Book 3 in the Iron Trilogy

Chapter Title Page

Blood Song

Book 3 in The Iron Trilogy

Jenny Doe

Copyright 2013 by Jenny Doe

Also by Jenny Doe:

The Iron in Blood (Book 1 in The Iron Trilogy)

The Vampire Gene (Book 2 in The Iron Trilogy)

Chapter Prologue

Rebecca

When I was eight years old my father died in a boating accident. One day he was there in my life, and the next he was gone. I don't remember much of those times with my father, but the months after his death were branded into my memory by the hot iron of my mother's grief.

To this day she refused to talk about him in any but the vaguest way - a passing reference every now and then, often in the middle of an arbitrary conversation which had little to do with father or his life. It was a recurring pattern, and the scenario which inevitably followed these unexpected revelations was also entirely predictable. My mother would pause as if she had uttered some terrible obscenity, and her face would shut down, and she would respond to our initially eager questions with a pained silence. It was almost as if she regarded our enquiries as an affront, and her disappointment in our enthusiasm remained for hours after we had given up and returned to more routine discussions. It drove me crazy.

I was initially confused by her reaction, as only a grieving eight-year-old can be. After a few years I realised just how much of my father she was denying me, and I became angry. During my early teens, for what seemed like a long, long time, I hated her. My older brother Joe barely noticed the animosity that bristled between us, but Mark was puzzled. He was only a baby when Dad died, barely five years old, and Dad's death did not seem to affect him much as he grew older. I guess it was because you can't miss what you don't remember having.

I eventually spoke to one of my guidance teachers about it, and she told me about the five stages of grief. The first stage, which usually occurs immediately after the loss, is denial. This is usually a temporary phase, where the person refuses to acknowledge either the loss or their reaction to it. The second stage is anger, then comes bargaining, depression and acceptance. Apparently the grieving person can become stuck in any of these stages on the way through. I could never be completely certain which of these Mum languished in, but I suspected it might have been the first. I assumed that her grief must have been so great that she had been unable to go through the process, her heart stalling at the base of an insurmountable obstacle.

I wondered if I would be like my mother if such a loss were to strike me, stuck forever in denial, crippled by the enormity of my loss, or if I would be able to endure the burning flames of my sorrow, and eventually emerge from it.

Would I be braver, stronger? Or would I too flinch at the mere mention of the man who meant more to me than anything else ever could?

Chapter 1

Angus

We said our goodbyes the morning after Jack's beheading. We had all travelled to our family estate in Aberdeenshire first thing in the morning, Marcus and his gruesome samples sharing the van with various bits of equipment he and Fergus had brought across from the estate two days before. The rest of us had crammed ourselves and our luggage into the gold coloured Bentley Fergus had hired. We travelled light.

We had breakfast at the estate. It was very disconcerting to have actual guests in the home that we had grown up in, but Fergus and Marcus appeared to be unaffected by the newness of it all, and treated the situation as if it were a common occurrence.

I looked around me at the familiar walls and the old, heavy furniture with the scars left by three small energetic boys, all redolent with the memories of a carefree childhood overseen by a benevolent father. I wondered if he would have been surprised by the collection of people around the massive wooden table. He had always assumed the existence of others like us, but he had never managed to find anyone else, apart from our mother, of course. Ours was of necessity a lonely and clandestine existence. Each and every one of us sitting at that table had very good reasons for remaining out of the spotlight. The first and foremost of these would always be the genetic accident that had created us all.

My father had unravelled part of the mystery of our peculiarities many years ago, long before the advent of modern science. I had always wondered how he had deduced that iron had played such a large role in our lives. I remember vividly a conversation we had had so many years ago, just after we three had changed, leaving the idyll of childhood for the uncertainty of a future where every day was a struggle to restrain the monster inside. My father had explained that our bodies had changed with the onset of puberty. Our tissues had developed the ability to metabolise iron, and not only did this result in us being exponentially stronger and faster than normal people, but also in a deep and abiding craving for blood and the violence that produced it in copious amounts.

Marcus had asked my father how he had deduced the role of iron in our lives and my father had smiled at us, and said, "There's a lot of iron in blood."

We had sat at a similar table to this one, in a similar room, out in the freezing wilds of Scotland, our bodies trembling with the lust for blood, and we had understood.

Our father was a good man, for a vampire, and he had taught us restraint and a respect for the unsuspecting humanity that swirled around us. But more importantly he had taught us to deal with the eventual self-hatred that we developed once we realised exactly what we were capable of. Marcus and Fergus had handled the whole situation a lot better than I had done. They had approached their differences with a kind of fatalistic acceptance, and had used their individual talents to transform themselves into the accomplished geneticist and electronics expert that they had become.

I had not been quite as accepting, and I had fought. Initially I had fought my father, but his kindness and patience had defeated me. Then I had taken on my brothers, who had quickly teamed up together to repulse my hostilities. Then I had launched myself on an unsuspecting world.

I was fifty nine years old on the day that I sat at that table in our family home with our guests, but I still looked as if I were twenty. I had seen much of the world by then, and I had destroyed a fair bit of it. In my defence, the elements I had removed from existence had desperately needed removing - I targeted criminals for the most part, and I obliterated them, deriving as much satisfaction from the act itself as I did from the knowledge that it needed to be done.

And then I met Rebecca. She had stumbled into my world less than two weeks ago and she had irrevocably changed my life.

I glanced at her profile as she spoke to one of my brothers, and marvelled at her loveliness. It was still very difficult for me to sit so close her; her scent enveloped me and drove me almost wild with desire. I suppose it may have had something to do with my enhanced, predator's sense of smell. Either way, being near her was both ecstasy and agony for me.

