by Sky Winters
The hallway that they moved into was hardly lit; only a few lights casting a low, orange glow lined the length of it. They stopped at another door, this one smaller, metal; like a stage door. Nora then saw the girls split off; one moved to the front of the line, the other moved to the back. They were whispering something to the girls in line.
“Put on a wholesome act. Look sweet, but shy,” someone said to one of the girls in a low, rhythmic voice; that same hypnotic, insisting tone.
Then the door opened. The first girl went, then, after five minutes or so, the second. Then the third. Nora was next. She had no choice. She stepped through the door and was blinded by the beaming lights above the long, wooden stage.
Chapter 5
Kieran clasped the cool ivory of the antique bidding sign as he looked with approval at the girl on stage. She was beautiful, with innocent features and a lithe, graceful body. And her hair… strikingly red.
“What do we think, boys? Was I right, or was I right?” the auctioneer said, not a little impressed himself with the specimen on stage. “Like something from the old country.” He winked in the direction of the Irish group.
There was something else about her, thought Kieran, waiting with eager impatience for the bidding to begin; something different from the other girls. But he couldn’t put his finger on it.
“Aye,” said Ian, his voice low and whispered, “you finally see something you like up there?”
Kieran said nothing, but his mouth curled into a slight smile.
“About damn time,” said Ian with a smile of his own before turning back toward the stage.
“Bidding for this lovely young thing will start at…” the auctioneer’s voice trailed off. It seemed that he had been given a number to start, but was doing mental calculations to determine a higher number now that he was seeing her in the flesh.
“Fifty thousand!”
A brief chattering spread through the crowd. They didn’t see numbers like this very often, but the auction house knew when they had something on their hands that could fetch such a high price. With a lackadaisical raise of his arm, Kieran placed his bid.
“We have fifty thousand to the Irish gentleman in the back. Do we have fifty-five thousand?”
Kieran spotted a flash of white out of the corner of his eye from the Ukrainians. It was Drugi.
“Fifty-five thousand to the Ukrainian gentleman!”
Kieran shot a look to Drugi, who responded with a shrugged shoulder look that seemed to say, “Can you blame me?”
Kieran’s expression softened. No, he couldn’t. He raised his sign once more.
“Sixty thousand to the Irish gentleman!”
Kieran did some quick calculations, thinking how much money he could spend. He had yet to purchase a girl from any of the annual auctions, which gave him a substantial amount of cash to play with. And he knew he’d need it all.
“Do we have sixty-five thousand?”
Another sign shot up, and Kieran’s eyes tracked it. It belonged to someone in the Polish society, but he couldn’t see who.
“That is sixty-five thousand! Do we see seventy-five thousand?”
Drugi’s sign went up.
“Seventy-five thousand to the gentleman in the navy suit. Do we have eighty-five thousand?”
Kieran moved to raise his sign.
“One hundred thousand!” a voice called out in silken, allegro tones.
Murmuring erupted through the crowd of seated men. The six-digit ceiling was rarely cracked.
Kieran craned his neck and moved in his chair to see who the voice belonged to. Sure enough, it was Marcus Ricci, one of the newest members of the Italian society. Though he was only recently turned, his ostentatious, flamboyant nature was already making waves. He was bold, brash, and above all, impudent. Already wealthy from before his turning, Marcus had wasted no time in using the elevated levels of energy that came with being a vampire to increase his fortune even further. Kieran had heard rumors that Marcus had recently purchased one of the most expensive penthouses in the East Village, where the Italians lived, but it had to be merely rumors. Kieran knew there was no way the status-conscious Italians would allow an upstart to pull a move like that.
Kieran looked at Marcus, noting his curled and swept-back coal-colored hair, his aquiline nose with long nostrils, and scheming, scouring eyes. His lips were tomato-red and curled into what seemed like a permanent smug sneer.
“One hundred thousand!” called the auctioneer.
