Night Life

by Caitlin Kittredge

  "Well, anything that makes you happy, Detective," he said with a low rumbly laugh. Skin all up and down my back and arms tingled.

  When you're a police officer, a suspect making you tingle is a bad sign.

  "How about Maven's, the bar on Devere. By the university?"

  Sandovsky snorted. "Why the hell are we going to that freak joint?"

  "Because I have to interview a potential witness," I told him, "and I thought you'd appreciate the fact they have lots and lots of beer."

  "You know me too well," he said, and I could almost picture the smirk on the other end of the line.

  "Seven sharp," I told him.

  "I wouldn't dare stand you up, Detective," he said. "I'd be in fear for my manhood."

  "What did you mean, Maven's is a freak joint?" I asked before he could hang up.

  Sandovsky laughed again, and I tingled again. Damn it. "You'll see," he told me. "Meet you there at seven."

  * * * *

  Sunny found me just as I hit the wall in the back of my closet and uttered a growl that would have done Lon Chaney proud.

  "Let me guess," she said, surveying the ruin of vintage shoes, dresses, and lingerie that concealed my bedroom floor, "you've decided to give away your prized possessions to the Shiny Master of Sparkly Overpriced Accessories and join his cult."

  "If the Shiny Master of Whatever can help me put together a decent outfit, he is welcome to the rest," I told her, puffing a strand of hair out of my eyes.

  "What's the big occasion?" Sunny asked, automatically beginning to refold everything I had thrown out of my closet.

  "You know that were I didn't have a date with before?"

  "Sandovsky?"

  "Yeah. I sort of have a date with him now."

  Sunny blinked, looked down at the Gaultier heel she was holding, and then looked at me again.

  "You're going out."

  "Yes."

  "On a date."

  "Yes."

  "With a murder suspect?"

  I grimaced. "He's not really a suspect anymore. Now I think the DA's son did it." Proof was another matter… but that's what this date was for. Who says you can't multitask at love?

  Sunny flopped on my bed. "Oh, Luna, why can't you use Match.com like everyone else?"

  I grinned at her. "Because if I was everyone else, I couldn't give my caring and concerned cousin a heart attack, now could I?"

  Sunny rolled her eyes. "Wear whatever you want. I guarantee Sandovsky's not interested in your clothes, just what's under them."

  "Why, Sunny," I told her, "your cynicism is shocking."

  She got up and left at that point, and I went on obsessing until I realized it was time for me to take a bath and get ready to meet Dmitri at Maven's.

  * * * *

  Maven's was a perfect example of interior design gone horribly Goth. With satin-draped walls in red and black, reproductions of oil paintings hanging in black frames, and furniture that had enough feet for a herd of wooden cows, it resembled more than anything a high-end Victorian brothel.

  Lamps with colored shades hung over the tables and velvet-covered chairs, bathing the entire place in red. I felt like I was inside a beating heart.

  Most of Maven's patrons didn't display any more taste than the decorator. Pasty bodies strapped with spikes, lace, and leather to an androgynous man, accompanied by approximately eighteen pounds of black eyeliner per face.

  Even though I was all in black—knee-length satin skirt, tight tank, my jacket, and my Chippewas—if "we had been playing that one of these things is not like the others game I would have lost badly. Every single eye I met on the way in glared at me with overt hostility.

  Dmitri was hunched in a corner near the bar, clutching his bottle of Rolling Rock like a shield. I waved at him over the elaborately coiffed head of a plump girl sausage-wrapped into a corset and PVC mini skirt and made my way through the suffocating brocade space to his table.

  "I told you," he greeted me.

  "It's not so bad," I said. "Although I feel a little out of place without my bleeding soul exposed for an uncaring world to see."

  Dmitri cracked a smile and then flicked his hand at the bartender. "Drink?"

  "Theoretically, I'm on duty."

  He shrugged. "Suit yourself." After another pull from his bottle he said, "So what's this big question you want to ask me?"

  I sighed. "Is there any way that someone can be a were and not know it?"

  Dmitri cocked an eyebrow at me. "That's an odd damn question, Detective."

  "Humor me?" I pleaded.

