Blood Engines

by T. A. Pratt

  “Because we’re going to a party, right? A soiree? Don’t you have anything more…” He waved his hands vaguely. “…festive?”

  “No, Rondeau, I don’t have anything more festive. I only brought one change of clothes. You brought a freaking suitcase. Besides, I’m not going to enjoy Finch’s hospitality. I’m going to get information.”

  “Sure, but I just want us to fit in, so we don’t draw undue attention to ourselves. See, I’m thinking of the mission.”

  “Nobody’s going to look twice at me when I come in with you anyway. You wearing that tuxedo is all the camouflage I need. Besides, this is California, where casual is king, right?”

  “I guess,” Rondeau said. “It wouldn’t kill you to wear a skirt occasionally, you know.”

  “No. But it might kill you to suggest it again,” Marla said, showing her teeth.

  They took a bus from Union Square to the Castro, Marla sniffing suspiciously. “Where’re the piles of filth? The aggressive panhandlers? The guys at the bus stop who look like they’re just waiting for the right moment to shove a yuppie under the tires? I don’t trust a city that has a bus system this clean.”

  “They get a lot of tourists,” Rondeau said, leaning back in a sideways-facing seat. Marla, too antsy to sit, was standing beside him, hanging on to an overhead rail. “They have to observe the proprieties a little more. Nobody comes to our city to visit, unless their relatives die or something. Besides, this is the middle of the city still—it’s got to be nice. I’m sure there are places around here that are unpleasant enough to meet your low standards.”

  Marla frowned. “It’s not that I like dirty stuff for the sake of dirt, Rondeau. It’s just…I distrust all this cleanliness. It feels like I’m in Disneyland or something, someplace monitored and managed.”

  Rondeau reached up and pulled the cord, making the “Stop Ahead” sign by the driver light up. “Our stop,” he said.

  “Already?” Marla said.

  “San Francisco doesn’t sprawl as much as our own pockmarked metropolis,” Rondeau said.

  The bus stopped, and they got off. “Welcome to the Castro,” Rondeau said as the bus chugged away from them. Marla looked up and down the street. Aside from the rainbow flags hanging from the windows of well-kept Victorians and over the doors of various businesses, it could have been any bustling, well-lit avenue in a prosperous city. Though there were more men holding hands here than Marla generally saw elsewhere, and there was a man wearing a leather vest over his otherwise bare chest. “I thought there’d be more guys in dog collars and buttless chaps,” Marla said.

  “We could come back later this year for the gay pride parade, or for Folsom Street Fair, and I bet you’d see more buttless chaps than you can shake a riding crop at.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind for my next vacation,” Marla said. There was no gay district as such in Marla’s city, though of course there were bars and clubs geared toward such clientele, and Marla found herself wondering, in a municipal-management frame of mind, whether the incidences of domestic violence in this neighborhood were of greater or lesser frequency than that in straight neighborhoods with similar population and economic conditions. Probably not much different. People were people.

  “This used to be a run-down neighborhood,” Rondeau said—presumably sharing his hard-won tourist-guidebook wisdom. “Then in the ’60s gay men started buying up the old Victorians and renovating them, and before long this was the unofficial gay capital of the world. Some people are afraid the Castro’s going to go the way of Fisherman’s Wharf, though, lose all its authenticity and become a kitschy tourist-trap. It’s pretty popular with straight tourists, for some reason.”

  “Small-minded bastards want to see the modern homosexual in his natural habitat?” Marla said, drawing a glance from a middle-aged man and woman taking pictures of the rainbow flags. She grinned at them nastily and they shuffled off.

  “Um,” Rondeau said. “Dunno. There’s supposed to be some great bars around here, though.”