“One-ten,” called Drugi.
The auctions tended to move like this: Gentlemanly, incremental increases of five thousand until the hundred mark was hit, then it was a slug-fest.
Kieran looked again at the girl on stage, at her comely face and slender body, and asked himself if she was worth it.
Yes, she is.
“One-twenty-five,” he called.
Drugi shot him a surprised look, then waved his hand toward Kieran in a motion that seemed to say, fine, you want her? She’s all yours. He then tossed his sign onto the table and finished his vodka with a quick swig.
“One-fifty,” called Marcus.
“One-seventy-five,” said Kieran in response, not missing a beat.
“Hey, I know you’re sweet on this one, but you got the funds for this?” asked Ian, leaning in and talking in a low whisper.
Kieran said nothing in response.
“Two hundred,” said Marcus.
Now the room was in a mild commotion. Vampires from each society were talking amongst themselves, gesturing to Kieran and Marcus with hands holding drinks, trying to figure out who these two men were, exactly, and just what was so exceptional about this girl on stage beyond her obvious beauty. The rest of the vampires of the Irish society looked toward Kieran with worry; they were pleased that one of their own could throw money around like this, but the question of whether he had it to spend was another matter entirely.
Kieran thought for a moment, rubbing the tip of his index finger against the cool, polished ivory handle of the bidding sign. He knew that all the eyes of the room, the hundreds of men of the society of vampires, were on him.
“Two-twenty,” he said, his voice loud, but impassive.
More murmurs and chattering rippled through the crowd.
“Two-fifty,” said Marcus, his eyes flicking over to Kieran for a brief moment. He wanted to see how Kieran would react, but didn’t want him to see that he was looking. But Kieran saw.
The room was quiet and gripped with anticipation. The auctioneer maintained his professional demeanor, and awaited the next move from either of the two men. Kieran could see Drugi’s face painted with a wide-eyed expression of incredulity.
“The fuck’re ya doin’, man? You got this kind of money?” said Ian, keeping his voice to the same low whisper.
“Three hundred,” Kieran said.
Upon hearing these words, many men in the room dropped the cool façade and began to outright talk amongst themselves, wondering in confused, expletive-laced terms what was going on, who was this this Irish upstart and the redhead he was bidding on, where, exactly, did he get all this money, and so on.
Kieran waited for Marcus to react. He knew that he had the money, if he wanted to spend it. But was he acting with the same strange impulse to buy this girl that Kieran was?
His question was answered by Marcus tossing his bidding sign on the table and throwing up his hands in an exaggerated, open-palmed gesture of defeat.
“She’s all yours, my friend, for whatever good it does you,” he called out before taking a slow sip from his glass of bloodwine.
“Sold for three hundred thousand dollars to the Irish gentleman,” said the auctioneer in a grand, proclaiming voice, followed by a slamming of the mallet on the podium.
The girl was led off the stage, the soft tinkling of her chains audible in the silence of the hall. Despite the drama of the girl’s auction, there was no pause in the events of the evening. After she was taken from the stage, t
he next girl was brought on, bid on, and sold off… for a price much lower than three hundred thousand dollars.
Chapter 6
When Nora’s bidding was done, she was rushed from the stage and into a small, room appointed with elegant, Louis XIV-style furniture. She took a seat on the couch, and sat in silence, her head still swimming from what had just happened.
Some kind of bidding, that was? She could hear the Irish come out, even in her own head.
She realized that it was an auction of some kind, though for what, exactly, she didn’t know. Who were those strange men, all clad in expensive suits, and all seeming to wear the same expressions: Serious, but trimmed with the haughty arrogance of aristocrats.
The thought of what they were bidding for made her stomach tie into tense hot knots. She thought of the likely answers: Sex slave, live-in maid… organ harvesting. Her stomach became sick at the thought of that last option, and she crossed her delicate arms over her smooth, flat stomach.
