There was a huge expensive steak on my eye, and I was seriously considering having it grilled for breakfast. The steak was still in a Ziplock bag, and since it was now on my eye, helping tremendously with the swelling, I considered that it was now my steak.

The ceremony was going on a hundred feet behind me, obscured by the crowd of people either trying to get a better view of what was going on or to escape unnoticed. Apparently, not everyone was interested in watching Sebastien get his final initiation rites, either because they didn't care or just didn't know him. That was pretty telling on its own, and comforting that the vampires weren't all mindless zombies following Harry's orders. That was either going to be a good thing or bad thing...

A tall good-looking black man was walking towards me. He looked vaguely familiar, like he was on tv or something, a celebrity I'd forgotten I'd known about, and to be truthful, it wasn't that surprising to me that he was a vampire. I just wished that I could remember his name...

"Nice one," he said and offered a fist for the obligatory fist-bump. Of course I fist-bumped him. I mean I'm not stupid. I might have misplaced his name, but I wasn't completely stupid.

"That was pretty stupid of you," he was saying. "But totally worth it to see the look on Harry's face when you knocked the shit out of Golden Boy over there."

The crowd cheered at something just then and I grinned at my newfound admirer. Something clicked in my head and a name attached itself to his face.

"Glad I could provide a momentary distraction for the King himself," I said. "I even got a free steak out of it."

The King was one of the biggest rappers in Toronto, wildly popular, and when you stopped to think about it, with all of the music videos and public appearances he had to make, he'd actually managed to achieve a perfect balance of lifestyle that made him look like a perfectly normal if eccentric rich human being. If you actually had to live through his schedule, you'd see quickly that he was one hundred percent a vampire.

The King gave me a business card and grinned at me. "Text me sometime. You can come hang with my crew when you get tired of this place. It's not for everyone..."

"Isn't this the official spot for vampires to hang out?"

"Only if you're rich and pretentious. The new ones Harry's got coming out seem to love it, but some of us have been around a little bit longer. We just ain't got the patience for all this bullshit."

"Plus it's full of blood-sucking bastards, right?"

"You said it man." His eyes flickered over to the crowd where Sebastien was no doubt being anointed with oil or some shit to the approval of said crowd. "Be careful here tonight." And with that, the King was gone.

Another roar came from the crowd and I glanced over just at a moment that there was a gap between people. I could see Sebastian drenched head to toe in what looked like blood, the red making him glisten even more than before. Sebastien grinned at the crowd and his fangs were huge even from where I was sitting. I subconsciously rubbed at my own mouth where my fangs still hadn't made an appearance.

Someone shoved a beer into my face. I looked up to see Beatrice holding the beer and not even looking at me, her gaze firmly in the direction of the thoroughly bizarre ceremony.

"It's called the Ritual of Magazi. For the past fifty years, all new vampires have gone through the ritual. It reminds them of where they've been and what they are... or at least that's what Harry says. I think he just likes to drench these idiots in blood."

Well, that answered that question. Beatrice was really good at the exposition thing.

"Is that real blood then?"

Beatrice looked at me for the first time since she had returned.

"Either take the beer or I'm drinking it myself."

I took the beer and after a brief glance at the label to appreciate Beatrice's expensive taste in beer, swigged long and hard. Beatrice sat down next to me and poked at the steak on my eye.

"Nice steak. You should grill it up later."

"Oh I have plans for this steak, don't you worry. If I had known there would be free steak I would have started a fight earlier."

"It would have been an actual fight if Harry hadn't had to drag you off of whats-his-face. You should have seen the look on his face—"

"Oh I saw it, right before he punched me. He's got a mean punch."

"At least he only punched you once. And at least it was Harry doing the punching. In his own way, he was protecting you."

"How the fuck do you protect someone by punching them so hard that the bruise instantly forms?"

Beatrice glanced at my swollen face and then leaned in close. She pointed out a man in the crowd to me.

"See that guy in the white suit?"

I looked and remembered seeing the guy before. The white suit kind of made him stand out, but he still would have been hard to miss. He had long silver-grey hair pulled back into a ponytail, not a strand out of place, and wore rose-red sunglasses. He was tanned in a way that you knew it was spray-on but that it was also an expensive spray tan. I could tell from looking at him that he drove a little convertible with too much power under the hood.

"You mean the Mafia guy?"

"That's Renaldo Demucci. See the white suit? It's ritual for the sponsor to wear white. He's the one sponsoring Sebastien, and his methods of teaching are a little unconventional, but very affectionate. He's also a vicious fuck who is probably plotting to have you gutted in the alley out back when this is all over."

Renaldo glanced our way at that moment and just for a second there was direct eye contact between the two of us. The crowd shifted and the gap closed, leaving me feeling more panicked than I had known was possible.

