Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1)

by Rosemary A Johns

  I gripped Ruby hard by the shoulders, as she traced the blood from my lips, slowly sucking it from her fingers. Then we were kissing.

  All the nasties and wankery? Yeah, that first kill was the most complete moment I’ve ever experienced in First Life or in Blood.

  I’m not going to lie to you, not one word when this is the last time…

  Well, you know, right? And git that I am, less or more than human that I am, it was bloody perfect.

  When Ruby held up her neb to be kissed - it’s true - I loved her. And I was turned on because I wanted her, the same as I wanted the blood.

  I’d have done anything for her. The two of us could do whatever we pleased.

  It was intoxicating.

  When I pushed my hand down towards Ruby’s quim, however, she caught my wrist, with a laugh. ‘Just the blood heat. It will pass.’

  ‘What if I don’t want it to?’

  ‘You are young, and this is new. When it fades--’

  ‘I won’t let it.’

  I saw Ruby’s expression change then. For the first time, there was a mixture of confusion and doubt, rather than contented control. Ruby stepped back. ‘I know a place we could… Where our own kind…’

  ‘Others?’

  Ruby frowned. On her brow it was terrible. ‘You do not want that?’

  I slipped away from Grace’s naked body, noticing with surprise that no blood had leaked from the tiny puncture wounds at her neck, as if something in my venom had sealed the holes, after my teeth had withdrawn. It was a marvel of evolution.

  Grace was still alive – just - her gaze seeming to follow me around the dark vault.

  I leant against the caskets; the wine fumes were making me heady. ‘I don’t play nicely with others, or at least they don’t with me. I never was much part of the world, even when I walked in it.’

  ‘But we play very well, do we not?’ Ruby was at my side, even before I’d seen her move. Her fingers teased my tackle with long strokes.

  ‘You’re different,’ as the rhythm of Ruby’s hand increased, I struggled to stay still, ‘you’re my Author, muse, liberator…’

  ‘Love?’

  I caught Ruby’s fingers before I climaxed, raising them to my lips. ‘Is that not why you chose me? So I would love?’

  Ruby slunk closer, entwining her fingers around my throat. ‘So, lover, if you do not wish to walk in the world, will you let me be your guide to it?’

  ‘A Grand Tour?’

  ‘Of sorts. The two of us.’

  ‘And the earth to eat whole.’

  Ruby’s nails bit crescents into my neck. ‘Patience. Learn its secrets first, before we dance. You have a mind, as well as a heart. I elected you for both.’

  When Ruby wrenched her fist back, I waited for the clout – this one liked to play rough. But the smash came beside my head with a loud splintering of wood. Then an explosion of red, a blast of wine fumes, and I was flooded with it, as a crimson gush poured from the gaping hole.

  Christ in heaven Ruby had some power in her; I wanted some of that.

  No, all of it. Ruby and her secrets wrapped up in a bow.

  Ruby thrust me back, until we were caught in a fountain of French wine. We were giggling like kids, opening our mouths wide, drinking deep, as it coated us in a second skin.

  ‘Thought you weren’t going to get me ran-tan?’

  Ruby licked the red tears streaming down my cheeks. ‘This is a celebration. There must be wine at a man’s…’ She caught my hand between her sticky fingers, twisting it back towards the contorted corpse of the First Lifer, who I’d once wept for. ‘To Grace.’

  I blinked the wine from my peepers. The blood was still hot, pulsing through me in a howling haze of ecstasy. I smiled. ‘To the world.’

  Ruby. My red-haired devil, Author, muse, liberator, guide: my gorgeous nightmare.

  Ruby did it, you know. She showed me the world’s secrets.

  Yet here’s the thing, to do that she took me to darker depths than I’d ever dreamt of, let alone knew had beat in my own Soul.

  But that’s bollocks, right?

  Because I’d only thought they didn’t, until Ruby showed me those places, which we all hide locked away, reckoning we’re dead civilised, rather than bloody cavemen. As I said, bollocks.

  We’re animals when it comes down to it. Predators of one type or another. You First Lifers war over territory, your gods or your women, as if you’ve only just discovered bleeding fire. If you ever try and get between a woman and her cub, you’ll soon discover you’ve got a tigress on your hands.

