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

- of course she had - because reducing stress for carers is so buggering important in our care plan. I know that because they’ve kindly written it down in black and white. If it’s on a piece of sodding paper, it’s got to be true, doesn’t it?
    Black ice on the road , Wednesday had moaned, you’re so isolated here on the moors .
    Another complaint and mark against my name.
    So now my best mate the sun was smoking over the horizon; slivers of light scorched around the corners of the blind.
    One toasted Blood Lifer: not the best bloody start to my day. If I melted much more, I’d look bleeding dodgy. Still, Wednesday was ripe for a heart attack…
    All right, I’m just pissing about here. I’m not that tosser anymore. Especially not when you were lying there off colour, your thin fingers clutching the bedclothes and then tap , tap , tap, like you were trying to pass on a message because you can’t talk to me. You can’t tell me what you really want to say. I scanned your mush desperate to understand but - tap , tap , tap - I couldn’t. Not anymore.
    Your mouth twisted in frustration.
    ‘They did leave the leaflets with you yesterday?’
    ‘Binned ‘em.’
    ‘No you didn’t,’ Wednesday smirked. ‘Read them.’
    Tap , tap , tap . That desperate wringing of the covers. Tap , tap , tap .
    ‘I don’t need to.’ I stormed towards the door, flinging it open. The band of light from the window scorched my cheek. But only for a moment.
    When Wednesday grabbed my arm, I stared down at her wrinkled hand in surprise. ‘Whether you want to admit it or not, it is going to get to a stage when your…grandma needs a higher level of care than you can provide. Or than we can. The local care home’s excellent. They’re specialists with her type of--’
    I shook Wednesday off my arm. ‘No one’s bloody taking her, got it?’
    Wednesday’s gaze gave me the once over. Then she shrugged, as if having done her duty, she could now wash her hands of us.
    ‘Advance,’ you muttered between clenched teeth, as your back arched. ‘Advance.’ Your eyelids flickered.
    I dropped to my knees beside you, stroking your candy floss white hair. But I knew I wasn’t there because you couldn’t see me. Worse, there was sod all I could do about it.
    ‘Always wanting to advance this one,’ Wednesday stared down at you perplexed, ‘but never says where to.’
    Here’s the thing, I could explain it to her. What your splintered mind’s drawn to at the end: what it can’t forget, when it’s obliterated all else.
    Why it’s not at peace.
    Yet even I didn’t know what Advance meant before the summer of 1968.
    Everything comes back to then.
    And before?
    Before came the decades of lies and my beautifully gilded cage.
    It wasn’t until that glorious summer that my world expanded to more than an orgy of blood, thrills and discovery. They were my buttons, which Ruby knew how to push and in what order. I was caught up in her tempest.
    It wasn’t until then, that my peepers were opened to the consuming darkness: how each kill inexorably pushes you into the shadows. Until you don’t even know where you end and the gaping dirt mouth of the earth begins. Until you don’t know what tiny shard of what you once were is left.
    All right, so here’s the truth of it: I thought in death I’d shed fear and sin. That’s the refrain we Blood Lifers hold aloft, like a bloody standard.
    What I didn’t understand was that my Soul would claw at me to be saved. Not by a god but through my own graft, bottle and the ball of squirming terrors tight in my gut.
    I only started to taste the truth of that, when Ruby finally brought me to Advance.
     

    JULY 1968 LONDON
     
     
    The Who’s “My Generation” – a tribal bloody howl of Mod rebellion and youth’s hymn of raging, stuttering disgust at humanity’s inevitable, ageing decay - blazed up the wide staircase of Advance Record Company, as I descended. I was already sweating patches through my