“We’ll all need to be at full capacity for this fight,” I pointed out. “That’s easy enough for you two in a city of three hundred thousand, but it’s a bit more complicated for me. And I absolutely refuse to drag Len into things again.”
“Good,” Guthrie said. “That poor kid’s life is screwed up enough as it is.”
“Still, it’s a fair point,” Rans agreed. “You’ll need a randy crowd to feed from if we’re going to do this properly— not just dribs and drabs of animus picked up from a handful of tossers at a bar or nightclub.”
Guthrie scrubbed at his eye sockets and sighed. “Right... so as much as this subject pains me when it’s in reference to my granddaughter, I do have a suggestion.”
“Oh?” Rans asked, looking intrigued. “Do you, now?”
Possibly, I was a bit loopy from the combination of stress and a disturbed sleep schedule. Because I made a coughing noise and grunted the word “Hypocrite,” into my closed fist, as I remembered the scene Rans and I had walked in on when we’d been hiding on the cruise ship.
Guthrie shot me a severe look. “I thought we agreed never to speak of that incident again.”
I shrugged, and made a half-hearted attempt to appear contrite.
“Focus, you two,” Rans said. “Guthrie? Your suggestion?”
“I heard about a place a while back. Not my cup of tea at all, but I’d been considering dragging you there the next time you really pissed me off, as a form of backhanded punishment.” Guthrie’s expression turned sour. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem nearly as funny now.”
“Guthrie...” Rans warned. “The point, if you don’t mind?”
“All right, all right. I’m getting to it. There’s a club called ‘Faint’ down in Soulard,” he said. “Dress like a goth, and I imagine you’ll find what you need there.”
“’Dress like a goth’? That’s it?” I asked wryly. “Cryptic much?”
“Just trust me,” Guthrie grumbled. “And let me enjoy whatever subtle payback I can get out of this whole mess.”
Rans shrugged. “If you say so, mate.”
I met his eyes and shrugged as well. “Okay. Goth girl it is, then. Let me check my black eyeliner supply. And I might need to make a pit-stop at CVS for dark nail polish first.”
NINE
SO, APPARENTLY ‘FAINT’ was a vampire-themed club. Because of course it was. It took a bit for the realization to sink in after we arrived, but the moment it did I doubled over, wracked with undignified snort-laughter.
Rans looked around with clear distaste. “Right. Very droll. If all of us manage to survive the next few days, this will definitely call for some sort of devious payback in kind on my part.”
The door to the underground club was around the back of the old brick building. If not for the line of goths waiting to get in, and the pair of bright red upside-down crosses above the threshold, it would have been easy to miss. Beyond the entrance, the bass was thumping and the place was lit like the inside of a womb.
Of course, neither of those two things particularly screamed ‘vampire bar,’ in and of themselves. The coffins scattered randomly around the place and the giant neon representation of a fanged mouth hanging on the wall behind the bar... did.
“Wow,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the music and voices. “This place is legitimately awful. You never warned me Guthrie was hiding such an evil streak.”
“Oh, he definitely is, but it’s well hidden,” Rans called back. “Not unlike any semblance of good taste in this travesty, in fact. So, shall we take our punishment with a stiff upper lip, or try our luck elsewhere?”
I gestured to myself from head to toe. “Hey, now! I didn’t put on black nail polish and black lipstick for just any old club. Come on, let’s go see what the clientele is like.”
Even with undead hearing I could barely make out Rans’ grumbled reply, but it sounded something like, “About what you’d expect, I’ll wager.”
The patrons had a definite vibe going on. Not a supernatural one, admittedly, but also not quite... natural. I honestly wouldn’t have guessed that St. Louis and its surrounding environs could lay claim to this many people of indeterminate gender with shaved heads and tattooed skulls. Also, there weren’t many places in the city where Len would fall into the lowest quartile when it came to number of facial piercings.
In the spirit of goth-ness, Rans had done a few quick and dirty piercings in one ear with silver rings in graduated sizes, along with one through the eyebrow on the same side. I’d declined his offer of the same, content to play the reluctant goth girlfriend rather than having holes poked through me—even ones that would heal within seconds once the silver was removed.
At my insistence, Rans had also gone heavy on the guyliner... not that I was nursing, y’know, a thing for that or anything. Other than that, he’d stuck to his usual bad-boy motorcycle-chic ethos. Meanwhile, my tightest black band t-shirt was now sleeveless and ripped into a rough v-neck collar that showed a generous amount of cleavage. A pair of chunky-heeled black boots and cheap black fishnet stockings beneath a black miniskirt completed my ensemble.
I felt... fairly ridiculous, actually—though ‘goth girl’ was admittedly a step up the ladder from either ‘latex dominatrix girl’ or ‘butt-naked bondage girl,’ both of which were roles I’d played recently. Now, Rans and I just had to figure out how best to transform this evening from a ‘bad club date’ situation to a ‘succubus feeding frenzy’ situation.
“So, what’s the deal here, anyway?” I asked as we wandered casually through the monochromatic crowd of black-clad revelers. “Are we looking at a bunch of people who find it ironically hipster-ish to come to an awful dance club full of coffins and compare piercings... or are there rooms in the back full of people selling syringes of fresh blood, like in that one X-Files episode?”
Rans shot
