Pomegranates full and fine

by Unknown Author

  Tango scooped the joints back into the crayon box and set it, along with the other seven boxes, to one side. She turned her attention to the other contents of the suitcase.

  * * *

  Solomon lived in a discreet old house on top of the bluffs that overlooked downtown Toronto. The house was classically elegant, tucked in among the trees and winding streets that sheltered other expensive homes. Clean red brick, trim that always seemed freshly painted, a cobblestone drive, grounds that were twice as large as most modern building lots — the house would have commanded a very hefty price on the real estate market. Miranda wasn’t sure exactly how Solomon had acquired the house, but she doubted if he had purchased it outright. There were too many other ways to acquire property. Much of the wealth that

  Solomon enjoyed came from members of the Bandog, members who were willing to curry favor with money just as she curried favor with sex. Miranda didn’t inquire too closely about the house.

  Nothing about the neat exterior of the house so much as hinted at what went on inside. If those private activities were revealed, though, property values in the neighborhood would probably plummet.

  Miranda pulled into the drive, past tall, ornamental iron gates that were open to receive her, and parked by the side of the house. There was a side door to the house and she almost used it before remembering that this was supposed to be her first visit here. The pack might become suspicious if she came into the house that way. She went around to the front of the house and across the wide verandah. David must have been watching for her, because he opened the front door even as she was reaching to turn the old-fashioned doorbell. She almost grimaced at his eerie alertness. “I’m Miranda,” she said, as though he were a complete stranger. “Solomon is expecting me. 1 think my friends are already here.”

  “Yes.” David’s face betrayed no more recognition than her own. Not that it ever did. “If you will follow me, Solomon will see you immediately.” He turned smoothly, leading her into the dark interior of the house.

  She heard the rest of the pack before she saw them. Matt was lecturing Tolly on good behavior. When David led her into the Victorian-style parlor where the pack was waiting, she saw why. They all had wineglasses filled with blood, a courtesy that Solomon frequently extended to her when she visited. Tolly had been using his to paint his face, turning it into a mask of red swirls.

  He simply smiled back at Matt’s lectures. At least he had removed most of the piercings from yesterday, although Miranda saw that he had kept the silver shaft that transfixed his tongue. Blue was very wisely staying out of the discussion. Miranda stopped beside him. “How long have you been here?”

  He looked up. “Twenty-five minutes, maybe a bit longer. Where did you slip off to tonight?”

  “Feeding,” she said shortly.

  David cleared his throat discreetly. “This way.” He indicated a heavy, dark wood door that Miranda knew led into Solomon’s study. Blue rose while Miranda snapped for Matt and Tolly. But David shook his head. “No, I’m sorry. I meant only Miranda. She is the one Solomon wishes to see.” .

  Matt flushed. “Why did you bring the rest of us here, then?”

  “He will speak with you all after he has spoken with Miranda.” David regarded Matt coolly. “I don’t question his decisions.”

  And neither should you was the clear implication. Blue permitted himself a tight grin at Matt’s discomfort. Tolly snickered. Miranda didn’t even look at Matt. She simply followed David as he walked over and knocked on the door, then opened it just enough to permit her entrance. The door closed behind her with the muffled thud of solid wood.

  “You’re late.” Solomon was seated behind his desk, a simple, graceful construction of glass and black metal. In stark contrast to the rest of the house, his study was decorated in a very contemporary style. The glass-and-metal desk, matching shelves, black metal-frame chairs. A powerful desktop computer. The curtains on the window, dark and heavy in the rest of the house, had been replaced by blinds. The windows themselves had also been replaced with seamless panes and sleek frames. Solomon’s study faced out into the dark tangle of a ravine. Lights from other houses were barely visible, their brilliance masked by the thick leaves.

  “By ten minutes. You didn’t give me much time. I got caught in traffic.” Miranda crossed the room and leaned across the desk to kiss Solomon’s chain tattoo. His hand lingered on her face, but she dropped down into one of the chairs facing the desk. “Thanks for the phone, by the way.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “In the car.”

