by S. M. Reine
The bus stopped at the downtown transit center, tucked between a bowling stadium and yet another hotel-casino. Elise was the first to hop off.
The casino lights flashed in time with music piped over sidewalk speakers. A man by the front door played the saxophone. He hesitated when Elise passed. She gave him a quick once-over, taking in the translucency of his skin, his long, brittle fingers and strangely-proportioned face. Nightmare. Probably second class. Hardly a threat.
She nodded at him as she passed. He didn’t look worried, so maybe he thought she was a demon, too. As far as the underworld here knew, there were no local kopides. What was there to worry about?
Elise plowed through the casino, ignoring the glittering machines and their inebriated patrons. She passed the poker tables, the blackjack, the rows of machines in front of huge plasma TVs, and the diner in the back. She exited through an unmarked door to an alley.
Wedged between the casino and its attached hotel, the dark passage appeared to have no purpose except for gathering trash. A chain link fence blocked one end of the alley, and the other side was a rotten brick wall that most people wouldn’t realize belonged to the prettier side of Craven’s. Elise never went through the front door—too many people watched it.
Elise ducked around a Dumpster, kicking a case of empty beer cans out of the way. A set of cement stairs led down into shadow.
Only a single word on a small, rusted sign hinted at the door’s purpose—Blood , it said, the metal so pocked and rusted it was almost unreadable.
She pushed it open and went inside.
Elise was never sure how long it took to get from the surface to the club—time took on a strange quality in the descent, warping and fading. Maybe she only walked for a few seconds; maybe she walked for hours. The black walls narrowed as she moved down the passage, guided by the pulsing thump of bass.
In time, Elise came upon the end of the hall. A neon sign blazed a single electric word above the door: BLOOD.
She crossed the threshold and left the human world behind her.
Music thrummed around her, shaking inside her chest and against her eardrums. The back door was on the top level of Eloquent Blood. Humans sat amongst half-demons known as the Gray, doing business and swapping spit as though they weren’t different species. Many of the humans probably didn’t even know who they were associating with—a few idiots stumbled upon the bar thinking it was an underground Goth club, and nobody was in a hurry to tell them differently. Idiots were great incubus food.
Yellow sulfur formed a fine layer on the floor. The thick stench of sweat and whiskey almost overpowered the brimstone. They tried to keep it clean in the club, but Elise was all too familiar with the stink of demons. She could have recognized it if they drenched the entire building in formaldehyde.
She glanced at the dance floor two stories down. A DJ spun a dance beat and the bodies below pulsed in time to the rhythm. Hips rolled, arms twisted, and now and then Elise would see a flash of pale skin as another dancer stripped off her shirt. It was hot enough in Blood without dancing. Throw in a fast beat and a racing pulse, and it was nearly intolerable.
She moved through the tight press of bodies on the spiral staircase as she would have waded through an ocean tide. Speakers on either side of the bar pumped out music so loud it drowned out even the conversations hollered inches from her ears. Elise peered up at the bartender through fog from the smoke machines to determine if it was someone she knew.
The blond girl on the bar swayed side to side, her hands trailing up her hips and stomach. Her fingers traced the swell of her bare breasts. Her nipples were erect despite the warmth, and her skin was dark olive. She was one of the Gray bartenders Elise didn’t know. Probably part-basandere, judging by the heavy iron chain around her waist.
Someone waved at her from behind the bar. Neuma’s hair was liquid midnight, like each individual strand had been dipped in an inkwell. As she moved toward Elise, she faded slightly into the shadows behind her until only her white skin and bathrobe were visible. The half-succubus Gray hadn’t yet dressed for the night, and she earned a few strange looks for it.
“What you doing here?” Neuma asked, leaning on the bar. “Business or pleasure?”
Elise had to yell to hear herself over the music. “Business. Can we talk in back?”
The bartender’s welcoming grin slipped off her face. “Sure.” Elise jumped over the bar and followed Neuma down a hall. The volume of the music faded the further they went. “How you doing, doll?”
