‘I’m the Vicarius around here. It’s like the local councilman for this area. The Concilium is nine guys, and women, no sexism here, who make the big decisions for everyone in their region. Local representatives are elected to provide a voice to the vampires in their area. If someone has something they need to bring to the Concilium’s attention, they come to us. We handle disputes at a local level whenever possible, rather than taking it higher. Sometimes things escalate.’
‘And that’s when Dione comes in.’
‘Oh, not always. It takes something that’s going to spill out into the public before she gets involved. And when it does, we can contact her directly. Any vampire can contact her directly if they believe there’s a threat to us all. The Hunter, and you, report to the Concilium, and she’s responsible to the Concilium, but once one’s appointed, it’s their job to ensure that threats are eliminated.’
‘So she’s beholden to the Concilium, but independent? I’m starting to see why vampires get nervous around her.’
‘Exactly. And it’s worked well. Dione can tell you when it was most necessary. When the threat came from the worst place possible. She was there. Better if she does the explaining, though. Some things are not shouted from the rooftops and that’s one of them.’ He looked away. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that at all. I get carried away when I’m nervous.’
‘There’s no need to be nervous around me, Mister Ross. And I don’t think there’s any need to be nervous around Dione unless you’re secretly murdering students. I haven’t known her long, but she seems very fair, kind of laid back.’
‘Call me Eddy. Eddy Ross is just another identity anyway. You’re right, of course. Dione wouldn’t harm a hair unless I’d broken a law, but then you haven’t seen her riled. Woman is fire and brimstone when she gets going. Best-looking Angel of Death this side of Heaven, but she’ll cut you in half just the same.’
~~~
The best-looking Angel of Death this side of Heaven was climbing, but not to Heaven. The stairs led up to the loft of a building in Tribeca. She owned the entire floor and, in fact, the building below which she let out. Up there, she had a studio she used for exercise, a bedroom with attached bathroom, and a kitchen. She ignored those to go into the lounge.
Here, there was a small, circular dining table with two chairs, and the memory of drinking coffee at it while Kate ate breakfast. The walls were bare brick and held the memory of pressing Kate up against them to kiss her passionately. A pair of elegant, white leather sofas formed an L-shape with a table at the join, and Dione remembered every time she had made love on them, and in front of the fire which was beside them.
In the eastern wall there was a glass-panelled bubble, a sort of conservatory, jutting out from the side. There was no light coming in through the windows, but she walked out there to check on the planters set on the floor on one side and then turned to look out at the city and reached up to the pair of eyebolts set into the frame at the halfway point. Kate had hung in soft leather cuffs from those bolts while Dione played her body like a virtuoso on a Stradivarius.
‘Fuck it,’ Dione said and turned on her heel. She marched through to the studio stripping off clothes as she went.
The room had whitewashed walls on three sides, the fourth being mirrored with a balance rail mounted on it. On the floor against the western wall was a rack with two katanas mounted on it, but she would start with unarmed katas. Good, hard exercise would drive the memories aside. She needed to get over it. It was too soon, but she needed to get past it. She had lost people before.
‘Too many.’ And she led in with a straight, forward punch.
25th November.
‘I’d have thought this place would be closed this time of day,’ Mike said as they walked up to the Black Candle.
‘To the general public, it is,’ Dione replied, ‘but to vampires and supplicants, it’s open all hours.’
‘Pat said something about it being a place to find supplicants.’
‘That’s right, and we’re going to watch some vampires feeding.’ Dione opened the door and walked in, Mike following with a frown on his face. She closed the door behind him. ‘You need to see this. Come down here when you get some off time and observe. You’ll get to see all kinds of vampires and the different ways they go about their business.’
‘I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to get out of that.’ They walked past various people sitting around on the dancefloor, apparently chatting. Mike felt nothing from them and he guessed they were supplicants.
