“Oh, I am so terribly remiss. Please, call me Deirdre.”
“Deirdre. I see.” And I did. Deirdre was one of the names on the list of New York City vampire leaders. A chill went through me. I was in the home of one of the most powerful vampires in New York and Nick had no idea how to find me. This was not good. I gripped the stake and the crucifix in my pockets more tightly than before.
“And I insist,” said Deirdre, “that you change clothes before joining us again.” Her voice never lost its underlying smoothness, but it became hard and implacable.
“Greg told me that he was bringing me to my friend Malcolm.”
“Of course, of course, my dear. But first you must change. I shall brook no opposition.” She raised her eyebrows at me expectantly.
“Fine,” I muttered. I would dress up if it meant I got to see Malcolm, but I didn’t have to be gracious about it.
The dressing room the servant led us to upstairs was lovely, decorated in white and cream, with a dressing table and full-length mirror against one wall and a folding privacy screen against the other. A fainting couch upholstered in a cream brocade angled out into the room from the far corner. The servant, a tall black man, eyed me up and down, then said, “Size eight?”
“Ten,” I replied. I could sometimes squeeze into an eight, but I wanted to keep some of my stakes on me. A skintight dress would definitely prohibit that.
Apparently Deirdre’s staff already knew Greg’s clothing size, because nobody had asked him. When the servant came back into the room, he handed a tuxedo to Greg and an armload of dresses to me. Some of the dresses were size eight, I saw. I handed those back to him, and he accepted them with a bow, then left the room.
I turned around to find Greg already stripped to his underwear.
I stepped behind the privacy screen.
Okay. Greg and I had lived together for years. We’d had sex in our dorm rooms in college, for chrissakes. It’s not like I hadn’t seen him naked before. Or like he hadn’t seen me.
But it was different now. I kept remembering the way he had eyed the young woman on the way to the train station.
He didn’t get to see me naked any more. Or even in my underwear, for that matter. I was going to keep as many of my veins as possible out of his sight.
Most of the dresses were of the skintight sheath variety. Many of them were backless, and a couple of them were strapless. I discarded those.
I finally settled on the most modest dress of the bunch. It fit more loosely than the others; the front of the dress scooped low across my chest then swooped up to tie behind my neck. I tied it slightly tighter, and the front covered my cleavage. Most importantly, though, the dress had sleeves. They were mostly detached from the shoulders, connecting only at the top and under my armpits, but they fell into a wide hem at the wrist. The skirt of the dress fell away from the fitted waist in a wide A-line that mimicked the shape of the sleeves. The hemline just brushed the floor.
Overall, the dress was both elegant and (more important to me at the moment) good for hiding weapons. I had to take the stake out of my waistband and tuck it into one boot; the one from my jacket pocket went into the other boot. I dropped the cell phone down into the boot as well. I decided to hang onto the crucifix. If I got out of this alive, I was going to sharpen the end of it into a stake so it could do double duty as deterrent and weapon.
A polite knock sounded on the door just as I was stepping out from behind the screen. Greg answered the door and the same servant walked in carrying boxes of shoes.
“What size?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll just wear what I have.” I wasn’t about to take off the boots and lose four of my weapons and my only means of communication. “ The dress covers my feet anyway. And I don’t plan to dance.”
The servant looked nervous, but he nodded and left. Greg turned to me and smiled.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
“Shut up,” I replied. “I don’t care how I look. Let’s go to Malcolm.”
“There’s a fully stocked makeup table here.” He gestured at the dressing table. “And you could put your hair up.”
“I’m not putting on makeup. I’m not fixing my hair. I’m going downstairs now. I really don’t care what you do.” With that, I left the room. Greg followed.
Deirdre was waiting for us at the bottom of the curving staircase. She spoke to us as we descended. “Ah. Much better. Though I must say, the crucifix is a bit much.” She waved her hand at it with a faint smile. “Now, please do come join us in the ballroom. We have a fabulous band this evening, and dinner will be served shortly.”
“Wait,” I said, stopping three steps up from the bottom. “You told me I’d get to see Malcolm.”
“And you shall, very soon.” She stopped a passing waiter and grabbed a champagne glass from his tray. “Here,” she said, handing the glass toward me. “Do have some champagne.”
When I looked at the glass, though, I realized that the bubbly liquid inside it had a suspiciously pink tint.
Deirdre saw me examining the drink and laughed. “It’s raspberry, darling.”
I sniffed the contents; it did smell fruity.
“I promise it has nothing in it that will harm you, provided you don’t drink too much and end up with a hangover in the morning,” she said in her lilting accent.
The ballroom was packed. More people had arrived while we were getting dressed. Women in sequined dresses and men in tuxedos sat around almost all the tables. Some of them were even eating. Couples crowded the dance floor. The band was indeed very good—they were playing a version of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to” and the lead singer, a tall woman in a slinky black dress, had a deep, smoky-sounding voice.
It would be easy to be charmed by this setting, by all the elegance that surrounded me.
Of course, all the vampires that surrounded me weren’t quite so charming. They were terrifying.