  Dmitri shook his head. "Nope. Sometimes you hear that phasing makes you lose your memory, but it ain't true." He smiled without any humor. "Trust me, Luna— when you're turning into a giant wolf, you tend to remember."

  I don't know why I'd expected him to offer some revelation on were lore that I, as a lowly Insoli, was not privy to. Stephen Duncan was just a lying psychopath trying to throw me off, and all the parts of my brain hollering that Stephen as Suspect didn't quite fit needed to shut the hell up. The logic train had pulled into the station and all passengers were getting off.

  Anyway, I had come here for reasons other than a Q&A with Nocturne City's sexiest pack leader. And damn it, why did my traitorous brain insist on using that adjective to describe Dmitri?

  "Okay, well, it's been fun. And informative," I said, standing a little too quickly and banging my knee on the table leg. "Gotta blast." Time to put Dmitri, Stephen, and weres period aside and go find Cassandra LaVey, the body-mod goddess. If I couldn't prove that Stephen had attacked Marina and Lilia, I could at least find who'd attacked me.

  "Hey, wait just a minute." Dmitri took my arm, not ungently. "You got your answer, now I got a question for you."

  I turned back to him, and he stared into my eyes with such intensity it felt as if the floor had evaporated under me and I was rocketing upward at the speed of light.

  "What are you doin' to solve Lilia's murder?" he asked.

  I crashed into the ceiling as my ride halted abruptly. It would have to be that question.

  "Weres who mate are packbonded," said Dmitri. "Until her death is reckoned with I'm bound to make that my first duty."

  "Make what your first duty?" I asked, though I already knew. The special were brand of justice, administered with tooth and claw.

  "Making the doer pay." Dmitri glared and drank his beer, straight-ahead stare indicating the topic was closed for discussion.

  I sat down again, and felt as torn up as if a blood witch's athame had ripped me open. I had a sworn duty to be dead-set against things like street justice and revenge killing, but at the same time I liked Dmitri, and I knew him now. If he went on with his pack duty, he would be hurt.

  Could I handle that? I wasn't sure, and it chilled me more than the overcirculated air in Maven's.

  "Dmitri," I said after a long moment, "you're a smart guy, and the reason I'm telling you is that you're going to figure it out eventually."

  I bit my lip as he put down the drink and leaned in, now intent on me. Discussing an open case with anyone except other cops is an automatic termination, and revealing evidence or suspect lists to anyone outside law enforcement pretty much guaranteed whatever you had would be thrown out at trial. Then again, I doubted Stephen Duncan would ever make it that far. Daddy's boy would plead out and get to spend his summer vacation in a criminal psychiatric hospital.

  "I'm looking at someone," I admitted. "But he's claiming that a were killed the woman he was found with."

  "A were?" said Dmitri. "Good. I can find him quicker."

  "Wait!" I snapped. "I'm not finished, damn it." I glanced across the club again. No sign of anyone who could be Cassandra, unless she was under twenty-five and favored Day-Old Corpse as her foundation shade. "There was no were scent on the second body. And the only one on Lilia was her own. The guy is not a were, Dmitri—but he keeps saying the were did it like a freaking mantra."

  "So he's a crazy motherfucker.
Doesn't mean he couldn't kill Lilia," Dmitri said.

  I put my hand on his forearm. "You have got to let me handle this. I'm equipped. You're not."

  "You're a cop—big Hexed deal!" Dmitri snarled. A few of the leather-and-lace crowd looked over at us. "So what if you can flash a badge?" he went on. "You won't do what's necessary of a were whose packmate got killed by an outsider."

  That stung, but I shrugged it off and kept my voice level. "I'm not a member of your pack," I reminded him. "And had I known you were going to be an asshole about the whole thing, I would never have asked you here to try and help me get some real punishment for the Hexed creep who did this."

  Dmitri put a hand over his face and breathed in. His wide shoulders, encased in another T-shirt—Black Sabbath, this time—shivered for a moment before he got control.

  "Sorry," he said roughly. "I just… I miss her. You wouldn't know what it's like, being mated and then having that other person ripped away with no god damn warning."

  "How do you know I don't?" I asked quietly.

  Dmitri snorted a laugh. "I know, Detective."

