Bad Blood

by David Bussell

  I emerged through the service entrance and followed the directions Anastasia had given me to the back of house changing room. Unlike the rest of the Pearl’s decor, which was all heavy baroque drapes, velvet wallpaper, and phallic pink candles, the backstage area was strictly functional. The changing room was tatty, with a threadbare carpet, cracked mirrors, and blown light bulbs. A couple of half-naked girls occupied the room, adjusting their wigs and painting their faces. They barely glanced up at me as I entered, suggesting that The Pink Pearl’s staff turnover must have been pretty high.

  I went to Anastasia’s wardrobe and selected the evening’s outfit, a figure-hugging black dress with a neckline that dipped below the navel.

  ‘This had better be worth it,’ I muttered to myself, stepping into the thing and contorting my body to make it fit. I looked like an off-brand Elvira.

  After that I put on some slap, bunged in the chompers, and headed off to meet the client. Anastasia had instructed me where to go and what to expect there, but no amount of warning could have prepared me for what I found.

  I pushed open a heavy, wooden door to discover that the area of the bordello I was working had been done up to look like Dracula’s castle. The theme room’s walls were made of fibreglass stone and studded with flaming torches set in fake iron sconces. On the floor was a giant, bearskin rug, and on top of that was a four poster bed made of scalloped wood and hung with a red velvet canopy. Rattling a hidden subwoofer was the soundtrack to Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

  Yeah, when it came to his fetish, this guy really went all in.

  ‘Hello,’ said a phlegmy Russian voice as a liver-spotted old man in his underwear stepped out from behind a folding oriental screen.

  Vasily Alimov.

  It was obvious right away why the bloke had to pay to get his rocks off. His figure, which I imagine was once shaped like a lowercase d, had, in time, progressed fully to the upper case. He had eight-pointed stars inked onto each of his clavicles, while elsewhere on his bloated torso were swamp-coloured tattoos of angels and crucifixes. His face was disgusting. He had piggy eyes and a hook nose stippled with thousands of blackheads. If you were to wring his head through a mangle, you’d have ended up with a shot glass of the foulest substance known to man or beast.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What happened to Anastasia?’

  ‘Do not vorry about Anastasia,’ I purred, aiming for sexy but sounding more like the Count from Sesame Street. ‘Let me take care of you tonight.’

  I flashed my fangs at him and ran a tongue down each of my eye teeth. He looked me up and down and raised a bushy silver eyebrow. ‘Oh, what the hell,’ he said, his eyes glued to my chest. ‘How does expression go? “A change is as good as a rest”?’ He laughed and I willed the muscles in my face to form a smile. ‘Speaking of rest...’ he said, heading for the bed, stretching out on the mattress and kicking off his underwear.

  My first thought upon seeing him settle between the bed’s four sturdy posts was to wonder how I’d go about securing him to them. I’d come equipped with handcuffs but I only had the one pair, and doubted they were big enough for the job. I briefly considered using the bed sheets to tie him up, but that would have involved tearing the thing into strips, which seemed laborious and likely to frustrate the old man, who was already struggling to maintain the little (and I do mean little) arousal he’d brought with him.

  Then I saw the manacles.

  Attached to the far wall of the room were a set of thick iron bracelets, the kind you’d find a cobwebbed skeleton dangling from in an Abbott and Costello movie. I circled around to them and tinkled the chains, offering Alimov a sly wink. ‘Vell?’

  ‘But I just got comfortable,’ he kvetched. He sounded like a grandpa who’d just collapsed into his favourite chair, only for his nagging wife to tell him the bin needed taking out.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t van’t to play?’ I asked, jutting out my bottom lip kittenishly and batting my eyelashes.

  Realising that he was passing up a good thing, Alimov sat up with a grunt, swung his legs off the bed, and made it to his feet. ‘Not for long though, okay? My legs are not what they used to be.’ He stroked my cheek and I felt my skin crawl. The smell of his breath was like a freshly-cracked sarcophagus.

  He held his hands up over his head compliantly and I snapped on the manacles. ‘There’s a good boy,’ I said, checking them until I was satisfied that he was secure.

