Blood Oranges

by Kathleen Tierney

  It did occur to me that if police were finding the bodies, and maybe they had gotten it in their heads there was a serial killer on the loose whose modus operandi was bleeding out his quarry, they might be keeping a lid on it for any number of reasons. By the way, here’s another by the way. I never have yet seen any reason to distinguish vamps from serial killers. Same damn thing, near as I can tell. Sure, vamps need the blood. But then, seems like an awful lot of mortal serial killers are driven by their own needs, impulses, compulsions, whatever, and that those compulsions can be as maddening as a bloodsucker’s need to feed. Which, of course, makes me a serial killer. We call this avoiding denial and self-delusion. We call this keeping myself honest. I simply see no reason to lie, not in this instance. Way I see it, I’m not a predator, not like a grizzly bear or a lion or a great white shark, I’m just a killer, and me being dead and still walking about might make me a different sort of killer, but if we believe Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy had a choice, I sure as hell do. Questions of the existence of Evil—capital E—arise. Anyway. You believe the nineteen-year-old murderess who, last count, has chewed her way through some three hundred (yeah, I keep score) human beings, or you don’t. Not my problem.

  Back to our story, already in progress.

  Two weeks come and go. On the one hand, I was getting the hang of the vampire thing. On the other, I was waiting to get fuzzy with no warning whatsoever, wondering how that would go, and also wondering where the fuck Mr. B was holed up. Finally, last week of August, I decided it was high time that I at least tried to get a few answers from someone who wasn’t a troll who preferred to speak in unsolvable riddles.

  Now, my first trip to a demon whorehouse (or bordello, or bawdyhouse, or house of ill repute, or whatever strikes your fancy) was not that night B dragged me down to meet Drusneth, a.k.a. Madam Calamity, the night we all had a laugh at Bobby Ng’s expense. A couple of months before the disaster by the Scituate Reservoir, B had me tag along with him to this dump over in the Armory District. If you’re not from Providence, I know that means fuck all to you, which is why Rand McNally sells maps; find one, if you actually care. This place was in an old Victorian, about as rundown as they come. The ladies were mostly, as you’d guess, demons of various stripes, while the clientele consisted not only of other demons, but also a motley assortment of human mystics, warlocks, and necromancers. They even tolerated the occasional vamp. Oh, but all these joints have a very strict, zero-tolerance no-loup policy. Anyway, while I was waiting for B to finish up whatever dubious transaction had brought us there, I got to talking to one of the girls. Turns out, she wasn’t such a bad sort, despite her pedigree and her specialty, which was taking the souls of mortal customers in exchange for a single night of unspeakable pleasure of the carnal variety. She went by the ironic anonym Clemency Hate-evill. I’ve already pointed out how demons don’t use their real names, and a doozy like that, you know she cadged it off a Puritan headstone somewhere like the Old North Burial Ground (ca. 1700). Before we left, I was on friendly enough terms with Clemency, she’d even offered me a freebie should I ever find myself in the mood. She kindly pointed out (as if I didn’t know) that the age of consent in Rhode Island is sixteen, so whether or not there might be a law somewhere governing transplanar prostitution, at least no one could cry statutory rape.

  Since that night, I actually had visited her a few times. Though, for one reason and another, I’d never taken her up on that generous offer (mostly because I suspected there was a loophole that would land me in whichever realm of eternal torment she called home). So, maybe Aloysius wasn’t my only friend-type-friend in those days. Maybe Clemency Hate-evill was, too. Which, as you’ll soon see, was enough to get her killed (or banished to another dimension, or whatever it is happens to demons when they “die” here on Earth).