  “What’s the dyke presence like?” Marla said. Rondeau wasn’t the only one with flexible sexuality. She’d had her share of affairs with women, though she’d never given up entirely on men; as far as that went, she’d had a fling with an incubus once, and a one-night stand with a woman she suspected of being a Rakosh dressed in a beautiful illusion. After you’d mated once or twice with the supernatural, mere differences in genitalia seemed irrelevant—humans were at least all built along the same lines, with the same basic nerve endings, just in different configurations. These days, she didn’t have much time for romantic entanglements of any sort.

  “Eh,” Rondeau said. “They come out for the pride parade, and they’re around, but I get the sense they’re a minority in occupied territory.”

  “You ‘get the sense,’ oh bold explorer?”

  “All right, fine. The guidebook says so, then. But I’m practically a native compared to you.”

  “Let’s scout out Finch’s place,” Marla said. “Lead on, native guide.”

  After peering at the map for a while, Rondeau set off away from the bright thoroughfare, down a side street. “This area is still heavily residential,” Rondeau said. “Tourist influx notwithstanding.” Neat Victorians stood behind wrought-iron gates, and trees in iron cages lined the sidewalk. There were more rainbow flags, posters in windows bearing political slogans, and one black-and-blue S&M flag. A couple of the houses they passed had signs discreetly marking them as bed-and-breakfasts.

  “I guess that’s it,” Rondeau said, “on the other side of the street.” Finch’s house, a dark blue three-story Victorian, was near the top of a hill. There were perhaps fifteen people standing in a ragged line in front of the house, which had a small porch blocked off by an elaborate wrought-iron gate. Marla and Rondeau stood in the shadows, watching as an attractive, dark-haired woman wearing a wine-red velvet cape opened the gate from the inside and spoke to the assembled crowd. She beckoned four people forward, who promptly disappeared through the front door, into the house. The apparent hostess chatted briefly with the others waiting, then went inside herself.

  “Weird party,” Marla said. “Making the guests wait.”

  “But I didn’t see money change hands, and more important, nobody handed over invitations,” Rondeau said. “So maybe we can get in without any fuss.”

  “Unless they all know one another,” Marla said. “But we’ll obliterate that obstacle if we come to it.” She crossed the street, and Rondeau followed. They took a place at the back of the line. Most of the people waiting were youngish, and diversely dressed—some in leather jackets, some in ordinary street clothes, some in velvet and lace, all talking to one another comfortably.

  A man with short black hair and Buddy Holly glasses glanced at Marla and smiled. “Have I seen you here before?”

  “Maybe,” Marla said.

  He looked her up and down, openly appraising. “I think I’d remember you. Maybe I’ll see you downstairs later?”

  “Anything’s possible.” Her admirer was, quite obviously, not a sorcerer, and Marla’s initial assumption that Finch’s party would be a gathering place for the magically inclined was apparently mistaken. She hadn’t yet come up with a new theory. Maybe Finch just liked to entertain. That wasn’t unheard of, even among the sort of deeply self-centered people the magical arts attracted. Some people enjoyed seeing their radiance reflected in the eyes of others.

  Rondeau was deep in conversation with a willowy, pale woman with white-blond hair. She was beautiful, Marla supposed, in a nearly-translucent, fragile way. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl, and she looked up at Rondeau with a mixture of childlike awe and sexual longing, but Marla suspected that was her default expression, an accessory as carefully chosen as the knee-high black boots and the black latex flip-skirt. The look certainly worked for her—it had captured Rondeau like a Venus flytrap snared flies.

  The caped woman emerged from the house, and Marla stood on her tiptoes to get a glim
pse of what lay beyond the door, but all she saw was a staircase leading up, blocked off with a velvet rope, and an open doorway to the right of the entrance, with the suggestion of movement beyond. The gatekeeper held up four fingers, opened the gate, and ushered four more people inside. The gate closed again, and Marla began to feel a slow burn of impatience start in her chest. She’d had to stand in line at the airport, too, just this morning, and that had nearly driven her insane. Marla hadn’t had to wait in line for anything in a long time, and it didn’t suit her.

