“How the hell are we supposed to make sense of that?” she said, scuffing the toe of one Doc Marten against the sidewalk in frustration.
“I’ve never heard of any of those musicians in my life. Have you?”
“No,” I said absently, wondering about the rules of the puzzle. The first order of business was to figure out what kind it was in the first place. An anagram? Some kind of cipher? Maybe, since the last word was actually a digit…
I met Val’s frustrated gaze. “Hey, will you do something for me?” “Yeah, of course.”
“Do you have a way of writing down the numbers of each of those letters”—I pointed to the marquee—“in the alphabet? Let’s see if they make an interesting sequence, or combine into something meaningful.”
“Sure, all right.” Val seemed happy to have something to do that didn’t involve trying to solve a brainteaser directly. While she pulled out her phone and started tapping numbers into it, I tried to rearrange the letters of each word mentally. This would have been a lot easier with a pen and some scratch paper so I could write down permutations and cross out letters as I used them. I was just
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about to suggest that we go to a drugstore so I could pick up a cheap little notebook, when—
“Cat Claws,” Val mused, still staring at her phone as she punched in the numbers. “That reminds me of you. How about you use me as your scratching post when we get home from this goose chase, hmm?”
I felt the barest stirring of a realization, subtle and shifting like an underwater current. What do cat claws do? They scratch. Maybe Val’s first suggestion had been closer to the right method—to look at each word or phrase as an entity instead of breaking them up into pieces.
“You may be on to something,” I murmured, frowning even harder at the marquee.
“Seriously? I was just teasing you.”
“Shh.” I tuned out the sounds of the city around me. Cat Claws, Forknife, DJ 010. Okay. We were looking for a location—a place to hold what promised to be a highly illegal event. The venue would have to lend itself to discretion. Cat Claws. Cat claws scratch. But what about “Forknife”? Fork, knife…spoon? Scratch and spoon. Both began with the letter “s.” I shook my head slightly. I was going to get nowhere fast on that line of thinking—plenty of words began with “s.” So back to “Forknife.” Funny looking word. The interesting part about it was that it was missing the extra “k” in the middle—in between “fork” and
“knife.”
In the depths of my brain, a spark leapt brazenly across the synapse separating me from interpretation. In between fork and knife. Of course! On a table, the space between a fork and knife was occupied by a plate. Plate. Scratch. Plate.
Scratchplate.
“I’ve got it,” I said, hearing the surprise in my own voice. The panther raised her head, curious about the source of my sudden excitement. “Val…sweetheart, I’ve got it.”
She raised her head eagerly, slipping her phone into her pocket.
“Yeah?”
“Scratchplate. It’s a grunge club on the Upper East Side.”
Val leaned in to kiss me swiftly, triumphantly. Her eyes were bright and sparkling in excitement. “How on earth did you figure it out? And what the hell is a scratchplate?”
Laughing, I wrapped my arms around her waist, pressing against
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her long, lean body. “A scratchplate is a piece of metal or plastic on a guitar that protects its surface from being scratched by a pick.”
The bridge of Val’s nose scrunched up adorably as she pondered that. “Huh,” she said finally. “I always thought that part was just for show.”
“Nope. So, Scratchplate the club is famous for two reasons. First, it was started by one of the master guitar builders at Fender in the early nineties—supposedly the same guy who made Kurt Cobain’s hybrid
‘Jagstang’ guitar.”
Val was staring at me, slack-jawed. “How do you even know this stuff?”
“My high school grunge phase.”
“You had a grunge phase?”
I smiled at the note of disbelief in her voice. It was easy to forget that Val didn’t know all of me, because it sure felt like she did. I had to actively remind myself that she had met a carefully cultivated version of Alexa Newland—cosmopolitan, sophisticated, urbane. Light-years away from the restless teenage farm girl who had dreamt of the neon lights and sky-scraping towers of the sleepless city.
“It was my freshman year. In hindsight, I think I was trying to get attention. Big family, remember?”
“I must see those pictures.” She curled a stray lock of hair behind my left ear, and I shivered lightly as her fingers trailed down my neck.