  His body shuddered and the coat button he called a dick twitched. ‘What are you going to do to me, Mistress?’ he breathed.

  I smiled, showed him the whites of my fangs, and leaned in oh-so-slowly.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he moaned. ‘Bleed me, Mistress. I am your humble vessel. Take your fill of my vitae.’

  I leaned in closer still. I was inches from his throat, my breath hot on his neck, the tips of my fangs grazing his flesh… when I tilted my head back and delivered a heatbutt right to the middle of his face.

  I heard the back of his skull bounce off the fibreglass wall with a satisfying crack. His nose was shattered, his chin dripping blood.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the old man wailed, his hands searching for his face but kept pinned to the wall by chains.

  From my garter I produced a stiletto knife and held it to his crotch.

  ‘Please, no,’ he hissed from between my fingers. ‘Anything but that. Anything but my manhood.’

  ‘Is that what that is?’ I replied, cocking my head. ‘And there’s me thinking you had chewing gum stuck in your pubes.’

  ‘Why are you doing this? Who sent you?’

  ‘I’ll give you one guess.’

  His eyes widened further. ‘I promise, I did not know the cocaine had been cut with rat poison!’

  ‘Okay, I’ll give you a second guess, and a little help. You abducted their son.’

  ‘I what?’ he spat.

  ‘Don’t act coy,’ I shot back, stabbing a finger into his breastbone for emphasis. ‘I know you ordered the kidnap.’

  ‘I did not, I swear. I do not know who you are talking about!’

  I patted his genitals with the side of my knife. ‘Come on, just tell me where he is. Where did the Red-Eyed Man take him?’

  ‘Who?’

  Okay now I was getting pissed off. I lifted the knife from his junk and stabbed it into his left arm. He howled and shook in anguish.

  ‘The Red Eyed-Man! Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know! What red-eyed man?’

  I heard a polite cough and whirled about to find a young man stood in the doorway behind me. At least I think he was a man. He had slicked-back hair and wore a burgundy smoking jacket accessorised with lots of necklaces; so many that he looked like an effete Mr T, only instead of gold, he wore pearls. His sharp cheekbones were highlighted all the more by immaculately applied makeup, as were his smoky grey eyes, which met mine with a sort of curious amusement.

  I continued to hold Alimov at knifepoint. ‘Don’t come any closer,’ I warned the stranger.

  ‘I don’t believe you’re one of mine,’ replied the peculiar man, holding his ground. ‘No, I’d certainly remember you.’

  Alimov strained at his bonds, screaming until spit flew. ‘Get me down from here! This whore bitch motherfucker is trying to kill me!’

  Without turning to look at him I stabbed the knife into his other arm, giving him a matching wound. ‘Now you’ve got the set,’ I said.

  ‘Kill you! I kill you!’

  The young man put a finger to his lips, and to my surprise, Alimov hushed. He continued to scream, his face coloured beetroot red, but no sound came out.

  He’d been silenced with magic.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked the stranger. ‘What are you?’

  He laughed. ‘Oh, that is rich. You break into my house, threaten my client, and you ask who I am?’ He look a long drag on a jade cigarette holder and breathed out an artful plume of smoke. ‘Very well. My name is Madam Ambrose. I am an incubus.’

  That
added up to nothing good. An incubus is a male succubus, and the most famous succubus I knew of was called Anya, who ran the London fetish club known as The Den.

  Madam Ambrose saw me putting the pieces together. ‘Yes, that’s right. Oops.’

  Anya and her family were incredibly powerful—ancient, well-connected, one of the strongest of the U.K.’s Uncanny creatures—and I’d trespassed on their property and stabbed up one of their guests.

  ‘This isn’t about you or your family,’ I said. ‘I’m on a job. This is between me and the old man.’

  ‘Be that as it may, you accosted him here in my place of business, so you’ll understand if I take a vested interest. The putrid chap has provided this establishment with a pretty penny over the years.’

  The old man continued to rage despite being kept on mute by the incubus’ magic. Tired of feeling Alimov’s spittle on the back of my neck, I returned the point of my knife to his privates, which put a swift end to his theatrics.

