Paint It Black (17 page)

It didn't take him long. After all the planning, all the waiting, everything was happening so fast. As his celestial lover pulled herself off him, Sun Wang Zuocai felt something in his chest fold in on itself. Fast. Everything was happening so fast. first the mating, now his death. Even as his seed quickened in her womb, Wang Zuocai's life came to its end. Of course, he had already known it was going to happen.

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) Part 2.

When the Dead Die.

Death is not the greatest of evils; it is worse to want to die, and not be able to.

ophocles, Electra.

The fever called 'Living'

Is conquered at last.

Edgar Allan Poe, 'For Annie'.

11.

As she stepped out of the limo in front of the Chelsea Hotel the first thing she saw was a homeless person pissing in a doorway. She smiled and tossed the driver an extra twenty.

Hell, it's New York.

The limo pulled back into the traffic and she shouldered her one piece of luggage - a black nylon duffel bag - and strode towards the entrance of the hotel, just in case she was being watched. She did a turn in the revolving door and was back on the streets within seconds, her hair five inches longer and the color of raw honey.

She kept a nest in Tribeca, a stone's throw from City Hall.

There were a couple of holding companies and realty agencies involved in collecting rents and maintaining the property, but essentially she owned the building. She'd bought it several years ago with some of the proceeds from Ghilardi's estate.

She dodged into the subway entrance on Eighth Avenue, dropping her vision into the Pretender spectrum, scanning for signs of the inhuman amongst the commuting hordes.

In any major city there were numerous shadow races hidden amongst the bread-and-butter featherless bipeds, and New York was certainly no exception.

It was five-thirty - well into the rush hour - and the subway platform swarmed with the Pretending kind of a dozen different cultures, each having followed its traditional prey group to the New World in search of a better life. A naga wearing the skin of an elderly Pakistani gentleman flared his cobra's hood at her in ritual warning, then went back to peruse its newspaper. A garuda, cloaked in the disguise of a lowly busboy, clattered its bill nervously as it fed itself unshelled sunflower seeds. It kept exchanging glances with the naga. Their respective species were ancestral enemies, but having to maintain the appearance of humans - and catch a

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) train - forced the necessity of coexistence. At least for the moment.

An ogre, its misshapen limbs hidden by homeboy fashion, slouched against one of the support beams. A succubus, dressed in the body of a young woman, smiled seductively at an older man in a London Fog raincoat carrying a briefcase, who was fumbling for a light for her cigarette. She doubted he could see the succubus's cyclopean eye or the mane of living, writhing worms she sported in place of hair.

Suddenly the platform was full of the smell of ozone and filth and the A train came thundering out of the tunnel. It screeched to a halt and the doors opened. Inside she found a vargr dressed as an investment banker, and a thickset, clay-eyed golem serving as an escort for an extremely old Hasidic man who, according to her peripheral mind scan, was carrying a fortune in diamonds on his person.

She rode the train to the World Trade Center, then made her way to the surface. The first thing she saw as she exited the glass and steel megalith was the seventeenth-century churchyard across the street. Twilight had mellowed into dusk while she was underground, and, amazing as it might seem in such an urban landscape, a handful of fireflies danced between the leaning tombstones.

Her nest was located on Chambers Street off West Broadway.

The building was six storeys tall, identical to those flanking it. The first three floors housed various businesses

- a karate school, a photographer's studio, an accounting firm while the top two floors were left vacant.

It was after six o'clock and all of the businesses were closed for the day. The elevator was old, with a collapsible gate and a control switch that looked like something from an old-fashioned ocean liner. She stopped the elevator on the fifth floor and rolled back the protective gate so she could unlock the outer barrier. She made a mental note to be careful not to trigger the booby traps she'd installed.

The entrance barrier rolled back with a rusty squeal, and she squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced, but nothing happened.

She stepped out of the elevator into the foyer. A double barreled shotgun and a loaded crossbow, rigged with fishing line and lead counterweights, were pointed at the elevator.

She unlocked the door to the fifth-floor loft and entered into total darkness. Not that it mattered. She could read the New York Times in the deepest pit in Carlsbad Cavern without straining her eyes. The loft had the dusty, close smell that sealed rooms often get. As it was, her nest was actually on the sixth floor. The fifth was empty of anything except booby traps. She liked keeping as much space between herself and

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) whatever might be looking for her as possible.

One of the first things she had the renovators do when she bought the building a decade ago was alter the interior staircases. The original staircases had been sealed after the fifth floor and a second staircase installed that bypassed the fifth and sixth floors on its way to the roof, thus ensuring her privacy. But, this was New York City, after all, so she placed a few booby traps in her private stairwell just to be on the safe side.

She unlocked the door that led to the roof after disarming the spear gun aimed at gut level. The moment she opened the door, she knew that one of the traps had been sprung.

She found what was left of the would-be burglar on the landing between the roof and the sixth floor. He'd triggered the deadfall, sending a cinder block secured by a rope into the middle of his face. He had probably been young, although it was hard to tell with most of his features pulped. He'd been lying there at least a month or two, and he'd decayed to the point where she couldn't tell if he was black, white, latino, or asian. In any case, he was dead.

Sonja dragged the body down to the sixth floor and unlocked the door to the loft, careful not to trigger the old box-spring mattress studded with bayonets hinged to the ceiling just inside the threshold. The sixth floor was sectioned into three large areas centered around a long hallway. The one closest to the entrance was a fully outfitted workroom with a carpenter's bench and a huge array of power tools. Not to mention a large glass-lined metal tub.

With the help of a few well-chosen power tools, it took her less than ten minutes to reduce her unwanted guest to component parts. She tossed the limbs and viscera into the glass-lined tub and opened one of the industrial-sized hydrocholoric acid bottles she kept in a special cabinet. The solution was meant to process metal, but it was also handy in turning troublesome dead bodies into soup.

