A Taste of Love and Evil

by Barbara Monajem

  Violet filled one of three plates on the table and set it in front of him. Jack scooped up a pair of chopsticks and dug in. “What do you know about a thug called Biff?”

  Violet’s blue eyes widened for the briefest second. Huh.

  “Such a distressingly fifties name,” Violet said languidly, but her fingers gripped the stem of the wineglass. “Biff was at the hotel this morning?”

  “Biff is the man who shot me.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that one,” Violet said, a dangerous edge to her voice.

  “Spit it out, Violet,” Jack said. “Who is Biff?”

  Those sharp little fangs peeked out again. A muscle flickered at the corner of one of her eyes. “I said later.” She took a long draft of wine. The fangs disappeared.

  “While it’s nice to know you can control your temper, I need you to answer my question.”

  Violet sent a pained glance at Gil’s back and murmured, “He’s already uncomfortable about Bayou Gavotte. You don’t want him to know.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “You’re so insensitive. Gil is a sweetie, and so much fun to talk to. I want him to stay here in town, and it so happens this is the worst.” Violet lowered her voice even more. “Biff’s a part-time enforcer for the underworld, and he’s moving up the ladder fast.”

  She didn’t need to say the rest.

  He works for Constantine Dufray.

  Chapter Ten

  Jack left the minute he finished eating, devoutly thankful he had never let Gil in on the camo thing. His partner’s respect for his supposed courage drove him nuts, but the fewer who knew the truth, the better. Who could say what Gil might confide to Violet if they became deeply involved? For now, they were stuck with a vampire as their first haven hostess in this town.

  Grudgingly, Jack admitted that she might do on a temporary basis. Whatever she had spilled her guts about to Gil must have convinced Gil she wasn’t dangerously skewed. On the other hand, Gil had kept his mouth shut about Rose, probably because Violet had also let fly about her ongoing feud with Titania. It didn’t matter that he’d told Violet about the rescues—hell, the rescues themselves might spread the word about where they’d found help—but Jack’s chameleon ability made the whole operation possible.

  Strange, Jack thought, I kept it a secret from everyone. I hid it from Titania by sheer dumb luck, and then totally blew my cover with Rose. The circumspection of a lifetime negated by an instant’s insanely blind trust.

  Although, to be fair—and he was determined to be scrupulously fair where Rose was concerned, because every little thing added up toward restoring the balance—Rose had shown no sign of holding it over his head. In fact, she seemed more inclined to protect him. Which tipped the balance in her favor again.

  I’m not going to think about her.

  Jack buttoned the old overcoat he’d borrowed from Gil and made for the club district. Too bad there wasn’t time to do some digging in Blood and Velvet, but Violet would return to the club soon. He didn’t think much of her conviction that no one else knew her plans. If Biff was one of Violet’s lovers, he might have overheard something. If not, someone else had. Regardless, who had sent Biff to kill him?

  Constantine had no reason to want Jack Tallis dead. In fact, Gil was probably right, and Constantine had forgotten his very existence. Which would definitely suck, but there you go. On the other hand, it was said that even from a distance, Constantine kept his finger on the pulse of Bayou Gavotte. Jack was careful, putting his buildings in a corporate name, keeping himself and his usual vehicle as nondescript as practical, not because of Constantine, but because he tried to keep Jack the Rescuer separate from Iachimo Tallis, son of the international mogul. Still, he wasn’t hard to find. Violet, once he’d given her his new cell number, had had no trouble at all.

  Maybe Constantine had heard about random disturbances in the clubs over the past months, incidents where innocent people were removed from danger by a guy no one had actually seen. Maybe Constantine had put two and two together. Maybe he resented interference with the Bayou Gavotte clubs. Maybe he wanted Jack out of the way.

  But that contradicted everything Jack believed—no, knew—about Constantine.

  And what about Rose? Do. Not. Think. About. Rose.

