Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) (33 page)

I realised you wanted to share this secret thrill of the night with me.

I don’t reckon you’ve ever understood what it meant that you didn’t want to teach or mould me. Instead you were happy to share in something, which blazed me with passion. I hadn’t seen it before in you and no one had shown it to me, in either First or Blood Life.

That’s when I truly got what you meant by wanting us both to be free together.

The problem was that the moors weren’t safe at night for you. All right then, safe enough for our little excursions together and nookie in the heather. But not to cross the whole thing, when you didn’t have my nocturnal vision. That’s why we worked out this trick, which became our treat to ourselves, where the caves transformed into our personal, night-time playground.

I’d get there just before dawn, descending deep enough that I wouldn’t melt. Then I’d spend the day setting up, before I’’d settle back and zonk out. I’d surprise the occasional climber, who’d shake me awake with comic urgency, terrified I’d fallen. It was always fun to see their different responses, when I’d give them the diver’s signal for A-ok and then say
cheers
, as I’d settle back for a kip.

When the sun had set, and the last of the climbers had found their way out of the caves, you’d drive down the road up to the quarry. You’d wait until you were alone, before you’d tool up: ropes looped over your shoulder and a helmet with a lamp on your nut.

It wasn’t long before you were as good…buggering hell, all right…a
better
climber than me.

We pushed onto harder routes, hammering pitons into new seams. We supported each other when it became tough. Shagged each other on the damp cave floors when we got too turned on.

Funny the burst of extra courage a bloke gets when his bird’s watching him. It’s even greater when his bird’s the one right behind him, shadowing his every move. I wasn’t going to back down from a cave wall. And that was the buzz. I was never closer to life, than when I was touching the face of death.

One night, we’d just descended from a bugger of a climb, which had been as exhilarating as hell.

You wrapped your arms tight around me, shivering in the night’s cold at the cave’s entrance. Then you snogged me hard and long, before drawing back. ‘Ready to go? I’m fair starved.’

I shook my nut. ‘I want one more shot at it.’ I ran my finger down your cheek. ‘Eat and get warm.’

You smiled. ‘Don’t forget the dawn.’

That’d become your singsong catchphrase every night, like I could ever bloody well forget the searing heat of the boiling sun. Yet since I’d had to tell you what’d happened to Aralt… Only under duress, mind you. You’d forced it out of me, whilst I was still smoking in a scorched state on the seat of your car.

Anyway, how I figure it, you deserved the truth, since you were the one, who’d managed to scrub the melted skin from my leather jacket.

It would have done me in to lose that coat.

Well, you’d been anxious since then, every time the sun first started to dye the horizon with light. Look, I don’t blame you. What happened was enough to give me sodding pause. So you said,
don’ t forget the dawn
. And I loved you even more for it.

I watched you back out of the quarry in a trail of dust, before I ducked down into the labyrinth of caverns.

I’d taken my first grip on the rock face, when I knew something was wrong.

That smell -
her
smell.

You never forget the call to blood. But it was too late. Even though every muscle tensed, as I swung my shoulders, the rock still connected with my temple, hard enough to force me stumbling to my knees.

Black crashed over me, like a curtain swishing shut at the flicks.
Show over
.

As my peepers closed, I saw the sweep of red silk.

At last my peepers fluttered open again, blurred and confused.

Christ did my head hurt
.

Then panic, twisting into fear, because my wrists and ankles were bound tightly with my own climbing ropes.

As I struggled, my skin crawled with cold and the dawning realisation howled through my muddled brain that I was starkers, stretched across a rock in the caves, like a sacrificial offering.

Bollocks
.

I thrashed from side to side wildly – hollering - but the ropes only bit deeper. I could feel the dull, heavy throb of bruises and the sticky trickle of blood.

‘Prithee peace. Be still,’ Ruby bent over me, her red hair stroking my exposed skin. Her pendant rubbed against my lips, as if expecting a deferential kiss. ‘Your brazen-faced First Lifer has gone. We are alone.’