Satisfied that her erstwhile intruder was liquefying nicely, Sonja shucked her protective gloves and apron and headed down the hall to the room set aside as living space. At a thousand square feet, it was larger than most New York apartments.

A kitchenette, complete with microwave, dishwasher, gas range, refrigerator, and breakfast bar took up one corner.

There was an inch or more of dust on every surface and a shriveled orange the size of a walnut in the fridge. What had once been a walk-in closet was now a bathroom, with shower and toilet, and a loft bed occupied the exposed brick wall.

Thick Persian carpets covered the floor, and the ceiling was decorated with drooping falls of mosquito netting, giving the space the feel of a bedouin's tent. A couple of starkly

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) chic halogen lamps, a free-standing antique wardrobe, and an oversized leather chair set in front of a projection television screen were the only other pieces of furniture.

Sonja opened the wardrobe and the smell of cedar filled the room. Inside were hung several expensive silk suits sealed in protective plastic wrappers, along with half a dozen matching black silk shirts. Four pairs of Italian shoes littered the floor of the wardrobe. Chaz's stuff. He'd had a taste for the expensive things in life. Not necessarily good, mind you, just expensive. She bundled the suits together and dumped them in the tub with the melting burglar, then went back into the living area and stripped naked.

She hadn't realized she was still a blonde until she looked down at her crotch in the shower. She closed her eyes and, when she reopened them, the last of the yellow was being replaced by black. Her hair was still long, though. Since it was impossible for her to shorten her hair the same way she forced its growth, she elected to jettison it. She ran her fingers through her hair and all twelve inches dropped to the floor of the shower. By the time she'd stepped out to towel herself dry, her scalp was already bristling with fresh growth.

If I am going to find a clue as to where to locate Morgan, it will be in the traditional hunting grounds of the urban vampire

- the nightclub. I hit the first one around midnight The interior is designed to resemble a church, with stained-glass windows and a disc jockey spinning CDs in the pulpit. The waitresses are dressed as nuns, except that they wear miniskirts, high heels, and fishnet stockings. There are a lot of lasers and loud music, but the faces that stare back at me through the dance floor fog are painfully human. I leave before one o'clock.

The second club is a cavernous space filled with taxidermy exhibits liberated from defunct roadside attractions. A cougar, frozen in mid-leap, reaches out for a startled mountain goat. A grizzly bear, its fur somewhat moth-eaten, towers over the main bar, as if warding off imprudent drinkers. The head of a gigantic water buffalo, its nose worn down by club patrons stroking it for luck, peers off into space, no doubt eyeing the ghost of the Great White Hunter who plugged it decades ago.

As I wind my way through the club-goers, I get the distinct feeling I'm being watched - and not just by the glass eyes of the dead animals on the wall. I duck through a beaded curtain into one of the orgy alcoves off the main floor. The walls are painted with fluorescent paint and lit by black light-tubes. A king-size mattress on a carpeted dais dominates the middle of the room. A couple of queens tricked out in Mary Tyler Moore drag, wearing six-inch platform shoes, are sitting on the bed, smoking a joint. They look at me quizzically, then return to their previous conversation.

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)

'So what did you tell Donny?'

'Just that she should go ahead and get big ones. I mean, if she's planning on dancing to pay for the operation, she ought to give them what they want. . .'

I grab my shadow before he even clears the curtain, slamming him against the wall. I have my forearm pinned against his windpipe and my switchblade a millimeter from his right eye.

'Tell me why you're following me, or I'll put it out,' I hiss.

The drag queens gather up their purses and exit the alcove as quickly as their platform heels can carry them.

My shadow smiles slow and wide, opening his hands to show me they are empty. 'No need to get hostile, milady. I mean you no harm.'

I step back and let him go, but I do not put away the knife. My shadow is a man of slight build, about five foot seven. His hair, which he wears in a medusa's coil of tightly woven dreadlocks, is gray, but it is hard to guess his age. There are ceramic beads, pieces of metal, and what look like knucklebones braided into his locks. He wears a loose-fitting black overcoat that reaches almost to his ankles, tight-fitting black leather pants, a black velvet dress shirt with a ruffled dickey, and Doc Martens that lace up to his knees. Although his hands are finely manicured, he sports pimp spoons on both ring fingers; his nails are so long they curl inward. He smiles easily at me, but his pale blue eyes watch me intently, like a cat trying to calculate the best way to evade the jaws of a dog.

'Why were you following me?'

'It's my job to follow . . . those such as you.' His right hand dips into the breast pocket of his overcoat and retrieves a printed invitation. 'My ... employers ... are discreet and very . . . discriminating ... as to who they allow into their establishment. Their clientele 'tis most select indeed.' He hands me the card with a flourish. Tell them Jen sent you, milady.' And with that he slips from the alcove, pausing only long enough to look over his shoulder to make sure I'm not about to plunge my switchblade into his back.

I study the invitation, frowning slightly. In appearance it looks no different than any of the thousands of invites and announcements handed out on the New York party circuit every night. The picture on the front is of a naked female torso. The nipples are pierced and connected by a fine filigreed chain, the labia infibulated. A surgical steel ring winks from the model's navel.

On the back is printed, in Gothic script: 'The Black Grotto at No Exit: W.14th at 10th Avenue. Open to the Trade.'

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) There is something odd about the texture of the ink used to print the card - and something familiar about it as well. I sniff it, then taste it with the tip of my tongue. Human blood has been mixed with the ink. Quite a bit of it too.

I step out of the alcove just as the two drag queens are coming back with the bouncer. I slip into the murk of the dance floor and I'm out the door in seconds. No matter. I already know which nightclub I'm going to hit next.