Hellbent

by Cherie Priest

  And after another couple of hours populated by similarly childish bickering, he jabbed at the screen almost hard enough to crack it. “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “This one, there. Look at it.”

  I read aloud, “Ill Manner,” and clicked through to the listing. “Looks like a goth bar. But that doesn’t mean real vampires hang out there.”

  “Ill Manner … the place’s name, though. Check it out—lots of the same letters as William Renner.” He took my pen and wiped off the end as if I were germy or something, and started fiddling with the letters on the hotel’s letterhead.

  I observed, “It’s close, but not quite. Still …” I wondered if he wasn’t on to something. There was the double meaning of manner/manor, and vampires love a good entendre. “Hang on. Maybe we’ve got this. What letters are you missing to make the anagram complete?”

  “R, I, W, and E.”

  “Hot damn,” I declared with a smile. “Ill Manner is on Wire Street. I do believe we’ve found it.”

  “Great!” He hopped up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and stretched so hard that his back cracked. “Let’s throw on some eyeliner and hit the dance floor. Or whatever the protocol is, in situations like these.”

  “I think we’re a little old to …” I almost said “hit the dance floor” but then I remembered who I was talking to. “Never mind. Do you have any kohl? I don’t usually wear eye makeup, myself, but I think I could use some tonight.”

  “Do I have any? Woman, I could write a book with it. And come to think of it, that’s true, isn’t it? I never do see you made up.” He gazed at me with a critical eye and his hands on his hips. “You’d better let me put it on you.”

  “What? No. I may not be Rembrandt with a stick of liner, but I’m not a monkey at the obelisk, either.”

  “My makeup, my rules.”

  “I can’t believe you even brought makeup.”

  “I’m sorry, have we met? Of course I brought makeup.”

  “To a reconnaissance operation?”

  He shut me up with, “In San Francisco? Hell yes, I brought makeup. And oh, look—it’s an emergency supply that you failed to pack.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “No. Now hold still …”

  “This is ridiculous,” I griped, but in ten minutes he had me looking like a supermodel. A very pale, sulky, raccoon-eyed supermodel, but a supermodel nonetheless. I was impressed, but I didn’t tell him so. Didn’t want him to get a big head about it.

  In ten more minutes, he’d given himself a good swath of guy-liner, which I qualify as guyliner because he wasn’t in drag. He was wearing black head-to-toe, just like me, but he was sporting a black fitted stretchy sweater and black cargo pants—and I was in a black blouse (not too frilly, but just a smidge girlie) and black cigarette pants. And boots. Always the boots. It’s hard to kick anybody’s ass in sandals.

  By half past midnight, we were down in the lobby hailing a cab, and on the ride over we got our story straight.

  “We need a story?”

  “Absolutely. Neither one of us can or should walk in there cold, with nothing but a smile and a handshake to recommend us. First of all, you’re going to be my ghoul, get it?”

  “Your what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Do I look like a ghoul to you?” he asked.

  “Ghouls are like serial killers, they look just like everybody else. At least, they do unless they’ve been ghouls so long they start the slow-change, but that doesn’t happen very often. You’ll pass for one, don’t worry about it.”

  “What do I have to do to pass?”

  “Everything I say. Down to the letter. And you have to be nice to me. You have to pretend you respect me, and you don’t want to kill me where I stand.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake. You’re making this up.”

  “I’m not, and you’ll see that for yourself when we get there.”

  He gestured toward the driver with a jerk of his chin. “Maybe we should have this chat … later? In private? There must be a coffee shop or bar nearby.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, waving his concerns away. “He barely speaks English, and he’s not paying attention anyway.” I could feel the driver’s apathy. It radiated off him—or oozed off him, really. My psychic sense didn’t even need to flex its metaphoric muscles to read him.

  The cab hit a pothole and nearly followed that up with a pedestrian. Swearing and honking ensued, and I continued, “Your job as a ghoul is to serve and assist. Ostensibly, you’re kissing ass because you want to be a vampire someday. Got it?”

