Sin City Vampire Club

by Kristen Strassel

  “Since those guys were talking about her when I came over to you.” He nodded toward Gabriel’s crew. Their seats weren’t nearly as good as ours, in a corner booth. “Rainey doesn’t seem to be a big fan of most men, so I don’t take it personally. But I knew they weren’t friends.”

  I reached for her knee under the table. She’d practically turned to stone. “Maybe we should go.”

  “No,” Blade said quickly. “You’re safer here. And the show’s about to start.”

  I was already on edge when the lights dimmed. Lennon brought Rainey her second drink, not leaving anything that important and dangerous to a random waitress. She put her hand on her shoulder and winked at me before she left. We were safer here.

  As Blade promised, it was much like the opening number to Cirque Macabre. Models paraded down a catwalk, wearing nothing but thongs and their own blood. Hair scrambled, eyes totally dead. They were drained. The stage was surrounded by chairs, and mostly men gazed up at the entertainment, with something much more dangerous than lust in their eyes. Bloodlust.

  Although they all bitched about their pay, the performers at Cirque Macabre still went to work every night. I doubted the free will of these performers.

  “Are you sure they volunteered?” I asked. That was the scariest part of the whole thing. Not the blood, not the sacrifice. The lack of choice.

  “Something like that.” Blade couldn’t tear his gaze away from the blood. He’d been denied too much for way too long. I didn’t know what he did with his last few nights of freedom, but there was no way he didn’t hear Rainey fucking me on the other side of his door last night. And he kept leading me to a dangerous place. One where I traded everything—control, stability, and love—in hope of a few sparks.

  We needed each other, but right now, Rainey needed us just as much.

  The show ended, and the donors exited the stage steps away from our table. Their features were no longer obscured by the lights. Hollow eyes, slack jaws, violent wounds at their pulse points. Even if they had volunteered to donate, they had no idea what they agreed to.

  A donor lay on a table in the middle of the room. His thin limbs dangled off the edges, and his head was propped against a vampire’s chest. The vampire whispered into the man’s ear, and he nodded, his eyes heavy-lidded in an inebriated bliss. It was like he didn’t notice the other vampires who picked up his limbs, sucking the life from him. The one directly across from him had slipped his flimsy thong to the side and ran his hand violently along the length of his erect, bloody shaft as he sucked on the artery at the top of his thigh.

  Different versions of the scene played out all over the room. Feast and foreplay. Moans and cries muffled the music, and the smell of sex burned my nose. Blade was in a daze, so much decadence surrounding him. True Bloodlust.

  Gabriel and his friends stormed out of the room in disgust. We weren’t far behind.

  “Hey,” I said. Blade jumped when I stood up. I was afraid to get too close to him. Just as these donors probably only had a foggy idea what was happening to them, he’d drifted to another dimension as well. Hunger swirled in his eyes, and his fangs were fully visible. I didn’t let go of Rainey’s hand, and for once, I was afraid to touch him. The emotion that coursed through him would give me an electric shock. “Do you need a place to stay tonight? We’re headed home.”

  I wasn’t sure if I should congratulate him on the opening of his show or pretend the atrocity never happened.

  “I’d planned to stay here.” His voice was graveled, like after we burst into the flames in the heat of passion. Great. My mouth was watering. He looked around the room, pretending to be unaware of my gaze on him. “They won’t bother you.”

  Rainey squeezed my hand. There was no need to elaborate.

  “I’ll see you soon.” It would’ve been totally natural for me to kiss Blade good night, if my girlfriend didn’t have my hand in a death grip.

  “Yeah.” He snapped out of whatever spell had been cast on him. His eyes were tinged with red. “You need to tell me all about your show.”

  I never told him about my show. I didn’t have a chance to protest before he grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me hard on my closed lips. I couldn’t let him in. Not tonight. It was too dangerous.

  Heat shot out of a place that had been numb for too long. It rushed to greet Blade, and we separated with a spark. A strand of my hair ignited, and Blade tamped it with his palm.

