Are you a fan of my first supernatural young adult novel, Twisted Bloodlines? Well, you might be excited to learn that I’m currently writing the sequel! I have three books (so, a trilogy) planned for the ‘Bloodlines series’ – Twisted Bloodlines, Reborn Bloodlines and Broken Bloodlines. Would you be interested in reading an excerpt from the first chapter of Reborn Bloodlines? Great! It’s waiting for you just below!
Reborn Bloodlines – Chapter One, Equivocal Hope
“Would you ever consider, like, starting again?”
As the pink-haired girl, my closest friend at that moment, put two glasses full of deep red liquid on the counter top, I shrugged. I wasn’t sure that I knew what she meant. But, besides that, the alluring scent of refriderated blood was seeping into my nostrils, and the curse needed to be fed.
Sometimes, calling vampirism ‘the curse’ and separating it from myself made me feel better. Sometimes it made me feel worse.
In any case, it had become my default during those difficult months after… well, after everything.
Picking up the glass, I gulped down the sweet drink, savouring a little on my tongue after the initial mouthful. They’d added sugar. Or drained some pretty sugary people. Something. It wasn’t the same as the dizzying blood I used to drink, when we hunted and fed on the sleeping denizens of Dreswell, but it was safer. Easier. Convenient.
Just like with every other form of civilisation, someone had stepped in to make our lives more comfortable. The now-empty—ugh, that meant another trip out soon—carton, its insides stained red, had their name printed in friendly blue letters on a flimsy label. Just like milk. But the cows were humans and the company was Frangen Support. Nameless, smiling faces behind a receptionist desk. Options for pick-up or delivery. Even group counselling sessions for newly-turned vampires facing the mental anguish of their second lives.
It was all ridiculous, in my opinion, but the blood was good enough.
“You mean doing something like Sebastian did?” I wasn’t sure why I used the past tense. Sebastian’s bloodline was alive and well, even if it had a few less members than on the night when I was turned by the crazed Sai. She was a lunatic. But now she was a dead lunatic, and I didn’t really know how that made me feel.
Numb, mostly. Like everything else.
“Yeah. You know, a bloodline,” just like the Hardy bloodline, started (I presumed) by Sebastian, although he’d never gone into the specifics with me. He was the first of the existing bloodline—but what about the dead? There’d been no time for questions after Thornwhit. The funeral took everything out of me—and Charlie.
That happy girl standing in front of me wasn’t always so bright and cheerful. Losing a sire was like chopping away a bit of your soul. It took us weeks to even be able to talk about it, and it was months before she smiled again. The smile was golden. Only small, but so precious.
“That’d mean siring,” I said, putting down my empty glass. It clinked against the counter top. Faint red circles were littered across it—I added coasters to my mental shopping list, so that the cartons of blood we needed wouldn’t be lonely. “I don’t know what’d happen if I sired.”
“What do you mean?” even as she asked the question, Charlie’s face flickered with the signs of realisation.
My split bloodline complicated everything. Two sires. Two types of venom running through my veins. Sai started my transformation, but she was interrupted before she could complete it. Teddy took over.
Teddy…
Somehow, I started my second life with two sires but sat on that stool, in me and Charlie’s shared, cramped kitchen, with none. Both dead. Sai took Teddy’s second life from him, and then the Hardy bloodline executed her. Not just for that. She did a lot of bad things. Even though I knew her story—I knew how tough it was for her, being a second-generation stuck in the modern world, endlessly wandering—I couldn’t entirely forgive her.
“I guess… maybe your childe would be just from Teddy’s generation—that’d be seventeenth generation, right?”
“Eighteenth,” I corrected Charlie, not knowing whether to smile or not. I decided to keep my face neutral, “because I’m seventeenth. And third. I hate how complicated it is.”
“You’re mainly seventeenth, though. So I reckon the seventeenth venom would just sire your childe, and they’d be normal—sorry, not normal,” she shook her head, picking up the carton and depositing it in a small rubbish bin to the side of the counter, “just complete, I guess. Not half and half.”
“If we make a bloodline,” I started the sentence slowly, thinking it over while Charlie moved around the counter and sat on a stool next to me, “we are not doing all that stupid introduction stuff. We can say it if we ever see Sebastian again, but we’re not doing it every time we see each other.”
“Should I write this down?” Charlie giggled, reaching over and squeezing my shoulder, “I don’t know, Kass, I was just thinking out loud. It’s nice, being just you and me, but I guess—I sorta miss what we had. A group.”
“A family,” I said, sighing as she took a sip from her glass, “that’s what we were.”
Oskar Leonard 