Black Bear Rising: A BWWM Paranormal Romance (Black Bear Saga Book 1) (16 page)

Clay came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam. He wore an expensive tailored suit, his shoes shone to a high buff and his hair was perfectly in place. Theres nothing a shower and an expensive suit wont hide Brad thought grimly to himself. Clay looked every bit the slick politician he played during the day and nothing like the crazed sadist who had recently snuffed out one life and probably came close with the other
 

“Lets get out of here,” Clay said surveying the room.

Brad checked the corridor and nodded that it was all clear. “I’ll see you down at the car, I’ve a few more things to clean up,” he said.

Clay left without even glancing back. He left the room as any other guest did on countless other days, sure in himself that what ever trace of his was left behind would soon be erased by Brad.

The task of final clean up went swiftly and with a measured and practised ease. The bathroom was wiped down and all towels thrown into the bag. Once everything was clean Brad tore off his thin latex gloves and threw them into the open bag, zipped it up and locked it with a small padlock. He glanced around double checking and everything looked good. He dragged the heavy bag over to a metal frame with wheels propped up close to the door and attached it to the bag with some bungee cords. He took a name badge hanging from a bright pink lanyard off a hook on the back of the door and hung it around his neck. It declared his name as Simon and listed the name of a fictitious conference he was attending.

Brad leaned against the wall breathing deeply from the exertion and looked over at the girl. She looked so young and was probably around the same age as his own daughter who he hadn't seen in close to fifteen years. How does a girl like her get mixed up in a seedy world like this he wondered. He could imagine the kind of sleazy guys who would chip away at a young girl to get her to do this kind of work. Maybe this one had some sort of drug habit that she had to feed he rationalised to himself. He squeezed his eyes shut and massaged his temples. Thinking about the girl on the bed as something more than a piece of trash to be fed into the burning furnace of Clays desires was not something that would help him sleep at night. Brad knew he was paid not to think and not to see the depraved things that Clay liked to indulge in. Lately the money was not enough for Brad and growing a conscience in his line of work could be dangerous business. Brad stowed his emotions and his face froze into a stony visage, a look that had scared many ,a tweaker and reprobate when faced with it. He was a walking monolith, an unfeeling stone statue as he left the room and the unconscious girl behind.

Lana Jones eyes began to flicker as the first woozy waves of reality washed over her. She stared up at a circular brown stain on the ceiling as the corners of her vision pulsed. Her first thought as her muddled brain slowly came out the fog of powerful narcotics was where the hell am I? Her arms and legs felt like lead pipes encased in heavy insulation as she slowly sat upright. Her throat was dry and raspy and felt bruised as she looked around. Part of the fog cleared and she remembered where she was. She was in a downtown hotel in a room booked in her name. This was the the fourth so called sleeping beauty gig she had taken in the last few months. Rich guys paid a premium to have her drugged and unconscious so they could live out whatever twisted fantasy they wanted. Lana had cried uncontrollably for nearly two days after the first time she did one. She continued to do them for the money and each time she swore she would never do it again. One of these sleeping beauty nights paid ten times more then a regular night with a client which she had been starting to hate doing more and more. She was desperate not to get kicked out of college, she couldn't face the shame if anyone found out about her father and his fall from grace and so had been forced to do all she could to raise money for her tuition fees. Only a few more times she promised herself and I will never have to do this again.

Lana stood on shaky legs and checked herself out in the full length mirror. A bruise was already forming on her neck where the client had dug his fingers into her soft skin. The clients were not permitted to hurt the sleeping women and Lana tried not to think too hard about what was really stopping them from going too far. This was a kink like any other she told herself weakly. If she dug too deeply into the dark recesses of why these men choose to sleep with knocked out women Lana knew she would not be able to do another of these jobs. Two more this year and she would have the rest of her tuition paid for.