  See the truth of it is, everyone enjoys a good barney - win or lose - they hunger for the fist and the boot. Who doesn’t want to get a bit dirty, once in a while?

  Modern life tries to smother it, but it’s under there, if you lift up the corner and peer beneath, then you’ll see it’s bubbling to get out. And Ruby, sod it, did she let it out.

  Ruby brought me to life by killing me.

  Every emotion amplified? Mine – love, curiosity, an aversion to authority – they survived but twisted, like a blasted tree after lightening. Where once they were pale and sickly, now they were intense, powerful and dark.

  It’s not as straightforward as good and bad. You don’t get to sticky label me. No one does. It was simply different.

  It made me feel like loving Ruby would be the death of me, even as I lived for being close to her. We relished breathing the same air. Draining the same First Lifers. Shagging and hurting, until we knew each other’s bodies the same as our own. All was nothing outside our love. It smashed on us. Broke on us. We savaged it. Together we screamed at the world and when we had the world by the throat, the world screamed back. There was nothing we couldn’t do, or take, together. Nobody else we needed.

  I thought Ruby was mine, stupid bastard that I was. But I was young, so yeah, I didn’t reckon I’d be the one who got burnt.

  It should’ve been impossible for us to understand each other, what with Ruby being an Elizabethan bird, and me not being born until the age of steam power. In First Life, if there’s a single generational divide, the parents can’t understand a word their kids are spitting, whilst the kids reckon their parents are dinosaurs, who should be euthanized for not keeping up with the latest slang.

  So how can Blood Lifers bridge the centuries: Tudor to Generation X? Punk Rocker to Georgian dandy?

  Because we don’t stand still: mosquitoes teared in amber or museum exhibits in wax.

  Each moment we travel through - in our parallel lives to yours - it sticks, clinging like caught gossamer spider webs to our skin. The worlds of First Lifers never die. They live on in the blood of those who witness their crawl from the cradle to the grave, which just sometimes is a brilliant burning dance across the stage.

  Me? I’m the bleeding audience.

  True, some Blood Lifers despise this adaptation and mingling of species; they want to keep themselves pure and uncontaminated. The wankers. But me?

  First Life fascinated and consumed me; it haunts me still. The ease of it, which I’d never learnt. Its warmth, joy and life drew me, like the sodding moth to proverbial flame; I hungered for the burn. In turn, your world clung to me more than most. We suckled each other as the years seeped by, one year crimson into the next.

  But I was only ever on the outside, looking in.

  It all started with stuffed hedgehogs. The Great Exhibition of 1851. Of course I was too young then. But papa’s lot? They went bloody barmy for them, starting a craze (and you know what us Victorians were like with our crazes). We never knew where the bleeding line was.

  Ruby decided the first thing on our list, after we’d sampled the delights of London, was to have a gander at Potter’s Museum in Bramber. We broke in one night, when the well-to-do tourists had already gone home.

  We strolled in the silence, between tableaux of dead kitties with ribbons tied around their fluffy necks, as they posed on hind legs, like miniature First Lifers at the altar: brid
e, bridegroom and vicar. Others modelled frilly costumes, as they sedately supped at a tea party: a polite society of corpses.

  That was Ruby’s number one lesson, and it didn’t take me long to get it: it’s not us Blood Lifers, who dream of death - it’s you First Lifers.

  It fascinates, possesses and excites you. So you hold it close, precious for those quiet moments. You fear it. Yet you still seek it out vicarious. Even though you always know it’s coming, you still love the shadows.

  Blood Lifer’s aren’t death; they’re merely part of something bigger.

  ‘See how they play games too?’ Ruby had whispered.

  After, we travelled by night to Dover, crossing the English Channel to Le Havre, by coach again and then a trip by boat up the Seine to Paris.

  When Ruby spoke French it was beautiful, mesmerising – and perfect. I foolishly reckoned she’d be impressed with my mimicked attempts.

  Ruby, however, only laughed, dragging me away. ‘Do not frown so. We will find you a tutor. A good tutor. A proper tutor.’

  ‘But I…Wasn’t it right?’