Dione went to a door tucked away under the staircase at the back. It was marked ‘Staff Only,’ but she pushed through it, nodding to a man sitting in attendance in the small room behind it. ‘The first thing you’re going to get is a view of vampires and their drinking habits which doesn’t involve one tearing at your throat like a rabid dog.’
‘Oh.’
They started down a staircase into the basement which, it seemed, was pretty big. There was a room at the bottom with corridors leading off on three sides with the steps coming down on the fourth. Pat was waiting for them there, perched on a small desk, and there was another woman sitting behind her.
‘Welcome back to the Black Candle,’ Pat said. There was a smile in her voice, but her face was straight. ‘This is the part most people don’t see.’ Her gaze flicked to Dione. ‘Are you sure he’s ready for this? He’s looking kind of pale.’
‘If not now,’ Mike said before Dione could answer, ‘then when? First time we catch someone doing it off the reservation and I freak out in the field?’
‘I guess that’s a good point. Okay then. The procedure’s fairly simple. Supplicants arrive upstairs and check with whoever’s on the top door. If there’s a room free, they get sent down and they’re assigned their place at the desk here. Vampires follow the same procedure, essentially. Check for an available supplicant, come here to be assigned one. We do allow a few basic preferences to be taken into consideration, but it’s more or less randomised for a reason.’
‘Reduces the chance of attachments forming?’
‘Exactly. But we account for preferred gender and whether the supplicant wants sex with their gift.’
‘Gift. Nice euphemism.’
‘Not really a euphemism, but I take your point. Your only experience with this was a violent one. This is different.’ Pat glanced again at Dione. ‘Very different from how vampires got their blood in the past.’
‘It is,’ Dione agreed and Mike thought he caught a hint of sorrow in her voice. ‘Shall we?’
Nodding, Pat slipped off the desk and crossed to the corridor on the left as they had come down. She opened the first door on the right and Mike was surprised to see a security desk of some sort with banks of monitors all around it and the doorman Mike had met before sitting watching them.
‘We take this pretty seriously,’ Pat said once the door was closed. ‘We have eighteen rooms, and they’re all monitored by two cameras each giving full coverage of the room. When we’re open, there’s always someone in here monitoring for problems. Take a break, Tony. We’ll handle it for a while.’
Tony got to his feet. ‘Room three should be a good one to watch,’ he said. ‘There’s a carpathian in there, just went in and she hasn’t started yet.’
‘Thanks. Mike, take the seat.’
Mike sat down and located the screens for room three while Tony left. All the rooms seemed to be the same: plain, whitewashed walls and lighting which was neither too bright nor too dim. Ten were currently occupied, but the others had a notable feature that occupants tended to obscure: each had a plain, white sheet laid out on the floor. A couple of those had dark spots on them and Mike figured they had been in use and not cleaned up yet. There was never much blood, but some obviously got spilled.
Finding room three, he sagged a little in his seat. In the middle of the sheet, on her knees, was a naked woman, fairly young, red-haired, and quite slim. Another woman, presumably the vampire, was sta
nding near a small cabinet by the door, undressing and placing the garments in the cabinet. Mike realised there was a similar arrangement at the back of the room, presumably for the supplicant’s clothes. With all the white paint, the boxes were hard to spot.
‘They do it naked?’ Mike asked.
‘Not always,’ Dione replied. ‘Getting rid of your shirt is advisable, assuming you’re going for the neck or wrist. There’s always a little spillage.’
‘I figured the neck would be the obvious place.’
‘It is when you’re attacking someone the way you were attacked, but the wrist works fine and has a rather romantic feel, and a lot of people prefer the femoral artery if sex is involved.’
On screen, somewhat to Mike’s embarrassment, the two women were kissing. ‘Do they know we’re watching?’
‘They know someone is,’ Pat told him. ‘We make it clear that we monitor for everyone’s safety. Obviously, some people get off on it, but it’s mostly seen as a necessary part of the process. We have a few rules, maybe a lot of them, depending how you look at it. No names get used. No arrangements to meet outside. There are other ways to hook up with supplicants if you’re going straight and this isn’t a dating service. Fifteen-minute time slots. No rough stuff, though we allow a little role play. You get what you’re given, within your preferences, but we do make some allowances. We have enough valentines in the city to make sure that if someone feeds a necros, they get something special the next time.’