No, if that’s what they wanted, they wouldn’t go to all the trouble of dressing us up like this.
But that just made her more certain that this was some kind of black market sex slave operation, which only made her a bit less fearful.
And the price that she’d fetched; why? She couldn’t understand what caused those men to bid such large amounts of money. She had always considered herself, at best, cute. And that was on a good day. Never would she have priced herself in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, were she told to do such a thing.
She stood up and began pacing back and forth, her heels landing on the carpet with thin thuds. There was a mirror in the room, and she caught a glimpse of herself as she paced. The high-waisted black panties hugged her hipbones, accentuating her curves. The bra pushed her modest bosom up, but not in the in-your-face, look-at-me way that Nora was used to seeing among the middle-aged housewives who were the mothers of her students.
That Mrs. Serko seemed like a bit of a bitch, but she knew what she was doing. Nora looked over her shoulder and admired the fullness of her rear end in the mirror.
Then she froze, remembering that she was supposed to be pretending to be in some kind of zombified state and wondering if there were cameras watching her every move. With the same slow, deliberate steps that she had been taking throughout the evening, she walked back to the couch, sat down, and folded her hands across the rosy-white skin of her thighs.
The door flung open, and two of the suited men entered and looked Nora over. She kept her eyes forward, her head as still as a stone.
“This the one?” said one of the men, his voice crisp and professional.
“Yeah, Miss Three Hundred K,” said the other.
“What do you think; worth it?” asked the first man.
“When I’ve got that much money to spend on fresh meat, I’ll let you know.”
Fresh meat?
“Okay, let’s get her to the buyer.”
The first man kneeled in front of Nora, removed his sunglasses, and spoke in the low, suggestive tone that she had been hearing all night. “Stand, and come with us. Follow three steps behind us.”
She complied, and rose.
The men filed out of the room, and Nora followed. She wondered who this buyer was. Just who was this man who saw her on stage for, at most, five minutes, and decided to spend what Nora would be lucky to make in half a decade? Her heels clicked on the stone floor of the hallway, and the air was damp with a strange, musky smell, like a wine cellar, or a cave. The hallway seemed to go on forever, just a thin hall with doors evenly-spaced and across from each other; green rooms for all the girls as they awaited their buyers.
After a time, they reached the end of the hallway, which was capped with a door of the same exquisite, crafted quality that Nora had grown used to seeing in this strange place. She wondered where she was, if she was even still in New York. If so, she wondered who, exactly, was paying for this massive establishment. There were clearly deep pockets behind this enterprise.
One of the men opened the door, and, with a quick, stabbing gesture, indicated for Nora to pass through. Once she entered, the door was shut with a low, slow creak.
The room she entered was large, with walls of mirrors, and lined with flowers that sat in pots atop golden pedestals of varying height. The room smelled of a swirl of floral scents, and strange warmth seemed to emanate from a source that Nora couldn’t determine. Aside from the large door that she entered from, another door, this one simpler in design, was on the other side. Above her, an ornate chandelier of dangling crystals hung from the vaulted ceiling.
Nora could see herself from every angle in this mirrored room, and the lighting was warm, soft, and flattering. Everything about the room seemed to be designed to appeal to the senses. Nora stood still among the opulence, wondering how much longer she would have to maintain this charade of hypnosis.
Then, the door on the opposite side she entered from clicked and opened in a slow sweep, and a man stepped through.
He was so strikingly beautiful that Nora’s knees weakened. He was tall, nearly a head taller than Nora, and his face was white, even paler than Nora’s skin, the color of a fresh sheet of snow. His nose was slim but strong, his jaw was wide and angled, and his lips were red, as though filled full with rich, pulsing blood. His hair was long, resting on his shoulders with the weight of crushed velvet curtains and capped his head in a deep, chestnut brown. He was dressed in a suit tailored with immaculate craftsmanship; it emphasized every angle of his lean, but muscular, body.