And in a room full of people, I discovered that it was easy to tell which ones were vampires and which ones weren’t. Some of the humans were easy to spot—the ones who were eating food were easy to pick out as humans, of course, and many of them had bandages or fresh wounds on various parts of their bodies. The parts where the veins ran close to the surface: the neck, the crook of the elbow, the wrist.
There were other humans there, too, though, humans who weren’t eating and who didn’t have any visible blood-donation marks. But they were clearly human, just as some of the other people moving around the room were clearly vampires.
The vampires tended toward pallor, of course. And occasionally one flashed a fang here or there, particularly when they laughed—an effect I found chilling. They were mostly extraordinarily beautiful, but then, so were the humans. Deirdre seemed to like surrounding herself with beauty.
It had something to do with the energy the vampires projected, I guess. They seemed strangely brittle, yet almost vibrating with a nervous vitality. I’ve seen a similar thing with people who were on the verge of an emotional breakdown but attempting to hide it. I’ve also seen it in people with bipolar disorder. It’s a sort of forced, manic gaiety verging on hysteria.
But that energy was combined with an indolence of movement. They swayed through the room slowly, languorously, all the while virtually quivering with some suppressed power.
All in all, it was just about the creepiest thing I’d ever seen—toward the top of the list, anyway, right after “Seeing My Beloved Eaten.”
I recognized now some of that same energy in Greg himself. It wasn’t as pronounced, but it was there all the same. Perhaps it grew with age.
That meant that I was in a room full of old—perhaps very old—vampires.
God. I was in big trouble.
Deirdre herself moved with that vibrating slowness as she led us to an otherwise unoccupied table.
“Please, join us for dinner. And then I shall take you to see your lovely friend,” she said, then moved away from our
table.
Almost instantly, a waiter—human, I noted—appeared as if from nowhere and set a plate in front of me. It held a gourmet meal of seared salmon and vegetables on a bed of saffron rice; if I had been able to eat anything at all, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it immensely. A second waiter, also human, brought Greg a balloon-shaped wine glass full of the dark red liquid I had noticed earlier. When he took a sip, it traced a thick, viscous path from the bottom of the glass to his mouth. Any hunger I might have had vanished in a surge of nausea. I pushed the plate away from me.
“How long am I going to have to wait?” I demanded, turning to face Greg.
“As long as Deirdre wants us to. I recommend you follow her suggestion and enjoy your dinner.” He took another long drink from his wineglass.
I forced myself not to gag.
I also forced myself to sit utterly still, my arms crossed over my chest and hugging my crucifix to my body. I might not be able to change anything, but I didn’t have to follow Deirdre’s orders, either.
The meal seemed to drag on interminably. After what felt like about an hour, I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. I spent every moment tensed for something terrible to happen. I kept twisting in my seat, watching for someone to sneak up behind me. I felt awkward and exposed. Two different women approached our table and asked Greg to dance. Both of them were human. He declined the first offer, and she left, but not before shooting me a dirty look. I wondered if they knew each other. It was an odd feeling, watching other women proposition my ex-fiancé. It had never happened when he was alive and we were together, at least not to the best of my knowledge. He accepted the second offer. The woman had a large bruise on the left side of her neck spreading out from what were clearly two puncture wounds. Someone hadn’t been very neat with his dinner. The other side of her neck was smooth and white.
This was horrible. This was beyond horrible. I was the anti-Cinderella at the Beasts’ Ball. All I wanted to do was gather up my charming non-prince and go home.
Eventually I noticed that the crowd was thinning. Almost all of them left in pairs, some in groups of three or four. There was always at least one human and one vampire in each group.
I decided to see where they were going. Greg still wasn’t back from the dance floor, so no one noticed when I stood up and made my way to the door. I was still clutching the crucifix, but I had almost forgotten about it until I accidentally brushed it against the back of a woman in a long, hunter-green dress. She hissed and turned toward me, baring her fangs. Her dark hair was pulled back tight from her face, and I could see that her fangs were crusted with an ugly brown substance; blood, I assumed. Gross.
In an instant, the veneer of civility, of humanity, was gone, and I was forcibly reminded that this was no ordinary gathering. I took a step back from her and came up against Greg, who had moved up behind me.
“This one’s mine,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder possessively. I flinched, but didn’t move away from him. I was willing to let him protect me until I got out of this freak show.
The other vampire drew a long breath and visibly got her anger under control. I saw her look first at the bandage on my shoulder and then back up at Greg’s face. Great. She thought I was a member of the Blood Donation Brigade.
“Then you should keep her on a shorter leash,” she said, nostrils flaring.
“I think that perhaps you should sit back down, Elle.” Greg spoke to me, but his eyes never left the woman’s face. This was clearly some weird vampire dominance ritual, and there were undertones to it that I couldn’t exactly read. What I could see, though, was the way that strange vibrating energy increased, not only in Greg and his opponent, but in all the vampires who were now standing around us watching the show.
Suddenly the woman laughed—a strangely girlish sound coming after such a display of ferocity—and the tension evaporated so quickly that I could hardly believe it had ever been there.
