Haggling with the Devil never ends well.
It does for the Devil.
And which of us is that then?
You want your nicotine hit; I want to impress my superiors. Here’s the remit: an inquiry into the leader of the ruthless Renegades, which is a terrorist organization fanatically dedicated to eradicating human slavers, thereby endangering our secret world.
Yet I know that I could provide answers to questions the rest of the Council don’t even understand that they need to know.
This is more important — bigger — than anything they can conceive. Yet I do. So, I want one truly personal memory every day of the trial. Your secrets. Ones that you’ve never told anybody, and if you hand over that, then I may allow your treats.
Memory? You want to violate my mind as well?
That’s the deal. Or we could just get on with the interrogation as Captain wants it. You don’t need to smoke.
I abs-bloody-loutely do.
Right, I’ll bite. One secret a day that I’ve never told anyone. But I want something else thrown in: a vintage ‘60s motorcycle jacket with gold ace of spades on the back. It's mine, and you wankers took it.
Cold, are you?
That coat has been through the bloody wars with me, and I’ve been through the bloody wars to get it back.
What’s it worth? One memory — one secret — for one coat.
The sensory deprivation hood that’d been pulled over my head was a devastating piece of kit. Sight, sound, and smell, as well as taste and touch were all wiped out.
Blackness. Silence. Nothingness.
It was like you didn’t exist, or the universe had ceased to and all that remained was the howling in your mind. I was adrift in the darkness, giving these shallow, panted gasps. Sir hadn’t added the gag this time, however, so small blessings.
I could only smell the suffocating stink of leather. Only feel the freeze of the cellar floorboards underneath my shivering skin. Everything was narrowed down — focused — onto the few senses that I had left: the strain in my shoulders, as my hands were shackled behind me, and the furious beat, beat, beat of my heart.
My blood called to me, whispering predator in every pulse, harsh behind my eyelids.
I was lost, however, in the black.
Soon, I didn’t even feel the pain…cold…floor. My shoulders weren’t mine because I wasn’t sodding me.
As I said: a devastating piece of kit if you want to break a Blood Lifer, and the First Lifers of the Blood Club wanted us as their pretty playthings.
The specters of the dead rose before me in comfort: my two human sisters, Nora and Polly beneath our willow tree, my Blood Lifer family and first mate Alessandro, smiling up from a chess match waged against himself, and Kathy: my gorgeous Moon Girl. Each of them was erased, however, as fast as they were conjured like my brain was shutting down.
Loss. Loss. Loss.
Each one abandoned me, until I was alone in the dark at the end because we always bloody are.
Alone in the dirt.
And it was my own wankering fault. I’d still been playing the rebel, you see. Although, there’d been no play about it.
You’re a born a rebel; you die a rebel.
Except, that moment had been looming closer than I’d hoped because I’d refused to submit to a First Lifer.
“Prostrate.” Tap, tap, tap. I’d risked a quick glance from underneath my eyelashes at Sir. He’d been tapping the red-and-black hide riding crop impatiently against his gray-suited trouser leg. A furrow had been between his plucked brows. “Prostrate, shadow.”
I’d known that position: drop to the floor on my stomach in front of Sir and then turn my head to place my cheek against his black Oxford shoe. If Sir was in the mood, it gave him a stiffy if I also kissed the leather; it didn’t matter that I was never in the mood.
This time, however, I’d stayed in kneel, even straightening my shoulders. It was hard to look dignified when you were naked and on your knees before a bloke in a suit, but I’d reckoned that I’d pulled it off.
Yeah, deluded prat here.
That shred of Light not yet swallowed into slave shadow hadn’t let me prostrate myself. Not to Mr Corporate slave owner. Not again. I wasn’t a trained monkey, even if I performed like one.
Pride: it’ll catch you by the balls every time.
Sir had pushed his black framed glasses further up his nose, studying me in disturbing silence. Then the tongue of his riding crop had licked out, welting my cheek.
I’d yelped.
“Look you, my pretty leech, don’t start and make trouble.” A sick caricature of a smile had tugged up just one side of Sir’s mouth. “Or maybe you’re the sort of bitch as likes to make trouble, isn’t it? Shall we play a game? See if you’re a true hero or just a worthless bitch?”
