"Rumors," Bill said. "I spotted two Wardens coming out of the local entrance to the Ways, but when I asked them what was up, they stone-walled me. I figured you might know what was going on."
"Darn," I said. "I called to ask you you."
He snorted. "Well, we're a fine bunch of wise men, aren't we?"
"As far as the Council is concerned, the U.S. Wardens are a bunch of mushrooms."
"Eh?"
"Kept in the dark and fed on bullshit."
"I hear that," Meyers said. "What do you want me to do?"
"Keep an ear to the ground," I told him. "Captain Luccio will tell us sooner or later. I'll call you as soon as I learn anything. You do the same."
"Gotcha," he said.
We hung up, and I frowned at the phone for a moment.
The Council hadn't talked to me about Morgan. They hadn't talked to any of the Wardens in my command about him, either.
I looked up at Mister and said, "It's almost like they want to keep me in the dark. Like maybe someone thinks I might be involved, somehow."
Which made sense. The Merlin wasn't going to be asking me to Christmas dinner anytime soon. He didn't trust me. He might have given the order to keep me fenced out. That wouldn't hit me as a surprise.
But if that was true, then it meant that Anastasia Luccio, captain of the Wardens, was going along with it. She and I had been dating for a while, now. Granted, she had a couple of centuries on me, but a run-in with a body-switching psychopath several years before had trapped her in the body of a coed, and she didn't look a day over twenty-five. We got along well. We made each other laugh. And we occasionally had wild-monkey sex to our mutual, intense satisfaction.
I would never have figured Anastasia to play a game like that with me.
I got on the phone to Ramirez in LA, the other regional commander in the United States, to see if he'd heard anything, but just got his answering service.
At this rate, I was going to have to go to the spirit world for answers-and that was risky in more ways than one, not the least of which was the very real possibility that I might get eaten by the same entity I called up to question.
But I was running a little low on options.
I pulled back the rug that lay over the trapdoor leading down to my lab, and was about to go down and prepare my summoning circle when the phone rang.
"I'm meeting Justine in half an hour," my brother told me.
"Okay," I said. "Come get me."
Chapter Eight
Chicago's club scene is wide and diverse. You want to listen to extemporaneous jazz? We got that. You want a traditional Irish pub? A Turkish-style coffeehouse? Belly dancers? Japanese garden party? Swing dancing? Ballroom dancing? Beat poetry? You're covered.
You don't have to look much harder to find all sorts of other clubs-the kind that Ma and Pa Tourist don't take the kids to. Gay clubs, lesbian clubs, strip clubs, leather clubs, and more subtle flavors within the genre.
And then there's Zero.
I stood with Thomas outside what looked like a fire-exit door at the bottom of a stairway, a story below street level in the side of a downtown building. A red neon oval had been installed on the door, and it glowed with a sullen, lurid heat. The thump of a bass beat vibrated almost sub-audibly up through the ground.
"Is this what I think it is?" I asked him.
Thomas, now dressed in a tight-fitting white T-shirt and old blue jeans, glanced at me and arched one dark eyebrow. "Depends on if you think it's Zero or not."
Zero's one of those clubs that most people only hear rumors about. It moves around the city from time to time, but it's always as exclusive as a popular nightspot in a metropolis can possibly be. I've been a PI in Chicago for better than a decade. I'd heard of Zero, but that was it. It was where the rich and beautiful (and rich) people of Chicago went to indulge themselves.
"You know somebody here?" I asked. "Because they aren't going to let us-"
Thomas popped a key into the lock, turned it, and opened the door for me.
"In," I finished. A wash of heat and smoke heavy with legally questionable substances pushed gently against my chest. I could hear the whump-whump-whump whump-whump-whump of techno dance music somewhere behind the red-lit smoke. of techno dance music somewhere behind the red-lit smoke.
"It's a family business," Thomas explained. He put the keys back in his pocket, an odd expression on his face. "I met Justine at Zero."
