Paint It Black (Sonja Blue)

by Nancy A. Collins

  “Jen sent me,” she explained yet again.

  The ogre made a snuffling noise like that of a hog rooting for truffles and unlocked the final door with a key the size of a tire iron. “Have a good night,” he oinked.

  The only light in the Black Grotto came from low-wattage, red-tinged bulbs, which were largely for the benefit of the human attendants, so they didn’t trip and fall while y working the room. Like most speakeasies, there was a lot of black velvet drapery, antique statuary and Victorian furniture, but what caught Sonja’s eye were the people hanging from the ceiling. Men and women of every ethnic group were represented, suspended, naked, from hooks on piano wire fixed in their flesh. Most of them had been flayed alive, their skin peeled away to expose the muscles that lurk beneath. All of them clutched burning tapers in their hands

  Something warm and wet struck Sonja’s hand. She looked up to see a young man suspended directly over her head. The skin on his thighs and calves had been carefully pared away, leaving only the gleaming bone. He smiled down at her like a medieval martyr, his eyes going in and out of focus as he spoke.

  “Welcome to the Black Grotto, milady.”

  The other human chandeliers took up the greeting, their voices slurred and dreamy.

  This is my kind of place, purred the Other.

  Too distracted by the flayed chorus to squash the Other’s voice, Sonja licked the blood from the back of her hand and moved on.

  There came the whir of a chain being paid out as a woman encased completely in black latex, save for her throat, stepped forward. Her exposed jugular was outfitted with a phlebotomist’s shunt for easy access. The woman’s arms were encased in a single glove and bound behind her back, and she had a leather band cinched about her waist that was affixed to a spool of chain set into the wall. Her face was obscured by a leather bondage mask, the mouth zippered shut from the outside, but her eyes gleamed like a trapped animal’s.

  A slender young man dressed in lollipop panties and a starched pinafore stepped forward, holding a solid-gold serving tray in his hands. On it was arranged a syringe and a champagne flute. Sonja shook her head and turned away. As she did so, she spotted the string quartet in the corner. They were playing Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. As she looked closer, she realized that their eyelids were sewn shut and their mouths filled with ball gags.

  There was a scream from elsewhere in the club and a naked ten-year-old boy darted out from a curtained booth, blood streaming from the wound in his neck. A vampire dressed in the cassock and collar of a priest dashed after him, hissing angrily. The attendant dressed like Shirley Temple grabbed the frightened boy by the hair and slammed him against the wall, momentarily dazing him.

  Before Sonja could intervene, the priest slapped the human who had manhandled the child, snapping his neck and killing him instantly. The naked, bleeding boy knuckled his teary eyes and ran to embrace the vampire. The priest cooed endearments and stroked the boy’s hair as he led him back to the curtained booth.

  As the string ensemble switched from Mozart to Purple Haze, an ogre shambled out of the shadows and picked up the body of the dead attendant no more than a suitcase and tossed it over his humped shoulder.

  “So you decided to check out the Grotto, after all, eh?”

  Sonja turned to find Jen standing behind her, a twist of a smile on his lips. He had his left arm draped over the narrow shoulders of a naked girl who looked to be about sixteen, with heavily painted eyes, like those of an Egyptian priestess.

  “My employers would speak with you, milady,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of one of the curtained alcoves.

  “When do Renfields have employers instead of a master?” Sonja queried, lifting an eyebrow in surprise. “And who are they that I should care what they want?”

  “I am no Renfield, cousin,” Jen replied cryptically as he lifted the heavy velvet curtain and gestured for her to enter. “And as for my employers’ identities, they are their most Serene Majesties Baron Luxor and the Lady Hedera.”

  Sonja scowled. Nobles. Of course. Most of the bloodsuckers she had dealt with over the years were minor league, many of them little more than brain-damaged revenants. But every so often she would stumble across a Noble, like Pangloss or Morgan. They tended to be far older and a great deal more powerful than the garden-variety vampires they spawned, and more than a little crazy.

  Inside the audience chamber was an antique love seat on which sat a male vampire dressed in nothing but a black leather pouch, a garter belt, black silk stockings, and matching patent-leather pumps. His dark hair, worn is a shaggy Beatles cut, framed a long face that had neither eyebrows nor lashes, and his flesh was so pale it seemed almost translucent, like that of a finely polished opal. A human male wrapped in a latex gimp-suit lay curled at the vampire’s feet like an adoring hound.

