I started to say something to the satyr, but before I could get a word out, I felt pressure as a hand gripped my shoulder. I turned around to see a petite woman dressed in a 1920’s flapper outfit glaring at me. Her skin was covered with pulsating lesions, and when she opened her mouth to yell at me, I saw that her tongue was covered with blood-fattened ticks.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said, her words made mushy by all those ticks. “I’ve waited hours in this line, and now that I’m next, I’m not about to let some chewed-up deader and his leather-clad slut cut in front of me!” She bobbled her head as she spoke, making the locks of her page-boy hair cut swish back and forth and causing the ostrich feather tucked into her headband to jerk about spasmodically. Her lesions began to throb violently, presumably as a result of her anger.
“Surely those aren’t those real ticks.” I leaned close to the flapper and squinted my eyes, while at the same time reaching into one of my pockets and palming one of the objects I found there.
“Of course they’re real!” she said indignantly. “They’re the very latest thing. Take a look if you don’t believe me.”
The flapper stuck out her parasite-infested tongue for my inspection, and that’s when I flicked my lighter and touched the flame to the insects. The blood-gorged bugs popped and sizzled and leaped off the flapper’s tongue like…well, like dying ticks leaping off a burning tongue. The woman shrieked and batted her blazing tongue with both hands, while tears streamed down her face. “My babies!” she shouted. “What have you done to my babies?!”
At least, I think that’s what she said. It was kind of hard to tell with that flash-fried tongue of hers.
I then turned to glare at the rest of the people at the head of the line, and in my best gruff cop voice said, “Anybody else got something to say?”
A tall man dressed like a mortician with an insideout face stepped forward, but before I could do anything, Devona bared her fangs at him and hissed like a cougar on crack. The tall man swallowed-a very disturbing sight considering the state of his face-and quickly stepped back in line.
I looked to Devona. She kept her fangs bared, but I could see the satisfied twinkle in her eyes.
A hearty laughed boomed out, and Devona and I turned to face the satyr.
His teeth were perfectly white, perfectly straight. “Thanks for that-it was the most fun I’ve had all night! But even though I’m a great fan of street theatre, I’m afraid the two of you will just have to wait in line like everyone else.”
There was some half-hearted applause from the people behind us, but it cut off when Devona whirled around and hissed again.
I sighed. It had been a long day, and I’d never had much tolerance for people who thought they were God’s gift-on in this case, Dis’s gift-to the world. “We’re going into the club to look for someone, and you’re going to let us in. Now.”
The satyr’s left eyebrow climbed toward one of his horns. “Really?” he said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “And just how is this miraculous event going to take place?”
The asshole was really getting up my nose, but even though I was no longer a cop, I had a cop’s training, and I knew that it’s best to negotiate whenever possible. And I did have a few darkgems on me to offer as a poor excuse for a bribe.
“It depends,” I said. “What would it take for you to help make it happen?”
The satyr ran his fingers thoughtfully through his shaggy beard. “Oh, I don’t know.” Then he looked at Devona. A smoldering lust came into his gaze and a sly smile spread across his face. “She’s not bad-looking, and even better, she’s feisty. Fifteen minutes alone with her in the back alley, and I’ll let you both in. What do you say?”
Devona’s pretense of fierceness dropped away, replaced by shock. She looked to me, unsure how to respond. But that was all right-I knew exactly how to respond.
I still had hold of my lighter, and now I slipped it back into my pocket and exchanged it for a small burlap-wrapped ball tied with a thin white ribbon. I tossed it toward the satyr and said, “Catch.”
He caught the ball in one hand and then turned his palm up to examine it.
“What’s this?” he said, frowning in suspicion.
“Inside is some hair shed by a hellhound with a serious case of mange. As for what it does, it functions as a highly effective depilatory spell.”
The satyr’s frowned deepened into a scowl. “Depilatory? What’s that mean?”
A second later, he found out precisely what it meant when all of his hair-atop his head, on his face, and most especially from his waist down-slid off his body and fell to the ground in large clumps.
The people in line took one look at what the satyr’s groin fur had been hiding and started to laugh-and despite her injuries the burnt-tongue flapper laughed loudest of all.
“You wanted fifteen minutes with me?” Devona said, giving a certain portion of the satyr’s anatomy a pointed look. “That thing’s so small, it would’ve taken me half an hour to find it.”
More laughter, and the satyr-who was now absolutely and undeniably naked in the most profound sense of the word-wailed with embarrassment and took off running. The crowd on the sidewalk obligingly parted for him as he clip-clopped away on his goat hooves, bawling like a baby, which I decided was only appropriate considering he had an infant-sized weewee.
The satyr had dropped the hellhound fur ball when he ran, and I bent down, retrieved it, and tucked it back into my pocket. As I straightened, Devona said, “Is there anything you don’t have in those pockets of yours?”
“Yeah. A wallet. Who needs one in Nekropolis?”
I offered her my arm, she took it, and together we walked into the Krimson Kiss.
The atmosphere of the Krimson Kiss was even seedier than Skully’s. Bare dirt floor, crude wooden tables and chairs, guttering candles shoved into beer bottles…Vermen servers scuttled from table to table, the humanoid rodents taking and fulfilling orders with obsequious speed. The creatures stand between four and five feet tall and usually walk with a hunched-over shuffle, though they can move damned fast when they want to. They only wear clothes when working for humans (or humanlike beings), and the servers in the Krimson Kiss wore white waistcoats liberally splattered with bloodstains, equally stained white shirts, black pants, and black bow ties. No shoes, though. No amount of darkgems could get Vermen to cram their long clawed toes into such tortuously uncomfortable things. One passed close by me, carrying a tray loaded with pewter tankards. It was a female, I think, though I have a hard time telling one gender from another when it comes to vermen. She twitched her whiskers as she went by, and I couldn’t help feeling a wave of disgust. I’ve made a lot of adjustments since coming to Nekropolis, but for reason I’ve never have been able to get used to vermen. Maybe my mother was frightened by a Mousketeer when she was pregnant.
The Krimson Kiss’s clientele was a mix of vampires, lykes, and ghouls, with a scattering of demon kin and a few less identifiable beings. Some were watching a horror movie playing on big screen TV-I didn’t recognize it, but it was one of those English ones, in color, with lots of blood-and laughing uproariously. But most were busy gorging themselves on the establishment’s specialty-plates heaping with slabs of raw, wet meat and tankards brimming with blood, all provided by the Krimson Kiss’s claim to fame: the Sweetmeat.
The ghastly thing filled a recessed pit in the center of the club, a grotesquely fat blob of pink, boneless flesh from which a dozen stunted, withered arms and legs jutted forth. Vermen waiters ringed the creature, cutting off hunks of its flesh and slapping them on serving trays, filling mugs from brass spigots surgically implanted in its sides, all as fast as the ravenous crowd could order them.