Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  Suddenly there was the sound of a door opening, and Mavis turned to see a movie star famed for being “America’s Sweetheart”, standing behind her.

  “Call 911!” Mavis barked.

  The movie star recoiled, indignant at being ordered about by a ladies room attendant. “Excuse me—?”

  “I said call 911! Someone abandoned a baby in one of the stalls!”

  America’s Sweetheart’s demeanor quickly changed from haughty to shocked as she frantically dug her iPhone out of her Prada handbag.

  Mavis chuckled to herself, taking a moment’s pleasure in the role reversal, then looked down at the baby she held cradled in her arms, wrapped in a clean towel intended for the hands of the super-rich. He couldn’t be more than ten minutes old.

  “So where did you come from, little guy?” Mavis sighed, running a work-roughened hand against the baby’s cheek. As if response, the infant looked up at her, revealing eyes the color of marigolds. Although she wasn’t sure, Mavis thought he might be part Asian.

  “The police are on the way,” the movie star said, looking over Mavis’ shoulder at the baby. “They’re sending someone from Child Services, too. Ohhh! Look at him! He’s absolutely precious. Too bad the little guy can’t tell us who he belongs to.”

  “Maybe the fairies left him behind,” Mavis said with a smile.

  When The Dead Die

  Death is not the greatest of evils; it is worse to want to die, and not be able to.

  —Sophocles, Electra

  Chapter Seventeen

  As Sonja stepped out of the limo in the Chelsea District, the first thing she saw was a drunk pissing in a doorway. She smiled and tossed the driver an extra twenty. It was good to be back in New York. She shouldered her one piece of luggage— a black nylon duffel bag—and strode in the direction of the subway. She kept a nest in TriBeCa that she bought several years ago via a holding company, but she had learned the hard way to take as circuitous a route as possible to any of her safe houses, just in case she was being watched.

  She ducked down into the subway on Eighth Avenue, dropping her vision into the occult spectrum as she did so in order to scan the commuting hordes for signs of the inhuman. There were always Pretender races hidden amongst the bread-and-butter humans in every major city, and New York was no exception.

  It was well into the evening rush hour, and the platform was crowded with human and Pretender alike,each eager to get wherever they were headed for the night. A naga dressed in the skin of an elderly Hindu gentleman flared his cobra hood at her in ritual warning before returning to his newspaper. An ogre, his misshapen limbs conveniently hidden by the latest in hiphop fashion, slouched against the wall end the end of the platform. A succubus dressed in the body of a supermodel smiled seductively at the older man gawking at her, unable to see her cyclopean eye and the mane of living worms she wore in place of hair.

  Suddenly there was a rush of hot, foul air, and a moment later the A train came thundering out of the tunnel. It screeched to a halt and as the doors opened Sonja spotted a thickset golem sitting beside an elderly Hasidic man. A quick mind scan revealed the old man to be a jeweler carrying a small fortune in diamonds on his person, hence the need for his hulking bodyguard. The golem glanced at her with its clay-colored eyes, but did not seem to consider her a threat.

  By the time she emerged from the Chambers Street station twilight had mellowed into early evening. Her nest was located in a six-story building, just off West Broadway.

  The first four floors housed a Chinese take-out place, a karate school, a photographer’s studio, and an accounting firm while the top two floors were, theoretically, vacant. Since it was after six o’clock, everything but the take-out joint was closed for the day. The elevator had a collapsible gate and was controlled by a lever that looked that it belonged on the bridge of the Titanic. She halted the elevator at the fifth floor and rolled back the protective gate so she could unlock the metal barrier that allowed access to the foyer.

  The barricade opened with a rusty squeal, and Sonja stepped out of the elevator into the fifth floor landing, being careful to avoid the tripwires that lead to the double barreled shotgun and loaded crossbow she’d set up to dissuade uninvited visitors while she was away.