  “Got it.” He said it like he was already plotting my death. I was in for a humiliating demise, I could tell. Probably something involving autoerotic asphyxiation and small rodents.

  “Just play along, would you?” I implored. “Do it right, and we’ll probably survive this visit. Do it well, and we might actually learn something useful.”

  We pulled up to Ill Manner after twenty minutes of further pedestrian abuse. I paid the cabbie and stood on the sidewalk next to Adrian, who was staring up at the big red sign with silver and black accents. It looked like a custom artisan job, wired for lights. A regular work of art, it was.

  Outside on the sidewalk, the air was choked with cigarette smoke and accented with the tang of cloves. I think they’re illegal to buy and sell now, as a result of some ridiculous “protect the children!” big brother campaign gone ludicrously awry. But that doesn’t stop people from getting them, and it sure as hell doesn’t stop goths from smoking them.

  Most of the smokers were wearing black (shocker, I know) and too much makeup, and a whole lot of silver. I also saw goggles here and there, and the occasional Technicolor dye job, so all was pretty much de rigueur for the scene.

  Disaffected young people? Check.

  Stupid accessories? Check.

  Flavored cancer sticks? Check.

  Adrian looked like the oldest guy there, but that was sort of a tricky thing to quantify. It would be more accurate to say that he stood out as a potential drug dealer or narc, but I’m baby-faced enough that I didn’t earn many second glances. I think it annoyed Adrian. It pleased the hell out of me.

  He reached the door first, and the door-guy didn’t card him, but asked him for an eight-dollar cover. Adrian covered us both, and then I got carded—ha ha ha—and we squeezed inside.

  The dance floor spun with moving lights in dark, bloody shades of purple and red, and there was a stage but it wasn’t occupied. The bar was lit up like a shrine, as it damn well ought to be, and it was crowded—but I was pretty sure I could sneak up and get the information I needed without too much fuss.

  “Madness,” Adrian said, just loudly enough for me to hear him over the thudding drone of some old Combichrist song.

  “What’s madness?”

  “These … these …” He gestured at himself, and at the ceiling. “Black lights. Terrible idea.”

  I shrugged. “I thought black lights were pretty … um … goth, or whatever.”

  “No way. No self-respecting, black-wearing goth wants to be anywhere near a black light.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Look at all this lint!” He picked a piece off his sweater, held it high, and flicked it onto the floor.

  “Damn.” And now that he’d said something, I couldn’t not notice it.

  “Pathetic,” he sniffed. “A good red light works better, it’s more atmospheric, and is easier on your night vision.”

  “Spoken like a SEAL.”

  “What did you expect?” he asked.

  “Everything else you’ve said, pretty much all night, has been spoken like a drag queen. I’m glad to see you can jump back and forth so easily. A SEAL will be of more use to me downstairs.”

  “So you think.”

  I let it go, and said, “Hang out here, or near the stage. I’m going to go bother the bartender.”

  “Why?”

 
“Because she’s a ghoul. And she knows where the action is.”

  He started to ask me how I knew that, but I was already out of his reach and he didn’t want to shout it in a crowded room, Combichrist or no.

  As for me, I wormed among the dancers and pushed when I had to, slinking sideways when it was doable and elbowing a few people out of the way when it was necessary. It took a minute to get to the bar, but that was fine—because it gave the bartender plenty of time to see me, notice me, and probably push the silent alarm that told the folks downstairs that one of their own had arrived.

  I used my shoulders to make room between two girls sucking down cherry-flavored somethings, and the bartender was right there waiting for me.

  She was gorgeous, with slick, short green hair and a nose ring that hung down from her septum like a bull’s more utilitarian jewelry. I suspected she made a goddamn fortune in tips. “Can I help you with something?” she asked.

