by Devin Hanson
I twisted my hips away from her. “Ilyena! Stop it! What’s wrong with you?”
Her face twisted as hurt and anger flashed into grief. Ilyena’s knees gave out and she sagged to the ground, little plastic bottles of liquor falling from her hand and scattering over the floor. “You should be happy for me,” she said brokenly. “It’s what you wanted.”
I sat on my heels and touched her shoulder gently. “What is?”
“I’m…” she muttered something in Russian. “Damaged. My sight is gone. I could not guide Caradoc down his path today. He was furious.”
I tried to imagine David angry and shivered. Ilyena’s shoulder shook beneath my hand. Tears dripped from her nose and fell to the carpet, spotting it. “Oh no. How? Do you know what happened?”
Ilyena rubbed her arm across her face. “No, but it does not work at all! Not even on simple people with no forks. For Caradoc, it was nothing but gray emptiness.”
“You didn’t see my path before. How is this different?”
“Alex, your path is so confused and twisted that it wasn’t until… later, that I was able to find it. People like you are one in a million. Caradoc is powerful, but his path has few forks in it. He is so old, it is difficult for him to change his ways. His path is simple to find. Was. It was simple.”
She snatched a bottle off the floor at random and twisted the top off before pouring the contents into her mouth. She coughed and reached for another one. I caught her hand. “So, you are going to drink? Is that your solution?”
Ilyena raised her tear-streaked face to me. Anger furrowed her brow and she yanked her hand free of mine. “What else do I have left to me? Not you. Not my ability. My master will sell me to make back his investments. Once I return to Russia, I will be a sex slave to some government official. I have nothing left but alcohol.”
She pounded back the fresh bottle, glaring at me defiantly, daring me to interrupt her grief again. I stood and turned away. I couldn’t stand self-loathing. Too often I had seen it used as a coping mechanism among other children in the foster system. They drove people away from them, then used their isolation as a way to further their downward spiral of self-abuse.
But that wasn’t Ilyena. Normally she was a cheerful enough person, sarcastic and joking as much as me. She was having a genuinely hard time. Maybe it was a Russian reaction to receiving bad news. Get angry-drunk and hope the hangover was worse than the news.
“Well, if you’re going to get drunk,” I sighed, “I’m not going to let you drink alone.” I squatted down on the ground next to her and grabbed a bottle at random. I glanced at the label and vaguely identified it as a brand of cheap tequila. Like it mattered. I unscrewed the top and took a mouthful of the harsh liquor. It burned going down and I coughed. Immediate warmth spread through my stomach and I finished the bottle with another swallow.
Ilyena leaned against my shoulder, smearing her makeup onto my robe. “You are good friend, Alex,” she said.
Was I? I barely knew her. We’d had sex, a lot of it, but who was Ilyena Demivich, really? I tilted my head over and rested my cheek against the top of her head. Who cares. I liked her. In the end, that’s all that really mattered to me.
I found another bottle by groping around the floor blindly and drank it without looking at the label. It tasted like paint thinner, but I forced it down and tossed the empty bottle. On my empty stomach, the alcohol was going straight to my head. Even sitting down with Ilyena leaning against me, the room seemed to be twisting about me slowly, on more than one axis.
The spinning was getting to be too much. It’s not like I had never had alcohol before, but I had just turned twenty-one and my opportunities for heavy drinking were few and far between. I tipped over backwards and brought Ilyena down to the floor with me. “Woops.”
“You are lightweight,” Ilyena accused me.
“We can’t all be Russian,” I said. Or I tried to. I’m pretty sure I fumbled some of the compound syllables.
“You would make a terrible Russian,” Ilyena said. She rolled up onto an elbow and leaned over me, grinning. “You are far too optimistic.”
“I haven’t eaten dinner,” I grumbled. “It’s not fair.”
Ilyena swung a leg over my hips and laid down on top of me. “What would you like to eat?”
“Oof. I don’t know. Uh… what do you eat in Russia?”
