Darkfever

The house rambled over an acre and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to learn it had upward of sixty or seventy rooms. On the top floor, strobe lights flickered beyond tall narrow windows, in tempo with raucous, driving music. On the lower floors the ambience was different: black and crimson candles were the light of choice, and the music was soft, dreamy, and voluptuous.

Barrons had given me a good bit of background about our soon-to-be host on the way over. Mallucé had been born John Johnstone Jr. to old British money some thirty years ago. When the senior Johnstones had died in a suspicious car accident, leaving their twenty-four-year-old son sole heir to a several-hundred-million-dollar fortune, J. J. Jr. had turned his back on his father’s vast financial empire, sold off one company after the next, and liquidated all assets. He’d cast off his embarrassingly redundant name, gotten it legally changed to the singular, romantic Mallucé, dressed himself in the height of refined steampunk, and presented himself to Goth society as one of the newly undead.

Over the years, several hundred million dollars had bought him an extensive cult of true believers and hardcore groupies, and in some quarters, the name Mallucé was nearly synonymous with Lestat.

Barrons had never met him face-to-face but had seen him on several occasions in the trendier nightclubs. He’d made it his business to track Mallucé’s interests and acquisitions. “He goes after many of the same artifacts as I,” he told me. “Last time he tried to outbid me in an exclusive Internet auction—a wealthy recluse in London, Lucan Trevayne, disappeared and within days a large portion of his collection was up for grabs on the black market—I had a hacker standing by who took down Malluce’s entire computer network at the crucial moment.” Dark eyes glittering, Barrons smiled, a predator relishing the memory of a cherished kill.

But his smile faded as he continued. “Unfortunately, what I’d been hoping to find in Trevayne’s collection was no longer there. Someone had beaten me to it. At any rate, Mallucé must have learned of the Sinsar Dubh in the years preceding his father’s death. The senior Johnstone dabbled in artifacts and there was a considerable uproar in the antiquities world some time back when photocopied pages of what most believed to be mythical—indeed, a joke of an icon—debuted on the black market. I have no idea how many photocopied sets are out there, but I do know Mallucé saw the pages at some point. The undead fuck’s been getting in my way ever since.” Barrons said “undead fuck” as if he strongly wished Mallucé dead—not believed him undead.

“You don’t think he’s a vampire,” I said in a hushed voice, as we picked our way through room after room of stoned-looking people draped across low-backed velveteen divans, passed out on brocade chaises, and sprawled in various stages of undress on the floor. We were searching for an entrance to the sub-basement, where a dazedly compliant sloe-eyed Goth-girl had told us “the Master” would be. I tried not to notice the rhythmic thrusts, grunts, and moans as I stepped carefully over half-naked tangles.

He laughed briefly, a hollow, humorless sound. “If he is, the one that made him should be drowned in holy water, defanged, gelded, skinned, staked, and left to blister agonizingly in the sun.” He was silent a moment, then, “Feeling anything, Ms. Lane?”

I didn’t think he meant embarrassment about what I’d just stepped over, so I shook my head.

We passed half a dozen more Unseelie by the time we found the sub-basement. Mingled in with the white-skinned, pierced and chained, black-nailed, black-lipped Goth-youth, casting similar noir glamours, the Dark Fae were doing things to their unwitting victims I refused to see. Though I saw none as horrific as the Gray Man or the Many-Mouthed-Thing, I was beginning to realize that there was no such thing as an attractive Unseelie.

“Not true,” Barrons said when I remarked upon it. “Unseelie royalty, the princes and princesses of the four houses, are every bit as inhumanly beautiful as Seelie royalty. In fact, it is virtually impossible to tell them apart.”

“Why are there so many Unseelie here?”

“Morbidity is their oxygen, Ms. Lane. They breathe richly in places like this.”

We’d been navigating a maze of subterranean corridors for some time. Now we turned down a long dim hallway that ended in an immense, square black door belted by bands of steel. A dozen men stood guard between Mallucé and any of his too-fervent faithful, shoulders slung with ammunition, toting automatic weapons.

A large bull of a man with a shaved head stepped into our path, blocking our way. The safety pins in his ears didn’t bother me. The ones in his eyelids did.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he growled, fixing his rifle on Barrons with one hand, resting the heel of the other on the butt of a gun tucked into the waistband of his black leather pants.

“Inform Mallucé that Jericho Barrons is here.”

“Why would the Master give a fuck?”

“I have something he wants.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

Barrons smiled and for the first time I saw a glint of genuine humor in his dark eyes. “Tell him to try to access any of his bank accounts.”

Ten minutes later the door to Mallucé’s inner sanctum burst open. The shaven-headed messenger stumbled out, his face ashen, his shirt covered with blood.

He was followed by two Unseelie Rhino-boys who jammed guns into our sides and marched us through the doorway and into the vampire’s lair. Nausea flooded my stomach and I gripped my purse tightly with both hands so I wouldn’t inadvertently touch either of our ugly escorts.

The chamber beyond the steel-belted door was so sumptuously decorated in velveteens, satins, gauzes, and brocades, and so busily furnished in Neo-Victorian that it was difficult at first to locate our host in the clutter. It didn’t help that his attire matched his surroundings, the very height of Romantic Goth.

I spotted him at last. Motionless on a low-backed, richly embellished chaise scattered with gilt pillows and tasseled throws, Mallucé was wearing stiff, textured brown-and-black-striped trousers and fine-tooled Italian slippers. His eggshell linen shirt dripped lace at his wrists and throat, and blood at his jabot. He wore a brocade-and-velvet vest of amber, russet, crimson, and gold, and as I watched, he withdrew a snowy handkerchief from a pocket in the inner lining and gently dabbed blood from his chin, then licked a few remaining drops from his lips. Muscular and graceful as a cat, he was pale and smooth as a marble bust. Dead yellow eyes lent a feral cast to his sharply chiseled, too-white face. Long blond hair pulled back in an old-fashioned, amber-beaded queue emphasized his abnormally rigid pallor.