Paint It Black (18 page)

The doorman at the No Exit is dressed in black leather chaps, a suede jockstrap, and a leather and chrome-studded slave harness.

He scowls at me and lifts his hand to block my path.

'Seventy-five dollars t'get in.'

'Jen sent me,' I reply, holding up my invitation so he can see it.

The doorman jerks back his hand as if I'd scalded him, eyes widening. 'I'm sorry, milady! I ... I didn't realize! Welcome to No Exit. You'll want the second door on the right after the ladies' room, in back of the main hall.'

I breeze past him into a cinder-block antechamber filled with gym lockers. I pass through a doorway hung with black velvet curtains and find myself headed down a concrete corridor lit by lurid red spots that make everything seem awash in blood. Fifty feet later there is a heavy vault door. I turn the handle and the door hisses open on pneumatic pistons. The sound of the Cure amplified beyond human endurance pours into the confines of the corridor.

The main hall of No Exit is large enough to park a jet.

The cinder-block and poured-concrete floor motif is continued, accompanied by standard disco fog and laser light displays.

There is a long bar made from cinder-blocks and glass bricks occupying most of the west wall, with a handful of tables and booths nearby. There is an elevated stage on the north wall, with a set of stocks, a flogging post, and a rack of whips and chains.

Close to a hundred people, all in various stages of undress, wander the floor. Some have black leather masks over their heads, some wear harnesses, and one patron walks around with a chrome bit in his mouth, the reins held by a pudgy woman stuffed into a Merry Widow corset. All of them, to my surprise, are human.

I make my way to the back of the club. The ladies' room is a toilet placed in the middle of a waist-high corral of cinderblocks.

The door I was instructed to find is guarded by a monstrously huge specimen wearing leather pants, a muscle shirt, and a zippered leather face mask. Try as it might the hood cannot

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) conceal the fact that the bouncer is an ogre.

'Jen sent me,' I say, flashing the invitation.

The ogre grunts something and stands aside, swiping a magnetic key through the computer lock that secures the door. I glimpse a stairway leading to the basement. Once I'm inside, the ogre closes the door behind me, leaving me to whatever fate I've walked into.

I hear music - not disco or techno or rave, but the strains of Mozart - as I climb down the stairs. At the bottom is yet another secured door, this one guarded by an ogre too misshapen to ever be mistaken for human, with or without a bondage mask His single brow furrows and he rubs his lower left-hand tusk as he studies the invitation I hand him. In his huge, gnarled hand it looks like a playing card.

'Jen sent me,' I explain.

The ogre makes a snorting noise like that of a warthog and unlocks the final door with a key the size of a tire iron. 'Have a good night' it oinks.

The interior of the club is dark, lit by low-wattage rose-colored bulbs so the human attendants don't trip and fall as they work the room. There is a lot of black velvet drapery, antique statuary and Victorian furniture in evidence. But the first thing that catches my notice upon entering are the people hanging from the ceiling. Some are men, some are women, some are children.

Almost every major ethnic group seems to be represented.

They are all naked and suspended by piano wire from hooks fixed in their flesh. Some are wrapped in barbed wire. Some have been flayed, peeled to expose the muscles that lurk beneath their skin. All of them are alive.

Something warm and wet strikes my hand. It's blood. I look up to see a partially skinned young man suspended directly overhead.

The skin on his legs and feet has been carefully pared away, leaving only the bone. He smiles down at me like a medieval martyr, his eyes going in and out of focus as he speaks.

'Welcome to the Black Grotto, milady.'

The other human chandeliers take up his greeting, their voices slurred and dreamy.

This is my kind of place, purrs the Other.

I'm too distracted by the chorus of flayed cherubs to try and squash the Other's voice, so I lick the blood from my hand and move on. A woman encased completely in black latex, except for her throat her arms stuffed into a single glove and bound behind her back, walks up to me, accompanied by the

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) whir of a chain being paid out. I notice her dog collar is attached to a spool of stainless-steel chain set into the wall. Her exposed jugular is outfitted with a phlebotomist's shunt.

