Red Grow the Roses
Blood lust and sexual desire; for vampires the two are inseparable.Prepare to devour ‘Red Grow the Roses’, an explicit vampire erotica novel with plenty of bite.There are six vampires in the city. Ageless, terrifyingly beautiful and always hungry – not just for blood but for the other pleasures the human body offers.Sadistic chanteuse Estelle; feckless Ben; Roisin, the mirror-ghost; Wakefield, haunted by his own damnation; Naylor, the most feral of them all. And Reynauld is the Good Shepherd, the one who holds them all in check.But his grip on his own humanity is fading, and when Wakefield accidentally kills a woman and Naylor gets the blame, a power-struggle erupts between the city’s immortal undead.
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RED GROW THE ROSES
Janine Ashbless
Contents:
Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners
Seven for the Seven Stars in the Sky
Five for the Symbols at Your Door
Prologue
I’ll sing you Ten-O,
Green grow the rushes-O!
What is your Ten-O?
Ten for the Ten Commandments:
Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners:
Eight for the April Rainers:
Seven for the Seven Stars in the Sky:
Six for the Six Proud Walkers:
Five for the Symbols at your Door:
Four for the Gospel Makers:
Three, Three the Rivals:
Two, Two the Lily-White Boys, clothèd all in green-O.
One is One and all alone
And ever more shall be so.
(Folk song)
There is a City. Maybe you live there: eight million people do. Maybe you’ve visited it. Maybe you’ve only heard of it. It’s an ancient place, founded by the Romans on a marshy floodplain watered by a great tidal river. Its foundations go deep into the sucking mud of history. But these days its population is young, its faces diverse. More than three hundred languages are spoken in its schools and malls and streets. Proud new buildings are hatched among the husks of ancient architecture.
There is only one person left who still remembers the rushes and the bog myrtle and the wild ducks in what is now the heart of the City. And she is not a living person, not in any real sense.
Come to the City. Take photos of the famous landmarks on your cell phone. Shop for designer clothes and tourist tat. Walk the frantic streets of the theatre district at night. What will you see, there in the neon dark? Is that shadow behind you someone following? Is that reflection in a plate-glass window horribly distorted, or horribly accurate? Are those eyes that watch from the night even human? They must be, surely. He looks like a man – though his eyes reflect the dimmest of lights in crimson circles.
Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe he’s not human. Maybe he’ll take you in his arms and you’ll feel his strength – a strength that makes it impossible to fight him, even if you did want to. But you’ve already lost the will to resist, that moment when he looked into your eyes and showed you all his hunger and his promise. You knew then. You knew, quite suddenly, that this is what you are for – what we are all for – with our warm beating hearts and our aching sexual needs.
We are for them.
He’ll hold you like a lover. You’ll feel his breath on your throat and think to yourself: it’s so cold! His fingers will be cold too – cold on your puckering nipples, chill as they slide between your legs and inside you. Perhaps he’ll rip your clothes as he works them off; his nails are sharper than they look. No matter: it’s not as if you’ll have much use for them afterwards. His hard cock will seem startlingly cold, as cold as glass chilled in ice-water, as it presses into you. You’ll feel your body yielding to him just as eagerly as your will did, all your hot secret places opening to his gelid insistence. Then he’ll enter you, and your flesh will be impaled inexorably on that brutal length. For a moment he might only fuck you. He’ll wait for your cries, thrilling to the noises that burst from your throat as he rides you. It’s not for your sake but for his, since anticipation sharpens his pleasure. When his teeth first shear through your flesh the pain will make you panic – but only for a second. After that there will be no more pain, only desire. His and yours, as you feed ravenously upon each other, frantic to be filled.
In the morning they will find you limp and drained, the splashes of your spilt blood scattered on you and about you like fallen rose petals.
There are no rushes growing around here any more. But in this City there are always roses.
1: Ten for the Ten Commandments
Sophie met the vampire while speed-dating.
There were twenty numbers printed on the paper, each with a tick-box next to it. So far Sophie had ticked two, slightly reluctantly, and she wasn’t all that sure about Number Eight: he’d had an annoying laugh that ended in a snort each time. It was a good thing, she told herself, that this wasn’t a professional event, just a charity do put on by their regular bar in aid of some cancer relief charity. She and Netta had only paid a tenner each to enter.
And oh, boy, are we getting our money’s worth, she thought, suppressing the urge to giggle.
‘I’ve got a classic MG that I’m doing up myself in my garage,’ said Number Nineteen hopefully. ‘I’ve just had the new front wing sprayed British Racing Green.’
This meant nothing at all to Sophie. She stole a glance sideways at Netta, perched just like her on a high barstool at one of those teeny little round tables you could never quite fit all your glasses on, her legs crossed, her foot twitching sharply as she listened to a beaky-nosed man talk. They had five minutes with each guy and this time it had turned out to be four minutes and fifty seconds longer than she needed to decide No. ‘Really?’ Sophie said.
