"How come you have so much money?" Seth asked.
"I married into a family of vampires with good investment strategies such as "be hundreds of years old" or "have precognition"," I told him.
"I married into a family of vampires with good investment strategies such as "be hundreds of years old" or "have precognition"," I told him.
Every qualified buyer who responded to the Dark Invitation was offered the Dark Pact: a lengthy contract promising the end of aging and disease, plus magic-powered mental and physical vigor, in exchange for the specified sum and other unusual but completely legal commitments.
A few of the oldest and sickest took the deal. They got what they paid for.
When colleagues and competitors saw the results, the trickle of customers became a flood. Within five years, a high portion of the elite had embraced the Dark. Those who hadn't... well, they were mortal, weren't they? Tick. Tock. Attrition happens. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the price of membership had soared, and "super-rich" was synonymous with "Darkling."
—All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault, by James Alan Garner
"I could use the additional coin. The gods know Juno Moneta has not lent her grace to me of late. If I had half, no, one-third of the relics this fool government is keeping from me..."
The Roman goddess of money wasn't going to be much help to Marcus these days. Her time had passed. Marcus had frittered his substantial wealth into a long string of poor investments. First, the dot-com bubble burst; then he tried to double down with real estate before the bottom out of that, too. By human standards, he could be considered wealthy, but by vampire reckoning, particularly Ancient standards, he was a pauper.
—Graveyard Shift, by Michael F. Haspil
