“Just to feed on?”
“Hey,” Donovan dropped the boy’s corpse across the desk — bang — the steel back in his eyes; I stiffened, “no more questions. Come here.”
Donovan opened his arms wide, like I’d rush back into his embrace.
Not bleeding likely.
The door knob was hard behind my back; its sharp outline was all that I could think about. I tested it with my fingers without Donovan seeing. “He’s a good brother for letting you have them all. Come on, what’s the big deal? We’re tight, aren’t we?”
“All? My bro was never one for letting anyone but himself have it all. He feeds me one or two scraps and the rest…” Donovan stopped, peering at me suspiciously. “Why are you over there? I said, come here.”
“Love to but…I’ve got to hunt.” I thrust open the door in one twist, diving out into the corridor. I was expecting to feel Donovan’s hands hauling me back in, but he didn’t follow.
This time nothing would stop me from finding out what the hell was going on.
I darted down the deserted corridor to Aralt’s empty study. I slid inside, slipping to the storage unit, which skirted the desk and tried not to think about Aralt sharing blood with Ruby over it, until she was overdosed.
It still smelled of both of them, under the rich blood that laced the entire room.
Life’s like that: it bites you where it hurts. The bad memories kick themselves to the surface faster than the good.
We’re secret masochists at heart.
I didn’t know what I was searching for, I only knew that I had to find something that would free Alessandro and me.
The top compartment of the unit was an internally lit Plexiglas band. Beneath that were box drawers and sliding aluminum doors. I scrabbled through them, discovering finances, formulas, and scraps of data, which all formed a picture of something big. It was still too fragmented, however, to leap to life.
The pattern was there, however, and it was off, like it’d been at the bank a century before. If I could just study it a bit longer…
I glanced up at the door as I reached for the next file.
Voices. Then footsteps coming closer.
I was in Aralt’s study, surrounded by a tempest of paperwork, in a way that would only have looked comical to me: Aralt wouldn’t get the funny side.
I snatched the papers up in handfuls, throwing them back, snapping shut boxes and crashing doors around, before chucking myself across the room.
Visions of Overend, Gurney and Company’s marble floor, my spit and blood pooling, as my eyes closed, possessed me.
You are going to die, dearest prince…
Yeah, so your own death’s hard to shake. And my second one loomed much closer.
Some blokes just don’t learn from their mistakes.
Aralt slammed through the door, his arm hooked around Ruby’s waist; he nuzzled into her neck. Ruby was laughing, and I could tell by the way that she quivered, shuddering in waves, that she was high on feasting again. They stopped abruptly though, when they saw me in the center of the study.
Ruby tutted. “And what is my darling Light doing in here, all by his lonesome?”
Aralt didn’t look at me. He’d disentangled himself from Ruby and sauntered over to a UFO-shaped drinks cabinet, where he poured himself a whiskey. He swirled the amber liquid around the glass. “You’re taking ages to answer there, babby,” he said, softly.
Here’s the thing, it’s easier to think of lies, when your bloody life doesn’t depend on it. I remember a time too as a First Lifer, when they’d come tripping from my tongue as easily as breathing. A century spent with Ruby, however, when our Souls were bared, and we were each other’s truth (at least I’d thought so), had weakened my ability to lie.
Lying is our natural defence because either everyone must tell the truth or everyone must lie. Now I’d found myself in a land of falsehood and it was me with the serious design flaw. Still, I was getting better every day that I shared the same fetid air with these lot.
After all, I’d held my own with Donovan, hadn’t I?
“I was looking for Ruby. Where else was she going to be? It’s not like she’d be with me, is it? The bloke that she actually elected?” I acted the sulky teenager, sticking my hands in the pockets of my jeans with a sullen pout.
I reckoned that they half believed me.
Ruby stretched on her back over the length of the desk; her hair flowed out, like a flame. “Dearest prince, you have been naughty indeed.”
Aralt stroked down the silk of Ruby’s stomach, taking small, careful sips of his whiskey. His black gaze didn’t leave my face.
You know that feeling when someone’s mentally ripping you apart?
I glanced at the door, but Aralt stalked towards me. He stood so close that our noses nearly touched. “Remember that conversation we had?” I tried to twist my head away. Aralt, however, grabbed me by the chin, yanking me back. “Ruby’s not your ma. She’s not even your bird anymore. Stop making such a holy show of yourself.”
Aralt turned away, but then just as fast, cracked the whiskey tumbler across my cheek. My skin split, and blood poured from the gash, as I fell to my knees.
Aralt swaggered back to the UFO cabinet and casually selected a new glass. He poured himself a second whiskey, trailing his hand between Ruby’s tits.
And Ruby…? My Author?
She gazed up at her brother admiringly, like he was head of the pride. As if I wasn’t crouched in a mess of my own blood and bruises, with a lacerated face sliced to sodding pieces.
That was it, the moment I knew beyond any doubt: Ruby and I had been twinned in blood for over a century.
Yet now that bond was broken.
I’d been replaced.
Ruby would always love Aralt more than me. I was alone. And Aralt would always hurt me.