  “I want you to carry it with you all the time. I want to be able to reach you if I need to.” He smiled and sat forward. He was wearing a crisp white shirt, and the fabric rustled when he moved. “You’re doing a perfect job, Miri.”

  Miranda nodded modestly. “Thank you. So what’s our next assignment?” She almost crossed her fingers, hoping that it wouldn’t be another gay man from Hopeful. Tango hadn’t said anything to her about Todd’s murder in the brief moments she had seen her. Maybe she didn’t suspect the vampires’ involvement. If a third man connected with Hopeful died, though.... “We can’t go back to Hopeful again. Nobody has remembered our faces yet, but they will if we keep going there.”

  Solomon shook his head. “I don’t want to you to go back to Hopeful. Go out to the west end of the city tonight. Find a prostitute. Kill her the same way you did the others — I like the touch of laying the body

  out. And the pennies. Sinister.”

  “I’ll tell Tolly you approve.” Miranda couldn’t help wrinkling her nose in distaste. “I don’t know if he’ll be happy or if he’ll even notice, but I’ll tell him.”

  “Just as long as you keep doing it. It’s becoming a signature. Make sure the body is found again. Leave it in High Park, somewhere visible.” He folded his hands on top of his desk. “Tomorrow night, I want you to do something completely different. Keep the beating and laying out the same, but choose someone solid and respectable. Middle-class, white-bread, you know. Kill them early in the evening instead of late at night.” Miranda looked at him for a moment, puzzled. “Why?” she asked finally. “Why are you doing this, Solomon? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Solomon smiled again and rolled his head backward, gazing up at the ceiling. “I told you not to ask, Miri.” He got up and came around the desk to stand beside her. He offered her his hand, pulling her up out of the chair. “You’ll spoil the surprise. Don’t worry, it’s all planned out.” He slid his arms around her fondly.

  “I need to know some of the plan, then.” She looked down into his eyes. He was just slightly shorter than she was. “There could be trouble with the pack if I don’t have something to tell them. Tolly doesn’t care what’s going on and Blue will take orders, but Matt questions everything I do.”

  “Trust me. You’re not the only Bandog working on this, you know.” He touched her hair. “Why do you think the police aren’t doing more? Why do you think the media is playing on the worst aspects of the murders?”

  Miranda gave him a narrow glance. “Bandog?”

  “High Circle.” He put a finger over her lips as she opened her mouth. “You’re not going to ask me who, are you? You know I won’t tell you that.”

  She pulled her head away from his finger. “Why gays, then a hooker, then white-bread middle-class? There’s no pattern there.”

  “You don’t see a pattern because you know what’s coming next. Think what the average person has heard on TV or the radio, or read in the newspaper. Two gay men are murdered....”

  “Someone is killing gays.”

  “And the riot today helped shape that impression.” He nodded in reply to Miranda’s silent, narrow glance. “There are some gay activists among the Bandog — radicals, some professionals, a student.” He grinned. “It was only supposed to be a protest. The violence was an accident. But it didn’t hurt.” Solomon’s hands slid down along Miranda’s sides to her hips. “Now, if the next murder victim
is a prostitute, what will the public think?”

  Miranda thought, trying to ignore the sensation of Solomon’s hands moving over her. “Sex? The penny murders are all sex-related?”

  “Right. Everyone knows that gays are promiscuous, don’t they? And prostitutes... well.” Solomon looked into her face. “It’s all sex, isn’t it?” Slowly he sank down to his knees in front of her. Miranda caught him by his arms and pulled him back up.

  “Not now!” she hissed. “The pack’s in the next room!”

  “So? They don’t have to know.”

  “They can’t find out.”

  “They’ll think we’ve just been talking.” Solomon started to caress her again. “I need you, Miranda. After last night... I was thinking about you all day.”

