Blood Drunk

by Ben Shepherd

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Urban Fantasy; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

​BLOOD DRUNK introduces a new kind of vampire hunter in former gangster Freddie Burns, and joins him as he fights for his place, for his family, and for the hell of it in London’s gritty magical underworld. Mostly for the hell of it, to be honest.

Freddie Burns just wants ten pints, a spot of football violence, and to take over his uncle’s fading South London crime business. But when a gangland execution goes wrong, Freddie discovers a new kind of organized crime—one where vampires are spine-breakingly real and monsters hide just out of sight.

Good thing Freddie has a supernatural gift for giving vampires a kicking—them and anyone else that looks at him funny.

Dragged into a world of shadowy organizations, secret sorcerous pacts, gruesome vampire initiations, and a plot to rule it all, Freddie realizes it’s up to him to save the world – or at least not wreck it entirely. He just needs a drink and a smoke first.

Release date: September 8, 2026

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

I tried crack once, when I was younger and significantly more stupid, if you can believe that. Not my greatest moment. I’d ended up in the back room of a party I hadn’t been invited to, somewhere off Commercial Road. Seemed like a good idea at the time. But then again, nearly everything did, back then.

I can’t lie, the hit was extraordinary, euphoric and buzzy and good; good like landing a punch, or being wrapped in a towel and carried to bed.

Then it wore off, and boom you’re back under a bare light bulb, in a flat with sticky carpets and a slight smell of shit, next to people with dirt under their fingernails and sores on their faces. The choice, at that point, is pretty simple; wake the fuck up, leave and do something else – anything else – or, and this is the really popular option, go and suck dick until you’ve got enough money for more crack.

I left them to it, went back to the party. Drugs have never been my thing. I’d like to have been a hippy, I think, but I’m just too fucking aggressive. Lager and whisky does the job perfectly well, thank you very much.

I got thrown out twenty minutes later anyway.

I only mention it because human sacrifice is a bit like crack, in the end – a cheap way for losers to mortgage their souls for power, a soaring moment of omnipotence that turns out to be all too temporary followed by a short lifetime of finding out what it cost.

I got close once, but never again.

Well, never say never. Needs must and all that. But I generally get by on insects these days. I’ll explain that in a bit.

I told you already that I can do magic. We call it the Practice. No, I don’t have a wand, there’s no Latin involved, or pentagrams, or naked sky-dancing – I’m fat, balding and fucking hairy, so I think everyone’s pleased about that. It’s a natural talent, so far as I know, a very, very rare ability to take the raw energy of the death of any living thing and use it to do stuff. Mostly break things, in my case, as I fucking love a fight and my fingers are too fat for anything else. It generally starts, like spots and involuntary erections in geography, around puberty.

Some of us are never discovered, and many end up killing themselves in various spectacular ways before they work out what’s going on. Those that are tracked down end up on a sort of foundation course, learning how to control our power. It’s had a few names over the years, but most just call it the Academy. It’s mainly run by that terrifying old bastard Hawkins, though there is a handful of other staff.

The Academy has two purposes, really, and neither of them have anything to do with maximizing the unique potential of every special child. Nurturing it very much ain’t.

The first purpose is ensuring that magic remains a scarcely believed myth. That is more important than our life, or anyone else’s, a point that Hawkins makes abundantly fucking clear. We are, therefore, mostly taught how to avoid blowing ourselves or anyone else up, at least by accident, as well as some of the basic skills we’d need to keep it all under wraps – lockpicking, combat, that kind of thing.

We are also left in absolutely no fucking doubt at all about who makes the rules, who enforces them and what happens if we break them.

Hawkins, Hawkins again and getting very dead, very quickly, in case you were wondering.

If we pass the foundation course, we are deemed competent to go out into the big bad world without adult supervision, albeit under sufferance. But before we do, we’re sat down and given the chance to take the shilling and become part of the Firm, Hawkins’ network, something between a secret society and a medieval guild. That’s the second point of the Academy – feeding talent into Hawkins’ meat-grinder.