  It was a Thursday, and I knew the whorehouse was closed on Thursdays. So I called her. Clemency said she was “relieved” to hear from me. I didn’t ask why, though it did nothing good for my nerves. I figured I could ask her face-to-face. I took the bus cross town, got off on Westminster, and walked the rest of the way, past the green swath of Dexter Training Ground and the bizarre towers and turrets of the Armory itself. The sun was setting by the time I reached the rundown house on Cranston Street. I went around to the rear entrance (only customers are permitted to use the front, and no one uses it on Thursdays, no exceptions). There were the usual wards to keep just anyone from strolling in, but Clemency had given me the incantation that would grant me access. Then I got a thorough patting down by the se’irim bouncer. Once I was pronounced clean, I was led through three parlors, their walls plastered with velvet wallpaper, each room a different garish color, and each decorated with a confusion of threadbare antique furniture. Clemency was waiting for me in the foyer, at the bottom of the staircase.

  As demonesses go, she was a looker, no denying that. Hell, as human women go, she was a hottie (pun unintended). Clemency was about a foot taller than me, and I’m five seven, so, to say the least, she was an imposing presence. Her skin was a faintly pearlescent hue of very pale blue. Let’s say sky blue, because I’ve always liked the way “sky blue” rolls off the tongue. I’ve always liked blue skies. Anyway, Lady Clemency Hate-evill, with her spiraling ram’s horns, her stormy gray eyes, and those carefully braided fetlocks that all but hid her hooves from view—it wasn’t hard to see why she was a house favorite, despite her admittedly exorbitant fee. Also, I’m pretty sure she was immune to even the concept of clothing.

  “Hello you,” she said when she saw me. She was smiling, but it was a nervous smile. “You’re a sight for sore eyes. Let’s go to my room.” I hugged her, hugged her hard, because at that point it was good to see anyone familiar. Anyone at all. Anything at all.

  Then I followed her up to the third floor, trailing one hand along the polished oak banister as we went. We passed a few others. I smiled and made no more eye contact than necessary. To them, I was just another mark, another bit of candy with a chewy center. The sort of acquaintance I had with Clemency, it wasn’t so much frowned upon as it was deemed extraordinarily peculiar and unprofitable. Demons are all about profit; they make great madams, and even better CEOs.

  Her room was the same brand of tawdry as the rest of the house. She shut the door, locked it, and pointed to a wide récamier. The cranberry upholstery looked like several very determined cats had taken exceptional joy using it as a scratching post. I knew plenty better. She sat down next to me, and slipped an arm around my shoulders. She stared intently at me for . . . I have no idea how long. But I couldn’t turn away from those eyes until she was done.

  “So, this is the new Quinn,” she said, seeming to relax now that we were in her room. “Must admit, I’d prefer you without the phony headlights and all that war paint. A crying shame, hiding whatever’s under there.” She ran a finger beneath my chin, and I told her I’d wash my face and remove the contacts before I left, if she wanted, and she said she did, very, very much please.

  “The word going round,” she sighed and sat back, “it isn’t of the good sort, my lamby darling.”

  “I didn’t expect it to be. So, you’ve heard?”

  “Enough to put the pieces together. Likely more than you, and I’m guessing that’s why you’re here. Knowing you, it isn’t small talk and chitchat. And I know you’re not here for a good belly-bumping.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my throat gone dry. Until then, I hadn’t realized vamps throats could go dry. “Wish it were.” I didn’t precisely mean that, but I said it, anyway.

  “Lucky they even let you through that silly maze of phylacteries. I hate to say, and no offense, but you stink of dog. And you know how that goes.”

  “No offense taken.” I’d been thinking the same thing myself.

  “I asked for a favor,” she said. “Old Wormlash, she owes me a few.” Wormlash was Clemency’s madam, and she had a rep as a hellion among hellions.

  “You probably shouldn’t have wasted it on me.
”

  She leaned close again, flaring her nostrils and curling her lip to expose teeth that made mine look like nubs. “I do so loathe the smell of dog,” she said.

  “Then maybe you should stop sniffing at me,” I said, trying not to sound annoyed. Never, ever fucking pays to get annoyed with demons, not even the ones who, inexplicably, have a soft spot for you. “I need to know whatever you know. Anything at all.”

