The World Will Stain Us

Youth & Whisky

Ashley, it seemed, was full of surprises.

Jinxx didn't know why he'd ever thought otherwise. Ashley had always been the most daring of them―the most willing to interact with humans, the most likely to do risky things that could potentially reveal their grand secret to the world.

But this was ridiculous.

"What in the hell made you come to possess this information?" Jinxx asked, staring at the bassist from across his kitchen counter.

"Look, I missed alcohol, okay?" Ashley defended. "I missed being able to get fucked up and escape my head. So I went looking for a way to make it work. It took me at least a decade to find the answer."

Jake groaned. "You actively went looking for a way to get drunk?"

"Yes." Ashley cocked his head, almost defiantly. "I don't see why you guys are having such a problem with this."

Jinxx sighed. This argument was one he really didn't want to have. By all accounts it was stupid, something small, something that shouldn't require a fight.

But when you were vampires, alcohol became a problem.

Andy had told Jake and Jinxx of Ashley's method of drinking a couple of days after the meeting with Jason Flom. A lot had happened in those couple of days―they'd read the contract and Dina had deemed it mostly favorable, they'd straightened out the issues with Flom and officially severed ties with Standby, and they'd gotten themselves well and truly signed to and settled with Lava Records. The nightly parties taking over the Compound had gotten even more crowded and rowdy, and now it seemed that people were just staying there through the night. Jinxx hadn't gotten a lot of sleep, but he had remained stone-cold sober as he always did.

And then Andy had approached the two of them in a dark corner of one of those parties and said in a bit of a rush, "Ashley's drinking. But he's doing it his way." He'd explained about the alcohol-infused blood, and Jinxx had exchanged a worried glance with Jake.

"There's no way that's safe," Jake had said.

"There's no way that's legal," Jinxx stressed.

And so here they were in Jinxx's kitchen long after CC had left, arguing about it. Ashley seemed to think he wasn't doing anything wrong. Jinxx wasn't so sure.

"How long have you been doing this?" Jake asked now.

Ashley shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe a decade longer than I've known you guys?"

Jinxx hissed. "Ashley."

"It's not a big deal!" Ashley insisted. "All I did was find a way to circumvent the fact that vampire biology means we can't drink alcohol. If it's been absorbed into a human's blood, then we can consume it because technically we're not consuming the alcohol itself, just what's been absorbed into the blood."

"Do I even dare ask how you discovered this?" Jinxx groaned.

"Decades of playing and partying," Ashley replied flippantly. "The same shit I've been doing since 1807."

Jinxx shuddered to think of what the world he'd known would have thought of teenage Ashley drinking before it was legal to and hanging out in places that shouldn't exist but did. He shuddered even more to think of how they'd see him now. He shuddered to think how the time he'd left behind would view any of them―demons sent from Hell to do Satan's bidding, probably, a result of some dark witchcraft. People tended to view rock music that way, anyway, but Jinxx pictured his parents, his brother, the friends that had died that night at the court house, and knew there weren't enough words in the dictionary to describe how frightened and repulsed they'd be.