A slender young man dressed in lollipop panties and a starched pinafore steps forward, holding a solid-gold serving tray. On the tray are a syringe and a Baccarat crystal wineglass. I stare at the syringe, then back at the shunt set in the woman's neck. I cannot see her face - it is obscured by a leather bondage mask, the mouth zippened shut from the outside. Her eyes are wet and gleam like a trapped animal's.

I shake my head and turn away, both disgusted and excited by the display around me. In one corner of the room is a string quartet playing Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. Upon closer examination I can see that their eyelids are sewn shut and their mouths filled with ball gags.

There is a scream from elsewhere in the room and a naked boy no older than ten runs out from a curtained booth, blood streaming from the wound in his neck. A vampire dressed in the cassock and collar of a priest darts after him, hissing angrily. One of the attendants grabs the frightened boy by the hair and slams him against the wall, dazing the child. As I move forward to intervene, the priest-vampire slaps the attendant so hard the blow snaps his neck. The naked, bleeding boy, sniffling and knuckling his teary eyes, runs forward to embrace the vampire. The priest coos endearments and strokes the boy's hair, all the while leading him back to the curtained booth. The string ensemble switches from Mozart to the Kronos Quartet's arrangement of 'Purple Haze'. An ogre shambles out of the shadows and picks up the body of the dead attendant as if it weighs no more than a suitcase, tossing it over one stooped shoulder.

'I see you decided to come check out the scene.'

Jen is standing off to one side, watching me with a twist of a smile on his lips. He has his left arm draped over the narrow shoulders of a naked girl who looks to be about six or seven. The girl's eyes are heavily painted, like those of an Egyptian priestess, and her hairless labia are sewn shut.

Jen's smile disappears and he jerks his head in the direction of one of the curtained alcoves. 'My employers would speak with you, milady.'

'Your employers? And who might they be?'

Jen lifts the heavy velvet curtain at the mouth of the alcove and gestures for me to enter. Their most Serene Majesties Baron Luxor and the Lady Nuit'

The names sound familiar, although I cannot place them.

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) They are Nobles, that much is certain. In the twenty years I've spent in search of Morgan, I've only come across one other vampire of power -- Pangloss, Morgan's own vampiric sire. Most of the bloodsuckers I've dealt with are exceptionally minor league, many no more than brain-dead revenants. Now I'm being brought before not one, but two Nobles. I make sure my switchblade is at the ready before entering.

Inside the audience chamber is an antique love seat on which is seated a male vampire, naked except for a black leather pouch, garter belt, black silk stockings, and matching patent-leather pumps. His hair, shaped to resemble a shaggy Beatles cut, frames a long face that has neither eyebrows nor lashes. The vampire's flesh is so pale it seems translucent like that of a finely polished opal. A human male wrapped in a full bodysuit of latex lies curled at the vampire's feet like an adoring hound. I shift my vision into the Pretender spectrum in order the gauge the vampire lord's aura. It is a powerful one, surging and bubbling around his head like boiling sugar.

'You are Baron Luxor?'

The Noble's lips pull up in the approximation of a smile.

'And you are the Blue Woman?"

'I am Sonja Blue, if that's what you mean.'

Luxor sits up slowly, his eyes never leaving me. No doubt he's assessing me as well. 'We ordered Jen to keep an eye out for you. The old man told us you'd be coming sooner or later.'

'The old man?'

'Pangloss.' Luxor stands up, wobbling slightly on four-inch heels.

'He was the one who told us about you - that you were the one who marked Morgan, the one who devoured his chimera--'

'You keep saying "we", but I only see one of you. Where is this Lady Nuit Jen mentioned?'

Luxor smiles and turns to face me, flashing a brief glimpse of fang. 'Oh, she is here. She is always here.'

Suddenly Luxor's opalescent flesh starts to twitch and ripple, as the muscles underneath begin to dance. The vampire lord's waist seems to draw in on itself, as if cinched by an invisible hand. The muscles lining his chest slowly ripen and swell, blossoming into small, but serviceable, breasts. The leather pouch covering Luxor's sex begins to deflate as he retracts his testes.

