Page 6 of By the Pint

Or the other option; the new vampire’s sire (that would be Killian) could fork over approximately a hundred million silvers to the Assembly to essentially jump the queue. Between his six-hundred years of un-life and my hoarded wingball wealth we had the cash. But Killian wanted some assurance that he’d be able to recoup the damage and potentially make even more on top.

There was a way, he’d told me. There was a guy, another vampire, who’d made an absolute fortune bottling the alcohol-laced blood of humans and packaging it up for vampiric consumption.

I knew instantly who Killian was referring to.

“They’re relaxing the laws on narcotics,”Killian had said.“Some drugs are becoming legal. If we can … harvest this guy’s business secrets, I can recreate his success. Casey, bestie, he’s made billions. He’s the richest self-made vampire in Borderlands.”

“I’m listening,”I’d said, though he already had my attention atDima Black, and he knew it.

So, we concocted a plan. We would attend the Bloodsuckers in Business conference where said vampire was due to give the keynote speech. We would seek him out after the speech. And we would syphon off all his accumulated business smarts. That was it. After that, Killian would pay the turning toll, and I would become immortal. And whether or not he acted on any of this stolen business knowledge and started a company for himself would be of little to no consequence to me. I’d be a vampire. My memories wiped clean during the turning process. I wouldn’t even remember him.

Except that, twenty minutes before we’d planned to leave for Dreadmourne Castle, Killian flaked out.“Yeah, I’m not going. I think I’m having a menty B,”he’d said, tossing his waist length black hair over his shoulder. He tossed his hair about a lot. He also had ‘menty Bs’ a lot too. I had learned to pay them little mind.“But I have every faith you’ll get what I need.”

I’d simply nodded my acceptance because, if I was being honest, there were certain things I didn’t trust my master not to fuck up. And this was one of them.

Killian had pulled my face down, kissed me on either cheek, and sent me on my way.“Do whatever it takes to get thatinformation. Even if that means letting him dogpile you with a bunch of other vampires at the bloodbath. Love you, bestie. Have fun.”

The only response I could conjure in that time was,“Do not, and I repeat,nothave any parties while I’m gone.”

I whipped my head up. Someone nearby at the conference had thought abouthim.The person I’d been sent on this harebrained mission to locate.

Dima Black.

I’d never met him. Living in downtown City of the Undead, I’d more or less bumped into every vampire in existence at one point. But Mr Black was different. Elusive. Kept himself to himself. Not like all the other vampires. He even lived on the other side of Borderlands, where there were more hours of sunlight per day, fewer blood banks, and no Assembly offices, meaning it was rarely the chosen residence of the undead. And from what Killian had unearthed online, Mr Black lived with two humans and three non-human-non-vampire flatmates. It was the most inexplicably bizarre vampire behaviour I’d ever heard about.

Admittedly, I was … curious. I’d only ever seen portraits of him, and part of me was a little intrigued to—okay, I was desperate to see if the paintings were accurate.

Because if they were … damn, he was cute.

I may have been harbouring just a teensy crush on Mr Black.

In human circles, he wasn’t well known. But to vampires, and vampophiles like myself, you couldn’t escape the famous Dima Black. The man who invented Blooze; and forever changed vampires’ night-to-night un-lives.

It wasn’t solely his looks that caught my attention, because how true to life were those old oil paintings, anyway? It was that the man had gone from villainous murderer, sentencedto a century behind bars, to bootstrap pulling, empire building, redemption arcing, modern-day hero. And no one really knew a stitch about him.

I still didn’t really know what he looked like. Could have been any old vampire in those portraits. No photos of Dima Black existed, because vampires couldn’t be captured on film. Or see themselves in the mirror. Or even walk through motion activated doors. Probably one of the main reasons why so many had human familiars these days.

Those bloody motion-sensor doors were the bane of my existence. I went from an award winning, Inter-Realm sports star to a fucking doorman. But if it got me that much closer to my end goal, so be it.

Don’t even get me started on the automatic toilet flushes.

People didn’t realise the level of shit we had to deal with on a nightly basis. Literally.

The five-year plan, Casey. Think of the plan.

I straightened my jacket, ran my fingers through my hair, rumpling it in the way that made folk want to pull it and whine obscenities into my ear, and I stepped out of the Ex-Sanguine booth into booth number one-eleven.

And there he was.

Mr Dima Black himself. Perched on the edge of his table, wearing black trousers, black boots, a probably-once-white-but-now-aged-to-cream frilly vampire shirt, an embroidered blood-red cloak, and a silver locket hanging against a mostly hairless chest.

He stared right at me, and my breath caught. Because not just cute.

Drop dead gorgeous.

3.

Casey

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