“You’re not ready to challenge me, young one,” she said to Greg. “Go ahead and take your little pet away. But don’t let her out in public again unless you restrain her.” She waved her hand dismissively and turned back to her group of friends. I heard one of her companions mutter something to her, and she said, “Oh, let it be, Angelica; the newly turned have no sense of propriety. We must give them time to adjust.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding.
Greg gripped the top of my arm tightly and virtually dragged me back to our table.
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” he hissed.
“No. I’m trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing here in the middle of this Creature Feature. Who are these people? Why are they here? And where is Malcolm?” I whispered just as fiercely as Greg had.
That, of course, was the moment that Deirdre showed up again.
“Oh, my. I hate it when my guests are unhappy,” she said, scrunching her mouth up into a little moue of sympathy. I didn’t believe it for a minute.
“Good. Take me to Malcolm and let me take him home. Then I’ll be happy.”
“Take him home?” Deirdre raised her eyebrows and looked at Greg. “Was that part of the agreement?”
“No,” said Greg, “it wasn’t. I just promised to bring her to Malcolm.”
“I see. I couldn’t imagine that you would presume to speak for me; I’m glad to know I was right. Well, then, dearest,” she said, addressing herself to me again, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to bargain with me if you want to take your friend back home with you.” Her lips curved up into a little half-smile. On anyone else the smile would have been enchanting. On her, it was perfectly blood-curdling.
“What do you mean by ‘bargain’?” I asked suspiciously.
Deirdre laughed—the sort of laugh that under other circumstances might have been described as seductive. “Let’s wait until you’ve seen your friend and then we can talk business.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
But I still didn’t have any choice; there were far too many vampires here for me to fight alone. And I wasn’t getting any backup. So I followed Deirdre out of the room.
She led us down the marble staircase this time. Since the ballroom was on the ground level, I assumed that she was leading us to some sort of basement level. Actually, she led us past the first basement level, which had perfectly normal-looking doors—two of them were even marked “Ladies” and “Gentlemen”—and down to a second basement level.
I trailed along behind Deirdre, hoping that I could trust Greg to watch my back but not really counting on it. I ended up doing a sort of sideways step down the stairs that enabled me to see both vampires in our little group and still keep my back to the wall.
This wasn’t the sort of creepy dungeon staircase I’d seen in countless horror movies. It was white marble with an obviously modern railing—light and airy. The chandelier on the first floor dangled just above the stairway and shined its light into all the nooks and crannies.
The bottom step ended in the middle of a long, burgundy-carpeted corridor stretching to the left and right and lined with numbered doors. Some of the doors were standing open, others were closed. It looked like an upscale hotel, of all things. There was even a cleaning cart in front of one of the open doors.
But it sounded like a down-scale brothel. I could hear people moaning behind the closed doors. I couldn’t tell if the sounds were of pleasure or of pain, but either way, I didn’t want to listen to them.
Deirdre turned to the left. As we passed the rooms, I caught hints of murmured conversations, low laughter, and more than a few screams. The screams made me wince.
We walked all the way to the end of the hall and Deirdre pulled a key out from between her breasts. She caught my look and said, “I don’t want it to be too easy to get to, pet.” Then she turned the key in the lock and opened the door on one of the most horrible scenes I could ever have imagined.
Chapter 15
Mal
colm’s completely naked body hung from chains against the back wall. His knees sagged so that his arms, stretched to their utmost, took most of his weight. His head drooped to one side. His eyes were closed; he didn’t try to see who had entered the room. I wasn’t sure he was even conscious.
The bed in the middle of the room was a tangle of sheets and blankets, all smeared with old bloodstains. The carpet under Malcolm’s body was also darkened with blood.
Worst of all were the wounds. His entire body was covered in bite marks. Big purple bruises spread out from the worst of them, painful looking quarter-inch puncture wounds, white and ragged around the edges. Several wounds ringed his nipples, another one punctured either side of his bellybutton. There was one particularly livid mark on his neck and what looked like the edges of another one on his inner thigh, though I couldn’t see it well enough to tell how bad it actually was. His wrists had been rubbed raw by the shackles holding him, and underneath the chains he was pale.
Instinctively, I started toward him, but Deirdre gestured and a vampire I hadn’t seen stepped out from the shadows beside the door. That hiding in the shadows business was about to get on my nerves. He was a huge black man, probably the biggest man I’d ever seen. He was bald and shirtless, dressed only in khaki pants, and his muscular upper body gleamed in the reflected light. If he’d been human, I would have said he was beautiful. As it was, he was just scary. He grabbed my arms, pinning them to my side and effectively holding me in place, though I continued to struggle against him.
“Oh,” I breathed out in a long, drawn-out syllable. “Deirdre, you godforsaken bitch. Unchain him right now, or I swear to you—”
“If I were you, I’d be careful what I swore to right now, princess,” she interrupted me, speaking lightly. “It might come back to haunt you.” She lifted her head in that scenting motion that all vampires seem to use when they’re searching for whatever information it is they get from smells.
Whatever it was she detected in the air made her look thoughtful. She cocked her head to one side and looked at me thoughtfully.
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