‘Necros?’ Mike watched as the kissing stopped and the vampire laid her partner down on the sheet, stroking down her body. It looked like she was going for the thigh.
‘I’ll introduce you to some at some point,’ Dione said. ‘You’ll catch on to why there’s a reward for gifting them.’
‘We don’t get that many in here anyway,’ Pat said. ‘They tend to feed from homeless people. She’ll bite any second, but you see she’s making it as comfortable as possible. When they’re done, the supplicant will be checked to make sure she’s okay, and then she’s required to wait upstairs for thirty minutes before leaving.’
‘Like giving blood at a clinic.’
‘Same principle, but with the virus whacking your healing up to eleven, you walk out of here a lot healthier than you do giving a pint for a blood bank.’
It looked like the fangs had gone in. The girl was lying on the sheet, writhing lethargically, her head shifting left and right, and her hands bunching the sheet in a slow pulse. Mike remembered the euphoria which had smothered him when he was bitten, and the terror which had been lying under the surface of it. The redhead did not look afraid, not even a little bit.
‘I… guess I can see the attraction. Is it addictive?’
‘Can be. Hence another rule, which is that supplicants only gift once a week.’
‘Even that can be too often with me or a valentine,’ Dione said.
From the way the vampire was moving and the way the supplicant’s back was arching, Mike got the impression that there was a lot more than just feeding going on, but the angles made it hard to tell for sure. ‘You two are more addictive than what she’s getting?’
Pat giggled. ‘Hell yes, but we kind of pay for it. Dione more than me. Feeding makes us horny. It’s not an absolute necessity to combine the two activities, but it’s probably going to happen.’
‘Valentines have more control,’ Dione added. ‘Succubi basically don’t. And we induce the same sort of desires in the person we’re feeding from so…’ She sighed. ‘You either get used to the loss of self-control or you starve yourself to death.’
In room three, the vampire had lifted her head to watch as her supplicant thrashed wildly. It was erotic in an oddly clinical way. Mike’s body was not reacting to it quite as much as he had worried it would. Still, he felt he should complain for form’s sake. ‘So, you want me to come over here and watch porn and call it on-the-job training.’
‘You’re not particularly aroused,’ Dione said.
‘Admirably objective, I’d say,’ Pat added.
Mike frowned. ‘You can tell?’
‘Our lineages, and some others, have a more developed sense of smell than humans,’ Dione explained. ‘Wolves have good noses, and very good hearing, but ours are good enough to let us judge emotional state. Helps with determining how our prey is reacting.’
‘So,’ Pat said, ‘how aroused you are is easy, and this is not getting you that hot.’
‘Well, it’s kind of… clinical,’ Mike explained. ‘She’s obviously enjoying it, but from out here, not so much. And look here’ – he pointed to another screen – ‘man and a woman, she’s still wearing a bra. She’s got that dreamy look in her eyes, but it’s all business.’
‘Good,’ Dione said. ‘That’s the point I wanted you to get. You should still come down here and watch, to see the variations, but you’ve grasped the main point. This is something we have to do to live and, for some, it’s just that. For some of the supplicants, it’s just a slightly kinky high and the chance to meet interesting people.’
‘It can be so much more, though,’ Pat added, ‘just like any form of intimate relationship.’
‘It can,’ Dione agreed, ‘and often is, but it doesn’t have to be.’
‘It’s just so much better when it is.’
~~~
‘Enough, I think,’ Dione said as they watched a vampire medic checking on another supplicant in room sixteen. ‘I’ll take you back to your apartment, Mike. We’ll clock off a little early and maybe I won’t hit traffic all the way back to my place.’
‘Sure,’ Mike said. ‘Thanks.’
