The disabled soldiers wept out of the bowl’s wounds, hopping one-leggedly from its sides, and then determinedly across the sideboard towards me in a grotesque parade.
Was this real…?
“Go away! Go away! Go away!” I howled as I slid down into the shadow of the sideboard. I huddled close to the wall with my knees to my chest. I screwed shut my eyes but I could still hear them… Clack, clack, clack… “You’re not real,” I whimpered. “Not real…not real…not…”
I didn’t dare take a look. I clutched onto the wall behind me.
With a roar, I threw myself up, swiping everything off the sideboard. Blinded in my panic, I couldn’t see the damage but I heard the smashes, bangs, and clangs. Facing my fear, I jumped up and down — stomp, stomp, stomp. The plastic crunched under my feet, even as I yelped at the pain.
At last, my breathing calmer, I wiped my arm over my cheeks. The sweet gangrene aroma had died away. I couldn’t hear the boom of the guns.
I could see, however, the fruit bowl smashed into tiny sodding pieces; hero that I am, I’d killed the little bastards. The apple was ground into pulp; the Mistress and slave books were sticky in the juices.
Bugger it, I was going to cop it.
That’s when the true panic set in.
I don’t remember everything. All I know is, my body was set for escape. I made it to the front door, wrenching at it. You must’ve had it reinforced, however, because there was no movement. Not a sodding thing. I booted the door, until my leg ached.
My blood was up now. I was no longer weak from the starvation, which had dogged me since my capture. Predator energy sizzled in fury at becoming the prey. I snatched an ugly vase from the sitting room’s fireplace and hurled it against a bay window. The vase smashed, but the window behind the blind didn’t even tremble.
Reinforced glass too then.
In 1964 I nicked this blinding Triton motorbike. On times like this, I’d take her out and tonne it down the motorway: a crimson ghost in the dark. That’d settle me.
But locked inside this silent apartment…?
I lobbed the relax chair over on its side; it was heavy, so that was…satisfying. Next went the soft blue Sponge chair, which was wrinkled like an elephant’s hide, before I overturned the glass coffee table with a dull crash.
When I stood in the middle of the destruction that I’d wrought, I was shot through with sudden terror. But then, as I spun on the spot and had a better look at the devastation, I was filled with squirming pride too.
The place was trashed.
I was back.
Unfortunately, that’s when I heard the key in the lock, because so were you.
You took one glance at me standing frozen in the remains of your sitting room — and thank Christ you’d yet to discover your dining room — turned once on the spot, as if somehow you could’ve come into the wrong apartment and then trudged into the kitchen.
“Just…go to bed,” you muttered, without looking round at me.
I didn’t need to be told twice.
So, now I’m sitting here, writing this and hoping that you’ll understand why…
Look, I haven’t caught a wink tonight, and the eerie glow from the ivy is already dimming. I could’ve simply said sorry but that’s not my style.
Are you sorry for enslaving me?
Will you humiliate and punish me no matter what? Do my words mean anything to you? Can’t you see that I’m not your prey?
All right, I want to…
Yeah, sorry.
7
MAY 15
Stupid git, aren’t I? Because I guess my ‘sorry’ truly didn’t mean anything to you.
I stumbled out of my cell this morning, after only a few hours’ sleep, at your call. You were standing in the center of the sitting room, like an owner poised to shove a puppy’s nose in its naughty accident.
Anxiously, I twisted at my slave ring. “Look, can I just say—”
“Naw, I don’t think so.” Your gaze was frosty. “What the frig were you thinking?”
I shrugged.
You pointed at me. “You’re clearing this up.”
“I never doubted it.”
You clutched my arm with surprising strength and marched me into the dining room. I’d forgotten that you hadn’t discovered this nice little surprise last night.
We both stared down at the shattered remains of the soldiers and at the books with their split spines.
I wondered which of us would break first.
“You do get that was, like, an original?” That’d be you then... You nudged the remains of the bowl. “It was wicked valuable.”
