Lately, though, things had gotten worse. She didn’t sleep and nothing tasted good. Probably because of the damned cigarettes. She had to stop the fucking smoking, she knew, watching the cigarette burn fitfully between her fingers. The caffeine was driving her crazy. The lack of money was making her crazier than ever.
“Well, you think about it,” Mr. Pimp said. “Young beautiful thing like yourself shouldn’t be wasting your time on a stage working for peanuts.” He reached out to touch her hair and Irena instinctively drew back. Mr. Pimp lowered his hand and instead plucked a card out of his breast pocket, setting all that metal against his chest to jingling life. “Auditions are on Tuesday,” he said coolly, dropping the card to the table.
She looked at the name in gold gilding on the card: Chad Bellerophone, Producer.
“Phoenix?”
Irena turned to glance at the doorway behind her. Erebus was there with his arms crossed. He looked imposing, as always. Like always, like a mahogany version of Mr. Clean. The analogy had once made her giggle. Now it just annoyed her. Erebus was always watching her. Like she wasn’t just employed by JP but belonged to him, like the sick girls upstairs, the ones who did the fetish work for him. But she tried to be civilized anyway. “Yeah? What’s up?”
“Who’s this?” Erebus nodded at Bellerophone.
Irena put her hand over the card. “Just someone who wanted to talk to me.”
“I’m a fan of the Phoenix’s,” Bellerophone said, standing. “I wanted to know if she was free Tuesday.”
“She works Tuesday nights,” Erebus said in a barely audible bass growl.
“Phoenix.” Bellerophone turned to glance at her, his eyes glittering. “I like that.” And then he took her hand and kissed it.
Irena resisted an urge to wipe her hand off on her dance outfit. Mr. Bellerophone looked her up and down, as if measuring her. The outfit was one of JP’s best, a silk blue kimono carved overtop her breasts and cut into banners around her legs. Yet despite the fact that she took most of it off almost every single night, she had a sudden, chilling need to cover herself up in front of him. She pressed her knees together. And though she hated herself, her hand swept the card into her lap. She needed the money bad and she didn’t see herself making that much this winter onstage. The club was too close to the Twin Tower disaster area and getting people in was a job. Getting them to stay even harder.
No tippers meant no tips.
And then what would she and Lilly do? It wasn’t like there were a lot of jobs available… and really, she liked dancing. The music. The dance that made her feel alive when she felt like shit mostly all the time. She couldn’t see herself scrubbing floors or waiting tables. Anyway, all those types of jobs were done during the day when her astigmatism was at its worse.
Bellerophone pushed open the Exit door, letting in the lights, smoke and stink of the city. “It was nice to meet you… Phoenix. Maybe I’ll see you again.”
Irena didn’t know what to say.
A moment later Bess flew through the stage door past her, her flash dancer’s outfit glittering like Broadway all over her. Bess Girimonte always looked pantherish to Irena, dark and lithe, teeth white as light. Even her name purred. Bess slapped her on the shoulder before making a beeline for the coffee pot. “Girl… them boys are sweatin’ tonight!” She poured herself a mugful, then watched Mr. Bellerophone exit stage left. “What you doing in here talkin’ to that hustler?”
Irena looked toward the heavy pneumatic door swinging closed.
Mr. Bellerophone was gone. And so was Erebus, when she thought to check behind her, which meant she could talk freely with Bess.
“He’s got a job.”
Bess flopped down into the seat opposite Irena, yet she still somehow managed to make it look graceful. She lit up a long slender cigar and grinned, her teeth shining like pearls in her dark face. “He gonna make you a star?”
“He says.” Irena sipped her coffee, then put more cream and sugar into it and stirred it around. “What do they make you do?”
“No sex. You make him realize that early on and everything will be fine.”
“No sex. Riiight. No sex in a porn film.”
Bess grinned and said, “It’s all fakin’ it anyway. You ever hustle on the streets, you’d know.” Bess struck a dramatic pose and went into her Scarlett O’Hara routine, the same one she used in all her films, complete with a fake accent from the South where she’d never been: “Oh Lance… oh dahling… Ah do believe you give me the vapors.” Then she did a mock swoon across the table.