He strode over to Nora with imperious steps, his polished black dress shoes clicking on the smooth stone floor. As he closed in on Nora, her eyes were drawn to his. They weren’t the hot gold color of the other men. This man’s eyes were a brilliant shimmering green, lush, like thick rainforest leaves glistening with a morning rain.
The man walked around her in a slow lazy circle, one hand in a pants pocket and the other clasped-shut in front of his mouth, the tips of his thumb and index finger against his pillowy lips. He looked with the inspection and scrutiny of an art collector confirming the quality of his latest acquisition. And through this all, Nora stood still, though she could feel the tight knot of anxiety in her stomach unwinding and dissipating in a warm pool of strange, tight heat that radiated lower in her body. Much lower.
As he walked around her, a strange scent trailed behind him, a smell that was heavy with musk, but clean, like raw cloves. Nora found the smell to be irresistible and had to fight the urge to bring in a deep inhalation through her nose. He stepped close only once, to take a look at Nora’s hearing aid, which he regarded with an indifferent “hmm.”
After a time, he came to a stop behind her. Nora could feel his presence, and a wave of pinpricks traveled down her neck and back.
“You may be free, now,” he said in a low, sonorous voice, as he withdrew a small, bronze key from his suit jacket pocket and undid her chains, which clanked onto the ground in an irregular pile.
Nora tensed, unsure how to imitate the hypnosis dropping her from its grip. She decided to loosen her body, like a puppet whose wires had been snipped. But she caught herself before the feint would’ve required her to drop her body onto the ground in a heap. She then stood up in her normal posture. Then she allowed her panic to flash across her face.
“Who are you? Where am I? What the fuck is going on?” she said, turning to the man and speaking in frantic, hurried tones.
He responded by holding up one hand, his palm toward her. “Calm down,” he said, annoyed by her sudden turn from docile statue to panicked woman. “You’re in Brooklyn.”
“That doesn’t do me much good,” said Nora, scanning the man with frightened eyes. Even in the midst of her fear, her immediate attraction to this man occupied a not-insignificant portion of her conscious thoughts.
“The exact address isn’t important; we’ll be leaving in a few minutes, and you’ll never see this place again.”
“But—”
&n
bsp; He raised his hand again, and with the other, reached into his suit jacket interior pocket, withdrew his phone, and dialed in a number.
“I’m ready,” he said, before hanging up and replacing his phone.
He looked over Nora once more, a look on his face that she couldn’t quite understand. It was that same expression of professional assessment, but now laced with something else. She took advantage of her freedom to not have her eyes locked forward to search him with her gaze, hoping to find something out about this man who had purchased her, but to no avail. His face was inscrutable.
“Please,” she said, a whimper escaping her throat, “just tell me what’s going on.”
“What is your name?”
“Nora,” she answered reluctantly.
“This is the assessment room, Nora,” he said, turning toward the door that he’d entered from. “It’s bad form to converse with the merchandise here.”
“The ‘merchandise?’” she said, feeling weak in the knees.
Then, the door opened again, and Mrs. Serko stepped through, her long, heel-clad leg slicing in through the darkness. She approached Nora and the man, and joined him in looking over Nora.
“Everything you thought she’d would be, Mr. O’Brien?”
“Yes. I’m pleased with my purchase,” he said, before adding a terse, “so far.”
“Well, good. Highest price of evening, this one. I trust your payment for this little number will be prompt and in full?” she said, a trace of uncertainty hanging from her words.
“Of course,” he said, not removing his eyes from Nora.
“Very good. I check the records and see that this girl your first purchase since, ah, joining our organization. So protocol is this: You have any problem, you let us know. But within twenty-four hours. After that, your problem.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, growing impatient with the formalities.
“Very well, then. The post-auction events are underway, if you’d like to partake.”
She then stepped around Nora, giving her a pleased once-over. “And do enjoy,” she added, before leaving through the door.
