them to my lips. “Is that not why you chose me? So I would love?”
Ruby entwined her fingers around my throat. “So, lover, if you do not wish to walk in the world, will you let me be your guide to it?”
“A Grand Tour?”
“Of sorts. The two of us.”
“And the earth to eat whole.”
Ruby’s nails bit crescents into my neck. “Patience. Learn its secrets first, before we dance. You have a mind, as well as a heart. I elected you for both.”
When Ruby wrenched back her fist, I waited for the clout; she liked to play rough. But the smash came beside my head with a loud splintering of wood. Then an explosion of red, a blast of wine fumes, and I was flooded with it, as a crimson gush poured from the hole.
Christ in heaven, Ruby had some power in her; I wanted some of that. No, all of it. Ruby and her secrets wrapped up in a bow.
Ruby thrust me back, until we were caught in a fountain of French wine. We were giggling like kids, opening our mouths wide, drinking deep, as it coated us in a second skin.
“I thought you weren’t going to get me drunk?” I smirked.
Ruby licked the red tears streaming down my cheeks. “This is a celebration. There must be wine at a man’s…” She caught my hand between her sticky fingers, twisting it back towards the corpse of the First Lifer, for whom I’d once wept. “To Grace.”
I blinked the wine from my eyes. The blood was still hot, pulsing through me in a howling haze of ecstasy. I smiled. “To the world.”
Ruby. My red-haired devil, Author, muse, liberator, guide: my gorgeous nightmare.
Ruby did it, you know. She showed me the world’s secrets.
Yet here’s the thing, to do that she took me to darker depths than I’d ever dreamed of, let alone knew had beat in my own Soul.
But that’s bollocks, right?
Because I’d only thought they didn’t, until Ruby showed me those places that we all hide locked away, reckoning we’re dead civilized, rather than bloody cavemen.
As I said, bollocks.
We’re animals when it comes down to it: predators. You First Lifers war over territory, your gods, or your women, as if you’ve only just discovered bleeding fire. If you ever try and get between a woman and her cub, you’ll soon discover you’ve got a tigress on your hands.
See the truth of it is, everyone enjoys a good barney — win or lose — they hunger for the fist and the boo
t.
Who doesn’t want to get a bit dirty, once in a while?
Ruby brought me to life by killing me.
Every emotion amplified? Mine — love, curiosity, and an aversion to authority — they survived but twisted, like a blasted tree after lightning. Where once they were pale and sickly, now they were intense, powerful, and dark.
It’s not as straightforward as good and bad. You don’t get to sticky label me. It was simply different.
It made me feel like loving Ruby would be the death of me, even as I lived for being close to her. We relished breathing the same air, draining the same First Lifers, shagging and hurting, until we knew each other’s bodies the same as our own. All was nothing outside our love. It smashed on us. Broke on us. We savaged it. Together we screamed at the world and when we had the world by the throat, the world screamed back. There was nothing we couldn’t do, or take, together. Nobody else that we needed.
I thought that Ruby was mine. But I was young, so yeah, I didn’t reckon that I’d be the one who got burnt.
It should’ve been impossible for us to understand each other, what with Ruby being an Elizabethan, and me not being born until the age of steam power. So, how can Blood Lifers bridge the centuries: Tudor to Generation X? Punk Rocker to Georgian dandy? Because we don’t stand still: mosquitoes teared in amber or museum exhibits in wax. Each moment that we travel through in our parallel lives to yours it sticks, clinging like caught gossamer spider webs to our skin. The worlds of First Lifers never die. Instead, they live on in the blood of those who witness their crawl from the cradle to the grave, which just sometimes is a brilliant burning dance across the stage.
Me? I’m the bleeding audience.
True, some Blood Lifers despise this adaptation and mingling of species; they want to keep themselves pure and uncontaminated. The wankers.
But me…?
First Life fascinated and consumed me; it haunts me still. The ease of it, which I’d never learned. Its warmth, joy, and life drew me, like the sodding moth to proverbial flame; I hungered for the burn.
In turn, your world clung to me more than most. We suckled each other as the years seeped by, one year crimson into the next.
I was only ever on the outside, however, looking in: a lonely monster.
It all started with stuffed hedgehogs at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Of course, I was only a kid then. But papa’s lot went bloody mad for them (and you know what us Victorians were like with our crazes). Ruby decided the first thing on our list after we’d sampled the delights of London was to explore this morbid First Lifer craze at Potter’s Museum in Bramber. We broke in one night, when the well-to-do tourists had already gone home.
Ruby and I strolled in 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 modeled frilly costumes as they 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. 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.
The following night, we traveled 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, mesmerizing…and perfect. I foolishly reckoned that 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 hair spread over the sheets. Yet when I’d roll over in the four-poster (a new luxury indeed), and slip my hand to Ruby’s tits, her emerald eyes would snap open, cold and hard as hell. “If you wish your trinkets not to be rent or be-torn, I’d remove your hand and concentrate on your lessons instead.”
That’s one bloody powerful motivator.
Fencing, riding, and 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 banquet; the greatest works of First Lifers were as if ours alone. In the blackest night, Ruby and I would 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 that 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 head 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 clouted me, before I bit. I guess it was the outfit that caused me to hesitate (all that black), or maybe the chanting had made me sleepy. Yet after the first taste, I fumbled, and he darted away with 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 leaned against the cool stone, probing the swelling around my eye. “I’ve 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.
Here’s where I come clean: how it really works. The truth is that Blood Lifers don’t drain dry: Blood is pure and powerful, even the smallest drop. One pint is more than enough to satisfy us.
It’s our secret that’s deadly.
It’s not the loss of blood that kills you, not when we’re taking so much less than the half, which causes a First Lifer to die. 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 bitten, 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 physicians, 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 Blood Lifers.
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 that 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 around because it always comes back to… Yeah, you know what.
Did 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?
One night, Ruby and I slipped into La Specola, a museum next to the Pitti Palace, which stank of something sweet but rotten. When Ruby gripped my hand, I realized that 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, color, and size. They were neatly ordered, categorized, and labeled. 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. Ruby and I 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 that it throttled me. I’d lived with it, intimate-like, as a Blood Lifer.
But this…?
I’d known science in my First Life or reckoned that I had. Yet somehow, I’d failed to see the darkness underneath.
“All that’s missing is one of us.” Ruby stroked the back of my head. “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.”
Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series Page 4