  She passed to the far side of the foyer and unlocked yet another door, this one to the fifth-floor loft and entered into total darkness. Not that it mattered. She could read the New York Times in the deepest pit in Carlsbad Caverns without straining her eyes. The loft had the familiar dusty, close smell of a sealed room. Not that it mattered. Her actual nest was located on the sixth floor. The fifth was entirely empty—save for booby traps and deadfalls. She liked keeping as much space between herself and whatever might be looking for her as possible.

  When she renovated the building, she had a new stairwell installed that by passed the fifth and sixth floors on its way to the roof. She kept the original stairway intact, save for sealing the doors to the lower floors with concrete, so she could travel to and from the roof without anyone seeing her. But, since this was still New York City, she also installed a couple of booby traps, just to be on the safe side. As the unlocked the door to her private stairwell, the smell of putrefaction told her one of her traps had been sprung.

  She found what was left of the would-be burglar on the sixth floor landing. He’d tripped a deadfall wire, sending a cinder block on the end of a rope flying into his head. Judging from his clothes he had been relatively young, although it was hard to tell since his face had been reduced to pulp. He’d been there at least a month or two, and had rotted to the point where it was impossible to guess his ethnicity. Well, whatever he’d been in life, he was dead now.

  Sonja sighed unlocked the door to the loft, careful not to trigger the old box-spring mattress studded with bayonets hinged just above the lintel. The sixth floor was sectioned into three large areas centered on a long hallway. The one closest to the entrance was a fully outfitted workroom with a carpenter’s bench, a huge array of power tools, and a large glass-lined metal tub. Sonja went into the work-room and returned with a blue plastic tarp, which she used to drag the body of her unwelcome guest out of the stairwell. With the help of a few well-chosen power tools, she reduced the dead burglar to his component parts within ten minutes. She then tossed the collection of limbs into the glass-lined tub and took one of the industrial-sized bottles of hydrochloric acid bottles from its place inside a cabinet. Although the solution was meant to process metal, it also came in handy for turning troublesome corpses into soup.

  Satisfied that her would-be intruder was liquefying nicely, Sonja headed down the hall to the room she kept set aside as her living space. At a thousand square feet, it was positively cavernous by Manhattan rental standards and had a kitchenette in one corner. Thick Persian carpets covered the floor, and a free-standing antique wardrobe, an oversized leather chair, and an old cathode tube television set were the only other pieces of furniture. What had once been a walk-in closet had been converted into a bathroom, with shower stall and toilet, and a lofted bed was attached to the exposed brick wall. There was an inch of dust on every surface and a shriveled orange the size of a walnut in the fridge. Sonja opened the wardrobe, and the smell of cedar filled the room. Inside it were hung several expensive silk suits sealed in protective plastic wrappers, along with half a dozen matching black silk shirts. Four pairs of hand-made Italian shoes littered the floor of the wardrobe. It was all Chaz’s stuff. He’d had a taste for the expensive things in life. Not necessarily good, just expensive. She bundled the suits together and dumped them in the tub with the melting burglar, then went back into the living area and stripped down for a shower.

  If she was going to turn up a clue as to where Morgan might be, it would be in the traditional hunting grounds of the urban vampire: the nightclub. And she wanted to look her best if she was going out clubbing.

  She hit her first club around midnight. The interior resembled a church, with stained-glass windows and a disc joc
key spinning CDs in the pulpit. The waitresses were dressed as mini-skirted nuns, with high heels, and fishnet stockings. There was a lot of lasers and loud music, but the faces that stared back at her through the dance floor fog were all painfully human. She left after fifteen minutes.

  The second club was a cavernous space filled with taxidermied animals. A cougar, frozen in mid-leap, reached out for a startled mountain goat, while a moth-eaten grizzly bear towered over the main bar as if warding off bad tippers. The head of a gigantic water buffalo, its nose worn down by club patrons stroking it for luck, peered off into space, eyeing the ghost of the Great White Hunter who had plugged it long decades ago.

  As she wended her way through the club-goers, Sonja got the distinct feeling she was being watched— and not just by the dead animals on the wall. She ducked through a beaded curtain into one of the alcoves off the main floor. The walls were painted in fluorescent colors and lit by blacklights. A couple of queens tricked out in Mary Tyler Moore drag were sitting on the king-sized mattress set atop a carpeted dais in the middle of the space, smoking a joint. They looked at her quizzically, and then returned to their conversation.

