"I am in fact named after a fictional detective. In a sense."

"In a sense?"

"I had an extremely unusual childhood. Among other quirks, I didn't have a name until I took it upon myself to pick one."

"All right. I'm Cam, I don't think I said. If introductions to people who have ordinary names for ordinary reasons isn't too mind-numbing for you."

"I appear to have survived the experience."

"Congratulations. Immortality would be a sad thing to waste. How far is your crypt, anyway?"

"Not much farther." The jug of blood is mostly empty by now; he peers into it, drains the last little bit, then tosses it over a wrought-iron fence into the third graveyard they have passed since leaving Sunnydale High. "And don't get your hopes up. I am running out of ways to avoid becoming fatally bored."

Cam looks mildly askance at the littering but doesn't raise a fuss. "Well, you may be out of luck with escaping it. If the system of the afterlife that I'm familiar with applies, you may have becoming some kind of daeva to look forward to upon dying in a less ambulatory fashion. To the extent of my ability to survey the relevant populations only people who never summoned anything end up in Limbo, but also people from the wrong year never seem to end up in Limbo, so maybe you had something else to look forward to before and now that you've got me on your resume you're going to be a wingy-thing later."

"Oh, joy," he says, with extreme sarcasm.

"Well, I was pretty thrilled over I got over my prejudices about having died and woken up in Hell specifically, but it sounds like you might do better to find a way to spend extended periods of time unconscious if it comes down to it."

"Sounds like far too much effort if you ask me."

"I can't do anything about it. I might've warned you if there had been any way to do that before you, you know, summoned me, so I'm warning you now; make of it what you will."

"Bitter complaints. Bitter complaints are what I am making of it."

"So it would seem." Cam cracks his knuckles. "Maybe I will just become ever more fascinating. Or something."

"There are a lot of graveyards in this town."

"It's because of all the deaths. At least partially. I also think someone might have encouraged their proliferation for aesthetic reasons, but I haven't come across any hard evidence to support the theory."

Cam snorts. "Grand. Can vampires starve to death?" he wonders.

"Starve to severe discomfort, certainly. To actual death, I'm not so sure."

"So I'm not doing the population any disfavors if I set up a dispensary before I go. It'd have to be preserved blood to last without regular top-up, I guess... do you want to sample state-of-the-art science-fiction blood substitute and see if that's any good?"

"Why not," he says, shrugging.

Cam makes him a little shotglass full of something a little too rust-colored to be real blood.

"Not awful," is his conclusion. "A little odd. My prediction that your dispensary will be unpopular stands, but I'd drink this stuff before I'd steal from butchers or subject myself to the tedium of hunting."

"I mean, it's sounding like to control my schedule of return I have to keep you occupied? So I can make you actual blood, too, I wanted to try that because it'd keep. If it's not going to make a dent in the need for graveyards I can concentrate on other interventions that don't necessarily have anything to do with vampires, like the bees thing."

"Actual blood is preferable. If you want to drastically lower the incidence of vampire-related deaths, which would certainly take a chunk out of human mortality rates in general, you're probably better off aiming at the reproductive process or just killing a lot of them outright. Convincing your average vampire to stop eating people is a doomed effort."