by Lee Dignam
“I don’t come to your place of work and tell you how to run your affairs—don’t presume you can come and do that here.”
“I didn’t mean to do that. But she’s missing, and no one’s looked into it. Could I talk to one of the girls? Maybe they know something.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t let anyone who isn’t me or a customer go near them. The girls are under my protection, and certain protocols have to be followed.”
Lionel’s phone, which was sitting on the desk, began to buzz. He glanced at the screen, revealing a name Cyanide didn’t recognize, and killed the buzzing with the press of a button. “What about the last client she was with?” she asked, “Do you know who they were? It might help me get a sense of who’s running this show.”
“Why are you so interested?”
Cyanide held Lionel’s eyes, trying to reach his human side with only a look. “The girl I’m looking for,” she said, “I don’t know if she ever worked for you, but if there’s a chance she did, and that she’s been taken, I need you to help me find her.”
A pause hung, suspended in the air like a held breath, like the moment before the trapeze artist dives off the platform to grab hold of the bar and swing himself through the air without a support net to catch him should he fall. She wasn’t sure which way he would go. On the one hand, he seemed like the kind of person who enjoyed being on top and having something on someone else he could exploit for his own gain. On the other hand, everything he had said led her to believe he was an honorable man who treated people with respect—or at least, treated them like precious china, which, for a vampire, was close enough.
“Alright,” he said, “I’ll help you. But we’ll have to do things my way, understood?”
“Your way,” Cyanide said, unsure of what he meant. “Okay, let’s do things your way.”
CHAPTER TEN
Tresses of smoke floated lazily from a burning cigarette tip, dancing in the alternating light coming off the street. As the girl inhaled, the tip burned brighter, then relaxed, like a star considering going supernova, but thinking better of it. Daniel watched the cigarette burn, his heightened senses picking up every little crackle and pop of the paper and the tobacco as if the cigarette were a roaring fire, hungrily chewing up someone’s discarded manuscript.
He found it difficult keeping the woman’s eyes on his. She had turned to her side on the chair and found a wall fixture on the other side of the room to stare at. There was a time when this woman may have radiated beauty, but that radiance had been choked out by the cold hands of oppression, leaving a near-empty husk of a person behind; her eyes were lifeless and dull, her nerves so tired of working overtime they no longer caused her hand to tremble.
She was closed to him, but he needed to learn what she knew.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” Daniel said.
He sat across from her with a small kitchen table between them. On it was a pack of smokes, a lighter, and a can of soda. All hers. She nodded, then turned to flick her cigarette into the empty can of soda, returning her gaze almost immediately to the inert TV across the living room.
“I know you’ve been through a lot, Vicky, but I need to ask you a few questions.”
She said nothing.
Daniel exhaled a breath of air, mimicking the kind of gesture a human would make in conversation with ease. “Do you know who took you?”
Vicky shook her head after a long pause.
“Where was it you were taken?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Was it day or night?”
“Night.”
“Do you remember what you were doing when it happened?”
“Working.”
“Where did you work?”
She turned her head toward Daniel now, but seemed to have trouble meeting his eyes. Her hair, loose, black, and full, provided enough natural cover for her to hide behind, leaving only her lips and chin visible. The way the light from the open window spilled into the room seemed to only amplify this ability of hers to conceal herself.
“I don’t have a job,” she said, after a long drag of the cigarette.
“But… you said you were—”
“I know what I said.”
Daniel understood what she meant without having to ask a follow-up question. He decided to tread carefully. “Did you see his face, Vicky?”
She nodded.
“Could you tell me what he looked like? What he was wearing?”
“What does it matter?”
“Because if I’m going to have a shot at finding him, I need to know what he looks like.”
“You a cop or something?”
“No.”
“Then why do you give a rat’s ass about what happens to me or any of the other girls?”
“I care. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have set this up for you.”
“I suppose you’ll be expecting something in return for your generosity?”
Daniel shook his head. “I don’t want anything in return. Once you’re feeling like you’re ready to go, I’ll make sure you have the means to get where you’re going.”
“And what if I don’t know where I’m going?”
She turned her eyes up at him now, and despite the darkness, he thought they were beautiful. Perhaps, on a sunny day, they would shine green. They seemed like the kind of eyes possessed of their own inner light. But that glow had been taken away from her. He wanted desperately to return the shine to them, but how could he?
He belonged to the night, and his inner shine had left long ago.
“I can help you figure that out, Vicky.”
She took another drag of the cigarette, this time hard enough to finish it, then dropped the butt in the can where it fizzled and died in what was left of the soda. “I know you think you can help,” she said, “And maybe you can, but it’ll take more than a safe house and some clean clothes to convince me.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you’re a man. I’m just an object to you. Maybe to some I’m a rag doll to be tossed around. To you I’m a broken glass figurine you feel some obsessive need to piece together. Either one fucking sucks.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“I’m not upset. I’m pissed. You pulled me out of that truck, and for that I’m thankful, but who’s to say it won’t happen again?”
