Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) (21 page)

Because this?

Aralt didn’t see it (clearly didn’t want to), but this was where I was
king
: buried balls deep in the numbers and giving my mind free rein for once.

Aralt wielded effortless control because he preyed on others’ weaknesses, sniffing them out like blood. Yet he never saw their strengths. And that? Was
his
weakness.

All right then, so by now I knew Advance was nothing but a front for something dodgy. Even the gigs and LPs.

Sorry love, I never wanted to tell you before, not bald like this. I’m certain you guessed at it. But this is me turning round, so there’s no hiding it, even after all these years. Christ you deserved so much better with that voice of yours.

I wish I’d been the one to give it to you.

See what those reams of numbers whispered to me was that Advance was there to make cash (and it did), but it was also a money laundering scheme.

It was hidden in plain sight but also had gaping black bloody holes in its finances. They gave Alessandro nightmares each night because he was too honest to understand his Author had to know they were there. The thing was, I’d partly sussed out where the money was being siphoned to, and
that’s
what was giving
me
bleeding nightmares.

When I glanced round for Alessandro, I saw his legs in tweed trousers, poking out from behind the bed. He was crouched in the tiny space against the wall, rocking backwards and forwards. He was muttering something under his breath. Over and over. I sighed.

Alessandro was one of the snowflake patterns. Not one the same. But now with you I’ve grown intimate with that rocking and muttering, haven’t I? Sometimes it feels like it’s all I’ve got left of you because when you stop, you lie so still I’d give anything for you to start up again.

What are you thinking about when you rock?

Come back to me
.

I’m here. Keep listening to my voice. And come back to me.

Alessandro was curled foetal. When I slipped down next to him, he flinched, like I was gearing up to clout him. We sat in silence like that for nearly half an hour, until slowly Alessandro unfurled. He glanced out of the corners of his peepers at me.

‘It’s too much,’ Alessandro murmured, ‘too much.’ Then his pale cheeks pinked, as if suddenly becoming aware of what he’d been doing, in an awful moment of lucidity. He mumbled, ‘I’m sorry.’

I shrugged. ‘It’s all right. I’m bloody with you on that, mate.’ I flashed him a grin. Alessandro stared at me and then he grinned too. ‘Come on,’ I dragged him up, before we clambered over the bed. ‘Let’s stick something on.’

‘Kathy again?’ Alessandro suggested with a furtive glance, diving for his orange paper record racks. The racks were now permanently ranked around his walls, transforming his dormitory into a proper bloke’s room for the first time. It was a small change but it’d made me smile when I’d seen it.

You can liberate someone’s body from the prison of First Life, but it takes a hell of a lot more to free their mind.

Alessandro began to flip through to find your record.

I quickly shook my nut. The image of Ruby’s devastated expression was still too raw; I wasn’t that much of a tosser…not that I’d forgotten the stench of Aralt on every inch of Ruby’s skin.

Alessandro glanced at me, surprised. I realised I was frowning. Alessandro shuffled to the lipstick transistor, twisting it on instead to Radio Komodo.

The Kink’s “Really Got me Going’s” gritty, distorted guitar blasted out, loud enough to hide what I had to say. It was time to dig down below Advance’s glossy red surface to the rottenness underneath; I wanted to know where that money was disappearing. If the Plantagenet siblings intended to make me a part of this, then I wasn’t about to be a mindless puppet.

I edged closer to Alessandro. ‘When I was coming here I saw this older bloke, up in our private area. He was marching around like he owned it, wearing this…you know…white coat…scientist type…’

‘Silverman.’

‘Right, so what’s he then?’ Alessandro shifted from foot to foot, tapping his fingers up and down on the aluminium chair. ‘Come on, this is me here. I’m Ruby’s, just like you’re Aralt’s. That makes us family. You can tell me.’

Alessandro nodded. ‘I know. But Aralt’s rule states--’

‘Sod the rules. I’ve told you before, we’re the Lost: we take what we like and we do what we want. Or are you still locked up in an institution? Did you never bloody escape?’

