Prologue
The knives are bright under the moon, lying on a dark, grey crag of rock.
With my head on its side, all I can see are those knives; long, wicked things of shiny, sharp metal. Their handles are white, and I realise that they’re made of bone.
I am not the one who will be wielding them. I am the thing that they will work on. Mine is the flesh that they will slice apart.
The sand under my back and cheek is wet, grey mica speckled sand, cold as ice. The sky over me is black, the clouds obscuring the stars. Ancient stars that were dead when I was born, still shining over me.
The rag in my mouth tastes like the sea, damp from where it’s lain on a rock. It tastes like the grizzled face of a dead crab, like matted seaweed, sour, bitter enough to make me gag.
The words of the six men around me are outside of my understanding. True, I am so frightened that I would be unable to understand my kinsmen in my current state, but even so, I can tell that they are from very far away. Their tongue is strange to me.
The first cut is like ice, and then fire. The cold knife, the hot springing of my blood, and my muffled scream. My whole arm is sliced open, and a moment later something like sand is pressed into the wound with cold fingers. It burns all the more after that.
Salt. Salt in my wound.
They cut again, again. My arms, my legs, my chest and shoulders, even my cheeks. Each part of me flayed open, until I am senseless with agony, unable even to cry out. I’ve bitten my tongue, tasted the blood. I know I am going to die soon, and I welcome it. I cannot stand the pain. I have never known such pain.
They rub salt into every cut, squeeze my ragged flesh like overripe fruit, until the juices run out of me, taking with them my will and strength, and finally, they drag me screaming hoarsely into the sea, where the icy, caustic waters are like acid on my flayed body.
I scream until the taste of blood and salt flood my mouth, until I feel myself drowning.
And all the while those cold hands hold me, twelve hands. Unfeeling. Heartless.
These are the only things that I remember of my life.
Or rather, these are the only things worth remembering, about my life.
Chapter One
‘Life is what you make of it’ isn’t that what people say? You’re given what you’re given, and after that it’s all in your hands. Your life, your fate, and all the choices and roads you can go down. It’s up to you to make it happen, whatever ‘it’ is. Your dream I guess. Whatever it is that you want can be yours, if only you work hard enough, if only you can stay focused and move through life like I ship through the ice. Undaunted.
Those people, are morons.
And clearly, they weren’t born donors.
Technically, I wasn’t either. The law says that one person in every family has to serve on the donor register. That was my dad when I was born. His dad before him, one of the first wave of donors at the age of thirty-nine. And it should have been my older brother when Dad died. But, as I’ve already said, man has no control over his fate. And an eighteen year old like me had even less.
Ward, that’s my brother, is three years older than me. When Dad died, natural causes, before you can start wondering, Ward was twenty-one, and he should have been the one to go out into service.
Only it was me. My idea, you see, to sign the waver that meant I could take his place. That was the only choice I ever got to make in my life. And I made it because there was no other option. If your brother had been in and out of hospital his whole life with asthma, anaemia, and glandular fever, would you send him into service? Would you expect him to go into a house hundreds of miles away, so that a vampire could drink his blood every day for the rest of his life?
Thought not.
I woke up staring at the underside of the dining room floorboards, same as I had every morning for six years. The boards were painted white on my side, but that didn’t disguise the fact that I was under someone’s floor, in the basement space under the dining room and living room of the big house that still wasn’t my home.
I’d come to Eldale House when I was eighteen, in 2007, and I’d lived in the basement ever since. The day I arrived, I was terrified, clinging to the handle of my tin suitcase as I carried it from the brand new 4X4 that had picked me up at home to the front door of the house. I had been accompanied by a man named Elias, one of the body guards that served at the house. He was human. Up until I met the head of Eldale I had never met a vampire.
