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

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.
    We weren’t meant to even be there, shouldn’t have been within a thousand miles of those bleeding killing fields and that madness, where I truly learnt where the science I’d once worshipped could lead.
    All the beauty and terrible splendour of this earth, yet First Lifers were racing to develop new ways to annihilate it?
    Death, you see, that’s all right – natural - carnage raw in tooth and nail. But apocalyptic machines, which dealt it out with a twitch of a finger, chattering ack-ack-ack , whilst dying soldiers were entangled in aprons of barbed wire, like puppets shuddering on strings..? The whomp above your nut, before the whole world dove for cover, and the earth shook to dust; metal beasts lumbering through the heat and churning the world to nothing but mud and sleet, nothing but sodding mud and sleet, whilst the neat white crosses were erected between blood-red poppies..?
    And the boom of those guns…
    If you haven’t heard those guns, you’re not haunted by them. But me..?
    We got trapped once for a full month between those lines of First Lifers. The blood of either side smelled exactly the same; the mound of rotting corpses, which we were forced to hide under, stunk just as badly. Yet they were still trying to mechanize slaughter each other, as if