“We can look after you.”
“Can you? Because unless you’re willing to pay all my bills and settle all my debts, I’m going to be back to doing what I was doing just to make ends meet.”
Daniel let the moment hang, giving her time to calm herself and come back down from her agitated state. He could hear her heart beating, thumping faster than it had been at the start of the conversation. This was a handy trick for a vampire to have—the ability to tell whether someone was nervous simply by listening out for the beating of their heart.
“Could you tell me what exactly you were doing the night you got picked up, Vicky?”
She looked like she was about to reach for the cigarettes, but stopped herself. “I was shooting a video,” she said.
“A video?”
“Porn. I was doing porn. But I’m not a prostitute, okay? I needed money, and these guys said they’d give me a couple of hundred dollars if I shot a video for them. Nothing crazy, nothing I didn’t wanna do.” She reached for the cigarettes then and took one. Daniel picked the Zippo up and offered her a light, which she took.
After a drag, she continued.
“I don’t remember who was there in the room, exactly. I remember the guy I was working with. He wasn’t a jerk. We filmed, we screwed, I got paid, and then one of them offered me a ride home. But I had my own car, so I headed out on my own. Then someone jumped me in the parking lot. Knocked me out or something.”
“The man who offered you a ride home… was he the man you had been working with?”
“You mean the guy I’d been fucking? No.”
“Coul
d you tell me what he looked like?”
“I guess he was tall, bald… he was foreign, too. Maybe from some European place. Definitely not American.”
“Was he a cameraman, or a director, or…?”
“He didn’t seem to have a job at all. He was just there. He was nice enough, I guess. We talked between shots. He brought me water when I asked for it. He was the one who paid me, too.”
“Did you get his name?”
“I didn’t ask him for it. I heard someone call him by his name, but I’ve forgotten what it was. Something foreign, though.”
“After you were knocked out, what happened?”
“When I woke up I was in a room, like a warehouse thing. There were chains, other girls, and people talking.”
“Do you have any idea where the place was?”
She shook her head.
“What about the girls that were in the trailer with you? Were any of them in that warehouse?”
“Some, I guess. I don’t know. I was pretty out of it. Couldn’t even stand up.”
Daniel then considered something. “Wait,” he said, “How long ago was this?”
“One of the girls counted fourteen days, but we never saw the sun, so I can’t say how accurate that was.”
“Two weeks… you were stuck in that place for two weeks?”
She nodded.
Daniel reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a Polaroid with a picture of a girl on it. Chestnut hair, bright young face, deep clear eyes like the full moon at night. She was wearing a denim jacket over a cut up top and throwing the middle finger at the camera. A very 80’s shot, but that had been the point; it had been taken at an 80’s themed party.
He handed the picture to Vicky. “Did you see this girl at any point while you were being held?”
Vicky took the Polaroid and gazed at it carefully. Her eyebrows pinched together, and after a number of seconds that could have been hours, she nodded. “I think so,” she said, “Yeah, I saw this girl.”
Daniel drew in a breath and sat up straight, uncrossing his legs. “Where?” he asked, “When?”
“Tonight. I saw her tonight, before we were moved.”
“You’re sure? I need you to be sure.”
Vicky turned her eyes up at Daniel and shied away from him, from his intensity. He hadn’t realized it until then, but he had inched toward the edge of his seat and had started to lean toward her. His jaw had begun to throb, too, the way it always did before a fight or a feed. He was becoming agitated. On some subconscious level, she was starting to understand that, sitting before her wasn’t a well-dressed, handsome man, but a monster. A killer.
A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
He forced himself to relax, leaning back into his chair and turning his gaze away from Vicky while also trying to tune out the sound of her rapidly pulsing heart. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“She… she’s important to you,” Vicky said.
Daniel nodded. “Very much so. I’ve spoken to six women tonight, and none of them have been able to confirm seeing her as you have.”
“When you live in a world full of creeps, you learn to be attentive. I’m guessing most of those girls you spoke to weren’t used to the streets before they were taken.”
He shook his head, but said nothing, focusing all of his willpower on calming down. She had been seen. Tonight. But she wasn’t in the trailer, so, where was she?
“I know it was her,” Vicky said, “I also know why she wasn’t with us when you… when your people rescued us.”
Risking his composure, Daniel turned his eyes to look on Vicky. Her face had softened, now, and she had put out the cigarette he had lit for her. “Could you tell me?” he asked.
“We were in the trailer,” she said, “Not her—me and the other women. We had been ushered in by guys wearing ski-masks and were just waiting for more women, I guess. None of us had any idea where we were going or what they were going to do with us, only that every once in a while, the back of the trailer would open and another woman would get pushed inside. So, then I see this girl, and I thought she looked a little young, a little doe-eyed, but I remember her because someone grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the trailer, like, a second after she was thrown in.”
“Did you see who?”
