Appetite — Sunday, 6 January 1991, 4:28 PM

Succubus Club / Allerton Hotel Chicago, Illinois — January 6, 1991

The line outside the Succubus Club went around the corner on State Street and she stood in it for exactly as long as it took the bouncer to see her face, which was four seconds. The velvet rope opened the way velvet ropes had opened for her since before the Embrace, since the first fake ID and the first borrowed dress and the first door that decided she was worth more inside than out. She didn’t look back at the people still waiting. She never looked back at the people still waiting.

Inside: bass low enough to feel in the architecture of the ribs. Strobes pulsing at a frequency designed to make pale skin look intentional. Three levels – the ground floor where the living danced and the dead watched them dance, the mezzanine where the watching was professional, and somewhere above that a darkness she could sense but not name. The air tasted like clove smoke and sweat and underneath that something older, something floral and wrong, like standing water in a room full of cut flowers.

She’d been here once before with Sir Henry. She knew the layout. She knew what lived upstairs.

Three nights without feeding. The hunger wasn’t pain – it was reduction. Colors pulled back half a step. Sound flattened at the edges. The world behind glass, and the glass getting thicker.

The bike messenger was at the bar. She picked him out because he was the only person in the room moving faster than the music – hands drumming the rail, jaw working, one leg bouncing on the crossbar of his stool. Cropped hair, sharp face. Messenger bag still slung across his chest like he’d come straight from a run. He was drinking something clear and scanning the room for whatever he’d convinced himself he was looking for.

His name was Marco. She didn’t give hers.

She ordered a vodka tonic she had no intention of drinking and let proximity do what proximity does when you look like Sable Price looks under industrial lighting. Four seconds of eye contact. His pupils were already blown from the cocaine but they dilated further and that wasn’t the drug. She said something about the music. He said something back that died in his mouth when the strobe caught her at the right angle.

They danced. She let him believe he was leading. She navigated them toward the back wall where the crowd thinned and the bass softened and the light didn’t reach. His hands found her hips, her waist, the small of her back. She let each one land because each one pulled him further from the witnesses and closer to the dark alcove past the restrooms.

He pushed her against the wall. His mouth found her neck. She turned it – mouth to throat, teeth to vein, the Kiss opening him up the way a key opens a lock you didn’t know was there. He made a sound like the word oh without the consonant and went slack against her.

The blood was hot and sharp and the cocaine hit like a wire pulled taut through the center of her skull – electric, bright, the taste of ambition as a chemical state. She took three mouthfuls. Counted them. Licked the wounds closed. Marco slid down the wall six inches and stayed there, blinking, messenger bag twisted under one arm, looking like a man who’d just lived the best forty seconds of his life and couldn’t remember any of them.

She walked back into the sound.

The club was different now. The bass had architecture. Every face on the floor was a composition she could title. Her skin felt like something she was wearing on purpose. The cocaine made everything precise and bright and slightly too fast and she thought: more.

The woman was at the edge of the dance floor. Dark hair cut asymmetric, one side shaved close. Doc Martens. A torn Revolting Cocks shirt knotted at the waist. She danced like she was trying to settle something with the floor – fists loose, shoulders rolling, jaw set. She came alone or whoever she came with had stopped mattering.

This one didn’t come easy. Sable had to get on the floor and move, which meant being visible, which meant the mezzanine could see her if anyone cared to look. She danced close enough to be an option and far enough away to make the option feel like a choice. After two songs the woman chose. Eye contact. A smile that was more like something being opened.

Her name was Kat. She smelled like patchouli and Pabst and the specific chemical edge of warehouse labor. Her hands were calloused – guitar or box-cutter, one of the two – and when she grabbed Sable’s hip it wasn’t a question. Nothing about Kat was a question.

She spent the blood to make the body work. One point and the skin flushed and the temperature rose and the breathing started because Kat was going to touch her and Kat deserved to touch something that felt alive. They found the single-occupancy bathroom. The lock worked. The fluorescent flickered. The Doc Martens stayed on because the floor was wet and this was still a nightclub bathroom in Chicago in January.

Kat kissed her first. Hard. Tasting like beer and conviction. Sable turned it the way she’d turned Marco – mouth to throat, teeth finding the vein. The Kiss opened and Kat made a sound that had no language in it and the blood came in like a forge – choleric intense, the anger load-bearing, the fury of a woman working sixty-hour weeks for a band that would never break and a city that would never notice. It tasted like iron held over a flame.

She took two and stopped. Licked the wounds. Ran water in the sink. Pressed a wet paper towel to the back of Kat’s neck.

“Jesus,” Kat said. “What’s your name?”

Sable didn’t answer.

The third was the easiest and that was the worst of it. A woman at the end of the bar in a dark blazer and gold earrings – CBOT trader energy, checking her pager, drinking Maker’s Mark neat. Sable sat down next to her and the whole thing took twenty minutes. The cocaine had worn to a warm residue that made every gesture feel rehearsed, and the trader laughed at something and touched Sable’s wrist and Sable thought this is what I am now and the thought didn’t hurt, which was the thing that should have hurt.

