In the Garden of Sin (23 page)

OU GOTTA BE KIDDING,” Doug said when Elic and Lili paused before a gray-painted, age-scoured wooden door, sans doorknob, which was squeezed ignominiously between a St. Mark’s Place brownstone and a brick apartment building with a record store on the ground floor.
“This
is your place?”

As Turek watched from behind a tree across the street, grateful for the nearly full moon and cloudless sky, Elic pressed his thumb to a metal plate on the door jamb. Lili produced a remote control from her clutch purse and pushed a series of buttons, causing a little green light on the top edge of the door to wink.

“Holy shit,” Doug said as the door popped open an inch, painting a ribbon of light onto the sidewalk. “What is this, like your secret spy lair or something?”

“It’s Penumbra Court, a private residential quarter,” Elic said as he swung the door open, gesturing them through. It was a heavy steel door; the gray-painted wood was just a façade.

Turek squinted, trying to see beyond the doorway, but all he could make out was a weathered old brick wall and cobblestone paving. At a casual glance, the door would appear to provide access to the apartment building housing the record store. Looking up to the roofline, however, he saw a tangle of razor wire about five feet wide where the roof above the door should have been.

The door clicked shut. Turek sprinted across the street, scanning the area to make sure he was alone. After hauling himself up by the pipe frame supporting the record store’s awning, he clambered swiftly up the building’s four-story fire escape and onto the roof.

Galiana probably could have leapt the whole five stories from a standing start. With a backflip and a silent ten-point dismount thrown in for good measure. Turek had seen her bound along rooftops like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat; once, she leapt from one roof to another across the Champs-Élysées. She called that kind of shit her “wireless wire fu,” like in those cheesy kung fu movies she couldn’t get enough of. Turek called it obnoxious hot-dogging.

Not to her face, of course.

From above, Turek could see that the brownstone next door and the apartment building on which he stood were separated by an alleyway, to which access was gained by the knob-less gray door with the state-of-the-art locks. A series of motion sensor lights turned on one by one as Elic guided the others down the narrow passage, leading Nicky by her leash as he dug a key ring out of his jeans pocket.

The alley opened into a courtyard so heavily treed that
Turek could barely make out the three-story town houses huddled around it. Tucked within the embrace of the surrounding buildings—all of them, including that on which Turek stood, rimmed in razor wire with no windows overlooking the court—the little cluster of houses would be indiscernible from either St. Mark’s Place to the south or East Ninth Street to the north.

Turek could see little of the houses aside from four gabled, slate-shingled mansard roofs, their flat surfaces carpeted with roof gardens of juniper, boxwoods, and holly. All of the plantings were conifers, like the trees in the courtyard, most of the latter towering over the roofs. Shrouded by evergreens, Penumbra Court would look like any other East Village backyard on one of those satellite maps, even in the dead of winter.

“Dave will go apeshit when I tell him about this place,” Doug told Nicky.

“Dave?” Elic said.

“My buddy writes this blog about the little hidden remnants of old New York that people walk right by and don’t even notice. You won’t mind if I bring him here and let him take some pictures.”

“You won’t remember where this is,” said Lili, exchanging a look with Elic as they paused at the end of the alley.

“Sure I will.”

“I don’t think so.” Elic touched Doug’s forehead, then Nicky’s.

They both blinked.

Nicky frowned at Doug. “What did you say?”

“What?”

“You said something.”

“No, I didn’t. And the next time you speak out of turn, or fail to address me as ‘Master,’ you get five hours gagged and bound in the fucking corner.”

Ah
, Turek thought. So his failure to locate the château all those years ago wasn’t entirely due to having inexplicably lost his sense of direction, nor had it been swallowed up into the valley. It would seem that Elic’s bag of tricks included the ability to impose selective amnesia upon those who may have learned just a bit too much for comfort.

The foliage muffled the group’s conversation as they disappeared into it. Turek had to strain to hear Elic say “That’s our house, the one with the red door. It was the first one put up here in the early eighteen forties. The others were built later, for friends.”