  I wasn't sure whether to be flattered Dmitri had finally let down his guard or insulted that he wouldn't give up harping on the Insoli thing. As if I didn't understand what it meant to be a mate. I understood. I had been one, and the loss of abandoning Joshua after the bite had sat deep in the pit of my stomach for years, a physical need I didn't understand until I stopped drinking and went to school and the police academy.

  The appearance of Cassandra LaVey saved me from having to think that one over anymore. A spotlight hit the tiny stage at the far end of the room, and illuminated a woman with black hair, black makeup, a black dress, and black boots with spike heels at least five inches tall. From a distance, Cassandra looked as if she were pulling the light into her, and her pale triangular face floated above her high lace collar.

  She raised her arms above her head, gypsy sleeves falling back to reveal arms so scarred they shone.

  "Good evening, children."

  The fashionably challenged assembled cheered when they caught sight of her.

  "Freak show," Dmitri muttered. I was inclined to agree.

  "Tonight we draw the flesh and spill the blood," Cassandra proclaimed, arms still raised. "Who will be the first?"

  A chorus of the crowd rushed the stage, and Cassandra performed a twirl before telling her followers, "Let the flesh-changing begin!"

  The lights in the bar went down and that music with no words and a pulsating beat that was popular when I was still wearing more than the standard number of rings in my ears and going to all-night parties started to throb. In the dimness I saw Cassandra slip offstage through a plain black door suspiciously devoid of any filigree or lacquer.

  I nudged Dmitri. "I need to talk to Cassandra! Wait here!"

  He yelled something back over the music, which with heightened hearing ranged on painful, and went to the bar to procure more booze.

  I wound my way through the dancing bodies, careful not to get impaled on anyone's jewelry, and knocked at the stage door. On closer inspection the letters VIP were painted black-on-black in large curly script. Oh, scandal. Wonder what went on back there.

  The door opened a slit and a blue eye in a sallow face peered out, topped by scraggly blond hair in pigtails. "Kindred?" I said in shock.

  Her visible eye went wide. "You!"

  I shoved my way in before her shock could give way to remembering who I was, and the door—heavier than it looked—clicked shut and locked behind me.

  "Oh, crap," Kindred said with a heavy sigh. "You're really not supposed to be in here. Cassandra and Maven'r gonna kill me." She wore a variation on the white latex Come-Pay-To-Screw-Me outfit I'd first seen her in, but the disaffected speech and flat face were the same.

  "Relax," I told Kindred. "I know how to behave in the VIP room. I promise not to spill my drink or arrest anyone."

  The gentle bubble of speech died down as I moved past a despondent Kindred and toward Cassandra, who held court with a large cluster of Maven's less tacky patrons. A quick scent made me nearly choke on copper and sweat. Cassandra liked to keep herself surrounded by blood witches.

  She raised her glass. "As we are all children of the darker gods here, on this dawning of a most auspicious twilight I toast you all as blood and brethren, bonded by the dark flesh. To flesh!"

  "To flesh!" the witches around her chorused.

  I giggled. It was just a tiny sound, no more than a short peep before I bit the insides of my cheeks to stop it. Wouldn't do to be cackling at Cassandra's act if I wanted her cooperation.

  Every single head in the room turned my way. The closest glared. Cassandra lowered her glass and stepped free of her cadre, eyeing me up and down.

  "Who are you, unbeliever?" she asked in a tone so far from the theatrical I wondered if I was talking to the same woman.

  I slid my fingers into my jacket pocket and touched my shield, then took them out again.

  "I'm a friend of Perry's," I said. A rush of hisses and expletives ran through the crowd.

  "Perry's friends aren't welcome here!" Kindred shouted. "Cassandra, she forced me to let her in! I didn't disobey you!"

  "Yes, and you did a bang-up job of being guard dog, what with the whining and the pouting," I told her.

  "Perry sent her to spy on me," Cassandra said definitively. "How unmannerly of him."

  I put up my hands. "Listen, Cassandra. I just came to talk to you." I was going to kill Perry for this.

  "Talk is not what we do here," Cassandra told me. Her irises expanded, and in the brighter light I saw the inkiness spill across her entire eye. She smiled. "What we do here is sculpt flesh."