I’d knelt in silence.
Sir’s smile had snarled into a frown. When he’d reached behind him excruciatingly slowly, I’d tensed, whilst my cheek had still stung from the crop’s kiss. Then Sir had pulled out something that had been tucked into the waistband of his suit trousers. It’d been folded in half, so I hadn’t been frightened of it until…the smell.
That stink of leather.
And before I’d known it? I’d been bawling out my nancy heart. “Please, Sir, I’m sorry Sir…”
“Don’t. Move.”
Intense citrus underlined with cedarwood — Sir’s aftershave — had choked me, as he’d leant closer. I’d shuddered but I hadn’t legged it like every instinct had shrieked. Fight had already been stolen from me in the fight or flight equation.
Then everything had gone dark.
I don’t know how long I was lost in the dark. Time has no meaning in that torture. Our enhanced senses are our strength but used against us they become our weakness.
An hour? Day? Week?
In that panicked, gasping void, I lay curled on the freezing floorboards and I shook.
All right, so I was an idiot to piss off the human who had the power to steal the light. Yet such extreme punishment, over such minor rebellion...?
Sir and I had been playing cat and mouse for weeks; it wasn’t like I had anything else to do, since I was naked and chained in a bricked-up cell. A thrashing here, a day or two of starvation there. Adrenaline drenched interludes, in between days of lying on my back counting the blossoming hordes of spores or splinters in my fingertips.
Numbers are the only mates who’ve never deserted or betrayed me.
The game? Somehow, it’d changed, and I’d been caught bloody in the cat’s jaws. The problem was that I hadn’t reckoned I was the mouse.
Then I screamed, as the hood was wrenched off, and the shards of light pricked my retinas. I screwed up my eyes against the sudden brightness; tears tracked from their corners.
I let out a sob of relief. I wasn’t lost anymore. Sir had found me.
Mould, dust, and floorboards; I could smell again in a volcanic rushing overload. It was citrus, however, which was invading every bleeding inch of me. Through my bleary eyes I could see a shadow.
Sir was crouching down. I curled closer around myself but I couldn’t save myself: I knew that. Even in the midst of our dance, I’d never forgotten it. I could feel again: my aching shoulders and numb legs. My body was my own once more, but that was the illusion because I was property possessed by Sir.
Then Sir pounced on me; he cradled one arm around my thin spine, whilst the heavy weight of his legs held me down. He stroked my cheek with his manicured fingers, lightly tracing where the red welt had paled to pink. If I’d fed? It would’ve become as invisible as I now was to the world outside, locked here in Abona House, whilst Sir trained me to become a slave for First Lifers.
Sir gently lifted my chin. When I forced myself to meet his hard gaze, I was shocked to see it become suddenly tender. “You don’t know nothing, you don’t. How things work in here or on the Estate. Why I have to…” Sir tightened his grip; I gasped. “Now, little leech, you tell me
which bitch has been feeding you, like a greedy baby bird.”
Sir knew?
He’d found out about Blood Lifers risking…everything…to feed me blood gnawed from their own wrists, even though blood sharing was like communion, a bond as close as family?
Two Blood Lifers saved me: Hartford, the powerful Long-lived (or angel-haired cupid to the First Lifers who used him like a toy), and my cousin Donovan (with slave name ailill, meaning elf in Irish Gaelic, just to strip away his dignity). Once, I’d killed Donovan’s sadistic twin, Aralt, to save the First Lifer world from his screwed-up vision of using our venom in the name of superior evolution. Yet even Donovan, with his dark mop and lilac eyeshadow, blood shared to help me. We were united in adversity.
True hero?
Hartford and Donovan were the bloody heroes.
Sir knew?
I shook my head quickly.
Sir’s lips brushed my cheek, whispering wet patterns across the pink of the welt. “Come on, don’t look so frightened. I’ll keep you safe, my shadow. Your Sir’s here. Just tell me which bad bitch is forcing you to feed. It’s cupid, hmm?”