‘Why?’ I tried to slow my heart and remember I was the predator and not the prey.

But this was Ruby: my Author, muse… Sod it, not my liberator. She’d never been that. But habits bred over a century are difficult to break.

Ruby slapped me hard across the mush; her nails raked my flesh. ‘Why? You traitorous wretch. You murdered my brother.’

‘He murdered Alessandro. He was gonna murder the world.’

When Ruby drew back, I saw the slightest shard of doubt in her. ‘We were going to build a new one.’

‘You mean Aralt was? One in his own image?’

‘He was a Plantagenet. A slave like you will not speak of him. Not when you left me for a First Lifer bawd.’

Ruby was wrapping a rag around a thick stick, dipping it in something, which stank of…
paraffin
.

Ruby didn’t look up at me but her hands were shaking. ‘Plantagenet was a bastard son, with no family in a time when that was shameful indeed. When his Author, one of the Magnificoes, elected him, all he wanted was to create a family. A family, which would be his legacy and blot out that beginning. His Author was…foolish, like you. He believed in a time of intolerance that some First Lifers could be trusted. Instead, they mistook him to be the devil. He could have saved himself but to hide the existence of Plantagenet and his family, he let himself burn.’ Ruby turned to me: her peepers were hollows. ‘We watched him scream and did nothing, as he blackened to ash. We are not one of us safe in this First Lifer world. Pray, do you believe they would willingly share it with us? Love you, if they knew what you are…and what you’d truly done?’ I shifted my gaze away from Ruby. This is what I hadn’t allowed myself to think. Couldn’t think. ‘As we hid in the shadows, watching the flames dance, the lesson seeded well.’ Ruby paced closer, holding up my gold lighter in her other hand. Then she smiled. As she flicked the lighter and it sparked, I twigged what she was planning. Christ in heaven, those are the moments you wish you were still in the dark. Ruby dipped the paraffin into the flame. The torch roared to life, casting grotesque shadows. I strained against the ropes, but they only cut my skin. Again. ‘I could smell you,’ Ruby trailed her hand down the length of me, caressing the inside of my thighs and then my tackle. She painted spirals on my chest with her nails. ‘I could taste your blood calling.’

‘And what was it saying?’ I trapped Ruby’s gaze with mine. ‘Sod off?’

Ruby’s hand stopped mid-pattern. Then I was howling with pain, unable to move away - held down by the ropes – and absorbing every ounce of agony, as Ruby shoved the torch against my naked gut. At last she pulled away, leaving my skin seared and blistered.

Right, so the bitch intended to cook me slowly.

Ruby had her back to me now, as if she was watching the shadow puppets cast by the torch. ‘Do you remember this, darling Light? My little games?’

‘Your games. Not mine.’

Ruby twisted back to me – blazing - the queen she’d always been. She flew at me, burning my right shoulder this time, until it blackened.

I screamed, not because I reckoned somebody would hear but because the pain had to go somewhere, or my nut would explode with it. The reek of my own roasting coated my nostrils.

I panted, as Ruby studied me, before gently wiping the tears from my cheek with her trembling finger. ‘Nay,’ Ruby agreed softly, ‘you were all about the kill.’

And Ruby was right. Who was I kidding? Like I was any better? Any
different
? I’ve never been one for heroics. We’d hunted the world together and drained it dry, so who knew me better than Ruby? That’s what I was: one of the Lost. What was the point in trying to deny that to my own Author?

I was a Plantagenet too.

When Ruby leaned closer, I tensed. Ruby, however, merely kissed my cheek, like a mama would their own kid. It’d been so long since anyone had given me that little gesture: it broke something inside.

I wanted to curl into Ruby again and be lost in her deadly safety, as I had for so long. I craved to let her cradle me close and forget how she’d betrayed me for her addiction to bloodlust and power. As our foreheads touched, I swore I saw a glimmer of my old Ruby. The one from before the taint of Advance, which she’d kept just for me, when we were two flames free in the world to dance in its ashes.

