Page 69 of By the Pint

I held my laughter at bay, because the question had been on the tip of my tongue.

“Well,” Dima continued. “They wanted to create a place where all species would live harmoniously. Almost all species. They changed a lot of laws. Introduced a load of new ones. Had infrastructure built, roads, hospitals, schools, universities. Introduced currency. Democracy. They tore down the walls separating the realms. Killian and I were there when they pulled down the southern wall between what is now Remy, and the Human Realms. We’d heard there was going to be a mega-party.Killian was like a fucking child in a toy shop. If the toys were all edible and made of party-drugs.

“Our first mistake was not feeding for two months before.”

“Shit,” I said, sensing where this story was heading.

“Yeah, shit. Killian found three human women, young women, early twenties. Well-to-do types. Sisters. Debutantes. And most importantly, consenting. They would let us feed from them. Maybe Killian would get his dick wet. And they would get to walk away with the tale of the sexy vampires in the night.”

I wanted to tell him to stop. I remembered Killian saying more or less the same as Dima. That no vampire remained innocent. Would it alter how I thought of my master? How I thought of Dima?

But Dima pressed on. “Only Killian didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Not after the first girl passed out from blood loss, not after the second one followed her sister. I managed to stop him from draining the third and got her back to safety. Turned out the sisters were the newly appointed mayor of Remy’s daughters. They didn’t make it, didn’t wake up. The third immediately cried bloody murder, and I was arrested on the spot. Killian simply vanished.”

I opened my mouth to speak. To protest. Killian was selfish, sure, and hedonistic and a coward, but he’d never let his blood-brother take the blame for his crimes. Surely?

“When it came to my trial, Killian was absent. I took the fall because he wasn’t as strong as I was. He’d would’ve crumbled in gaol. He wouldn’t have survived. Nowadays, of course, if you kill a human, it’s a death sentence. Back then, they gave me a century. Fifty years per girl. It was … it was fucking awful. The conditions were … The food was …” Dima raked a hand down his face, apparently unable to give specifics.

“Some days I thought about stabbing myself with a stake to escape it all. But you know the worst part? Killian never visited me. One hundred fucking years in that place — my cellmates; a fucking pack of werewolves with overactive bladders — and he never once came to see me.

“I covered for him. I sacrificed everything for his freedom. The only friend I had. The only person I remembered from either of my lives. And he never came. I waited. And I waited.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, reaching out and cradling his jaw in my hand.

Gently, Dima pulled my hand down. It wasn’t a dismissive gesture, it was simply that he had more to tell me. “When I was freed, one hundred years later, I went to find him. He was living in a house with six other vampires in the City of the Undead on the northern border, but he wouldn’t come to the door. And none of the fuckers would invite me in so that I could confront him. I just wanted to know why. Why, after everything I’d done, was he pretending I didn’t exist?

“After a few tries, I gave up. I moved back to Remy. But it had all changed, evolved without me. I tried the whole undead commune thing a couple times, but you know how it is, being a telepath. It’s not exactly quiet. I bought a castle, lived there for a bit. Decided it was fucking lonely. Then I met Mal, an incubus, and Goldie, a nymph, and I moved in with them. And that was almost three-hundred years ago.

“Recently, past few years or so, Killian has been trying to, I don’t know, rekindle things with me, but I haven’t given him an opportunity to meet face to face. I figured he wanted to apologise, make amends, but now, having him send you to me in order to find out my business secrets has made me reconsider. Is that what his attempts to make contact have been about all this time? Making money? The first time he tried to get in touch wasright after I’d sold Blooze for, like, a hundred and sixty mil’. I mean, it makes sense, he’d always been a rider of coattails, and his lifestyle by far exceeds his ability to produce money.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I should have never … If I’d have known …”

Dima took my hand in his and lifted it to his face. “Now you can comfort me like this.” He nuzzled into my palm.Life is unfair,he said.And undeath even more so.

23.

Dima

“Oh, I recognise that guy,” I said, pulling my freezing feet onto Casey’s lap. We were snuggled on the sofa in his Constellations suite to watch the wingball game. It had become our new tradition every night we weren’t sat on the volcano. And unlike when we were on the volcano, we had forgone any mind blocking practise. It was just me and him, my quilt, which I had spread out over both of us to stitch the binding, and some snacks. Both the edible kind, and the ones jumping around on the telly. Joey had been right, watching sportsing made for thirsty work.

“Mike Ryder?” Casey cracked open a can of soda and reached forward for a handful of spicy coated nuts.

“Yeah, Goldie has a signed poster of him. He’s cute, don’t you think? Is he single?” I teased.

Casey laughed. “He’s married, unforch. You developing a taste for wingball players?”

I took a sip of my A positive and licked the residue off my lips. Casey’s eyes followed my tongue. His breath stilled. Then he pursed his own lips together and turned his head in the other fucking direction.

I should have been pleased he didn’t try to kiss me. Should be grateful that he wasn’t closing the gap between us and tangling our bodies together. It would make it harder to give him up. To say goodbye after all of this. But all I could think about was pushing him onto his back, wrapping his legs around me, and burying my face into his neck to suck in the scent of us as I fucked him.

And I knew he wanted that too, as evidenced by the subtle adjustment he made to the front of his jeans. So, I did what any self-respecting vampire would do, I edged him to the very brink of tolerance.

I wore fewer and fewer clothes, only putting a shirt on when he nagged me to. I wore sweatpants — because Goldie swore by them, and they had worked so well on Holly — and I casually left my hand tucked into the waistband, right beside my junk. I made satisfied, throaty groans when I took a sip of my drink. Those had Casey closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. But he was still holding back for some reason.

“What is it you like so much about quilting?” he said, almost shouted, as though he was trying to distract his own thoughts.

“I just love the colours, I think. And the patience it takes. You start with some scrappy bits of fabric and then you stitch them all together and you’ve basically made the textile equivalent of a hug. My flatmates are sick of them now. I don’t have anyone else to make them for.”

“You could make one for me,” Casey said, his voice a whisper.

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