  ‘Tell me one thing and I’ll leave,’ I told the incubus.

  He turned a sleepy smile on me. ‘Go ahead, dear.’

  ‘Does this perv ever go in for children?’

  The incubus turned to Alimov and gave him a look that asked, ‘Do you mind me sharing your sexual proclivities with this madwoman?’

  The old man returned a panicked shake of the head.

  Madam Ambrose looked back to me with his lively grey eyes. ‘No,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘Mr Alimov’s kink is as predictable as it is regular. Every Friday he comes here, and every time to play victim to a bloodsucker. Now, does that answer your question?’

  ‘Wait, go back. Did you say every Friday? What about Friday 17th November?’

  The date the Goloffi kid was abducted.

  Madam Ambrose sighed. ‘We don’t exactly keep a guest book here so you’ll have to take my word for it, but yes, even then.’

  Well that didn’t mean much. It made sense that he’d organise it on a day he’d have an alibi.

  ‘Can you make him tell me something?’ I asked.

  The incubus smiled. ‘And why would I do that?’

  ‘To satisfy my curiosity?’

  ‘Now, you have heard what that did to the cat, have you not?’

  ‘Made it more enlightened so it could leave without causing any trouble?’

  The incubus was grinning now. Hey, I could turn on the charm when I needed to.

  ‘What is your question?’ he enquired.

  ‘Ask him if he had anything to do with the kidnap of a child a week ago.’

  The incubus looked past me to the naked, gross old man chained panting and bleeding to the wall. I turned to him, his big, wet eyes met mine, and he sneered.

  ‘Tell her,’ the incubus insisted.

  ‘I did not,’ Alimov spat.

  ‘There you are. Enlightened?’

  ‘How do I know he was telling the truth?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I asked him, and he knows what happens to those who lie to me.’

  I nodded. You’d be insane to cross an incubus, which made me at least a little mental.

  No, Alimov wasn’t the one.

  I placed the dagger back in my garter. ‘Thank you for your time,’ I told the incubus, ‘I’ll be off now.’

  ‘The pleasure was all mine,’ he replied, wearing the devil of all grins. ‘Feel free to visit again if you ever want to make some money.’

  I removed my fangs and tossed them on the bed. ‘Thanks, but I’m done playing dress-up.’

  He placed an arm around my shoulders. ‘There are plenty of other creatures you can pretend to be if you don’t like vampires, my dear. Why, there’s a busty little thing with a stuck-on fish tail doing laps of the mermaid tank next door, and she’ll barely be able to swim for all the coins in it by the time the sun comes up. All I’m saying is, have a think about it.’

  ‘As soon as I lose any and all self-respect, I’ll give you a call. So you’ll be hearing from me in the next week or so, most likely.’

  Madam Ambrose laughed and I headed in the direction of the door, moving slowly, struggling to believe that an incubus was letting me go unharmed, expecting him to pounce on me at any second.

  Instead, as I backed out of the door, I saw him turn to the bloated old man. ‘It seems you have become a little too familiar with the specifics of my business, Mister Alimov...’ He drew a bowie knife from the inside of his smoking jacket, at the same time dispelling the magic holding Alimov’s tongue. ‘I regret to inform you that your membership at The Pink Pearl is hereby terminated.’

  The Russian’s screams followed me all the way out of the building. It was the scream of a cow in an abattoir.

  7

  The blue-grey light of dawn was approaching as I was sat in my car outside the Pearl, striking Alimov off my list. One down, lots to go. I didn’t feel downhearted, this was all a process. The chances of the perpetrator being the first person I stuck a knife in were slim at best. Seemed like I’d inadvertently got the old perv killed, though, which wasn’t exactly the plan. Oh well, couldn’t have happened to a grosser bloke.

  I looked up from the list to see a vehicle pull up alongside me, black as a slab of volcanic glass. The Galoffi limo.

  Their head henchman leered out of a rear passenger window at me, eyes black, nose bridged by a big white plaster. He saw what I was wearing and laughed. ‘Christ, you’d have to pay me to go anywhere near that.’