  Sonja shifted her vision into the occult spectrum so she could the gauge the vampire lord’s aura, and saw it surging and bubbling around his head like boiling sugar. Baron Luxor was, indeed, a Noble of considerable power.

  The vampire’s thin lips pulled up in the approximation of a smile. “Ah! The Blue Woman has arrived!”

  “You know me?” Sonja asked in surprise.

  Baron Luxor nodded, never taking his eyes off her. “The old man told us you would be coming here, sooner or later.”

  Sonja frowned. “What old man?”

  “Pangloss,” Luxor explained as he stood up, wobbling only slightly on his four-inch heels. “He was the one who told us about you—he said that you were the one who marked Morgan. We found that most impressive.”

  “You keep saying ‘we’, but I only see one of you,” Sonja said, glancing about for signs of Luxor’s partner. “Where is this Lady Hedera I’ve heard of?”

  Luxor smiled, flashing a brief glimpse of fang. “Oh, she is here. She is never far away from me, no matter where I am.”

  Suddenly the vampire’s flesh started to ripple as his muscles began to dance. The vampire lord’s waist abruptly narrowed as if cinched by an invisible hand, while his pectoral muscles began to expand, blossoming into small, but serviceable, breasts. The leather pouch covering his sex deflated as his testicles retracted into his lower abdomen. The bones in Luxor’s face groaned like the timbers on a ship at sea as they molded themselves into a softer, more feminine aspect. Meanwhile, his hair grew even longer, until it spilled over his shoulders. Sonja had to admit to herself that she was impressed. Such tightly controlled shape-shifting is not easy, even amongst Nobles.

  Revealed at last, Lady Hedera clapped her hands and the gimp jumped up and scurried off into the shadows, returning a moment later with a silk kimono decorated with butterflies.

  “Why do you want to talk to me?” Sonja asked.

  “We were told you are a creature of great power,” Lady Hedera replied, her voice a lighter, more feminine version of Baron Luxor’s. “A creature of... purpose. And your purpose is seeing the Lord of the Morning Star dead.”

  “What’s that got to do with you?’

  “Morgan has been our enemy for centuries,” Lady Hedera explained, producing a syringe from her kimono pocket. She then stuck it into the shunt jutting from the gimp’s inner arm, drawing fresh blood, which she decanted it into a champagne flute.

  “Our broods have clashed and struggled with his since the days of the Bourbon kings. Countless Renfields have died in our service, protecting us from his attacks on our person. We would see him destroyed.” She paused to sniff the blood she had just drained, and then sipped it. “Exquisite! Please, do try some,” she said, motioning for Sonja to help herself. “It’s from my private stock, as you can see.”

  Sonja felt her palms begin to itch. It had been a couple of days since she’d last fed— and only on animal blood, not human. She eyed the gimp hungrily but shook her head.

  Lady Hedera studied her with interest, rolling the champagne flute full of warm blood between her palms. “Ah, yes…the old man told us you had a peculiar attachm
ent to humans. But you have tasted their blood, have you not?’

  “Yes,” Sonja replied grudgingly.

  “Then why do you hesitate? All the humans you have seen in the Black Grotto are here of their own free will. The world is full of those who seek their own destruction. They are drawn to our kind, like moths to the flame. Certainly you must know that, my dear. They begged us to use them in such a fashion.”

  “Even the children?” Sonja countered sharply.

  “Runaways, each and every one of them fleeing abusive parents and guardians far more inhumane than us. They come to us for refuge, and we provide it. We show them a love no harsher than what they have already known.”

  “I do not believe you,” Sonja said flatly. “I think I’ll see for myself if what you’re saying is true.” She focused her attention on the gimp crouched at Hedera’s feet. As she adjusted her vision, she could see control threads, pulsing like raw veins, sprouting from the latex slave’s head, tethering him to Lady Hedera’s own aura. With a single, concentrated swipe, Sonja severed the leash binding mistress to slave—with instantaneous effects.