  “I hate this line,” her erstwhile admirer commented to the short-haired, stocky woman in biker’s leathers standing in front of him. “I remember in the old days, there was no waiting, even if you got here later than this. Now you have to come before nine to get even a crappy spot downstairs.”

  “According to you, everything was better in the ‘old days,’” the biker muttered, without turning around. “Personally, I’m glad more people come these days. I was getting sick of seeing the same bunch every week.”

  The young man sighed theatrically. “Sure, I guess, but some of these new people have no manners.”

  “Some of the old ones didn’t have manners, either,” the biker replied. “Hell, even Mr. Finch can be a pushy bastard.”

  “It’s his party—he can have all the party favors he wants, right? And if you don’t like it, you don’t have to come.”

  “I don’t know why I hang around with you, Jared,” the biker said. “You’re some kind of a post-feminist misogynist, I think.”

  Marla was reassured to hear both that Finch lived here and that these people had been here before—that this wasn’t some killing-ground she and Rondeau were being lured into. That would have been a pretty amusing way for the Chinese sorcerer to get his revenge—sending them into a sacrificial pit disguised as a party.

  Rondeau wandered back to stand beside her. “That’s Zara,” he said, nodding toward the blond girl.

  “Oh? Did you learn anything useful from her?”

  “She likes drinking vodka and Red Bull and she shaves everything,” Rondeau said. “She’s one of the most forthcoming people I’ve ever met, actually, though she seemed disappointed to hear that I don’t have anything pierced. Maybe I should look into it.”

  “You don’t have much of a threshold for pain,” Marla reminded him.

  He shrugged. “No, but I think Zara could expand my threshold for pleasure.”

  “Nah,” Marla said. “She’s all image. People with real technique don’t have to flaunt their kink like she does.”

  Rondeau looked at Marla speculatively, and she gave him another grin. There was a time when he’d been hopelessly in love with her, though he seemed to have gotten over it lately; probably the plain fact of spending so much time with her in a business capacity had worn down his romantic aspirations. Marla in person wasn’t easy to idolize—she was too earthy, too cranky, and too prone to practicalities.

  The velvet doorkeeper appeared, and let four more people in, including Zara. Now that Marla was closer to the wrought-iron gate that blocked the porch, she noticed that the metal wasn’t curved in a sunburst or fleur-de-lis or any other standard design. The gate was clearly custom-made, the metal twisted in a sinuous and organic design that suggested flowers and snakes. She recognized the shape.

  The design was a veve, a ritual symbol, used in a ceremony to call up a loa, an occupying spirit. This was not the well-known veve of Papa Legba (which Marla had even seen on the occasional T-shirt), not did it belong to any of the better-known gods of Voudon, like Baron Samedi or Maitre Carrefour or Damballah. This was the veve of a minor spirit, one of the Guede, a loa of sexual passion. When summoned, a loa would take over the body of one of its worshippers, using it to communicate and satisfy corporeal desires (many of the loas were gluttons for rum and candy); the loa signified by this particular design would push its adherents to acts of sexual excess and gratification, and gain power from the mass coupling (and tripling, and quadrupling, and so on). Having the design in a gate wouldn’t actually call up the loa—the ceremony was more complicated than that—but as a design choice, it was certainly suggestive. Marla now had a pretty good idea what kind of sorcerer Finch was. Marla herself was a general practitioner when it came to magic; Hamil sometimes called her a brute-force-omancer. Many sorcerers chose to specialize to a greater or lesser degree, however, becoming necromancers, pyromancers, diviners, aviomancers, biomancers, technomancers—all with their own strengths and weaknesses, all with their signature obsessions.

  From the design on the gate, Marla suspected Finch was—at least in part—a sexual magician. What Marla had always somewhat contemptuously referred to as a “pornomancer.” Her own first teacher, Artie Mann, had been a pornomancer, though of an unconventional sort. It was actually a relief to discover this about Finch—pornomancers weren’t known for their offensive capabilities, though it wouldn’t do to underestimate Finch, and she was just making assumptions based on an odd home-design choice.