  “So what did you tell Donny?’

  “Just that she should go ahead and get big ones. I mean, if she’s planning on dancing to pay for the operation, she ought to give them what they want…”

  Sonja grabbed the man shadowing her before he could clear the beaded curtain, slamming him against the wall. She pinned her forearm against his windpipe and pressed her switchblade to the side of his face, a millimeter from his right eye. The drag queens gathered up their purses and exited the alcove as quickly as their platform heels could carry them.

  “Tell me why you’re following me, or I’ll put it out,” she hissed.

  Her shadow smiled slow and wide, opening his hands to prove they were empty. “No need to get hostile, milady,” he said. “I mean you no harm.”

  Sonja let go of his throat, but I did not put away her knife. The man who had been shadowing her was of slight build and about five foot seven, and wore his gray hair in a mare’s nest of tightly woven braids, with ceramic beads, pieces of metal, and what look like knuckle bones worked into his dreadlocks. He wore a loose-fitting black overcoat that reached his ankles, tight-fitting black leather pants, a black velvet dress shirt with a ruffled dickey, and Doc Martens boots that laced all the way up to his knees. Although his hands were finely manicured, the nails of both ring fingers were unnaturally long. Although he smiled easily, his pale blue eyes watched her intently, like a cat trying to calculate the best way to evade the jaws of a dog.

  “Why were you following me?” she growled.

  “It’s my job to follow…those such as you,” he replied cryptically. His right hand dipped into the breast pocket of his duster and retrieved a printed invitation. “My… employers … are discreet and, shall we say, very discriminating as to whom they allow into their establishment. Their clientele is most select,” He explained as he flourished Sonja the party invitation. “Tell them Jen sent you, milady.” And with that he slipped from the alcove.

  Sonja frowned as she studied the invitation. Outwardly it looks no different than any of the ten of thousands of invites and announcements handed out on the New York party circuit every night. The image on the front was that of a naked female torso, the nipples are pierced and connected by a fine filigree chain. On the back was printed, in Gothic script: The Black Grotto at No Exit: W.14th at 10th Avenue. Open to the Trade.

  There was a familiar smell to the ink used to print the card. Sonja sniffed it before tasting it with the tip of her tongue. Human blood had been used to mix the ink—and quite a bit of it too. She stepped out of the alcove just as the two drag queens were coming back with the bouncer. Sonja quickly slipped into the confusion of the dance floor and then out the door.

  Next stop the Black Grotto.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The doorman at the No Exit, dressed in black leather chaps and a chrome-studded slave harness, held out his hand as he moved to block Sonja’s path. “Fifty dollars admission,” he growled.

  “Jen sent me,” she replied, holding up the invitation.

  The bouncer quickly stepped aside, his eyes widening in alarm. “I’m sorry, milady!” he said, with more than a touch of fear in his voice. “I did not realize! Welcome to No Exit. You want the second door on the right after the ladies’ room, in the back of the main hall.”

  Sonja walked past the chagrined doorman and into a cinder-block antechamber filled with gym lockers, where an investment banker was trying to wiggle into a latex bodysuit. She passed through a doorway hung with heavy black velvet curtains and headed down a narrow cinder block corridor lit with lurid red spots that make everything seem awash in blood. At the end of the hallway was a large metal door, like that of a bank vault. She turned the handle, and the door hissed open on pneumatic pistons, allowing techno music amplified to the edge of human endurance to pour forth.

  The cinder-block and poured-concrete floor motif was continued in the main hall of the No Exit, which was large enough to park a jumbo jet. A bar fashioned from glass bricks occupied the west wall, with a handful of cocktail tables and booths clustered nearby. The north wall was dominated by an elevated stage that boasted a whipping post, along with and a rack of accompanying flails, paddles and chains. A couple hundred people, all in various stages of undress, wandered the floor of the club, which was decorated with torture devices ranging from a rack to an iron maiden. Some had black leather masks over their heads, others wore slave-harnesses, and one patron walked around with a chrome bit in his mouth, the reins held by a pudgy woman stuffed into a Merry Widow corset. All of them, to Sonja’s surprise, proved to be human.

