“Great place you got here,” said the man, whose name had slipped by Kent at the moment. “See you next week.”
“Thanks,” said Kent automatically. “We’ll be looking forward to it.”
The thought of Angela captive played over and over in Kent’s brain, and it was almost impossible to act as if everything was normal for the last hour the club was open. Finally the last member departed, although not without dropping the suggestion that the club stay open until four.
They’d taken to holding their conferences in what was intended to be the medical theme room. There were five rooms on the sides of the warehouses that were ultimately intended to cater to various fetishes. The Arabian Nights room would be open next week; the medical room was the least far along, in large part because it didn’t inspire the creative imagination of any of the management team. The walls were painted baby blue, not the ugly green of the hospital he’d been in recently, and Kent had installed some white cabinets and a sink for washing hands, but that was about it. There was a brown card table there that didn’t belong to the theme, and four blue metal folding chairs.
“So,” Charles said when he sat down. “We’re going to talk about staying open later?”
“Actually,” said Kent, “we have a more pressing problem.”
Genna nodded. “Much more pressing.” The tone of her voice told him that she still wasn’t entirely satisfied with the fact that he hadn’t yet taken action.
“What gives, boss?” asked Brennan.
For once, he let the “boss” label slide. He was still standing, although the others were sitting down and looking up at him expectantly. “Angela, my date for the evening, left early, as you all probably noticed. She also came back, but before she entered the club, she was grabbed by a man with green spiky hair wearing black leathers, and driven away in a car. She looked like she’d been drugged or knocked unconscious.”
He held up his hand to stop the questions. “No, the police haven’t been called, and there’s some good reasons for that. I never did share with you all what happened in L.A., and why I left to move back east. Trust me, it wasn’t the weather.”
“Your company got bought out,” said Charles, and then he grinned. “And you missed us all so much.” There wasn’t a grin on his face for long, though.
“Yes, it did, but I didn’t have to sell, and I could have sold before.” Kent took a deep breath. “You’re going to have a great deal of trouble believing this, and I wouldn’t tell you except that it’s pretty clear from Angela’s kidnapping that anyone associated with me is in danger. The reason why I left is that I discovered that a vampire was killing women taken from a club I went to out there.”
“You mean, like a psychic vampire?” Genna looked at him strangely.
“No. I mean a vampire. Fangs. Allergic to sunlight. Mesmerizing gaze. Anyway. I stopped it from happening, but ran into a whole group of them.” If they thought he was crazy, it was probably best to leave out the part where he burned down their house with several inside during the daytime, when they couldn’t protect themselves. He barreled on, ignoring for the moment their stares. “Theoretically, vampires don’t like to travel long distances. It’s hard to be sure that your daytime arrangements are secure. However, one of the vampires from L.A. showed up the other day.”
“The green-haired guy?” asked Brennan.
Kent took it as a good sign that the question was relevant to what he was saying, and not an attempt to probe his sanity or to ask when he was getting to the punch line. “No. The green-haired guy is a vampire, but not from L. A. as far as I know. The guy who beat me up is the vampire from L.A., and he made it very clear to me that he’s here for revenge.”
Brennan nodded. “I was wondering how you got taken out so easily by one guy.” The others seemed too stunned to talk.
“That was why.” He searched Brennan’s eyes for a moment, but got nothing out of them. And his friend was most definitely breathing. “Vampires are stronger than most people. Stronger than me, although maybe most of them can’t dead lift as much as an Olympic weightlifter. That I could have handled, I think, even surprised as I was, but they are also much faster than any human being could be, and virtually invulnerable to being punched and the like. Bullets pass through them more or less harmlessly, although they can be slowed down a little by the kinetic energy a bullet delivers.”
“This is all very difficult to believe,” said Charles. His face had gone to the neutral expression that sometimes drove submissives crazy, because they couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Charles knew how to take that edginess and use it to turn up the sexual heat, but in this situation, it was just unnerving.
“Yes. I know. But it’s a fact, and sometime this evening each of you is going to make a decision: you can believe that I’m crazy, you can believe that I’m lying, or you can believe in vampires. Here’s the facts of what’s happening right now. Greenie has Angela, and he might or might not be alone. I followed him to the house he took her to, but at night, he’d be very hard to kill. Basically, you have to have a flamethrower, or chop off his head, and in the meantime he’d be moving inhumanly fast with enough strength to kill anyone with his bare hands. Driving a stake into their hearts looks great in the movies, but it’s actually not that easy to penetrate someone’s body deeply with a piece of wood. My guess is that Mario is with him, so that makes at least two vampires. If I was to call the cops and tell them the truth, they’d laugh at me. If I was to leave the truth out, they’d fail, and most likely some of them would be entranced by the vampires.”
“Entranced?” Genna asked.
“Psychically compelled to do the vampire’s will. Which would probably include coming back and locking me up. The effect wears off after a while. Additionally, the vampires in L.A. had already established relationships with the police, and I got the impression that was standard practice in any large city. So the police are out.
“If I go alone and fail—and the vampires may very well have human servants guarding their bodies in the daytime—then they won’t need Angela anymore to get at me. The odds that they’d let her go at that point are pretty slim, I think. That’s why I didn’t go charging in to rescue her. If I die while she’s a captive, I think they’ll kill her as well. The best plan I’ve been able to come up with is to enter the house as early as possible after the sun comes up, with as much force as possible, and hope that they’ve not messed her up too much in the hours that she’s been their captive.” He shrugged, turning his palms towards them. His heart was pounding. “You guys are the only people I know who might decide that I’m not crazy, and who might know that I wouldn’t lie.”
