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 eyes, 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. Everything was made of chrome, like stepping into one of those rockets that First Lifers had 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 was about: planting the flag and making sure that the rest of the world was enviously watching because they didn’t get there first. Ruby witnessed centuries of such imperial expansionism, before it shriveled. Everything withers eventually. And yeah, that’s morbid, but I’m dead, right?
Science marches on and it drags us all in its wake.
Silver moon lights hung in clusters of iridescent mother of pearl, satellites to the chandelier, which illuminated the room brighter than day. The black and white paintings made me dizzy, fragmenting and distorting the room, especially as I hadn’t fed 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.
She’d always cared if I’d fed before…
And then there was him: brown velvet jacket despite the heat, blush of eye shadow and smudge of eyeliner and a dark mop top. A head-to-toe uber-Mod.
The uber-Mod danced in the eye of the whirlwind, jumping and twisting — he was the whirlwind — and 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, whether Donovan or Aralt, lost in the throb of the music and the blood high, he didn’t see me. Just like I’d been invisible to Ruby the moment that 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 plastic, I noticed the First Lifer cowering in its frame; she was nothing but legs in her 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 gaze was 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 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 head.
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.
Then over his head, I saw Ruby. And when I did, I wished that I’d stayed upstairs sulking.
Ruby swiveled around, 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, and snogging…like she did with me. Only me, I’d thought. She was feasting too; the poor sod was nothing but a paralyzed 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, but 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 realize that I’d never had any control to start with.
The twin threw himself off the girl. Blood stained his mouth like lipstick — just one more touch to his costume — as he boogied to the far corner.
I slouched against the door frame in the shadows. I’d lost my appetite. I still watched, however, when the Mod dragged up a 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, 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 guilty about feeding because we’re designed like this. In the same way that every animal has its adaptations. It took you to help me see that 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 onto the rug, back and forth. The twin’s fangs pressed the skin at his neck but didn’t quite break it.
So, the prat was a prick tease too.
I wasn’t into those types of games: that was Ruby’s thing.
The Mod was laughing; the boy was crying. The twin’s fingers caressed the tears…
Then the twin plunged in his teeth, drinking hard. He was tripping on the music. Blood. Freedom. The drums were beating out a frantic rhythm. A clash of nothing but raucous noise.
When Ruby coiled around the now motionless body of the First Lifer with an ecstatic, satiated expression (which I hadn’t seen for decades), agonizing hurt and resentment ripped through me.
Why wasn’t Ruby like that with me anymore? What had changed? Me? Yeah, bloody well blame the man.
What was so special about this Advance…?
The Mod twisted back to the girl, who was limp in the chair, yanking her up into his arms. Her head lolled back, like the bones in her neck had melted. He wrapped himself around her, holding her tight on his left side, at the same time as tugging the struggling bloke closer on his right. He laughed. First, he snogged the girl’s drooping mouth and then turning to the guy, he tasted him more lingeringly.
Bang. The door on the far wall slammed open.
Bloody hell, who was this now?
An identical copy of the Mod. But this smarmy bloke was in a vintage 1950s Savile Row suit and his Ivy League hair oozed oil.
Bastard twin number two…
“Turn off this fecking racket,” Bastard Twin Number Two snarled.
There was a thud, as Ruby nodded and shoved the First Lifer’s corpse rolling off her. She scrambled out of the chair, in a flurry of scarlet hair and silk.
Bugger me, it was like angels had trooped from Heaven in blinding rays of light because I’d never seen Ruby scramble to do anything before. Certainly not for me. Yet now she flew to the hi-fi, cutting the music dead.
Bastard Twin Number Two in the charcoal suit scanned across to me with dark eyes; I didn’t reckon he was the sort to miss much, or maybe he was simply the only one here who wasn’t spaced out of his head. “Is this your babby then?”
I raised my eyebrow. “I don’t see no bloody rattle, mate.”
For the first time, Ruby seemed to notice me. She made a strange type of hushing motion. “Aralt, he is—”
“A wee gobshite?”
“Name’s Light.” I pushed in from the doorway.
&n
bsp; I tried to read Ruby’s expression but found that I couldn’t. It was different from the one I knew. It nearly killed me to see that in the years we’d swum in each other’s Souls together in Blood Life, she’d held back this fragment from me.
“Someone’s big on irony,” Aralt deadpanned.