Irena laughed into her coffee, making it sputter up her nose.
Bess picked herself up, grinning from ear to ear. “You be a star, girl. You go and do it. You got the looks.”
“No, I don’t.”
“All that red hair? Those brown eyes? You calling me a liar?”
“Liar.”
“Shush! You go do it. Get your pretty ass outta this hole. Why not?”
Irena thought about that a moment. “Because JP pays well.”
Bess waved it away. “Fuck JP. I hate the way he looks your way anyway.”
“What way?”
“That… look. Like he’s sizing you up for Heaven. What if he asks you to work upstairs? What you gonna do? Say no?”
Irena thought about that. What, indeed? True, JP was infamous for his kindness to strays, but he also worked his girls like a pimp. You didn’t tell him no. You just said Yes or I quit. No was not an option. And if JP asked Irena to work Heaven, what could she say? She wasn’t like that. She couldn’t sell herself. She couldn’t do the things those sick girls did.
She would have to quit.
She stared hard at her bitten nails, wondering what she would say. And where she would go if she lost this job.
“Count Dracula was out there tonight,” Bess said, choosing a good time to change the subject. She sipped her coffee. “He must be looking for you.”
“He is not!” Irena said with a smirk.
“The way he looks at you? Shit.” Bess grinned.
The changed of subject let her mind wander off the more pressing problems. She had to smile. No one knew who “Count Dracula” really was. He just seemed to be someone who showed up at the club from time to time. But he didn’t act like a regular. He was quiet and acted like somebody looking for someone. Maybe he was a cop. He had a kind of cop look about him, though he didn’t resemble one in any way—tall and lank, but not at all in an unattractive way, with long black rock-musician hair and a long black leather coat. Like some character out of a moody black-and-white movie. Maybe he was with a band. Irena didn’t know. No one did. The only thing for certain was that whenever she made eye contact with him while dancing he always chose to hold it in his dour, unblinking way. As if he were trying to communicate with her. Trying to tell her something.
“Damn, girl,” said Bess, staring at the clock, “you gonna be late for your own funeral.”
Late?
“Oh my God! When was my set?” Irena asked more to herself than to anyone in the room. She checked the wall clock again and saw she was already ten minutes into her first set. Oh Jesus God… JP was going to have a fit and might even fire her! And then she really would need Mr. Pimp’s job!
Gulping down her coffee and smashing out her cigarette, Irena rushed for the door. The sight and odor of the club hit her like a wall, making her feel like she was running through molasses. The booze, the smoke, the spilt blood from upstairs… there was some nights she actually felt her head spin from it all, like she was drunk on nothing. And so she was not entirely certain if it was real or if she was just hazing out when JP grabbed her arm from out of nowhere. He was just suddenly there with her backstage, hurting her.
Irena stopped dead in her tracks.
“Ma cher,” Jean Paul said, his voice almost like a purr across her skin. Like a tongue. At least, that was what it might feel like to others. For her it was like an electrical charge. She hated his voice. She hated being
anywhere near him.
“I’m sorry,” Irena stammered. “I lost track of time.”
JP looked unconcerned. “You look unwell.”
“I’m fine,” Irena said. Her hand suddenly felt very hot.
JP seemed to notice too. He let her go, flicked a lock of hair out of her eyes, and put his left hand over his right where it rested atop his antique walking stick. He was dapper as always in a pristine white suit and a tie as red as a crimson tongue. As always, he reminded Irena more of a priest than a pimp. He smiled, but it was a smile full of promise. Not like a priest’s at all. “We need to talk. After.”
Irena nodded, too frightened suddenly to say or do anything but watch his storm-grey eyes watch her back. He looked like a man until you looked more closely at him. Then he looked like a man-eating tiger watching you from between the tall grass, waiting to strike.
“I better go,” Irena said, her voice a mere whisper. She felt her heart running like a clock in her chest.