  “I think you can.” I could “hear” her, sort of—she was communicating with her boss, somewhere else in the building. I couldn’t trace her psychic signal or follow it, but I knew what she was doing. That’s how I’d pegged her for the ghoul in charge—that thin stream of psychic vibration, pulling back and forth between ghoul and master. It’s a soft sound, but a distinctive one.

  The beautiful bartender said, “I could make you a drink. What strikes your fancy?”

  I played along. “Nothing from the front room, but I’ve got the money and taste for the vintage stuff. Do you have anything in the back?”

  “We might. I’ll have to ask.”

  “By all means.”

  She was looking past me, over my head—since the bar was lifted off the main floor by a couple of steps. “You brought a friend.”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “He’s with me. I keep him close.”

  “He’s pretty.”

  “But he’s not any trouble. He knows how to do what he’s told.”

  All of this was silly, and necessary.

  To share it on another level—she was asking me if Adrian was my ghoul, and if I had him on a tight enough leash to bring him to the vampire party; and I was telling her that of course he was fine, he was with me, and he’d behave. I presented this as if it were gospel fact, though let’s be real: I had no idea what Adrian would or wouldn’t do if things got tight and he started to chafe in his role as underling. Didn’t matter. We were too far deep to back out now, and I’d promised him he’d stay with me, so that’s how I pitched it.

  The phone behind the bar rang. It lit up in time to the ringing, so the staff would notice it above the social din. The bartender picked it up and turned away from me to talk. I couldn’t read her lips and there was too much background buzz to pick out the details, but she was telling someone that I checked out—or at least I knew the lingo—and I wanted to chat in the den.

  She hung up and returned her attention to me. “Someone will be with you in a moment.” Then she nodded toward Adrian as if I should fetch him, or join him—but what she really wanted me to do was call him over without a sound.

  I can do that, sometimes. Not because Adrian is my ghoul, but because I have that pitiful rudimentary psychic sense, and sometimes it works better than others. It’s not common to all vampires; only a relative few of us have it, and no one knows why (or why not) it ever appears. Mostly it’s just a heightened sense of awareness with regard to what people are feeling, and it’s kind of crap as a communication tool.

  But it’s worked in the past, and I hoped to God that it’d work now.

  I concentrated hard, but tried equally hard not to make any kind of straining, squinty face that would betray the effort. Brain-chatter between ghouls and masters is as easy as a whisper. If it looked like I was fighting for the connection, the pretty lady with all the booze would know something was up.

  With all my might, I “said,” Adrian, look at me.

  He did, though whether it was a case of my powers at work or his natural curiosity over where I’d gone off to, I can’t say and don’t care. I added, Get over here, with a casual crook of my head to underscore it—in case my psychic powers were experiencing an off day.

  He ducked his chin in return and began working his way across the floor to meet me. In order to do this, he had to perform a wacky, forward-moving, martial-arts-style dancing due to the fact that it wasn’t Combichrist playing anymore—it was Lady Gaga, which frankly surprised me. What had been a half-empty dance floor five minutes previously was now crowded with clusters of spinning, bobbing, weaving dancers.

  Goths. Who can fathom, am I right?

  Almost as soon as Adrian managed to join me, we were both joined by a thin, pierced, mohawked kid whose attitude implied he was the servant of someone important, but he probably wasn’t. He was probably your average teenager with a part-time job, only his part-time job involved getting the occasional infusion of bodily fluids from someone important.

  “I’m Gabe.” Even though he shouted it, it sounded disaffected and very, very bored.

  “I’m Raylene, and he’s with me.” Visitors don’t introduce their ghouls except to the bigwig. They don’t need names. They aren’t important.

  Adrian’s scowl said he wanted to object to this already. My return scowl told him where to stick it. To his credit, he swallowed his pride, shut up, and walked behind me as I followed Gabe through the bar-area crowd and to the back of the club. We maneuvered past a pool table that was being used as a shot-glass buffet, a pair of restrooms that were each marked as unisex, and a small kitchen off to the right—on the other side of some swinging doors.