  Right over my heart.

  Chapter Eleven

  “WHAT DID YOU SEE?” I asked Rainey as soon as we got home. We didn’t forget to lock the door that night.

  “Judgment. Decisions. A purpose.” She swallowed hard. “Finality.”

  None of that sounded particularly optimistic. “For who?”

  “All of us.” She frowned and put her hand on my chest, in the same place Blade had before we left. “Your dress burned.”

  I fought the grin the whole way home, and I couldn’t do it anymore. “When both of you touch me, I’m whole. I felt it earlier tonight. I think that’s the key. I need you both.”

  Rainey’s expression had already been grim. She didn’t share my victory tonight.

  “Have you ever seen those men before? Blade said they were talking about you,” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Only in visions.”

  Her visions were like riddles. She often described them as crystal clear in her head, but she had a hard time fully articulating them. They came in flashes, and they overwhelmed her. Reading the tarot was child’s play for a Seer like Rainey. She could pull vibrations from people easily, but these cryptic messages had always troubled her.

  She reached around to unzip her dress. I pushed her hands away and did it for her. Rainey looked so beautiful, the fishnet twinkling on her thighs. I didn’t let the dress fall to the floor. Instead I stepped into the closet and hung it up. Blade’s scent hung heavy like the slap of sex.

  “I promise to take you on a better date.” I sat next to her on the edge of the bed, and moved into kiss her, but she shook me away.

  Her body tensed and her eyes were visionless.

  “What do you See?” I asked.

  “It was Gabriel. I knew his name before he introduced himself. He was trying to give me instructions. I’ve had visions of him so many times, and he tells me what I need to do, but I don’t understand what he’s talking about.”

  “Is the vision clear?” I asked, wishing I could crawl inside Rainey’s head and protect her from the things that scared her.

  “Yes, but he’s wavering between English and another language. He tells me I should understand, because it’s my native tongue.” She sighed. “When I was younger, I tried to talk to Lucille about it, but she made me feel crazy.”

  I put my arm around her, and my head on her shoulder. “You could’ve talked to me about it.”

  “I’ve tried. When you used to time travel a lot, I’d ask you questions to see if any of it made sense. It never did.” Rainey knotted her hands in her lap. The light bounced off her legs.

  “That’s not what I mean. You should’ve told me that it was happening. I could’ve helped you.”

  She shook her head. “We’re not the same, Holly.”

  “You’re more than a Seer. You’re immortal. That doesn’t come from the gift of Sight.” I didn’t doubt Rainey, not for a second. But something remarkable had happened tonight, and I wished it made her feel stronger. More powerful. She’d been a wreck ever since she laid eyes on him. "This guy basically walked out of your vision into the fifth ring of your own personal Hell, a vampire bar, to make a personal appearance. There was a reason he came up to us. He knows who you are.”

  Rainey looked at me with wide eyes. “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be.” I was freaking terrified. I’d never considered that Rainey was more than what we were told she was. But this blew that theory out of the water. She wasn’t a vampire. We’d always assumed she was a witch, since she could cast a spell like
a mere mortal would put together a recipe. No matter what she was, Rainey had power, whether she felt it at that moment or not. I needed her to tell me everything, but we had hundreds of years of material to go through. Goosebumps prickled my skin. “Is his message always the same? Does he threaten you?”

  “It’s similar. He gives me instructions and tells me he’s depending on me. The one I just had, he said this was the most important one yet, but then it went into gibberish. But the other thing about the language is, I feel like I spoke it long ago.” She cradled her head in her hands.

  I rubbed her back. “Has he ever hurt you?”

  “No. When I was younger I thought the visions were comforting. But now they seem more urgent, and with everything that’s happened in the last year... you and me breaking up, you losing your powers, and I felt responsible. I thought that’s what he was trying to tell me. But now I think it’s something more.”

  Instructions. He’s depending on her, the most important one yet... Rainey had a purpose much bigger than babysitting me. “You had nothing to do with me losing my fire. That was the vampires. Which means he’s probably anti-vamp, too.”