“Russian food is bad. Everything in America is better. I know what I want.” She leaned in and kissed along my collar bone.
“Food, Ilyena.”
She sighed and tucked my robe back into place before sitting up. “Fried chicken.”
“You want chicken?”
Ilyena shrugged and wiggled her hips, eying me with her lip caught between her teeth. “It is tasty, and there is a restaurant that serves it two blocks from here.”
“Should we walk?”
She giggled. “You can’t drive.”
She had a point. “All right. Get off me so I can get dressed.”
Ilyena was right. The fried chicken restaurant was practically across the street from the hotel. It was a quaint little place, with picnic tables outside next to the sidewalk where diners were eating, enjoying one of the first cool evenings of fall.
We had to wait a few minutes for a table to clear. Ilyena passed the time by telling me a story about being chased across the ice by a dog, with both of them slipping and sliding all over the place. She had us both in tears with laughter. I realized halfway through the story that she had been in her fox form at the time, which made it even funnier in context.
A lot of looks were thrown our way by the people around us, and I could practically read their thoughts: drunk in public on a Thursday night. I would have been embarrassed a month ago, but now I couldn’t care less. It felt good to laugh and have fun. The last couple days had been all seriousness. I don’t know how people like Ethan did it, spending day after day in grim determination to get the job done. People were made to have fun.
We got our food and made it to a table outside. The chicken was fresh and hot, the biscuits buttery and slightly sweet. The food cleared my head some, leaving me with the good humor and none of the dizzy drunkenness.
“So, where did you go today?” Ilyena asked me. She had the bone from a drumstick held delicately in one hand and she was gnawing at the cartilage with a happy smile on her face.
“Oh man. I had a crazy day.” I told her about meeting Detective Friday and being ambushed by Raveth. I glossed over being chased through the apartment by gunmen and ended with Raveth’s failed attempt to bribe Lara.
Ilyena listened, wide-eyed, the bone forgotten in her mouth. “Raveth is behind the destroyed apartments?” she asked when I was finished. The bone had cracked at some point, and she started sucking the marrow out.
I watched her eat, fascinated. Most people I knew ate the bulk of the meat and abandoned the rest of the drumstick as not worth eating. Ilyena, though, went after every scrap of digestible material on the bone. Given time, she probably would have chewed even the bone splinters up and eaten those as well.
“Well, um. He certainly seemed to be. I can’t figure out why, though. What could be his interest? I was certain the apartment destruction had something to do with vampires, but Elaida shot that down.”
“Raveth only cares about two things,” Ilyena said, ticking the points off on her fingers. “Finding a permanent physical form for his mother, and making people feel greedy.”
“How do you know?”
Ilyena shrugged. “He is not the first demon-sworn I have met.”
“Demon-sworn?” I hated when I was so far behind the rest of the class that all I could do was repeat the keywords with a question mark at the end.
“Nephilim, like you, who have taken their patron’s offer.”
“Why haven’t the Red House caught him yet?” I demanded. I couldn’t help but feel a little petulant. They had been all over me before I even knew what was going on, and here Raveth was, running aro
und LA, doing dastardly deeds without so much as a slap on the wrist.
Ilyena started on her second drumstick, having stripped the first down to a scattering of off-white bone shards. She shrugged. “I do not know. Likely he is skilled at hiding his presence.”
“You know,” I said, “The vampires make an absurd amount of money from their pact. There must be greed stamped all over that, on both sides.”
“Greed is not just for money,” Ilyena nodded. “There is much greed in the vampires for the weak and unaware in America.”
“Which is something I don’t understand. Why don’t the vampires just break their pact? They’re as scary as anything else I know of. Once they were here, it would be very hard to drive them away again.”
Ilyena looked at me appraisingly. She had chicken grease on both hands; she ate like a child, with no regard for propriety or cleanliness. “There are forces in this world that are far worse than the vampires, Alex. They of course have tried to break the pact. Each time they are caught, the violators slain, and the payments continue.”