Shocked, I startled, but Sir held me fast with his long body hard on mine.
Sir was brutal to Hartford. I had the sudden memory of Hartford’s tiger-striped arse, bruised from the same riding crop, with which Sir had marked me, and then Hartford’s brilliant smile as he watched me suckle at his bloody wrist.
“No, Sir,” I blurted.
“Don’t lie,” Sir jerked back my head; buggering hell that hurt, “you leeches think that I’m stupid, isn’t it?” When he laughed, every part of me wanted to crawl into itself and hide. “Say it. The truth now.”
“No, Sir.”
“Cupid thinks that he can be a father to you leeches because he used to be a Long-lived. That he’s still worth something. But look you, he’s nothing but a whore now, and after this offence, messing with your training like he can still stand up to me, I’ll send him back to Master. There was never no slave that Master couldn’t break, even cupid. The things Master will do when he trains him a second time—”
“No, Sir.” I gripped Sir’s wrist like somehow that could stop him.
Sir’s lips crawled across mine. “You must love the dark, isn’t it?”
I heard a rustle and a movement like the slither of black tar. Then Sir was dragging the hood over my head again.
I screamed, thrashing side to side, as if I was a snared Komodo dragon, but I was pinned tightly under Sir. My pulse pounded, whilst I quivered in terror.
Then everything went black.
I trembling, weeping at the loss of sight, sound, and smell. The scratch of leather was against my lips. I couldn’t breathe… No more black, please, no more…
But if I admitted the truth about Hartford’s blood sharing, then he’d be sent to Master and be broken forever. That only left one Blood Lifer that I could sacrifice: family.
“Ailill,” I whispered.
I’d played the game and come out a fake: no true hero. Yet I’d made the darkness hesitate, as it paused over my lips. And in that moment?
That was a sodding victory.
Then the black was delicately rolled back and my senses returned one by one. I returned to a world, however, that I no longer wanted to face because I’d Judas betrayed my own cousin. I felt sick.
“Good boy.” Sir ruffled my hair like I was a mutt.
Yet drowned in my own guilt, I barely heard him, as if I was underwater. When Sir pushed himself off me, giving my cheek a final paternalistic pat, I doubled up with it.
What the bleeding hell had I just done?
It only took me a short while to find out.
The chest looked suspiciously heavy when Sir dragged it in. Sir had taken off his jacket and sweat patches had formed like growths under his salmon pink shirt. He stank but he was smiling with too much triumph for it to bode well.
The smug bastard.
The chest was made of steel, strapped shut, and padlocked with leather around its middle like a chrysalis. There were also these strange pinprick holes along its side, as if…
The bloody, bollocking, buggering bastard…
Donovan was inside that chest because of me.
Sir dropped the end of the chest hard, and I heard the groan. I glanced up at Sir from kneel, not even attempting to hide the glare.
“Don’t fret you,” Sir turned his smile on me indulgently, “he can’t hear us.”
Clang, clang.
When Sir banged on top of the chest, which must’ve shocked it with vibrations, there was a terrified whimper; it clawed at my insides. “Sensory deprivation, like the hood, see? Hotter though. It’s an experiment. Let’s see if ailill enjoys the dark as much as you.”
Sir left me alone then. Alone with the chest…and Donovan.
I’d messed up, and Donovan was paying the price. It hurt too much to imagine Donovan as he’d danced the Charleston yesterday with Hartford around this cell, reliving Hartford’s glory days on the hunt in the Cotton Club to the throb of Duke Ellington. Then as they’d snatched my hands, pulling me up too with them, dragging me out of despair, reigniting the fire and rebellion, which today had led to…
“Please, I’m sorry. Whatever I did…whatever it was? I’m sorry. Sir?” Donovan begged.
Sir hadn’t told Donovan why he was being punished or that I’d told on him.
Wanker that I was, I was shot with relief. Then I was sick from it because I knew what it was to suffer and not to know why.
I crawled across the cell to the chest as if — irony of bloody ironies — it could hurt me.