It’s not big, the Firm, given how seldom the talent crops up – maybe a total manpower in the dozens, max. But it has real global reach, and can punch a long way above its weight; those that stay get access to the accumulated wisdom of countless generations of practitioners, honed over centuries, arcane techniques for surveillance and war magic, eldritch secrets that would sear the mind of the unprepared and blacken the soul.

At least, I assume so; I told them to get fucked.

Don’t get me wrong, all of that sounds cool, but I’m not much of a joiner, me.

Tried that once. Didn’t work out too well. See, I ran with some bad, bad boys when I was younger.

Fucking hell, that makes me sound like a prick. Let me try again.

I was a gopher for a low-rent sociopath somewhere just up from the ground floor of organized crime in a little patch of unfashionable and unlovely South London.

Yeah, that’s better.

I was aiming for Scarface at the time, but it was just low-grade thuggery, and that’s all it was ever going to be. The dying days of sustainable family-run crime. Organic loan-sharking with a side of artisanal prostitution, served up thick with self-regard and bogus sentimentality.

Break your dad’s legs over a missed payment, then buy you a pint in the local, that kind of thing. Fuck me, but were we ever cunts.

Anyway, for me and Tommy, my brother, it started out with running errands for the next-door neighbour. We just knew him as Uncle Jim, real good friend to us he was – particularly to my mum, after Dad passed – and he tucked us under his flabby perma-tanned wing when I was thirteen or so; Tommy would have been fifteen. Just dropping the odd package off down the local pub, or taking an envelope round the corner. Quicker than the Royal Mail, he used to say, and he’d sort us out with bikes, new trainers, all that stuff.

It was him took us to the football, the first time. Dad hadn’t really liked sport, into books mostly, and music. But Uncle Jim lived for the football. We’d go sit in his seats just behind the dugout – always got a respectful nod from the manager, and the chairman used to come over to shake hands now and then. The chairman. Made us feel like dons, like big men.

Got in with the headbangers, the hardcore, after a few years; good lads mostly, if a bit thick and too quick to fix things with their fists. Six pints before the game, couple of spliffs and a toot of dirty speed in the car park, then kick someone’s head in outside a train station on the way home. Standard Saturday.

After it all went to shit, after I had my eyes opened, I still went to the games sometimes, though the seats weren’t as good. Even during the year at the Academy. It was my one link back to my past, the only normal thing left. The teachers, well, some of them understood, and in the end they got used to me turning up on Monday morning with a black eye, or limping. I think a couple of them were jealous, especially Double-Wide. And I absolutely guarantee that I’m the only one of us that knows how to fuck someone up with a rolled-up newspaper.

See, that’s what makes me stand out. I’ve got the brains of the rest of them, wouldn’t have made it this far if I hadn’t, and I’ve picked up enough learning to get by. We all ended up able to throw some weight with the Practice and even do a bit of damage without. They can fight, no doubt, even the effete-looking ones in rimless glasses and gabardine fucking trench coats.

But, if I have to, I can mix it as well, break bones and spill blood with my hands and head and teeth. They can do marksmanship, and open-hand strikes, but they’ve never really understood violence, none of them. Me, I’ve got violence in my soul. I like it.

A lot of them don’t really approve of me, look down their noses at the Adidas shell-toes and Fred Perry. Except Hawkins. He gets it. But if you’ve seen what he’s seen, I guess you lose the priceless capacity for glib judgement. Fucking tiring, I imagine, seeing the truth of things all the time. Nowhere to hide.

July 1995, the month I finished school. A year before Uncle Jim got eaten. That’s when it all started properly, I suppose.

I was eighteen, must have been, and couldn’t wait to get out into the big bad world. Tommy had left school a couple of years before and had been working for Jim since, which meant he was hardly ever at home. He turned up one afternoon in a convertible, with a pierced ear and a new leather jacket, looking like someone had told him the world’s best secret. He took me for a drive, bought me a pint and showed me some grubby photos of the bird he’d been banging.

He played the big brother, the big man, but it fit him like a second-hand suit; there was something simmering underneath it all that wasn’t quite right, something in the way that he played with his lighter and tore a beermat into fragments.