“Who lives in them now?” Doug asked.

“Individuals who value their privacy, as we do.
Entrez vows
.”

A door creaked open, and a few seconds later, Turek heard it close. Singling out the closest of the tall spruces, he backed away from the edge of the building, mentally calculating distance, speed, and trajectory. He took a running leap, feeling a snag in his right jeans leg as he
almost
cleared the razor wire.

Gottverdammt
. Turek grabbed a branch and held on, grimacing as a barrage of spruce needles scourged his face and hands. His right loafer slipped off and thunk-thunk-thunked to the ground as he scrambled for a foothold. The shoes were no doubt scratched beyond recognition. Ditto the jacket; the black silk scarf he’d worn insouciantly draped over it had flown off in midleap and fluttered to the ground.

Turek paused for a moment, watching and listening, but his blundering foray into this exclusive little enclave had evidently gone unnoticed. Of course, it was late at night. Even if the other residents of Penumbra Court were Follets, as Turek suspected, they were probably fast asleep. To his knowledge, it was only the Vampire race that was primarily nocturnal—and even among their ranks, there were those, like Turek and
Galiana, who could go about during the day with minimal discomfort if they were properly outfitted, especially if it was cloudy or they could keep to the shade.

Vampires had varying tolerances to ultraviolet light on their skin and eyes. With some, it was like what you see in movies, with the poor doomed bloodsucker basically frying to a crisp in short order. Thankfully, the Upír, while still vulnerable to direct sunlight, and therefore repulsed by it, experienced a less dramatic physiological reaction. Most of them had to be exposed to it with no protection for at least five minutes before their skin began to blister. With prolonged exposure— each individual’s UV vulnerability varied—came a progressive, systemic sun poisoning known as solar cremation. As with exposure to fire, once the body was damaged past a certain point, recovery was impossible.

For this reason, in the past, the Upír had traditionally slept between sunrise and sundown and done their prowling at night. However, recent technological advances enabled them to mingle with humans during daylight hours with little risk to their health—specifically, high-SPF sunscreen and either good-quality sunglasses or glasses with photochromic lenses, the kind that react to UV rays by turning dark. Turek, who favored the latter, owned upward of fifty pairs of designer frames fitted with nonprescription Transitions lenses; he never left the house, even at night, without a pair tucked away somewhere on his person.

He climbed down, located and replaced his scarf, shoved his foot back in the loafer, dusted off the needles, and finger-combed his hair so that the long, layered front fringe—he hated the word “bangs” in relation to men’s hair—was swept off to the side, where it belonged, and not hanging in his eyes.

Dark figures shifted in a pair of ground-floor windows of the house with the red door. By their glow, Turek could see
that the courtyard was actually a little deep-shade garden, with vines and flowers growing around the base of each tree and iron benches on the cobblestone paths winding this way and that. The house itself, like the other three, was the type of bourgeois brick town house that had been all the rage in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, more majestic in design than in size, although it appeared to be the largest of the four.

Turek crept closer to the house, crouching behind a rhododendron bush between the two windows, which were hung with semisheer yellow curtains that afforded a soft-focus view of the room and its occupants. Through the right-hand window he saw a pair of tall bookcases bracketing a fireplace with a painting over it; through the left, more bookcases and a cozy little arrangement of Victorian furniture—couch, coffee table, and a couple of chairs, all upholstered in dark green leather.

Lili and the other couple were in that area of the room, she sorting through bottles at a liquor cabinet as Doug settled into one of the chairs, loosening his tie while he surveyed the room. He’d taken the pink leash back from Elic, and he tugged Nicky down onto the floor at his feet. She sat with her legs curled under her, hands in her lap.

Turek ducked as Elic whipped open the curtains over the window he was looking through, flipped the lock, and tugged it open.