  The gimp jumped to his feet, yowling in wordless horror as he pulled the mask from his head, revealing himself to be a balding man with the look of a prosperous banker. He clawed frantically at the shunt stuck in the crook of his arm, his eyes bulging out of their sockets like ping-pong balls.

  “How dare you!” Lady Hedera shrieked. “How dare you break my leash?”

  The gimp’s body snapped like whipcord as the Noble shoved her will back into him. He collapsed on the floor, his lips foaming and limbs twitching spasmodically. There was a ripe, unpleasantly organic smell as he shit his suit.

  As Hedera turned to face Sonja, fangs bared in ritual challenge, her features began to slide back into those of Luxor. For a brief moment, Sonja glimpsed the vampire Noble for what it truly was: a walking cadaver with skin the color of tallow, its withered flesh stretched taut over desiccated muscle. Then the horrific apparition disappeared, the illusion of life once more securely in place.

  “I’ll take your heart out for that,” Luxor snarled, reaching for her with claw-like hands.

  “You can try,” Sonja replied, brandishing her switchblade.

  Luxor’s eyes flashed at the sight of the silver blade, and he quickly drew back his hand as if it was a hornet’s nest. “Ssssilver,” he hissed, staring at the knife the same way a cobra follows the motions of a fakir’s flute.

  “What’s the matter, your lord and ladyship?” Sonja sneered as she began to back her way out of the audience chamber. “Didn’t Pangloss tell you about my little toy? The one I used to mark both Morgan and him?”

  “Put that horrid thing away!” Luxor hissed.

  “How about I drive it through your heart if you try and stop me from leaving?” she growled. “So, let me get this straight: you hate Morgan and want me to get him out of your way, is that it? Funny, Pangloss came to me with the same proposal a few years back. You fuckin’ Nobles are all the same: too afraid of one another to get your own hands dirty! Personally, I don’t give a flying fuck that you hate Morgan. I’m going to kill the fucker, but not on behalf of some gender-bending bloodsucker. Oh, and Luxor? Once I’m done with Morgan, I’m going to come back for you. Both of you.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  She knew she was being followed. Her ‘fan club’ had been stalking her since the Black Grotto, and from what Sonja could sense of its mind, it certainly was not human. No doubt Baron Luxor had sent one of his by-blows to keep an eye on her in hopes of finding out where she kept her nest.

  She pretended she didn’t notice she was being shadowed, making sure to screen her own thoughts, just in case Luxor’s errand boy might have something in the way of psychic ability. She sauntered along the West Village streets, headed in the general direction of Alphabet City, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her leather jacket. Even though it was four in the morning, there were still people on the streets. She passed a handful of party-goers standing outside a Korean deli, clutching tall-boys to their chests as they tried to figure out where to go next. A little farther down the street, a drunken man with a Jersey accent was bellowing into his cell-phone at the top of his lungs.

  “Fuck you! Fuck-fuck-fuck!”

  As she drew nearer, the drunk attempted to hurl the offending cell-phone at a passing cab, the momentum of his swing throwing him into Sonja as she walked by. The sound he made as she casually strong-armed into a nearby wall was particularly meaty. The string of ‘fucks’ abruptly stop.

  She could feel her shadow hesitate as the unconscious drunk sprawled on the sidewalk was tempting. Since she did not want Luxor’s minion to realize she was paying attention, she kept walking towards Houston.

  The entrance to the F train stop was in the corner of a tiny, vest-pocket ‘park’ sandwiched between East First Street and East Houston that consisted entirely of asphalt, swing-sets, and courts for basketball and handball and the early morning emptiness give the area genuine urban menace.

  As Sonja headed down the stairs to the mezzanine level, she switched into high gear, moving between the cracks in human perception, as all Pretenders do. She flitted past the token booth, pausing for a fraction of a heartbeat to look into the bulletproof cage at the bored Transit Authority worker inside. To Sonja’s eyes the woman was moving as if underwater as she paged through the contents of her Smartphone. If she sensed Sonja’s gaze upon her, it merely registered as a brief shudder of gooseflesh, nothing more.