Still, it impressed me enough, and if a moron like Tommy could do well for himself then I was going to clean up. I’d known for years that I just had to serve my time, keep running the errands for Jim – he said the school blazer was the best disguise in the world – and the door would be unlocked. I remember the feeling, walking out the gates on that last summer day, ripping my tie off and putting it in a bin. I turned my back on the kids screaming and jumping around – I thought of them as kids, all of them – and got in the back of Jim’s Jaguar, to a brandy and a Rothmans. It felt like being born.

We drove round London, me and Jim in the back, the sweating fat neck of the driver glistening up front, windows down. Jim was in expansive mood, laughing and throwing his fat hands around. He told me about coming up in the sixties, running with the old-school mobsters, brasses and bootlace ties and sawn-offs. Over the years, he’d maintained the front that he was a businessman, in property and bars and restaurants, and he did own a lot of all three of them; a riverside restaurant down in Wandsworth, a couple of terraces of two-up two-downs, a chip shop, a few pubs, that kind of thing. It was ‘a little empire’ he said.

But that wasn’t all he was into. He leant forwards, the heavy gold St Christopher’s medal swinging free from the grey fur on his sagging chest. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s a bit more to it than that.’

I nodded, mute.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am a man of business, it’s just that I don’t draw a neat line between what the rest of those muppets’ – he waved airily out the window – ‘think of as a living, and what those of us in the know can enjoy.’

He leant back again. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we can frolic through the fucking clover, son, and it’s all gravy.’ He paused, suddenly meditative, and looked out the window into the sunlit street. ‘Gravy,’ he said again. Then he looked at me, sharp.

‘Thing is, son, the absolutely pivotal fucking thing, is to have people around you can trust. You know, properly trust. Family.’ Then, suddenly, he barked ‘Stop!’ and leant across me as the car braked hard, putting one heavy hand on my knee, and stuck his face out of the window on my side of the car.

‘All right, darling,’ he shouted. Two young girls, in white school-uniform shirts and short dark-grey skirts, were walking along the pavement, eating chips from open paper packets. They were three years below me at school. They stopped and looked.

‘You wanna bring those beautiful tits over here, sweetheart? Give you something meaty to go with your chips.’

‘Fuck you, you fat pervert,’ shouted one, and she threw her chips at the car. Jim lurched back into his seat, laughing like a drain. ‘On we go, Derek,’ he said, ‘don’t think they were game. Frigid little sluts. Still,’ he said, ‘they love it really.’

The car pulled away.

‘Yeah, son, family,’ he said, suddenly serious again. ‘And that’s how I think of you and your brother, you’re like the boys I never had. You know that.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’ve always been real good to us.’

‘And, love him to death, but your brother ain’t, how can I put this, he ain’t never gonna win Brain of Britain, now, is he?’

I smirked.

‘But you,’ he said, ‘you’ve got something. You see things, don’t you? Take it all in. I like that. Now, I’ll keep your brother busy, and make sure he’s got all the cars and slags he wants, no drama, but there’s no way he’s ever going to understand what I do. Not really.’

He paused again, and poured himself a brandy from the cut-glass decanter between the grey leather seats.

‘It’s complicated,’ he said, ‘what I do. There’s… challenges. Always. Anyone who’s made anything of themselves round here, there’s gonna be a queue a mile long of people waiting to knock ’em off and get fat on the remains. A mile long. Some of them are mugs, easy to run off. Some you can buy. And some… well, I’ll tell you about that in good time.’

‘Point is, Freddie, I need help. I’m a fat fuck and I’m not getting any younger and I want to hand all this’ – he slapped the leather of the seat, and the heavy gold watch on his left wrist – ‘on to someone. I think,’ he said, looking at me, ‘that should be you.’

‘Me?’ I think I said, though I was reeling.

‘Who else, you dozy sod? You’re a big lad, smart, carry yourself well. What else you going to do? Clean fucking windows?’

Well, when he put it like that.

We went to the pub, where he fed me a couple of pints of Guinness with brandy chasers, then on to a little place he knew, where the decaying madam in too much blue eye shadow welcomed him in like a long-lost brother. He sat there telling me how much my mum meant to him while a parade of bored hookers walked through the swimming brandy haze in my head. He wouldn’t leave ’til I’d picked one, so I chose the last – a chubby girl with dark, kind-looking eyes. She was nice enough. I remember his big gold pinkie ring cold on the back of my neck as she led me away, and him saying I’d be a man in a couple of minutes, then laughing his big sloppy laugh.