“What’s the second reason?”
“Hmm? Oh.” I rolled my eyes at her smug grin. “Apparently, the club has been shut down by the police at least a dozen times, but always finds a way to reopen.”
“Color me not surprised on either count.” Val looked back up at the marquee. “So, what about ‘DJ 010’? DJ-ten…could ten o’clock be the starting time?”
“Makes sense,” I said, nodding. “That zero in front of the one bothers me, though.”
“Why?”
“It’s not necessary. All you need to express a time is two digits. Four if you’re using military. But never three.”
“Good point.”
Val’s warm breaths stirred my hair as we both stared at the last obscure element of the code. Zero. Why was it a zero? Maybe it would
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be helpful to think about what information we still needed. We had the time and the venue, but not a date. Not that we needed a date per se, since Sebastian had implied that these were weekly events…but we did need a day of the week.
“Oh!” Val said suddenly. “What if it’s binary?” Just as quickly as it had come, though, her excitement faded. “Fuck. Even if it is, we don’t know what the two options are.”
But she was wrong. An event like this wasn’t going to happen on a weeknight. “Yes, we do. Friday and Saturday.”
“Nice!” Val hugged me tightly. “Think Friday is zero and Saturday is one?”
I stepped out of the circle of her arms and reached for her hand.
“There’s only one way to find out.”
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Chapter tweNty-twO
We meant to leave at ten o’clock on Friday, but it ended up being closer to eleven before we were walking toward the subway. I blamed Val’s leather pants. And her black tank top. And the black leather cuff that adorned her left wrist. Val blamed my skintight T-shirt and ripped jeans—the closest outfit I could muster to what I’d worn routinely back when I was fourteen. Our lovemaking had been fierce, almost desperate, born of anxiety and the need for closeness. We rode the train uptown to 110th Street and turned toward the river. As we walked, we huddled together for warmth, my left hand and Val’s right cupped together in one of her jacket pockets. The other held her gun. Val was hoping that she wouldn’t have to check it at the door. I didn’t know whether I’d feel better or worse if that happened. A few months ago, our conversation on the way to a party would have been light and animated, banter and flirtation. On this walk, both of us withdrew into our own thoughts. I was trying to mentally prepare myself for what awaited us. Blood. Violence. The thought of seeing someone die again forced bile into my throat, but I couldn’t afford to fool myself: it would probably happen tonight. I was torn between revulsion and a morbid curiosity that made me avoid meeting my own eyes in the storefront windows. The panther was very surface today, as if she could tell that something was going to happen. If I was going to have any chance of keeping control tonight, I would have to pull it together. Beside me, Val fairly vibrated with tension. I could only imagine how she felt, knowing that tonight sh
e might see the face of her attacker.
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She caught sight of the club before I did. Red letters arched over a set of concrete stairs leading down into a recessed doorway. A large sign on the sidewalk declared that Scratchplate was closed for a private event. Val squeezed my hand.
“Ready?”
Given the fairly public nature of this place, I had expected some kind of security outside—a bouncer at the very least. But there was no one leaning against the plain black door, and when Val grabbed the handle and pulled, it swung open onto a hallway painted entirely black. Fluorescent lights embedded into the ceiling lent the corridor a glossy, metallic look. For a second, I hung back, hoping that Val might change her mind. She didn’t.
We felt rather than heard the music after a few steps down the hall; it pulsed through the walls until it seemed that the club itself had a heartbeat, and we were caught in its bowels. Twenty feet later, we descended a set of spiral stairs that opened into a narrow atrium. Straight ahead was a tall metal gate—the revolving kind that were still in use at certain subway stops—and directly in front of it, a metal detector. I glanced at Val in time to see her jaw clench.
A Hispanic woman, her face and arms covered in sinuous tattoos, stood gracefully from a stool at the side of the metal detector. “Coats,”
she said in a husky voice, pointing to a rack crammed mainly with leather items. Clearly, Val was going to fit right in. “Weapons,” she continued, pointing to a skinny man in a recessed alcove that I assumed was normally Scratchplate’s coat check. Ironic.
