Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  Rylie stretched onto her toes to look over his shoulder. He wasn’t as tall as he seemed; his girth gave an illusion of size, but he was really only a couple inches taller than she was.

  “How sturdy is the shed?” Rylie asked in a low growl.

  “Sturdy,” McIntyre said. “It’s taken a hit from a daimarachnid assault. She can’t break out.” But he sounded kind of doubtful.

  “We need Elise,” Rylie said.

  He swore colorfully. Leticia pointed at the jar of change, but instead of paying up, he shoved his beer into her hands. “I’ll be back.”

  McIntyre clomped out the door again. Seth and Rylie watched through the dusty kitchen window as he went into the shed.

  As soon as he was gone, Leticia set the beer down. “If you want to see Elise… Well, here’s the thing: Lucas wasn’t making shit up when he says that there’s trouble.” She flipped another quarter into the “Bad Words” jar without even looking at it. “The Union’s chased Elise into hiding. I’m sure that’s why she isn’t here to meet you.”

  Rylie’s face crumpled. “You mean, you don’t think she’ll exorcise Katja?”

  “I’m sure she will,” Leticia said. “But Lucas is being a huge—uh, he’s being weird, so you gotta go talk to her yourself.” She grabbed a flier off of the refrigerator and stuffed it in Rylie’s hand. “He was talking to her right before you guys got here. She and Anthony are currently hiding out at a friend’s business. You’ll be able to find her there tonight, guarantee it.”

  Rylie lifted the card to read it. “Original Sin?” She turned it over, and her cheeks turned flaming red.

  There was a picture of a topless woman on the back with a snake wrapped around her throat and tiny stars concealing her nipples. Seth plucked it out of her hand, reading the small print. Naked bitches wet and ready for you.

  Leticia was sending them to meet Elise at a brothel.

  Nine

  Detective Gomez was dreaming about fucking and being fucked—not by the woman in bed with him, whom Elise presumed to be his wife, but a man with hard muscle and a body covered in coarse hair.

  Elise didn’t want to see the details, but she did. She saw every instant of Detective Gomez’s fantasies from her position crouched at the end of his bed. Elise would have believed he was really in the act if she hadn’t been watching his motionless body. His sleeping face was smooth, unreflective of the flashes of naked flesh within his skull.

  Her eyes skimmed his barrel-like body. Detective Gomez slept shirtless, so she could see the appendectomy scar curving around the lower bulge of his stomach fat, the scars on his shoulders, the puckered bullet wound on the right side of his chest. Bet that had scared the shit out of him when he got it.

  The detective was slicked with sweat, so Elise assumed that the room was hot in spite of the grinding ceiling fan. She couldn’t tell. Her fingers were numb with cold and she desperately wanted a smoke.

  Elise cleared her throat.

  Gomez stirred. His wife didn’t. She rolled over, curls falling over her face, and hugged her pillow to her body.

  His eyes fluttered open to fix on the wall by the bed. Elise remained seated on their hope chest, elbows resting on her knees, half-melted into the shadows behind her. Gomez sat up, rubbed his eyes. Tried to focus.

  “Hello, Detective,” Elise said.

  It still took a few seconds for him to spot her. She must have been even more ghostly than she thought. She concentrated on pulling herself into her body again, solidifying her skin so that he could make out her paleness against his wall.

  He jerked his bedside table open, reached inside.

  Elise had already removed his sidearm. She lifted it to show him. The magazine was in the pocket of her leather jacket.

  Gomez went rigid.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked in a raspy whisper.

  “I didn’t kill Senator Peterson. I want to know why you think I did and who’s got you looking for me.” Simple, straight to the point.

  He glanced at his wife, then back at Elise. “Are you going to kill me?”

  She gave him a long, empty stare.

  Gomez moved like he wanted to stand, and then thought better of it. He glanced at his wife again, licking his lips, rubbing a thumb over his eyebrow. “I’m a Union subcontractor. Been working with them on the pacific coast murders. I know the area, I know the people; it’s better for me to show up than an army of men in black.”