“You know me. You also probably know why I’m here.”
Neuma grimaced. “Money?”
“Money,” Elise confirmed.
An entire wall of the dressing room they entered was dedicated to shelves of alcohol. The other wall was a line of messy vanities. Black light illuminated the room, darkening everything but Neuma’s skin, which glowed violet in the shadows.
She gestured to the alcohol. “What you want today?”
“Information and a paycheck,” Elise said, dropping her jacket on the dressing table. “You can help me with the first one, but I’ll need David Nicholas for the second. Where is he?”
“Shot of vodka it is.” Neuma dragged a stool out of the closet and positioned it under the shelves. “I haven’t seen you in a couple weeks—how’s life being sugar and spice?”
“Not as profitable as I would like. I really need to talk to him, Neuma.”
She snorted. “Yeah, good luck. He left an hour ago to ‘restock,’ so the fucker’s probably higher than the moon by now.”
Neuma stepped onto the stool, lifting onto her toes to reach for one of the higher shelves. Elise watched her pale calves and ankles flex under the hem of her bathrobe. She made a triumphant noise and dropped to the floor again, alcohol in hand.
Elise forced herself to look away from Neuma’s legs. “What’s he taking?”
“I think he’s gotten into lethe, but he ain’t going to admit it.” She took out two shot glasses and opened the vodka. “I can’t imagine how a sexy girl like you got stuck accounting when you could be doing fun shit, like touring with me and the other Blood girls. We’re leaving for St. Louis on the twenty-third. You can still come.”
“I’m not an employee,” Elise said.
“Could be by the twenty-third.”
“Believe it or not, I like my job.”
Neuma shrugged and handed her a shot. “The offer’s out there.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Elise tossed back the vodka. The alcohol burned hot all the way from her throat to the pit of her stomach. “When do you think David Nicholas will be back?”
“Could be a few minutes, could be a few days. Depends on how good the trip is.”
A few days. She couldn’t wait that long to pay rent. Elise dropped the shot glass amongst a pile of leather straps on the counter. “Where’s the shift manager?”
Neuma’s full lips split into a grin. “You’re looking at her, beautiful!”
“Congrats. Where did our least favorite witch go?”
“Moved off to live with some aeshma.” Neuma took a swig right out of the vodka bottle. “I hope she gets put into slavery by something with a lot of boils and a fetish for shit-play.”
“Speaking of slavery, there’s a lot of humans here tonight. What’s going on? I thought you guys banned humans below the casino level.”
“New policy from on high. We gotta play nice. Too many people wandered in and disappeared, so we’re not letting humans into private rooms anymore, neither. We’re gonna lose business like this.”
“Demon business, but not the humans,” Elise said. “And it will keep the police out of your hair.”
“Cops are easy to pay off.” Neuma sighed. “I kind of wish the Night Hag would come out of hibernation. Then we’d have someone to deal with public crap. You know?”
Elise grimaced to think of it. Demonic overlords were seldom thrilled to find kopides hiding in their territories—even retired ones. “Sinc
e you’re the manager now, I need news. Anything you can tell me.”
“There ain’t much to say,” Neuma said. She started changing into her costume for the night. “Like I said, I’ve heard tell the big boss is stirring, but you know, people say she’s going to wake up every six months or so.”
“Where did you hear it this time?”
“David Nicholas. I think he’s just stirring shit up so nobody will kill him and take the casino, but...” Neuma dropped the bathrobe. “You know how he is. He’s not even keeping hours down here anymore. He’s got an office on the ninth floor like he thinks he’s some fucking big shot.”
“Is that all?”
“There have been some bodies going missing around town, too,” Neuma said, grabbing a pile of leather straps off the counter. “Not just grave robberies. It’s the hospital too, and it ain’t some ambitious thief. When we gossip about it this much, you know one of us has gotta be involved.” She donned her costume piece by piece, buckling the shorts on the side and holding one of the straps over her breasts. “Mind hooking me up?”
