Blood Dance — Friday, February 22, 1991, 5:30 PM

Succubus Club — Reality / Balcony / Brennon’s Office

Chicago, Illinois

The Succubus Club on a Thursday. Not the weekend crush — a working crowd. People who came here because they needed to, not because they wanted to be seen needing it.

Darius arrived through the State Street door at 11:14. Brennon’s man at the rope acknowledged him with a nod that meant seen, logged, pass. Inside, the floor was moving. The Labyrinth below was open. The bar ran four deep. Two dancers worked each of the hanging platforms — bodies that had figured out how to occupy the space they were paid to occupy.

Sable was already on the balcony with a glass she would not drink. Tomás was at the smaller bar, back to the room, watching the back-bar mirror. The coterie had come in separately because that was the protocol now. Three separate arrivals. Three separate exits. Whatever happened in between belonged to whoever was looking.

Brennon Thornhill came out from the office hallway in a charcoal suit cut for him in 1973 and re-tailored every five years since. Crossed the balcony. Smiled at Darius the smile he gave everyone, real and worth nothing, and tipped his head a quarter inch in the direction of a corner table the waitstaff had cleared for them without asking.

“Mr. Cole.”

“Mr. Thornhill.”

That was the entire exchange. Brennon went back down the hallway. The corner table sat empty in a club that was four deep at the bar, and that was the whole performance: I see you. Sit if you want. Don’t if you don’t.

Darius didn’t sit. He came up the spiral stair to the balcony and put his back to the rail and read the room.

Sable had her eyes open in the way that meant they were doing something else. He saw it in her stillness: the absence of the small social adjustments that real attention required. Her face was tipped toward the floor but her focus was further away. He stood next to her and let her work.

“Brennon,” she said, the word for him alone. “Controlled. Not hiding anything specific. Just doesn’t have feelings he intends to share. There’s gold at the edges. Ambition or the memory of it.”

“Neally?”

“VIP section. Cracked. Slow crack, the kind that’s been there long enough to look like the stone.”

“Emily?”

Sable did not answer for several seconds. He waited.

“Warm,” she said, and the word came out wrong, freighted. “Mortal warm. But the warmth has a shape. All of it pointed at him. Like a compass calibrated once and never recalibrated.”

He looked across the balcony. Neally Edwards was at a VIP table in the corner under the gallery, Emily beside him in a soft black dress with her hand on his sleeve. Neally was not drinking the drink in front of him. Emily was. Three feet from them, a Blood Doll in a velvet choker waited at the next table for someone she was never going to be invited to join.

“Kindred sweep,” Darius said.

A pause. “Too much static. If there’s anyone else here, the room is eating it.”

He let her work the floor. Tomás had moved to the foot of the stairs without seeming to move. Tomás was always somewhere a little before he needed to be there. The Tremere management of distance.

Neally rose at 11:38.

Whatever switch had been flipped inside him by Jefferson Foster’s blood across two cities and three weeks flipped at that moment. He set the glass down. He stood. He turned toward the floor.

His Presence came on like a thermostat. Darius felt it as a pressure shift inside his own chest, an instinctive attend, and he killed it in himself the way he had learned to kill it: by naming it and refusing it. Sable’s mouth tightened. Tomás’s shoulders adjusted half a degree. The dance floor noticed before anyone could say what it had noticed. Bodies turned. The music kept going. The people stopped.

A woman near the front of the platform — twenty-six, hair pinned up, sleeveless dress, no companion — turned toward Neally and walked across the floor as if she had been called. She had been. Awe and the suggestion underneath it. She stopped a foot from him and tipped her head.

“Sable,” Darius said, low.

She was already moving.

She crossed the balcony to the stair and came down it in the long-legged way she had that read as glamour from any angle and was, just now, a feeding approach. By the time she reached the floor she had her hand on the woman’s elbow and was making eye contact with Neally and the eye contact was working harder than the touch was.

“Neally.”

He looked at her. Recognition surfaced under something else. Whatever had pulled him out of the chair had its own gravity. Sable was inside it, registering, but small.

“Sable Price.” Even, formal. The voice cracked once around her name. The mask was on but the hinges were loose. “Good to see you.”

“Don’t.”

The word was clean. No pretense. She held his eyes and let him understand what she was asking.

