Blood Engines

by T. A. Pratt

  “I’ve never been to a party like this before,” Rondeau said. “But I always knew they must be out there somewhere. I love this city.”

  “We have parties like this in our city, too,” Marla said, sliding closer to the wall in order to let the crowd ebb and flow around her. “My old mentor, Artie, used to throw them. He loved having people over, fucking on his living room floor, while he sat and smoked a cigar and ate a ham sandwich and watched.”

  “Some people have a strange sense of fun,” Rondeau said.

  Marla snorted. “He didn’t do it for fun. He—”

  But before she could finish, Zara appeared before them, smiling at Rondeau. Maybe her simpering look from earlier had been aimed at him in particular, then. She wore a wide leather collar, shiny black, with a silver ring in the front, and a black latex maid’s apron. Silver bars pierced her nipples horizontally, and she had a ring in her belly button. In one hand she carried a battered leather backpack—not unlike Marla’s—from which the handle of a whip protruded. The deeper contents of the bag clinked, metal on metal, when it shifted. To his credit, Rondeau didn’t stammer or drool—he smiled and nodded to her. “You look wonderful.”

  She dropped an ironic little curtsy. “I’m going to walk around a bit and see who’s here, then I’ll be downstairs. You should look for me later.” She glanced at Marla, then lowered her eyes demurely. “If that’s all right with…everyone.”

  Marla laughed. “He doesn’t belong to me, sweetheart. Don’t worry.”

  “Yeah,” Rondeau said. “I don’t belong to anybody.”

  “I’ll see you, then,” Zara said, and slipped into the stream of people pouring deeper into the house.

  “All is forgiven,” Rondeau said. “The way you took the window seat on the plane, the sightseeing tour that culminated in a parking-garage elevator, all of it. I think I’m going to like it here.”

  Marla considered trying to restrain Rondeau, to make him focus on the serious work at hand, but what harm was there in letting him run off and play? He wouldn’t be much help in talking to Finch, and it might prove advantageous to have a secret ally in the house. “All right,” Marla said. “But check in with me in an hour or so. I’ll meet you in the kitchen. And if I’m not there, come looking for me, all right?”

  “You’re a princess among peasants, Marla,” Rondeau said. He went to get a paper sack, then began to strip.

  Marla sighed. It would be more conspicuous to walk around a party like this fully clothed, and she didn’t want to start any buzz or commotion—she just wanted to find Finch. She’d thought her days of walking around mostly naked before crowds of strangers had ended a long time ago, when she gave up waitressing in favor of sorcery. At least she wasn’t a novice at public nudity. She asked for a grocery sack and undressed, stripping down to boots, panties, and cloak. With the cloak closed around her, she looked as modest as a nun, though of course it slipped open with every step. Marla was a long way from prudish, but she had a chief sorcerer to parlay with tonight, and negotiation in the nude hardly seemed like bargaining from a position of strength.

  She went deeper into the house, to look around, and to look for Finch.

  Jared, the young man who’d leered at her in line outside, started following her right away, and no number of glares thrown over her shoulder seemed to discourage him.

  5

  B sat with a few people he didn’t know in the hot tub behind Finch’s house, pleased that so far no strangers had recognized him. He’d never been a superstar, but he’d had a certain flavor-of-the-month quality for a while, and had starred in one very high-profile, successful film; he thought of himself as the cinematic equivalent of a one-hit wonder. There had been a time when he’d craved attention, and loved being recognized, but these days he preferred obscurity and when he was recognized, it was sometimes all he could do to be graceful about it, especially since so many people started by saying “Didn’t you used to be…?” Though when cute guys like Rondeau knew who he was, and expressed appreciation, he wasn’t above basking a little.

  B hadn’t intended to come to a sex party tonight, but when he’d gone to one of his old hangouts he’d run into Daniel, a friend from before B got into the movies. Daniel greeted him as if he’d seen B just last week instead of six years before, and suggested he come to the party.

  “I’m not sure I’m in the mood to hook up tonight,” B said.

