When Miss Harriet Marwood's painful birching was finally completed, the oiled Red Martians had released her, then indoor pony girls draped her in a blue silk robe, to cover her smarting stripes, and assisted from the room. With the show concluded, Barton had risen to his feet, as if he intended to follow his mistress to some rear dressing room or antechamber, but, before doing that, he had discreetly, but very deliberately walked by Yancey Slide.
"I sense you carry a gun, sir."
"Do you now?"
"A radium revolver, if I'm not mistaken."
Slide's voice was chill. No side-whiskered Victorian, no matter how well connected, was going to intimidate him. "You would appear very perceptive, sir. Especially from across a crowded room with so much else going on."
"Are you a hired assassin or perhaps a Continental Operative? Slide dismissed the question as though it was of little importance. "Neither, at this particular moment."
"Maybe in the pay of our local Gorthan Assassins?"
Slide made a stiff gesture of ronin denial. "In no one's pay, I assure you." "But you felt the need to arm yourself?"
"Let's say the weapon came with the package."
"That must have been an interesting package."
"Not particularly. I suppose it depends on your perspective."
"I didn't catch your name, sir."
"I didn't release it to be caught, Sir Richard."
Barton had looked bleakly at Slide, and drew hard on his cigar. Rosa Coote quickly intervened and made a fast introduction. The two men shook hands, and Barton's smile was courteous but, at the same time, hard eyed as he excused himself. "Right now, Miss Marwood is expecting me, and I cannot keep her waiting after all that she has been through, and, indeed, neither would I want to. I suspect, however, we will be meeting again, Mr. Slide."
Slide had nodded, knowing that a kind of unspoken challenge had been issued, but to what exactly he wasn't sure. All he knew was that Barton intended to make the predicted meeting happen. "I will look forward to it, Sir Richard."
"You do that, Mr. Slide. You do that."
After the exchange, Rosa had made it clear that it was not a good idea for Slide to be loitering in the public rooms of her Establishment. She wanted to stash him, with suitable means of amusement, in some more private sector of the house. Slide was in total agreement with that, if perhaps for different reasons. The two Green Martian hostesses, with their flexibility, ingenuity, wanton zealousness and, of course, those extra Martian orifices, would divert the body allowing the essential Idimmu, that was the core of Slide, to float free to the place of abstraction where his demon essence could, for the duration of the stoned and physical games, find an untroubled, demon stability. After all the drugs, and its prodigious journey across space and time, Slide's adopted body
now bore little resemblance to the long gone Johnny Yuma, and was rapidly taking on the Slide more standard gaunt features. Nothing, however, was able to change the unconscious tactile memories contained in the cadaver's Orlac cells, and these urged it first to load up on the local advanced opiates, hallucinogenics, and then drift sideways, delightedly responding to the attentions of the two nubile Martians, who caressed extraordinary local stimulants into the body's eagerly receptive cells, some of which were actually secreted from their own lewd flesh, and then continued to work on him with hands, multiple tongues and other extremities, practicing extreme and vigorous obscenity until the body writhed and screamed, exactly echoing their own alien passion howls as the three way coupling rose to a climax.
When all was done, Slide returned to ex-Yuma body. He dismissed the hostesses and dressed for the world outside. The temptation was simply to remain at Rose Coote's establishment as long as she would endure him as a guest, but, once again, his demon curiosity got the better of him. The body wanted to sleep, but Slide would not be dictated to by any annexed carcass and its imagined needs. He wanted to see more of this strange human city set down in an ancient Martian landscape, and that was how a further half hour found him walking in Albert Park, approaching a grove of faux-oaks, and a small stone henge-circle of modern fabrication that had been rather poorly distressed to make it resemble an ancient ruin. The structure would have fooled no one who had ever seen the real thing, and Slide assumed it was a pretentiously decorative folly, until he read the discreetly engraved bronze sign attached to one of the megaliths that claimed it as the property and sacred place of the Victorian Order of Martian Druids. Slide hoped he would be spared having to meet the VO of MD. They would not be dangerous, but, as a self-respecting demon, he had no desire to bored to distraction by occult whimsey.
Slide was about to leave the fake henge when he felt the movement, a motion quite beyond his human senses, but with the resonance of a solid mass to his demon perceptions. What gave him paused was the inability of his demon perceptions to pinpoint location of this mass. He immediately went on the searching defensive, but still didn't catch the intrusion until it suddenly appeared in the form of a supposedly human figure, bullnecked and powerful, dressed in a flowing black overcoat and slouch hat.
"Hold up there, daemon."
Slide halted and turned to face the intruder. He might look like a man, but Slide knew instinctively that it was no more human than he. A human was unable simply to appear out of nowhere with quite such a supernatural sense of drama, and no human could conjure the ground fog that was suddenly drifting between the trees and around the megaliths of the stone circle, and certainly no human could recognized Slide as a demon in a man's body quite so easily. He been both made and surprised, and that was not good. No choice but the bluster.
"And who might you be? You don't look like any Druid. Even a Martian druid."
The figure moved closer. "You don't know me?" In fact, Slide did know the figure, after a fashion, or at least he thought he did. It greatly resembled the man at Rosa Coote's, sitting behind Sir Richard Barton, the one who Rosa had pointed out as Nightshade, and had said smelled of vampire. Was Barton so advanced that the had the undead in his employ and had sent this one to waylay Slide?
"I don't believe I've had the pleasure."
"But I think you know me."
Slide was stunned. Now he could smell vampire, and it was all he needed to trigger the recall. His full idimmu memory was vast, but made complicated by infinite dimensional levels and the relativity of time. The result was that large accumulations of data went ignored and unnoticed for sometimes subjective centuries at a stretch, until a random nudge brought long buried facts to the
conscious surface. Nightshade. More fully Joey Nightshade. The entity was also known Lupo Leomonte, sometimes Lupo Rieti. In other contexts, he was Vincent Satrielli. He was a vampire, one of the colony led by the formidable Victor Renquist, by all accounts with a career of bloody assassination that went back to the Italian Renaissance. All that Slide knew told him that such a being had no such business on Mars at all, let alone eight million years in his own linear past.
"You are Nightshade?"
"I prefer the simple Lupo."
Slide made a routine demon-to-vampire ward-off pass with his right hand, more to indicate that he had made this Nightshade, just as this Nightshade had made him, than as a gesture of protection. "I didn't know they had vampires on Mars?"