“I know you wouldn’t lie,” said Charles. “And I can tell you’re not joking.” He shook his head slowly. “I believe that something traumatic happened to you in Los Angeles. You’ve certainly been acting strangely enough, especially this last week, and I think maybe if you took it easy for a bit, took a vaca—”
Brennan grabbed Charles’s shoulder. “No, Chuck. Vampires are real.”
Charles blinked. “You too? Brennan, they don’t even make sense. There is no evolutionary reason for something to develop their sets of weaknesses, although their strengths are certainly justifiable. The sunlight thing is fanciful, blood doesn’t provide a good enough diet, no matter how much you drink, to sustain anything bigger than a bat—”
“You’re right, Charles,” Brennan cut in again. “They don’t make sense, because they aren’t natural. But believe Kent. Believe me. The supernatural exists, and it doesn’t follow the ‘rules.’ It follows its own set of logic, but you’re not going to get there with theories about evolution and nutrition.”
“How the hell do you know?” asked Charles. “Have you seen one?”
“No. Not as far as I know. I just know, Charles.” Brennan averted his gaze for a moment, and then looked back up. “How I know is not my secret to tell.”
“Shit.”
For two minutes there was silence. Brennan and Charles stared at each other. Kent didn’t have anything he could say that could convince Charles, or Genna. He was thankful enough that Brennan didn’t think he was crazy, whatever Brennan’s secret was. He was lucky to have even one of them on his side, and he knew full well that if Brennan believed his story, he wouldn’t just stand by while the vampires had Angela.
Finally, Genna spoke. “I don’t know what to believe, Kent. But you know that I’m with you. Even to rescue the girl you love.”
Kent knew Genna and he played well together, but it wasn’t until that moment that he realized she was in love with him. Or that his feelings for Angela were so obvious. He thought of how Genna had hooked Angela up with Gerald, and for a moment he thought that she had been petty. But then it struck him. Maybe Genna had set up that scene knowing it would fail, knowing that he’d come to the rescue when it did. Would Genna be that devious if she was trying to get two people together?
Hell yes.
He realized he was staring at Genna, and that Genna was staring back. He couldn’t return her feelings, but he had to acknowledge them. He bowed his head. “Yes, Genna. I know. Thank you.”
Genna shook her head. “I know that you’d be there for me, even if I came to you with a crazy story. We’re okay, Kent. You and me are okay.”
“That’s settled, then,” said Charles. “We’re all in. Busting into a house in broad daylight, to rescue a damsel from creatures that can’t possibly exist. Sounds like a plan.” He grinned up at Kent. “So, who does what?”
Chapter Nine
The first words out of Angela’s mouth once she woke up were, “Why are you doing this to me?”
To her surprise, the green-haired man hadn’t touched her clothes. Neither had the other man, whose business suit and conservative haircut made him an odd accomplice. But they had tied her to a heavy oaken chair while she was passed out, and strapped her arms behind her. The bottom of the chair was a metal plate, and it felt freezing cold against the back of her thighs.
The room itself was almost bare. There was a wooden chest, probably half a century old or more, right behind her, and a dark wooden desk that might have come from a thrift store across the room. There was one window, a narrow thing set almost to the ceiling, from which Angela surmised she was in a basement. Heavy black fabric covered the window, however, and it had been stapled to the frame. The only light in the room came from a bare incandescent bulb in a ceiling fixture.
“We’re gonna blow—” started the green-haired man, only to be cut off by the darker one.
“We’re playing a little practical joke on your friend, Mr. Carlisle. You know, you really should watch who you associate with. It could get you into trouble someday.”
“Someday, like tomorrow.” Green-hair giggled.
“Quiet, Peter.”
“Let’s gag her.”
Business suit shook his head, much to Angela’s relief. “No. We have to abandon our little charge, here, and gagging someone and leaving them unaccompanied is not safe or sane, Peter. They have a dreadful tendency to choke to death on their own fluids. It starts when they panic.”
Safe or sane, thought Angela. It was a phrase she’d heard in the club, and in her own reading, usually with the word “consensual” added. So these two were part of the BDSM community? She felt a little safer, although the casual way in which the man in the business suit talked about people choking wasn’t comforting at all. It was almost as if he’d seen it happen.
“What does it matter, Mario?” asked Peter.
So much for safe and sane.
“I want him to see her when—” Mario paused, then continued, “the moment comes. To see the look in her eyes as both of them realize this only happened because of him. Our people have suffered; I want him to suffer. Enough. We’ve done what we need to do, and I, for one, have no desire to linger.”
Peter chuckled. “You told me I could feed.”
“So I did. Have at it, then.”
Peter got close, bending over her, looming. Angela expected him to have bad breath, but as far as she could tell he wasn’t breathing at all. He smelled vaguely off, somehow, but she couldn’t place the odor.
He bit her neck. The unexpected pain jolted her for a moment, and she strained against her bonds. They held her tightly in place. He was sucking on her.
Gross.
He thinks he’s a vampire. I hope he throws up later.
But it was she who felt nauseous as the blood left her body. Things started to get blurry, distorted. Holding her head up was an effort.
Mario pulled Peter off her. “Everything in moderation, Peter.”
Peter growled at him, but Mario didn’t seem particularly perturbed. Instead he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood off the younger man’s chin. Peter turned and left the room, going out the door that was the only entrance. No light filtered down from above; either it was still nighttime, or other windows were papered over as well.
“Pleasant dreams, my dear,” said Mario with an insincere smile. He closed the door behind him until it latched.
For a few long minutes she rested there, not moving. She wasn’t losing any more blood, at least, as far as she could tell. But she was pretty sure that however this ended, it wasn’t going to end well. Mario was using her to get at Kent; that much was clear. He had no idea how little she meant to Kent. She was someone he was training, that was all. She wished she could think of him as just her trainer, too, but she couldn’t.