Your face was spectral pale. Death and killing weren’t natural to you…yet. They couldn’t simply mean justice, without the guilt. The first time, of course, is always the hardest; I remember my own.
Hold onto my hand a little longer.
When I darted to you, I panicked when I noticed blood trickling down your neck. Without thinking, I pressed you harder to the wall, scenting the blood; thank Christ it wasn’t yours.
Then, however, I could hear your rapid heartbeat. I suddenly realized that my mouth was stained crimson, as I scented your pulse point. My fangs itched.
I forced myself to draw back. “I wasn’t going to…”
“I know,” you murmured.
You, however, were still in shock. I stared around me. For the first time, I saw the scene, as if I was a First Lifer. Hartford in particular had been busy: it was bloody carnage, where one side didn’t even need weapons because they were the weapon. Upturned trays of hors d’oeuvres were ground onto the terracotta tiles, and shattered crystal flutes were like modern art, between displays of twitching bodies.
Donovan was dancing the Charleston, clutching a paralyzed servant in black tie as his partner; I recognized the man as one of the minions who’d delivered my bottled blood, whilst ignoring me, as if I’d been a piece of furniture.
I caught Donovan’s sleeve as he passed. Then I jerked my head at you. He seemed to understand and nodded.
I tried to smile. “Come on, darling. Let’s get you to the boat. Leave the clean up to me and my family, yeah?”
“Clean up?”
Right, well done wanker.
“You’ve done your part.” I said, softly. “Now you wait at the boat. That’s what we agreed.”
I grabbed your hand, hauling you after me: that was the first time taking your hand didn’t make me feel diminished to a boy.
You stumbled in your high-heels over congealing blood; you should’ve been prepared for it, considering that you’d chosen Heartbreak for your bedroom.
When we reached the empty atrium, however, you yanked away from me. “I’m not leaving here without you. Clean up? Who the frig are you going after?”
“That would be me, innit?” M.C. was sprawled in the baroque chair that was crusted, as if by rough-cut crystals. She was trying to appear casual, like the party to promote the Blood Club was in full swing, rather than having wound down to a bloodbath.
Yet I could see the rage simmering underneath.
I pushed you behind me, never mind your squeak of protest.
“Don’t talk to him.” You were as furious as your sister. When M.C.’s dark gaze focused intently on you, it was clear that you’d become her next target. “Don’t look at him or—”
“Touch it?” M.C. curled her tongue behind her teeth as she sprang out of the chair, slinking towards you — anarchist tiger on the prowl. There was blood stained down her bondage trousers and it wasn’t hers. You were shaking with either delayed shock or anger. Maybe both. “Want to know how I made it scream? Or taught it to be a good slu—”
“Shut your mouth,” you snarled. I caught your arm, holding you back.
M.C. laughed. “All this for a leech? My crew? They be my family, you feel me?” M.C. widened her stance for the attack. I’d analyzed M.C.’s cage fighting technique, but you were here and that complicated things. It put you at risk, and I wasn’t about to kill your sister in front of you either. If I did, would you be able to look at me the same way? I remember every moment that I’ve ever seen; I wish someone had saved me from witnessing the darkest. M.C.’s gaze flickered to me. “You murdered my family for a toy.”
This was my opening. I hoped that you’d understand. “I’m not a toy.” I refused to do anything but meet M.C.’s killer’s gaze dead on. “I’m Light and I’m a Blood Lifer again.” When my fangs shot out fully grown, it was like being reborn once more. “Let’s see you touch me now.”
When I sprang at her, M.C. stumbled backwards to the foot of the staircase, which swept up to the private rooms. “Outside. Boat. Now,” I threw at you over my shoulder.
Then I dived up those stairs like they led to my redemption and not the fight of my Blood Life.
I wove through the warren of corridors, until I reached the hallway with the motto above the doorways: Quocunque Jeceris Stabit — whichever way you throw, it will stand.
My guts clenched: Master’s wing.
The door was open to the training room. I could see the black void, which had been the scene of my torture. But I wasn’t a defanged slave on a leash anymore; I was a fanged Blood Lifer and I was free.