Alessandro was breathing hard. He was wearing this glazed look, like he was imagining being back there right now, abandoned by everyone he loved, with the label of
idiot
around his neck. And I’d caused that, heartless bastard that I was.

But how I figure it, sometimes you have to push, if something’s important enough. Plus it was for the lad’s own good. It wasn’t like anyone else was volunteering to show Alessandro what was what.

At least, that’s how I justified it, even with everything that happened after. We all make our choices: I reckoned I was doing the right thing. What that meant, however, got screwed up, even before I was elected into Blood Life.

I gripped Alessandro’s shoulders. ‘Who’s Silverman?’

‘A biologist. He’s a specialist.’

‘In what?’ I caught a flash of ugly lizard, leering down from the walls, as its mouth salivated blood and I knew, clear as day. Alessandro’s obsession - and Aralt’s. What this whole set up was built around, like a bleeding house of cards. ‘Komodo?’

Alessandro nodded, running his hand through his neat hair. His glance darted to the door, as if Aralt would sweep down on us in bloody vengeance.

I remembered what I’d seen, as I’d stormed away from Ruby, blinded at first with grief and rage at the death of our love but then how I’d spotted this bloke, who was out of place in scientist get up. He’d also been where he
shouldn’t
have been.

I realised this scientist had lurked in the shadows for weeks now, without it sinking into my consciousness. I’d caught glimpses of him out of the corner of my eye, down corridors or coming out of meetings with Aralt. You know the way you miss the most important things because they’re hidden under the everyday? Now my emotions had been heightened by my pain, until every detail shone out to pinpoint clarity, I’d noticed: the way the geezer had crept silently along the edge of the corridor, his greying nut down, as if deliberately trying not to draw attention.

Here’s how I was fixing it: what record company needed to research anything, let alone in secret?

So I’d followed the scientist down a warren of hallways to a section of Advance, which I’d never explored before.

When the bloke had opened a locked door and edged inside, I’d caught a whiff of pungent chemicals. I’d dashed closer.

Just before the door had slammed closed, I’d seen a sliver of what was inside: a white room, which was decked out like some sort of laboratory. Needles. Vast crimson vats, which I could taste - even from that distance - fizzing on my tongue. And what did the bastard have strapped down to a steel table?

A starkers First Lifer, shackled at wrists and ankles.

‘Tell me about the experiments,’ I ordered softly.

Alessandro started forward, his small fingers gripping my arms, like bleeding claws. ‘Aralt expressly told me not to--’

‘Ask him myself, shall I?’

‘No, no, no,’ Alessandro dragged me back. ‘It was the Komodo. That’s what the whole thing has been for. The venom. Of course, then they started to bring in these First Lifers and…’ He wrung his hands miserably.

‘Told you I’d be a Dutchman, didn’t I? So what’s it really all about?’’

Alessandro collapsed onto the bed. ‘
Our
venom. How to split it: the part, which paralyses and that which kills. Truly, though, I don’t know why, cross my heart and hope to die.’

‘But you will know, ‘cos you’re gonna find out.’

Alessandro jolted off the bed. ‘Can’t, please, can’t.’

I placed my hands on his shoulders again. ‘You told me that to be alone and trapped was worse than death. But what I can’t figure out is how
this
,’ I gestured round at Alessandro’s tiny room (improved though it was), ‘your life, such as it is here with Aralt, is any better? You don’t owe that tosser nothing. And I promise, if you help me, I’ll take care of him. I’ll free you, good and proper. Then, if I’m still breathing, I’’ll show you the world, as you should always have been shown it. Understand?’

Alessandro shook his nut. ‘But how..?’

‘Let me worry about that. For now, you figure out a way to hold up your end.’

I skulked down the carpeted corridor towards Aralt’s study, like bloody history repeating itself. I was going to sneak into the lions’ den and unearth into the light, whatever secrets were festering deep in Advance’s dirty heart.