11
Funny how you First Lifers divide everything with your sticky labels, as if it’s not enough for a house to have four walls to be called a home or even to be with the one your heart bleeds for.
I never got it until now. Not until these last few quiet years with you.
We’ve spent so much of our life running, and that’s all on me. I’ve tried to make it into one big adventure. Was that how you felt? You never told me, and now it’s too late.
I’d work nights. It didn’t matter what city or job and no matter how dirty or low the work because I wasn’t exactly official, no matter where we went. I wasn’t in the taking what I wanted, when I wanted business either — not with you at my shoulder.
When we were traveling through the Philippines, it was brutal cage fights, like the martial arts matches in Japan. In Las Vegas, I’d help casino owners sniff out card counters. It wasn’t like I didn’t know every trick in the book. They weren’t the sort of bosses to worry about paperwork, although it’d felt wrong to be sitting on that side of the glass and not to be the one pocketing my winnings. You, however, had been very firm about that.
If there was nothing else going, I’d work bars or take a bouncer gig, like that time in Mississippi. But you hadn’t been keen. Look, it’d been the accent; the American women had been dead into it. You’d become furious about them stuffing their numbers into the back pocket of my jeans.
When we were settled long enough to make it count, you took the type of office roles, which I’d sworn would never be for a woman like you. Another broken promise. It seems I’m better at breaking them, than keeping them.
I did show you the world though, didn’t I?
You never mentioned your singing again and because you didn’t, it meant that I couldn’t. Yet there were so many times, especially in the quiet of twilight, when I’d see that distracted look on your face and I’d break inside not to say…sod it, something.
Like I had the right? So, I didn’t.
I couldn’t listen to your record, and since you never sang either, the silence drove me mad.
I reckoned — just once — you’d burst f
ree. Then I’d hear the beauty of your sultry, raw tone, even if you were only cleaning the bathroom or thought I was still sleeping, as you pulled on your stockings in the morning.
Peace is overrated.
Occasionally, we’d pass a pram with some gurgling baby, and I’d see this expression behind your eyes, like sadness or…regret, even though you’d hurriedly mask it. I knew a part of you yearned for children, grandchildren, and the whole package deal fantasy, which everyone’s fed from the cradle.
That deep down you craved a normal life. Except, that’s no more than a sticky label again.
It’s no different to how I’ve always wondered if electing was like having a child. Whether Ruby had seen me in that way.
How can it ever be an equal pairing, when it starts with one having such power over the other? When an Author tries, like a parent, to create their own reflection? If I’d elected you, then you’d have been my act of procreation; I’d have been birthing a new member of my species. But you didn’t want that. It was you who denied me the chance.
How do you reckon I felt, every time you looked at some kid, when I’d have given you anything but I couldn’t give you that…gift of humanity?
Not that First Lifers are so special. If the Lost seem like monsters, then we learned everything we know from First Lifers. I’ve more of a conscience than many First Lifers. I’ve killed to survive but there are bleeding worse things.
Just watch the news.
If there’s something after death or second death, I don’t have a bloody clue how they’ll sort us all out. But it’s not going to be a neat little reaping; it’ll be messy as…well, Hell.
Still, when everything’s said and done, I need to say sorry.
I’m sorry you lost everything. Sorry I buggered up your short First Life. Sorry you didn’t even have a home, not before I brought you to Ilkley Moor again and I don’t even know if you can really tell that you’re here.
How much do you know or sense? I reckon that you do realize you’re home. I can feel it deep in me, like something moving.
You’re home and…sod the wankers at the Blood Life Council: when you die, what more can anyone do to me that I give a damn about?
As a First Lifer, I never had a real home, not since I was young. And as a Blood Lifer wherever we rested for a day (or settled for weeks or months) was never — no matter the trinkets that I nicked and discarded as fast — our true home. We were beyond that.
At least, that’s what I’d reckoned.
When we came to stay at Advance in 1968, however, I realized something about Ruby, which she’d kept buried secret from me in all our years of nomadic wandering.
You see I never had a home. But Ruby? Her home had been right there at Advance with her brothers. And before that? With Plantagenet.
Every time Ruby had disappeared on me without a word that was where she’d been: playing happy families.
Without me.
In a world of outsiders that’s got to make a bloke feel like the biggest outsider of them all.
But then, I found you.
NOVEMBER 1968 LONDON
You and I were curled together on the red baroque rug, as I stroked my fingers through your long hair in the quiet of evening.
The moments with the stillness and silence have always been the most perfect ones to me. In Blood Life, you’re never in the eye of the storm — you are the storm. So, I took the calm with you, whenever I could.
This disease of humanity? I was riddled with it.
Then bang, bang, bang, as loud as a thunderclap. You startled up.
“What is it, love?” I pushed myself to my feet; my pulse thundered.
Had Ruby found us?
Yet there was a something in your eyes, almost like you’d been expecting this knock in the dark of the night; the same something, which’d made you insist at first that you couldn’t have someone like me — Rocker, bad boy, and freak — in your life.
I straightened my shoulders. “Do you want me to…?”
You brushed me aside, however, like I was a ghost. Then you paced out into the hall by yourself.
