by Mark Henwick
“She can call us from ten miles away, she’s the last of the shaman-Adepts and she can’t give us even a pointer to what we need to do? I’m going back,” I said. The afterimage of the candle wasn’t so bright in my eyes now that I couldn’t make out the way we’d just come.
“Amber, no,” Tullah called.
But I was already moving. “If she knows this much she can just tell us what to do, instead of us blundering around in the dark.”
I ran back into the fairground, Tullah following with protests.
It had gotten darker where the booths had been. The lights from the food booths seemed to hinder rather than help.
I trotted into the area where the old van had stood. The space was empty, of course. There was one vendor left thirty yards further on. He was finishing up the last of his loading using a tiny LED flashlight mounted on his hat. I ran over to him.
“Say, you know the brown van that was over there?” I asked. “Couple of women run it and there’s a young girl, about eight, who scouts for them.”
“Oh, I know the one ya mean. Little girl, bangles, cute as a button. Doesn’t take no prisoners.”
“Yeah. Them. Where’d they go?”
He shrugged. “They gone’s all I can say. Dunno where. See ’em at fairs, time to time. They come, they go. More way of life for them than a way to sell stuff, y’know.”
“Any idea which way they went?”
He grunted and picked up another box. “Too busy packing to watch ’em, lady.”
I got the hint.
Chapter 18
“Where are we going?” Tullah said half an hour later. I was driving now.
“I feel mysteriously called,” I replied, getting her back for the whole Chatima thing. “We’re going to see someone I know who has a business around here. I’ve forgotten the exact address, but I’ll know it when I see it.”
I’d gotten off the interstate again and I was following San Mateo Boulevard south, through a district full of chain restaurants and auto sales. I was still wearing the necklace. It felt oddly heavy around my neck.
“Shouldn’t we check into a motel somewhere first?”
“No, I want to get a feel for this place before we do that.”
I took a right and followed the road down the side of a shopping mall, then right again onto a wide street with grass verges and trees, bicycle paths and a couple more small restaurants. It was close to the interstate, but discreet. There was a self-storage warehouse across the way, a dog-grooming boutique, an ocean of parking spaces, and one tan brick building illuminated by spotlights pointed up its walls. I knew I’d found it.
About fifty cars were clustered around that building, so I guessed business was reasonable.
There were few windows; if you were inside and looking out then something was going badly wrong with the club. Instead, to break up the blankness of the walls, an artistic design of intertwined brown and white lizards had been painted, circling the building at the height of about ten feet. It was cleverly done; in the uplighting, you lost a little of the detail and it made you think of naked bodies writhing together. In the daytime, hey, it was just art.
“Amber, this looks like a strip club,” Tullah said as we walked across the drop-off area and up to the front doors.
“Oh, at the very least,” I said.
The glass doors opened and a doorman with the sort of shoulders that made any jacket look too small ushered us into a plain lobby. I couldn’t say it was a warm welcome. He probably thought we didn’t look like the types to spend money inside, and he was right. I guessed that was better than being taken for working girls.
“Hi,” I said brightly. “My name’s Amber. I’m here to see Dominé.”
He blinked at the name. It looked like Dominé had kept her previous operating style; her name hadn’t been well known to patrons when she was based in Denver. Still, knowing the owner’s name wasn’t a magic way to get in. The bouncer pressed his earpiece once, nodded silently and stood in front of the inner doors with his hands held loosely at his side. His nose twitched. I was still wearing Mary’s bouquet and I must have smelled like a major disaster in a perfume factory.
Above his right shoulder a spy cam swiveled and focused its cold eye on us.
Dominé ran sex clubs. Back when I’d been released from the army, Colonel Laine had me scouring the fringes of the social scene in Denver hunting for vampires, as we thought of them then. Dominé’s Club Agonia had been flagged as a possible place they might use, and the colonel had gotten me to visit the club on their vampire-themed night.
Dominé herself had nothing to do with them, but three Matlal Athanate had visited the club. Unfortunately, the three had tipped over into rogue behavior. I’d done what I could, which ended up with my killing all three, but not before Dominé had lost two of her staff. Despite that, when she’d left, she sent me a message to contact her if I was ever down in Albuquerque. And here I was, not exactly sure of my welcome. But Dominé was sensitive to the paranormal, and I was eager to know anything she could tell me about the city.
Behind the doorman, locks clicked open.
He moved smartly to one side.
“Welcome to Club Vasana, ladies. Dante will escort you to see Dominé,” he said, opening the door for us and actually managing a smile. “I trust you’ll have a memorable evening.”
“Brace yourself,” I muttered to Tullah.
Dante was waiting for us in the indigo-carpeted hallway.
Dominé designed the most outrageous uniforms for her staff. Last time I visited her old club in Denver, the general staff, who worked the doors and the bars, had been dressed as romantic highwaymen, with black Zorro masks, velvety jackets, puffy lace cuffs and silken ruffs. The wait staff had been nearly naked in a take on BDSM cowboy porn.
