Episode 007

Jequon and Uri have a talk about Lucian's demise, violence ensues

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Chapter 5

Alt Country replaces the keyboard-heavy chanting I heard earlier. Sounds a little like Green Day doing a Hank Jr. cover, with some 1980’s Bengals mashed in.

To each their own.

Which seems to be the underlying theme of this place. Something for everyone. Three elevated stages centered against adjacent walls, three different types of action: girl-on-girl, girl-on-guy, girl-on-self…no penetration, so I guess you could call it “dancing.” Technically. Enclosed by this panty-triage triangle, a massive dance floor, with its sea of sweaty flesh undulating to the pull of a moon which only orbits the exstacy-soaked consciousness of ravers.

Uri escorts us past the past the bar and toward a VIP room on the far side of this hipster / swinger / stripper hybrid. I’m hoping it doesn’t double as the lap-dance lounge. I don’t want a lap-dance. I want a drink. First one: chilled, next one body-temp.

“Vodka?” he mouths back to me.

I nod. He holds up two fingers to the bartender and then points to the back. He leads the way. I’m surprised these kids don’t part like the Red Sea before him. Guess he’s not that kind of gangsta.

There are many Veingels in the crowd. Their heads, eyes meeting mine in almost perfect unison. I acknowledge their presence with a nod. Like attracts like in the harmonics of the spiritual. Their bond with Lucian would have been even stronger.

We get to the door labeled “Keep The Fuck Out” in English and Uri knocks twice. One of his heavies escorts us inside and then leaves us. We sit down at a poker table that’s seen better days and Uri slides the five-hundred G’s less-change under it.

“How long was Lucian up there before you went to check?”

“Forty-eight hours, almost to the minute,” Uri says.

“How long did you wait to call me?”

If Uri’s not what he appears to be, I want to catch him in a lie as soon as possible. The Veingel presence pretty much rules out SOJ involvement, as does Artemis being behind Lucian’s murder—but what can I say?—the two snipers outside the train station leave me suspicious.

“Jequon, you I call immediately.”

I consider this: forty-eight hours, plus another twenty-four for me to arrive…meshes with the condition of the body, anyway.

“Lucian, he was supposed to do a job for me north in Tuzla, but I hear he never make the trip. Not like him.”

Lucian doing a job for Uri? What the fuck?

“Back up. You said you sent Lucian on a job… Maybe you’d better fill me in on how a Naphil finds himself under the employ of a human?”

 “Lucian, he started coming to the club a year ago. Quickly he becomes friendly with the ladies. Paying customers, they like him, and my dancers, they like him too. Before long, the club, it’s earning triple…all girls, until the guys, they figure out where they went, and then they come also.

“Lucian, he is good for business. I see this. I ask him, ‘what can I do to make your time here more enjoyable?’ He ask for nothing. Still, his money was no good to me from then on, and I make sure the girls, they keep him happy.

“But…I start to get jealous of him.”

I nod and take a sip from my drink. “You are an ugly motherfucker,” I say.

“The girls who work for me, I get what I want. But knowing I repulse them…it’s not the same.”

Uri digs in his pocket and comes out with a pack of clove cigarettes. “Do you mind?”

“Yes,” I say, “Put them away.” He doesn’t argue.

“But Lucian, he is still just a man—I think this at the time—so something else must be behind his effect on the girls. Something I can learn from him. I ask Lucian, he will tell me his secret, yes?”

I empty the vodka and crush an ice cube between my teeth. As written in the Codes, the penalty for revealing our true nature to a non-Veingel human is severe. Not even donors realize what we are, as the feedings are disguised as part of the sex act. Anesthetic enzymes present in our saliva render the bite painless, often pleasurable. Nor does the wound need to be so deep as to scar, since our saliva also thins the blood as it mixes below the skin.

“And so he just came clean and explained to you he was a Naphil. Just like that?” I ask. “What did you offer him?”

Uri points at our empty glasses and holds up two fingers to the closed-circuit security camera mounted to the ceiling in the corner. The damn things are everywhere. Like cell phones.