This was where it had to be.
If M.C. was so proud of what she’d done to me, let’s see how she fared now that she didn’t have that bastard tracker in her hand. And I had my fangs.
“You want to be touched?” M.C. was standing in the doorway to her bedroom like a threat.
I forced myself to grin. “You find it that hard to get a date, do you?”
“Grayse don’t. Not with humans. She don’t need leeches, when she has Fernando—”
“Give it a rest. Fool me once, yeah? Grayse loves me.”
M.C. snorted.
“I didn’t ask for your approval.” My gaze hardened. “I told you because I wanted you to know: First Lifers can love us Blood Lifers. They can love me and have done twice now.”
M.C. scowled. “And I told you that Grayse don’t love no one…”
“Just because she doesn’t love you, doesn’t mean that she can’t love. It just means that you’re an unlovable bitch.”
M.C. exploded (as I’d hoped), in an uncoordinated flurry of knife-hands and palm-heel strikes, all of which were easy to block or let harmlessly slip past. Blinded by emotion, M.C. wasn’t maintaining distance or strategy. When M.C. growled in frustration, unbalanced by missing her punch, that was my in. Suddenly, I was swarming all over M.C., with an uppercut to her chin that nearly took off her head.
Jab, jab, cross, jab, jab, cross, hook, hook, uppercut, jab, jab, cross…
M.C.’s face was a shattered mess.
I’d driven M.C. staggering back to the doorway of her bedroom with a sidekick to her guts. She was struggling to breathe, as she spat out a bloody canine onto the floorboards between us. Like a hunted, man-eating tiger that was wary but still dangerous, she swayed, glaring at me through swollen eyes.
I only realized that M.C.’s apparent weakness had been a trick, when I closed in for the kill: she swept both my feet out from under me, in a move so swift that she could’ve been a Blood Lifer herself. Then M.C. brought her heel stomping down onto me in an axe-kick, as I sprawled on my back.
Right onto my throat.
I choked, before rolling to the side, just as M.C. went to repeat the move. I tried to crawl out of M.C.’s reach, further into the bedroom with its satin bed, which was enclosed by erotic Blood Lifer glass panels. Before I could escape, however, M.C. clutched me by the ankle, cranking on the small joints at the rear in an Achilles lock.
I howled.
I rode out the pain, allowing myself to fall limp, as if beaten by it. I could feel M.C. creeping closer.
When M.C. stroked down the back of my neck, I cringed. “I be touching you, see?” Still I played dead. “Guess what I found by the bedside? Only the tracker, innit?”
Then everything went white.
There was branching fire in the forests of my nerves. Nothing existed but my pain. I was flying.
M.C. dragged me like felled prey across the floor and then up onto her bed… Lie down… She was still inflicting punishment, and my back arched off the sheets, as my hands convulsively opened and closed.
I was lost in the white. The cloud light was bright above; the twists of nylon and tiny lights were as if infinite. M.C. must’ve eased down the tracker’s level because my back hit the bed, although I still buzzed with electricity.
Please, let you have gone to the boat.
Hartford had made Donovan promise — First Lifer and slaver�
��s daughter as you were — that you’d be looked after like family. Hartford paid his debts. I trusted him. You were safer with those Blood Lifers than anywhere else in this corrupt and brutal world.
If you’d gone to the boat.
“I’m going to touch you and then I’m going to learn you that you be nothing but a toy. Just like dad learned that bad leech cupid. Cupid fought more than any other leech since and we made it suffer for it. When we get cupid back… When dad…” M.C. hesitated, as if uncertain for the first time, “retrieves both the two bitches.”
“Good luck with that,” I rasped. “The last I looked, we’d eaten your Blood Club.”
M.C. increased the tracker’s power, and I gritted my teeth. Then I shuddered, as M.C.’s long tongue licked up my neck.
“And now you get to eat me, slut,” she hissed.
My fangs sprang into my crimson stained mouth. “The bloke with the red Mohawk? I just bit his chin. Do you really trust me near your soft and privates?”
