by James Fahy
“What?” I practically dug my heels into the floor, but to my alarm he just pulled me onwards as though I hadn’t stopped at all. My heels squeaked along the floor comically.
He pulled us into the crowd and gathered me close to him, his arms sliding around my waist. I held my hands up, ready to push him away, but under his jacket he was as immovable as stone. His chest felt cool through the t-shirt, as though he were lightly refrigerated. Not the most pertinent observation of the evening so far, I’m aware, but I admit, despite my confusion and anger I didn’t find the sensation entirely unpleasant.
“Have you lost your mind?” I shouted at him, trying to make myself heard over the din of the music. “I didn’t come here to dance with you!” He pulled me closer and practically buried his face in my neck.
“Look,” he whispered in my ear. “People are watching us. People are always watching here. Dance with me, Doctor. If we have a conversation in the middle of the club bellowing at each other, we’re both going to get in a lot of trouble. You need to act normal.”
“Nothing about this is normal,” I said. His hair was slightly brushing my lips. This was a tad more intimate than I had planned on getting with any vampire this evening.
“Trust me, you have no idea,” he said. “Your people come here to dance with my kind. To be with us, so just … be with me, okay?”
I shivered despite myself as he purred in my ear. I made a mental note to check when I got back to the lab whether there was any record of vampires releasing pheromones.
“That is the worst pick up line I ever heard,” I managed. He was ridiculously close to me. I could smell his hair, soap and something dark and oddly smoky, but not entirely unpleasant. He moved me around the dance floor. “Dance with me like your life depends on it … please.”
I felt him grin suddenly, against my neck, clearly amused by my protests even through his strange panic. He was an unusual one, that was for certain. His lips brushed close to my ear.
“It’s not just your life I’m concerned about, Doctor; my own is on the line here too now.” His hands were on my ribcage. They were large, making me feel like a child.
Okay. I desperately needed to regain the upper ground here. I slid my hands around his shoulders, convincing myself it was done reluctantly and entirely in the name of keeping up appearances for any watchful eyes, and allowed him to lead me in an ambient sway. The music had changed to something slower and trance-like, which was probably a good thing. I don’t think we could have held a clandestine conversation whilst moshing frantically.
“I gave you my number to call me, not to come here in person,” he said. His voice held nothing more than rueful remonstration. “You are surprisingly unpredictable. Why did you come. Curiosity?”
“Why not?” I said, as he turned me slowly round, his fingers playing in my hair at the nape of my neck. I was dimly aware of eyes on us. Mainly other jealous clubbers, die-hard Helsings wishing they were the one dancing with the undead, impatiently waiting their turn. So this was what the vampires did. They danced with the poor needy humans, made them feel special for a while.
“My boss,” he said simply. “That’s why not. I would have come to you. You being here, tonight, it’s very bad timing. It’s better if everyone thinks you’re just another Helsing out looking for a ride.”
“A ride?” I frowned at him, trying to ignore the strange presence radiating off him like a fever. “What exactly is it you GOs do here? You just work the room, dancing with the adoring humans who worship you? Seems a bit … cheap to me.” Allesandro was beginning to seem an awful lot like a gigolo in my eyes, which was a shame, as he really was quite striking in an otherworldly way. I realised on some level I’d been hoping for something more interesting. To my chagrin, he looked momentarily wounded at my comment, but before I could even really register that I might have said the wrong thing, his face hardened into something like cold amusement.
“You’re clearly not used to our scene, Doctor,” he said softly. “We vampires give you people what you want. Or what you think you want anyway. What’s wrong with that?”
Our impromptu dance shifted, and he twirled me away from him, then drew me back so I was leaning against him but facing away, his arms encircling me from behind.
“And what is it you think we want?” I asked. The lights flickered and strobed above us, red and white in the darkness.