I remembered the mutilated soldiers crawling along the sideboard. Then as they’d swarmed down my neck, before covering my entire body, until I was nothing but a plastic soldier too. I shuddered, before forcing myself to smirk. “What’s money?”
This time — to my surprise — you tried unsuccessfully to smother a grin.
I reckoned that the First Lifer trapped in those photos on your bedroom wall wasn’t totally dead.
I glanced around, with a shrug. “Anything else you want me to...?”
“Naw.” You snatched my arm again, dragging me until my back was pressed against the fresco, as if out of harm’s way. “You witnessed the wars against that guy…Philip II, huh?”
“What?” I spluttered. “I’m not that old.”
“But I thought...?”
“The Great War. 1914, yeah?”
“Why were you even…? What did our war have to do with you on account of you being a Blood Lifer?” For the first time, your shoulders had relaxed, as you leant next to me. Intrigued, you watched me, as if we were simply two mates having a chat.
It was…nice.
I slouched, crossing my arms. “Too bloody right. All that First Lifer mechanized slaughter? You reckon that we gave two figs which side could massacre more of the other? But me and my Author, we got trapped for weeks, caught between both lines. We were going barmy with it. The boom of the guns…screams...lights…stink…” I shook my head, battling to clutch onto the present. “War’s not a toy…or a sodding fruit bowl.’ It was times like these that I missed my ciggies: I needed something to do with my hands. I bit at my thumbnail. “Bloody stupid First Lifers.”
And just like that, our moment was over.
You straightened, turning away and booting at the banks of paper leaves. “These books? They’re another matter to the bowl. My sis loaned them and she’s going to…”
Sister?
I’d heard whispers of an older Cain daughter, whilst I’d languished at Abona. With blinding clarity, I realized who the she was, who’d been giving you instructions on slave management.
I was buggered.
False bravado, however, seemed my best bet.
I slouched further against the wall. “What…? Box my ears?”
You shivered. “For starters. Plus…all this…it’s only…things. But what I want to know is why you tried to get out?”
When had you started caring about my motives? Or admitting that you read this journal? Usually you pretended like I came with an instruction manual rather than emotions.
I tilted my chin. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I get that. I do. But you tried to escape, like, for real.” You slipped your manicured fingers into the pocket of your flared shirtdress.
Frustrated, I pushed closer. “Look, you daft bint, if I hadn’t been so bloody starved, I’d have tried it long before now. The first chance I got.”
That’s when you pulled something out of your pocket, holding it up in front of me: a small touchscreen device with a black Manx logo.
Shooting, spearing, white-hot agony. Lava snaking down my spine, and then in sparking rivers down every nerve in my body. Paralyzing. No escape, only suffering and enduring, as Schumann played in wild carnival.
The memory of all that was held within the one innocuous looking device, which you were now pointing right at me.
/> Why had I been stupid enough to reckon sorry would be enough?
I fell to my face at your feet in submission. “Please…”
Horrified, you reached out your hand, as if to pet me but then curled your fingers closed. “I don’t…? It’s only your tracker. Light...? I just wanted to remind you that we always know where you are. That’s all. You’d be soft to risk anything with how my daddy feels about his property. Plus, I reckon you should know that there are hidden cameras in each room.” Even in my fear, I understood now how you’d known about my unsuccessful escape attempt. Once more, my world narrowed. “Our Retrieval Crew’ll come get you in less than an hour, if I touch this button…”
I flinched, waiting for the agony.
As if shocked at my response, you stuffed the tracker back into your pocket. “What the frig?”
You didn’t know. You didn’t sodding know.
Manic laughter bubbled inside again, but I held myself still. Fury was building. The owner’s daughter — rich on blood money — training to join the Management…
Yet you didn’t have a bloody clue.
Had you ever dirtied your lily-white hands?
You lowered yourself to your knees, before grasping my chin. “Tell me.” When I simply stared at you, your gaze became steely. “I don’t care about the… But you’ve got to be honest with me. That’s non-negotiable: honesty.”