“But… why?”
“Think about it. If Caradoc and the others stopped paying the pact dues, the vampires would be free to invade America at will. Those that would stop them would turn a blind eye, as the pact no longer compels them to care. Caradoc keeps paying, as it forces the vampires to disavow the ones caught and abandon their conquest attempts once more.”
I shook my head. “That is very different from the impression Elaida gave me.”
“How would Elaida have an opinion?”
“She’s a member of the Priory of Sion. A marshal, I think.”
Ilyena sniffed disdainfully. “The Priory. Hah.”
“She fights vampires,” I objected. “That automatically makes her a lot tougher than me.”
“You pulled me from the grasp of a lilin and routed his forces.” Ilyena pointed at me with her drumstick bone. “You are stronger than you think.”
That wasn’t how it had seemed from my perspective. “I got lucky,” I muttered. I didn’t have any illusions about my ability, regardless of Ilyena’s high opinion. I wouldn’t forget the thrashing Savit had given me anytime soon. Maybe, if I lived long enough, I could learn how to actually fight. When that day came, then maybe I could consider myself good enough.
“By the way,” Ilyena said, speaking around the cracking of the bone in her mouth, “I take it things with Elaida turned out all right? You haven’t said one way or another.”
“Really?” I frowned thoughtfully. “Huh, you’re right. Yeah, I suppose we’re getting along okay. I’m not going to invite her to my birthday party, though.” I remembered that I had to somehow get David’s phone into his rooms somehow and sighed. “Why can’t things ever be easy?”
“I’ll help you,” Ilyena said slyly, “but you have to do something for me.”
“I don’t know, I don’t want you to get in more trouble.”
She rolled her eyes. “I cannot possibly get in worse trouble.” For a moment her eyes clouded and worry swept over her face. Then she gave herself a shake and brought her smile back. It even reached her eyes. “We have a saying where I come from.” She rattled off an incomprehensible string of syllables. “It means, just wait, things are about to get much worse.”
“That’s very… Russian.”
Ilyena nodded happily. “Worrying about how bad things are going to be is pointless, as it will always be worse than you feared.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “That’s one way to look at life, I guess.”
“No,” she shook her head. “It is the Russian way. What do you need done?”
“Elaida gave me David’s old phone. She wants it returned to him.” I tried to think of a way to phrase my request that would get Ilyena in as little trouble as possible if David found out she had helped. “I had the idea to put it behind a couch cushion, where it could have slipped and been lost.”
She shrugged. “Is that all?”
“Um. Yeah?”
Ilyena laughed. “That is easy. I can do that for you, Alex.” She picked a fragment of bone off her tongue and leaned forward with a wicked grin. “But only if you help me with something first.”
I cleared my throat. “I’m guessing I can’t do it for you here.”
“Not unless you want an audience.”
Jesus. What had happened to the girl who was so shy she couldn’t look me in the eye without blushing? “It’s not really my thing,” I said.
“I am full,” Ilyena announced. “We had food, now it is time for fun.”
I laughed. “Okay, but we can’t stay up all night again. I have to get up early tomorrow and I don’t think I slept at all last night.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The sun was barely peeking over the horizon when I pulled my scooter into the circular drive and killed the engine. For a minute, I just stared around me at the mansion, the manicured grounds, the splashing fountain in the middle of the turnabout. If the guard at the gate hadn’t confirmed my name before letting me in, I would have assumed I was at a wrong address.
This was a photographer’s house? Damn, but I was in the wrong line of work.
“Alexandra!”
I heard Francois’ exuberant cry and looked up at the front door. The polished hardwood doors had been flung wide and a tall, gangly man with closely cropped brown hair and black-rimmed glasses stood in the opening. He wore a plaid collared shirt under a navy-blue vest, and brown slacks. He looked as gay as he sounded over the phone.