She had coped with the events of the past ten days remarkably, almost unbelievably well. Not quite eighteen years old, she had transformed into an iron metaboliser, and had been repeatedly abducted by Jack's minions, and eventually by Jack himself. Rebecca had brought him down, and he had died at the hands of his sister yesterday.

I looked across the table at Julia. She seemed younger somehow, now that her brother was dead. Even for a vampire. She and Marcus had developed a promising relationship, and she was going to travel back to Russia with my brothers and her children, Oliver, Simon and Lucy. They would be safe there for now.

Rebecca and I would travel back to Banbury today. Mark, her younger brother, was arriving from Barbados this evening where he had been on holiday with their mother and older brother, and I had promised to fetch him from the airport. I wondered how he'd be, whether the news that he too had the vampire gene had sunk in yet, with all it's implications and complications. He would become one of us, but we had no idea when this would happen. He was only fourteen. Rebecca had changed when she was seventeen, although Marcus postulated that meeting me had precipitated the transformation.

Either way, he was still human, and until he became a vampire, he would need protecting. There was an army of blood drinking vampires still out there, and we had no idea how many of them there were, or even who their leader was, now that Jack was dead. Julia's sister Anne was the most likely candidate, but Julia couldn't believe that she'd be capable of something like that. I wasn't so sure. The way Jack had spoken of her suggested that she was more of a partner than a captive.

Rebecca and I left before the others, who were all due to travel on the family jet to Russia later that morning. We had a few hundred miles to travel, and a white kitten to spring from her holiday accommodation at a local vet. Mark would never forgive us if we forgot to fetch her. I thought of how attached we had all become to the little cat and smiled. It would be good to be back home, with Rebecca curled up on the sofa with the cat, and Mark searching my kitchen for coffee and something to eat.

It seemed incredible how alone I'd been before they had arrived in my life. I guess it wasn't that surprising, then, how much I relished the company of my own kind.

Rebecca

I was prepared for the exhaustion that I knew would sneak up on me as soon as the immediate threat of Jack had been dealt with. I had appropriated a couple of pillows and a soft wool blanket from Angus' childhood home, and had stashed them on the back seat just as we were saying our goodbyes to his brothers and the family of iron metabolisers we'd met what seemed like months ago, but was actually only a few days ago. Simon and Lucy still had the stunned look of people who had just found out that they're vampires-to-be, and Oliver looked as he usually did, ridiculously good-looking and self-assured. Julia glowed with a kind of inner peace, especially when Marcus was around. Fergus, well, he was Fergus, my irreverent and mischievous "big brother". I would miss him the most.

As soon as we pulled into the first service station to fill up the petrol tank, I abandoned the front passenger seat for the back, and was asleep a few minutes after we hit the motorway.

I slept for most of the long journey home, wrapped in a deep, engulfing slumber undisturbed by nightmares. When I finally emerged from its delicious embrace, we were a hundred miles or so north of Banbury. Angus smiled at me in the rear-view mirror as I rubbed my eyes and yawned. I felt a bit guilty that I'd more or less abandoned him for the past few hours, so I offered to drive the rest of the way. He gave a bark of incredulous laughter, and my guilt dissipated instantly. I grinned at him, and clambered over the back of the passenger seat.

"Welcome back," he chuckled softly.

"You missed me," I teased him.

"Not enough to let you drive my car," he told me bluntly. It was my turn to laugh. He had a nice car, to say the least, and typical man, he was very attached to it. I had driven it once before when his femur had been shattered by a bullet about ten days ago, and had decided that I wanted to drive it again. He had laughingly resisted all my efforts so far, but I was determined.

"Well, I have about two hours left to persuade you," I warned him, estimating the distance we had left to travel from a signpost we passed.

"I have a better idea."

"I'll bet," I said dryly. He turned his head slightly to grin at me.

"We haven't had much time to talk over the past couple of days, so I was wondering if we should use this opportunity. We probably have lots to discuss."

"Like what?" I was puzzled.

"Like whether or not you still want to get married in a couple of days' time."

"Why?" I asked, suddenly afraid that he'd changed his mind. Before I met Angus I had never really been hung up on the idea of getting married, and I knew it had been suggested and arranged as a way to try and keep Jack away from me, but I had gotten used to the idea. More than used to it. I actually really wanted to marry this man, to tie him irrevocably to me. We hadn't had much time to develop our relationship, but sometimes I guess you just knew. And I knew with every fibre of my being that I belonged with this man. Maybe that was love, maybe not. Either way, I didn't want to lose him.

"Because even though there is now no pressing need for us to get married, I would still very much like to marry you. But I need you to be sure of this, my little love. I know that you've never been with a man before, and I don't want to rush you into anything you may regret."

I was flooded with relief at his words. Ha! As if I could regret that. Sometimes it was all I could do not to throw myself at him. The only thing that had saved him from my lustful advances over the past few days was all the kidnapping and fighting and killing that had been going on. And now we were headed straight for the airport to fetch Mark, who, much as I loved him, would be a serious hindrance to my intentions.

"Forget it, buddy," I told Angus. "You're stuck with me. We could postpone the wedding a couple of days if we have to, but you're not wiggling your way out of this one."

He smiled at me and reached out to take my hand, and we sat like that, our fingers twined together, for most of the rest of the journey, while we spoke of inconsequential and important things, and I tried not to wonder what the rest of his skin felt like. Epic fail.