“That should be enough,” I said drily, eyeing the stash that was revealed. There were twelve bottles, each holding maybe a pint. That didn’t sound like much, unless you knew what was in them.
Fey wine wasn’t really wine. It wasn’t much like anything else found on earth, either. A distillation of plants, mostly fey in origin, plus some herbs, spices, and God knew what else thrown in for taste, it could put a bull elephant on his knees. That much would drop the whole damn herd, only they weren’t going to be drinking it.
We were.
I’d have preferred something else, since my metabolism neutralizes regular old alcohol almost faster than I can drink it. Unfortunately, the same is true for vampires. If I wanted to win, Cheung had to end up under the table. And that meant hauling out the hard stuff.
“Is it not customary to cut this?” Cheung asked as Ray poured clear liquid into a couple of shot glasses. A little sloshed onto the table. I was slightly surprised it didn’t eat on through.
“If you feel the need,” I told him sweetly.
Cheung narrowed his eyes at me and tossed back his first shot. He didn’t do anything so unmanly as choke, but his eyes widened perceptibly. And then it was my turn. I’d proposed a drink-till-you-drop challenge for two reasons. Physically, it was all I was up for at the moment. I was in no condition to take Cheung, and even if I somehow did the impossible, no way was Scarface letting me walk out of here after killing the boss. But it was reason number two that I was betting the farm on. Or at least Ray’s continued existence.
One of the interesting facets of life as a dhampir is frequent rage-induced blackouts. They are a natural result of the vampire killing instinct mixed with an excitable human nervous system, but tell that to the people who’ve encountered one of us on a rampage. Not that there are usually any left.
Because of the scarcity of my kind—and the fact that we aren’t on most people’s Christmas card list—nobody had ever bothered to devise anything to control the blackouts. But after hundreds of years of questionable sanity, I’d recently discovered a remedy on my own. It wasn’t a perfect solution: it kept me more or less sane, but it severely reduced my ability in battle—something that, in my line of work, was considerably less than ideal.
It also had some interesting side effects.
I picked up my glass, hoping one in particular was going to kick in. Because otherwise, I didn’t have a much better chance at this contest than I would at a duel. I might drag it out longer, but my half-human metabolism was almost certain to be more susceptible to the wine’s effects than a full vampire’s.
I slammed back the shot, and felt my eyes start to water. Fey wine varied a lot in type and potency, depending on what exactly went into the mix, and this particular batch ought to have been illegal. Of course, come to think of it, it was.
“You okay there?” Scarface asked, looking amused. I nodded, my throat burning too much to speak, and sat the glass down beside Cheung’s. Ray immediately refilled them, while I concentrated on my version of a Hail Mary pass.
I had not inherited the vampire ability to mind speak. But I had found that if I drank the feys’ favorite beverage in enough quantity, I could pick up bits and pieces of what others were thinking. And I could speak to the mind of one vamp in particular.
This had led to some awkward situations, as the vamp in question, Louis-Cesare, was also my … well, I didn’t know what to call him. We weren’t lovers, exactly, at least not yet. And we were only friends in the way that we yelled at each other a lot. But there was definitely an attraction there. And for a few intimate, wine-fueled moments, I’d felt closer to him than to anyone else I’d ever known.