  Semicamouflaged in the darkness, more like shadow than reality to anyone who noticed him, he bypassed the brilliantly lit front entrance to the Threshold and turned up the alley toward the rear. Inside the back door, an armed and brutal-looking guard hovered in a barren, equally well-lit vestibule, virtually impossible to camouflage past. But sooner or later he would come out for a smoke break with a couple of his buddies, and Jack would slip past unseen.

  If Rose were with him, he wouldn’t have to lurk out here in the cold. The Threshold wasn’t a private club, but you couldn’t get in if they didn’t know and trust you or want you for some of their games. Underage girls, and to a lesser extent guys, got in occasionally and sometimes didn’t come back out. One flash of Rose’s fangs and she and her escort would be welcomed with open arms. The Threshold would never refuse a vamp.

  Again, Jack shut the door on thoughts of Rose. He slid between the Dumpster and the rickety wooden fence at the edge of the Threshold’s rear court. Bedraggled English ivy hung against the fence, an interloper from the walls of the restaurant next door, where seekers of vicarious thrills were treated to tales about the hellish shenanigans nearby. Glad that the cold muted the stink from the Dumpster, Jack camoed against the ivy’s musky leaves.

  Twenty minutes later, when he’d justified thinking about Rose as a method of keeping warm, a furtive footstep from behind the Dumpster broke his reverie. A scrawny male figure, silhouetted against the murky gray sky, appeared at the end of the Dumpster and crept through the darkness toward him.

  Shit.

  Option 1: get out of the way quickly and quietly, and let the fool meet the fate he deserves.

  Unfortunately, he had to go for Option 2.

  Jack locked his right arm around the guy’s throat and thrust him hard against the side of the Dumpster, twisting the guy’s left arm up behind him. The morning’s wound in his own arm spasmed. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he growled.

  The kid was too busy suffocating to answer, so Jack let up a little. The kid gasped and hacked, bucking feebly between Jack and the Dumpster. Jack shoved on the twisted arm and the kid whimpered.

  “Any minute now,” Jack said, letting up again for his own sake as much as for the kid’s, “some dude about twice as tall and three times as heavy and a thousand times meaner than me will come out that door. Either you shut up, stay still, and listen to me, or I’ll throw you out there for him and his buddies to rip apart with their bare hands. And teeth.”

  Maybe this was a mite exaggerated, even given the bizarre predilections of the people who frequented this dive, but chances were the kid would soak it up. And he did. The boy subsided, and Jack eased his grip a little more, cursing his injury.

  “Don’t get me wrong, kid. It’s fine by me if you have a death wish, but go in through the front door. That way you might have some fun while you kill yourself.”

  “They won’t let me in the front.” Bitterness choked the youth’s voice.

  Of course they won’t. “Because…?”

  “Because I’m underage.” The ultimate humiliation. The kid tried to twist his head to see his captor and sobbed as Jack put pressure on his arm again. “I’m not a kid. I’m old enough to know what I want.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. It might be smart to wait till you’re eighteen to find out for sure.”

  “That’s forever,” the boy protested. “I need to get into that club.”

  Christ. “The people who run the Threshold don’t care what you need. They intend to stay in business, and staying in business means no one gets in if they’re underage.”

  “I’ll never tell,” the boy said. “Please, man. Please let me in. I belong there. Out here, I�
��m so fucking bored I could die.”

  “Suit yourself,” Jack said, a familiar indifference taking over. The club door swung open and fragments of hot, heavy music slithered out, accompanied by a massive figure. Two bouncers followed to hover at the edge of the pool of light by the door. One was Stevie, a bruise on his left temple and a vacant scowl on his face.

  “Now’s your chance for some excitement,” Jack whispered in the kid’s ear. “I’ve heard they’re very creative about punishment for rule breakers. Who knows what they’ll be in the mood for tonight? Death by stoning…dismemberment…Castration first, I suppose. Out you go.” He set the kid free.

  The boy flung away from Jack with a loud, choking cry, thunked against the Dumpster, and stumbled toward freedom as fast as he could go. What a nincompoop. Still, Jack knew he’d gone too far with the scare tactics. Anyone gullible enough to think frequenting the Threshold would solve his problems had no idea how to think at all.