  It all happened so fast that even now I can't really say how the three men closest to me managed to pin my arms behind my back, holding me with my shoulders twisted painfully as I struggled with blind fury.

  I screamed the only invective my frenzied mind could form. "Dmitri!"

  More of the crowd moved toward me, a tide of angry-eyed people reaching out. The man who had my arms ripped off my leather jacket and tossed it aside. I breathed a silent thanks as my badge went with it. Being a cop in this situation would not help me. The other two hissed when they caught sight of my Glock.

  "Cassandra!" one shouted. "She's armed herself."

  Cassandra smiled. "A lot of good it does her now." She pointed her finger, also painted black, at me. "What did you hope to accomplish with that crude instrument?"

  "Not what's happening obviously. Dmitri!" I screamed again, thanking whatever deity was watching over me that the Evil Dead weren't smart enough to recognize a police rig.

  An impact hit the door from the outside. A size twelve steel-toed boot, at a guess.

  "Luna!"

  I had guessed right.

  I struggled to turn my head and saw the door explode open, Kindred jumping back with a yelp. Dmitri barreled in, stopping when he saw me pinned. He cursed in Ukrainian.

  "Bring her here to me," said Cassandra, not even ruffled by the appearance of a large, pissed-off were in her club. "It's time we had a true demonstration subject."

  "Touch her and I'll rip your fucking hands off," Dmitri warned. He hissed as a flick knife appeared at his throat. The bartender from the main room kicked the door shut behind him and nodded at Cassandra.

  "Sorry about the disturbance, ma'am. He went for the door before I even realized someone was screaming."

  So screaming was dandy and normal in this place. Hex, this was seventeen kinds of not good.

  "Let me go," Dmitri warned. The bartender laughed and tightened the knife, nocking skin and bleeding a thin ribbon down Dmitri's throat.

  I thrashed and struggled as hard as I could, but against three determined blood witches even my were strength wasn't making a difference. They ripped off my shoulder holster and gave it to Cassandra, who set it aside with an expression of distaste. I was shoved to face her and released, panting and enraged.


  Cassandra grabbed my chin. I yanked out of her grasp and put up my hands in a combat posture.

  "Oh, my," she said. "You are so agitated. Please." She reached toward me ever so slowly, like I might bite. I would, if it came to that. She placed both hands on my shoulders and fixed me with her black-on-black eyes. "Rest, child," she told me.

  I felt lead creep into my limbs, and the sounds of the club faded as Cassandra's face grew to cover my entire field of vision. I felt remarkably pleasant, like I had just slipped into a warm bath and could stay there for a good long time. A shudder ripped through my abdomen, a terrible cramp that was usually the first sign of phase. With it came the panic and the rush of adrenaline, and I looked back up at Cassandra and saw her waver with confusion. My first impulse was to tackle her, rip her to pieces, make her hurt for thinking I could be laid low with a cheap glamour. I smelled the close press of bodies, most of them laden with hostility, and thought better of that plan. I tried to keep the dopey, obedient look on my face while Cassandra's worry vanished and she smiled.

  "That's right, child. Come here to me." She motioned me to a heavy wooden chair with a plush cushion and sat me in it, arranging my bare inner arms outward. Across the room, Dmitri stood stock-still and bleeding, breath coming fast.

  A man in a velvet smoking jacket and obscenely tight leather pants presented Cassandra with a black leather zipper case the size of a dictionary. He was albino, with white hair and pink-rimmed eyes.

  "Thank you, Maven," Cassandra told him. Maven grinned at her and went back to Kindred. He put a hand on her white-leather-clad ass and watched me like I might juggle fire or pull a rabbit out of somewhere.

  Cassandra unzipped the case and revealed a row of surgical-steel knives and scalpels, as well as a set of tiny pliers and piercing needles. She selected a scalpel with a curved end, like a boning knife, twirling it between her fingers as she leaned in and touched the very tip of the blade to my skin. That's right, bitch. I smiled inwardly. Get nice and close so it hurts.

  I looked past her shoulder and found Dmitri's eyes with mine. I tried to telegraph that everything was all right, but I must've done a lousy job because he just bared his teeth, which were looking pointier by the second, and growled.