All right, so last time I’d played at heroics like this, I’d got done in by Erwood. But I was learning that Blood Life wasn’t so different to First. You could fight against it, run or hide, yet in the end the same Soul still clung to you and babbled in your ear, until you sodding well listened. This was who I’d been and who I was: a daft berk with a death wish.

I was passing Donovan’s quarters, the buzz of the Small Faces’ high energy guitars bleeding through, when his rosewood doors swung wide, and I was hit by the full blast of the music. Then I was grabbed by my jacket and hauled inside.

‘Hey man, where are you going? Stick around, it’s really happening in here.’ Donovan slammed me against the wall, with a shrill laugh.

The git was tripping; the sweet fug from a thick joint, which he was clutching, choked me. Donovan took a drag, before offering it to me.

I shook my nut. I didn’t need to add being stoned to this night’s heady mix of danger. See one lesson had seeded from first time round at least: I wouldn’t allow myself to be sucked in by the world’s temptations.

But then unlike Grace, Donovan wasn’t my type.

Donovan shrugged, slipping his arm around my shoulders. He pulled me further into his suite of rooms, which were an explosion of colour and life, as much as Aralt’s were a paean to the cold space age: a rainbow of pop artist posters and black and white portraits of celebrities. Donovan seemed as in love with this age, as I’d fallen tackle deep.

Donovan caught me staring at the posters. He puffed on his joint with a grin, which turned his mouth up wide around his canines.

‘Man does all this bug my bro,’ Donovan gestured round at his room. ‘But you know what I say?’ Donovan threw himself down on an inflatable PVC chair, which was cast in sickly orange by the Lava Lamp next to it that oozed translucently. His pupils were dilated.
He was
so sodding gone
. ‘We take our poses on the stage. Dress up. Choose our props, set, lighting and music. First Life’s just the opening act. But us? What’s so groovy is we get to live the grand finale. And how I see it? Why not go out with a freaking bang?’ He stroked his fingers down the Lava Lamp, tracing the bubbles. ‘Try watching this when you’ve taken something to expand your mind…it’s far out…’

I eyed the door. How many hours left before dawn? Before Aralt came home? I took a step backwards. ‘I need to--’

‘Sit down.’ A sudden steel, as Donovan fixed me with a gaze, which said
no bleeding
way
was I getting out of that door anytime soon.

Here I was meant to be redeeming myself for a former life’s mistakes and instead I was trapped with this nancy boy and his mind altered wanderings. I should’ve guessed this was how it’d go.

There’s no such thing as redemption: that’s only so much claptrap to keep the night-time terrors at bay, when the old conscience comes aknocking.

How great’s a photographic memory then?

I glanced around but I couldn’t see another seat; I wouldn’t put it past these wankers to make everyone kneel at their feet. Sighing, I began to crouch down.

‘Watch this, it’ll blow your mind.’ Donovan staggered up to an abstract sculpture, which was pushed against the wall, like a giant brown puzzle. Then he hauled it apart with quick motions, chucking the foam pieces down into bizarre seats.

You First Lifers never stop amazing me with the different ways you invent to conceal the truth: seating as art, radios as lipsticks, false hair, eyelashes and bodies…

You’re so frightened of this world and the one fundamental truth of all - you’re born, you live and then you bloody die – that everything in-between you hide, mask and transform, as if that makes it easier. It sodding doesn’t, you know. Get what I’m fixing at?

Only when you stare at what lies beneath - right in the eyes - can you face living. And dying too.

That’s what I’m doing right now, even though this hurts, every bleeding word I write. Hurts worse than anything I’ve ever felt. I’ve got to face it though because you deserve that. No, you deserve so much more than I can give. Yet it’s something, and that’s got to count, right?

Can you still hear me? Hold on, love. Just hold on a little more for me.

‘Chairs are so bourgeois,’ Donovan shrugged. ‘Everything should either be art or throwaway.’ All right then, so there I was perched on one end of this sphere, Donovan draped on the other, as he swayed to the music. ‘You’re gonna dig the gigs I booked for Saturday. Are you having a cool time in that crazy scene?’