That’s not actually that unusual, most people never meet a vamp, unless they work in service. Vamps aren’t big on going out into the world and doing their own shopping, or picking up dry cleaning. Most of them live in compounds, self sufficient to a large degree. They have human servants, and they’re the ones who go out on errands. My older sister, Effie, does that. She works on a compound in Alaska, keeping the cars and electrics running.
Anyway, when I’d left the house with Elias and gone out to the car, Ward had held me back a moment and said,
“Remember, don’t stare, and don’t do anything to piss anyone off. If you want an easy life, you have to be easy with people.” He’d looked paler than usual that morning, his unshaven stubble standing out like iron filings on his skin.
He’d watched until the car went around the corner, even though I knew he couldn’t see me through the tinted windows.
When I’d arrived at the house, Elias had handed me silently over to the head of the household staff. He hadn’t spoken to me for the entire drive, and I was shit scared by then. But the woman was nice enough, and she patted my shoulder.
“Hello, I’m Pam,” she said, her mouth smiling before her eyes could catch up, so for a moment she looked a little scary. I waited for her to ask my name, so I could say ‘Hi, I’m Bailey’ and then I’d have made my first acquaintance at their weird house.
Only, she didn’t ask. Instead she said, “I expect you’re feeling homesick already, don’t worry, it’ll pass. Sooner than you know it you’ll be visiting home again. Who’ve you left behind?”
“My brother, my sister’s already out at work.”
“And your parents?”
“My mom died when we were little, my dad about three months ago.”
She nodded sadly. “Well, I expect your brother will write to you soon, so you can keep in touch with him.”
She led me into the hall of the house, which was corniced with elaborate plaster shapes and designs. A massive staircase made of polished wood and granite led up to the second floor, and there were two floor above that. The very ceiling of the house was a strange shape, and I could see that it had once been a skylight, but the glass had been replaced with pearly tiles that surrounded an enormous chandelier. Pam showed me a door under the grand staircase.
Through the door and down a set of dark stairs, was a corridor, one end of which ended in a heavily locked door.
“That’s the garden, don’t worry, we don’t use that door. This one’s to your rooms.”
The door at the other end of the short, musty corridor was the kind of cheap thing that I’d seen in apartment buildings. Through it was another dim hallway; everything seemed to be lit by emergency lighting. I noticed that the light fittings were shatterproof plastic, like the kinds in police cells.
The carpet on the floor was green, and appeared new. The walls had also been painted, a kind of off-white with a bit of cream in it. There were three rooms that would be mine. The first was a bedroom, under the dining room. There was a double bed against one wall, and opposite a chunk of empty space big enough for another bed, before my eyes reached the dresser and table under three small, blacked-out windows. From the shape of the wall, I could tell that there was a bay window overhead.
“They’re blacked out because this part of the house faces the outside, and it wouldn’t do to have passersby know that a human was living down here,” Pam said, “the whole reason you’re down here is so that no one breaking in will know where you are. The rest of us
have rooms under the eaves.”
I felt protected when I heard that, and glad that I wouldn’t be easily gotten to. I’d heard a lot about people, mostly anti-vampire groups, getting at donors and killing them, or worse, drugging them, to deprive the vampire in the house of blood, or poison them. I didn’t want that to happen to me.
The other two rooms were a bathroom, with a toilet, bath and sink, more dim lights, and a ceiling which was tunnel shaped and made of bricks, so it was like being in an antique sewer pipe. There was a room at the back of the little apartment, and it had a chair and table, as well as a shelf and a reading lamp.
“We’ll get you some books and things shortly,” Pam promised.
So, that was my home, and it still was, six years later.
I got out of bed, stretched, and padded out of the bedroom and into my bathroom. I ran water into the sink, checked my face in the mirror, and opened the tiny medicine cabinet under the sink. There wasn’t much in there, only antibacterial cream, some other lotions and plasters. I rubbed some Arnica cream into my neck, which looked sore and bruised. The ring of teeth marks was livid against the skin. All that stuff about two twin puncture marks? Forget it. I wish vamps only had the two fangs.