I spent a lot of time at his place over the next year, three little terraced houses on our street that he’d bought and had knocked together. I made endless cups of sweet tea and watched the faces that came in to see him, Jim either leaning back in his big armchair or sat out on his patio at the back, pink legs spread under a white towelling robe. He wanted me to see it all, he said, so I did; the sallow-faced pimps, his ferret of an accountant, the big lads he sent out to do the hard work. I didn’t have to do anything, just learn the ropes, the network, the game.

Sure, there was a bit of resistance from the other boys, the ones who’d been hoping to inherit, but Jim kept an eye and Derek was always around to have a little word if they wouldn’t go away. Derek was Jim’s driver and bodyguard, bald and the size of a truck.

It would have come back to bite me, all the politics and small-minded ambition, if I had ever taken over the reins. I don’t think I would have been very good at it. Probably would have ended up in prison or a box.

I saw in the New Year at his pub, with Tommy and Mum, doors locked and Jim sweating into his suit and throwing lit sparklers at people. Happiest night I can remember, that. I could have moved out of Mum’s house, looking back. I was old enough and had the cash for it, but she did my laundry and put food on the table and I wasn’t about to learn to fucking cook. Tommy just didn’t want to leave Mum.

Jim kept money coming my way, too, then tiny tastes of authority. A decision here, a sit-down there; all with his yellowing eyeballs glued to the back of my head. He kept me out of some of it, the bits that the boys wouldn’t talk about when I was around, the nights that ended with limps and cuts and unexplained stays in hospital.

I half hated him, even then, for his crudity and his cruelty. Because he treated me like a child, still. The weight of his hands on my mother’s shoulders.

But the other half of me wanted it. Wanted something. Still do, I suppose. Not sure anyone works that part out.

And he knew how to run a business. So I listened, and I learnt.

First moment I had a sense something was wrong must have been in May, maybe June. Little bits of tension round the edges of our territory, friction with crews we’d been easy with for years. A bookie got robbed, someone set fire to a warehouse down by the river, one of the brasses got followed home and beaten up. Little things, really, and nothing to link it all up, but everyone was a little bit on edge. Wound tight.

Then Jim came back one afternoon in early August with a new suit for me – my first – and took me to a meeting in the back room of a pub somewhere in Lambeth, where I shook the hands of a series of grotesques: a hugely fat Turk, a corpse-like cockney with skin like yellow-white orange peel, an old Rasta guy with the coldest eyes I’d ever seen. Eight of them in all, spread round this heavy, stained wooden table, lit by one green-shaded bulb over the middle. They looked like a bunch of fucking carnival masks, Jim included, but you could feel the assurance, the power. It crackled. I stood behind his chair like a medieval pageboy as they did some strained small talk over takeaway Chinese, then went and sat with the other drivers, gophers and bodyguards in a dusty, dim anteroom, while the real business got done.

I was lost in thought, smoking a Benson & Hedges I’d cadged off a monosyllabic driver with a crew cut and the bearing of a soldier, when I heard raised voices from through the closed door, and the bang of something – someone – hitting the heavy wooden table, followed by the tinkle of breaking glass.

A tremor ran through the anteroom, a little ripple of tension. One of the seconds in with me touched the lapel of his jacket, a guy with a mass of dreadlocks and a gold front tooth; the soldier type took a couple of slow steps backwards into the corner.

I realized two things, right there; they were all tooled up, and I was so far out of my depth I couldn’t even see the shore.

We stood – or in my case, sat, looking at the musty carpet between my feet – in complete silence. It might only have been a couple of minutes. Felt like years. Then, thank fuck, a laugh echoed through the shut door followed by the low buzz of conversation. And then we heard chairs scraping back, and the door opened, and it was all right, I hadn’t died.

Jim was grim-faced, tense under his normal heavy-handed bonhomie, grey under the broken capillaries and pinkish jowls. We left, sharpish.

He was quiet in the car, waving me to silence when I started to speak.