For one second Darius watched the man he had met in November try to come back up through the man Jefferson had built. Something flickered. Gratitude or the memory of it. The neonate who had impersonated a prince in the dark at the Field Museum knew he was looking at the only person in the room offering him an exit, and he wanted to take it. Darius saw it in the way his eyes softened. Saw it in the half-tilt of his head toward Emily, who had not moved from her table, who was watching with the focused patience of a person whose only job was to keep one specific outcome on rails.

Neally turned back to the woman.

“Closer.” He said it to her. Soft. Almost tender.

She stepped closer.

He fed in thirty seconds. Controlled. Surgical. The technique of a man who had been doing this nightly under direction and had gotten precise about the geometry of it: hand at the small of the back, mouth at the throat above the collarbone, the woman’s knees folding into the support of his other arm so cleanly it almost looked like a dip in the choreography on the platform above them. Sable stood three feet away with her hand still on the woman’s elbow and her face went through four expressions in five seconds and settled on the one she used when she had decided to clean up after something instead of stopping it.

Three mortals within line of sight stopped moving.

A man at the railing with a cell phone the size of a brick had it half-raised. Darius did the math on him in two seconds — focus on it now, before the picture, before the call — and was on the stair.

Tomás was already going the other way.

Emily Carter had stood from the VIP table at the moment Neally lifted the woman’s wrist. She was already moving toward the service corridor behind the gallery before the woman’s knees folded. Rehearsed route. Tomás cut across the balcony to intercept and Emily turned through the side door of the corridor and was gone. He reached the door six seconds later and pushed it open and the corridor branched at three storage rooms and a freight elevator and a stair down to the kitchen and Emily was inside one of those rooms or down one of those passages or in the elevator going up or down or simply standing in a dark doorway thirty feet away counting his footsteps.

Tomás stopped. Listened. Heard nothing useful. Closed the door behind him without slamming it.

The woman knew the building.

Neally lifted his mouth from the wound. The woman in his arms exhaled the long shudder that the Kiss put into a body, and Sable caught the weight of her as Neally let go, and Neally was already turning, already walking, the feed complete, the assignment performed, the man Jefferson Foster owned doing the work Jefferson Foster had sent him to do.

He did not look at Sable.

He did not look at Darius.

He crossed the floor toward the service corridor Emily had taken. The crowd parted for him because his Presence was still up and then closed behind him because they had already started to forget that any of it had mattered.

He was gone before the woman in Sable’s arms had her eyes fully open.

Three witnesses. The man with the phone. A blonde near the rail who had stopped dancing mid-step and was standing with one hand at her throat. A college kid in a flannel with a beer that was tipping toward spill.

Darius reached the man with the phone first.

“Look at me.”

The phone came down. The eyes came up. Mortal pupils, no resistance, the gate already open. Darius held the eye contact and pushed the thing in him that did this work, the discipline he had spent eight months learning the names for in a basement in Pilsen. Memory rewriting was not a clean tool. It was a shovel.

“You checked your phone. The screen was too bright in here. You put it away. You didn’t see anything on the floor that mattered. You came up for air because the bass was killing your ears.”

The man’s face went through the small adjustment that mortals did when a memory was put inside them. Not a flinch. A settling. He looked at his phone. Looked at the screen. Said, “Christ, the brightness,” and slid it into his back pocket.

The blonde at the rail next. She had been farther away. Her sightline had been partial. The implantation was a haze rather than a rewrite — crowded floor, lost track, probably had too much to drink — and her face accepted it gratefully. She put a hand on the rail and laughed at nothing.

The college kid was the hardest because he was the closest. Darius caught him at the bottom of the spiral stair before he could think about what he had seen long enough to know he had seen it. The Dominate landed clean. The boy nodded. Friend of mine took a header. I helped her into a seat. The guy on the floor was just a dancer. Just a dancer.

Three rewrites in ninety seconds. Darius’s mouth tasted like aluminum. He stood at the foot of the stair with his hand on the brass rail and let the tremor pass.

Sable had her arm around the woman’s shoulders by then, leading her toward a banquette near the wall. She murmured something at the wound that was not a word and put her tongue to the ragged edge and worked the blood. Toreador craft. The wound closed. The skin pinked. The woman put her hand to her neck and felt nothing wrong there.