Elise pulled the strap tight and slipped it through the buckle, but her fingers wouldn’t work the way she expected. The proximity to Neuma’s skin was distracting. “Why would a demon stock up on bodies?”
“Food? Hell if I know.”
Grave robbing didn’t sound like a wholesome activity, but Elise doubted it had anything to do with Lucinde’s problem. “Have you heard about anything big, bad, and incorporeal in the area? I’m looking for something that might be possessing people.”
“Don’t think so, babe. If there was something that nasty around, we’d already know.”
“Yeah. You’re probably right. Look, I’m going to go, but thanks for the shot. I’ll try David Nicholas again tomorrow night.”
Neuma pouted, sticking out her lower lip. It was ruby-black as though she had painted her skin with fresh blood. “I’d love to see you on the bar with me tonight. We could have a lot of fun.”
Elise couldn’t seem to tear her gaze from those lips. “No,” she said unconvincingly, “I don’t think we could.”
The door to the dressing room swung open. A man with an angular chin and a too-large nose stuck his head in. “Why aren’t you on the bar, bitch?” His gaze turned to Elise. It felt as though a wet rat slithered up the vertebra of her spine. “Oh. You again.”
“David Nicholas,” she greeted.
The club’s manager was a full-blooded nightmare—hundreds of years old, but ages past his heyday. David Nicholas made people dream of rotting alive. He had been extremely powerful in the Middle Ages, when everyone feared leprosy, but now his specialty was being obnoxious.
“What do you want?”
“I’ll give you three guesses,” Elise said. “Let’s have a talk in your office.”
His lip curled. Smoke trailed from his thin lips to the caverns of his nostrils. David Nicholas stabbed a finger at Neuma. “Bar. Now.”
She gave him an ironic salute, and Elise followed him out of the room. When she shut the door to the dressing room, Neuma’s draw lost strength, and every step away made it easier to keep walking.
David Nicholas led her up the stairs behind the changing room, taking long drags on his cigarette. Elise could almost see the smoke billowing down his esophagus.
They emerged on the ground floor of Craven’s. The lights were dim and the slot machines glowed like oases in the desert. A cocktail waitress that could have been Neuma’s sister hurried by in little more than a leather leotard with a tray of drinks on her shoulder.
He led her up a couple levels of escalators, past a handful of imps that weren’t pretending to be human, and through a locked door marked MANAGER.
David Nicholas’s office overlooked the casino floor. Tinted glass dimmed the tables until Elise could barely make out the dealers, although monitors on the walls gave her a clear view of the cards. They were also the only source of light in the room, which Elise considered a mercy—it meant she could only imagine how bad the mess in his office was by the smell. It reeked like the dorms from Elise’s college days.
She had to step over a pile of rags to get through the door. Piles of books and papers formed columns to her shoulder. Some had tipped over. And that was all what she could make out in the darkness—there were too many vague, shadowy shapes that could have been any number of horrible things.
David Nicolas twisted his lips and spat into a shallow metal bowl filled with cigarette butts and black smears of ash. “Let’s make this fast, bitch, I don’t have all night. What’d I do to earn a personal visit from the big boss’s accountant? You got a problem with our taxes or some shit? I don’t want to hear about it. It’s your job to fix it.”
“Everything is as good as can be expected with your finances, except for one thing.”
“What?”
She leaned over him, arms folded across her chest. “I’m not getting paid.”
“Bullshit. We paid you.”
“You paid my retainer a year ago, and nothing since,” Elise said. “That’s six months of outstanding fines. I’ve sent you three notices.”
He rolled the cigarette between two of his fingers, contemplating the glowing end. “Haven’t seen anything. Maybe the Night Hag got them. Did you hear she’s waking up?”
“She’s not going to stir and you know it.”
David Nicholas spread his hands wide in a helpless gesture. “Yeah, if that’s what you want to think, but I can’t pay anyone that much money without getting it approved. Rules are rules.”