We cruised back across South London, him staring straight ahead, hands clasping and unclasping in his lap, while I peered out the window – Old Kent Road, still looking half a bombsite, the Elephant, Vauxhall; concrete on dirty concrete, takeaways and bookies. My manor, I remember thinking.

Who the fuck was I kidding. It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t anybody’s. But I suppose it was home.

It was only once we’d got back to Jim’s, and he’d thrown back three fingers of Scotch out of the chunky square-cut decanter and had another even bigger one on the go, that he started talking.

He looked at me – properly at me – for the first time since he’d left the meeting and said, fairly calmly, ‘We’ve got a problem, son. I didn’t tell you – didn’t want to scare the horses, as it were – but we lost someone last week. Guy called Finch, ran bits and bobs out of the Nag’s Head for me. Never a big wheel, but solid, reliable. Been with me years.

‘They found him out the back of the pub when they were opening up on Sunday. He’d had his throat cut. I just put it down to a little local tension, fact of life in this business. Sent ten grand and a bunch of flowers to his missus, and put the local boss – Graham, you’ve met Graham, in’t you? – on handling it. Job done, very sad, move on.

‘Then Asil called – the fat Turkish cunt what just ate half the fucking food for eight – and… Freddie, this smells bad. I mean, he’s lost three in a month – one of his best pimps, his bodyguard and then, and this is what’s got his blood up, his youngest son. And as he’s telling us this, I can see the recognition going round the table – we’ve all lost people, all in the same way.

‘Well, nearly the same,’ Jim said. ‘Some had their throat cut, others been opened up here and here’ – he slashed the edge of his hand across his inner thighs – ‘like letting the blood out of a fucking sheep. And none looked like they’d put up a fight, even some real hard bastards, just all laid out to find – peaceful, apparently. Someone’s moving in, that’s what’s going on. Someone’s putting the squeeze on all of us.’

His eyes bulged suddenly, and he half rose and threw his heavy crystal tumbler at the wall opposite, where it detonated.

Then he went on, calm as before. ‘The cops know, ’course they do, but they just think we’re fucking with each other, some sort of turf war. They won’t do shit.’

He paused. ‘Get me another whisky, would you, Freddie, there’s a good lad,’ he said.

I went and poured him a whisky, carefully replaced the heavy cut-glass stopper and placed the new glass by his elbow. He took a sip, staring into the cold fireplace.

‘Nah, don’t buy it. I’ve been there, we’ve all fucking been there; get into a war and all you get is heat for all of us, and in the end, no one wins. It’s been comfy, clean and comfy, for years now. They’ve all done well, as well as me. No way they’re going to rock the boat.’

‘One of their people, gone rogue?’ I said, the first time I’d spoken in what felt like hours. My voice sounded thin, high, compared to Jim’s rumble.

‘Yeah, that’s where I went too,’ he said. ‘A coup, something like that. But they all swore they’ve got things tied down tight.’

He looked thoughtful.

‘But I bet that’s what every poor fucker thinks just before someone stabs him in the back,’ he said, more to himself than me.

Then he smiled, and there was something different, hard-edged, cruel in his eyes. ‘Let’s do a little bit of spring cleaning, eh?’ he said. ‘Just to be sure. Can’t hurt. Well, it’s definitely going to fucking hurt someone. Just not us, eh?’ Then he laughed. ‘Right, let’s make some calls,’ he said.

So he did. He owned a warehouse in an industrial estate a couple of miles away, and we sat there in a sweatbox of a back room while the population of his little empire came and stood and were judged, one after the other. Took us a couple of weeks. He had Derek with him, and Phillips most of the time. Phillips didn’t do much day-to-day but was always on the payroll and hardly ever spoke. Jim’s pet killer. Even Derek was scared of him.

Jim’s people all said the same thing, in the end. Some started off cocky, others palpably nervous; after Jim had gone through his little routine, Derek had shouted at them and Phillips had bent down and whispered something in their ear, they all – universally – started to babble. ‘You know I’m loyal, Jim, don’t know nothing about it, do anything for you.’ Then they started turning on each other – ‘that cunt is on the take, this one is fucking the girls for free, the other hates you, heard him saying it.’