Within a few minutes she had stiffly dressed and left the room. Every step down the corridor brought her closer to her payment and she could feel the drugs woozy effects wear off the more she walked and the further she got from the room. The ding of the elevator bell broke her out of her robotic state and the nagging shard in her mind made her turn around and return to the hotel room. She stood on the corner of the bed and looked up at the ceiling tile in the far right of the the room. It had been pulled back a little showing a tiny crack between the wall and the tile. Lana hooked her finger in to the crack and slid the tile back. Sitting on the cross brace was a small camera similar to the type people strapped to their helmets when doing parachute jumps or snowboarding. The camera had a wide angle lens and was angled to capture most of what would of went on in the room. Lana palmed the camera and slid the tile back into place and left the room. She headed back to her dorm to check the file.

Sara Grant had her feet propped up on the desk and chewed on a pencil absentmindedly as she starred at her laptop screen. She nodded in Lana's direction when she entered the room, the pencil in her mouth had several deep bite marks on it and she added another as she slammed her laptop shut with an exasperated sigh. Sara was twenty two with short blonde hair in a pixie cut. Her fine boned features had fooled many a person into thinking she was a wallflower. When Sara entered a room people usually paid attention, she was loud, brash and oozed confident sexiness. Even when Lana felt at her most attractive she sometimes felt in Sara's shadow, the perky blonde bombshell and her interesting black friend.

“Having trouble with the paper?” Lana asked.

“Big time. My critique of the work is coming off as insincere. I don’t know, I'm writing myself into circles at the moment,” Sara replied.

Lana sat on her bed and kicked off her shoes while stretching.

“Rough night?” Sara asked.

“You could say that. I took another of those sleeping beauty clients. I feel like I need to wash my body and my mind out with industrial grade bleach,” Lana said.

“I don’t know how you can do them. The thought of being completely powerless and out of it gives me the damn shakes,” Sara said.

“Money pure and simple. If I can power through two more of these nights I’ll have enough to cover me for college until I finish and I’ll never have to trick again,” Lana said.

“Do you want me to leave you alone for awhile?” Sara asked.

Lana nodded and Sara stood up and pulled on her favourite sweater. They had a routine after a job and Lana always needed some time on her own when she checked her secretly taped sessions. She couldn't bear anyone else seeing her being so vulnerable while older and always white men worked out their dark fantasies on her. Sometimes it wasn't even the sex that was the most disturbing it was what the men said to her unconscious and unhearing body. They would call her every racial slur they secretly held in their hearts, their words coming with machine gun ferocity and this disgusted her even more than them roughly turning her over to fuck her The words are what echoed in her mind and not the image of these pasty over weight men sweating and grunting into her slack body. Sara gave Lana's shoulder a reassuring squeeze as she left the room and headed for the cafeteria.

The first image on the video was an extreme closeup of Lana as she manoeuvred the camera into the gap between the wall and ceiling tile. The image stabilised and most of the room was in frame. The tiny camera captured nearly all of the two single beds and the corner of the desk. Lana sped through the video. At double speed she moved about the room, removed something from her bag and then left the cameras viewpoint as she went into the bathroom to take the pills that would knock her out for the duration of the session with her client. The men who requested this particular service always wanted the woman asleep before they arrived, they had no intention of interfacing with an awake and sentient woman. She returned from the bathroom and sat on the bed as the drug started to work on her. In the video she quickly undressed and got into bed. This client had requested she be naked when he arrive. Some liked her to be full clothed. She would awake with torn and soiled garments on these occasions. She had burnt the dress she wore to that particular job. Lana felt her throat tighten watching herself lose consciousness, it made her feel uncomfortable seeing herself lose agency. She slowed the video to playback at regular speed when the light in the room changed as the door was opened.
 

A big burly man walked in wearing a suit that was too tight across his back and shoulders. He looked around the room, left the frame to presumably check the bathroom and then entered the frame and double checked that the curtains were securely shut. The man glanced down at her and paused. He approached her and gently raised her head and placed a pillow under it. The big man left and returned a minute later with a young white guy who was probably in his mid twenties. He was good looking and wore a tight shirt that showed off his sculpted biceps. He never once glanced in the direction of Lana's unconscious body.