  “What does that have to do with the senator?” Elise asked.

  “They sent out an internal notice when they identified the assassin,” he said. “I didn’t recognize your picture. Someone else in my unit did—someone that used to be stationed in Reno, and he said that you were this legendary kopis, a ghost. I pulled your files. Figured I could use the wards at the scene of the murders to grab you and get a promotion.”

  A shockingly mundane explanation for such a supernatural problem. “Who sent the internal notice?”

  “It came from up top,” Gomez said. “The OPA Secretary.”

  Secretary Gary Zettel. He was smart enough and malicious enough to try to pin murders on Elise—they had been acquainted for too long. But it didn’t explain why he would have waited that long.

  Elise straightened, dropping off the hope chest onto the ground. Gomez jerked. The abrupt motion made his wife hug her pillow tighter and sigh.

  “Please,” he said, “she hasn’t done anything.”

  She tossed the gun at him. He caught it.

  “You’re done investigating me,” Elise said. “I’ll take care of it now.”

  “Take care of…what?”

  “I’m going to find the assassin. I might even give them to you when I do.”

  Gomez mopped the sweat from his glistening forehead with the back of his hand. “But the footage.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “The footage.”

  She took a sidestep into the shadows and melted away.

  Rylie wasn’t exactly a good girl. It was hard to consider anyone “good” when they had killed so many people—even if she had done it for the sake of survival, or because she had been crazed by silver poisoning. But she wasn’t exactly a bad girl, either. She had sex with the lights off—at least, she always used to, and what she did now was the kind of black hole of miserable thought that Seth preferred to avoid—and her idea of dressing up for a date involved a little extra eye shadow and knee-length skirts.

  Outside a brothel like Original Sin, she stuck out like a lamb among a pack of werewolves.

  The men wore sagging jeans and snug tank tops. The women wore almost nothing at all, aside from their caked layers of makeup: strips of leather, precariously tall heels, fur-collared vests.

  The entrance was illuminated by red light bulbs, which turned Rylie’s flesh and hair to a crimson monotone. She stood under the canopy, shrinking inward until she looked too young to be at a bar, much less a brothel. “Smells bad here,” she whispered.

  “You can always go back,” Seth said, earning a look of annoyance from Rylie. He had tried to talk her into staying with Katja, but she had refused to stay behind, especially since Leticia seemed to have an eye on free babysitting. There was nothing restful about being trapped in a single wide with two rambunctious kids. Seth had managed to get a few hours of rest, but he still felt exhausted, disjointed, out of place. And being in line for Original Sin wasn’t helping.

  The brothel wasn’t in a bad neighborhood, exactly—and Seth probably wouldn’t have been out of place in a bad neighborhood anyway. In fact, it was its proximity to the luxury hotels that made him uncomfortable. He could see the lights from the Bellagio’s fountains, the towering billboards that flashed through ads for various shows, the pedestrian walkways lit by scrolling neon lights.

  Leticia had explained that Nevada’s mortal laws prohibited Clark County from licensing brothels within its borders, so Original Sin wasn’t publicly known as a whorehouse. It was advertised as a bar. Seth could see a dance floor thr
ough the darkly tinted windows, backlit by crimson neon. The pounding music beat a suggestive rhythm to which the women waiting for entrance seemed to respond. The line wrapped all the way around the block, extending beyond the lights of the Strip into the streets beyond. It was filled with gyrating bodies. Women grinding, moaning, waiting.

  They weren’t just reacting to the music. Seth’s senses were burning. He tasted brimstone on the back of his tongue. There were demons inside—probably incubi and succubi—and they were radiating sexual energy. A lot of it.

  They were almost to the doors now, and he wasn’t sure they would have been able to leave the courtyard if they wanted to anyway. The press of bodies at the gates left no room for navigation. Abel could have parted the crowd easily. Between his face and his height, he could stand in a mosh pit without ever being touched. But Seth wasn’t nearly as intimidating.

