Page 24 of By the Pint

For so long, I had thought of myself as an anomaly, that other mind-readers were merely a myth, until I met my master. I was twenty-five when I met him, and until very, very recently, he’d been the only other telepath I knew.

“Oh, how’d all this mess get here?” Killian said, affecting laughter but still avoiding my eye. He scooped empty cans of blood and beer across the floor with his foot.

He’s telepathic. Dima Black is telepathic, I said in my head, because the likelihood of Gobby Gabby feigning sleep and pressing her ear against the crack in the coffin door was astronomically high.

Killian made aneeekface.Yeah… he said.

Yeah?! What do you mean, yeah? You knew he’s a mind-reader?

He didn’t respond. He simply pulled his eyebrows into his hairline, his lips between his teeth, and covered his nipples with his fingers.

Unlike Dima, Killian had a more ‘typical’ vampire’s physique, i.e., the skinny, almost concave, silhouette of a young man just emerging from puberty. Back when he was turned, six hundred years ago, being ripped was often a sign of poverty. Muscles meant you grafted. That you couldn’t afford someone todo your grafting for you. Killian had obviously never grafted, had been a young man privy to a fortune, and a full staff no doubt.

You knew he was telepathic?I said, louder this time, forcing him to look at me.

Maybe… he said after the longest pause.

So, you know him? Or you know of him? Or what? Why did you send me to meet him if you knew he was a mind-reader? He was blocking his thoughts. Like you do, but on a much huger scale. I … I didn’t recognise it at first.

I felt so stupid, I should have seen it. How had I not seen it? I let my infatuation get the better of me. I had a schoolyard crush, and I let it cloud my judgement. And great, now Killian was hearing all of this too.

He grimaced.Shiiiiiit, sorry, mate.

Did you also know he would block his thoughts? And, fuck … is this why you didn’t come? Killian, what the fuck is going on?

Okay.He placed a cold palm against my shoulder, his eyes clocked the scratch marks on my neck, but his mind didn’t register them, or he didn’t let me see those thoughts. Now I was questioning everything I knew about mind-reading.Let’s talk about this somewhere else, shall we?Killian motioned his head to the casket and pulled me by my arm out of the bedroom.

“Oh, fuck. Shit, sorry, what a fucking mess,” he said, taking in the devastation of the halls. At least he had the good sense to look embarrassed while kicking debris into the corner and down the stairs. Wigs, a pair of oven mitts, a ball gag, empty bottles, a bloody towel. He scooped up some papers, letters it looked like, on old-fashioned parchment with the Assembly coat of arms stamped onto the top, and shoved them, crumpled, into the pockets of his long johns.

“You should turn me just for having to put up with all this shit.” I righted a standard lamp and a coffee table as wewalked into the library, which thankfully survived last night’s blowout relatively unscathed. Though, as Killian’s sanctuary, I would have expected nothing less.

As a familiar, it should have been my responsibility to clean up all the mess. But there was no point. Not when I could outsource it all. Work smarter, not harder, yeah? I’d call the cleaners later, just as soon as I’d gotten to the bottom of all this.

“Tell me everything. What’s the deal here? Do you know Mr Black?”

Killian studied me while I probed his memories for any trace of Dima.

“Find anything?” he asked.

“You know I didn’t.” I leant against the back of the leather chesterfield sofa. “And we’re going to circle back to this later. You’re going to tell me exactly why and how you can block off certain parts of your mind.” I wanted to punch myself for never asking these things before. I felt so fucking stupid and naive. I’d have to wait until I was alone to punish myself, so that Killian wouldn’t hear my little internal tantrum.

He draped himself over the tall-backed armchair, hooked a leg over one armrest, and cast an eye at the laptop on the side table next to him. He slammed it shut before I could see whatever he’d been looking at last, though I was certain I caught a glimpse of my name,Freckleman.

That didn’t bother me. I was accustomed now to Killian’s periodic searches of me. Used to him presenting gossip columns and opinion pieces written by ‘inside sources’. We usually read them together and had a good chuckle. There was only one person that could qualify as an ‘inside source’ in my life and he was currently sitting opposite me, arranging his waist length hair into a ramshackle bird’s nest shape on his bare stomach.

After I taught Killian how to use the internet, he developed a partial addiction. He used it almost exclusively forporn, or doomscrolling on BatBox, but every now and then he’d find himself on a week-long binge of one random hyperfixation or another. He never wanted me to see what he’d been researching, but he also never cleared his search engine history.

Recent deep dives included:

The ancestry of trolls.

Can you taste diseases and illnesses in blood?

Have penguins ever been able to fly?

Can bats fall in love?

Learn Orcish in a month.

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