Service corridor behind the kitchen. Standing up. Quick. The blood was warm and sweet and tasted like the word momentum. She took two and stopped and licked the wounds and steadied the woman against a stack of beer cases and walked away.

Full. Fourteen points of stolen blood in a body that used to be a dancer from Gary, Indiana. Three strangers who would wake up dizzy and confused and never know her name and never know what happened in the dark at the back of the room. None of them hurt. All of them used.

She found the payphone in the back corridor. The bass from the floor hummed through the brick. She dialed Gary.

DeShawn answered on the sixth ring. Shop’s fine. Pete running errands. Coop checked in. Spoon on Sixteenth & Grant. Nobody asking questions. Nobody from the Aspiration.

“When you back?” he asked.

She hung up.

Second call. The Aspiration Suites. Victor’s voice, polite and reporting as always. He put her through.

“My dear.” Modius. Warm and unhurried and with too many rooms in it. “How thoughtful of you to call. I was beginning to wonder if Chicago had swallowed you whole.”

She told him they’d pulled Lodin out of a bad situation. That Lodin owed them. That it was good for Gary – a prince who owed Gary neonates a debt was a prince who remembered Gary existed.

The silence on the other end lasted four seconds. She could hear a glass being set down.

“And the Prince of Chicago was in difficulty,” Modius said. His voice hadn’t changed temperature. “And you resolved it. In Chicago.” A breath. “How fortunate for Prince Lodin that Gary’s emissaries were so proximate.”

He asked the question he was always asking, which was never the question he appeared to be asking. When Lodin expresses his gratitude – to whom will he be expressing it? To you? Or to Gary?

She turned it. Asked him what Gary needed from Chicago.

Silence again, but different – the genuine pause of a man recalculating. She’d surprised him.

“Gary’s needs are simple,” he said, and she could hear him sitting forward. “Recognition. An acknowledgment of sovereignty. A standing invitation to court. And some consideration regarding the Skyway corridor.”

He’d given her his wish list. Legitimacy, respect, access. The things a small prince wanted from a large one.

“Of course, my lord.”

The my lord landed. She could feel it – the slight shift in breath that meant he’d received something he was hungry for. She’d been calling him Modius the whole conversation. The title at the close was a gift, and they both knew it.

“Don’t stay away too long,” he said. “The city misses its most luminous resident.”

The line clicked. He always hung up first.

She stood in the corridor with the dead receiver in her hand and the cocaine fading and the Blush beginning to cool. She hung up the phone.

Sir Henry wasn’t in the club. She looked – a slow circuit of the ground floor, the bar, the mezzanine stairs. The Sunday-night crowd was thin upstairs. Half the booths empty. Whatever the elders did on the night before the work week, they did it somewhere else.

So she stayed. Got another vodka tonic and held it the way you hold a glass when you don’t intend to drink from it and watched the room empty and refill and empty again. A couple arguing near the restrooms, the woman’s hands faster than her words. A bartender pouring four drinks without looking at the bottles. A boy in a Depeche Mode shirt working up the nerve to ask a girl to dance, failing, trying again, succeeding.

The Sisters of Mercy came on – “Temple of Love,” the long version – and the floor thinned and refilled with couples. The 2:30 AM crowd. The ones running out of time.

She danced alone. Not performing. Not hunting. Moving in a room full of people who were alive in a way she wasn’t and letting the music make the distance feel smaller than it was. It was the closest thing to peace she’d had since Gary.

At last call she met Nina. A paralegal from a Loop firm who’d come from a birthday in Wicker Park and ended up at the Succubus Club because someone told her the DJ was good. She talked with her hands and laughed before she finished her own jokes and smelled like cocoa butter and cab exhaust.

Sable spent the blood. One point for warm skin and breathing and the flush that made the fiction hold. She got a room at the Allerton on Michigan Avenue – her last forty dollars and a story about a lost key. Third floor, street-facing. She checked the curtains twice before Nina noticed.

What happened in the room wasn’t about power or hunger or the Kiss. It was slower than that and less precise and the sounds were different – human sounds, awkward and honest, elbows and laughter and the moment where Nina said wait and Sable waited, actually waited, because waiting was what a person did.

At six-fifteen Nina was asleep and sunrise was fifty-one minutes away.

“You gotta go.”

Not cruel. Just flat. The warmth from two hours ago gone from the voice like it had never been there. Nina stirred. Sat up. Read the room the way a woman reads a room when the situation has changed – quickly, with her jacket already in her hand.

“You okay?” she asked at the door.

Sable didn’t answer. Nina left. The lock clicked. The room was silent in the way that hotel rooms are silent when you are the only dead thing in them.

She checked the curtains a third time. Tucked the edges. Wedged a chair under the door handle. Turned off every light.

The Blush faded. The skin cooled. The breathing stopped because it was never breathing.

Two hours ago she was a woman in a bed with a woman and it felt like crossing a distance. Now she was a body in a dark room with heavy curtains and a chair against the door and the sun rising over Lake Michigan and doing to her what it did every morning, which was make her stop.