  The bouncer at the door stopped them with a hand on Seth’s shoulder. “Let me see it,” she said. She was taller than even Abel, and had broader shoulders. Seth wouldn’t have been able to tell that the bouncer was female at all if it hadn’t been for her metal bikini.

  Rylie’s fingernails dug into Seth’s bicep. “See what?”

  “Driver’s license.”

  Seth had forgotten that he was holding both of their IDs. He offered them to the bouncer, who looked at Rylie’s for a little too long, as if she couldn’t believe that Rylie really was twenty-one. It was a fake ID she had been using for the last two years, but a convincing one. They didn’t have to stretch the truth very far—she would be of age in a couple weeks anyway.

  “We have a dress code,” the bouncer said, handing the licenses back.

  Seth looked down at himself. He was in a black tank, jeans, hiking boots. Basically the same thing that the other men were wearing.

  But the bouncer wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at Rylie—Rylie, with her long denim skirt and white blouse, more like a farm girl than someone that would go to a club. She was wearing light makeup. She was stunningly beautiful.

  Rylie reacted as though the bouncer had called her ugly, though. She blushed, ducking her head.

  The bouncer on the other side of the doors was letting people in—women that wore virtually nothing at all, along with their male companions.

  Seth bristled. “What’s your problem?”

  The bouncer gave them a flat look, as if to say, You kidding?

  “Jesus,” Seth said, “we’re meeting someone here. It’ll take five goddamn minutes.”

  The bouncer snorted. “Kids. Human kids.”

  So that was the real problem. Not that Rylie wasn’t attractive enough. They were trying to get into a demon fetish club reeking of humanity and decency. “Look at her,” Seth said. “Really look at her.”

  Rylie lifted her head, meeting the bouncer’s gaze with gold eyes.

  “Oh,” said the bouncer. “Damn, don’t look so human next time. Neuma’s gonna love this.”

  Neuma? Was that supposed to be a name? Seth didn’t stop to ask.

  The clean, hot desert air outside stopped abruptly at the door, changing so suddenly that it was like they had walked through an invisible wall. Inside, it was muggy and close, as if the entire club was sweating. The stink of salt and sulfur clung to Seth, tangled up in the smoke from the fog machines. Music pulsed like a heartbeat, gripping him deep in his bones.

  Standing in the red lights outside the door had been enough to give his eyes time to adjust to the darkness, but there wasn’t much to see inside. He had to struggle through the press of half-naked bodies, which turned the dance floor to a mass of shadow; the walls were draped with plants and ferns and vines that only allowed a faint glow from the ceiling lights to reach the floor. A constant warm mist sprayed over the plants. It looked like a lot like The Rainforest Cafe—if they served kinky sex instead of burgers.

  The only real light in the room came from a stage at the far end, which shined stark spotlights on a naked body. It was a tall, broad, muscular man with his arms stretched above his head. A tattoo of a serpent clutched his spine. Seth realized with a jolt that he was chained to the stripper pole. The arches of his muscles glistened from the moist spray and his sweat.

  Crack.

  A whip appeared from the darkness, then disappeared as quickly, leaving a burning red stripe across his back. The man arched and groaned. He must have had a microphone on him—it echoed through the potted ferns and made the whole crowd shiver.

  Crack.

  Another lash. His biceps bulged, pulling him to his toes.

  A woman slunk from the darkness beyond him. For an instant, Seth thought that it was Elise. She had that same hair tied back in a severe ponytail, and the pale skin. But her features were all wrong. He couldn’t tell if she was Latina or black or what. She wore a metal bra, spike-heeled boots. She carried the whip like an extension of her arm.

  She had a dark, seductive smile as she strolled around the chained man, raking her fingernails down the welts. It evoked another deep groan from her captive.

  This wasn’t just a brothel. It was a freaking bondage club.

  What the hell was Elise doing here?

  Seth was halfway to the bar when he realized that he was alone. He turned. Rylie was frozen in front of the stage, staring up at the man being flailed. Every snap of the whip cast black shadows across her face.