  And then we hit the stairs.

  There are always stairs. Vampires are creatures of tradition and habit, despite any insistence to the contrary. When we want to feel safe, we head underground.

  Two floors down—into a sub-basement—we were led through a large mahogany door and through (I shit thee not) an arch with a beaded curtain. The beads looked like obsidian, or heavy glass. Something expensive that tinkled prettily as it announced our passage.

  On the other side of this curtain, five people were scattered—sitting, standing, and leaning around a large open room with one of those seventies-tastic sunken seating areas. Inside this retro depression in the floor, a curved red couch ate up two-thirds of the circle, and seated alone upon it was an ethnically ambiguous brunet who’d probably been about thirty when he’d died. He was expensively dressed in a navy wool suit and purple tie, and his wavy, dark hair was allowed to hang tastefully free just above his shoulders. If I had to check a box or two, I’d have guessed him for Latino with a North African influence, but it was hard to say. He was good-looking in a distinctive way, with strong features, good bone structure, and a lean build. At a glance, I could both (a) imagine him on a United Colors of Benetton ad from the eighties, and (b) ascertain that he’d never be so gauche as to shop there.

  You didn’t have to be a vampire to see that this was obviously the Guy in Charge.

  The other four people in the room were less of a problem. Two ghouls, a man and a woman in adult gothwear (all black clothes and hair, but less makeup and bling); two vampires, one by casual appearance an elderly woman, and the other a teenage boy who looked enough like Gabe to be his brother—or maybe not. It’s hard to tell when everyone’s in Halloween mode.

  The Guy in Charge smiled at me, showing enough tooth to be a little impolite, but hey. When you’re the Guy in Charge, you get to do that. He said, “Hello there, and welcome to San Francisco.”

  I stopped at the edge of the sunken couch pit and said, “Thanks.” This is the part where, under ordinary circumstances, I’d make some blah-blah-blah about bringing greetings from whichever House I hailed from. “My true name is Raylene Pendle, and this is my ghoul—but I am here on behalf of no House, and I claim no affiliation.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “No … House?”

  “None, but don’t let that bother you. I’m no ostracist, and if I meant any trouble, I would�
�ve made it in a more roundabout way. I wouldn’t present myself.”

  “Then what does bring you here?” he asked smoothly. He didn’t offer us a seat or anything, but that’s typical. The man (or woman) in the power position always wants to preserve the appearance of control.

  “Information. I might have some that can be of use to you.”

  He brought the eyebrow back into its original position. “And you’ve come to volunteer it? How kind.”

  “I’ve come with an offer to pursue it. I understand you’re looking for Ian Stott.”

  I hadn’t told Adrian about this part, and I had to trust him to trust me. I wasn’t about to sell Ian out, but I needed to share a bit of the truth if I was going to get anywhere with these guys. My statement was met with silence and stares, but it wasn’t an innocent silence and they weren’t disinterested stares. Eventually Dude in Charge gave a little laugh.

  “Perhaps we should speak privately, you and I.” Then he clapped his hands and said sharply, “Out.”

  I glanced over my shoulder to see Adrian looking iffy about this, and uncertain about where he was supposed to go. So I said to the Dude in Charge, “He stays with me.”

  “No, he leaves with mine. Annabelle, please make our visitor feel at home.” Ah. Then she was the ghoul-in-chief. The female half of the tasteful mortal goth pair nodded and gestured for Adrian to come with her as the room emptied. “Get him a drink, or a bite to eat.” And he added to me, “They aren’t going far.”

  I didn’t like watching Adrian leave, even though he put on a good show of not giving a shit one way or another. I hoped maybe he’d learn something from the other ghouls; they’re like the “help” anywhere. They know things … the kinds of things they’re expected to keep to themselves, but don’t always. If they believed Adrian was a ghoul, they might talk to him like one of their own. He knew to keep an ear out for info regarding Brendan, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut if he needed to.