“Mostly to dance, sometimes to be … tasted,” he whispered. He must have felt my body stiffen, and not in a good way. “Don’t be prudish. It’s on everyone’s mind here, trust me…” he said. “One little bite, just to see if it’s as good as they say it is. You humans are a very curious species.” He leaned in to whisper in my ear. “You would be surprised how many come back for more once they have a taste for it.”
I disentangled myself from him, turning to face him again. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted less in the world than to be bitten in the neck. “That’s not what I want,” I said. “Plus … eww!” I added for good measure.
He smirked. His eyes were still occasionally darting around the room, more subtly than before though. He was looking for someone, still nervous, still a little jumpy, even hidden here in the crowd. I wondered how long he had worked at the club, how long he had carefully honed his seductive-undead persona. And how much of it was just complete crap.
“And what it is, then, that you want?” he asked, sliding close to me again. I put my arms around his waist, trying to keep up the pretence of the perfectly-normal-for-a-vampire-nightclub dance. I mentally screamed at myself: dear God, woman, don’t grab his ass!
“What do I want?” I said out loud. “Information. What the hell is going on? Who are you? Why do you want to speak to me? Everything you said to me the other night … things have happened since then. Really bad things.” I narrowed my eyes, trying to read his reaction, and failing. “But I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that you know about them.” I thought back to the video on the DataStream, the mad ramblings of the angry voice. “What do you know about the sunrise?” I asked him.
He looked at me quizzically. “That it isn’t my favourite part of the day, I guess.” He looked suddenly thoughtful. “How did you get in here anyway? Sanctum is invitation only, and I already told you I didn’t get any message left by you.”
This hadn’t occurred to me until now. “Well, someone got the message,” I said. “I was on the bouncer’s guest list. I don’t know who the woman who answers your calls passed my message to if it wasn’t you, but whoever it was, they happily put me on the…”
“Menu?” he finished. His charm face had fallen again and he looked concerned once more. He kept momentarily forgetting to smoulder. It was unsettling.
“I know who. My boss.” He looked irritated. “For future reference, Doctor, nothing that happens in Sanctum goes unnoticed by the boss. If he let you in, and knows you were calling for me, then we could both be in a hell of a lot more trouble than I thought.”
He began to lead me off the dancefloor, away from the bar. “Come, we need to get you out of here, and quietly.”
“I’m not going anywhere until I’ve got some kind of answers from you,” I protested. “Look, I don’t even know you. I don’t know anything about you, except that you seem to be some kind of undead professional dance-card with a sideline in nibbling the neck of any lonely human willing to pay handsomely for it. Which in my mind by the way is pretty much prostitution, and also incidentally illegal.”
“I don’t sleep with the clients,” he sneered. “I just dance and feed. It’s what we do here. You don’t need to approve of it. And there’s nothing illegal about a consensual act between two adults, even if they are different species.” He glanced back at me. “And you are leaving. Before he spots you. I will call you tomorrow, we will meet, and I’ll we will talk then.” He was practically dragging me through the crowd now, into one of the darker corners of the club.
“Before who spots me?” I asked.
“Yes, Allesandro,” a voice in front of us said as we reached the edge of the dancefloor. “Where are you rushing off to with this pretty young thing? I’m fairly certain you don’t get off shift until two.”
Alessandro stopped short like a deer caught in headlights. His hand gripped mine so tightly in a spasm he almost broke my fingers. I didn’t know vampires could even be scared, but the one holding me possessively right now was radiating at least a very serious level of controlled unease.
The man who had spoken, who had appeared out of nowhere and blocked our way, was not a man at all. It was another vampire.
Tall and thin, he was dressed in an extremely expensively tailored dove grey suit. Slender lines, tastefully cut to his whip-like body. He loomed over us, looking like a stretched shadow. His hair was short and styled, his face angular, strangely ageless, and slightly amused. His eyes very piercing. If David Bowie had been a vampire, he would be this one.