  ‘That’s a bit rich coming from a bloke who looks like Adam Ant fucked a panda.’

  His smile flattened then went away. ‘The Galoffis want a word. Now.’

  The car pulled off; my cue to follow.

  I sighed and turned the key in the ignition. This was turning into a long old night.

  Whether the Galoffis had planted a bug on me or they were using some kind of voodoo to track my location I didn’t know, but I wasn’t loving the way their goon squad seemed able to track me down at the drop of a hat. I made a mental note to carry out a sweep once I got the chance, and scrub myself off their radar.

  I followed the limo to the Galoffi dwelling, their gothic mansion in Rottingdean, and passed between the impressive wrought iron gates that bore the family crest. I parked up on the gravel forecourt and changed back into my civvies before joining the Galoffis in their back room.

  The brother-sister/man-wife/big ball of icky were attired impeccably as always, Millie dressed like a villain from an old Disney movie, Layton looking like Satan’s own groomsman.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to ease up on the reins if you want me to find out what happened to your boy. I can’t do my job if you’re going to keep—’

  Layton placed a matchbox in front of me. ‘Open it.’

  ‘Aw, but I didn’t get you anything.’

  I could see now that Millie was crying. I reached for the matchbox, pulled it towards me, slid it open.

  Inside was an ear. A very small ear.

  ‘Our men found it sat on the porch an hour ago.’

  I studied the ear. It definitely belonged to an infant. ‘You’re sure it’s his?’

  Layton nodded.

  ‘How did the person who dropped it off get past your gate? Your security?’

  His expression greyed even further. ‘Ms Banks, people in our world can open portals to other realms and conjure fire from their fists. You think having a matchbox appear on a porch to be beyond them?’

  ‘Fair point. What about a note?’

  He handed over a small slip of paper rolled into a tube. I unfurled it and read the spidery scrawl inside.

  MORE TO COME

  ‘Is this it?’ I asked, flapping the scrap of paper. ‘No ransom demand? No mention of money?’

  Layton shook his head and I saw a tear spill down his cheek. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. ‘My son. My only living son. All this should be his one day. One father to their son after another. A chain. My whole life has been about building this busines
s, this family, ever stronger, ready to hand it over when my time comes, and now...’

  To my surprise, he quick-stepped across the room and pushed through the door into the hallway, sparing us his sorrow. The henchman followed.

  Millie was in a deep state of shock, too anguished to even cry, her knees giving way and dropping her down onto a chaise longue. I didn’t know what to say to her, but I knew how she felt. How I felt when James was taken from me: all shattered, my guts on the floor. Like someone had taken the world apart and put it back together wrong.

  I took a seat beside her. People reached out and comforted one another in moments like these, I knew that. I’d seen it in films. Didn’t mean I understood how to do it though. How to show I cared. I wasn’t equipped. If the Banks family had a crest, it would be a pair of plugged ears and a bottle full of feelings.

  ‘Are you, sort of... okay?’ I asked.

  Ooh, move over Oprah.

  Millie continued to shake, her shoulders wracking up and down, breath snatched in pained gasps.

  ‘I get that this is upsetting,’ I went on.

  Millie pounded a fist into the couch. ‘You don’t know anything.’

  I placed a hand on her arm. It was weird. Not just because it went against every fibre of my being, but because I was providing emotional support to a gangster’s moll.

  ‘I lost someone in my family too,’ I explained. ‘Someone I loved a lot.’

  ‘Who?’

  The fact that the Galoffis even knew my name was more than I wanted them to have on me, without them knowing my family history too. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘What matters is getting your boy back.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, burying her beehive in my chest. ‘Thank you.’

  I looked to the door Layton had left through. ‘How do you think your brother/lover is handling things?’

  ‘He’s doing his best,’ Millie replied. ‘This is the first I’ve seen him break. Layton’s a rock, always has been.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Ever since we were little, he’s always been there for me.’ She chuckled at a memory. ‘When I was eight years old a boy in my class showed an interest in me, and Layton beat him to death with a brick. He really is the best big brother ever.’