Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

of yours than most. You were weeping, quivering like a cornered animal.
    Then you said, clear as day, ‘Ruby.’ I stared down at you, pretending – wishing – I hadn’t heard. Those lies we tell ourselves, right? Because I was a total wanker. I’d conjured up that nasty from your murky memory, with my own selfish wander down memory lane. When I’d been trying to remind you of love, I’d invited the devil in, instead. ‘Ruby,’ you repeated and then screeched, over and over, ‘‘Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby…’
     
     
     
     
     
    JULY 1866 LONDON DOCKS
     
     
    ‘It has been many weeks, my darling Light, you have grown weak.’ Ruby drew me further down the London Docks, by the low lodging houses, lusheries and bordellos, through streets still swarming with labourers, sack-makers and all the poor, who clung onto the stinking river, which swept away both the City’s filth and delivered up the world’s riches.
    Rats those First Lifers seemed to me now in the dark.
    I was shaking but I struggled hard to hide it.
    Ruby’s red hair swung loose, like a bawd. She dressed, however, as if a queen. Although not one this Victorian age had ever seen. She floated above humanity in her own world, where she was without question, sovereign.
    Here’s the thing, Blood Lifers don’t follow trends. When you live as long as us, it’d be a sodding waste of our second life. Instead we choose our favourite and we stick (at least for a century or so), until something new comes along, which takes our fancy. Then we add it in, eclectic-like.
    It’s all dressing up, isn’t it, the whole bloody thing?
    The birds don’t go in for makeup because they don’t need it; night lighting’s not exactly harsh on the skin. And the blood? It gives us a glow. Ruby shone brighter than anyone - or anything – I’d ever laid eyes on.
    Ruby was still a bleeding mystery to me though because all she’d told me, since she’d elected me into this Blood Life, was that she’d been Authored in the reign of Elizabeth the First, which made her one of the powerful Long-liveds. There was something about the crimson silk of her dress and the way she moved, as if she was an aristocrat and I was a servant on her Estate, which whispered of the world she’d died to.
    ‘Dearest prince, if you do not eat, you will not live.’
    ‘Then I won’t live.’
    The back of my nut banged against the sail maker’s window. Ruby’s long-nailed fingers were hard against my chest, crushing me, as she twisted the choker at my neck, until it bit.
    The tar from the lines stank. I couldn’t control it, these new nocturnal senses: seeing in the dark, smelling the stench, hearing the cacophony of sailors’ shanties, goats bleating from some ship’s hold in the basin, a rope splashing in the water and the feel …like my skin was being grated down to the eyeballs. It was as if I’d been surrounded by a bubble, which had separated me from the real world, and now everything was touching me for the first time. And all at once.
    ‘You will live. You will obey me. And you will feast most heartily.’ Ruby’s lips were close to mine. I couldn’t move. Ruby stroked my mush, with a tenderness I’d never experienced in my First Life.
    I remembered waking only a couple of hours before in our crib, tumbling naked in white sheets with Ruby and without a word, making the beast with two backs. Ruby had done things to me, which I’d never known had even existed.
    When Ruby released the pressure on my chest, I gulped for air. ‘I can’t do this.’
    ‘I am your Author, muse and liberator. Put away First Lifer thoughts. Death is a human companion. We are simply the agents, no different to smallpox or a tempest. God created those too, did he not?’
    Ruby nibbled my lower lip; her bite was hard enough to draw blood. When she pulled back, she stroked the hair out of my peepers in careful, moulding motions.
    ‘God created us?’
    Ruby smiled. It was child-like, yet so very