The bones in his face squelch and groan as they mold themselves into softer, more feminine aspects. A thick nest of coppery curls sprouts from his scalp, spilling down to cover his shoulders. I have to admit I'm impressed. Such tightly controlled shape-shifting is not easy, even amongst Nobles.

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) Lady Nuit claps her hands and the latex-coated slave jumps up and scurries off into the shadows, returning a moment later with a silk kimono decorated with butterflies. She stands there, arms outstretched, and allows him to dress her.

'Why were you looking for me?'

'We were told you were a creature of great power. A creature of... purpose. And that you would see the Lord of the Morning Star dead.'

'What's that got to do with you?'

Lady Nuit produces a syringe and sticks it into a shunt that juts out of the latex slave's elbow. As she speaks, she draws quarter of a pint of blood and decants it into a champagne flute. 'Morgan has been our enemy for centuries. Our broodlings have clashed and struggled with one another since the days of the Bourbon kings. Countless renfields have died in our service protecting us from his attacks on our person.

We would see him dead forever.'

'So?'

Lady Nuit pauses to sniff the blood she's just drained, then sips it. She smiles appreciatively and motions for me to help myself.

'Exquisite! Please, do try some. It's from my private stock, as you can see.'

It had been a couple of days since I last fed - and on animal blood, not human. I can feel my palms begin to sweat and itch as I eye the latex slave. 'N-no thank you.'

Lady Nuit studies me, rolling the champagne flute between her palms thoughtfully. 'Ah, yes ... Pangloss told us you had a peculiar attachment to humans. But you have tasted their blood, have you not?'

'Yes.'

Then why are you hesitating? All the humans you have seen here tonight came here of their own free will. They begged us to use them in such a fashion. The world is full of those who seek their own destruction. They are drawn to our kind, like moths to the flame. You know that, my dear.'

'Even the children?'

'Runaways, each and every one of them, fleeing parents and guardians far more inhumane than ourselves. They asked us for refuge, and we provide it.'

'I don't believe you.' I focus my attention on the latex slave crouched at Nuit's feet. There are control threads the color

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) of raw veins sprouting from his cowled head, leading back ,to Nuit/Luxor. With a single swipe of my mind, I sever the leash binding master to slave.

The latex slave jumps to his feet and begins screaming. He pulls off the mask shrouding his head, revealing himself to be an older man with gray hair and the look of a prosperous banker. Still shrieking, he claws at the shunt stuck in the crook of his arm, his eyes bulging out of their sockets like ping-pong balls.

'How dare you!' shrieks Lady Nuit, her bone-white cheeks marred by unbecoming raspberry blotches. She must be really pissed to get that much blood pushed into one area. 'How dare you break my leash?!'

The latex slave's body snaps like a whip as Nuit shoves her will back into him. He collapses on the floor, his lips foaming and limbs twitching spasmodically. There is a ripe, unpleasantly organic smell as he shits his suit

Nuit spins to face me, her eyes flashing red, fangs bared in ritual challenge. She is so flustered she's lost control of her physical nature and her features are sliding back towards those of Luxor. I briefly glimpse the vampire for what it truly is - a walking cadaver with skin the color of tallow, its withered flesh stretched taut over desiccated muscle - then the illusion is once more in place.

'I'll take your heart out for that stripling,' Luxor snarls, reaching for me with fingers capped by six-inch-long talons.

'I don't think so,' I reply, the blade of my switchblade leaping out from my fist.

Luxor's eyes flare with fear at the sight of the silver blade and he draws back his hand as if he realized he was about to stick it in a hornet's nest. 'Put it away! Put that horrid thing away!' he hisses.

'What's the matter, your ladyship? Didn't Pangloss tell you about my little toy? The one I used to mark both Morgan and him?'

Luxor doesn't take his eyes away from the blade. He stares at it the way a cobra follows the motions of a fakir's flute. 'Silver,'

he mumbles. 'SssilVver.'

I start backing away from Luxor and out of the alcove, ready to fight my way out if need be.