“Sir? Let me out… Let me out…”
Clang…Clang…Clang…
This time the banging was from inside the box but it was muted. The box must be padded then, which was considerate of Sir. I reckon that he didn’t want the merchandise to bruise itself: that was his job.
I raised my trembling hand to the steel side, although I didn’t dare touch it. I could feel the heat radiating in waves like the sun. When the banging stopped, I heard a stifled sob.
“Are you there?” No more than a whisper.
“Yeah, Donovan, I’m here.” I couldn’t help reassuring him, even though I knew that the box was soundproofed. My eyes burned with tears.
“Is anybody there?”
Christ, I wished that Donovan could hear me. “I’m here, you git.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m bloody sorry, right?”
“Just, don’t hurt Hartford. I…whatever it was…I did it. Me.” Donovan didn’t even know why he was being punished and he didn’t care as long as he saved the Blood Lifer that he loved.
True hero, see?
I threw myself to the corner, as far as I could from that mummified box, and rocked when Donovan’s screams started. Yet it was worse when they stopped because Donovan’s silence was like an accusation.
When Sir came back (all I knew by the burn for blood was that it must be days later rather than hours), he found me huddled with my knees drawn up and my arms over my head, at the back of the cell. I’d briefly considered gouging out my own eyes, so that I wouldn’t have to keep looking at that chest or I couldn’t see it staring at me.
See how guilt turns you mad? Lady Macbeth had nothing on me.
Instead, I’d hidden and counted the cost of betrayal.
Then Sir was there, crouched like a long-legged spider, stroking my hair away from my face, as he cooed, “Is he disturbing you, my pretty little leech?”
I could’ve exploded in anarchic rage, until the world cowered in its rightful place at my feet. Instead, I twisted my silver S.L.A.V.E ring as I stared at my dirty toes. “No, Sir. But—”
“Yes?” There was danger in the tightness of that one word.
Family. It makes you weak. That’s how they hurt you; shank you through the heart.
Love is for berks with neon signs over their bollocks flashing Boot Me Here. The world’s one tangled web
; you can strain against the sticky matrix all you like but you were born inside the nest and you’ll die inside it. I’d reckoned — daft bugger that I was — that my glorious rebirth into Blood Life had burnt through the web, and I was safe on the other side.
But that was the lie.
As long as we love, then we control, and we’re controlled. You don’t have to be a slave to lose your freedom. Just look around you: every First and Blood Lifer is a zombie from the cradle to the grave. And Sir had simply discovered the trick to being the necromancer.
If I denied family and love, then Sir couldn’t make my dead limbs dance. At least, that’s what I thought.
I clenched my hands into fists, even as my pulse pounded. “It was my fault that I drank from ailill, Sir.”
Sir rubbed his thumb across my forehead in a gentle circle. “What a good boy you are, confessing at last. You need punishing then, don’t you?”
I froze: that wasn’t the outcome I’d been hoping for. Not the dark, not the dark, not the…
“If I’m punished,” I’d peeked up at Sir from underneath my eyelashes, “then you’ll let ailill out?”
“Do you want me to?”
Sir was playing with my hair, tufting it up into a mocking pompadour; I hungered to rip off his bloody fingers. “I’m sorry I was bad and…I want to be good for you.”
I realized that I’d walked the right humiliating line, when Sir’s eyes lit up. He stroked my cheek, now pale and perfect, as if to check that I was real; I’d been wondering that too, ever since I’d been hunted, defanged, and enslaved.
“Of course you do, and that’s why I’m helping you.” He tapped me on the nose like he was nothing more than my attentive lover. “I’ll take that bitch away, and then we’ll have some quality time, see? Just us. Of course, you’ll still need to be punished.”
When I stiffened, Sir chuckled, as if my conditioned terror was a blinding joke. “A fortnight without blood. That’ll teach you to only drink from one source: Me. No one else gets to feed you. Now,” his too soft lips whispered into my ear, and I cringed, “ailill didn’t know why he was punished. That can be our secret if you like.”
I’d been wrong: Sir could make me dance any time he liked. It hadn’t mattered what I’d said or done because family? Love? They hadn’t made me weak to Sir’s magic.
Rebel Vampires: The Complete Series Page 55