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 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.
“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