  Rainey frowned. Figuring this out upset her more. “Right. So what was he doing at that awful bar?”

  “He was looking for you.” And he wasn’t shy. He should’ve talked her. But that wasn’t how supernatural creatures operated. It didn’t matter the species. They talked in circles and then made their audience jump through them. “We’ll find him. He’s here to make sure you get the message.”

  “What if I’ve failed him?” she asked, her lip quivering. “What if I’m punished? If my powers are stripped from me? He could take my immortality. I don’t want to die.”

  She let the tears fall. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Rainey cry. She’d been my rock ever since we came together as scared little girls centuries ago, and it occurred to me that she thought these messages from the mysterious Gabriel were about me. After all, it was my world and everyone else just lived in it. I used to feel invincible—traveling through time and bursting into flames at will—but now I was nothing but an unemployed pole dancer. My vampire side had made me selfish and attention starved, and Rainey had always been my biggest fan. My safety net. Now she needed me to do the same for her. It wasn’t a role I was familiar with, and I had to learn on the job.

  But for someone to crawl out of her visions and become flesh and blood... I touched him. He was solid and warm and very, very real. No wonder she was freaked out. I had no idea how she regarded him—as a symbol of the message, as a comfort, or as a warning.

  “You won’t die.” I hoped I was right. “What do you think he was trying to tell you?”

  “He confuses me. Makes me feel like I’m not getting things right.”

  “He’s come to deliver his message in person. That’s a good thing. He wants you to understand.” I kept talking because it seemed to soothe her, but I was talking out my ass. In the last couple years, I’d been violated several times by pure, unadulterated evil. Gabriel didn’t throw off the same vibe. And it wasn’t because he was beautiful. Beautiful people tended to cut the deepest, because they always got away with it.

  Rainey didn’t sleep that night. She arranged candles, stones, and herbs on the table before she pulled every spell book off the bookshelf. Even the ones covered in a layer of dust. She was looking for something I couldn’t help her find, but I wouldn’t leave her alone. I pulled the blanket off the floor of the closet, feeling guilty that I enjoyed inhaling Blade’s scent while she pored over her books. I dozed off several times. She had a ritual to reading the spell books and picking up certain stones to channel their powers, and it put me at peace. Even if she hadn’t found the answers she was looking for, I knew they existed.

  I jumped the next time I woke. Rainey had moved from the middle of the room to the edge of the couch. She hugged a leather-clad book to her chest and stared at me.

  “That’s not creepy at all,” I chuckled.

  “I didn’t want to wake you.” Even though I knew she really did. “I found a mention of Gabriel. He’s a messenger.”

  “We know that.” He’d been whispering sweet nothings into Rainey’s ear for the better part of two centuries.

  “He’s more than that, though.” She flipped through pages with less care than she usually did, frustrated like she lost the proof of her findings, like his information had come to her in another vision that had vanished. All she usually had to do was explain the extraordinary things she’d Seen. “I think.... he might be an angel.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “DID I BRING THIS BACK for you as a souvenir from one of my travels?” My joke about the ancient book fell flat, but Rainey was scared shitless, and I’d do anything to make that feeling disappear. There must’ve been a spell in one of the volumes that surrounded us to cure that.

  It would have to wait. Rainey handed me the book with the evidence she found very carefully. “No, I’ve had this all my life. It was the first book Lucille taught me to read from.”

  The pages weren’t paper, they were thick and waxy, and the text was handwritten. I wondered why I never saw it before, and why they hadn’t shared it with me. Stop being selfish, Holly. That was exactly why. It wasn’t meant for me. Rainey was special in her own way, and it was her book, and her message. She had books and spells, and I danced half-naked and blew up.

  “It’s hard to read, but it says right here that Gabriel is a messenger who brings good news. He can often appear as a menacing figure, but is not to be feared. His messages are important. That’s why he seems intimidating. They come from a higher realm of the universe.”

  “Is this a Bible?” I carefully turned the pages, looking for an answer to our latest riddle.

