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

flicked the burning ciggie down, grinding it sharply with my heel, ‘so well I stopped asking. Stopped bloody thinking. All those times you just left. Days? Weeks? Months? And that one time..? And me ..?’ I’d raged towards Ruby (although damned if I’d known what I was going to do) but then had found myself slamming my fist clean through a shipping crate instead – crash – tiny splinters embedding in my gashed knuckles. ‘Not once even a message or… You know what? I’m the one buggering off now, all right? Maybe you’ll understand what…’
    Ruby’s move towards me had been so fast, I’d felt her hand crushing my throat before I’d seen her, as she’d slammed me against the damp wall. Ruby’s sharp nails had torn through my skin.
    ‘Darling Light,’ Ruby had whispered, tightening her hold on my neck. I’d struggled to breathe. ‘You do not possess me. No man does. I am not yours; I’ll never be anyone’s again. What I tell you, I tell you but what I hold to my heart is private to me alone. Do you understand this now, my naughty lover?’
    My eyelids had fluttered. A stabbing pain had pierced my lungs. A dark mist had descended.
    Being throttled’s really not my cup of tea .
    I’d struggled to nod just a fraction.
    Ruby had held my gaze, as she’d smiled. ‘I allowed you to follow me. But I will not be led. Never again.’
    Then I’d been lost in the cruel green of her peepers, whilst I’d slowly blacked out.
     
     
    I pressed my ear to the rosewood doors, taking a single breath. This was it then.
    When I flung open the doors, before I could bottle it, I was hit by a tidal wave of light and sound. ‘Blimey…’
    Everything was chrome and white, like stepping into one of those rockets, which they’d been promising to land on the moon, ever since Kennedy and the space race alpha male jostling my Johnny’ s bigger than yours.
    Territory, that’s what it’s about. Planting the flag and making sure the rest of the world’s enviously watching because they didn’t get there first. Ruby witnessed centuries of such imperial expansionism before it shrivelled. Everything withers eventually. And yeah, that’s morbid, but I’m dead, right?
    You First lifers don’t see the beauty in this transcendent world around you but you’re still greedy for another to bugger up. Or maybe you were just desperate to prove you had the balls to do it.
    Science marches on and it drags us all in its wake.
    White and silver Moon lights hung in clusters of iridescent mother of pearl discs, like satellites to the humongous chandelier, which illuminated the room brighter than day. The black and white paintings made me dizzy, fragmenting and distorting the world, as if I was on something.
    I hadn’t fed, however, since I’d tonned it down here on the Triton, with Ruby clutching tight around my waist and my neck still purple with bruises. Not feeding was a form of silent protest.
    Ruby, however, hadn’t even noticed.
    And then there was him : brown velvet jacket despite the heat, blush of eye shadow and smudge of eyeliner and a dark mop top – head-to-toe the uber-Mod.
    This Beau Brummell dandy, dancing in the eye of the whirlwind, jumping and twisting – he was the whirlwind - belting out the lyrics at the top of his tone deaf voice.
    He was my new family?
    Christ help me .
    Whichever bloody twin he was - Donovan or Aralt - lost in the throb of the music and the blood high, he didn’t see me.
    I’d been invisible to Ruby the moment we’d roared into London, or at least that’s how it’d felt. I could still touch her body. But underneath? Ruby wasn’t with me anymore.
    When the Mod swung over to a lounge chair, which was translucent white plastic, I noticed the First Lifer cowering in its angular frame; she was nothing but legs in her pop-art micro-mini. The Mod dragged her up into the dance and then jived around the chair with her, like she was a doll. Her petrified peepers were focused on him, with a