Page 1 of By the Pint

1.

Dima

The decennial Bloodsuckers in Business conference was held, unsurprisingly, once per decade at Dreadmourne Castle. A fortress built approximately half a bajillion years ago, and so gothic and cliched, it was borderline offensive to my brethren. Every wall was pockmarked with crumbling, fist-sized holes and flaming sconces. Tapestries depicting anatomically incorrect forest animals hid bigger cracks, and shiny metal guys with axes were placed in the largest ones. I supposed if they couldn’t be hidden, they might as well be made a feature of.

The whole place looked like one Bloodbath away from collapsing in on itself. Could vampires even be killed by falling buildings? Hopefully I wouldn’t be around long enough to find out.

Dreadmourne Castle also served as the City of the Undead’s main functioning convention centre. So, in addition to thousand-year-old dust and loitering ghouls, in the GrandBanqueting Chamber, hundreds of classroom style chairs pointed towards a lone podium and an old-school overhead projector.

In the adjoining rooms, booths had been erected for later. Vinyl signs displayed whichever businesses had taken temporary proprietorship of them. The event organisers had allotted me booth one-eleven. Not that I’d asked for a booth, but it sort of came as a package deal when I’d agreed to present the keynote speech.

Which I was due to do any moment now.

Me. Dima Black. They’d chosen me. Ha!

Joke’s on them. I’d been writing my speech for over three years, and it was still total bullshit. Mostly soundbites that my flatmate, Goldie, had pulled from the internet.

Success. Blah. Innovation. Blah. Stepping off the train of self-doubt onto the platform of positive thinking. Blah blah blah.

Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to be there. It’d been so long since I’d ventured out of my apartment for anything other than a midnight stroll through my local parks in Remy, that I’d sort of forgotten other vampires existed. It was nice seeing familiar faces and new-ish faces. Nice to be part of society again.

Yup … nice. So … nice.

The one dampener on the niceness was the absolute cacophony of noise in the castle’s main chamber as I ascended the steps of the stage. A thousand plus vampires and their familiars (almost all human) were crammed into the space. All of them silently, raptly, waiting for me.

Except they weren’t silent. Not to me.

Being a telepath wasn’t all shits and giggles.

My ‘gift’ could be a real pain in the ass sometimes. Sure, it could be useful. I knew when someone was lying to me (often), if they were undressing me with their eyes (surprisingly often), or if they wished they were talking with a party more interestingthan yours truly (all the gods-damned time). More often than not, hearing everyone’s thoughts just made me want to claw my brain out through my ears.

Luckily, most of the other vampires at the conference were thinking about what they were going to have for dinner — spoiler alert: blood — or tonight’s more promiscuous entertainment.

Food and sex were thoughts I didn’t mind too much. Probably because they were two things I most frequently thought about myself. But sometimes, I caught a snippet of something darker, something decidedly more illegal.

I mean, I could’ve drawn a map detailing the whereabouts of all the buried bodies I was privy to.

But it wasn’t as though I could tell them all to shut up and stop thinking. Not even the event organiser at the side of the stage dreaming about the high-voltage nipple clamps he’d purchased for later could switch it off.

Nobody knew I was an unregistered telepath. Nobody in that hall, at least. Being a mind reader came with far too many regulations, too many restrictions. If a vampire was discovered to be telepathic, usually at the point of turning, they would be conscripted to service by the Assembly of the Undead. And if they didn’t go willingly into the night … well, they would simply cease to be vampires. Terminated. Un-undeaded. Whatever.

So, in that moment, I had to ignore it. Ignore the mental caterwauling. And push on with my speech. Pretend I couldn’t hear the vampire in the front row using this downtime to compose a highly erotic fanfic for her favourite reality TV programme,The Orc Wife. Or the one three rows back playing reruns of the moment a cashier had said,“Thank you for your custom,”and he’d replied,“You too.”Or the two human familiars at the side of the stage thoroughly dreading tonight’s ‘after-show’.

The conference itself was hosted by one of the largest vampire clans in Borderlands, The Damnable Descendants. Not as devious as the name implied. Mostly because vampires were a rather misunderstood bunch, but also because, for the past three centuries, murdering humans (our preferred food source) was another thing punishable by termination.

Plus, nowadays we got our blood in cans, or cartons, or bottles. One could buy blood in any supermarket or corner shop, so there was no longer a need to lurk around back alleys waiting for humans to separate from their groups.

Sometimes the blood came infused with extras like vitamins or alcohol. And this was the sole reason I was on the stage in the first place, waving to a sea of colour-drained faces and red eyes.

Once upon a time, like a decade or two ago, I founded a blood alcohol brewery called Blooze. Sold that company, four, five years ago, for one-hundred-and-sixty-million silvers. An absurd amount. I gave most of it away. To hospitals, and schools, and animal sanctuaries, and charities, and whatnot. No one person needed that kind of money. Certainly not me. I didn’t have many vices, unless you counted quilting, and I had no one to spend it on. Still didn’t.

A spotlight exploded around me — I guessed for the humans in the audiences’ benefit — and I walked up to the podium.

“Hey, I’m Dima,” I said. They all already knew this. Everyone here knew who I was, even if they onlythoughtthey knew me. “Dima Black, of the Black family clan.”

A family clan of exactly one, if you didn’t include my five flatmates. Since none of my flatmates were vampires, I chose not to.

“You will probably know me asFang Magazine’smost successful vampire entrepreneur for the thirteenth year in a row.As the founder of the now Inter-Realm, blood-alcohol brewery, Blooze, CEO of Black Heart Enterprises, and four-time winner ofThe Quilter’s Coven’srear of the year.” I turned around and swept my cape aside to give them all a good look at my ass.

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