“Oui.” JP’s hand lifted and he touched her face with the back of his hand. Fingernails like glass whisked across her cheek. “But… after.”
“After?”
“I believe it is time you understood many things.”
Irena did not know what that meant, did not know what things there were to understand, but she also had no interest suddenly in finding out. She stepped backwards, unwilling to take her eyes off of him. Then, when she was a safe distance away, she turned and rushed headlong through the heavy purple stage curtain and let the music and the dance have her and drive some of the eternal frustration out of her soul.
3
Few things were as immortal as revenge. Words came and went. People died, buildings burned. Maybe love survived some of the daily apocalypse of life, but revenge was certain to pull itself out of the rubble time and again.
Alek Knight thought about that as Dante swung at his head with his rapier. He ducked and met the fall of the sword with the Double Serpent Katana. The two blades clashed, shearing their edges in a spectacular shower of blue sparks that briefly alighted the abandoned warehouse on the docks. The place had once been an import hostel, a place where goods were housed for the bigger New York corporations. Later it had been turned into a machine shop. Even now, the husks of the burned out machines that once dominated the space lurked in corners like steel and iron carcasses, half seen reminders of dreams that had gone up in smoke and fire.
Alek fell against one of those machines as he skirted another fall of Dante’s blade. The sword, a magnificent piece of Madrid steel, hacked into the machine mount behind him and held a moment. Alek used that moment to kick Dante in the stomach, sending the slayer crashing to the floor some twenty feet away. Unharmed, Dante climbed to his feet and gave Alek a sweeping bow, rapier and all, as if he were on a stage in London rather than here in this filthy bowel of a building dueling to his death.
Alek held his ground and waited, the katana resting lightly against the outside of his thigh.
Dante smiled, his eyes never leaving Alek for a moment. He was small and fragile-looking, like a young boy. Although vampires stopped aging at the age of 33, he looked closer to 23. His exact age was unknown. Even his clothing gave away no hint since the cut of them was current and in vogue with most of the Underground crowd: a chain-mail jerkin, leather pants, tall boots, a spiked submission collar, and a long leather greatcoat armored with stainless steel plates the size of teacup saucers. His hair was cut in a long ragged blonde David Bowie-inspired mane that framed eyes that were either grey or green, depending on his mood. Right now they were green like a sky before a violent storm breaks. “Bravo, old son!” Dante said. “I had heard stories, but I never imagined the little whelp from all those years ago would become this stout warrior of today. Such a shame the Coven lost you, Slayer.”
Alek smiled a smile that was not. “You might say I lost it.”
“Nearly destroyed it, in fact,” Dante said. His voice was rich and came from deep inside his chest, like the voices some of the best actors emanated. It was a voice that his body didn’t seem capable of producing somehow.
“You flatter me,” Alek said and raised the sword so it rested against the underside of his sword arm, ready for Dante’s next attack.
He wished things had not turned out this way. He had gone hunting this Saturday night, but it was not supposed to be for slayers. No, he had wanted information on a series of unsolved crimes that had been plaguing the piers the last few nights. Working girls butchered like cattle. Brutal. Inhuman. Naturally the first thing he thought of was Jean Paul’s hive of vampires. Not Jean Paul himself—the Parisian was too smart for that—but his thralls were another matter completely. And if one of them wanted to hunt in his territory then it was important that they prepare to be hunted in return.
And then he had spotted Dante crouched over the desecrated corpse of a girl and everything fell together. Every murder. Every question. Dante…
The slayer had something in his hand—a glimmer of stainless steel—and then that thing was in Alek’s sword arm and a rush of fire encompassed his shoulder and arm and nearly made him lose his grip on the sword. The plates on his coat, Alek thought and tottered out of the way of Dante’s next attack. The shurikens embedded themselves in the wall behind Alek as he dodged them. Unfortunately, he was clumsy in avoiding them and crashed shoulder-first into a wall, sending the shuriken embedded in his shoulder that much further in. A spike of agony turned his vision red around the edges but Alek forced it back and turned, instinctively using a wing of his leather greatcoat to deflect two more shurikens.