  ‘There’s a difference between right and the feel of it coursing through your blood. You must learn to listen and feel. Not parrot.’ Tutors? It was like being a kid again. Every evening I awoke to Ruby’s naked outline pressed to mine, in the crisp Parisian air, with her long, red hair spread like curtains, over the white of the sheets. Yet when I’d roll over in the four-poster (a new luxury indeed), and slip my hand to Ruby’s knockers, her emerald peepers would snap open, cold and hard as hell. ‘If you wish your trinkets not to be rent or be-torn, I would remove your hand and concentrate on your lessons instead.’

  Fencing, riding, dancing… Ruby said all men must have these accomplishments. Even Blood Lifers.

  When at last Ruby was satisfied (and she was bloody hard to satisfy), we hired a carriage and flew on to Italy.

  It wasn’t until we arrived in Turin that Ruby finally rewarded me for my patience in my lessons, teaching me new ones as she did so, which I never wanted to end.

  We didn’t surface for several months from the ecstasy of each other, except to hunt in the ancient streets.

  From there we rode to Florence, where Ruby became my Cicerone, guide and tutor; it was a revelation. I was walking in this vast world, which I’d once enviously watched gliding by on the Thames. Now the earth was revealed, spread before us like a sodding banquet; the greatest works of First Lifers, were as if ours alone.

  In the blackest night, we’d wander the deserted piazzas, staring up at the Duomo’s terracotta and white dome; Brunelleschi, fifteenth century, Ruby would murmur and then point across the piazza at a Gothic bell tower, which soared into the star-lit, Tuscan sky: Giotto’s Campanile, she’d add.

  Or we’d perch on a crumbling wall high over the city. Ruby would rest her nut on my shoulder, as we were serenaded by the haunting Gregorian chants of San Miniato’s Benedictine monks, during vespers.

  We ate two of the monks after; they tasted sweet, like nectar.

  You’d expect monks to be peaceful, but one duffed me right up, before I bit. I guess it was the outfit, which caused me to hesitate - all that black - or maybe the chanting had made me sleepy. Yet after the first taste, I fumbled, and he legged it, his skinny shins kicking, like a long-legged hare.

  Ruby laughed at me; I hated it when she did that. ‘After him then, my brave hero.’

  ‘In this heat?’ I leant against the cool stone, probing the swelling around my purpling peeper. ‘Lost my appetite.’

  I watched Ruby guzzle at the neck of her fat prize; it hadn’t been a fair contest between our two - hers wobbled with too much lard to fight back. She gazed at me over his sweaty neck. ‘Eat. We can share.’

  ‘I don’t need charity.’ Churlishly, I turned to watch my monk’s stumbling collapse. He’d only fled halfway down the hill, before he’d staggered, clutching at his chest, with a comical strained look.

  All right then, here’s where I come clean: how it really works. The truth is we don’t drain dry, that’s the bollocks. Blood is pure and powerful, even the smallest drop. One pint is more than enough to satisfy us. It’s our secret, which is deadly.

  It’s not the loss of blood that does you in, not when we’re taking so much less than the half, which causes a First Lifer to cop it. It’s what’s invisible on the tips of our fangs.

  You can beat us off, or escape entirely. It won’t matter. If you’ve been bit, you’re dead.

  The heart – bam – explodes. The blood flow is blocked. The heart’s starved of oxygen. And then it’s all over. I believe the quacks, who reckon they’re dead clever men in this modern age, call it myocardial infarction.

  In autopsy reports across the world, low blood levels are only minor footnotes, where the primary cause of death is… You guessed it. Not us.

  We’re the perfect camouflaged predator.

  It’d be a bleeding crime, except in case you’re not getting the through line here, this is about survival, and I’m all for that. In the past, the only thing we left was a pale but peaceful corpse, before the wailing began.

  Now that’s evolution.

  A First Lifer’s heart, who lives an average life, beats 100,000 times a day, 35 million in a year, two and a half billion in a lifetime. All that thudding and squeezing simply to pump the blood round because it always comes back to… Yeah, you know what.

  You reckon every single weak heart gave out on its own? There must be part of you, which finds it reassuring that some were helped along?