  She continued to make her way to the back of the club. As it turned out, the ladies’ room consisted of a couple of toilets surrounded by a waist-high cinder block wall. Next to it was a door guarded by a monstrously huge specimen wearing a zippered fetish mask. For those with eyes to see, it was obvious, even with the hood pulled over his head that the bouncer was an ogre.

  “Jen sent me,” she said, flashing the invitation.

  The ogre grunted something and swiped a magnetic key-card through the lock securing the door. As he pushed the heavy metal door open, Sonja glimpsed a stairway winding downward into utter darkness. Upon her crossing the threshold, the bouncer quickly re-sealed the entry, leaving her to whatever fate awaited her at the foot of the stairs.

  As she descended the spiraling steps, she could hear music—and not the familiar thump of hiphop or techno, but the strains of Mozart. At the bottom of the stairwell was yet another secured door, this one guarded by an ogre too hideous to be mistaken for human, with or without a bondage mask. He rubbed his left tusk as he studied the invitation Sonja handed him. In his huge, gnarled claw it looked like a playing card.

  “Jen sent me,” she explained yet again.

  The ogre made a snuffling noise like that of a hog rooting for truffles and unlocked the final door with a key the size of a tire iron. “Have a good night,” he oinked.

  The only light in the Black Grotto came from low-wattage, red-tinged bulbs, which were largely for the benefit of the human attendants, so they didn’t trip and fall while working the room. Like most speakeasies, there was a lot of black velvet drapery, antique statuary and Victorian furniture, but what caught Sonja’s eye were the people hanging from the ceiling. Men and women of every ethnic group were represented, suspended, naked, from hooks on piano wire fixed in their flesh. Most of them had been flayed alive, their skin peeled away to expose the muscles that lurk beneath. All of them clutched burning tapers in their hands

  Something warm and wet struck Sonja’s hand. She looked up to see a young man suspended directly over her head. The skin on his thighs and calves had been carefully pared away, leaving only the gleaming bone. He smiled down at her like a medieval martyr, his eyes going in and out of focus as he spoke.

  “Welcome to the Black
Grotto, milady.”

  The other human chandeliers took up the greeting, their voices slurred and dreamy.

  This is my kind of place, purred the Other.

  Too distracted by the flayed chorus to squash the Other’s voice, Sonja licked the blood from the back of her hand and moved on.

  There came the whir of a chain being paid out as a woman encased completely in black latex, save for her throat, stepped forward. Her exposed jugular was outfitted with a phlebotomist’s shunt for easy access. The woman’s arms were encased in a single glove and bound behind her back, and she had a leather band cinched about her waist that was affixed to a spool of chain set into the wall. Her face was obscured by a leather bondage mask, the mouth zippered shut from the outside, but her eyes gleamed like a trapped animal’s.

  A slender young man dressed in lollipop panties and a starched pinafore stepped forward, holding a solid-gold serving tray in his hands. On it was arranged a syringe and a champagne flute. Sonja shook her head and turned away. As she did so, she spotted the string quartet in the corner. They were playing Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. As she looked closer, she realized that their eyelids were sewn shut and their mouths filled with ball gags.

  There was a scream from elsewhere in the club and a naked ten-year-old boy darted out from a curtained booth, blood streaming from the wound in his neck. A vampire dressed in the cassock and collar of a priest dashed after him, hissing angrily. The attendant dressed like Shirley Temple grabbed the frightened boy by the hair and slammed him against the wall, momentarily dazing him.

  Before Sonja could intervene, the priest slapped the human who had manhandled the child, snapping his neck and killing him instantly. The naked, bleeding boy knuckled his teary eyes and ran to embrace the vampire. The priest cooed endearments and stroked the boy’s hair as he led him back to the curtained booth.