I stood up, ready to run for my life. Beatrice grabbed hold of my arm and I froze in my tracks. Damn she was strong!

"Oh sit down and finish your beer," she said. "I've already paid for it, so you'd better finish it."

I sank back down and tried to hide behind my hand even though Renaldo could no longer see me with the crowd between us.

"Oh he's not going to be bothering you," she said off-handedly. "Harry wants me to make an example out of that motherfucker. I'm going to murder that sonofabitch in about six, seven hours. I'm going to murder him so good..."

I did a double take at Beatrice, a stupid grin frozen on my face. She had to be joking right? Nobody walks around saying things like that, did they?

Beatrice didn't give me a chance to ask. She drained her beer and got to her feet, slamming the bottle onto the table at the same time. She looked around the room, searching for something.

"Look, I'm going to bug out—" I said, or at least started to say. Beatrice glared at me and cut me off.

"You stay right there. I have to do a thing for you."

"I can catch an Uber—"

"Stay dammit!" Beatrice snapped and vanished into the crowd.

I looked around miserably, wondering if I dared to look in the direction of Sebastien and Renaldo "I'm going to kill your puppies" Demucci. I quickly decided hell no to that, and instead looked over at the dance floor where all of the humans below danced rhythmically to some song I couldn't hear but still had enough bass for me to feel through the walls and the floor. I wondered how many of the people down there even suspected that there were vampires above watching them dance. I wondered what they would say if they could see the bizarre blood ceremony going on in the middle of that crowd.

That reminded me. I looked back at the people on the VIP floor now, the mix of vampires and humans, the question that had been bugging me, popping up and reminding me that yep, it was still there and still wanted to be answered.

There were humans hanging out with vampires, mostly very friendly, almost equals. But there were a few of them, men and women alike who were bleeding from cuts on their wrists and in a few cases, on the necks, while the vampire they were with sucked on their wounds. Some of the less extreme cases even managed to carry on a conversation, pausing only every now and again to shift position.

It was bizarre and disturbing to watch, more because of the way they just made it all seem so casual, so every day... so goddamned normal. It made me wonder for the first time why the vampires were even drinking the blood. We could very clearly eat food, so it wasn't a nutritional thing. I hadn't even made the step towards even thinking about drinking blood in my short time as a vampire, even though the thought had occurred to me that I might wake up feeling homicidal one day, thirsting for blood like in the comics. But no dice.

Beatrice came back, two gorgeous young women on her arms.

"So Harry asked me to be your sponsor and I told him he could go fuck himself, but not in so many words because I hate having to grow back the teeth he would have knocked out, so there was this whole back and forth going on. I think he thinks he won, so I might be your sponsor, but whatever."

"What's going on?"

"This," Beatrice presented the redhead and she twirled for me, giggling. "Is for you. It's time you had a taste of blood."

The redhead plopped down into my lap and gently moved the steak from my face. I was stunned and was instantly out of my depth, wondering what the fuck was going on. I caught the eye of another human girl a few seats over, a female vampire sucking gently on her neck and it suddenly occurred to me that I could smell the blood and had been smelling it all along...

... And it was sweet, so sweet, and so close. Before I had realized it, I had tuned in to the thump-thump of the heartbeat of the redhead in my lap, and my breathing slowed, which in turn slowed my own heartbeat until I was in perfect sync with her.

I looked up to Beatrice and she smiled at me.

"Drink Bob. Find out what it means to be a vampire."

I looked back to the redhead and I honestly meant to ask her name, but there was that thump-thump-thump of her heartbeat again, not unlike the thump-thump-thump of the music downstairs. I meant to ask her name, to tell her that she could leave and go back to the safety of the humans downstairs, but I didn't.

She knew what I wanted even if I didn't and she held up her wrist for me to suck on, looking me deep in the eye and she may have whispered something like "don't worry, this is what I want" but I honestly couldn't tell if that was just my imagination. All there was, was the beat of her heart and mine, that thump-thump-thump, that heavy bass, the smell of the blood.

When she pressed the wound to my lips, I sucked willingly.

Taste exploded on my taste buds and it was sweet and rich and heady, and it filled me with absolute euphoria, spreading through my body slowly and instantly. It was just like heroin, but so much better. Oh, so much better...

It's in the name you know. It's all in the name of the beast, and I am the beast.

We suck blood because we are vampires.

We drink blood.

We share the blood.

We are the blood.

Drink deeply and know your name...

I know my name now, and it is oblivion.

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

The book is now AVAILABLE in Hardcover, Paperback and Ebooks. It's going to live here free on Wattpad, but if you love the story and want to support your awesome author (me), grab a copy from one of the lovely retailers below. Who knows: maybe it can become a bestseller with the help of you lovely WattPadders

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Check out the website: http://www.bobthevampire.com