I brushed my teeth, combed my hair flat and flicked at it. It would need cutting soon, it was hanging into my eyes a lot. Dull brown and unremarkable. When I was about sixteen I’d started putting streaks in it, blue, grey, black. But I’d let it grow out, getting anything like hair dye at Eldale was a nightmare.
My breakfast came down on a tray. The guy carrying it didn’t look me in the eye as he set it down. I was used to it. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and he was probably new to the kitchen, because I hadn’t seen him before.
Same breakfast as always. I started on it as soon as the dark haired kid went back upstairs. One egg, boiled, with toast soldiers for dipping. A bowl of oatmeal, a fruit cup. There was a little plastic pod of pills for me to take. Vitamin supplements, iron, vitamin C, the things that loosing blood every day can take out of you. I took them with my glass of orange juice.
I ate it up and put the empty plates back on the tray, then left it by the door for collection.
There was nothing I had to do until lunch came, so I got on with my regular time-killing activities. I put my portable TV on low, some talk show thing, and did my exercises on the floor in front of it. Fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups, fifty planks, repeat. I did a couple of sun salutations and shoulder stands to loosen myself up and cool down afterwards, then laid out on my bed and watched a couple of re-runs of a home makeover show.
It got boring, really fast, so I got out one of my books, even though I’d read it about a hundred times already, and flicked to my favourite part, where a young barber surgeon travels from England to Persia to become a physician. The journey was long and cruel, and I enjoyed reading every minute of it, especially where he get’s stranded in the desert, and thinks he’s going to die.
My lunch came, a variation on the usual theme, egg salad sandwich with a wrapped chocolate biscuit and an apple. The worst thing about it was, the chocolate always made me crave coffee, which I couldn’t have. Too much caffeine. Don’t ask me why that’s a rule, you’d think they’d want my heart to beat fast. I wasn’t allowed bacon either, or anything with too much salt and fat – bad for my arteries.
Of course, you needed a knife to cut bacon. There was no way they were going to give me one of those.
After lunch I ran backwards and forwards from one end of the apartment to the other, and did a few commando rolls in the empty bedroom space. I had too much energy to burn off. I ran through my exercises again, adding some somersaults for flavour.
After that I took a shower, jerked off, more out of boredom than anything else, as I usually do at least once, sometimes twice a day. You would too, if you never saw anyone else, not really, and had hours alone to kill.
I towelled off, and laid down on my bed, naked, letting my damp hair fall all over my pillows. It was warm in the basement, too warm, and the closeness of the air meant that I never had to wear much more than jeans and a t-shirt. My hair dried quickly, and I turned onto my side to read some more of my book.
Most of the time I could phase out, and realise that I wasn’t actually watching TV or reading, I was just staring at the wall, or one of the blacked out windows, and thinking. I thought a lot about what might be happening upstairs in the house, or about characters in the books that I’d read and re-read, always wishing that I had a new book, a new story to live out in my head.
I never tried thinking about Ward or Effie. It was too painful. When they turned up in my head, it was usually an accident.
All that thinking, but I didn’t feel smart, I felt dumb, and soft, like a pet. Overfed and given a little cushion to sleep on, but nothing much else to do. I didn’t really have to do anything.
At least, I didn’t have to, until night came around.
Dinner came, liver cut into bite-sized pieces and served on cooked spinach. Glass of orange juice on the side. An iron rich meal to improve the quality of my blood. I cannot describe how much I hate liver. It had the texture of inch thick layers of undried paint and eating it was a daily challenge. I only got it down out of sheer force of will.
There was no way to tell that it was night other than looking at the clock. The basement was always full of lukewarm yellow light. That night it was Elias who came to get me, it was always one of the secure personnel. Like hell were the household staff going anywhere near ‘master’ when he was hungry.
OK, so no one called him master, he was Desane to the other vamps who came to the house, and Sir to everyone else.