Dante was positively subdued in comparison to that. She wore an Al Capone suit, chalk stripe, with big shoulders and narrow hips, complete with black silk shirt and thin white tie, though big Al wouldn’t have been able to teeter along on the pin-sharp pumps she wore. Her blue-black hair was cut short as a boy’s, and teased into an old-fashioned wave curling over her forehead.
For a moment, I wasn’t entirely sure whether Dante was he or she. The face was exquisite but androgynous. No makeup. Her face was pale, the lips unfashionably thin and the jaw strong. Something in the glossy onyx eyes made me decide to stay with she.
The voice was low but feminine. “Please,” she said quietly, “follow me.”
The main club was in the middle of the building, separated from the curving corridor by a wall of dark glass. Sounds of good dance music came through, but it all seemed a lot tamer than Club Agonia had been.
Dante turned and led us down a set of painfully white marble stairs.
A matching pair of doormen stood at the bottom, male and female, their suits the same as Dante’s. They were guarding a double set of smoked glass doors.
Dante exchanged nods with them and pushed through.
We were in the VIP section of the club, and we got the first glimpse of Club Vasana’s wait staff uniforms. They were dressed as police to complement the mobsters, naturally. That is, if police uniforms comprised mainly the peaked hat and handcuffs. Pants had shrunk till they weren’t even as much as a hand’s width top to bottom. Shirts were a white collar attached to a strip two inches wide down their fronts, with a nipple-height bar of the same size going around the back. The guys had nightsticks hidden down their pants. Maybe. And those boots; well, I didn’t know much about Albuquerque, but they were definitely not compliant with Denver PD standards.
“Oh, my God,” Tullah muttered.
The room was soundproofed from the main club, and the VIP room music was being provided live. A shock-haired redhead in a split dress the same color as her hair was performing a slow motion belly dance while laying down dreamy, smoking vocals to an old disco number. Snakes of dry ice fog floated down from the ceiling and caressed her body. She sounded like she was about to reach
orgasm at any moment.
On either side of her, wait staff couples, stripped down to thongs, danced on podiums. Or rather, they were using their bodies to apply baby oil to each other in time with the music. The podiums were harshly lit from below, giving the illusion the couples were trapped in glass cylinders.
The clientele were draped over low couches in the shadows at the sides, or dancing under the laser-slim spotlights.
We passed close by one of those dancers. She was still half-dressed in a business suit, with a pink silk blouse hanging untucked over a pencil skirt bunched up almost to her waist. This morning’s elegant hairdo was now unraveling over her shoulders.
She was firmly locked between two of the male wait staff, all oiled, gleaming muscles and slow churning hips.
From the ecstatic look on her face, I guessed she would still think it was worth it, even when she found out later that there was no way of getting the baby oil stains out of those expensive clothes of hers.
Probably just another night at Club Vasana.
And then, like a snake sliding through the layered sensations, through the hot oil and dry ice and the floral shield of Mary’s bouquet, through the adrenaline buzz of the club: another scent and presence.
“Were,” I mouthed at Tullah, as we descended a last set of steps into Dominé’s private area.
Dominé wasn’t a paranormal, but she sensed the true desires and needs of all people, paranormals included. What if she’d followed that thread down the rabbit hole? What if Club Vasana was the favored nightspot for local Were?
Just how good an idea was this?
Chapter 19
Dante knocked on an oak door at the end of a short corridor.
“Entrez.”
Dante waved us in, remaining outside to shut the door quietly behind us.
Dominé sat at her desk in a black tux and bow tie, which contrasted sharply with her thick white hair, worn loose and flowing over her shoulders. A single red rose was pinned on her lapel.
She came around the table to greet me like an old friend.
“Amber, what a wonderful surprise.” She kissed me on both cheeks and held me by the arms as she looked me over, head to toe. Her eyes still had that depthless feel I remembered, that made their gray seem almost transparent.
“Well, well, well,” she murmured, and turned. “And this is?”
“Tullah,” I said, with a little smile. “My apprentice.”
“Très intéressant. Delighted, Tullah.” They shook hands, and we sat down around her desk. The chairs were big and soft, the frames made from an unfamiliar bronze wood, and padded with leather the color of old blood.
She’d already had a bottle of champagne delivered in a bucket of ice. She popped the cork and poured three narrow glasses.
I took the opportunity to scan the area while she was distracted with the drinks. My ability to sense paranormals had expanded enormously since I’d last met her a year ago. I sniffed with my wolf nose. I reached carefully with eukori.
She felt…different. But there was no sense of Athanate or Were or Adept about her, and nothing to indicate there’d ever been Were in this office. I relaxed. A little. If I could hide my Were scent, I’d assume others could.
“Is it only a year?” Dominé said as she handed us our glasses. “You should have called. As it is, you’re lucky to have caught me. There’s not enough for me to do here. Club Vasana runs itself.” She waved a hand dismissively to indicate all the floors above us. “Next week I will be back at my new club in Los Angeles.”
“Sounds as if things are going well,” I said. “I got the meaning of Club Agonia. What’s Vasana mean?”
She laughed. “That which your subconscious desires. Or maybe you could think of it as an imprint on the soul which disposes you to certain actions. For my members, I would like it to mean the habit of pleasure.”