“Good idea,” Lili said. “It
is
a little stuffy in here. I hope no one minds, but I’m suffocating in this velvet.” She slid down the side zipper of her dress, pulled it over her head, and tossed it over the back of a chair.

“Single malt?” she asked Doug.

He nodded, gaping as she poured a couple of fingers of Cragganmore into a glass.

Turek gaped, too. Lili’s undergarments, all black, consisted of a g-string beneath a tube of stretch lace that hugged her like
skin from the strapless push-up cups to the hip-length hem, to which sheer black stockings were attached by means of satin garters. With those fuck-me eyes, the ornate gold earrings, and the sex-kitten heels, she looked about fifty times hotter than the hottest Victoria’s Secret model Turek had ever seen.

She handed the glass of scotch to Doug, who stroked her hip as he took it, his boner stretching the fly of those elegant trousers.

Elic opened the other window and paused, frowning out into the night. Turek heard him take a breath in through his nose. “Smells like someone spilled about a gallon of Bijan for Men out there somewhere,” he said.

A gallon?
Turek was wearing Bijan, all right, but just a few splashes applied hours ago, when he was dressing to go out. Its scent had long since faded.

Some Follets had heightened senses. Lili’s eyesight, for example, was extraordinary. It would appear that Elic, like Galiana, had the nose of a bloodhound.

“And for you, Nicky?” Lili asked, handing Elic a glass of red wine as he took a seat on the couch.

“She’ll have milk, if you’ve got it,” Doug said.

Lili held Nicky’s gaze until Nicky met her eyes and nodded.

“I’ll get it,” Elic said, pushing himself up from the couch.

Waving him back down, she said, “I’m already up.”

Turek shifted his gaze to the right-hand window to keep her in his sights as she crossed to a door on the other side of the room. She had a distinctive walk, languid and naturally sensual, about a thousand times more alluring than Mistress G’s brassy streetwalker strut.

As she passed the fireplace, Turek’s gaze was arrested by the painting hanging over it, a portrait of a raven-haired beauty lounging on a couch—the same one on which Elic now sat, if Turek wasn’t mistaken, but upholstered in golden velvet. The
styling of her off-the-shoulder maroon gown dated the painting to the 1880s or ’90s. It was a very accomplished work, the artfully deft brushstrokes shimmering with light. Turek had no trouble identifying the artist as John Singer Sargent, several of whose works hung in Galiana’s private collection.

It was an exquisite painting, but what mesmerized Turek wasn’t the quality of its execution but its subject: Lili. Sargent had captured her perfectly—the luster of her skin, the graceful contours of her shoulders and arms, those lush, slightly parted lips curved in a secret smile… But most of all, the eyes, dark, exotic, dreamily seductive. They held Turek’s gaze until Lili returned with a tumbler full of milk.

“What do you say?” Doug asked Nicky as she accepted the glass from Lili.

“Thank you, ma’am.” Nicky sat looking at the milk until Doug gave her permission to drink.

“I can’t recall seeing you two at Tethers before,” Doug said as Lili sat next to Elic on the couch.

So that was where Elic and Lili had gone shopping for tonight’s playmates. Tethers was a bondage and discipline club on West Houston that attracted a mixed clientele, from posers to longtime devotees of “the lifestyle.” Like most alternative sex clubs, Tethers was the site of regular get-togethers, some of them private, anything-goes orgies and others open to the public, at which penetrative sex was verboten.

Some “clubs” were just loose affiliations of fetishists or BDSM types who met at various venues, including each other’s homes. Turek and Galiana belonged to a whole slew of them, their members being particularly easy to “harvest,” as Galiana referred to it. They were always up for anything:
“Okay, sure, you can bite my neck, but would you mind tying me up with clothesline first and putting clothespins on my nipples?”
And if they woke up in a strange place with bleary memories
of having been immobilized and ravaged, well, that was all part and parcel of the lifestyle, was it not? Aficionados of blood fetishism were especially suited to their purposes, for obvious reasons.