  You used to hate it when I talked like that; you’d get so shirty with me.

  Yet the memory of blood is the only thing I have left now I’m on the pig gruel.

  One night we slipped into La Specola, a museum next to the Pitti Palace, which stank of something sweet but rotten. When Ruby gripped my hand tight, I realised I’d never felt this radiating from her before: it was something alike to fear but not. It was revulsion.

  ‘The First Lifers are proud of this…museum of death,’ Ruby breathed. ‘They call it science.’

  ‘We can go. Let’s find some piazza with music, drinking and dancing. The land of the living for once? Then we can…’

  Ruby held her finger to my lips. ‘You need to see.’

  Ruby’s hand curled tighter around mine. I glanced up. The walls of the museum were pinned with dead butterflies: every type, colour and size. They were neatly ordered, categorized and labelled. As my pulse quickened, Ruby caught my eye. She nodded.

  Room after room was the same: display cases lining the walls, standing from floor to ceiling, or lying open, like glass coffins. Snow White in some twisted rendition of the tale. Rooms of stuffed birds, stilled forever on their perches, with predator next to natural prey: herbivores, carnivores, a huge hippo and a gallery of primates staring back blankly from their boxes.

  We paced in silence, until we reached the primates. Then I rested my forehead on the glass, holding my palm up to touch the grasp of the chimpanzee on the other side.

  Poor bugger.

  Death was so close it throttled me. I’d lived close with it, intimate-like, as a Blood Lifer.

  But this?

  I’d known science in my First Life or reckoned I had. Yet somehow I’d failed to see the darkness underneath.

  ‘All that’s missing is one of us,’ Ruby’s fingers were stroking the back of my nut. ‘Then they’d have the full collection. We’re the Lost species. Why do you think we hide?’ I twisted to Ruby, shocked. She raised her eyebrow. ‘Are we not superior? Evolution’s advancement? Yet we’re adapted for masking our true face, whilst relying on humans for sustenance. Just as we do the night for protection from the sun. Prithee tell me how beggarly is a divided world, in which half does not fathom the truth? And for it to be danger akin to heresy to reveal it? Consider what these First Lifers pay to see.’

  With disgust Ruby led me around the exhibits. For a moment, I thought there were mutilated cadavers laid out in the glass cases (
which gave me the willies I can tell you), but then I saw they were anatomical wax models, copied from real corpses.

  All right then, so that wasn’t much better because on every side were these torture victims, with their guts out, their chests ripped back and lungs offered up, as if we were about to dig in, whilst twins curled around each other bonded in uterus. The skinned man was laid on his side, arching in agony.

  When I paused at a man reduced to one large circulatory system, I felt Ruby’s arms snake around my waist. She rested her chin on my shoulder. Blue and red coils circled the corpse: First Lifer reduced to food and all it’d needed was a little flaying.

  Here, laid bare, was the proof that man was created for our needs.

  ‘They want to be feasted upon, even if they do not know it. A First Lifer is our prey. We grant the death he seeks, so he no longer needs to fear it.’

  I reckon Ruby experienced unexpected guilt for taking me to that place and giving me the collywobbles.

  No, all right then, not guilt - whatever was closest to that emotion, which she was still capable of feeling. She was tenderer than usual for the next few days.

  At least, she tied me up less often.

  I’d wake to Ruby just lying there, watching me. She’d kiss my neb lightly over and over, as if dispelling something.

  Then Ruby bought me a whole new set of close-fitting clobber: a double-breasted reefer with military stand-up collar in indigo check and a velvet trimmed overcoat. She twirled me round and round, clapping her hands in delight. Then she promenaded with me - all dolled up - in front of the fancy ladies and gentlemen in the piazza d’Azeglio, who were spilling out of the light and buzz of theatre performances, into the quiet of the night.

  They’d always felt off, however, those threads. Maybe because Ruby had chosen them for me, as if I was her sodding Mary-Ann.

  So later, when we were caught up in France during the First of the two bloody wars, I took the opportunity to filch a British Officer’s Great Coat. He didn’t need it, since he’d been shot through the head (poor sod). The coat, however, was fine.