Somewhere around the fourth bar (please don't ask me the name), and after an ungodly amount of tequila, the Hall of the Drunken King was only two blocks away. It was a distance that we were relatively confident we could cover and still be drunk enough not to chicken out at the last minute. We had really pushed the limits of drunkenness in vampires and I considered myself among the leading experts on the topic of how long it takes for a vampire to sober up after two bottles of tequila and a fair amount of walking.

"How far was that this time? Four blocks?"

"Three and a half," Stanley said. "Already losing my buzz."

Frankie had his cell phone out, Google Maps on the screen as he reminded himself what the next bar was. "The Wooly Mammoth is just around the corner. We can fill up there."

"Why didn't we just take an Uber?" I groaned. "All of this walking isn't good for us. We're sobering up way too fast! Are you feeling sober Stanley?"

"I'm feeling sober! How you feeling Ben?"

"Can we go home yet? This is taking forever."

"He's feeling sober!" Natalie responded for him.

"One more bar!" I tried to be more enthusiastic then I felt. "We're doing this, right?"

"Storming the castle!" Natalie and Stanley said almost together, but damn if they didn't sound as convinced as they had before.

"Don't make me give a rousing speech you bastards!" I growled. "I really, really suck at them."

"Just shoot me now," Benjamin groaned.

We stormed into the Wooly Mammoth (the name of the bar has been changed to protect the guilty) and drank ourselves silly. There was no karaoke at this bar, just a lot of over-priced alcohol and a clientele who was dressed way better than we were. For a few moments, I wondered if we had somehow discovered another vampire bar, but the lack of those piercing blue vampire eyes anywhere but among our little group told a different story. It was just rich people who liked to buy expensive drinks because expensive drinks at least kept the ordinary rabble far away from the bar. And there we were among them, rabbling as rabblers do. We got a few looks as we seated ourselves, but they were mostly just innocently curious.

"I gotta piss," I whispered to Frankie and grinned at him. "Don't you bastards go anywhere without me!"

"Storming the castle!" Frankie said without any enthusiasm.

"Storming the castle! Woo!" I echoed and then stumbled off to the bathroom. I stood at the urinal for a long time, taking a long deserved piss, wondering if I was actively reducing the level of alcohol in my system. It was a stupid thought, the kind you have when you're either drunk or stoned, but it was mostly the type of thought you have when the act of pissing is just taking for-fucking-ever.

I noticed the suit first you know. It's funny the things you notice when you're nice and properly drunk. The bathroom walls of the Wooly Mammoth held no graffiti to entertain us errant pissers, only little seven inch HD screens placed at eye level to blast us with the specials on the menu or whatever they wanted to show us, and believe me, those are impossible to hold the attention of the properly drunk. So yeah, the suit on the man at the next urinal, was definitely the first thing that caught my attention. I hadn't noticed when he had come in, you know, me being caught up in the throes of pissing and everything, so for me, it was as if he had appeared out of thin air.

"You alright there?" he asked, with a wry smile on his face.

"I think I just pissed the drunk away," I muttered, deliberately not looking at the dude. I threw a glance his way, of course, a slight turn of the head before jerking it back so he would be assured that I wasn't trying to sneak a peek or anything. Some guys can be weird. There was something wrong about him though, even though I wasn't looking at him, but it was just something I couldn't put my finger on.

"I'm sure you'll be able to fix that. This is a bar after all," my strange new friend said and we both laughed that weird hollow laugh, the purpose of which was only to assure the other person that you had a sense of humour even if what they had said wasn't that clever in the slightest. Rules of social etiquette and all.

I finally finished pissing, quickly tucked away and turned away to the sink, still being careful not to look too long or too carefully at my new friend.

"This bar doesn't have enough alcohol," I grinned as I reached to turn on the hot water. I stopped then, just a split second as I caught a better look at the profile of the man at the urinal and then finally realized what had been bugging the shit out of me.

It was quiet in the bathroom because nobody was taking a piss. Dude was standing at that urinal and the reassuring psssssssst of a stream of urine was definitely missing. Now that I had stopped pissing, the lack of sound was even more deafening and for some reason, it also scared the shit out of me.

The vampire at the urinal turned to look at me and I could see his eyes now, cold, blue and piercing, and now of all times, I realized that I knew exactly who this slightly scary motherfucker was. He had a great head of hair that could only be described as lustrous—

"Hey, didn't I punch you once?" I asked, and that flash of irritation and embarrassment that surfaced on his face was all the confirmation that I needed. What the fuck was his name again? Evanien? Bannion? Something-something-ien. What the fuck was it?

"This is not going to end well for you," Dude said, and that would have been disturbing by itself, except I was drunk and distracted trying to remember what his name was.

"Yea, I just figured that out," I said. "But before you fuck me up, could you remind me what your name was again?"

He gave me a look that told me he thought I was the world's biggest idiot.

"It's Sebastien you fuck! Sebastien De La- HEY! GET BACK HERE!"

I hit the bathroom door at a run, slamming it open much harder than I had intended. The idea had been simply to run as fast as possible but somebody should have told that to the two extremely large men waiting outside for me.

"Nyet!" One of them said as he clamped my arm in a hand roughly the size of a manhole cover. An equally large man had grabbed my other arm, and even though he had said nothing, I assumed he was as equally Russian as the other dude.

"Uh oh" did not begin to describe the stirrings of terror in my gut.