“At first, Lucian, he plays dumb. Says he doesn’t have any idea what I’m asking him about. I tell him it’s nothing, and change the subject. But later I ask him why I find a dancer crying in the dressing room. This girl, she’d been with me one week before—and now—Lucian, he does not talk to this girl, even though he spent much time with her in the past.

“It was an awkward conversation. Lucian, he was eager to change the subject. So I ask him again, what can I do for him to improve his experience here—anything at all, I tell him—and I say it so he knows I would be offended if this time he turn down my offer.”

“And?” I ask.

“This time he mentions a few things. He asks me if I could provide him a supply of absinthe, which has been outlawed for some time in this country. I say yes.”

“What else?” I say.

“Lucian, he wants girls from Novaya Kutaya—a Russian town so small you’d have to be a comrade to know of it. And these girls, they must undergo a blood test he says. Not for STDs—which I check for anyway—but for blood type. Lucian, he says to me, ‘bring only girls with type O-negative blood.’ And these girls, he makes clear, are off-limits to anyone but him.”

I can see where this is headed. Lucian wanted a private stash of O-negs. Immune girls from a farming community so backwater they wouldn’t appear in any of our donor databases.

Uri looks expectantly into the security camera and taps at his wristwatch. “Oh, I almost forget: he also want the apartment upstairs. The rent is no more than an hour’s worth of his admirer’s bar tabs, so I give it to him.”

“Did he tell you what he needed these girls for?”

“No. Lucian was loyal to your people. He didn’t tell me what he was until much later. And by then, I guessed something that. Unfortunately, The Green Fairy, she demands her own loyalty.”

The absinthe. This is starting to make sense. With a private supply of O-negs Lucian could keep word of his indiscretions from spreading to other Nephilim in Sarajevo, and make it less likely that word of his crimes would reach someone like me—or an overeager asshole like Artemis, as it turned out.

“So let me guess: Lucian starts getting all Van Gogh from the wormwood, and at some point, he fucks up. Did he feed too long on one of your girls? something like that?”

Uri shook his head. “No. But every dancer in the club, he’s already bitten before he requests the type-O girls from Russia. These Veingels, they know nothing of your donor database. He tells them nothing of the ways of your people until after it’s too late. There weren’t enough of the Russian girls to go around at first. I’m sure you can do the math.”

Shit. Math indeed. Math is why we have the Codes. Why we need donors. If Veingels were to feed indiscriminately on non-donors, in defiance of the strict quotas dictated by the Council each year, then the entire 6.5 billion human inhabitants of Earth would become Veingel in just ninety-seven days. The immune O-negs, outnumbered fifteen-to-one, would be sucked dry even sooner, as their newly infected neighbors overwhelmed them a quart at a time.

 “Since we’re having this conversation, you must’ve found a solution,” I say.

“Yes. But not before things got hectic.”

“Define hectic.”

Uri points to the camera. “I see you’ve noticed our security measures.”

I nod.

“We used to offer lap dances in this room. Naturally the girls’ safety is a concern, but who wants a bouncer around when you’re busy dry humping? Turns out though, the patrons, they needed the protection. Because—”

“—The dancers were hungry,” I finish for him. “So you put two-and-two-together: the O-neg request, the dancer’s new iron-rich diet, and their infatuation with Lucian…how long before you confronted him?”

“A couple days. Of course, I assumed he was vampire—I only had the usual Hollywood bullshit to go off of. Let me tell you, I was scared shitless. But I was even more scared of my captains. I cannot say to them, ‘my production is down because of blood suckers.’ So, I figure, fuck it, this has to stop. Lucian, I go to him, I figure, vampire or not, he seems like a reasonable guy.

“And he was. Lucian, he hears me out—said I was right for coming to him. He sets me straight about your people, about Veingels and vampires—the Sons of Jared, the donor databases, how blood works—all of it. Lucian, he know he fucked up. He needed to get it off his chest.

“So we clean up the mess. I make infected patrons bouncers and bar tenders. I bring in enough O-negative girls for everyone and we set up a strict rotation for feeding. In return for my understanding in this matter—and my continued support of his vices—Lucian, he places himself at my disposal.”