Then I remembered: the First Lifers strung on the walls of Radio Komodo, looped with tubes of blood and chemicals and the barren world, which Ruby would’ve left as her legacy, out of love for a brother, who’d hurt, controlled and battered, until there’d been nothing good left.

The fires were put out. And I was cold again.

Ruby nuzzled my neck. ‘Dearest prince, why did you foreswear me?’

‘You left me. For him.’

‘You were jealous?’

When Ruby sat up, gazing down at me steadily, I read something in her peepers. My hands clenched. ‘It was a bloody game? You and Aralt?’

Ruby laughed. ‘Love’s always a game.’

Maybe I’d been flamed to a crisp but even that was, for a moment, washed out of my shuddering body by a wave of lava hot fury. Those long months of torture and loss. Smelling Aralt on Ruby. Watching her share blood. Everything that had happened since - and all because Ruby had been pulling my strings in some twisted idea of romance, or adding spice, more out of skew even than my own..?

Remember I said that some Blood Lifers come back wrong but there’s no such thing as wrong, rather emotions amplified?

What must Ruby have been like in life? How screwed up by her father and husband to play with a bloke like that?

Yet even then I couldn’t hate my red-haired devil. That’s the thing with your Author. There’s a blood bond. And yeah, don’t strop, but our love had blazed through the decades and across continents.

But a
game
?

‘Not to me,’ I said softly, ‘it wasn’t a game to me.’

Ruby balanced the torch between my bare feet, sprawling over the rock next to me. When she rubbed her body against mine, the fire was back in the blistering burns.

I gritted my teeth.

Ruby pressed her knockers against my chest. ‘We played the world together. Ate it ripe. Do not tell me now that you’re tamed?’ Ruby’s long tongue licked against my lips.

‘No,’ Ruby’s tongue retracted, like a snake back into its hole, when I smiled. ‘I’m
happy
.’

Ruby sat bolt upright, staring down at me. Then she snatched up the torch, holding it against the sole of my right foot. She always knew how to hurt, Ruby did.

Through the haze of pain, I managed to hiss, ‘This world it’s…’ When Ruby eased off for a moment, I suddenly realised I was desperate not only to stop her burning me again, but for her to understand, so I could return to that feeling of wholeness, like when Ruby had kissed my cheek. ‘We get the night; the day’s not our due. First Lifers aren’t there to crush or conquer, exterminate or enslave, like they’re animals. Or we’re animals. We’re not. None of us. You’d have seen it too if you’d not been bound to the blood, your brother and this desperate desire never to be controlled again. And what am I? Just something for you to mould as dark as you and keep you warm in the shadows? Don’t you want something more? We don’t need to kill…’

Ruby bayed with laugher then, shocking in its sudden loudness. ‘A Blood Lifer who will not kill? Your shyness was not odd when you were first elected. But now?’ Her peepers quivered with tears. ‘That First Lifer has broken you.’

I managed to smile through the agony, which was hitting me in dizzying waves. ‘No. She’s freed me.’

Ruby didn’t talk to me after that. Instead she made her point with pain and she was bloody good with that. She knew how long to leave it between blows, so you didn’t grow numb or fall into shock because you want the bloke to feel it. To build up the anticipation, which is part of the whole deal: the waiting. Pain had always been Ruby’s thing. Not mine.

I discovered Ruby knew tricks, which she’d never loosed on me, from an age long before; I guess she’d been playing gentle with me over the years after all.

I told you Ruby remembered the Inquisition from first time around, didn’t I?

I began to feel like I was floating, lifted by such expertly dealt agony that there were no coherent thoughts left in me. That’s when I knew I was going to cop it. It was only a matter of boredom now - it always was with Ruby.

It was when light was creeping into the upper caves (because Ruby wasn’t a climber, she hadn’t taken me deep), that we reached that point.