Alright, sweetheart, so that’s what you want? Because there’s a cost. To know what I am, underneath the labels. To see the Blood Lifer beneath the skin. You’re not ready yet to hear who your family are beneath their skin. Not without me being the one who pays for it.
I’ll tell you about the blood then, before my fifty years of abstention. That’ll give you an intensive course in honesty.
I won’t tell you about the woman who blazed through me, until her death because you don’t deserve to know. I’ll write about the other one — the Blood Lifer. The wonderful whirlwind of Elizabethan blood and death.
Ruby.
She’s dead now, so you lot can’t enslave her. But her and me?
Together we were a force of nature.
8
AUGUST 1866 LONDON
Ruby and I were living in the rookeries, in the slums circling Westminster Abbey, before we set off for our Grand Tour.
We’d masqueraded as lodgers, who desired to share a dustman’s dark room in the crowded apartments for 2d a day. He’d stuffed his room with the broken treasures of the wealthy, which he’d sifted from the ashes and refuse. We’d ended the dustman’s miserable existence, moving in as eagles, rather than rooks.
We didn’t share the world.
From the tiny window, we could see out over the squalid roofs of the quarter and First Lifer watch.
Ruby would laugh at that: prithee, why do you hold to First Life so?
I, however, loved the chaos and the clamor: the death, clinging to the back of life. Whores haunted doorways, raising their skirts at passers-by with a wink, even as they coughed bloody into handkerchiefs. A shivering Jemmy, his naked chest purpled with bruises, sprawled in the muck of a side street; he was tormented by a pack of destitute kids, who were like tiny skeletons.
A ditch snaked down the middle of the street, which ran with sewage the color of green tea; doorless privies for both blokes and women were built directly over it. When you were outside, you could hear the splash of buckets into the ditch, which was also conveniently the water supply for the quarter.
Life and death, see what I’m getting at?
Ruby and I stuck to the blood.
I was leant against the wall, staring out over Westminster (or the Westminster of the poor), when Ruby slipped her arms around my waist. We’d spent the last few hours making love, whilst Ruby educated me in my own body, as much as in hers. We fitted (virgin that I’d been in First Life) in ways that I’d never dreamed a man and a woman could. Now, however, our hunger was up for something else.
“My turn to play the game.” Ruby rested her chin on my shoulder.
Down below, the early evening street bustled with First Lifers. A full moon had just pushed itself into the smoke-laced sky.
Shrieking. Bawling. Pleading.
A punisher (a swarthy bruiser with bushy beard and whiskers), was stamping on the legs of a young down and out, who’d earned himself a beating. Next the cosh was out, and scarlet was streaming to join the green tea sewage.
I raised my eyebrow. Ruby, however, shook her head.
Ah, ah, ah…dirty…little…blasted…whore…
Right beneath our window a gentleman, who was as drunk as they come, with his loosely knotted necktie eschew and his top hat fallen into the mire, was brutally buggering a Mary-Ann. The Mary-Ann was so young, he was lifted up onto his toes on each thrust.
Ruby started to nod, but then she hesitated and instead, pointed further up the street.
This bloke and woman, who were bundled under tatty coats and shawls despite the oppressive London heat, were cautiously creeping through the shadows. When the light of the moon struck the couple’s smug, excited faces, I knew what Ruby’s instinct already had, even though they’d tried to veil themselves in rags: they didn’t belong here.
They were masquerading as much as us Blood Lifers: the rich slumming it, as if the poor’s lives were a tourist attraction for their amusement.
Come and see the zoo…
Ruby smiled. “I believe that I have made my choice.”
Ruby and I stalked our quarry through Westminster’s narrow streets and back-to-back tenements. We passed match girls, starving street urchins on street corners, who were hoping to be sent on the wealthy’s errands and rat-catchers wearing their ferrets like fashion accessories on their shoulders, as terriers trotted at their heels with their latest kill hanging limply from yellow-toothed jaws.
