Page 26 of By the Pint

“So where does that leave our deal? Let’s not forget, you cashed in your favour knowing full well you were sending me there with false info. I kept up my end of the bargain as well as I could, you should do the same.”

“I’ll still do it. I’ll still turn you. I promise.”

“But …”

“But I need that info at the very least. Find him. And persuade him to let you in his mind. You will know the thingI am looking for when you see it. And as soon as I have it, I will make you a vampire. Pinky promise.” He held out his baby finger. I stared at it. He pushed it closer. I ignored it still. “Well, whatever, I promise you that once you get that information, your dreams of immortality will be realised.”

“What if he won’t let me in? If I can’t get access?”

Killian simply shrugged, puffed out his cheeks and made his eyes go wide. “I’m just a poor lowly vampire,” he said in a mock baby voice. A smile tugged at his lips. “He’s a billionaire. Be patient. You will find your way in. And if you’re worried about how to persuade him, may I suggest trying a repeat of this morning?”

8.

Dima

I left Casey-Not-Sean asleep, peaceful and human and warm, and floated back to my room on the other side of the castle. Before I departed, I tucked a little parting gift into his copy ofQuilting Patterns for the Undead.

After climbing into my coffin, I couldn’t sleep. I just laid there and waited for the glowing numbers of my hotel clock to tick over and announce the sun had dropped safely behind the horizon. I could have taken the Red Eye home. The vampire train, which boasted blackout windows for safe travel at all times of the night or day, but it would have left my human driver, Wayne, floating about, unaccompanied in the City of the Undead. I’d made worse decisions in the past, but I didn’t want to be partly responsible for Wayne’s disappearance. Plus, he was a fantastic driver. I should tell him more often.

It was gone midnight when I finally put the keys into the front door of my Remy apartment and crossed the threshold.

“You’re cheating!” yelled Goldie, the second I’d hung my keys up and chucked my suitcase against the wall.

“That’s not cheating that’s called being resourceful!” replied Joey, her tone equal to Goldie’s in both aggression and volume.

“Yes. Yes. NO! Haha!” screamed Holly.

I made my way into the living room where three of my five flatmates were squashed onto the same couch playing some revamped retro cartoon racing game.

Also, living room? Such a discriminatory term.

“Dima! How was the conference?” Joey, a curvy, red-haired, human woman, called out. Immediately, her on-screen avatar drove over a banana peel and began spinning in circles. She sat in the middle of the sofa, between Goldie, a blonde mountain nymph, and his fiancée Holly, another human, this time with short brown curly hair. Sometimes Holly wore glasses with non-prescription lenses, but she always wore dungarees.

My other two flatmates were absent. I was used to Mal not being home this late at night (early for me), but not Taurin, Joey’s shifter husband.

“Where’s Taur?”

“Oh, he’s gone out to dinner and the theatre,” said Joey, deciding all was lost in the game, abandoning her controller, and reaching forward for her bottle of beer.

I hovered over the smaller, unoccupied sofa. “You mean, he has friends that are not us?”

Joey laughed. “Not quite. His sister is in Borderlands for the weekend. We were all meant to go to the theatre together, but at the last minute she asked if it was okay to bring her new girlfriend instead.”

I held out my hand and floated a can of Blooze from the fridge, and a metal straw from the cutlery drawer.

“Doesn’t bother me,” she continued. “I’d hate to be the person sat behind two minotaurs and an orc. Especially at eighty silvers a ticket.”

“Yes!” Holly screamed at the telly, or possibly her fiancé, both hands shot above her head. “In your mother-fluffing face!”

“You fucking cheated!” Goldie said, reaching across Joey to play-swat Holly on the arm, but Joey deflected it with her own well-timed swipe to Goldie’s forearm.

“This is why I have to sit between them,” she said to me.

I cracked open my Blooze, dropped the straw into the hole, and took a sip. Finally, some B positive.

Goldie side eyed me.What is it?he asked in my head.

Nothing, I replied, the corners of my mouth twitched upwards.

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