Vicky shook her head. “They were wearing masks, but it was one of the guys. So, I decided to get close to the door to try and hear something. I didn’t hear much, but they were talking about how this one was going to heaven.”
“Heaven?”
“I don’t know what they meant. I thought… I thought maybe they were going to kill her, you know? Send her to heaven. Thought maybe they’d get to us all one by one. But that didn’t make sense. Why keep us in cages and feed us for however long we had been there just to kill us?”
“Because they weren’t going to kill you,” Daniel said, his undead body tightening as the puzzle pieces began to fit.
“How do you know?”
“Heaven is the name of a club.”
“A nightclub? That’s where she was going?”
“There’s only one in town, and I know who owns it.”
“Who?”
Daniel rose from his chair. He knew he couldn’t tell her any more than he already had. She was human, and while she had been through hell and back, that didn’t grant him permission to tell her the truth about the world of vampires.
“You’re leaving?” she asked, her eyes now needy and wanting.
He approached and squatted before her, looking up at her. “You’ve been incredibly helpful, Vicky,” he said, “I want to thank you for everything. You’re welcome to stay here for as long as you like.” He pulled a business card out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. “If you need anything, you call this number and we’ll make sure you get it.”
She took the business card and read it, but the specter of confusion washed across her face as if it had been written in a foreign language. “What I need is to know where I was being taken and why.”
“And I’ll tell you, I promise, but not right now. I need to find her, and that means I need to move fast.”
Daniel rose and headed for the front door, taking long strides as he went.
“Hey,” she said, calling out to him from her chair.
He craned his head to the side and glanced at her. “Yes?” he asked.
“What’s her name?”
“Kaitlyn. Her name is Kaitlyn.”
“I hope you find her.”
Daniel nodded, opened the door, and walked briskly down the corridor. A bulky man in a suit nodded at him as he went past, and Daniel returned the gesture. Three more such men patrolled the building—one on the upper floors, one in the lobby, and the other outside. This was Daniel’s building, one of his fortresses. Vicky and the other girls would be safe here, but Kaitlyn was still out there, and now he had a lead on where she might have gone. Something to sink his teeth into. If anyone there had anything to do with Kaitlyn’s kidnapping, or anyone else’s for that matter, his teeth would be busy tonight.
He would paint the walls of the club red and black with the blood of human and vampire alike if it meant finding her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Flickering computer monitors winked from within the belly of the dark room like the eyes of a monstrous spider in a cave. Lionel stepped in first and stood aside for Cyanide to follow, her eyes flitting from screen to screen, from eye to eye.
In one, a woman wearing nothing but black stilettos and a red silk scarf wrapped around her eyes, blindfolding her vision as she danced for a man who looked like he had just stepped out of a high-powered meeting where big-shot CEO’s discussed sums of money too large for the regular human mind to fathom. In another, a young man lay in the fetal position on a curved sofa, his head rested on a woman’s lap while she stroked his hair lovingly with one hand. With the other, she pulled his wrist to her mouth, and sucked gently of the blood within.
Two of the remainin
g six rooms were empty. In the others, similar scenes played out. The vampires who came here didn’t just come for a quick bite—they came to fulfill a fantasy, for an experience. Cyanide wasn’t sure how she felt about this. Feeding, for her, had been something she did as a necessity. Rarely had she ever made an evening of it.
At the same time, she could see the appeal.
Lionel sat at the computer station; a massive switchboard covered in buttons and touchscreens. He worked his fingers over the board, and a large monitor came to life—a widescreen positioned beneath all the others. Cyanide pulled up a chair and watched him as he flicked through numbered files in subfolder after subfolder.
When he had located the movie file he had been looking for, he selected it, hit play, and the scene began to unfold on the large monitor.
“Has this been watched before?” Cyanide asked.
Lionel turned his head slightly, giving her his eyes. “I haven’t watched it, but my staff do. They would have told me if they had seen anything suspicious.”
She nodded and gave the screen her full attention. Nothing happened for a time. The room was small, furnished only with a curved couch and a small table in the middle—like all the other rooms she had seen. They looked much like the private rooms in strip clubs, black lights and all, and she wondered if this had been intentional or not. Then the show started, and the thoughts vanished from her mind.
Into the room walked a girl. She was young, maybe about 20 or 21, with dark skin and long, black poker-straight her. Cyanide wondered what it was that brought her to this. Student debt? Car payments? Or maybe she was also looking to find her way out of Ashwood. She held the door open for a bald man to enter the room; he was tall, broad shouldered, and was carrying a jacket in his arms. Stretching out from his t-shirt collar was a tattoo which Cyanide couldn’t quite identify. More tattoos covered his arms, which looked like they belonged on the body of a heavyweight boxer.
The man sat down on the sofa and the woman—Lionel mentioned her name was Melanie—followed, cuddling up to him and kicking her feet up to the side. Her body language, because there were no microphones installed in these private rooms, suggested she was calm and comfortable; not at all worried.