To his credit, Jim took all of it with a pinch of salt.

‘These fuckers’ll say anything’, he said once we’d gone through the list, ‘if they think I’m going to let Tweedledum and Tweedledee over there off the leash.’

I remember he leant back in the creaking old office chair and put his meaty hands behind his head, looking up at the bare bulb. ‘Do you know what,’ he said, ‘I think they’re all solid. I mean, sure some of the little bastards are skimming off the top, but no one’s looking to knock me over.

‘I mean, which of those cretins do you think would have the balls?’ He looked at me.

‘Only, maybe,’ I said, ‘maybe that Tony guy, runs the Earlsfield operation. There was… Nah, I’m being stupid.’

‘No,’ Jim said, ‘go on.’

‘Just, I dunno. Something about him. Seemed, seemed like he was faking it,’ I said.

‘Faking what?’

‘Being scared,’ I said. ‘I mean, he made all the right noises, but he didn’t sweat. Not at all. Not even when he thought you were going to, you know. He shook my hand on the way out, and it was bone dry.’

‘Him?’ said Jim. ‘He’s been bringing in good money. Derek,’ he said, ‘how long’s Tony been with us?’

Derek rumbled to life. ‘Three years, boss,’ he said, ‘started as a driver.’

‘That’s right,’ said Jim, ‘stepped up when the Vicar had his car crash. Weird accent. Done good work, ain’t he?’ Derek nodded. Jim looked thoughtful.

‘Still, got to lose one. To encourage the others, as your man said. No point otherwise. Freddie’ – he looked over at me, amused – ‘Freddie’s got a good eye. Derek,’ he said, ‘bring him back in. Tonight. You’ll get everything sorted, yeah?’

‘Yes, boss,’ Derek said, then he looked at me, and winked.

I went cold, felt the blood drain out of my face. I’d just killed a man. He didn’t know it yet, and Jim hadn’t said as much, but I knew, from the way Derek grinned, and Phillips gave a look of dawning, animal enjoyment.

Jim said, ‘Yeah, you’re gonna be there, Freddie, so don’t even ask. You got to learn sometime, boy, this life ain’t just free hookers and blow. Sometimes you’ve got to get your hands dirty. Just don’t you enjoy it.’

I let myself out – sudden heat washing up off the tarmac – and walked up the street to Mum’s. It was early evening, I went in and had tea. Beans on toast, I think, sitting in the sun in our new conservatory – another little present from Jim – and I remember feeling detached, watching myself shovel down food. Out of my body, I guess you’d say, hearing my mum chat about her feet and the telly.

Truth was, I wasn’t frightened. Nah, I was excited. Just like the movies, I thought, only real.

I stood up. ‘Got to go, Mum,’ I said. ‘Jim wants me to help out again tonight.’

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said. ‘So nice that you’re being so helpful.’ She knew, of course, what was going on, but she’d been so lost after Dad died, and she liked the attention – she was well treated by everyone in the area, or at least everyone that mattered, and I think she assumed Jim would propose one day. Don’t blame her, really. She couldn’t have stopped me anyway.

Then I went, out into the baked concrete smell of the street and the hot leather of Jim’s car. ‘We’re gonna play this one careful, Freddie,’ he said. So we went to the pub, his shiny great motor parked front and centre. The local, the one that Jim owned, body and soul. He took his normal seat in the corner, bought a round for the bar and shook some hands.

An hour later, Jim got up, nodded at me to follow and wandered, belly first, into the back room. A round table was set up under a green shaded light, with little stacks of chips and a fresh pack of cards. ‘Anyone asks,’ he said, ‘we were playing poker. I won.’

Derek and Phillips came in, locked the door behind them. ‘All ready?’ said Jim.

‘No problems, boss,’ said Derek. ‘He’s trussed up like a fucking turkey.’

You know the rest. It didn’t go like we planned. Tony wasn’t what we thought and Jim’s best weren’t enough to keep his guts on the inside. Everyone ended up dead.

Except me.

I woke up to the sound of sirens, in the foetal position in a pool of blood. One wall of the warehouse had blown out and Tony, or what was left of him, was. . .