  Stevie gave chase, cutting off one escape route, and the mingled cries of success and agony told Jack the other bouncer had snagged the fleeing youth. “Well, well,” said the humongous security guard ponderously and unoriginally, “what have we here?”

  Stevie, oblivious to Jack’s presence only a foot away, turned to join his companions. Jack took the opportunity to yank him back by the throat and shove the muzzle of Stevie’s own pistol against his side. They stood in the darkness. “Not so fast, Stevie,” he said.

  “What the fuck?” Stevie clawed at Jack’s hand.

  “Cool it.” Jack’s injured arm spasmed again. “Keep your voice down and answer my questions, and I’ll let you join your buddies. What’s Juma’s last name?”

  “Who the…?” Jack tightened his hold and Stevie gasped, “Loveday-Smith.”

  “Good.” Jack eased the stranglehold and rested his reluctant gun hand against the fence, the muzzle still lightly on Stevie’s ribs. “Her grandmother’s name and where they live. The name of the hairdressing salon where she works.”

  “Estelle,” Stevie spat. “Estelle Loveday. They live in Des-trierville. I don’t know the fucking name of the fucking salon.” Jack squeezed, and Stevie choked out, “Loveday’s something or other.”

  “Her grandmother owns the salon?”

  “Of course she owns the fucking salon. She owns half the goddamn town.”

  “So why is Juma running away from home?”

  “Yo, Stevie,” called the other bouncer. “We caught the kid. Let’s go teach him a lesson.”

  If Rose were here, she could keep those guys busy while I finished with this moron. What bozo had hired Stevie? He hadn’t even realized Rose was a vamp, and he’d shown no self-control at all. Even in a club like this one, the employees knew their boundaries and feared the consequences of a slipup: if a vamp arrived unaccompanied, they wouldn’t do more than vie with one another to escort her inside and show her around, in the hope she’d bestow her favors on them later.

  He shut out the thought of Rose giving herself to any of these lowlifes, well trained or not, and tightened the stranglehold again. “Why does she keep running away?”

  Stevie coughed out a curse. “Her grandma won’t let her go to college.”

  “What?” Jack’s injured arm twitched. His hesitation must have shown, or maybe Stevie wasn’t as dumb as he seemed, but an elbow jabbed Jack in the ribs and he dropped the gun. Hissing with the pain, Jack sidestepped Stevie’s follow-up swivel and rush, grasped the fence with his good arm, and vaulted into the yard next door.

  In no time they would be after him. He toppled a trash can and flung the lid across the yard, tossed a flower pot toward the alley, and camoed against the ivy-covered wall. That should give them plenty to chase. His arm throbbed like crazy, though, and now it was sticking to his coat. Well, crap. It was bleeding again.

  Rose could have fixed that just fine.

  You don’t need Rose.

  Two minutes later, while Stevie and the other bouncer bumbled around the restaurant yard with flashlights, guns, and threats, Jack climbed over the fence, retrieved Stevie’s gun—maybe he was that dumb—and slipped through the back door of the Threshold in time to see the security guard round a corner, dragging the blubbering kid. God, he hated this place.

  Jack semicamoed up the gloomy corridor in the wake of the guard, wrinkling his nose against the stink of blood and fear that permeated the back areas of the club. This kind of dump screwed things royally for the regular bondage types, for the vampire wannabes who frequented clubs like Violet’s, for kink freaks in general. The media lumped them all together—and yet, if dives like the Threshold didn’t exist, extremists would dig themselves even deeper and take kids along with them to find the kicks they craved. Or so Jack believed.

  The guard turned right toward the private rooms. The kid could wait. A couple of minutes with the bouncers would guarantee he’d never, ever come near the Threshold again.

  Jack headed toward the safety of the dance floor. Even more nondescript than usual in the haze, with no need to camo against the flicker of the strobes, he worked his way through the pulsing, pounding noise and chaos, through the miasma of unrestrained highs and lows, to the men’s room. Inside a stall, he took off Gil’s coat and awkwardly retied the bandanna around his arm. He set his mind to figuring how to rescue the kid.