“Hey man, so you’re a Rocker?” The Mod briskly snapped the necks of his two First Lifers — crack, crack — dropping them in stricken, blue-lipped piles. He eyed my leather jacket, before sauntering towards me and wiping blood from the corner of his mouth. “I guess that we’re going to have to fight then? What a drag.”
Bollocks.
Aralt and Donovan, Ruby’s twin brothers and the most powerful Blood Lifers in London, and already one thought that I was a wanker and the other wanted to give me a hiding.
“Depends how you figure it. I ate some bloke and nicked his coat. But you bought those clothes, right?”
A black threat swept behind Donovan’s eyes: murderous, powerful, and sadistic.
Adrenaline surged in response through me. All right, it was back against the wall time. That suited me just fine; I could do with a right royal scrap.
The only thing that I could hear was the blood: the world aflame.
Then the danger passed. It was like Donovan had closed the box, trapping all those shadows inside.
Donovan laughed, clapping me hard on the shoulder. “You’re crazy dark; that’s cool, man. We’re going to have a blast, our little family. I can taste it.”
Aralt’s smooth features soured. “Now the hugs and blather are over, some of us have work.” Testily, he marched to a rosewood desk, dropping behind its shining surface and whipping out a silver fountain pen from his pocket. Donovan draped his arm through mine, drawing me further into the lounge. When we stepped over the corpses, my boot sank into the boy’s outstretched hand; the bones crunched. At last, I had the bottle to glance up at Ruby. She was bent over Aralt, studying a file, as he scribbled notes like a businessman. Ruby’s hair mingled with Aralt’s in a way it only ever had with mine for a hundred years. Yet Ruby was staring across at me: in that moment, she was mine again. How hadn’t I recognized her: my red-haired devil, Author, muse, guide and liberator? My gorgeous nightmare? All I wanted was to devour her, there on the desk. But then Ruby had turned back to Aralt again and was listening to him keenly. “I’ve booked the musicians for the gig at Heartbeat. But with the release of—”
“Why don’t we just bite them? I’m up for it, man,” Donovan interjected, pressing me down into the lounge chair; his fingers massaged my shoulders.
I stiffened, forcing myself to hold still.
“Shut your cake hole; the adults are concentrating.” Aralt glanced from his brother to me; somehow, I seemed to have got swept up in his rage. “And what job exactly were you planning for your boyo?”
“Job?” I straightened. “Who says I was applying?”
Donovan sniggered. “You are so going to bug my brother. Right on.”
Ruby ignored me. “He could work at the club at the weekends? He understands this…modern music.”
“Does he now?” Aralt rapped his long fingers — tap, tap, tap — on the top of the desk. “Until I know that he’s not a chancer, he can pair with Alessandro: two babbies together. Only grownups are trusted with secrets.”
Alessandro was hunched on the floor over a glass chessboard. He hovered over a pawn with rapt deliberation as he battled an invisible opponent.
Christ in heaven, Alessandro was a kid. A blond teen in indigo sweater pullover vest and bowtie. His feet, however, were bare, poking out from underneath his crossed legs.
Alessandro pushed the pawn one move and then swerved the board 180 degrees.
I slid down next to him, as I lit up. “Winning?”
Alessandro glanced, not directly at me, but somewhere to the side. “There’s no winning, only learning.”
“All right then.”
I leant back against Alessandro’s hard bed: his sheets were tucked in tight hospital corners. When I glanced around, I noticed that there was nothing else in his room, except for a desk and chair, which were made of aluminum strips. It could have been a bleeding dormitory.
Alessandro was watching me expectantly. When I flicked the ash off my ciggie, he flinched.
I shrugged. “Sorry, mate. I know sod all about this chess lark.”
“Alessandro Salvio was a chess genius — one of the first. Back in 1600 he was unofficial world champion.” Alessandro jumped to his knees, fiddling at his bowtie excitedly. “He wrote Trattato dell’Inventione et Arte Liberale del Gioco Degli Scacchi, in which—”
“You read Italian?”
“Don’t you?”
I laughed. This was my new playmate?
“When Aralt elected me, he insisted that I choose a new name, so I chose Alessandro, which was impertinent I know, but in that moment, I couldn’t think of… No other words would form. As I was working through this game in my head, which was based on one of his theories, his name popped out. You know, like words so often do. It’s better than my old one. Everything now is better than my old.”
I nodded.
