The Drinker of Blood

Chapter One

I'm not a very nice person. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking that I am.

But don't imagine me the worst of creatures, either. No. There are many far worse than I am, the kind who take the stories seriously, the kind who believe their own press, the kind who revel in the inflicting of pain and the taking of life—the kind for whom killing is more than even a sport. For such people, predation is the nature of what we are, the essence of the true us.

On that issue, I beg to differ.

But neither will I beat around the bush and draw out this tale of what I am. You see, ordinarily this is the part of the story where I, the storyteller, am supposed to play coy, to pretend, however briefly, that I am something other than what I am—all to build tension in order to seduce the reader.

I don't need to do that. Because I don't give three fucks what people think of me. I'm a drinker of blood, and I live the life I choose.

Now that that little morsel is out of the way, I can tell you my tale.

***

I came to Miami to kill a man. For my quarry indeed was a man—although a normal citizen, one such as yourself, might not see him as such. After all, you folks are no more immune to the incessant patter of propaganda than anyone. You've had well over a century of bad literature and a few decades of shitty movies telling you one type of nonsense or another. It's all about the press. Everyone falls for it.

The person I intended to exterminate was a colleague of a fellow who once did me a great wrong, a man who took something of inestimable value from me, and I'd spent the better part of 30 years doing all in my humble ability to heap wanton misery on that wretched sonofabitch. I did so by taking things from him, things that he valued. The soon-to-be-dead colleague was just one of those. The most recent, but most assuredly not the last.

I'm generally a sedate and tolerant individual, you see, but there are some slights even I will not abide. And, alas, once my ire is stoked, there is no quenching it. This outsized need to settle accounts is a shortcoming in my character for which I feel a certain amount of shame—indeed, I do—but not so much shame that I'm willing to mend my ways over it.

Back to the matter at hand.

It took me about three days nosing about to discern that Marion—the man I intended to inter—spent most of his free time at a nightclub called Ramses. My enquiry shouldn't have taken so long. The three-story venue, situated just off Washington on South Beach, was quite the tony establishment, full of the brightest and most beautiful of folk. Marion and his ilk always have been suckers for such baubles, the glamour and the glitz of the high society of the age.

What's more, Marion and his crowd all were laughably nocturnal in their habits. Such predictability made the set-up rather easy. And the execution? There aren't many of our kind, and most of us are old enough to know better. But there are certain weaknesses that come with being an apex-predator, especially one who has lived an abnormally long life: a person simply gets lazy and careless. And it was Marion's inattentiveness upon which I depended.

It wasn't that this chap was a friend of mine, but, even in such a cliquish community as ours, one gets to know one's fellows. It was no secret that Marion fancied himself a connoisseur. But who doesn't, amiright? Show me someone's vanities, and I will show you that person's weak spot.

So when I spotted my quarry and his coterie of lackeys at the club in question, I immediately withdrew. Marion knew me by sight, as no doubt did several of the others. I certainly didn't want him to catch wind of me. Nor did I wish to trigger any alarms. A fellow like Marion was seldom alone, and there always was some sort of security about—what a miserable, cloistered way to live.