  The vampire gritted her teeth. She didn’t want to do this. She didn’t feel like it tonight. But Solomon could be as difficult as Matt or Tolly, and she had far fewer ways of controlling him. If she wanted to know all of what the mage was up to, she would have to play along with his desires. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, they were smoldering with a red hunger. “Tell me the rest of your plan,” she told him, “and we’ll see.” She touched his neck with one fingernail, drawing it along his skin so that it left a long, red scratch in its wake. She stopped with her fingernail at the hollow of Solomon’s throat. She could feel Solomon’s pulse quickening as lust and fear twined themselves together in his heart.

  He drew a sharp breath and closed his eyes. “People start to think, ‘These people are dead because they tried to have sex with the wrong person. It’s their own fault.’ Somebody starts spouting psychobabble about repressed sexuality or something. It all becomes sex, sex, sex. But people think they’re safe because they don’t do that kind of thing.” He smiled again, slowly and without opening his eyes. “Then we hit them with a murder that couldn’t possibly be related to sex.”

  “Suddenly everyone is a potential victim,” guessed Miranda.

  “Exactly. They’re going to be scared.” He seized Miranda’s hand and guided it down to the first button on his shirt. He hooked her finger around the button. Miranda knew this game. She tugged on the button sharply, breaking the threads and sending it spinning off into the shadows of the room. Her hand moved

  down to the next button.

  “What next?” she asked Solomon.

  “We destroy every refuge of security that they have.” Miranda pulled off another button. Solomon’s shirt gaped open over his chest and he gave a little groan. “I want you to'kill a couple, a group.” Another button. “Get to someone behind an alarm system and kill them. Kill a big, tough security guard.” Two more buttons. His shirt hung open completely. Solomon opened his eyes. “The only thing Toronto is going to have left to cling to is its oh'so-polite manners. Cold, perfect Toronto.” He caressed Miranda’s back. “Then I’m going to take that away, too.”

  Miranda slid his shirt off his shoulders. She looked at him with the strong, commanding gaze that he wanted from her. “How? Why?”

  “I can’t tell you. Not yet.” One of his hands slid up under the shirt she was wearing, caressing smooth flesh that was warm with stolen blood. “Please don’t ask again. The next Bandog ceremony.T’ll tell everyone then. I promise.”

  She let the question go, accepting his answer and falling into the pattern of his sex. A reward for his answers. Both of his hands were under her shirt now, lifting it up and over her head. Solomon’s hands caressed her breasts through the silky fabric of her brassiere, then that was gone as well, the clasp released by a single deft touch to the small of her back. Solomon kissed the nipples one at a time, his tongue drifting gently, teasingly, across and around them. Miranda let her head fall back as her hands forced Solomon’s pants and underwear down until they slipped over his buttocks and slithered into a pool of black fabric around his ankles. Then she drew him up, drew his mouth to hers, and they kissed, Miranda’s arms tight around his naked body, Solomon’s lips working with a frantic desire.

  Miranda found that she couldn’t match that desire. This might just have been a game, but tonight Miranda didn’t feel like she was a player in a game so much as she was an actor in a play. A play that had been running for far too long. She went through the movements of sex mechanically. Her mind was elsewhere. What had Tango found in Riley’s bags? Was there anything there that would help lead them... her to him? Miranda berated herself mentally. The changeling’s concern for Riley was contagious. Tango was doing whatever she could to find her friend. Miranda was having sex with a Nephandus mage and plotting the murders of unsuspecting strangers. Suddenly, she wanted this to be over.

  Solomon finally moved away from her mouth. He ran his fingertips across her body, then glanced up at the lights in the room. Obedient to his magick, they went out. The moon had risen outside and shone in through the window. Solomon stood before her in the moonlight, silver-blue rays casting shadows in the hollows of his muscles and tinting his tanned skin with the pallor of death. Miranda looked at his nude, sculpted body, waiting passively for her touch, then shed her own pants and stepped forward. Shadows slid at her whim, making her larger and more intimidating, at the same time wiping out the relief of Solomon’s muscles. He became flat and featureless, a thin, weak boy. Miranda settled into a chair, her legs apart in the moonlight. Solomon knelt down between them, worshipping her with his mouth while his hands jerked at his hard cock and aching testicles. Miranda put her hands on the back of his head, forcing him into those places that she remembered from the days when this was real sex, and tried to find some passion within herself.

