Whatever hold Cat had over the club, this threat was enough for the bouncer. He was wired to serve the institution first and guard the door second. He cast a warning glance back at the crowd, sought once more for a supervisor to consult, then stood aside, opened the door, and bowed his head. “Ms. Elle.”
“That’s what I thought, Bill.” Cat produced a coin from her belt, feathered it down the side of his neck, and rested it in the hollow of his collarbone. He swallowed. “Be well. Say hi to your kids.”
She flowed past him through the open door, Tara on her heels. Abelard stumbled out of the clutching crowd and followed.
The club’s foyer eschewed the Quechal style for brass, marble, and polished wood, illuminated by a hovering crystal sphere within which glowed a creature tiny, winged, and almost human, trapped by twisting tines of Craft. An imprisoned sprite—but no. Tara’s eyes narrowed. Not imprisoned. A ward filled the creature with pain and rapture, yes, but it was temporary, and mutually beneficial. She allowed herself to be captured here every evening, and at dawn a portion of the club’s power passed to her. Was this, in truth, slavery? Ask the managers of the club and they would deny it, and the sprite trembling inside the globe would say the same. Tara was uncertain either of them could be believed.
A few patrons lingered in the foyer, checking their coats or smoking or waiting, but Raz Pelham was not among them. A thick, beaded curtain led to the dance hall. Tara strode toward it, and through.
The Xiltanda’s main hall was more to Tara’s taste than any of the crowded, sweaty dives she had seen in Alt Coulumb thus far. Trapped sprites shone within the crystal chandelier–cage above the oak dance floor, and a swing band twirled a lively tune. Patrons sat at deep booths along the walls, drinking, watching, and waiting. An iron skeleton with a heart of cold fire danced with a bronze-skinned woman whose hair trailed down the plunging back of her dress in long slender braids. The skeleton dipped her and she threw her head back and her teeth flashed. In a corner booth an ancient Iskari Craftsman played an Old World game Tara didn’t recognize—a board game with no pieces save stones the size of a thumbnail, some black and some white—against a long thin boy with long thin fingers and golden hair. By the bar, something that might once have been human, but now resembled a winged reptile, was losing an argument against a plump, smiling Craftswoman who munched on peanuts and nursed a tall glass of stout.
The club reminded Tara of pleasant evenings at the Hidden Schools, but this was not time to join the party. Across from the stage rose a broad iron spiral staircase, winding down into shadow and up through the vaulted ceiling to unknown chambers. Raz Pelham was three quarters of the way to the Xiltanda’s second story, and moving fast.
Rather than skirt the dance floor’s edge, Tara cut through. She dodged the spinning skeleton and his partner, and nearly tripped over the black dress train of a tall, pale woman dancing with a mustachioed gentleman in a pinstriped suit. A lumbering green-skinned man who looked to have been reanimated many times over nearly crushed Tara with a flailing limb, but she ducked. Behind, Cat shoved dancers out of her way as Abelard apologized in broken sentences. “Very sorry, I mean— My apologies, she— Well that’s hardly—”
“Come on,” Tara called over her shoulder as she sprinted for the stairs. “Captain Pelham!” she shouted over the music, but the retreating vampire didn’t break stride. He must have heard her.
Cat and Abelard started up the stairs behind her. The swift percussion of their footsteps clashed with the tripping rhythm of the band below.
This stairway connected all floors of the Xiltanda, but a veil of opaque shadow divided each level from its neighbors. Tara passed through the shadow between the gleaming first story and the second, a chamber drunk on red velvet and echoing with screams and sighs and repetitive, bass-heavy music. Raz’s feet were already disappearing through the shadow above, between the second story and the third.
Tara ran after him. When she reached the third floor (a bare monastic scene, altars and stone walls and the distant crack of whips), Raz had not yet reached the next shadow. He redoubled his speed without a backward glance.
Raz had to know that fleeing would make her pursue. She had already seen him. Even if she didn’t catch him, he couldn’t hide from her forever, or from Ms. Kevarian for that matter. If he was afraid of being identified, he should try to attack and silence her, not escape. There was no reason to run, if the decision was his to make.
Comprehension congealed in her gut. The next time she closed her eyes, she let herself truly see.
Vampires were creatures of Craft, their life in daylight traded for strength at night, their death for hunger, their satiety for senses more acute than mortal imagination. Folk in Edgemont feared vampires because they looked like people until it was too late, but to Tara’s eyes, their twisted souls shone.
Which was why she hadn’t previously noticed the hooks of Craft that speared Raz’s head and heart. Something was riding Captain Pelham, pulling him upstairs under his power but not of his own will.
“Someone’s got his mind!” she shouted back to Abelard and Cat. Whatever gripped Raz must have heard her, because the vampire ran faster still. She reached out with threads of Craft to lock his limbs in place, but the threads melted against his flesh. No surprises there. Craft was difficult to use against a person neither dead nor alive.
Someone had snared Raz’s mind all the same.
The fourth floor was white-walled and smelled sickeningly sterile, the fifth dark as pitch and so silent Tara did not hear her own footfalls. She closed her eyes and saw Raz outlined in blue and receding above. Motionless human figures floated in the darkness around her, curled into fetal balls and warded with Craft that banished all sensation. She shivered as she ran, and almost fell.
The sixth floor smelled of sulfur, the seventh of ice. Tara’s legs were made of melted metal, and something hot and sticky lodged in her lungs in place of air. Raz disappeared through the shadow ceiling above, to the eighth floor. Tara ran after him and found herself at the top of the stairs, her path blocked by a latched steel door.
With a backhand wave she shattered the deadbolt, crashed the door off its hinges, and burst onto the chill rooftop. Neither moon nor stars relieved the darkness of the cloud-clogged sky. The only light rose from the street below.
“Raz!” she called again. He did not break stride or slow as he neared the roof’s edge.
Vampires were difficult to catch with the Craft, but not impossible. She couldn’t touch his body nor his soul, but the dense contract that knit his spirit to his dead flesh, that she could hold. Threads of starfire spanned the distance between Raz and Tara; his muscles and mind locked up and he skidded to a halt five feet from the edge of the roof.
He pulled against her Craft. Sweat beaded on her forehead. This was harder than it should have been. Clouds robbed Tara of the stars’ power and left her to bind Raz with her own meager reserves of soulstuff. She needed to get that hook out of his mind quickly, or her strength would fail.
Footsteps on the rooftop gravel behind her. She recognized Cat and Abelard by their breath, hers even and steady, his wheezing.
“Tara,” Abelard said when he could form words. “What the hell?”
“Hook in his mind.” Raz pitched and strained like a fish against her line and she almost fell. Her unseen opponent didn’t seem to care whether the Captain escaped or plummeted to his death, so long as Tara didn’t hold him. “Controlling him.”
“What?”
She took a step toward Raz, two, the strain increasing with every foot. Her arms ached, her hands shook. She had never been one for raw displays of power. Hers was the clever solution, the quick step, but now she matched might with an old vampire who had been strong even in life.