"There any more of the other side of the family in there?" I asked him. White Court vampires were the least physically dangerous of any of the various vamps running around-and the most scary. Creatures of seduction, they fed upon the emotions and life energy of those they preyed upon. Their victims became addicted to the act, and would willingly offer themselves up over and over, until eventually there was nothing left to give. The poor suckers in thrall to a White Court vampire were virtually slaves. Tangling with them in any sense of the word was a bad idea.
Thomas shook his head. "I doubt it. Or Justine wouldn't have chosen to meet us here."
Unless she'd been forced to do so, I thought to myself. I didn't say anything. I like to stay cozy with my paranoia, not pass her around to my friends and family. I thought to myself. I didn't say anything. I like to stay cozy with my paranoia, not pass her around to my friends and family.
"After you," Thomas said, and then he calmly stripped his shirt off.
I eyed him.
"The club has an image they strive to maintain," he said. He might have been just a little bit smug, the bastard. His abs look like they were added in with CGI. My abs just look like I can't afford to feed myself very well.
"Oh," I said. "Do I need to take my shirt off, too?"
"You're wearing a black leather coat. That's wardrobe enough."
"Small favors," I muttered. Then I went through the door.
We walked down a hallway that got darker, louder, and more illicitly aromatic as we went. It ended at a black curtain, and I pushed it aside to reveal a few more feet of hallway, a door, and two politely formidable-looking men in dark suits standing in front of it.
One of them lifted a hand and told me, "I'm sorry, sir, but this is a private-"
Thomas stepped up next to me and fixed the man with a steady grey gaze.
He lowered his hand, and when he spoke, it sounded rough, as if his mouth had gone dry. "Excuse me, sir. I didn't realize he was with you."
Thomas kept staring.
The bouncer turned to the door, unlocked it with a key of its own, and opened the door. "Will you be in need of a table, sir? Drinks?"
Thomas's unblinking gaze finally shifted from the guard, as if the man had somehow vanished as a matter of any consequence. My brother walked by him without saying anything at all.
The bouncer gave me a weak smile and said, "Sorry about that, sir. Enjoy your evening at Zero, sir."
"Thanks," I said, and followed my brother into a scene that split the difference between a Dionysian bacchanal and a Fellini flick.
There was no white light inside Zero. Most of it was red, punctuated in places with pools of blue and plenty of black lights scattered everywhere so that even where shadows were thickest, some colors jumped out in disquieting luminescence. Cigarette smoke hung in a pall over the large room, a distance-distorting haze under the black lights.
We had entered on a kind of balcony that overlooked the dance floor below. Music pounded, the bass beat so loud that I could feel it in my lower stomach. Lights flashed and swayed in synchronicity. The floor was crowded with sweating, moving bodies dressed in a broad spectrum of clothing, from full leather coverings including a whole-head hood, at one extreme, to one girl clad in a few strips of electrical tape on the other. There was a bar down by the dance floor, and tables scattered around its outskirts under a thirty-foot-high ceiling. A few cages hung about eight feet over the dance floor, each containing a young man or woman in provocative clothing.
Stairways and catwalks led up to about a dozen platforms that thrust out from the walls, where patrons could sit and overlook the scene below while gaining a measure of privacy for themselves. Most of the platforms were furnished with couches and chaise longues rather than tables and chairs. There were more exotic bits of furniture up on the platforms, as well: the giant X shape of a St. Andrew's cross, which was currently supporting the bound form of a young man, his wrists and ankles secured to the cross, his face to the wood, his hair falling down over his naked back. Another platform had a shiny brass pole in its center, and a pair of girls danced around it, in the middle of a circle of men and women sprawled over the couches and lounges.