  All she could think of w'as Tango and her search for Riley. Her grip on Solomon’s head tightened.

  Solomon groaned and shifted, fighting against her strength and struggling to breathe. She let him lift his face for a moment, then pressed him back. Her fingers, she realized, were sticky and warm with his blood. She had broken his skin with her fingernails. Miranda brought her red-stained fingers to her mouth and licked them.

  There was passion in the blood. Maybe not true passion, maybe just the hunger of the Beast within, but it was enough. The blood she had taken from the attendant at the airport was like an appetizer. Pleasure and sensation came back to her with the taste of blood. She pushed Solomon away and then joined him on the moonlit floor. “Now,” she growled. She pulled him toward her. Obediently, the mage positioned himself over her body and slid his cock into her. It felt good, but her hunger demanded more. As Solomon thrust in and out, his legs and buttocks straining, Miranda toyed with his nipples, pinching and rubbing them. Her hands strayed across his back, scratching along his spine and teasing into the crack of his laboring ass. Solomon moaned, his eyes flickering with pleasure and his mouth sagging open. Miranda wrenched his head down and kissed him savagely, tongue striking between her fangs. Solomon’s thrusting grew spastic, animal instinct taking

  over and driving his body.

  Miranda chose her moment. She tilted his head back, plunging her fangs into his neck and savoring the hot, delicious blood that rose to meet her mouth. A gush of salty blood with each beat of his heart. One gush to spread warmth through her body. A second to bring her to the edge of ecstasy. A third to pitch her over the edge. A fourth to bring her short flight to an end. A fifth... oh, for a fifth.... She drew her head away, licking the wounds to close them, and pushed back the Beast. It wasn’t enough. It could never be enough.

  Empty, she held Solomon as he gasped and cried out, sweaty and trembling, in the wake of orgasm.

  * * *

  Reluctantly, Tango hung up the telephone. She had let it ring and ring, but Miranda had not answered. She wondered where the vampire was. Too bad. She would have liked to talk to her. Tango looked at the contents of Riley’s bags, spread out across the floor of the apartment.

  Most of the stuff in Riley’s bags had been the things that any man would take on a short trip: a shaving kit, toothpaste and a toothbrush, a comb, some hair gel, aftershave,
spare shoes, changes of shirts, socks, underwear, and pants. A book to read. A bathing suit. A roadmap of the San Francisco Bay Area. A bit of jewelry, his silver chain bracelet with the dog-head clasp casually tucked into the toe of one shoe. The rest, like the crayon boxes full of drugs, souvenir T-shirts from Pan’s and Club DV8, and a postcard with the words Thinking of you printed above a sunset photograph of San Francisco’s Coit Tower, were more typically Riley.

  Out of both bags, however, had come only three things that were remotely suspicious. One was the post card. There was no writing on the back of it and no address. It had simply been purchased and packed, and while it was amusing, Tango would have been surprised if Riley had bought it for humor alone. He would not have bought it for the photograph. Riley didn’t take photographs when he traveled and he didn’t collect photographs, claiming that his memory was better and more vivid than any still picture. That left the conclusion hinted at by the card’s lettering. Riley had bought the card for someone. The blond man from Hopeful? She still had no idea who the blond man was!

  The other suspicious items led even more rapidly to dead ends than the post card. The first was a slip of paper that Riley had been using as a bookmark;-there was an address on it. The second was the map, or rather, several circled locations on the map. Most of the circles marked locations she could identify, such as Pan’s, Riley’s hotel, and several tourist attractions. A circle across the Bay puzzled and excited her... until she realized that it was the location of the Cult of Ecstasy chantry house in Berkeley. Shortly on the heels of that realization came the discovery that the address on the bookmark was likewise that of the chantry house.