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

they weren’t the same species.
    And we’re the monsters?
    Boom, boom, boom …
    Those bloody guns bore into me, day and night. They drove Ruby half-crazed, buried as we were under the mud and the soft ooze of decaying soldiers, until she tore at herself with her nails. I had to hold onto her to stop her.
    Then Ruby lashed out at me instead. Still, that was better because I could take a hiding but what I couldn’t bear was to see Ruby hurt herself.
    Our extraordinary senses can be our weakness or our strength. Like all creatures, we have to adapt.
    The light shows in that war? They burnt my peepers. I can still see them.
    Hell came to earth in those days and not in the form of us Blood Lifers. Humanity invented it for themselves.
    All that said, I did get a blinding coat out of it.
     
     
    After that, we wandered the world seeking nothing but each other and solitude. Not that easy with my kind because if you don’t play by the rules, they’ll find some reason not to like your mush. Then they’ll bottle it, faster than First Lifers, after a curry and lager on a Saturday night.
    I’d witnessed thousands of bodies heaped on the fiery furnaces of Flanders. It was a sense of connectedness to the earth itself, fresh and unsullied, for which I hungered.
    It did fade, the shock or whatever, of it. Yet for years the sight of First Lifers triggered something sickening, jolting me back with flash shot clarity, to the boom and the lights.
    At those times, Ruby would sit with me as I shook, holding a woman’s neck pressed to my lips, so the blood would run in because I couldn’t hunt, more quietly patient than I’d ever have guessed my lover could be.
    Sometimes Ruby would disappear for days, weeks, even months…
    But she always came back. I reckoned Ruby simply needed to be alone: I sodding knew how that felt.
    We settled in Deadvlei - death valley - in Namibia, which in the twilight, looks like a surrealist painting and in the dawn is otherworldly; withered trees are silhouetted, against the highest sand dunes in the world. Where once there was a whole bloody forest, now the encroaching desert had smothered all life.
    Ruby and I felt at home there, like the sands and we were kin. We kept only the company of the black mambas, which coiled round us as we slept, as if we were no more alive, than the branches of the murdered trees.
     
     
    Years later when I was much more myself again (don’t roll your eyes, I get there’s no such thing as myself , all right?), when my mind was in fewer fractured pieces and spent less time screaming, stuck in that hole in the Great War, we were in Waitomo, New Zealand, as I prepared a special do to celebrate the day of my election into Blood Life.
    Ruby and I hunted together through the undulating green fields. Then fed on the same farm girl, whose lips smelled of the lad she’d been snogging, only moments before we’d snatched her in the dark.
    We whooped through the ice waters of a waterfall, in a rite of shared blood and bond of love.
    I wanted to surprise Ruby, so I led her down into the limestone Glowworm caves. Thousands of tiny, luminescent glowworms lit the ceiling of the grotto an eerie blue.
    ‘My dearest prince has indeed been busy.’
    ‘For you. Anything for you.’
    We were on the deepest level. I’d strewn furs over the damp cavern floor, along with a bottle of local gin, which I’d nicked (and might just blind us), and Ruby’s favourite toys: ropes, blindfolds, leather braided and knotted floggers…
    That’s when Ruby turned to me, serious all of a sudden and commanding as any aristocrat ever was. ‘I wish to go back to England,’ she said, her brow furrowed, ‘we should go back.’
    Bollocks .
    I knew, don’t reckon I didn’t? We’d go, there was no doubting that. But it also meant something was wrong - dead wrong - and for the first time Ruby wasn’t letting me in on it.
    Where was my Author, muse and liberator now? Where was my love, if secrets abided in