  Daniel clutched B’s elbow in mock alarm. “You? B? Once the terror of the seven club scenes? Too bad, but who cares? It’s fun even if you don’t fuck. Though that’s sort of like going to a casino, not gambling, and having a great time at the all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet. Still, there’s a hot tub, and if you like to watch—and I seem to recall you do—then there’s plenty to see. The guests are usually pretty hot, too, though you have to put up with the dykes and the hets. The guy who throws the parties, Finch, is a total bear, but he likes to mix things up at his parties.”

  “I know Finch,” B said. “I used to go to his parties back in the day. But I don’t know….”

  “Or you could sit here and drink fizzy water and turn guys down all night,” Daniel said. “It’s your call. You can even come back to my place first, get a shower, I’ll loan you something a little more fashionable than the street-people chic you’re wearing now.”

  So B had come, and was spending the evening sitting in fizzy water and turning guys down. Women, too, for that matter. But everyone here was well mannered, and no one seemed more than a little put out by B’s polite refusals. B remembered orgies where everyone was drunk and high and nobody remembered who or what they’d been fucking all night once morning came, but alcohol and drugs were absolute no-nos at Finch’s parties. That made sense, at least when one considered the dungeon—there was stuff down there that no one should use while mentally impaired. B had never been heavily into S&M. A few props, a little leather, that stuff could spice things up, but he’d never gotten off on elaborate scenes and equipment. Still, he had to admire their unseen host’s completism—there was stuff down there B had never seen before outside of a magazine or video.

  He slipped out of the water and sat on the edge of the tub for a bit, cooling off. Someone had told him that the people who ran the party periodically turned up the heat in the hot tub to drive people out, so that the same few people wouldn’t monopolize the tub all night. But B figured, since he wasn’t fucking anyone or eating the snacks, his twenty dollars had bought him a permanent place in the tub.

  When he saw Marla Mason emerge onto the back deck, B sank down into the tub up to his chin. He did not want her to think he was following her—who knew how she’d react? Of course, he’d planned to be where she was going tomorrow, so he’d have to deal with it then, but he was here to relax, to forget about oracles and monsters and sorcerers for a while. His stomach began to churn, acid sloshing, and he wondered if he was getting an ulcer again.

  Some guy with the standard-issue San Francisco hacker-boy look—short hair and chunky glasses—was following Marla like an overeager dog. He was naked except for a nasty-looking steel choke-collar, but the leash wasn’t in Marla’s hand—it was dangling down his back. He was talking—pleading almost—and Marla was ignoring him, clearly annoyed, stalking across the deck with the precision of an irritated cat. B couldn’t help but grin—Marla had found herself a willing submissive, and she wasn’t willing to do anything about it. She did emanate a certain dominant quality, though B wasn’t sure how that would translate to her bedroom preferences. She must be like catnip to the submissive het men here, though.

  He thought about going to talk to her, to rescue her from the eager sub, but she probably wouldn’t be happy to see him. Maybe he didn’t have enough psychic ability for her to take seriously—what did he know about it, after all? Maybe he really was a midget among giants. But his dream had been clear: Marla Mason would die unless he did something to stop it, and if Marla Mason died, the whole city would be destroyed—worse than the exodus of b
usted dotcommers at the turn of this century, worse than gentrification, worse even than the 1906 earthquake and fire. B didn’t know the details, but it had something to do with frogs. Which sounded silly, but the visions didn’t lie, any more than the oracles and sibyls B so often found himself in contact with did.

  Only the risk of a whole city getting more-or-less destroyed could bring B back across the bay, from the home of his current low-key equilibrium in Oakland, to this miserable place where he’d been so happy, once, back when he deserved such things.

  Marla stood on the back deck for a long moment, then darted down the steps to the basement. Her self-appointed submissive followed.

  B grinned. She’d just gone into the dungeon. Not a great escape route to choose when fleeing an overzealous submissive. Good-bye, frying pan. Nice to meet you, fire. He sat back in the bubbling water. Why worry about Marla? She wouldn’t die tonight, the spirit in the Dumpster had assured him of that much. All his problems would still be waiting for him in the morning.

  Someone slid into the water next to him, jostling a little—that was inevitable, given how packed the hot tub generally was—and then that someone said, “Hey, B. Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  B opened his eyes. It was Marla’s friend, or associate, or lackey, or whatever, Rondeau. “Um,” B said. “It’s a total coincidence, I just came here to—”

  “It’s cool,” Rondeau said. “I’m not exactly here on business myself, though I can’t speak for Marla.”