The undercover couple nudged each other, as the woman suppressed her giggles. When they reached the grander sweep of Victoria Street, they dived into a waiting brougham. When Ruby hailed a hansom cab, the dour cabbie didn’t even blink at our request to set off in pursuit of the private carriage, simply flicking the reins at his stamping horse.
We’d not long ridden through the gas lit streets, before we were pulling up.
I should’ve bloody guessed: Belgravia, where the fashionable ladies and gentlemen rented elegant stucco townhouses in this aristocratic but dull district.
We watched as the couple — husband and wife, back from their ghoulish jaunt — descended and were admitted to just such a three-storied mansion.
I dived from the hansom cab ready to swoop after our prey.
Yet Ruby dragged me back. “Have patience, my darling Light, our tatty pheasants will change their plumage and fly again.”
At first, I didn’t get it. Then I realized that the First Lifers’ brougham was still waiting outside.
So, it was playing dress ups, was it?
I booted at the cobbles. Belgravia was like being becalmed. I was used to the rattle and the roar. The confusion of the crowd. The bustle and the bother. Growlers, cabs, broughams and the whiny of steaming horses. The sharp, brutal, never-ending merry-go-round of London.
But this tranquility…?
A butler eyed me disapprovingly as he took his evening walk. There was a volley of double knocks on a door several houses up, whilst a powdered footman next-door lounged lizard-like on the doorstep of a mansion, as if he owned it. I watched a high-cheekboned gentleman trot his gelding past us, with the type of expression, which implied that all life was a bore; I itched to ease him of that burden.
You First Lifers have always ordered each to his Estate. Only the god now is named Capitalism. Look around London and see if the rich and poor don’t still live right next to each other.
Ruby insisted that it was God who’d lifted us up to Blood Life. If First Lifers didn’t question the natural order, why was I? And if we Blood Lifers were the apex predator, then you were the prey.
Between Darwin and God, they had i
t stitched up.
When the couple’s door swung open once again, I nearly didn’t recognize them. “Christ in heaven.”
Cinderella fairy tale, they’d been transformed ready for the dance. She was dolled up in a short-sleeved pink number, which was trimmed with tulle and embroidered in gold, which glinted when the rays of the moon caught it, as if she was caught halfway in the process of metamorphosis. He was in a black dress coat and trousers, with white linen shirt and cravat. His waistcoat was gold-studded, as if to match the preciousness of his wife’s outfit. His overcoat was trimmed with black velvet.
It was a cracking coat.
“Do they not look splendid?” Ruby snatched up my hand, spinning me in a wild circle, in a parody of the waltz. When I stumbled to keep up, she tsked. “We will hire you a tutor, dearest prince. Every man should know how to dance well.”
Impatient, I eyed the couple, who were dithering in their doorway, collecting up the lady’s ornate fan, gold and diamond bouquetier, and lace gloves. “Must we wait all night for these lovers to go to the ball, whilst I—”
Ruby stopped me with a kiss. All too soon, she drew back. I followed her with my lips but found only air. “Now, my lover. We hunt bloody, now.”
We rested our foreheads against each other, and I nodded. Then we swooped.
Ruby took out the liveried footman first with a quick bite. Ruby tossed him into the opulent entrance hall, under the glare of the bright gas light, as we barreled into the shocked aristocrats. We slammed the door shut behind us.
Ruby caught the husband, and I caught the wife close in my arms. The wife was frozen still in shock and then a moment later with paralysis. Her fan clattered to the Oriental rug. She was warm and sylph-like; I could feel the flutter of her terrified heart.
The husband? He struggled and thrashed like a hooked perch, as Ruby twisted both his arms behind his back. He stomped at Ruby with his patented leather boots, gasping out a litany of Cynthia, Cynthia, Cynthia, whilst he stared at his wife.
He jerked like he’d been shot, when Ruby slowly licked up his neck, tasting the fear and rush of blood beneath the surface.
Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series Page 28