  “No, it’s a history book.” Rainey lifted it from my lap. “An oral history, which may be accurate or it could be mixed with fiction, who knows. All history is fiction, written by the victorious. You know that.”

  “Two sides to every story.” I pulled the blanket close to my chin. Blade’s scent traitorously lingered. “What do you think he’s trying to tell you?”

  “That’s the thing. After the warning about how important it is, it goes into secret code. But this makes me feel better. Angels want to help, to heal. Maybe that’s how we get your fire and your show.” She bounced on the cushion, excited by the prospect of having a way to get my powers back that didn’t involve Blade. It was a tangible thing. Rainey was the reason to my madness, and it was refreshing to watch her get caught up in something.

  But I wished it had to do with her. I’d been selfish for so long that it had rubbed off on Rainey; we both thought of me first.

  “I don’t think it has anything to do with me.” I came from a much darker place than Rainey did. “I think your purpose is much bigger than this.”

  That didn’t offer her any comfort. “I’ve always believed that I can do a lot of good on a small scale. And think about it. If you get your fire back, you can perform. You make people happy. Your fire is no small thing.”

  “I never thought of it like that.” Maybe I wasn’t so selfish after all. “But if this guy has been talking to you your entire life, I think he’s got something else in mind.”

  She grabbed a throw pillow and hugged it to her stomach. All the excitement from moments before got stuffed back inside her. “Don’t say it like that. It makes me a failure.”

  “No.” Oh hell no. “You can’t win a game that you weren’t given the rules to. Lucille never told you about him, or anything, and you didn’t have anyone else to guide you. Until now. Gabriel came to help you.”

  “Or punish me.”

  “I won’t let that happen.” I pushed the curls away from her face and kissed her. I’d fight tooth and nail to keep her safe.

  She stared at the pillow, knowing I made a promise I couldn’t possibly keep.

  “We should go to bed,” I said. The sun was up, which meant at least we were safe from the threat of
vampires. “Get some rest. What do you want to do? We can find Gabriel. A pack of angels will stick out like sore thumbs in this city.”

  She laughed. Good sign. “No. He’ll come for me.”

  Sleep came in gulps, and then it was stolen away from us. We didn’t bother going to bed, I couldn’t bear to take Rainey away from her spells. Those books held her truth. The thick one with the blurry handwriting and language didn’t belong to me; I could read the words, but I didn’t understand them. Of all the times I lived and visited, this was the one I belonged in. But I wasn’t sure that was true for Rainey. Whether she believed it or not, she was meant for something better.

  She slept with her head on my shoulder, and I held her while she squirmed and mumbled through her dreams. We were both light sleepers. Our subconscious got the best of us when we were least equipped to fight it.

  I closed my eyes, doing everything I could to recreate to spark that burst from my lips when Blade kissed me. It was the most natural feeling in the world; the heat rising from the depths of my soul, sparks dancing on my skin...but I couldn’t do it. It was possible that Rainey’s energy neutralized mine, but it wasn’t that easy.

  We both jumped when my phone rang. The apartment was dark, which meant we’d actually fallen asleep. Hard, judging from the fog that surrounded me as I tiptoed around Rainey’s setup on the floor with only the light from the parking lot to guide me.

  “Don’t answer it.” Rainey groaned. She’d put her head on the other end of the couch.

  “Nobody ever calls me.” I hardly ever got text messages, unless they were from Rainey. By the time I dug the phone from the bottom of my bag, I’d missed the call. “It could’ve been important.”

  The screen lit up with a voicemail notification. Hey Holly, it’s Callie. The Mistress’ casual tone shocked me. She almost sounded friendly. Tristan wants to talk to you about collaborating. Give me a call back and let me know what time works for you.

  I didn’t know what the etiquette was surrounding these things. A manager had always negotiated my deals for me, and there was no way I could do worse than him. I was probably still under contract but he stopped returning my phone calls when his fifteen percent disappeared. Hell, I didn’t have any room to play vampire games. I hit send.