  The woman in velvet emerged, opened the gate, and beckoned the next four people—including Marla and Rondeau—inside.

  Sexual excess was not immediately apparent. Once inside the dim foyer, Marla and Rondeau joined the same people they’d been waiting in line with outside. By standing on tiptoe and looking over the heads of the people in front of her, Marla could see a woman standing at a counter as if tending a ticket booth. She was handing people clipboards, and retrieving clipboards from people who were finished filling out some kind of form.

  “What, we have to sell our souls to get into this party?” Rondeau said.

  “I guess so,” Marla said.

  “It’d better be a pretty good party, then. I like to get full value for my soul.”

  “Full value for your soul wouldn’t get you a cup of coffee at a convenience store,” Marla said, but her heart wasn’t in the banter; she’d suddenly realized what kind of party this probably was. She had to admire the Chinatown sorcerer for sending her here with a straight face.

  The line moved forward, and the people who were finished with their clipboards went down a short hallway and turned right into another room. Marla and Rondeau each took a clipboard, which contained a sheet of paper printed with a set of rules and disclaimers, with a place at the bottom for signature and date. Marla closed her eyes briefly and pressed her hand to the paper, feeling with a sense beyond touch until she was sure the paper wasn’t magically prepared. This contract would be binding only in the legal sense. Some sorcerers could write a contract in such a way that the signers were bound by pain of death to obey, but Finch hadn’t done that here. Marla scanned down the rules. Nothing unexpected. This was the kind of party she thought, which was likely to make the evening more complicated than she’d expected.

  “No drinking, no drugs, no touching without permission,” Rondeau said, bewildered. “Don’t monopolize the equipment in the dungeon, safe scenes are good scenes, use gloves, dams, condoms…. Oh,” he said, and Marla was not surprised to hear a smile in his voice. “You brought me to a sex party, Marla. You are letting me have a little fun on this trip.”

  Marla sighed, signed an indecipherable scrawl at the bottom of the paper, and handed the clipboard back to the smiling attendant. Rondeau did the same. “That’ll be twenty dollars each,” she said, and Marla nodded to Rondeau, who handed over two twenties.

  “For twenty dollars each, there’d better be some decent food in there,” Rondeau said. “Oysters wouldn’t be amiss.”

  “We’ve had bad luck with oysters,” the woman said, putting their money under the counter. “There’s asparagus, though, and lots of sweets. You’re here early enough that there’s probably still plenty of food.”

  The pressure of people behind them was building up, so Marla and Rondeau went down the hallway, into the other room. The line outside was meant to keep this preparatory area from becoming hopelessly clogged, Marla realized, and possibly to keep the house from getting too crowded.

 
; The next room was jammed with people in various stages of dress, undress, and dress-up. They wore corsets, spiked heels, leather collars, net body-stockings, baby-doll teddies, capes—every kind of lingerie and fetish gear, though some wore nothing but their skin, and some wore sarongs or boxer shorts. The majority were young and reasonably attractive, the sort of hip urban crowd Marla might expect to see at a dance club in Felport. A long table ran along one end of the room, staffed by volunteers who got to attend the party for free, Marla supposed, in exchange for helping support the infrastructure for an hour or two. The people behind the table were handing out brown paper grocery sacks with numbers written on the sides. “Remember your number!” they admonished, as the party guests put their street clothes and other personal items into the bags, which were in turn given back to the volunteers, who put the filled bags away on shelves made from scaffolding. A shelf along another wall held hundreds of neatly folded towels in faded primary colors, and once the guests had girded or ungirded their loins as desired and stowed their belongings, they took towels and went deeper into the house. Several of the guests still carried bags or cases with them—party supplies, Marla supposed.