Val handed over her gun while I hung our jackets on the same hanger. When I turned, she was pushing her claim slip into one of the narrow front pockets of her pants. The sight of her long fingers moving beneath the leather would have turned me on if I hadn’t been so anxious.
“Welcome,” the woman said as we approached the arch of the metal detector. She was holding, of all things, a spool of raffle tickets—
the same kind that I recalled Monique rejecting offhand last time. I wondered what they were for. This woman could have been a very twisted version of my mother standing at the door of the gym during a soccer booster event. And then she took three hip-swaying steps to stand directly in front of Valentine. I tensed. When she leaned in so that her mouth was barely an inch from Val’s neck, I couldn’t help the
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growl that bubbled up from my throat. The panther pushed in harmony with my spike of jealousy, and I had to work at forcing her down as the woman inhaled deeply, then moved back. She was smiling slightly, as though amused by my response.
“One for you,” she told Val, handing her a ticket. Val didn’t thank her. Very wise.
The woman came to stand in front of me next, but barely leaned forward before nodding once. “She almost fooled me,” she said, indicating Val with one hand. “Your musk is all over her.”
I smiled tightly. And don’t you forget it.
“Hang on to that ticket,” she told Val, gesturing for us to proceed through the revolving door. “If your number is called, you’ll be in for a treat.” Her tone made the hair rise on the back of my neck; I really didn’t want to think about why the tickets were only distributed to vampires. “I guess only your kind is eligible for door prizes?” I said, once we were both through.
Val rubbed the ticket between her fingers, regarding it thoughtfully.
“Whatever this is for, I guarantee you I won’t want it.”
We hadn’t even gone ten feet before the hallway bent at a ninetydegree angle, abruptly spilling out into a large, low-ceilinged room. The bar, a perfect square, took up the center. A few tables and chairs lined the walls, but most of them were vacant. The music blared from a DJ station in the corner closest to us, but the crowd was thickest near the far side of the room, between the bar and a stage. At the moment, it featured two completely naked women, their bodies glistening with sweat as they undulated their hips in an elaborate bellydancing routine. As I watched, one of them curled herself lasciviously around a tall metallic pole set in the center of the stage. I let out a relieved sigh; this was so much better than the dogfighting arena.
“Let’s stick with the DJ this time, okay?”
Val nodded and took my hand. Hers was hot and moist with sweat. I looked up at her, but her gaze was darting around the room, eyes constantly roving in a search for him. “Let’s get a drink,” I shouted over the pounding beat. She nodded and set off for the bar, drawing me behind her through the thick crowd. We threaded our way past a group of men who all had identical haircuts and the same white wolf’s head tattoo on their right forearms. A pack, clearly. I found myself feeling disdain and wondered whether it came from me or from the
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solitary feline who lurked under my skin. The uncertainty was still disconcerting.
Val slid into a small open space at the bar and pulled me in beside her. “Two whiskeys, neat,” she called to the bartender—a huge, barrelchested man with a shaggy brown mane that fell to his shoulders. His arms were as thick as my thighs, and covered in dark hair. He looked like a bear. I wondered if he was one.
“Any sign?” I asked, taking the opportunity to draw her arms around my waist.
“No,” she said, resting her head against my shoulder. And then I felt her entire body stiffen. “Holy shit.”
I followed her line of sight to the bar immediately opposite us, where a thin, pale woman wearing a dog collar was digging her fingernails into the pockmarked wooden surface, bracing herself as a chiseled man penetrated her from behind. I squeezed Val’s hand hard as shock and arousal streaked down my spine. My involuntary gasp came out more like a groan. And then the man grinned ferally at his audience before leaning forward to sink his teeth into the snow-white skin at the juncture of his victim’s neck and shoulder.
A rivulet of blood wended its way down her upper arm, but before it could pool in the dip of her elbow, one of the female bystanders leaned over to catch the stream on her tongue. The male vampire growled into the broken skin from which he still drank.