  No alarm was raised as Sonja jumped the turnstile and dashed toward the stairs leading to the uptown platform. She glided downward, keeping to the shadows between the thick red columns that held the roof of the station aloft. Upon reaching the second level she was greeted by a concrete platform that ran the length of East Houston, between First and Second Avenues. The platform was empty save for a solitary drunk, passed out sitting upright on one of the benches because of the wooden dividers splitting it into individual seats in order to keep the homeless from using them as beds. There was a puddle of vomit between the drunk’s shoes, and his head was lolling about on his shoulders as if his neck was broken. If Sonja had been human, she would have been nervous about waiting for a train in such a lonely place.

  Instead, she clambered up one of the girder-like support columns and squatted atop the cross-beams, surprising a rat in its nest as she did so. It squealed at her and showed its teeth. She grabbed the rodent and snapped its neck with a twist of her wrist, silencing its complaints, then settled in to await her shadow’s arrival.

  A few moments later a male vampire, looking thirty-something years of age, dressed in a nondescript but respectable manner, made his appearance on the platform below. Judging from his clothes, Sonja pegged him as a banker, or possibly some variety of public accountant. In any case, he appeared unobtrusive, but with enough social standing to pass unnoticed by the authorities. It was typical vampire camouflage, at least for the rank-and-file bloodsuckers. Only the older and more powerful Nobles dared to draw attention to them selves.

  The vampire was also operating in high gear, which meant he was practically invisible to the human eye. If the drunk suddenly woke up, all he would see would be a flicker of shadow at the corner of his eye. Perhaps, if he was particularly astute, he might suddenly become anxious, for no reason.

  Sonja watched in bemusement as her ‘shadow’ flitted back and forth along the platform, snarling in frustration at her apparent disappearance. It seemed Luxor had sent one of his duller drones to follow her.

  She waited until the vampire was almost directly under her before dropping down behind him. She tapped him on the shoulder as she landed, and he spun around, snarling angrily.

  “Lookin’ for me, dead boy?” she sneered as she punched him in the jaw. The vampire’s mandible swung to one side like a gate on a busted hinge as she continued to plow into him, hitting him in the gut hard enough to lift him off the ground.

  The mask of Marvin Milqueto
ast, CPA crumbled away, and Sonja found herself tangling with a gaunt, red-eyed, nose-less ghoul with three-inch fingernails and breath that could knock a buzzard off a shit wagon. The dead boy shrieked and clawed at her, slicing one side of her face open to the bone.

  Within seconds, they were rolling about of the platform, hissing at one another like a couple of wildcats in heat. Luxor’s get was strong, but it lacked stamina, and was accustomed to battening onto nothing more challenging than hapless commuters. He certainly was not used to having a real fight on his hands.

  Sonja quickly got the upper hand, straddling the dead boy’s chest as she hammered his skull into the concrete. She knew she should just take out her switchblade and do the deed and leave the rotting excuse for a bloodsucker’s head on his master’s doorstep as a warning, but she was enjoying herself too much.

  “Freeze! Police!”

  Suddenly there was a gun pressed against the side of her head. Sonja looked up and into the business end of a Glock. The gun was held by the drunk who had, until a moment or two before, been slumped unconscious on the bench. He held up a battered leather wallet, inside of which was pinned a New York Transit Bureau police badge. Sonja cursed herself. She had been so preoccupied with preparing an ambush for the vampire tailing her she had neglected to check to see if the drunk was what he appeared to be.

  She let go of the vampire, standing up slowly. The muzzle of the Glock was barely an inch from her head. She could probably take the cop, but she did not want to chance it since a bullet to the head would be fatal to her, vampire or not.

  The cop grabbed her by the collar of her jacket and threw her up against the nearest support column. “Hands up where I can see ’em! Keep those fingers spread out, or I’ll fuckin’ break ’em, understand!?” he barked. The cop then turned to address what he assumed to be a victim of a mugging. “Are you all right sir? I’ve got back-up on the way…”

  Even as the undercover cop spoke the words, Sonja could hear the wail of approaching sirens from the street two levels above their heads, like the screams of banshees rushing to a feast. As the vampire got to his feet, the policeman got his first good look at the so-called ‘victim’ and instinctively stepped back. The vampire’s lower jaw was dangling by a shred of muscle, revealing a gaping hole and flapping tongue where his mouth should be.