Elise set her jaw. “You want to do this fast? We can do it fast.”
“Oh no. Don’t hurt me,” David Nicholas said in a tone of mock horror. “I’m so afraid of the accountant.”
She drew her boot knife. “I need to get paid. I’m going to make that happen one way or another.”
“You don’t even know what to do with that.”
She stabbed. It sank into David Nicholas’s stomach as though he was made of putty rather than flesh, and she jerked the knife across his torso, tearing it out the side. Black smoke puffed from the wound.
He lurched out of his chair, spidery hands clutching the entry point. “Fuck! What the hell?”
“I can force you to insubstantiate, and I can make it hurt. Believe me, I know which buttons to push.” She lifted the knife again, and he tripped over a pile of trash trying to backtrack. He hit the floor and pushed himself away from her with his heels. “Or you can pay.”
“I don’t need the Night Hag to wake up to ruin your fucking week,” he hissed. “Some dark night, you’re going to go to sleep, and I’ll be waiting. And I’ll be there the night after, and the night after, and every other night of your life until you die shitting yourself. You’ll learn to fear sleep, and to fear me.”
Elise gave a little laugh. “The first night I dream of you, David Nicholas, I’ll tip off Aquiel. He’d be happy to know where you’re lurking these days, and I’d enjoy watching you get ripped apart.”
He stared at her. She stared back. A challenge.
“You’ll fear your dreams yet,” he whispered. He spoke so quietly that Elise shouldn’t have been able to hear him over the music, but she did. His voice was dead fingers scraping down her neck, and she couldn’t help but shiver. She didn’t show it.
“Money. Now. I take checks.”
It looked like he had many colorful words trapped between the spikes of his teeth, but he swallowed them down.
Fifteen minutes later, she trotted down the stairs into Blood again, flicking the check against the fingers of her free hand. David Nicholas slunk behind her, his arms wrapped tight around his body. He wasn’t going to fall apart yet—not if he could hold himself together long enough to feed. But Elise hadn’t made it easy on him. His shirt was in tatters, and the flesh beneath it wasn’t much better.
The amount on the check was more than what they owed her for six months of work. It would cover the next quarter, too—and two months of her of
fice’s rent. She tucked it down her belt along with her dagger.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” Elise said over the thudding of music. David Nicholas’s eyes flashed.
A scream.
Elise twisted, facing the direction from which the scream had come. The dressing room .
David Nicholas was already gone, jumping shadow to shadow to disappear from the stool and reappear at the end of the hall. He vanished around the corner in a swirl of tattered clothing.
Elise grabbed the doorknob to the dressing room and shook it. Locked.
Neuma screamed again, and the door rattled in its hinges as something heavy slammed against the other side.
She took a step back and unleashed a powerful kick next to the lock mechanism. The door shattered around the handle.
Elise kicked again. It slammed open.
Neuma was pressed against the counter, her back smashed into the now-shattered glass of the mirror. A gray creature with branded flesh crushed her, its stubby hands locked on her wrists as its slavering mouth lowered toward her chest.
“Hey!” Elise shouted.
The demon turned. Its bulging eyes were almost all black. Opens slashes across his face wept blood and pus, and saliva dripped from its mouth.
It focused on her, and its pupils dilated.
Elise drew back her fist and punched, throwing her whole body behind the blow. The demon’s head snapped to the side. It toppled with a keening scream.
The half-succubus cried out as she got off the counter. Several shards of glass stuck in her back, and blood poured down her perfect spine.
The little demon clambered to its feet. Elise pushed the bartender behind her.
“What do you want?” Elise demanded. The demon’s thin gray tongue darted out of its mouth to lick where its lips should have been.
It lunged at Elise.
She moved into its attack and it slammed into her shoulder. They hit the ground, and she rolled with their momentum. Her entire body felt the impact. It was like getting hit by a raging bull.
The fiend recovered instantly. Elise wasn’t quite so fast.