“He also let you live, even knowing what you know,” I say.

“Yes, that too.”

“Maybe that was a mistake,” I say.

“May-fuckin’-be,” Uri says. The first sign of disrespect from the Russian. His last utterance.

Kind of hard to talk with a vodka glass lodged into your neck where your voice-box used to be.

And that’s the first thing the SOJ hit men see when they kick in the door.

“Where is he? He was sitting right across from him!” Spewing confusion down the barrels of their assault rifles; tracing the room with the red dots from their laser scopes.

They go from about 6’ 2” to 5’ 11” and dead as I heel-stomp the top of their heads.

I drop from the metal truss I’m hanging from and hit the ground rolling in case there’s more behind them. You would think there’d be a back exit, but there’s not. I’ll have to go out the way I came in. Through the crowd, and who knows how many of Uri’s heavies.

I grab the AR15 from No Neck on the left and the AK47 from Accordion Head on the right and head for the front door. That gets people’s attention. The club becomes as silent as the last snowflake of winter. The Veingels, an immoral majority of the patrons it turns out, are grinning like a bunch of Keebler’s elves sprinkling crack on crackers. At least I know who my friends are.

 

#

 

Out in the night once more, I disappear into the same alley I used to survey my final approach to Uri’s club and ditch the firearms. Though my work requires an intimate familiarity with their design, maintenance, and use, their bulk is a nuisance to me right now.

Now that Uri’s out of commission, I regret having him pin Artemis to the floor with the wood stake. Even when he’s dead he refuses to blend in. Oh well. Can’t do anything about it now.

I don’t retrace my steps, that would be foolish, but I do make my way in the direction of the young woman who saved my life. It’s a cool night and I want to check on her. If she’s not already searching to replace the blood she so graciously offered to my lips, I’d like to warn her to steer clear of Uri’s club, since the former safe haven is now under the watchful eye of the SOJ. The short walk allows me time to make sense of things.

I still don’t think Uri had anything to do with the snipers at the train station. Nor do I believe he’s in league with the two dead SOJ. I just wanted to kill him. To punish him for the role, however small, he played in Lucian’s death. Fact is, I wish he’d been solely responsible. I wish he was the reason the SOJ came so close to bagging number one on their most-wanted list. Instead, I’m left with two questions I can’t answer.

First, if Artemis murdered Lucian, then why were the SOJ waiting for me at the train station, and how were they able to track me to Uri’s club? Since they weren’t responsible for Lucian’s death, they shouldn’t have even known about it, or known that I would be coming to investigate.

But somehow, they did know about Lucian, and putting aside how they knew for the moment, this prompts my second question: why didn’t they dispense with Artemis before their failed attempt on me? He would have made an easy target, too distracted with the details of his deception to be on the defensive for an attack.

It’s almost as if Artemis was in league with the SOJ. And however unlikely, this is the only scenario I can come up with right now that meshes with Uri’s story, Artemis’s attempted cover-up, and the SOJ’s near-psychic anticipation of my every move since I entered Sarajevo.

But why? Murderous, power-hungry asshole that he is, I can’t see anything Artemis would gain from teaming up with our sworn enemy. We are a wealthy, vibrant people. We have little interest in the affairs of humans, save for maintaining the delicate ecological balance in our respective numbers crucial to everyone’s survival. The only thing the SOJ have to offer us is slaughter.

Still, I have to admit, if Artemis was betraying us that deeply, it might explain the enemy’s recent efficaciousness. And since their success reflects poorly on my role as Protector—a position Artemis so clearly wanted for himself—that might explain his motivation. In fact, if Artemis could have convinced the Council to remove me from my post, and to appoint him as my replacement, he might have then used his relationship with the SOJ against them, and been quite effective at culling their numbers. A bold, risky strategy on the part of Artemis. It might have worked.        

I arrive at the alley where I left her and ease into the moon cast shadows. But she’s already gone. Only the overcoat I covered her with remains, still warm with her trapped heat as I slide it back on. Her absence disappoints me. Saddens me. I stare up at the universe of stars knowing that a God who despises my kind must be grinning down at my foolishness.