Damn. That was a long time. I sat there, trying to process the fact that a vampire had been kidnapping and turning innocent kids and young people in my city for the better part of a year with me completely oblivious.
“Can you tell us anything about the men that held you?” Abby asked. “Anything like tattoos, distinctive jewelry, smells, something that would let us find them easier.”
“The sidekicks were pretty generic,” Shelly said. “A cute blond guy that looked like a less douchey Justin Bieber, and the Ricky Martin- looking guy. a tall dark-haired guy with a little manicured stubble. The boss guy was scary-looking, though.”
“Still kinda pretty, but all that curly hair and hazel eyes just covered up a rotted soul. I should have walked away the second I saw that scar on his chin. I knew it was a sign of trouble,” Quinn said.
Abby leaned forward. “Tell me about this scar. Was it right beside the cleft in his chin, like a little fishhook, or the letter J?”
Quinn’s eyes went wide and darted all around the room. “Do you know him?”
“Did he have any tattoos?” Abby asked.
“Not that I saw,” Quinn replied.
“Yes,” Cindy said at the same moment.
Everyone turned to her. “It was summer when he took me, remember? He wore a tank top, and I could see this big tribal thing on his upper back, like a tramp stamp that got lost and wandered north.”
“Did he have tribal bands around his upper arms, too?” Abby asked.
“Yeah, big thick ones on both arms.”
“Shit.” Abby turned to me. “Jimmy, this is that asshole Ian that I told you about.”
“Who is he?” Quinn asked.
“His name is Ian. He was a bartender at the Angel when I took over. This guy is a real piece of work. I fired him like a month after I started running the place. The son of a bitch was running girls out of the VIP rooms.”
“So you shut down his little side hustle, but him turning kids into vampires? Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“I shut down more than his side hustle. I blacklisted him to every other club in the city. I cut off his side hustle and made sure the son of a bitch wouldn’t work in another club anywhere in the Carolinas. This wasn’t just conning girls into giving a customer a handy under the table, Jimmy. He compelled them to screw the customers, then he took eighty percent of the cash and sold the video online for even more money. This guy was the worst kind of exploitive prick. It was the next thing to selling these girls into sex slavery.”
“Oh my god,” Cindy said, her voice very low. “That’s where they went.”
Every head whipped around to her. “Where who went?” I asked, really afraid I already knew the answer.
“Every so often people would get taken out of their cages. Sometimes girls, sometimes boys, but whenever it happened, the guy— Ian, I guess—would show up with all three of his men. They’d take the girl or guy out of the cage, strip them down, hose them off, and dress them again, right there in front of all of us. Then they’d take the kid away, and they never came back.”
“Daaaaaaamn,” Jonathan said, staring at his knees. “I remember that. They said something about customers waiting one time.”
“How did they control them?” I asked. Those kids were not easy to handle when blood-mad.
“Ian just said something, and we all froze. We couldn’t disobey him,” Cindy said.
“Shit, couldn’t even think about disobeying him. When he spoke, everything shut down,” Jonathan added.
I looked to Abby, and she nodded. “Compulsion,” I said. “I’m guessing he layered on a bunch of brain whammies when he took you and probably reinforced the compulsion every once in a while. You were captives. Woulda been easy.”
“He needed you docile, so he could sell you,” Abby said.
“And to keep you from banding together to escape,” I agreed. “So this son of a bitch has been running an underground sex slavery ring in my city, selling teenaged vampires to the highest bidder for months, and I knew nothing about it?” I stood up and paced back and forth behind the couch. “Dammit! How could I not see this shit?”
“You were a little busy trying not to get true-dead and preventing the end of the world, remember?” Abby said.
“Yeah, not preventing the end of the world for the kids he sold,” I shot back. “I’m supposed to protect them. My city. I keep saying that, but here this asshole is, operating right under my nose. How?” I slammed my fists down into the back of the couch, getting a loud crack of broken wood for my efforts as I splintered the frame.
“I don’t know, but we’ll find him. Tell me more about these sidekicks,” Abby ordered Quinn.
“Like we said, they were nothing special. Just generic douchebags,” he replied.
“Yeah, and the blond one had that super-douchey necklace, like he thought he was The Rock in the nineties,” Cindy added.
“Wait, like a seashell necklace?” Abby asked.
“Yeah, those little white seashells that look kinda like vaginas,” Cindy agreed.
“I’ve never thought of puka shells quite like that, but sure.” Abby looked up at me. “Now we have a lead.” A fierce grin spread across her face. “Now we can start hunting this son of a bitch.”
“Care to share with the rest of the class?” I asked.
“Remember a couple nights ago when I came home and told you about Ian coming around the club? And that I fired a guy who still worked there because he was Ian’s friend?”
“Yeah,” I said, motioning with my hand for her to go on.
“That friend’s name was Warren. He was turned at eighteen, in Santa Monica, in the early nineties. He’s a total pretty-boy surfer type, and he’s never outgrown his Saved by the Bell fashion sense. I’ve never seen him without his favorite piece of jewelry.”
“A puka shell necklace?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“You fired him this week?”
“Just a couple days ago.”
“So he still has friends working at the club.”