That tickled me, so I held my glass up and proposed a toast: “The habit of pleasure.”
We touched glasses and sipped. The champagne tasted exquisite, and I purred a little appreciation of it, which made her smile.
“But you aren’t here on vacation, are you?” she said. “Not even a study trip. You’re not looking for the pleasures my little club provides.”
“Hmm, no.”
Diana had left Denver without her kin. She’d visited Canada to finalize the Canadian Houses becoming associates of Altau. Then she’d come here, to Albuquerque, and the trail stopped. From what I understood of Athanate society, in Canada, they would have offered her their own kin. But here, where did she go for Blood? Not House Romero until she was sure of them. I doubted it was Club Vasana, but stranger things had happened to me.
Tullah had prepared a standard missing persons packet before leaving Denver. She pulled a photo of Diana out of her pocket and handed it across to Dominé.
“Our friend came to New Mexico, and now she’s missing,” I said. “There’s a small chance she might have come to a club like this.”
Dominé held the photo tilted, to catch the subdued light.
“This one I would have remembered,” she said. “And sadly, I do not.”
She handed it back and sipped her drink. “If she were merely seeking a companion, I don’t think she would have needed to put herself to the effort of visiting a club.”
It was a question, delicately phrased. I understood, if I wanted any more, I would have to be more open. My Athanate instincts were to tell her nothing, but she already knew the background from our last meeting a year ago, when I’d been a policewoman hunting the rogues in my spare time.
“She has a need for Blood,” I said, “and she might have come looking for those who provide it.”
“Ah. The secret people. And you, Amber.” She leaned forward, chin resting on her hand. “You hunted them. To protect those who could not protect themselves, you stared into the abyss. Yet you call this woman friend. I think, as the philosopher would have said, the abyss has stared back at you. You have become what you hunted.”
“I have.” I could see Tullah twitching at how open I was being with Dominé. “It turns out that the secret world is more complex than I thought.” I took another chance. “I think that’s not news to you at all. You have some unusual guests tonight, for instance.”
“Not guests at all.” She sat back, a little frown mark appearing. “Let me be completely open. I wanted to take no sides in these disputes. To protect myself and my staff, I had to.”
“You’ve made a deal with the local pack? They’re providing bodyguards?”
She appeared genuinely uncertain.
“We’re not here to take sides either, Dominé. We just want to find some friends and go back to Denver.”
She came to a decision as she poured us more champagne.
“Naturally, I’m not supposed to speak about it. Yes, I have an arrangement with the werewolves. They protect me from the vampires and the witches. I’m wondering about how useful it is now.” She made a gesture at us. “No one has come to warn me about you.”
“We’re unusual, we’re not local and I have this to confuse them.” I touched the little bouquet pinned to my jacket. “And we’d like to leave without disturbing anyone or attracting any attention to you. We’ve no interest in meeting the Were. Quite the opposite.”
She nodded, relieved.
“Are you sure about this arrangement you have with them?” I asked. The Were that Larimer had told me about didn’t sound like the kind of people Dominé should be doing business with.
“One doesn’t enjoy paying protection,” her mouth twisted in that French way that said what can you do about it, “but it’s been satisfactory.”
She opened a drawer on her desk and brought out a tourist map and marker pens. Motioning us forward, she started to color blocks of the map in green. “These streets here, there are many clubs and pubs your friend might have been advised to visit. Places one might go to meet other people without commitment.”
She changed to red. “A
nd here,” she marked a location with a red circle, “this club is where the pack meets. I understand you want to avoid them?”
“Yes. Thanks.” I looked at the red-circled club and grinned. Bot Wobbly, it said. Not a name that reached out to me. But Dominé marking it was really useful. I didn’t want to trust to Mary’s bouquet too much.
“Last thing.” I dived into my pocket for the crumpled piece of paper that Larry had given me just before he’d been captured at Cheesman Park. “Do you have any idea what this is? I think it’s supposed to tell me where to find some other friends I’m also looking for.”
It was a mass of strange, illegible squiggles and lines on both sides. I passed it over to Dominé.
She took it, squinted, and clicked her tongue in impatience. She pulled the lamp on her table closer. It was an old-fashioned banker’s lamp, with a steel cylindrical shell directing the bright light downward.
She held the paper under the lamp and turned it around and around.
“I can see nothing that makes any sense,” she said and shrugged expressively.
“May I?” Tullah reached out and took the paper.
Under the lamp, the markings on both sides were clearly visible. While we watched, Tullah tentatively folded it, pulling the paper one way, then the other. Straightened it back out. One fold, then two.
On the third attempt at a multiple fold, she stopped. What had been random lines on both sides while the paper was unfolded now joined up, as long as the light was shining through it.
“Ah,” Dominé said. “A trick. So clever.”
Unfortunately, that didn’t get us very far.
“Is that a river?” I asked. It looked like a stylized image of two large rivers being joined by a few tributaries.
“There’s a word here,” Tullah said. “VAN.”
“A particular type of van? A place name? A person’s name? Van something?” I sighed. “Good job working out the trick, but I think we should send this back for David to look at. It’s the kind of puzzle he likes.”