Page 37 of Vanish Into Light

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Beck took her arm again, as they followed Damien through a less impressive door and down a cold, dimly lit corridor that was obviously not intended for customer traffic. A ceiling drip had puddled on the floor, and their shoes slapped wetly through it.

Damien’s tail continued to twitch – but nervously, now, she thought. It flicked, and crooked, and was in constant motion down low, just above the floor. Beside her, Beck radiated his usual calm anticipation, but Damien fairly reeked of nerves.

Rose slanted a look up at Beck, who slanted one right back, and nodded, once.

In a seemingly offhand voice, he said, “Day, business seems to be booming around here.”

Damien shrugged, and turned his head just far enough to offer a glimpse of one red eye, and the forced upward tick of his fake smile. “Sex sells. When all other business fails, you can always sell a hookup.”

“Do you advertise?”

Damien snorted, and faced forward again, as the hallway branched and he led them down the right fork. “Please. We don’t have to.”

Rose knew the answer to her question before she asked it, but she wanted to see his reaction to it. “Beck said you’re the manager. Are you the owner, too?”

As expected, his tail crimped, and then smoothed, ticking back and forth in rapid half-swings. “Nah. That’s Noah.”

Noah the human. The human who’d melted down a piece of heavenly silver, and shaped it into a pentagram. The human who this hellspawn, born in the pits with horns and tail, was afraid of.

A door loomed ahead, chipped black paint over heavy steel. She traded another look with Beck, and the glint in his eyes was as encouraging and confident as it had always been.Follow my lead.Don’t hold back when it counts.

With her free hand, she reassured herself that her knives were still strapped to her body, their weight a comfort in her holsters.

When they reached the door, Damien hesitated a second. She heard him take a deep breath. Then he knocked – gently. His tail lashed the ground.

A buzzer sounded, and the lock clicked as it disengaged.

A human who owned a sex club…who locked himself in his office. Okay, then.

Damien paused again, one clawed hand on the door handle, and glanced back at them. His smile had vanished, replaced with a look of open concern. “Just…” He sighed. “Whatever.” And opened the door and motioned them through.

The first thing she noticed was the steam. A soup-thick haze of it that she immediately reached to swat at. It tattered and streamed around her hand.

The room itself was stiflingly hot, lit a phosphorescent green by carefully hidden bulbs. And through the steam, she saw plants. Dozens and dozens of them. The room was narrow, more of a foyer, really, hemmed in on two sides by multi-tiered metal racks that held pot after pot. Most were ferns, several varieties, from the huge fronds of a Seattle forest, to the delicate, lacy tendrils of the type best grown inside.

Beyond waited a curtain of heavy plastic strips, and beyond that, a larger room, this one lit with gold, sunset light, and filled with cages. Cages full of birds.

Her arm secured in Beck’s, she allowed herself a lapse in situational awareness. Allowed herself the chance to scan the room into which they’d stepped: one that boasted dark, antique furniture, an elaborate sideboard full of crystal decanters, a massive TV playing six channels all at once, each a view of the inside of the club: people copulating in all ways and combinations in pink-tinted rooms.

And the birds: finches, and parakeets, and love birds. White doves cooing, and a macaw screeching as they passed, all in large, Victorian bird cages designed to look like castles and pagodas and manor houses.

A low, feminine giggle drew her back to the moment at hand; focused her attention on a sofa situated across from the TV and its security feeds. A man sat slouched back against the cushions, a lit cigar in one hand, the other resting indifferently on the hip of the girl straddling his lap. From this angle, she was a spill of gilded hair, and a tight, blood-red dress. The man tilted just far enough to peer around her shoulder – older than expected, his short beard and shoulder-length hair heavily streaked with gray – and then patted her hip. “Alright, Missy, that’s enough.”

The girl sighed, but climbed off his lap – and turned to reveal that she was about seven months pregnant, if Rose had to guess.

She blew a kiss over her shoulder at the man. “Later, Daddy.” And offered Rose and Beck a smirk as she clipped past on her red stilettos.

The man stayed seated; took a long drag on his cigar and blew a smoke ring toward them.

It gave Rose the chance to give him a more thorough once-over. He had to be sixty, but was still trim and strong-looking, muscle swelling the sleeves of his chambray shirt. He was dressed more for a day of farm work than ownership of a high-dollar sex club, down to the scuffed boots.

And he was studying them in return. He leaned sideways to pluck a drink off the side table and said, “Ah. I know you.”

“Of me, you mean,” Beck said, smoothly. “We’ve never met.”

The man sipped at his drink; the ice cubes clicked together. “Yeah. But everybody who matters knows who Arthur Becket is.” He had a rough smoker’s voice – and a casual, unbothered tone that, for its indifference alone, raised the fine hairs on the back of Rose’s neck.

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