  Seth seized her arm.

  “Move,” he said.

  He sat her at the end of the bar, next to the wall where the stage wasn’t as visible, and they had a little bit of light from the backlit wall of alcohol. A pair of huge ferns sheltered them, creating a leafy barrier between their seats and the crowd.

  The bartender was an olive-skinned redhead wearing an iron chain as a belt; she dropped two drinks in front of them the moment they sat at the stools. “I didn’t order this,” Rylie said.

  “On the house,” said the bartender before moving on.

  Seth lifted his glass and sniffed it. It was definitely alcoholic—though what kind, he couldn’t tell.

  Rylie smelled it, too. “Tequila, I think.”

  The pulsing music was too loud for them to hold a conversation, and Rylie was watching the sliver of the stage she could see with her jaw dropped. As if wearing the cowboy boots hadn’t made her look like enough of a kid, the stare sealed that she was way too young to be at such a club.

  Seth wasn’t doing much better. But he was having an easier time ignoring all the stimuli and focusing on looking for familiar faces. He had expected it to be easy to pick out Elise—she wasn’t exactly a subtle creature. But the woman that had stood out so starkly in pious Northgate was virtually indistinguishable from the rest of Original Sin’s patrons.

  Rylie lifted the glass toward her mouth, like she wasn’t even thinking about it. Seth put his hand over the top.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  She looked at him, startled. Then she looked down at her hand. “Oh,” she said, pushing it toward him. “Take it.”

  Seth set both of them aside. “It’s still not too late to leave.”

  Again, she didn’t seem to hear him. She was leaning far enough back on her bar stool to have a clear view of the stage, utterly transfixed.

  Did she actually like what she was seeing, or was she quietly freaking out? Her eyes seemed to glow a brighter shade of gold with every audible crack.

  He didn’t want to think about it.

  Seth scanned the bar, eyes skimming over the stage, the people watching, the darkness on the other end of the bar. He did a double take at the booths along the wall. Most of them were enclosed in heavy velvet curtains, but a few stood open. He couldn’t see beyond the edge of the tables. Even the occasional flash of strobe didn’t penetrate the shadows.

  Rylie whimpered beside him. His head whipped around.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She had gone rigid on her bar stool, fingernails digging into her kneecaps. He followed her gaze to the stage. The man being beaten
was bleeding now, streaming crimson blood down the small of his back, where it pooled in the cleft of his ass.

  She wasn’t getting off on it. The wolf was getting hungry.

  “Don’t look, Rylie,” Seth said, putting his arm around her shoulders and turning her back to the bar.

  “I can smell it,” she whispered into his ear. Her voice was deep and growling.

  “Think about something else.”

  Rylie’s hand shot out. She grabbed one of the drinks and threw the entire thing back in one gulp. Seth felt his eyes widen.

  She gasped and slammed the glass to the bar.

  “What if that was drugged?” he asked. “We have no idea who sent that to us.”

  “There’s no silver in it, and I’m not going to get sick from anything else.” She cast a dubious glance over her shoulder at the stage, then grabbed the second drink and downed that, too. “That tastes awful.”

  Oh, man. If Abel could have seen what Seth was letting her do…

  They needed to get out of there.

  Seth glanced at the corner again. It was bothering him, that strange texture to the darkness, which couldn’t seem to be penetrated by any amount of strobe.

  “Are you going to be okay here?” Seth asked.

  She nodded, hands clutching her empty glass tightly. The bartender was making her way back to them. Seth had to trust that an Alpha werewolf could handle herself against all the liquor.

  He got up and picked his way to the booths. The pounding of his heart was drowned out by the pulsing bass rhythm, the groans on the stereo, the hiss of spraying water. It misted his skin and made his bare arms glow in the crimson lights.

  The first booth was empty, and so was the second. Seth skipped past a couple of curtained booths and went all the way to the end.

  There was a lone, shadowy figure sitting at the table. He could barely make out a human figure.