The burly man left and came back with a glass of water and handed something to the younger man who took it and washed it down with the water. The broad shouldered man left and the young man began to strip naked. He placed his clothes in a neat pile on a bedside table and got into the bed. He lay down and was staring straight up at the ceiling his eyelids already flickering as the drug took hold. Lana could feel a tightening in her gut and a cold sheen of acrid sweat ran down her back. This was not what she had signed up for, the whole job was meant to be her and a single client. The sight of the other guy slowly drifting off into a drug induced sleep made her feel uneasy. She hit stop on the video and sat back for a moment. She had started filming her tricks after the second or third encounter, not really why she had done it. Was it some sort of protection for herself? Lana knew that if anyone ever found out she was recording her sessions she would probably be killed and disposed of without a seconds notice, And yet she continued to do it, saving and storing every encounter she had and forcing herself to rewatch them.

She hit play again. A few minutes passed and then another man entered and stood with his back to the camera. He wore an expensive looking suit and his grey hair was neatly slicked back. The man looked back and forth from bed to bed appraising what was before him. Lana could feel a tight ball of dread in her stomach. The man turned slightly and she got her first full look at him. He was probably in his late forties and was handsome in a conventional way. He looked like the kind of father figure you would see in a stock image in a catalogue for mens clothes. You would pass him on the street and think nothing special of him unless you saw the current look on his face. It displayed no emotion as he looked back and forth from his two prizes. Not a flicker of excitement was betrayed on his face. The corner of his mouth curled slightly and Lana's stomach did a queasy elevator flop. She could see the change moving across him like a dark cloud. It was complete and utter disgust at what was before him. The man looked at them like they were something you would scrape off your shoe. His mouth turned down in a grimace as he loosened his tie. He began to pace back and forth between each bed.
 

“You will take it, you will take it,” he repeated in a low voice as he walked back and forth between the beds.

As he paced he took something out of his shirt jacket and unfurled it. It was a thick piece of black leather which he allowed to trail on the ground as he continued to move back and forth. Lana could make out faintly some sort of ornate design on the strip of leather printed with a faded red ink. The man stood at the foot of the young mans bed and threw the strip of leather onto prone mans chest. It lay in a black coil across the young mans rising and falling chest. It looked like the shiny loop of a snake waiting for a moment to strike at the pale skin of his neck.

The grey haired man began to strip slowly and folded each item of clothing neatly as he went.

“They will see who I am. I will strike from the depths of their slumber, my wings spread wide and casting a shadow on those people below me. I am manifest before this stinking alter, this is my one true self,” the man said as he finished stripping.

Lana felt sick to her stomach as the video unfolded before her eyes. She felt like she was swimming against the tide and each of her frenzied strokes were getting her no closer to the shore as the incessant pull of the ocean pulled her further and further into darkening waters.

The grey haired man stood with his back to the camera. A tattoo of a raven covered the flesh between his shoulder blades. The raven was as black as pitch and each feather was inked in obscene detail. The raven was perched atop a gleaming white skull. The contrast between the black raven and the white skull made everything look all the more lurid. The skull was devoid of flesh. Where two dark holes for the eye sockets should of been two dazzling blue eyes peered out instead. The ravens head bent down towards the left eye ready to pluck it from its socket.

“We will go there together, hand in hand and forever spiralling away from this decaying and fetid world. I am a dark blessing in disguise. The bringer of light unto the darkness of your wasted and feral life. I am your one true saviour,” the man said as he stood at the foot of Lana's bed.

The man removed something from a jacket pocket in his neat pile of clothes and walked out of the frame. Lana's heart beat painfully in her chest and yet she could not drag herself away from the video unfolding before her.