Lucien kicked down the second door.
Behind it blinked a half dozen young women, all very much alive, all in various states of semi-dress, stretched out across cheap mattresses, seeming very weak and confused to see so much light streaming into the room all of a sudden. The smell was not very pleasant.
None of the girls, Lucien could tell, was a vampire. Yet.
But all of them had been bitten and drained, just enough to keep them compliant.
The mystery about what the vamps next door would eat when they awoke was solved.
“Gerald?” one of the girls asked in a bewildered voice.
“Is not Gerald,” another said, sounding even more bewildered.
All of them looked terrified.
Lucien turned around and signaled to Reginald.
“Get them out of here,” he said. “Start taking them upstairs. Wait for me there.”
“Okay,” Reginald said, affable now that the mystery of the basement had been solved. “But what about-” He nodded his head toward the room next door.
Lucien looked around the tiny cell in which the girls had been held, clearly for quite some time, and with no toilet facilities that he could see, save for a bucket. He saw a rickety chair and smashed it to pieces.
“This will do,” he said, lifting one of the chair legs and examining the pointiest end. “Now go.”
While Reginald went to work corralling the girls up the stairs-they needed a lot of assurance that it wasn’t a trap and that they were being set free-Lucien set about his own task.
It was grim work. He had no idea if the men had asked to be turned or if his brother was forming some kind of indentured vampire investment banker army to handle his finances.
Knowing his brother, he guessed the latter.
In any case, these men were not going to wake immortal, with superhuman powers, and thirsting for human blood.
They were never going to wake again at all.
When Lucien was finished with his foul task, he threw the chair leg away, washed himself off as best he could-humans who had not quite turned still exuded massive amounts of blood-and turned to leave the concrete room, giving it one last glance over his shoulder.
It was exactly the last resting place he’d pictured for all of them when he’d met them at the burlesque club.
Only he’d thought they’d be dying in a parking garage, in some sort of car accident. He’d never imagined he’d be the instrument of their death.
Except, he told himself, that he hadn’t been.
His brother was.
Dimitri knew the rules. What was he doing, turning humans and leaving them in a nightclub basement to awaken alone, then throwing them weakened human girls on which to feed?
At least now Lucien had a good idea where the bodies in the parks had been coming from.
“Reginald,” he called as he came up the basement stairs.
Reginald was waiting for him in the bar. He’d given all the girls cans of soda and little bowls of nuts, as if they were VIP guests of the club. Reginald had also, Lucien saw, raided the lost and found on the girls’ behalf. All of them were now fully, if somewhat whimsically, clothed.
“Yes, boss?” Reginald asked. He’d been wiping the bar as if the club was open for business and he was tending it.
“Where does Mr. Dimitri keep his safe?” Lucien asked.
“In his office,” Reginald responded promptly. “Here, I’ll show you.”
Reginald no longer needed the slightest mental push to do Lucien’s bidding. Having found a nest of soon-to-be vampires in his employer’s basement, alongside their next meal, Reginald’s loyalty to Mr. Dimitri seemed to have ended.
“Ladies,” Lucien called to the girls. “This way, please.”
The girls, chattering softly in their native languages, brought their sodas and nuts along as they followed Lucien and Reginald up the stairs to Dimitri’s plush office.
“It’s there,” Reginald said, pointing to a mirror that hung above a large art deco desk. “Behind the mirror. He keeps loads of cash in it. In case he has to make a quick getaway.”
“How fortuitous for us,” Lucien said. “Stand out of the way, ladies.”
He lifted a paperweight shaped like a greyhound and smashed the mirror to pieces with it.
“Dude really likes smashing shit,” Reginald remarked to the girls, who looked impressed.
Lucien took hold of the door to the safe and peeled it away, dropping it to the floor with a thump.
“Whoa,” he heard Reginald say. The young ladies gasped.
Lucien ignored them. He had work to do. As Reginald had stated, the safe was filled with a great deal of cash. There were also a lot of passports. Lucien reached for these and flung them to Dimitri’s desk.
“Look through these,” he said. “Perhaps the girls will find their own.”
There was a flutter of excitement behind him as the girls did just that. Lucien continued to rifle through the safe but found nothing else that would be of any use, to him or anyone else he could think of, except a set of keys and the title and registration papers to a car.
“Reginald,” he said. “What are these?”
“Oh,” the young man said. “Those are to Mr. Dimitri’s Lincoln Continental. He keeps it parked in a garage downtown. He lets me drive him in it sometimes. It’s a black ’69 Mark III. Sweet ride.”
Lucien nodded. “Consider it yours,” he said, and flung the keys and papers toward Reginald, who caught them expertly.
“Are you kidding me?” Reginald looked down at the keys in his hands. “But what’s Mr. Dimitri going to say?”
“Not much,” Lucien said, “when I get through with him. Ladies, come here, please.”
When the girls had gathered around the desk, Lucien gave them each several stacks of the neat piles of hundred-dollar bills.
“Take this money,” he instructed them, “and your passports, and start a new life, somewhere far away from here. Or go back to your old lives, if that’s what you think will make you happy. Just forget all about what happened here. I’ll take care of the people who hurt you. They won’t harm anyone else again. I promise. You have nothing more to fear. Go, and be healthy and happy.”
The girls, whose grasp of English was shaky, smiled-first down at the money in their hands, then at each other, and then at him.
They didn’t need to know English to understand what he’d said to them.
Because he hadn’t even spoken out loud. He’d said all he had to say in their minds, giving them each a gentle memory wipe.
It would be a long time before they were completely healed. Even he couldn’t do that for them.
But this, he knew, was a beginning.
The money would do nothing to bring back the lives that had been lost due to his failure to control his brother’s barbarism.
But for now, this was the only penance he could make.
“Reginald,” he said aloud. “Take the women outside, and make sure they get safely into cabs. Have the drivers take them to JFK. They can decide from there where they want to head next.”
“You got it,” Reginald said.
“Then,” Lucien said, “you’re going to take the car and drive it to Georgia to live with your brother.”
“My brother,” Reginald said, looking pleased. “That’s a good idea!”
“I thought so. Don’t forget anything here at the club. If you do, you won’t be able to come back for it. It’s just going to burn.”
“Burn, sir?” Reginald looked confused. “How?”
“In the fire,” Lucien explained patiently. “Go now. And don’t worry. No one will be left to point a finger at you, I assure you.”
Reginald turned, his arms open wide, and shepherded the girls away. They all left, smiling back at Lucien gratefully…and a little bit worshipfully.
He looked away. Gratitude was the last thing he deserved, much less worship.
He was dousing the bodies in the basement with rum from the bar-he’d always found that 151 burned quickest and most efficiently, leaving very little tissue residue-when his cell phone buzzed.