  A willowy, pale blonde slid into the hot tub, sat in Rondeau’s lap, and began to nuzzle his ear. Rondeau winked at B. “I won’t even mention to Marla that I saw you, ’kay?”

  “Thanks,” B said. “But it really is just a coincidence.”

  “Marla doesn’t believe in coincidences. Events have gravity, she says, and when the same people and places and images and things keep popping up together, especially when you know something big is happening, that’s not coincidence. It’s confluence. It’s magic. So you know. Maybe we’ll be seeing you around.”

  “Magic,” B repeated, but Rondeau didn’t seem to hear him. The blonde in his lap was doing something with her hand under the water that had wholly captivated his attention.

  B leaned his head back again. Confluence. Sure. He could appreciate the sense in that.

  Marla didn’t have a chance to look for Finch in peace, because she’d picked up something in the anteroom. “My name’s Jared,” he said. “I want you to whip me.”

  “As much as I’d like to see you whipped,” Marla said, “I’m busy.”

  That turned out to be the wrong thing to say, because now the moron thought she wanted to whip him. She hadn’t meant to encourage him, but with a masochist, it was hard to be discouraging. If she threatened to kick his ass, he’d goad her further in hopes of achieving that result. And if she really kicked his ass—not in some safe-sane-and-consensual way, but the way she increasingly wanted to—they’d throw her out of the party, and she’d blow her chance of seeing Finch.

  Jared followed her down the hallway, and Marla kept hoping someone else would grab hold of his leash, or at the very least that it would snag on a doorknob, but no such luck. The house was nice, what Marla could see of it, though the decorations were a bit one-note—the pictures hanging on the walls were prints of Mapplethorpe’s nudes and framed programs from all-male revues, stuff like that. Made sense, if Finch was a pornomancer, but dully predictable.

  The hallway ended at a small living room decorated with lots of white wicker furniture and a big-screen television playing porn. People in various states of undress sat around, probably recuperating from or gearing up for heights of sexual excess. The doorkeeper in the velvet cape was there, sitting on a bar stool, watching the television. “Excuse me,” Marla said.

  The woman looked up and smiled. She was pretty, dark-eyed with full lips and a dark cast to her skin. “Mmm,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t mind licking your boots. But I’m working tonight—just taking a little break to rest my feet.” She wiggled her ankle, and Marla glanced down to see spike heels, the clasps held closed with little golden padlocks. “Finch likes to keep me on my toes.”

  “You’re, uh, close to Finch?” Marla asked. Her admirer was hovering impatiently behind her, but she chose to ignore him.

  “Oh, he doesn’t fuck me,” she said, laughing. “Though he’s told me my ass is as pretty as a boy’s, which I take as a compliment. He’s been helping to train me as a submissive.”

  “You seem pretty bold for a sub in training,” Marla said.

  The woman grinned and shrugged. “Like I said, I’m taking a break.”

  “Is Finch around?” Marla said. “I need to talk to him.”

  The woman looked at her again, more speculatively. “You don’t strike me as someone who wants sub training, and you look like you know how to be a dom already.”

  Marla found herself strangely flattered. It was always nice to hear that she radiated confidence.

  “No, that’s not what I need to talk to him about,” Marla said. “We have some mutual friends. I just want to chat with him.”

  “He’ll be down later, probably,” she said, shrugging. “Just have fun in the meantime, grab something to eat.” She nodded to Jared. “You should probably beat your boy, too—he looks like he’s about to wiggle out of his skin.”

  “He’s not my boy,” Marla muttered, drawing her cloak around her and stepping into the kitchen, which adjoined the living room. There was juice and bottled water on the counter, and a buffet of sorts laid out on a sideboard, with asparagus, bowls of M&M’s, hummus, pita bread, artichoke dip—all finger food. Jared was still following her, and in the kitchen, Marla turned on him. “Look, aren’t there rules about unwelcome advances?”

  He looked wounded. “You said you wanted to see me whipped. There are rules about messing with someone’s head, too, you know.”

  “I meant you deserve to be whipped, you annoying little shit,” Marla said.