  She sat back again, frowned, and propped those hooves up on a crooked footstool. Her arm remained around my shoulders, and I tried to ignore how horny it was making me, her touch, just being so close to her.

  “You went after a loup named Grumet. Ugly bastard had the butcher’s trade cornered up in the Blackstone River Valley. No idea why he was down here. He took a chunk out of you before the Bride of Quiet put him down.”

  “Maybe tell me something I don’t know?” I suggested as politely as possible. She stared up at the water-stained ceiling for a moment.

  “See, that’s where I have to be careful, dumpling. That’s where a girl can get herself arseholed seven ways from sundown. So, what I tell you, I need to know it won’t leave this room. And even then . . .”

  “I fucking swear.”

  “Of course you do, sugarplum. You’re scared, and scared human beings—well, in your case, former human beings—will swear to almost anything if they think it’ll save their backsides.”

  I fished my Zippo and a crumpled pack of Camel Wides from my jeans pocket, then asked if she minded if I smoked.

  “Of course not, pumpkin.”

  I lit a cigarette, and held that first drag until my ears started to buzz. I exhaled, and the smoke curled into a vaporous serpent. That was Clemency’s doing, and I complimented her on it.

  “Don’t think it’s so much about what I can tell you, Quinn, as much as it is about the questions I doubt you’ve started asking yourself.”

  “I’m asking quite a few,” I replied.

  “Not the right ones, or you wouldn’t be sitting here. Not the genuinely unnerving ones.”

  I took another puff. This time I blew smoke rings that she shaped into a pentagram. “And what, pray tell, are the right and unnerving questions I’m not asking?”

  She hesitated a couple of seconds, then chewed at the ebony talon at the end of her right thumb for a bit.

  “Look,” I said, “I didn’t come here to get you in Dutch with anyone. I’m not here to fuck up your shit.”

  “Yes, you are,” she softly growled. “Mayhap you don’t understand that’s how it is. But, nonetheless, that’s how it is, dumpling.”

  “Then don’t say another word. I’ll leave right now.”

  The arm about my shoulder tightened enough there was no chance of my standing up.

  “Just for starters, ask yourself this. What was the Bride doing there? How did she know you were tracking Grumet, and yes, I’m assuming you and the loup, that wasn’t a chance encounter. You were calling him out.”

  “He was hanging bodies in goddamn trees.”

  “He was a dog. Dogs like their sport.”

  I frowned and watched the smoldering tip of my cigarette. “As it happens, that question’s already been asked.”

  “But has it been answered?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Well, that’s a step in the right direction, plumbing the depths of that particular mystery. Someone had to have tipped her off you’d be up that way that particular night, and you need to start asking yourself who that someone might have been.”

  “I killed her twat of a daughter. She could have been stalking me for who knows how long.”

  “Maybe,” said Clemency, “and maybe not. Where’s that son of a bitch B run away to, and why?”

  “Hell if I know,” I said, and then (lightbulb) I saw what she was getting at. “No fucking way he set me up. I’m his prize pit bull . . . or something like that.”

  She shrugged. “Here’s another news flash, darling. The grapevine leads one to believe Mr. Bobby Ng isn’t long for the world.”

  “Who the hell would bother killing Ng?”

  “He’s the reason you killed Alice Cregan, yes?”

  “Well, sure. Yeah, but . . . he’s worse than harmless.”

  Her skin darkened a shade or three, the way it did whenever she was holding back.

  “Nevertheless . . .”

  “Nevertheless nothing. You came wanting answers.”

  “And mostly I’m getting more questions, or answers that might as well be questions.”

  “Better than the troll gave,” she said, and went back to chewing at the claw. She pulled a sliver loose, then spat it at the floor.

  “You know about Aloysius? His dumb-ass riddle?”

  She nodded. “Ears everywhere. Quinn, you ought to understand that by now. Want the answer?”

  I chewed at my lip, then told her sure, of course I did.