“Not to mention the home address I have on file in my office.”
“Looks like we’re going to the strip club,” I said.
“Dress code requires a shirt with a collar. Go change and get all the one-dollar bills you have. Let’s go hunt sex criminals.”
Chapter 33
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES later, I was perched on a stool in front of the bar at Fallen Angel’s, the city’s premier topless bar for supernatural creatures of all shapes, sizes, and levels of violence. I got more than a few sneers and snarls when I walked in, and I think the selkie dancing on the runway missed a step. I hadn’t set foot in the Angel since I killed Lilith, and it looked like a few of the regulars held my actions against me. I thought about reminding them that if I’d let her open up a gateway from Hell in the middle of Charlotte, then two-for-one lap dances would be over forever, but I didn’t feel like a fight.
The bartender, a giant of a man named Timothy with a shaved head and murals of comic book characters running up both arms, leaned on the polished wood in front of me. “Yeah, Warren was a putz. He skimmed more than his share from the register, always angled for a bigger slice of the tip pool, and wouldn’t keep his hands off the girls. I was glad to see the little shit go.”
I turned to Abby, who showed no surprise at the blatant discussion of embezzlement. She caught my stare and shrugged. “We have a policy. On a good night, the bartenders can skim five percent. On a bad night, they get ten. Plus, they keep their tips.”
“You’re okay with this?” I asked.
“I took over a strip club from a dead gangster, remember? This place does not have a history of hiring paladins and priests. Lilith figured that they’re going to skim anyway, so if we make it a mutually agreed- upon amount
, the bar can keep a better handle on its revenue. It seemed to make sense, and the bartenders like it, so I kept the policy in place. I price it into my wet goods. Come on, you can’t think I charge five bucks for a domestic beer just because it comes with boobs, do you? I’ve got to make up for the thievery somewhere.”
“Well . . . kinda,” I said, marveling at the ruthless efficiency of it.
“So you wouldn’t know where we could find Warren now?” Abby asked the bartender. Something about him was tickling the back of my mind, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“Nah, but don’t bother going to the address in his file.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Abby smiled. “If I had to guess, it’s probably 801 East 4th Street.”
“That sounds familiar,” I said. “Isn’t that . . .”
“The county jail?” the bartender supplied. “That’s the address we all put on our employment documents. Most of us don’t want to be found when we’re off work. Some of us are like you and have a severe sunlight allergy. Others just don’t want their work life to interfere with anything they’re doing in their off hours.”
“What about you?” I asked the giant. “If I looked in your file, would it have the address of a Krispy Kreme or something?”
“Not me, I’m legit as hell. I got a house in Mint Hill on five acres.”
“On a bartender’s salary? I’m impressed.”
The bartender let out a huge bellowing laugh. “No, ye bleedin’ idjit,” he said, and his accent slipped for the first time. That’s when I realized what he was. “I had plenty of me gold left from the olden days, and I invested wisely when I got over here.”
“A leprechaun,” I said. I looked him up and down. “You don’t look like the stories led me to expect.”
“Aye, well you aren’t running around in a cape with your hair slicked back, now, are ye?” He grinned at me, then cleared his throat. “I try to keep the accent under wraps, but when I get mad or really tickled by something, me Irish comes out.”
“Are any of you short?” I asked.
“Leprechauns? Some. More in the old days, when we lived in hollows or faerie mounds. Nowadays it’s better for us to be the same size as people, to hide in plain sight.”
“Makes sense.” I nodded. “So if Warren won’t be at the address on his work forms, where could we find him?”
“I have no idea, and give not a single shit. I hated the little bastard from the get-go and was glad to see him leave. Not just because your girl here hired my daughter Tina, either.” He waved at the other bartender, a gorgeous redhead who looked to be in her early twenties. I knew better, since I knew she was Fae. She was just as likely to be two hundred and three as twenty-three.
“What about Ian?” I asked, changing the subject.
“I wasn’t here when that rat bastard worked here, and a good thing for all of us that I wasn’t. I’d have shoved a stake in his heart through his asshole.” The leprechaun flexed a bicep, and I believed he might even be able to overpower a vampire. The Fae are deceptively strong, and he certainly seemed motivated.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“I talked to some of the girls he . . . used. I helped them break the spells he laid on them to make them do his will. Nasty stuff, your mind-magic.”
“Mind—oh, you mean compulsion.”
“Whatever you want to call it. The spells are not easily undone, except by the caster, or maybe a much stronger vampire. Some of the girls lost whole weeks thanks to that piece of crap.”
I took a long draw on my beer, thinking about what he said. I’d never considered compulsion a spell before, but it made sense. Maybe that was why I couldn’t compel the newborns that Ian turned; they were already under his compulsion, and I wasn’t strong enough to break them. If he was stronger than the Master of the City, I had a real problem on my hands.
“Do you remember anything else about Ian, anything you might have overheard, anything Warren may have said?” Abby asked.
“No, sorry. I just remember Warren talking about how he was going to help a friend get his own back over some bitch that screwed him out of a lot of money, and his buddy was going to cut him in.”
I turned to Abby, who didn’t seem to have caught up. “That’s you, dear.”
