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

me much on his territory. Not to mention he was a bite at cards. He drained a dozen chicks a night but he was touched. Because after? He washed, not only his hands but also his whole body, head-to-toe - scrub , scrub , scrub - with these stiff wire brushes and bleach, until he scraped the skin from his muscles. But then he killed and washed and healed and killed and…
    See what I’m fixing at? Touched .
    Blessing for him really when I staked the poor sod.
    Disappointing bollocks vampire myth two: we can be staked.
    In this particular tosser’s case, I shanked him. Anything pointy, however, does the trick. Wood doesn’t figure: sword, knife, spoon (if you’re twisted), it just has to stop the heart. Everything comes down to the heart. It always does.
    Here’s the thing, this geezer was always tooled up, apart from when he was starkers in the bath awashing away his bloody sins: that’s what gave me my chance to do him, before he indulged in all the nasties, which he spent his nights bragging round town he intended to visit on me. It’s kill or be killed in this world.
    There used to be these blokes, Order of Electors, who made sure no one came back addled. You’d cop it at the end of a sharp sword, if you failed their tests - doggy jumps through bloody hoops to prove you weren’t off your trolley. Ruby told me about them. I reckon she had to go through those trials back in the day. But now? They’re long gone.
    So we come back any old how.
    Then we whisper behind closed doors about whether a fragment of Soul’s been screwed up in the transmutation, or the wiring’s simply different, as if in some buggered up universe we’re experts in mental health. But know what I reckon? The problem was already there, deep inside that person’s Soul. In the dark places folks don’t talk about. The hidden demons we don’t admit to.
    Blood Life simply lets them come out and play.
    The thing is, we’re not big on self-control. It’s not like we give in-depth interviews, or decide we’ll move in together for a year first, in case things don’t work out, before we choose who we’re going to elect.
    We go on heart and gut alone, you know? A few months of stalking, or nowadays maybe throw in a search engine or two. There’s no psychological screening.
    Not even a pop quiz.
    Psychopaths? Sociopaths? The mentally unstable? That worm was already eating the apple from the inside out, but the Author only saw the fruit’s glossy red surface, until after they’d gorged.
    Every emotion amplified, remember? The bad right along with the good. Even love curdles into obsession.
    All right then, here’s a thought: maybe none of us come back right. Maybe I didn’t. But then maybe there’s no such thing as right . Who gets to sodding judge?
    It used to drive you wild, me not knowing things, which seemed bright as day clear to you, yet were dark as dirt to me.
    It’s you First Lifers, who divide and categorise.
    Abnormal, normal. Sane, insane. Gay, straight. The in-crowd and the out. Good and bloody bad… So many labels I can’t keep them sticky in my mind.
    Even when you shade to grey, you call things spectrums : rainbow arcs that everyone’s to be charted on. Sharp pins along a curve to mark our bleeding place.
    The Lost? So there’s something wrong with us? But there’s nothing wrong with that because I slashed the chart up to confetti, fluttering pieces like paper snowflakes. No one pattern the same. And there’s nothing so pure as snow.
    What First Lifer can see the snowflake patterns and not the black and white divides or the rainbow?
    You could. And you loved me because of it…eventually.
    Yeah, maybe I did come back wrong. But buggered if I’d go back to how I was.
    I prefer the pretty patterns in my brain.
     
     
    Your snowy hair laced eerie beauty across my fingers, as I lay with you in the cold of dawn. The sun was peeping around the blind, searing brands to mark me.
    You were stroking your ivory silk scarf again -