Page 14 of Clay White
The darkness camouflaged Tenrael’s wings as we walked back to the motel, but since it was San Francisco, perhaps nobody would have found them remarkable. I saw strange things in the city nearly every day, and that wasn’t even counting the supernatural residents. Tenrael sat in the front passenger seat, his wings squashed awkwardly, while I took the back seat and gave directions to the club where I’d met Marek. There was no particular reason to believe our prey would be there tonight—the city had a lot of clubs—but it seemed a good place to start. Several of the murder victims had last been seen alive there.
Grimes parked the GTO in a lot nearby. We made an odd trio as we marched down the sidewalk, Tenrael barefoot.
Interestingly, the bouncer seemed more eager to let Tenrael into the club than to admit Grimes and me. Tenrael was certainly intriguing and exotic, while Grimes and I looked like disgruntled dads—and not in a good way. Still, after sizing us up and perhaps deciding either one of us could best him in a fight, he allowed us inside.
A mixed crowd jammed the bar and dance floor. Young people mostly, but some in their thirties and forties. Although the majority were male, the entire gender spectrum was represented. The one thing almost everyone had in common was a scarcity of clothing. While they must have been comfortable in the oppressive heat, I felt distinctly overdressed, and the mingled scents of cologne, alcohol, and sweat nearly overwhelmed me.
The three of us fanned out, each threading his way through the throngs in search of anything unusual. I was groped, jostled, and pawed, although my glare persuaded even the drunkest to back off quickly. I had a few pangs of longing over the beautiful naked flesh and the joyful way these people moved their bodies. I’d never experienced such casual pleasure, not even when I was their age.
An hour or so later, I stood outside the club with my companions, none of us much wiser after our expedition. “There are ghosts there,” Tenrael announced as he shifted his ruffled feathers into place. “They float along the edges of the room looking forlorn.”
I hadn’t noticed them, but then I had no special gifts for seeing the incorporeal dead. “I’ve never heard of a ghost killing people like this.”
“Nor have I. They’re not who we’re looking for. I doubt they want to harm anyone. They just long for what they’ve lost.”
Because conversation inside the club had been nearly impossible, we decided on an alternate tactic. Tenrael and Grimes stood several yards down the sidewalk, shadowed from streetlights by a shop awning, while I skulked inside a recessed doorway half a block in the other direction. We stopped anyone who came out of the club and questioned them briefly about whether they'd seen anything suspicious. Some of them were too intoxicated to give coherent answers, and the rest had no idea what we were talking about.
The flow of departing clubgoers had slowed to a trickle when Grimes and Tenrael rejoined me. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Grimes said with a scowl.
Tenrael patted his shoulder. “We can try other places.”
“Do you know how many bars and dance clubs there are in this city?”
“We have time.”
“The potential victims don’t.”
Realizing I was famished, I rubbed my belly. “Let’s give it up for tonight. Maybe we can think of a better plan during the day.” I wasn’t as optimistic as I tried to sound, but I didn’t want to simply stand on the dirty sidewalk, feeling defeated.
We walked to the same donut shop where Marek and I had gone. The women behind the counter weren’t happy with Tenrael’s shirtless state. But after they scolded him in Vietnamese and he replied calmly in the same language, they hesitated only a short time before giving in. I wondered what he’d said to convince them. He sat at a booth near the back of the room while Grimes and I ordered coffee and donuts, along with a ham-and-cheese sandwich for me. Then we ate and drank silently, each lost in his own thoughts.
“Will you stay at our motel?” Grimes asked after we were done. “Our room has a couch.”
I shook my head. Trying to settle my substantial body onto a couch was an exercise in anatomical origami that never ended well. Besides, I’d have felt as if I was intruding on their intimacy. “I’ll take BART to my place. I need a shave and a change of clothes.”
We agreed on a meeting time, and I watched as they moved away, their bodies so close that their shadows merged under the streetlights. I didn’t head for a BART station. Instead I walked to Marek’s Chinese restaurant. It held the same desolate air as before, the edges of the brown paper curling inside the windows. I couldn’t see any lights on inside, and there was an unambiguous emptiness to the place, a conviction that nobody was home—not even a vampire.
Still, I hesitated to knock. I ended up going around to the back of the building, an alley crowded with garbage bins and reeking of old food and cat piss. The green paint on the restaurant’s service door was peeling badly, and the flimsy lock was no match for me. Picking locks was one of the many useful skills the Bureau had left me.
I was in a storage room, dark and dusty, strewn with papers and cardboard. A part of me expected to discover bodies with their throats torn open, but the only corpses were tiny ones—several cockroaches, some flies, and a rat. Next I came to the kitchen, cramped and mostly empty aside from dented stainless steel counters and a large, corroded cooktop.
Only one small space remained before the dining room. It had probably served as the restaurant’s office, but now it nearly broke my heart. Marek had set up a pallet on the floor, nothing more than a pile of sheets and blankets. Three shirts hung from a hook on the wall, and two pairs of jeans sat neatly folded beneath them. Within reach of the makeshift bed was a little stack of paperbacks, their covers battered. He might have picked them up from one of the giveaway bins outside a bookstore, or perhaps they’d been abandoned on buses or in coffee shops.
Marek had existed far longer than I had, yet this was all he had to show for it—a lonely little squatter’s nest made of discards. I’m not sure what I’d expected, but I guess I’d hoped that Marek would have established more substance to sustain him.
I buried my face in my hands and considered whether to sleep here. I was just about to remove my boots when somebody—or something—made a small noise behind me. I tried to spin around to confront my assailant, but even as I turned, something sharp sank into my back just below my shoulder blade. A fierce coldness rushed through my veins. Too paralyzed to even cry out, I began to fall. I was unconscious before I hit the floor.
Chapter Six
My first awareness was of chains that bound me upright to something hard and solid. I immediately tried to strain against them, but they were strong. The second thing I noticed was the agonizing pain in my head, as if someone were scraping the inside of my skull with a rusty file. And third, I felt the cold.
I was naked, my hands shackled tightly around the back of a concrete pillar and my ankles tethered in place at the sides. A ball gag stuffed my mouth, making my jaw and teeth ache. A stream of drool ran from my lower lip down my chin.
I wasn’t used to feeling fear, and it didn’t overwhelm me now. Rage churned fiercely within me, however, along with a sickening pit of hopelessness. With a muffled roar, I struggled until my body ached and my skin was torn, but I couldn’t loosen my bonds.
Breathing hard through my nose and urging myself to be calm, I surveyed my surroundings. I was in a large basement—slight smell of damp, but otherwise clean, without even stray cobwebs. Concrete floor painted gray, several pillars like the one I was chained to, a low unfinished ceiling criss-crossed with beams. Light fixtures were mounted on the ceiling, but right now the only illumination was from several small windows high in the wall. The glass was frosted, letting in only a dull glow. Although three of my prison walls were cast concrete, the fourth was made of cinderblock and inset with a metal door. Aside from the windows, which not even a child could have fit through, the door was the only escape—and it was out of my reach.
There were no shelves in this room, no furnace or washer and dryer, no cardboard boxes markedXmas. None of the usual basement accoutrements. Just a naked and gagged former agent chained to a pillar.