“I’ve been called a bitch before. Broke that guy’s jaw. I think Warren might need a little stronger persuasion.” It had been a while since I’d seen that bloodthirsty glint in Abby’s eye, but it was back. I wouldn’t want to be Warren when she caught up with him.
Abby stood and moved toward the door beside the bar. I got up to follow. “Thanks, Tim.”
“No problem. You catch that little shit Warren, give him one good punch for me.”
“Will do.” We bumped fists, and I followed Abby into the hallway under the neon pink sign that said “VIP.”
“You finally giving me that private dance, Abs?” I asked as we walked past a series of curtained cubbies.
“Not even in your wildest dreams, boss.” We came to the end of the hall, and she opened the door to Lilith’s, now her, office. The place looked very different from the last time I was in there. Lilith had the room decorated in sleek black and aluminum furniture, with the whole place dominated by a huge desk and a wall of monitors set into the wall behind it.
Abby had remade the room in her own image, replacing the carpet with a lighter color, and putting in arm chairs and a large sofa along one wall. The wall of monitors had been replaced with an LCD TV displaying different views of the club in split screen, and the desk was a much less imposing thing, tucked away in a corner of the room.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” I said. I meant it, too. The office looked a lot less like something out of a gangster movie, and more like a place where employees could actually speak to their boss.
“Thanks.” She pressed a button on her desk phone and leaned over to the speaker. “Tony, can you bring Scarlett in here, please. Tell Adam that she won’t be on stage for the next half hour, so shuffle girls around as needed. Make sure she knows she isn’t in any trouble.” She gestured to the couch and walked over to a minifridge.
“Beer?”
“Absolutely.”
Abby passed me a Miller Lite and grabbed a Stella for herself, then sat in the chair by the sofa. “Scarlett has been here longer than any of the other girls. If anybody has any info on Ian or Warren, it’ll be her.”
“Is she human?”
“I’m not really sure, to be honest. I don’t ask the girls, as a general rule, so if they haven’t discussed it with me, then I don’t know. Scarlett has never come out and said she isn’t human, but she hasn’t aged a day since I’ve been here, so my bet is some variation on the Fae.”
We waited for a couple of minutes, sipping our beers and discussing room arrangements at home with the new arrivals. I found it a little funny how we both just assumed that Greg’s sister and her friends would move in with us, but it was also kinda nice, thinking about playing big brother to a few vamplets instead of just slaughtering them.
We heard footsteps just before a soft knock came at the door. I put my hand on my pistol, but Abby held a finger up to me and glanced at the monitor. The display in the bottom right showed a giant man in a black suit with a redheaded woman behind him.
“Come on in, Tony,” Abby called. The glamoured ogre squeezed his way through the door, and the young woman followed.
I was on my feet before I even realized it, then took hold of myself and gave the dancer a good look. She was ridiculously attractive, almost to the point of being cartoonish. She had Jessica Rabbit hair, but more realistic proportions, and eyes like pools you’d be happy to drown in. She held out her hand, and I shook it, but held up a finger as she opened her mouth to speak.
“Siren?” I as
ked.
She nodded.
“Then let’s make a deal. You don’t put anything behind your voice but the normal magic, and I won’t compel you to behave. Sound fair?”
She smiled, and I saw a little relief along with the inherent playfulness of the Fae. “Absolutely. Mr. Black, I presume?”
“I am indeed.” I walked back to the couch and sat.
Scarlett took the other armchair, and Tony left with a nod and a longing glance back at the faerie. “How did you know?”
“I’ve spent some time in the Goblin Market and Milandra’s court. I recognize faerie magic when I see it.”
“But how did you know me for a siren specifically? I could be any type of Fae.”
“Kinda fits with the job, doesn’t it? Luring men by their baser instincts? That, and you have the coloring of Ariel from The Little Mermaid.”
She laughed, and her voice was the most musical thing I’d ever heard. I could see how men would crash their ships on the rocks just to listen to her song. “That’s very good, Mr. Black. You are much wiser than I was led to believe.”
“Who was denigrating my genius?” I kept my tone light, because the faeries love to play, but there was no doubt that she was leading me down a path toward very specific information.
“Lilith, before you killed her, of course.” I didn’t bother to tell her that Sabrina technically killed Lilith, since she fired the bullet that put an end to the original witchy woman. “Then Ian, who loved Lilith like no other. He was very cross with you when she died. More recently, Warren seemed to have nothing good to say about the new Master. I was relieved when he was terminated.”
“Sadly, he wasn’t terminated with enough prejudice,” I grumbled.
“Is that why you’re here? To ask me about Warren?”
“No,” I said. “I need to ask you about Ian. And apparently about Lilith, and the people Ian was whoring out in the back rooms, and anything you might know about his whereabouts.”
“Are you going to kill him? Because he really deserves killing. Especially after what he did to Daphne. Hell, you know what? Don’t kill him. Bring him back here and drop him in the dressing room. I’m not the only girl back there who would like five minutes alone with that bastard.” The venom in her eyes was frightening, and I remembered what happened to the sailors in the old stories who fell prey to the siren’s song.
All Knight Long Page 22