The presence radiating from this GO was so much stronger than Allesandro’s, it almost drowned his out completely like a bad radio signal. This vampire was someone powerful and very old. I could feel it pouring off him. He was a good few inches taller than my dance partner, and he smiled down at the two of us like a wolf.
I didn’t like the look in his bright eyes. He looked a little fevered, like the too-intense television evangelists you saw on the Datastream. His face held a permanent wry smirk, the way he leaned over us like a strangely delicate but very poisonous spider.
“Rushing off?” Allesandro said, recovering on the spot. He smirked, like a naughty schoolboy caught in the act, his game face back in place. “Nowhere boss, just out for a little … private time with a client.”
Allesandro’s boss could not have looked less convinced. The unearthly figure tilted his head quizzically, like a curious cat. His smile had not faded, but it didn’t reach his wide eyes. He was staring at me, into me. It was hard to meet those eyes, and I’m not easily cowed. When I say it was hard, I mean physically hard, in the same way staring directly at the sun hurts your retinas. His look actually felt as though it burned. I wanted away from him on a primal level.
“Your personal recreation will have to wait,” he said, still smiling at the two of us.
He gestured to the dance floor with an extravagant sweep of his long thin arm. His fingers splayed like the legs of a white crab.
“Come two am, and your time is your own, Allesandro,” he said.
His good-natured smile dialled down by a tiny notch, as his eyes narrowed, almost playfully.
“Until then, you work. For me. You seem to need reminding of that lately.”
His eager gaze rolled over the assembled clubgoers.
“There are many fine folk here just dying for a moment of your godlike attention. I suggest you stop hogging the clients and get back to caring and sharing.”
He reached past Allesandro in a fluid motion, who only now I noticed had somehow moved so as to place himself between me and the stylishly statuesque master vampire. The older vampire ignored this obvious body language and quite simply took my hand out of that of my companion, claiming me for himself.
His hand was cold. His palm felt unnaturally smooth, as though any lines had been smoothed and worn away. The vampire plucked me from Allesandro’s grip with a worrying ease and grace, as though he were cutting in at a formal dance. My vampire watched helplessly as I was pulled past him and into the arms of his boss, the man who had apparently intercepted my message and seen fit to allow me on the guest list.
“Fear not, young man, I will be happy to entertain your young lady until then,” the older vampire said, humour evident in his voice.
He practically twinkled. Sweet and chipper on the surface, but the skin crawling up my arm at his touch made me think of him like a sour sugar cube with poison under the sweet dusting.
“I’m sure we can find something to talk about, Miss…?”
“Harkness,” I replied, unable to do anything else. “Phoebe.”
“A pleasure, Phoebe,” he said, with almost convincing olde worlde charm. “I am Giovannibatiste Gian Michelle Valeta Cordina de Medica. The owner of this little corner of the underworld, and of others. Please, call me Gio.”
He glanced at Allesandro, as though surprised to see him still standing there. Something in his too-bright stare hardened.
“Two am, my friend,” he said. “Do what I pay you to do, the time will fly. No rest for the wicked, as they say.”
Allesandro smiled and nodded in almost convincing respectful acquiescence. He clearly had no other option. His eyes flicked to mine briefly as he stepped away.
Was he shooting me a warning, or an apology, or a promise he’d come back and rescue me from the master vampire who had just claimed me? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know him well enough to read his facial expressions. Hell, I didn’t know him at all.
What I did know was that given the choice between him and the vampire I now stood with, I would have leapt on Allesandro’s back and let him carry me piggy-back from the club.
He was swallowed by the crowd a moment later, as the tall, suited, and extremely intense vampire Clan-master turned me away from the dance-floor like a ballerina on point. I was left alone with the master vampire.
