Blood Dragons (Rebel Vampires Book 1) by Rosemary A Johns Read Free Book Online

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,