Pat nodded. ‘Could you watch the monitors a minute, Dione? I’ll get Tony back in here.’
‘I can.’
‘Great. Mike, could I borrow you for a minute?’
‘Uh, sure,’ Mike said, getting to his feet. He saw the two vampires exchange a look which he could not interpret, but neither said anything more until the door was closed behind him and Pat.
‘There’s a task I need you to perform,’ Pat said. ‘It’s something Kate did, and the partners before her, and you might hear this from some of her other friends too, but… Anyway, you need to make sure she feeds regularly.’
‘Uh…’
‘Just keep an eye on her. If she hasn’t taken time to do it, or said anything about it, just watch for the signs. The biggest is body temperature. We run a little hotter than humans, but if we don’t feed, we go cool. If her skin’s cool to the touch, just ask her if she’s fed. You can catch it early that way. If she starts to show signs of discomfort for no reason, or seems weak, then she’s really let it slide. She’ll say she’s busy or that she forgot. Let her make excuses, but make her come and feed.’
‘I… I’m not sure I can make her do anything.’
‘Well, no, but you reminding her should be enough. It’s not like you’ll need to drag her here. Just point out that she’s left it too long. She normally feeds on the fourth of the month. It’s sacred to Aphrodite, you see.’
‘Not really, but I don’t need to. I guess I can do that, if you think it’s needed.’
‘I do. All her friends do. We don’t want to lose her.’
~~~
They were in the car and heading uptown before Dione asked the question which Mike had been expecting and already knew how he was going to answer.
‘So what did Pat want?’
‘She was telling me that one of my duties is making sure you feed once a month,’ Mike said as casually as he could manage.
Dione gave a grunt. ‘Yeah… Yeah, I need to be reminded at times.’
‘She said you usually do it on the fourth of each month.’
‘Mmhmm.’
‘Because it’s sacred to Aphrodite?’
The slightly sour mood evaporated and Dione laughed. ‘Yes, and you think that’s weird, but I was a priestess of Aphrodite in Corinth. I still practise, more or less. It works quite well because I hold the main festival on the fourth
of July. It’s not quite following the Attic Calendar, but it’s good enough and I don’t think she’d mind me formalising things on the new date. You’re Christian?’
‘I’m… lapsed. Mom used to take me to church when I was young, but she had something of a disagreement with the local priest and stopped going. She still believes and I… guess I sort of still do. You’ve never said anything so I assume crosses and holy water don’t work on vampires?’
‘Crosses are nice ornaments and some vampires are Christians. Holy water’s as good for washing as anything else.’
‘Garlic?’
‘I’m not very fond, except in pasta dishes. It stinks and I have a sensitive nose. Hanging garlic in your room will just make you smell of garlic, not keep vampires out.’
‘So what does?’
‘You’ve got bars on your windows and a high-security lock on the door, right?’
‘It’s all a lot more mundane than in the movies, isn’t it?’
‘Beyond the whole “walking corpse” thing, yes.’
‘Huh. You know, in the movies, the whole blood-drinking thing is kind of an imperative. You don’t see Dracula having to be reminded to sneak into Mina Harker’s bedroom.’
‘Eating is an imperative. Do you always listen to your stomach when it tells you to eat?’
‘Uh, I guess not. Mundane again. It’s just that Pat made it sound like you push it sometimes.’
‘Pat should apply to be my mother.’ Dione sighed. ‘They all got worried when Kate died. I was pushing too hard to get Bingham. That was his name. Don’t know whether you knew. Anyway, I went three days without and started getting sluggish. I had to take on two supplicants to recover. It was stupid. I couldn’t help Kate if I was gone too. And I’m sure Aphrodite was pissed off at me for forgetting. That’s why it took so long to nail the freak.’
‘You really think so?’
Her lips twitched. ‘Maybe a little. I think he had help. He wasn’t much older than a decade and he was too good at avoiding me for that age.’
‘You think there could be more like him out there?’
Hunter's Kiss Page 8