Giovannibatiste Ridiculously-Complicated-Surname, lord of Sanctum, master and employer of my one vampire contact, and serious creep-show, gestured to a velvet lined booth. They were arranged around the walls here, away from the fury and hubbub of the main floor, like an old-time American diner; private areas to rest from throwing your body around the place and concentrate on the serious task of getting hammered, I guessed. I would have loved the pre-war retro if I hadn’t been in present company.
“Shall we sit and talk?” he suggested genially. “I simply must know everything about you.”
There was bite beneath his polite words. I clearly didn’t have a choice.
I may not have had much personal interaction with vampires or other GOs before tonight, but in my line of work, I had studied them and their ways. I knew something about all the GOs.
The Pale, our human-created mutant killing machine plague, were my personal specialty, but I had also studied, for instance, the pack structures of the Tribals (they were matriarchal and deeply loyal) and the strange abilities of those we called Bonewalkers, modern day necromancers with the ability to reanimate the dead for short periods almost as if they moved the corpses back in time by a short amount.
Some of the more powerful Bonewalkers had the ability to translocate, which essentially meant they could move something – a person, an object, on occasion a whole building – from one place to another. I had spent two years in college trying to figure out how this worked, and had failed. Bonewalker lore was rare.
As for vampires, I knew this much: they existed as a society alongside our own, with its own rules, which had been around easily as long as our own had. It had just been hiding in the shadows before the wars. They operated on a very formal clan structure.
The older vampires were the more powerful, they gathered lessers around them. The ‘clan’ formed in this way, giving each individual the protection of the whole. Succession and advancement in the clan was largely through duelling or outright violence. It was very rare, however, for any clan member to rise up and attempt a coup of their existing master. The older vampires were old for a reason: they were strong. They held their place of power simply by being the strongest, most likely to rip the insubordinate head off any sons-of-bitches you could imagine.
When you’re immortal, staying the MD is a long term career choice.
What all this meant was that Gio was Allesandro’s master. He didn’t just employ him, he practically owned him, along with every other vampire who worked at Sanctum.
I also now knew that Allesandro’s note, slipped to me at the lecture, had been an entirely private enterprise. My announcing myself at the club had clearly intrigued his boss, who had lain in wait for my arrival.
> Smart move there, Phoebe, I chided myself. God, I would make a terrible spy.
I didn’t know what was between the two of them, the vampire ‘escort’ and his master, but it had been pretty chilly. And I sure as hell didn’t like being in the middle of it.
The booth to which the oddly ethereal Gio led me contained two other people – one male, one female. I glanced at them as we approached. The woman was a vampire, small and doll-like; her long dark hair like a curtain of ironed silk, a severe blunt fringe making her look like a glamorous, if slightly off the rails, schoolgirl. She was dressed like every other clubber here – sparsely and mainly in leather. She smiled as we approached. The smile turned up the corners of her very red mouth but nothing else on her face moved.
She was nowhere near as old or powerful as Gio, or even Allesandro. I was beginning to get an instant feel for their levels of presence, their vampire auras. I didn’t kid myself though, she still could have snapped my neck with one of her dainty hands if she chose to.
The other person lolling in the booth was male, young. He must have been barely eighteen, but had the kind of peaches-and-cream skin and floppy blonde pageboy hair which made him appear even younger. He was human, and looked utterly dazed, blinking his large Bambi eyes at Gio with a kind of hungry hero-worship as we slid into the booth – myself beside the girl vampire, Gio opposite me beside the boy.
“Phoebe, these are friends of mine,” Gio said politely. “Jessica here, one of mine, she works here, of course, and this…” he turned to the boy affectionately. “This is one of my absolute favourite clients, Oscar.”
The vampire leaned in and ran his thumb lightly against the young man’s pouty bottom lip playfully. The kid looked delirious, his eyes rolling up in his head at the touch. I wondered if he was either extremely drunk or drugged out of his mind. “Isn’t he just adorable?” Gio said indulgently, cupping the boy’s face with one hand in a proprietary manner, as though he were showing off a favourite knick knack. The vampire smiled over at me.