Everywhere I looked, people were doing things that would have gotten them arrested anywhere else. Couples, threesomes, foursomes, and nineteensomes were fully engaged in sexual activity on some of the private platforms. From where I stood, I could see two different tables where lines of white powder waited to be inhaled. A syringe disposal was on the wall next to every trash can, marked with a bright biohazard symbol. People were being beaten with whips and riding crops. People were bound up with elaborate arrangements of ropes, as well as with more prosaic handcuffs. Piercings and tattoos were everywhere. Screams and cries occasionally found their way through the music, agony, ecstasy, joy, or rage all indistinguishable from one another.
The lights flashed constantly, changing and shifting, and every beat of the music created a dozen new frozen montages of sybaritic abandon.
The music, the light, the sweat, the smoke, the booze, the drugs-it all combined into a wet, desperate miasma that was full of needs that could never be sated.
That's why the place was called Zero, I realized. Zero limits. Zero inhibitions. Zero restraint. It was a place of perfect, focused abandon, of indulgence, and it was intriguing and hideous, nauseating and viscerally hungry hungry.
Zero fulfillment.
I felt a shudder run through me. This was the world as created by the White Court. This is what they would make of it, if they were given the chance. Planet Zero.
I glanced aside at Thomas and saw him staring around the club. His eyes had changed hue, from their usual grey to a paler, brighter silver, actual flecks of metallic color in his eyes. His eyes tracked over a pair of young women who were passing by us, dressed in black lingerie under long leather coats, and holding hands with their fingers intertwined. The women both turned their eyes toward him as if they'd heard him call their names, and stared for a second, their steps slowing and faltering.
Thomas dragged his eyes away, and let that inhuman stillness fill him again. The women blinked a few times, then continued on their way, their expressions vaguely puzzled.
"Hey," I yelled through the music. "You all right?"
He nodded once, and then twitched his chin up at the highest platform in the building, on the far side of the dance floor. "Up there."
I nodded, and Thomas took the lead. We negotiated the maze of catwalks and stairs. They had been purposefully designed to be just barely too narrow for two people to pass one another without touching, as I found out when Thomas and I passed a girl in leather shorts and a bustier, both of which strained to match themselves to a body whose curves were made ripe and inviting by the red light's primitive rhythm. She slid by Thomas, her eyes locked on his chest, as if she was about to lean over and bite him.
He ignored her, but then the girl reached me-and I take up more room than Thomas. I felt her hip brush me, and she arched her back as I stepped past her, turned sideways. Her breasts pressed against my sternum, pliant, resilient warmth, and her lips were parted, her eyes too bright. Her hand brushed over my thigh, a touch that could have been accidental but wasn't, and my body was suddenly demanding that I stop for a moment and see where this would lead.
You can't trust your body when it tells you stuff like that. It doesn't understand about things like actual affection, interaction, pregnancy, STDs. It just wants wants. I tried not to pay any attention to it-but there were other people on the catwalks, and evidently there was no such thing as a less than gorgeous woman inside Zero's walls. Most of them seemed perfectly happy to make sure I knew it as they went by.
So did some of the men, for that matter, but that was less of an issue, as far as my focus went.
It probably didn't help matters that we were walking by things that I hadn't ever seen before, not even in movies. There was this one girl doing a thing with her tongue and an ice cube that- Look, just trust me on this one. It was distracting as hell.
Thomas was walking faster as we approached the stairway leading up to the highest platform, and he took the last steps three at a time. I followed along behind him, scanning around me steadily, trying to be on the lookout for potential bad guys. This had the side effect of me getting to ogle more pretty girls than I'd ever seen in one place at one time. But it was professional ogling. One of them could have been concealing- Well, actually, I was sort of shocked at what one of them was was concealing. concealing.
I made it up the last stairway just in time to see Thomas throw himself into a woman's arms.
Justine wasn't particularly tall, for a girl, or at least she hadn't been before she'd put on the boots with the five-inch heels. She looked like I remembered her last-a gorgeous face that still fell into the girl-next-door category, with a heart-melting smile. Her hair was silver-white, and was being held in a tight bun up high on the back of her head with a pair of white chopsticks.
