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world.’
     
     
    Ruby. My red-haired devil, Author, muse, liberator, guide: my gorgeous nightmare.
    Ruby did it, you know. She showed me the world’s secrets.
    Yet here’s the thing, to do that she took me to darker depths than I’d ever dreamt of, let alone knew had beat in my own Soul.
    But that’s bollocks, right?
    Because I’d only thought they didn’t, until Ruby showed me those places, which we all hide locked away, reckoning we’re dead civilised, rather than bloody cavemen. As I said, bollocks .
    We’re animals when it comes down to it. Predators of one type or another. You First Lifers war over territory, your gods or your women, as if you’ve only just discovered bleeding fire. If you ever try and get between a woman and her cub, you’ll soon discover you’ve got a tigress on your hands.
    See the truth of it is, everyone enjoys a good barney - win or lose - they hunger for the fist and the boot. Who doesn’t want to get a bit dirty, once in a while?
    Modern life tries to smother it, but it’s under there, if you lift up the corner and peer beneath, then you’ll see it’s bubbling to get out. And Ruby, sod it, did she let it out.
    Ruby brought me to life by killing me.
    Every emotion amplified? Mine – love, curiosity, an aversion to authority – they survived but twisted, like a blasted tree after lightening. Where once they were pale and sickly, now they were intense, powerful and dark.
    It’s not as straightforward as good and bad. You don’t get to sticky label me. No one does. It was simply different .
    It made me feel like loving Ruby would be the death of me, even as I lived for being close to her. We relished breathing the same air. Draining the same First Lifers. Shagging and hurting, until we knew each other’s bodies the same as our own. All was nothing outside our love. It smashed on us. Broke on us. We savaged it. Together we screamed at the world and when we had the world by the throat, the world screamed back. There was nothing we couldn’t do, or take, together. Nobody else we needed.
    I thought Ruby was mine, stupid bastard that I was. But I was young, so yeah, I didn’t reckon I’d be the one who got burnt.
    It should’ve been impossible for us to understand each other, what with Ruby being an Elizabethan bird, and me not being born until the age of steam power. In First Life, if there’s a single generational divide, the parents can’t understand a word their kids are spitting, whilst the kids reckon their parents are dinosaurs, who should be euthanized for not keeping up with the latest slang.
    So how can Blood Lifers bridge the centuries: Tudor to Generation X? Punk Rocker to Georgian dandy?
    Because we don’t stand still: mosquitoes teared in amber or museum exhibits in wax.
    Each moment we travel through - in our parallel lives to yours - it sticks, clinging like caught gossamer spider webs to our skin. The worlds of First Lifers never die. They live on in the blood of those who witness their crawl from the cradle to the grave, which just sometimes is a brilliant burning dance across the stage.
    Me? I’m the bleeding audience.
    True, some Blood Lifers despise this adaptation and mingling of species; they want to keep themselves pure and uncontaminated. The wankers. But me?
    First Life fascinated and consumed me; it haunts me still. The ease of it, which I’d never learnt. Its warmth, joy and life drew me, like the sodding moth to proverbial flame; I hungered for the burn. In turn, your world clung to me more than most. We suckled each other as the years seeped by, one year crimson into the next.
    But I was only ever on the outside, looking in.
     
     
    It all started with stuffed hedgehogs. The Great Exhibition of 1851. Of course I was too young then. But papa’s lot? They went bloody barmy for them, starting a craze (and you know what us Victorians were like with our crazes). We never knew where the bleeding line was.
    Ruby decided the first thing on our list,