Here’s how I figure it, when a Blood Lifer dies once and comes back, then an ancient part of our brain that’s attuned to danger, fight or flight, evolves.
So, when I saw how you were acting all of a sudden…? I got real quiet and crept to the door out to the hallway.
A dark silhouette was framed on the step, all bulky suit and hat. You weren’t moving: a fairy statue next to a giant.
I knew dodgy and I could taste it sour now.
Not all your nightmares are mine. The ones that shake you side to side and make you rake your nails bloody down my cheeks could be yours — this one moment — the same as any of my night-time horrors.
Do you want me to lie to you about this? I wish that you could tell me, or that I was able to decipher your tap, tap, tapping on the covers.
But love, I’m lost here, so all I can do is tell it how I remember it. What else is there now?
I pushed the lounge door wider. This giant wanker was the reason that you’d reckoned I’d not want to know you: the real you.
“All right Kathy?” My voice triggered you to life. You turned towards me.
The figure next to you emitted a low growl as it burst by, shouldering into the lounge. You trailed at the man’s heels. He reeked of stale bitter. When he spun around on me, I could read the threat in his glare. He backed me further into the room, but you patted my arm, as if calming a guard dog.
“Who the bloody hell is this?” The man snarled. “You living with him?”
You quickly shook your head. Too quickly, for my liking. “No, father.”
Father?
I eyed the shambling wreck, as he glowered at me blearily. His single-breasted suit was bulky and creased under his overcoat, like he never wore them except at weddings. He crumpled his hat between weathered fingers. I could see a breath of you in his hard features: the black hair threading to gray and watery blue eyes.
He tossed his head at me dismissively. “Then get thee gone.”
“Not a chance, mate.”
“This is between—”
My jaw clenched. “Not a chance.”
Your dad glared first at me and then at you, whilst scuffing his shoes backwards and forwards through the shagpile. Then he nodded. “Get ready lass, you’re going home.”
You started; a pink flush spread up your neck to your cheeks.
When the bloke first barged in here, breaking into our safe cocoon, I hadn’t understood the skin of tension, which had sent warning howls from my ancient brain, through every nerve of my body. But now the scent of fear was overwhelming. Your distress and the menace on your father’s face was impossible to miss; it would’ve been even to a First Lifer.
Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with the hunger to rip out your dad’s throat and let him watch himself bleed out at your feet: my bloody sacrifice for everything that I sensed he’d done to you. There wasn’t any need for words: it was all there in the fear, which is something we Blood Lifers understand.
You stepped away from your dad, twisting your scarf in these little nervous jerks — twist, twist, twist — like you were struggling to breathe. “This is my home now. I don’t have to go back.”
“Happen you do,” your dad growled.
I knew your dad was going to move towards you, moments before he did.
Blood Life heightens every sense, and then the hunt sharpens them with a thrill, which is as great as enslaving the world. Don’t knock it just because it’s hard to imagine. And yeah, maybe it corrupts, but power’s a bleeding turn on.
So, when I realized that your dad was preparing to clout you, I blocked him. Then I eyeballed him, like the bastard had never been eyeballed.
Your dad was so shocked, he merely stood like he’d been stuffed and mounted
You only hissed, however, as you clenched your own fists, “I don’t need you fighting my battles, Light.”
; Your dad chuckled; his gaze was mocking.
You really knew how to cut off a bloke’s balls.
Like a deflated balloon, I stepped aside. Stalking to the corner, I kicked the beanbag as I passed for good measure, realizing as I did it what a teenager I looked. I leant against the wall with my arms crossed, trying to regain some pride.
“You know that you don’t belong here? And not with…him?” Your dad’s voice was softer. He ran his rough finger down your cheek. You flinched. “Why did you run? There’s nothing here for thee…for people like us. But you have family. Think on.”
You pressed back against the wall. “I have.”
Your dad smashed his fist into the wall close to your head. When you jumped, I struggled not to dive at him, fangs out.
I didn’t intend to be your white knight, however, if you didn’t want rescuing. Yet there was also no bloody way that I was going anywhere, until you were safe. It was typical of how you made me feel: my every impulse and emotion turned on its head, see-sawing between contradictions.
Guess that’s what life’s about, right?
Your dad ripped the poster of Jimi Hendrix off the wall, which he’d felt under his hand, in disgust. He waved it in your face. “This? You choose this?” He crumpled up the poster, tossing it at you.
This time you didn’t flinch. “Yeah, I do.”
I thought your dad was about to throttle you; his hands were so close to your throat and scarf that I tensed every muscle hard enough to spasm.
You, however, didn’t move or look away from your dad; I’ve never admired you more.
Ruby had got you First Lifers all wrong. When your backs were against the wall, some of you had the same bottle as any Blood Lifer.
Then the moment passed. Your dad slammed his hat down on his head, like a goodbye, before he stormed out, banging the front door closed after him. It rang in the silence of the flat with deafening violence.
I studied your immobile expression.
Buggering hell, I never was one for times like this. Did you want me to rush to you and hold you or to sod off?
Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series Page 16