Dante giggled like an insane little boy.
Alek tore the shuriken from his shoulder and threw it aside. Almost at once, another got him in the side under his open coat, nearly doubling him over with the searing, eye-watering pain. And then he did indeed double over, and ignoring the screaming agony in his ribs, rolled to the floor, swinging his sword. It grazed Dante’s ankles and tripped him up.
But there—it was enough. Dante, lost in his concentration on the target, was never aware of what Alek was doing until it was too late. He went down, twisting onto his stomach to protect his throat from Alek’s blade.
Alek grabbed the ankle of his boot.
“Bloody hell!” Dante kicked him in the face. Alek took the impact and twisted Dente’s ankle until it crackled and Dante grunted and flipped back over from the impact on his leg.
“Bloody, yes,” Alek growled and towed the slayer toward him and his blade. “Hell, yes… ”
Dante reached for another plate on his coat while simultaneously trying to kick out with his good leg.
Alek applied pressure on Dante’s broken foot and Dante screamed.
4
Brett Edelman paid Erebus at the back of the club, in the nook that looked more like an accountant’s office than the rear side of a fetish club. Then again, what did he expect? This was a business Jean Paul ran. In fact, Erebus was an accountant—or had been, among other things. Wouldn’t know it to look at the seven-foot vampire weighing in at more than three hundred feral pounds. Right now, Erebus wore a dark suit jacket over the concert T-shirt he usually wore when he was on the door. He also wore glasses. Who would have thought that, either?
Erebus gave him back change for the wad of hundred dollar bills Brett paid him with. Jean Paul ran a high-end circus, but because Brett was a regular he was privy to certain benefits and discounts. Hell, maybe one day Jean Paul would offer a Club Bauhaus credit card. Well, maybe not. After all, this was a private expense that never showed up on any records, which was why Brett always paid in cash and made a point of never taking a receipt of any kind. Nadine’s kisses were his receipt. That and the tapes he always had made. Speaking of which…
“I need to pick up my camera,” Brett said as he slipped his wallet back into his pants pockets, which was a feat in and of itself. He always arrived with a hard-on and left with one too. It was as if he couldn’t be sated while he was here. He wouldn�
��t feel his normal self until he was halfway home and the stink of the club was out of his clothes.
Erebus took the ballpoint pen out of his impressive canines. “Gotta talk to Sticks if you brought your own.”
“Yeah, I’ve been bringing my own. Where’s he? Still in Heaven?”
Erebus gave him a slightly baleful look. “Sure. Where else?”
Brett nodded and waited. Heaven was a place no humans were allowed to go unless you were scheduled to be there. Right now, Erebus was giving him the typical down-the-nose look, as if he was thinking of what a piece of worthless shit the human race really was. Then again, he gave that look to almost everyone. Pushing away from the terminal, he hit an intercom and said something into it, but it was in a language Brett had never learned.
A few minutes later Sticks, another vampire lackey of Jean Paul’s, stepped into the accounting office holding a camcorder no larger than the palm of his hand, which was exceedingly small considering Sticks’s size and seeming frailness. He had not gotten the name by accident.
With the camera safely tucked away inside his suit, Brett Edelman made his way out to the Porsche parked in the lot of the Italian restaurant across the street from Club Bauhaus. Before he started the motor he checked himself in the rearview mirror. He didn’t look especially pale and Nadine was always certain to keep the bites where his wife wouldn’t notice them. Not that he was necessarily afraid of Laura finding out—Laura knew better than to question him about anything—but he didn’t need his coworkers and clients seeing them. He also had to be careful around Wes these days. His nosy firstborn was just old enough to start wondering where his father went after work and if he couldn’t find out and blackmail his old man for enough money for the blow he favored. Catching Wes stealing money from his safe last week had been enough. Brett didn’t keep anything of consequence at home anymore. If it was important and private—like his tapes—he kept them at the office.
Slayer: Black Miracles Page 16