“You came over because you felt faint,” Sable said, gentle, into the woman’s ear. “A kind stranger helped you sit. You’ll be fine. Drink water. Eat something on the way home.”

The woman nodded.

The floor was already moving again.

Brennon’s office was on the third level, accessed through the balcony hallway, windowless and warm. He sat behind the cedar desk with his hands folded over a leather portfolio and waited the half-hour out without doing anything visible. Prias slept on the couch in the corner the way Prias always slept, beeper on his belt, a sword somewhere within arm’s reach.

The coterie came in together. Brennon gestured at the chairs. Sable sat. Tomás sat. Darius stood for the first beat because he wanted Brennon to see him stand and then sat because he wanted Brennon to see him sit.

Brennon studied them in turn. Then opened the portfolio and did not look at it.

“You filed your Thursday report with his office.” Even register. The professional warmth gone, replaced by the working calm of a man asking a useful question. “He’s your handler on the Sabbat assignment. What I want to know is whether this is something Lodin’s office already knows about, or whether I’m about to make a phone call that lands on the Prince’s desk as a surprise.”

Darius let it sit two beats. Calculation.

“As far as I know, no. He tried to pull a fast one on us on New Year’s, though.”

Brennon absorbed that without expression. The portfolio stayed closed under his hands. He picked up the water glass on the desk and drank from it slowly. Vampire’s theater. The water did nothing for him and nothing through him and he set the glass down half an inch from where it had started. The motion bought him three seconds and Darius watched him spend them.

“New Year’s.” He repeated the date, not the claim.

A long beat. He looked at Darius without expression. The numbers in his head he did not intend to read aloud.

“You know what. Don’t tell me.” He moved the portfolio an inch to the left. “If Annabelle needs the operational detail she can ask Lodin’s office directly. What I needed to know was whether my call was going to land as a surprise. It will. That’s enough.”

He reached for a notepad. Wrote a single mark on the top sheet. Set the pen down parallel to the spine. Looked up.

“You three contained the situation tonight. That counts for something. Annabelle will want to know who was in the room. I’ll keep your names out of it where I can, but if she asks directly I won’t lie to her. That’s the arrangement.”

He stood.

The door was halfway open when Darius spoke.

“Mr. Thornhill. One thing.”

Brennon paused without turning, the way he had paused for a hundred people in his life, the courtesy that cost nothing.

“We had no way of knowing about tonight in advance. But when we saw what was happening, we moved on it. The breach is contained. Three witnesses. No loose ends. Annabelle should know that when your call goes out.”

He let half a second go by.

“And going forward. Anything we learn that concerns her interests, she’ll hear it when we hear it. That’s not nothing.”

Brennon turned then. Studied him. The smile he gave the room was nowhere. The face under the smile was pricing the offer.

“I’ll pass along that the situation was handled.” Even tone. “The rest we’ll see about.”

He opened the door the rest of the way.

He walked them to the service exit himself. Down the back stair, past the kitchen prep where one cook was scrubbing a tray that did not need scrubbing, through the loading bay where the freight door was already keyed open by a man who did not look at them. The alley smelled like grease and wet brick and the recycler bin against the south wall.

Brennon held the door.

“Travel safely.”

The door closed behind them.

Cold February air. Sodium lamp. Wet asphalt orange under the lot light. Somewhere on Michigan a cab with a bad muffler was idling at a red. Sable lit a cigarette and did not smoke it and watched the smoke curl up past the lamp until the lamp ate the smoke.

“He’ll make the call inside the hour,” Tomás said.

“I know.”

“Annabelle will hear it before sunrise.”

“I know.”

“Emily knew that corridor,” Tomás said. He was looking past the lot toward the service drive. His face was its usual unreadable economy. “She didn’t pick a door. She picked one of three doors and was through it before I cleared the balcony.”

Darius watched the cab on Michigan take the green and pull away. The muffler dragged a long bass note down State. He thought about Neally crossing the floor toward the corridor Emily had already taken, the symmetry of the exit. A Bond did not need a leash. The leash was inside the blood. He thought about Brennon’s water glass and the single mark on the notepad and a property manager pricing favors he did not yet know he was selling.

Annabelle would hear about it before sunrise. The Primogen clock would turn one more click. The cleanup was paid for by the head.

“Home,” he said.

They went separately. Three exits. Three cabs. Whatever happened in between belonged to whoever was looking.