Valentine’s breathing was ragged in my ear, and her fingers dug into the skin above my hips. “Does that turn you on?” she whispered harshly. “Does it?”
I couldn’t stop staring at the erotic scene before me. The woman’s eyes were glazed and a keening sound escaped her lips. She would come soon. I was throbbing in time with each thrust. I wanted Val’s thigh between my legs, but she refused to let me turn around.
“Do you want me to take you that way when we get home?” she said. “Strap it on and bend you over the bed and impale you on my teeth and my cock?”
A violent shudder seized me at her words, and then again as the woman finally screamed out her pleasure in a descant over the music. The vampire was right behind her, the cords in his neck standing out in sharp relief as he slid into ecstasy. My skin felt hot and tight and
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sensitive, and when Val slipped one hand beneath my T-shirt to run her palm over my stomach, I had to bite down hard on my lower lip to keep from crying out. Despite our lovemaking less than two hours before, I needed her again.
Now.
Desire stripped away self-consciousness. But just as I was about to coax her fingers beneath the waistline of my jeans, the music faded into the background and a microphone crackled to life.
“It’s time,” whispered a sibilant, disembodied voice as two pools of light coalesced onto the stage. One of them encircled the large post.
“Time to test the Record.”
The words were taken up by the audience. The Record, the Record, they chanted, distracting both Val and me long enough to break the spell between us. This time, when I tried to turn she let me. I threaded one hand into her hair and wrapped the other around her waist. Her eyes were still hazy with desire.
“
Baby,” she began, the word heavy with need.
I kissed the soft skin beneath her ear. “Later, my love. I promise.”
The balance of people in the room was shifting even more dramatically toward the front, and they hadn’t stopped murmuring about “the Record,” whatever that was.
“Do you know what they’re talking about?”
“No.”
The microphone channel opened again and the sound of soft, rhythmic breathing filled the room. A hush fell.
“Gwendolyn was reborn in India, one hundred and seventeen years ago. She believes that she can break the Record.”
Gwendolyn. The crowd took up the name, scattering it around the room like leaves on the autumn wind. I frowned impatiently at the twin golden circles of light on the stage floor. The unknown emcee of this event was doing an excellent job of whipping the mob into a frenzy. The cadence of his words inspired a fierce need in me to see him—to know the face behind such a bewitching voice.
A figure stepped out of the shadows, dressed from head to toe in black and holding a cat-o’-nine-tails. Long blond hair cascaded down to her waist, but her face was obscured by a mask shaped like a falcon’s head, the sharp beak ending just above the red slash of her lips. A small
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holster hung from the left side of her belt, which hung low across her curvaceous hips. Even before she took a bow, the room erupted in screams and cheers.
Two men entered from the wings, then—also dressed in black, but their faces were visible. They led out a naked woman, presumably Gwendolyn, by a chain clipped to a collar around her neck. Despite her captivity, she carried herself like royalty. Her aura of calm assurance did not falter—not even when she was secured to the post and her tormenter snapped the cat in anticipation.
“The Record,” hissed that eerie, tantalizing voice, “is fifty-seven lashes.”
Someone brought down the house lights so that the room was completely black, save for those two brilliant circles onstage. At the same time, the DJ began spinning a dark, throbbing beat. And then the whip struck for the first time. High above her head, it cracked like summer thunder before smacking against Gwendolyn’s bronze shoulders. I flinched, but she didn’t. Instead, she smiled. The room went absolutely insane. Again, the cat rose and fell, this time on her back. And this time, it broke skin. The crowd surged at the sight and scent of blood on the air. Gwendolyn’s smile wavered. I pressed instinctively closer to Val. Each crack of the whip made me shiver, as though I were the one feeling the knotted leather cords bite into my own skin. Of course, if it had been me up there, I probably would have shifted as soon as my blood had been spilled, out of instinctual self-defense. Even though the panther and I had reached some sort of understanding over Valentine’s feedings, I was sure that a vicious attack from a complete stranger would trump the measure of control I had fought so hard for.
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