See here’s the thing about us Blood Lifers: we have the name they wetted us with when we wailed all bloody from the womb but we also get the one that we select, when the blood elects us from the ranks into something else. It used to be like a holy anointing, with ceremonies, night long orgies, and feasts of the slain. I’ve seen the pictures: they wouldn’t make a good bedtime story for the kiddies.
Me? I chose Light because… Let’s just say that it wove me to the best of my First Life and everything that I never wanted to lose. Wanker that I am, I’m something else even amongst a breed of something else’s.
“Aralt’s your Author?” I carefully asked. Yeah, he seemed the type to go for kids.
“And you’re Ruby’s?” Aralt’s question was as wary as mine had been.
I sighed. “I used to think so.”
Ruby once told me that she’d elected me because she’d fallen in love with the taste of my Soul. Every emotion amplified: hatred, jealousy, or passion, like flavors of an ice-cream and each one unmistakable.
Our election isn’t random: Blood Lifers only choose the best of each generation to exalt from humanity and twin eternally blood to blood.
You’re rolling your eyes, right? I know the look, like you reckon that’s all grandiose nonsense? You never let me get away with the superior species spiel. Yet that’s how being chosen into the Blood Life works — the something more — which everyone craves. Feels. The black core gnawing through their First Lifer hearts.
I know because I felt it too.
It’s not the most successful who are elected, not by First Life criteria: the rich, parliamentarians, aristocrats, heterosexual males in their suits or bimbo celebrities.
No, we smell the true scent of you First Lifers. The bubbling emotions, which are veined underneath, like gold in rock: the ambition of true leaders, unrecognized genius of thinkers, and courage of warriors. Beauty is skin-deep, I’ll give you that, but we see it in the faces of the poor, unmasked by makeup or fancy dos. In the capacity for love, rather than its cold cruelty.
See our society (if anything so dysfunctional can be called that), has strata, like the layers of the earth, down to its burning magma heat. We’re chosen but with different roles. Some are thinkers, prodigies like Alessandro. Others warriors, so steeped in blood that you won’t find their names in any First Lifer chronicles because no one lived to write them. Then there are beauties, like my Ruby, who mesmerize with a look. And of course, there are leaders like the twins.
But the very bravest Authors? The ones with the real balls? They uncover First Lifers with a little of all four bleeding through them: thinker, warrior, beauty and leader.
Yet that’s the risk right there because if you mix it up, you create one hell of an individual: a loner who doesn’t play nice or by your rules. We bite the hand that feeds us.
&nbs
p; As Ruby would soon discover.
Alessandro was absorbed in his lonely chess match again, shuffling his King out of check.
I shoved myself up, wandering around to examine the posters on the walls of ugly lizards with long yellow tongues that forked out of blood-stained mouths. They were plastered over every inch of wall. “Have you got a thing about Komodo?”
“Komodo dragon, monitor or Island monitor. Known to natives of the Komodo Island as ora, buaya darat, the land crocodile or biawak raksasa, the giant monitor.” Bloody hell, Alessandro was a Blood Lifer encyclopaedia. He caught my expression and shrugged. “It’s one of my…obsessions. Aralt’s too.”
“If Aralt’s into reptiles, I’m a Dutchman.”
“I assure you that he is.” Alessandro hopped up, peering over my shoulder at the Komodo. “He insists that I research them and keep files on the data to present to him. He says that he’s going to elect other scientists, so they can…” Alessandro broke off, as if he’d let something slip.
“What type of research would that be then?” I raised my eyebrow.
“Oh, you know, how they’re closer to us than any other species.”
“Is that right?”
“First Lifers believe Komodo kill because of virulent bacteria in their mouths but it’s my suspicion that they have…” Alessandro paused, as if imparting some massive secret or insight, “venom glands.”
I tried to look suitably impressed. “You been there then? Seen them?”
Alessandro goggled at me. “Why of course not. Who would take me?”
I choked on my ciggie. “How old are you in this Blood Life? Do you still have to ask permission from papa?”
Alessandro paced to his bed, curling up on its hospital style sheets. “Aralt wouldn’t like it if… I have a job…an important job here…”
“We’re Blood Lifers, mate. Not bank clerks.”
Alessandro wrapped his arms tighter around his knees. This kid had been elected but not into Blood Life; he was still in a twilight caught between child and Blood Lifer. His eyes hadn’t been opened to the glories of the world, as Ruby had opened mine. He huddled in a perpetual half-life.
Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series Page 7