Midnight Cocktail

Midnight Cocktail - Chapter 8

But that was all in the past.

One thing vampires are very good at is leaving things in the past. We have to be, otherwise the burden of centuries would weigh us down, break us, leave us crying in dark corners until the sun came up.

Fuck that.

Seriously.

It's how Romanian Dave dealt with the whole Impaler phase and it's how I dealt with him. And a few other things.

But fuck the past, fuck it good and hard in the ass.

It was Wednesday night and I had just killed a whiny bitch vamp-dom trick and phoned the woman I love.

And I do love Cherry with all my heart, even though she frequently fucks my chauffeur. We've all got our guilty pleasures. Who the fuck am I to deny Cherry hers?

Either I have Ray very well trained or she does, because he had my limo on the drive a little after one o'clock Thursday morning.

Cherry came in through the front door, laughing and trying to fasten her bra under her T-shirt while she jogged to the stairs.

"Hey, Cherry bomb."

She looked up at the balcony and I gave her a little wave, just to let her know everything was okay. She raced up the stairs and into my arms, her unfastened bra strap forgotten as we started to kiss.

"I love you," she said.

"Are you ready to shop like a motherfucker?"

She let out one of her girlie squeals of joy that always make her sound way too human.

The plan was simple: fly to London, wild shopping spree, stopover with Dieter McNeal and his wife, short flight to Stockholm on Friday evening, catch the triumphant hometown show by all-girl, all-vamp Swedish hard-rock band StakeHart who were halfway through touring the shit out of their fourth studio album, Accessory After The Fucked. Optionally hump anything that moves and, if it isn't moving, hump it 'til it does.

Don't worry, it will all make sense. This is how we live, full throttle and right on the edge.

"I'll just grab my bag," Cherry said, reconsidered, kissed me like she hadn't seen me for a hundred years, and giggled against the side of my face.

"We need to be in the air by two-thirty," I said.

"I know. I can't do the maths in my head, but I know."

The maths she was talking about was flight time plus time-zone difference divided by the square root of a fast and horrific death in the afternoon sun.

My private business jet will do New York to London in eight hours with a good tailwind. The five hour time difference means that a 2:30am takeoff will put us on the ground sometime around 3:30pm local time. This time of year, that leaves us a couple of hours after landing to relax on the plane until the sun goes down.

I say 'relax', I mean 'fuck'. I'm guessing you already figured that out.

I get asked by scaredy vamps if I'm not worried about the plane crashing during the daylight hours. They seem to miss the point that if my jet crashes into the ground at 600mph, I'm not exactly going to be overly concerned about getting sunburn.

"Go grab your bag, honey."

"Okay."

She kissed me again, and once more for luck, then skipped off towards her room. I picked my own bag up, wondered why the fuck Jimmy wasn't carrying it for me at the same time as realising that I'd rather carry it myself than listen to him sighing about it, and went downstairs.