Of course, the last time I'd seen her, she hadn't been dressed in a formfitting white rubber cat suit that included gloves over her fingers. It emphasized absolutely everything and did it well.
Thomas fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her waist, drawing her to him. She twined her rubber-covered arms around his neck and clung tightly. Both of them closed their eyes, and just stood there for a long minute, embracing without moving, just holding each other close.
It was an alien act in that place.
I turned away, leaned on the platform's safety railing, and stared down at the club, trying to give my brother and the woman he loved a moment of privacy. Justine hadn't worn the cover-everything suit for the sake of fashion. The touch of honest love, real and selfless love, was anathema to the White Court. Thomas had told me about White Court vampires who had been badly burned by the touch of some wedding rings, or the brush of a sweetheart's rose. But most dangerous of all to them was the touch of someone who was loved and who loved in return.
I'd seen Thomas give himself a second-degree burn on his lips and mouth the last time he'd kissed Justine.
They hadn't been together since the night she had laid down her life to save his, offering herself up to his hunger so that he could survive the evening. Thomas, in turn, had refused to devour her, denying his own darker nature. It had nearly killed her anyway, turning her hair white literally overnight. It had taken her years to recover her mind, after a long-term addiction to being fed upon by an incubus, but she'd done it. She was currently an assistant to Thomas's older sister, Lara, and positioned to find out all kinds of juicy details about the White Court. Being protected by love meant that the vamps couldn't feed on Justine, which Lara thought ideal in a personal assistant.
It also meant that my brother couldn't touch the woman he loved. If he'd been like most of the White Court, only interested in feeding his hunger, he'd have been able to have her all he wanted. Instead ...
Sometimes irony is a lot like a big old kick in the balls.
I stared down at the dance floor for a while, not so much ogling as simply taking in the light and motion as a whole, until I saw them part in my peripheral vision. Then I turned and walked over to join them, as Justine gestured for us to sit on a pair of couches that had been moved to face each other.
Thomas sat down in a corner of the couch, and Justine pressed up close against him, careful to keep what little of her was exposed from touching his skin. I settled down across from them, leaning my elbows forward onto my knees.
I smiled at Justine and nodded to her. The floor and half-wall railing of the platform must have been made from sound-absorbing material. The roar of the club was much reduced up here. "Justine. You look like the Michelin Man's wet dream."
She laughed, pink touching her cheeks. "Well. The club has a look we try to maintain. How are you, Harry?"
"Half buzzed on this smoke, and floundering," I said. "Thomas told me you had some information."
Justine nodded seriously, and picked up a manila file folder from the couch beside her. "Word is out about a hunt for a renegade Warden," she said. "There weren't a lot of details, but I was able to turn up this."
She slid the folder over to me, and I opened it. The first page was a printout of a Web site of some kind. "What the hell is Craigslist?"
"It's a site on the Internet," Justine said. "It's sort of like a giant classified ads section, only you can get to it from anywhere in the world. People use it to advertise goods they want to buy or sell."
"Goods," Thomas put in, "and services. Help wanted, with veiled language for the less-legal things. A lot of shady deals happen there because it's relatively easy to do so anonymously. Escorts, mercenaries, you name it."
There was an ad printed on it: WANTED FOR PERMANENT POSITION, DONALD MORGAN, 5MIL FINDER'S FEE, CONSIDERATIONS.
"Hell's bells," I cursed quietly.
I passed the page to Thomas. "A wanted poster," he said.
I nodded. "And not dead or alive, either. They just want him dead."
Every supernatural hitter on the bloody planet was going to be coming after Morgan. Not so much for the money, probably, as for the favors that the ad promised. They carry a hell of a lot more weight than cash in the world of the weird. The five million was just there to provide scope, a sense of scale for the favors that would come with it.
"Every button man in the world and his brother," I muttered. "This just keeps getting better and better."