I didn’t call him anything, and he never spoke to me at all.
I have no idea why someone had to take me up to his room, I’d been doing it every night for six years. It was the only time that I left the basement, so I remembered the route through the house pretty much exactly. But someone always came to take me. I didn’t mind so much, because it was the longest time I spent with anyone, even if Elias and the others didn’t actually speak to me.
The place I went to meet Desane was his daysleep room, and it had a four foot thick door made out of solid steel. The walls were reinforced with the same stuff, not to mention the floor and the ceiling.
You think the average middle-eastern dictator is security conscious? Times that by ten and you have a vampire approach to security. That was why they had specific donors for blood. So they could make sure their supply was uncontaminated. Every member of their staff was vetted, and you could only work for a vampire if you had an unblemished criminal record, going back over the last four generations of your family.
Sounds pretty intense, but, the revelation that vampires were real had pissed a lot of people off. Pretty much the entire Republican party wanted vampires stuck on reservations out of the way of people, and most ordinary folks on the street were terrified that these nocturnal citizens would murder them in their beds.
Elias put his code into the keypad by the door, and the steel door opened. Beyond it was the antechamber. I stepped into the elevator sized space alone, and the door shut behind me. The idea was, only Desane could open the door from the antechamber into his daysleep room. I pushed the button that made the intercom buzz on the other side. Over my head the camera whirred, and I knew Desane was taking a look to make sure I was alone.
The door in front of my slid open and I stepped into the room beyond.
The daysleep room, where Desane spent the hours from sunrise ‘till sunset, was plain as the rest of the house was grand. The walls were plastered and painted white. The bed in the centre of the room was made of steel (vamps aren’t big on wood anywhere near their daytime refuges, so I guess all that stuff about wooden stakes is true) and had a charcoal coloured sheet over the mattress, and two pillows with matching covers. Why bother with a duvet when you’re not susceptible to the cold?
Aside from the bed, there was only one other thing in t
he room, a metal trolley loaded with first aid supplies. Those were for me.
Desane was still by the intercom as I came in, and he walked past me to the bed, taking his dark grey t-shirt off as he did so, and dropping it onto the floor. He lowered his black sleep pants with a graceful flick of his fingers, not even pausing as he stepped out of them and went to the bed.
I felt my throat close up, my heart thumping a little. So, it was one of those nights.
I don’t want you thinking that this is normal, because it’s not. Most vamps don’t sleep with their donors, or at least, I never heard of it ‘till I came to live with Desane. But, he’s a practical guy, and I guess clearing a prostitute or escort for security is too risky for him to consider. And I’m already cleared, and I come up to his room every night. So I suppose it’s easy for him. Vampires as a rule aren’t really ‘relationship’ orientated. Mostly they don’t even like other vampires, let alone humans. But sex is as good for them as it is for us, so I guess they don’t want to go without.
And I don’t either, which is why, when Desane first stripped and pushed me down on his bed, some five years ago, I went without protest. It’s not like they were going to clear someone for me to date.
That night, I guess he was tired, because he just laid out on the bed and motioned for me to get on top of him. I’d done my prep in my bathroom downstairs, and I took my clothes off quickly, because Desane isn’t exactly patient, like most vampires he views any fumbling as annoyingly human.
Desane was atypical for a vampire, because he was gorgeous. Not that most of them are ugly, but, they kind of just look like people, at least, until you get up close. Desane must have been hot in life, because as a vampire he was tall, slim and pale skinned. His hair was the kind of tawny brown that made me jealous, and his eyes were the colour of copper. With the standard vampiric pallor on him, he looked like he was made of flawless marble. If I thought about it much (and in the absence of the means to buy sex toys for myself, his dick was something I thought about a lot) I guess he was bigger than most guys I’d slept with before I’d come to Eldale. Not that there had been many.
Prior Engagements Page 29