Twisted Bloodlines – Second Edition Excerpt

Are you as excited as I am for the release of the second edition of Twisted Bloodlines on Friday? I certainly hope so! I’ve poured a lot of love and effort into this revamped (I’m using that pun so much, haha) edition of the book, with a completely rewritten story, improved characterisation, extended worldbuilding and a full 30k more words than the first edition! Today, you can get a sneaky peek at the new edition with this excerpt from Chapter One!

Chapter I – Insanity

Night dressed her in an eerie yet glamorous glow as she descended those concrete steps and stood, teetering, on the pavement. The building she’d left might have been a factory. Or a warehouse. I couldn’t read the sign above the door—the words were just symbols that turned to mush in my brain.

For some reason, I stopped. On any other day, my motto was ‘keep walking, keep walking until you drop’. ‘Dropping’ usually meant sleeping in the nearest, safest spot, which wasn’t always near or safe at all. Life on my own, as a teenage girl who should’ve been studying and fawning over celebrities instead of wandering the streets of Dreswell alone, was hard. There was nothing I could do about it, though.

Shivering, I tried to walk right past her—the strange woman coming out of a strange building on a strange street in a strange industrial estate—but I couldn’t. My legs wouldn’t move. Frozen to the spot, all I could do was look at her.

She was an oddity, though, so looking at her wasn’t some boring, mind-numbing task. Every time my eyes flickered to a different part of her body, they discovered something new. A stately red gown, like you saw on movie posters for films set in the 20s and 30s, covered her body, but it was ripped and torn. It looked like a fox had got at it. Some of the foxes around Dreswell could be vicious, ratty little things. All teeth and mangy fur, rattling through rubbish bins like there was no tomorrow. I could imagine one of them sinking their teeth into her dress.

Still, not while she was wearing it. She didn’t seem like the type to leave her clothes lying around in alleyways, either. There was something to her face—the roundness, the carefully-applied makeup which painted her in shades of pink and red, the way her skin seemed to almost shimmer—that screamed gentleness. It declared to the world that she wanted for nothing, and never had.

It could’ve lied, obviously. Many things did. I’d learned that lesson over and over, enough to remember it for a dozen lifetimes. But there was definitely something off about her, whether her face told the truth or not. She swayed on the spot, looking awfully off-balance in a pair of tiny black heels, her eyes flickering from side to side.

Again, that was odd. While her body moved slowly and clumsily, her eyes were sharp. Darting. Careful. Calculating. They were the eyes of a spy, not a rich woman who’d had too much to drink. They were the eyes of someone who knew exactly what she was doing. But the body disagreed, and that was confusing enough to keep me staring.

I stared until those piercing eyes found me on the pavement, just by the building she’d left. A brilliant smile yanked at the corners of her mouth, showing off a smearing of messy red lipstick. A date gone wrong, I thought, instantly. Sympathy hit me.

‘Oh, darling! Darling,’ she slurred the words—drunk, or maybe high—taking a faltering step towards me. Without thinking, I moved forwards and caught her arm before she fell and cracked her skull open on the kerb, attempting a smile back. ‘Oh, you are a star, my darling!’

‘Do you wanna get home, miss?’ I asked, a little wary of how she clung to my arm like a baby monkey holding onto its mother for dear life.

‘Home. Home! Oh, my dear, that would be something, if you could get me home.’

For a moment, those careful eyes became a little misty, their exact colour hidden by the darkness. More sympathy tugged at my heart. She wasn’t a threat. Drunk? Almost definitely. Lost? Probably. But dangerous? No. I knew danger. I’d seen it in so many forms that I was sick to death of it. She couldn’t be dangerous.

‘Which way is your home, miss?’ I spoke softly, trying to be kind to a stranger who seemed like she’d had a worse night than me. Maybe even a worse life. Kindness cost nothing, after all.

‘Ah, you are a darling, my dear!’ She grinned, the expression making my stomach ever-so-slightly uneasy, before dramatically waving her hand down the street. ‘I live down there, darling, only a little bit away! It’s not far, really, not far at all!’

With that, she lurched forwards, half-dragging me down the pavement with her. A little bewildered, I held onto her arm, near-frozen to the touch, and marvelled that she hadn’t formed goosebumps despite the revealing nature of her dress.

To dance under dead moonlight, crystal

We paused so abruptly that I found myself falling towards grimy cobbles, seeing their criss-cross pattern explode in size. She stopped that. Jerking my arm backward, she kept me on my feet and pulled me a little further down the worryingly dark alleyway. My insides shivered. Logically, I knew I wasn’t in a horror movie or a thriller novel, but my heart threw a fit in my ribcage anyway. Blood spurted through my body as if it was afraid of never being able to rush around my veins again.

Before I could blink, she released my arm. I staggered a little, reaching out to a damp brick wall for support and feeling dirt cling to my fingers. I didn’t care. This was one of the oddest nights of my life.

I held onto that wall and breathed deeply, just to remind myself that I could. Best case scenario, this would all be an interesting story that I could tell someone, some day. Worst case scenario?

I didn’t really want to think about that.

‘Here we are,’ she said with a sigh, her voice seeming instantly different. Tiredness seeped through it. Every word sounded like it had been said a thousand times before, or a million. A different sympathy attempted to enter my mind, but I blocked it.

Staring back at her intelligent eyes, my mind came to a slow, dawning realisation.

This woman wasn’t drunk. Or high. She might have been rich, or poor, or mad, but she wasn’t drunk. There was a flip, a switch, something which marked her as sober and—and pretending. Lying. Trying to gain my trust… but why?

To lead me down a dark alleyway. To get me alone. To do whatever she wanted to in a dodgy place devoid of any witnesses, or potential saviours. She wanted to create a victim, by playing one.

She’d succeeded.

‘This is your home?’ I took a step backwards, my gaze fixating on her face. Smooth. Gentle. Nothing like the eyes which stared back at me. She seemed to be a patchwork of different parts, put together by someone else for some strange goal.

‘The act has been dropped, darling,’ she said, laughing, but the noise froze my stomach and echoed hauntingly around the alleyway. ‘We can stop playing pretend. I’m too old for silly games. I need you, my dear—what is your name?’

Transfixed, I couldn’t even answer her question. My mind blanked. In that moment, I had no name.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, no… You’re like little Cleo, aren’t you?’ She mused, before shaking her head and smiling widely. ‘Yes, you are Cleo. Cleo, my sister, you will become my pet tonight. My dearest, closest pet. A companion, if you will.’

I wanted to tell her to shove off. I wanted to tell her no. I wanted to say something, anything, but my tongue died in my mouth. Thick and useless, it blocked off any words I wanted to scream at her.

‘All you need to do, pet, is come a little closer.’ She stepped forwards, her grin widening and becoming nearly unnatural. ‘Close your eyes, and trust me.’

She moved forwards again, closer, but I couldn’t move back even though every fibre of my being was screaming at me to. I was helpless—and she had effortlessly switched from prey to predator.

‘Oh, you’ll make a wonderful pet.’

The original Twisted Bloodlines can be purchased here, if you’d like to support me!

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