  “You’re right, mistress.”

  “Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “Gods, you’re a fuckwit.” He clearly enjoyed being scolded, so she clenched her teeth and went through the French doors onto the back deck.

  It was a little slice of paradise back here, Marla thought, suddenly jarred from her irritation. This was a hidden garden courtyard in the midst of the city’s streets. Marla took in all the amenities: a multilevel redwood deck with stairs leading up to the second floor; a hot tub big enough for ten; in the far corner, a majestic oak tree strung with electric fairy lights, branches spreading out as if administering a benediction; a pagoda-shaped fountain, furry with moss, standing on a mound of smoothly polished rocks in the adjacent corner; and a fourteen-foot privacy fence around the whole thing. Even the people in the hot tub, and the others standing in loose knots and talking, wearing sarongs or towels or nothing at all, seemed like a natural part of the garden. It was altogether beautiful.

  That’s how Marla knew there was a spell on the place. Though she could just barely believe in her own innate capacity to appreciate landscape and architecture, she knew she’d never like any landscape better with people in it. Marla sniffed the air, not trying to smell, exactly, but to sense at least the essential nature of the spell; sniffing helped her concentrate, because it seemed to somehow externalize the metaphysical process.

  The spell was simple, not really powerful enough to qualify as mind-control—it was simply calming everyone down, instilling in them a fleeting sense of gestalt with the other partygoers. Sort of like a mild airborne dose of ecstasy. Marla’s pet riot-cops back home used a much stronger version of the same spell for crowd control. There was an element of sexual enhancement here, too, a little nudge to the libido that Marla felt between her own thighs, but not as much as she might have expected, given that Finch probably drew his power from the sexual energy around him. She supposed that providing people with a fabulous house and a host of new partners to have sex with was enough to get eve
ryone’s urges ramped up, even without the help of magic.

  Marla glanced back. Jared was still there, looking both eager and downcast, and Marla briefly considered giving him what he wanted—a few lashes, a boot to the ass, then an order to go fuck someone else. A spark of anger floated up through the top of her calm then—she wanted to be irritated, she got her edge from being irritated, and Finch’s randy-sheep spell wasn’t going to change her. She needed to find the host of this party and find out what he knew about the Cornerstone, and then she could go.

  Both to get away from the tagalong submissive, and to see what else there was to see of the house, Marla went down the low stone stairs into the dark basement. Her vision adjusted instantly to the gloom, and it was light enough that she didn’t need her night-eyes.

  The basement—or dungeon, she supposed, though it wasn’t a real dungeon, being dry, well insulated, and lacking vermin—could have served well as the set for porn movies, except for the low ceilings. Everything was black, even the carpet and the support pillars, and especially the equipment, which was of a better quality than Marla had expected. One could improvise a spanking horse from a sawhorse and some padding, after all, but Finch had invested in a black-leather number with chrome accents. Marla hoped the young man currently chained over it, receiving the attentions of his broad-shouldered companion, appreciated the luxury and the lack of splinters. A woman lay bound to a gyno table, which was suspended from the ceiling by heavy chains—the table was also black leather with chrome accents. That seemed to be Finch’s motif. Not exactly original, but she supposed pinstripes or polka dots would have been out of place.

  One group had dispensed with the need for bondage equipment entirely. They had a woman in pigtails bound tightly to a support pillar with cling wrap, and the two men fondled her roughly, slapped her face gently, and kissed her. There were a few doors along one wall, presumably with closet-sized spaces behind them, with oval holes cut in the door at crotch height—what sex party would be complete without a few glory holes? None of them was in use at the moment, though. There were cages of varying heights and sizes—one was the size of a jail cell, while another was almost too low to even crawl into; the occupant would have to slither in. Marla briefly considered the cages as a way of getting rid of her persistent admirer, but a quick glance showed her that none of them had real locks, just latches that could be lifted from the inside as easily as the outside. This was a public party, after all—longtime playmates could use locks, but it wasn’t such a good idea when playing with strangers. In addition to the people playing, there were others with penlights, and bags filled with safe-sex supplies—gloves, dams, condoms, lube, and the like. Dungeon monitors were here to make sure everything was safe and consensual, and that no one was so caught up in the moment that they forgot to use protection.