M.C. clouted me across the cheek. With one final burst of effort, I rolled off the bed. When I thumped to the floor, I grabbed the base of the glass panel and yanked.
M.C. only had time to turn in alarm, as the porn photos collapsed on top of her — smash. They sliced her in bright slashes, scarlet on scarlet, whilst she bled out.
M.C. was submerged under the printed glass of fractured Blood Lifers, which trembled with her slight gasps.
I dragged myself closer to the bed. “When you were raping me in here, you’ve no idea how much I sodding wanted to do that. So, cheers.”
I hauled myself over to the tracker, which M.C. had dropped over the side of the bed. Sighing with relief, I slipped it off, before I crushed it.
When I edged on weak legs back through the hallway and down the staircase, I didn’t meet anyone. I glanced at the motto as I passed it. M.C. wasn’t doing much bloody standing anymore, was she?
When I reached the atrium again, I found Hartford and Donovan had made good on their promise to clean up. Wisps of ash smoke curled between the Doric columns and fairy tale props, licking up the Goliath Manx cat.
You were gone.
I hoped that you were safe on the speedboat, which was tied and waiting for us on the edge of the Estate.
When I poked my head into the main reception, everything was silent, except for the crackling of the fires that had been set. The air was thick with smoke and the pig-aroma of crisping human flesh, as antiques and modern furniture alike blazed side by side to the dying light of those one hundred pooling candles. Fernando had hacked into the mansion’s fire system and turned it off remotely. The Blood Clubbers were melting down, wax-like. Because we were camouflaged predators, their deaths were still natural: if the heart attack didn’t get them, then the smoke or fire would.
It wasn’t as if we wanted our attack entirely masked: it was sending a message to the Blood Clubbers still out there, to the Blood Life Council, and to anyone else who intended to step into the Cain’s shoes.
I guess that made us terrorists.
Still, that was better than collaborators, appeasers, or bloody cowards. One thing I’ve come to know is that you’ve got to live with yourself and no one else every single day. To face all you’ve done, failed, or intend to do.
I preferred to think of us as rebels, anyway.
I left that white and black room, which was curling to gray, consumed by tongues of orange and red. I dived through the back passageways, whacking in the six-digit security codes, which I’d memorized that time in Mr Cain’s study: the price I’d paid had finally been worth it. I’d drilled the codes into all your brains over the last few days and hadn’t that been a delight with Donovan’s grumbling.
When I reached the last code, I plugged it in and the fresh air hit me like life. I closed my eyes, resting back against the wall.
We’d bloody done it.
“Light, are you…?”
My eyes snapped open.
You weren’t down at the coast: you were standing only feet away, assessing my many injuries. I sighed. “I’m fine.”
“My sister?” I winced, looking away, but then your fingers entwined with mine. Surprised, I glanced up. “So, I met your family,” you said carefully. “I guess my family now. I like them.” I couldn’t help but laugh. Your grin was too close to tears for comfort but full marks for trying. “Hartford’s cool. He was…kind. Not what I expected. They both weren’t.”
“Yeah, we never are. But why didn’t you go with them like we planned?” I wanted to add — like I told you to — but I didn’t quite dare.
“I wasn’t leaving here without you. Donovan had to stop Hartford from going back in for you, when I said… He was wicked upset when he knew that Marlane was fighting you. They both love you, don’t they?” You gazed at me, as if you were surprised by this realization. “Hartford only stopped struggling, when Donovan told him that sometimes there were things a Blood Lifer had to do alone.”
“Wise words those.”
You nodded. “I had to kick their asses to get them to go ahead on account of they wanted to stay and protect me. I told them there’s no one left to protect me from.”
I bit my lip. “That’s not quite true, sweetheart.”
You frowned. “But Donovan said—”
“Your dad.”
You stared at me and then suddenly frightened, around at the black of the manicured gardens. The ragged clouds streamed over the savage moon and the ancient stars. “Right, let’s go.”
“No arguments here.”