  Just go home, his arm throbbed.

  Where home? I gave my bed to Rose.

  Who would be really, really useful right now.

  Fine, Jack snarled, she’d be useful, but she’s not here and there’s no time.

  I hurt, his arm complained. You got enough info from Stevie. Forget the kid. You can’t save the whole fucking world.

  Goddamn obligations, thought Jack. Goddamn stupid balance of favors. Why should I risk my life for some kid who’s determined to kill himself? Yet it was easy enough to create a diversion, get the crowd to panic, and draw the entire security staff away from the rear. If a bouncer stayed with the kid, he’d deal with it.

  He was weighing the boring option of flipping the circuit breakers against the more entertaining one of shooting out the lights, when the music faded and an appalling scream filled the lull. Drawn by the hope of blood and the thrill of fear, the crowd on the dance floor surged toward the back hallway.

  A screamer. Jack wondered what the situation was this time. If she’d signed on for the scene, the club had the right to keep the screaming woman here. She might even want them to. They wouldn’t do her any real harm—some artistically placed cuts, some souvenir scars—and if she got over her terror she might even get off on her fantasy come true of being licked, sucked, and invaded by several of the elite members of the club.

  She also might get any number of STDs and eventually die as a result. She sounded awfully young. Why did kids take these chances?

  Jack pushed and flowed with the rest, thrusting one drunken girl to the side, grabbing another from the midst of the melee and passing her off via his other arm, throbbing or no, before she went down under the wave. The bouncers moved fast with whips and bludgeons to control the mob, but not fast enough for the pushiest, who crowded the back hall. Shouting for blood, they surrounded a screeching, naked girl being hauled on a leash toward a private room where only the elite were allowed.

  “Help me, please!” the girl shrieked. “I didn’t sign up for this. They sold me to this club!”

  Sold? He’d heard about this, but he’d never found one in time. So far, he’d only rescued the occasional screamer who’d signed up for a scene and then changed her mind.

  Sold, sold, sold…An ecstatic hiss snaked through the crowd.

  Jack moved up behind two of the regulars. In his sleaziest murmur, he asked, “That true? They really bought her, or is it just a gimmick?”

  “What I heard,” one dude said.

  “For a fucking fortune,” the other guy said, awe in his voice.

  So…maybe, maybe not.

  “Blood,” somebody growled behind him. Another dude took up
the chant, and a woman’s shrill voice joined in. Calls for blood bounced off the walls, punctuated by the girl’s sobs and screams. “Somebody save me! Oh, God, have pity on me.”

  “No pity,” responded the growler, and the crowd took up the cry, and it might just be a performance, but…

  “Fuck,” Jack said, and went into action. Camoing as best he could while moving, he scrambled into the darkened private room amongst the leaders of the crowd, ducking the bludgeons, shoving toward the stage. Here he had room to maneuver. The crowd leaders would be allowed to stay; some might even be accepted into the elite, depending on how they handled themselves. Everyone else was slammed out into the hall to be driven like animals back to the dance floor.

  Two burly men dressed only in loincloths hoisted the squalling girl onto the stage and tied her arms to a bar above her head. A single spotlight haloed her, shimmered over her glistening tits and ass, casting the surrounding stage into even deeper shadow. Another man, hooded executioner-style, strolled into the light, sharpening a long knife with slow, sinister strokes. No telling what was planned here. If they’d paid for her, they would do whatever they damn well pleased.

  Judging by the mood in the room, they would do what they pleased regardless.

  Jack slipped behind the stage, scoped the room’s rear exit and the narrow hallway beyond, then semicamoed through the darkness onto the stage. The guys in the loincloths were spreading the girl’s legs. It was now or never.

  He memorized the setup, raised the gun, and fired. The spotlight shattered. With his weaker hand, Jack stowed the gun in his pocket; with the stronger hand he swiped the knife as his foot connected behind the executioner’s knees. Two swift strokes while the audience hollered and the big guys blundered in the dark, and the girl was free. Jack grabbed her as she fell, half carrying, half dragging her through the backdrop.