They threw me back into the bathroom and as I crashed into the wall, I noticed that Sebastien was still standing at the urinals, his rage barely contained. I looked from him to the two large men who were now very deliberately blocking the door.

"I'm sorry," I said. "You were saying something about killing me?"

"I had a whole speech prepared and I'm going to deliver it!" Sebastien hissed as he turned to me.

I rolled my eyes and settled back into a more comfortable position, glad that my back was at least to the wall. If anything was going to happen to me, I was going to see it coming dammit.

"By all means, don't let me interrupt. I just want you to know you're seriously fucking up my buzz right about now."

"Fuck you Bob. You're nothing but a joke! You think you're so special— GODDAMMIT!"

I had made another run for it, pushing off the wall this time and propelling myself forward hard, determined to smash through the Russian blockade, after all, they were only human, right?

When the ringing in my ears stopped and I picked myself up off the floor where I had been knocked to, I sat up and vowed never to do that again. Human did not equal soft, at least not when it came to these guys. I glanced at Sebastien, sure that he was going to be just about losing his mind about me not wanting to stick around to hear his stupid speech.

"Are we going to try the speech thing again?" I asked. "I'm really, really interested in anything you might have to say, especially if it involves me not dying. That was a big hint there in case you're interested."

"Oh, you're going to die," Sebastien said quietly.

"You're really not selling this very well,"

"There's no running away from it."

"Watch me."

There was a brief tussle with the Russians again and of course, that ended badly for me. Sebastien just shook his head mournfully.

"Where did you get these guys?" I asked. "Are they even human?"

"They're on loan from my Russian compatriots. They don't speak a word of English so I wouldn't bother trying to appeal to their gentler sides."

"Do they even have a word for gentle in Russian?" I took a look at the men and something occurred to me. "They don't know that we're vampires, do they?"

"Not a clue about me, no. But you? I don't know how you can even bother to call yourself a vampire at all. You're a terrible vampire and you know it. You're possibly the worst example I've ever seen. It makes me sick to my stomach to think I had to share my initiation with you. It was the worst kind of insult, but then you decided to embarrass me further by punching me in front of everyone. I've been waiting ten fucking years, and I put up with a lot of shit to become a vampire, and you just stumbled into it. You should be glad you've had Harry's protection all this time, but now all bets are off after what Harry did to Renaldo. He was my mentor and they killed him like he was some goddamn accidental."

Sebastien actually seemed really broken up by this revelation. He turned the full blast of his psycho hate towards me.

"I've been watching you for months you know, just waiting for you to give up and fuck up so badly and get yourself killed, but you're either really lucky or just a goddamn cockroach that just... won't... die. You just keep on going and going... and I'm sick of waiting for you to kill yourself. Somebody's got to put you down like the bad dog you are."

"Was that the speech? Cuz it sounded like you've been practising. Should I be applauding now?"

"It's going to be fun killing you."

"Are you going to kill me here? In this bathroom? Cuz my friends are right outside somewhere. They're probably very drunk, but they're there and probably looking for me."

Sebastien shrugged. "Ahh yes: your Friends of Vlad club. Very enterprising of you to start that. We've been hearing all about it. How's my friend Murray? Do you believe I actually bit that stupid sonofabitch and convinced the poor bastard that he was now a vampire... and he believed me? I sent him your way of course. I even gave him one of your little girlfriends from the club to suck on. My little joke."

Oh, you sick fuck.

"You realize he was killing people, right? He killed that girl. Meredith."

"Not my fault what you vampire rejects get up to. Real or otherwise. If you guys are out there actually killing people, it's because you're all so fucked up and undeserving—"

"Beatrice got to Murray. I think it's safe to say he's probably not with us anymore."

That got him to shut up. Finally.

"Beatrice?"

"Beatrice," I confirmed, wondering what it was that had gotten him so rattled about Beatrice. I mean she was unstable in a 'I'm going to kill you next and might even enjoy it' sort of way, but it wasn't like she was the Gentlemen or something. Something occurred to me.

"Didn't she kill your mentor? She mentioned something about murdering the shit out of some Italian guy. The same one you were crying about just now?"

Sebastien looked a little unsure of himself now, and I could see him doing the mental calculations. There was some kind of inner struggle going on which might mean I could actually survive this particular encounter—

"It doesn't matter. She doesn't scare me and you're still going to die."

"My friends will come looking for me."

"Your friends are already gone," Sebastien grinned. "They think you left without them."

"Why would they think that?" I asked, but I already knew the answer, could see it happening in my mind's eye, a full-blooded and extremely rich vampire approaching my drunken friends in the bar and telling them that I had run away into the night and that they should all just fuck off. Part of me wanted to say that they wouldn't believe that, that they would know something was up, but the truth has a way of being really obvious. Of course they had believed it and more importantly, it was exactly the excuse they were all looking for to run away back to their own safe lives where they didn't have to storm the castle in some misconceived plot that dared to dream about actually making it past the front doors of the Hall of the Drunken King.

"You know why " Sebastien said.

"I'm going to fight you," I said, my heart pounding hard in my chest. It was becoming difficult to breathe and I could smell the heat of adrenaline rushing off my top lip.

"You can try," Sebastien said and goddamn I couldn't wait to punch him in his punchable face again.

The Russians attacked me then and I fought like a demon. I'd like to say that I won, but this isn't that kind of story.

The last thing I felt was a prick of something sliding into my neck and then everything went black.

******** AUTHOR'S NOTE **********

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