Your hand tightened around mine, as we sprinted across the lawns; your Fendis caught in the long folds of your ball gown. I guided you in the darkness: A First Lifer safe in my world.
It was when we were weaving through the Cain’s personal wood over the carpet of wild garlic towards the coast that I first suspected that we were being hunted.
Even amidst the firework-burst of raw nature, there was something else underneath, which my Blood Lifer senses — now fanged and free — were attuned enough to pick out. The snap of a twig, the rustle of clothing, the thud of a third heartbeat…and a gun cocking.
I glanced at you, stumbling alongside me in the dark. You didn’t have a clue.
“Sod it, this has got to go.” I ripped up the hem of your dress to your creamy thighs, and you let out a gasp. Then I balled the desecrated satin, chucking it out onto the garlic.
Your dad was your hero and mentor. He was…your dad. I remembered my papa, his big hand in my small one on Regent Street… You let go Light…
Now your dad was hunting us through these woods, just like he’d allowed me to play at hunting here as a reward. I couldn’t fight Mr Cain; not like I had your sister. I couldn’t kill your own dad in front of you. And maybe the bloody wanker knew that.
I pushed you ahead of me, resting my hand on your shoulder to guide you. If the bastard planned to shoot one of us in the back, then I was electing myself for the position.
The third heartbeat was getting closer. I remembered the night-time walks, which Mr Cain had taken; he knew this Estate in the dark, as well as he knew it under the sun. Mr Cain didn’t get how close to being a Blood Lifer he’d grown over the past decade.
Suddenly, I heard the startle of pheasants: their ghostly honks and beat of wings, as they took to flight.
When you cried out, I pulled you against a Manx oak.
Bang.
I stared down at my right hand that had been pressed against the trunk. My hand was sprayed with pellets, which had ripped through the flesh, just as they’d shredded the oak’s bark.
There was nothing but silence now in the black.
“Bloody run.” I clutched my wounded hand to my chest and snatched you to my waist by the other. I dragged you on, until I was half-carrying you damsel-like.
Then we were out of the wood and onto the open common, which was lilac with ling and luxuriant with gorse. It smelt of you. My right hand was a throbbing ball of pain; the thorny Burnet
Rose bushes tore at my bare ankles.
Something low and dark with long hind legs ran across our path: its tail was stumpy and its eyes blazed gold. Then it was gone.
My Manx cat, free at last.
Then I saw the cliffs that led down to the cove and our speedboat, which was hidden amongst the boulders in the ravine.
We’d sodding done it.
“Grayse.”
No, don’t. Please, don’t…
At your dad’s siren call, you struggled out of my one-handed grip. Then you turned around and just for a moment, you were looking back. But that’s all it took.
“Daddy…?”
Bang.
The blast tore you away from me.
Then you were tumbling back, comic-slow in my horror, your chest scattered with pellet shot that was worming deeper into your vulnerable insides and flooding them with blood. As you hit the ground, you coughed scarlet, until our lips matched.
I dropped to one knee next to you, overwhelmed by your false gorse scent, which entwined with the real thing. I grasped your limp fingers with my left hand, desperate to use my right one too. But it was useless: blasted to pieces. Like you. I still tried: once, twice, three times… This sudden impotence, becoming a broken doll, brought the first tears.
I’d saved Ashanti’s girl, the other Blood Lifer slaves at Abona, and brought down the whole slaving Empire. I’d kept my promise.
But if I lost you…? The price was too bloody high: it always was.
The thud of your heartbeat was slowing. Your lungs struggling. There was no magical A and E, to which we could airlift you in time.
There was, however, your attacker standing right behind me, with the 20-bore shotgun that he’d used on you, pressed to the back of my head.
Tenderly, I placed your hand down on your chest with a pat.
Your eyes were searching. Your stained lips mouthed silent words. The desperation in your gaze for me to understand tore me in two.
I tried to smile at you reassuringly, before I gritted out, as the two barrels pressed harder, “Come on then, you wanker, what are you waiting for? A slave’s permission?”
Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series Page 53