I pulled my helmet off and shook my hair out. I heard him gasp and I looked up, expecting him to be in the process of tumbling down the stairs, but he was only staring at me, enraptured.
“Oh, Arnaud did not lie! Such grace, such beauty!”
Trying to remind myself that I had been the one to call him, I got off my scooter and gave him my best smile as I offered my hand. “Francois, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Alexandra, the pleasure is infinitely mine!” He bent over my hand rather than shaking it and turned with an extravagant gesture, inviting me into his mansion.
I’m not the kind of person who frequently is invited to mansions, so seeing Francois’ for the first time was overwhelming. Marble everywhere, gold-plated chandeliers, statues in the hallway, and furniture of dark walnut with solid silver fittings. It was as if Raveth had funded the construction, but someone with actual taste had carried out the details.
Francois led me out the back to an outbuilding. “My studio,” he explained with a wink, and opened the door with a flourish. Like the soundstage in Hollywood, the studio was separated into several different sets, each a box with one wall missing. One whole wall of the studio was dedicated to clothing, arranged in some fashion best understood by Francois. Another extensive shelving system had thousands of props.
“Sometimes it is best to do shoots on location,” he said breezily, “other times the desired results can only be achieved with the utmost control over lighting. And without the possibility of uninvited voyeurs wandering by, hm? Now. Let me see what you have to work with!”
I looked at him blankly.
“Strip!” he gestured enthusiastically. “Do not worry, you have nothing to fear from me, I assure you.” He cocked his hip and waved at himself.
I had never met anyone as flamboyantly gay as Francois. I wasn’t worried about him raping me or something; he seemed entirely human, and I was buzzing with energy left over from the night before with Ilyena. It would take someone more than human to physically threaten me at the moment. Still, I felt awkward as I slowly unzipped my jacket. “What, here?”
“No! Wait!” Francois waved his hands furiously. “Stop, stop, stop. Zip that back up!”
I complied, wondering if I had done something wrong, while Francois ran to the far side of the studio. He came back at a jog, with an enormous satchel slung over his shoulder and carrying a monster of a camera.
“Uh, sorry,” I muttered. I straightened my back and tr
ied to shake off my nerves. “Okay, what would you like me to do?”
“Come over here,” Francois gestured toward one of the photo rooms. The walls were painted a matte black, and black silk curtains were hung about the walls in graceful curves and pooling to the floor in artful folds. He spent a minute re-arranging the silks, then had me stand in the middle of the space.
Once he had me where he wanted, he grabbed a tablet from a wall holder and started playing with the lighting. There were no windows letting in the early-morning sunlight, and in a moment, he had the studio plunged into perfect darkness. Then, one at a time, he turned on various lights hidden in the frame of the photography bay, adjusting their brightness and color until he was satisfied.
“Now,” he said excitedly, “strip!”
I had watched his preparations in bemusement. I knew only just enough about lighting and equipment to recognize that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been invested into the studio lighting. “Any way you want me to do it?”
“Just look at the camera. That’s it. Slowly, now. Take off your jacket, just the way you were doing it before.”
I hadn’t been aware of a way I had been taking off my jacket. I had just been stripping, as he had requested. Francois had his camera held up to his face, with an enormous lens pointed toward me. I pulled down the zipper on my jacket and heard the mechanical click-whir of a photo being taken.
This is what he wanted to photograph? Just getting undressed? I wasn’t trying to be sexual or anything, but I took my time getting the jacket off per his instructions. As I did so, I started getting into it. I forgot that there was a gay Frenchman taking photos of me and pulled my clothing off piece by piece.
The whole time, I heard him muttering to himself. “Exquisite. Wonderful! Perfection. Sublime!” It would have been funny under other circumstances, but I tried to put him from my thoughts. I was getting no trickle of energy from him. Francois was true to his word. He was feeling no lust by watching me strip. Rather than making me more comfortable, I started wondering if I was doing the strip right. Surely, he should feel something toward me, right? Lust was a vice every human had, no matter how hard they suppressed it.