  “Death,” she said. “Think about it later on. The answer is death, not a sacrifice. Your death, Quinn. Only cure for going wolfish.”

  “But I’m already dead.”

  “This does present a conundrum. Though I’m guessing you’d find it an unsatisfactory antidote, if you weren’t.”

  She was right, but I didn’t tell her so.

  “B absolutely did not set me up.”

  “Never said he did. I only asked a question.”

  “You implied.”

  “No, sweetheart. You heard what, possibly, you were already thinking.”

  I finished the Camel, and she pointed towards an ashtray that had once been the top of a human skull, balanced on the arm of the récamier. I crushed the butt out. The ashtray wasn’t there before I needed it, which hardly came as a shock. It immediately vanished.

  “At any rate,” Clemency said. “Lots of people looking for B these days. Lots of loose ends, business he didn’t see fit to conclude before this disappearing act. Money he took from the powers that be, the high on high, and then failed to deliver the goods. He’s slipping from the kindly graces of the Dukes and Duchesses. Must have been terribly afraid to let it come to that, wouldn’t you think?”

  I admitted it wasn’t like him, and you don’t screw around with the sorts that hire Mean Mr. B. You take a job, you see it straight through to the bitter end, or it’s your ass. No way I couldn’t admit that much.

  “How’d you know to go looking after Mr. Grumet?” she asked, and the nervousness I’d heard downstairs was returning to her voice. “What put you on the dog’s trail?”

  “It was in the papers.”

  “Darling, you don’t strike me as a news junky.”

  “B, he said I should pay attention to the newspapers. That sometimes the nasties slip up. No offense.”

  “None taken,” she said very softly, her voice growing brittle. “So, B, he started you reading the papers, looking for the doings of the unholy and carnivorous, that’s what you’re telling me?”

  I furrowed my brow and lit another cigarette.

  “You smoke too much,” she said.

  “Clemency, I’m already fucking dead,” I replied.

  “Still a nasty habit,” she sort of tsk-tsked.

  I tried to get the conversation back on track. “So, you’re implying coincidences ain’t actually coincidences.”

  “Aren’t actually,” she corrected. She did that sometimes, corrected my grammar. Usually, I found it funny, or oddly sweet. “And no,” she continued, “I’m only asking questions you haven’t asked. Doubt—doubt and curiosity, doubt and suspicion—they may presently be the best allies you have, love. Listen to what they have to tell you. Draw lines, dot to dot. You know how that works, Quinn. Correlate what you know with what you don’t know.”

  “And just how am I supposed to correlate what I don’t know.”

  “There’s a choke leash around your throat,” she said, sounding as sad as I ever heard her sound. “Might as well be a spiked collar. I’d take it off if only I knew how. Might be my loss, doing so, but y
ou’re a good kid. You deserve better than what’s coming your way.”

  And before I could ask what the fuck she meant by all that, she turned and kissed me. I’ve had my fair share of kisses, but never anything came close to that. It was the Olympic gold medal of kisses, right? It was the finest wine, and all I’d ever tasted was Budweiser. Maybe it was even better than smack and the instant my teeth tear into someone’s carotid artery. It seemed to go on just about forever. Her tongue slid across mine, then grew longer and encircled it. Maybe, one day, I might forget the alien beauty of Clemency Hate-evill, but no way I’m ever gonna forget that kiss. Or the way she tasted: frankincense, a hint of what might have been charcoal, dried roses, cardamom, chocolate, and the sea.

  When she broke the kiss, the whole world seemed to shatter, sure as that hand mirror I’d dropped in Nordstrom’s.

  “You could always stay with me, Quinn,” she said. “Might buy you some time. Might even change the path you’re on.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” I muttered, and that made her smile.

  That was the last time I saw Clemency smile. That was the last time I saw her period. Reluctantly, and with a grand air of resignation, she led me back down the stairs, we said our good-byes, and I was ushered to the rear entrance.