Child, p.10
Child, page 10
part #6 of Sam and Sam Series
He rubbed his face again and stood.
“You’re right. Too much time off.”
“You have found the place to start, though.”
He helped her up and they walked back to the car.
“Wait until you see this place.”
<><><>
From the outside, the building looked like an old warehouse that had been recently bedazzled with neon scribbles. The sidewalk had been repaved and then surfaced with an astroturf interpretation of a red carpet, and the side door had an awning like a hotel.
“Needlepoint,” Samantha read with disbelief. Sam was amused.
“You can buy buildings, but you can’t buy taste.”
She shook her head, bewildered.
“Is this my many years of hanging out in New York, or is this place completely tacky?”
Sam shrugged.
“I think the stuff in New York is tacky.”
“You do not,” she said. “Not liking it is different from thinking it’s tacky.”
“I think they’re tacky,” he said.
“No, thinking they’re pretentious and egotistical doesn’t mean you think they’re tacky, either,” Samantha said with a smile. He shrugged.
“Potato, tomato, you know.”
She grinned.
“So what’s the approach?”
“There are loading bay doors in the back. Looks like they still use them.”
“You think anyone is there?” Samantha asked. Sam winced his face to one side.
“I couldn’t get a look inside, and even just watching it, things got… fuzzy.”
“Sam,” she said, emphasizing outrage. “You have got to be careful. If they can alter what you’re seeing, they can hurt you. It really isn’t any different.”
He sent her adequate remorse, and she promised to drop it.
“Could just go in as us,” he said.
“Who is that?” Samantha asked.
“Chick who likes to dance and her tagalong husband.”
She grinned at that.
“I like it, but if I were the one setting it up, and it were worth putting the effort they have into shielding the place, there’d be alarms up everywhere if something of angelic or demonic origin showed up.”
“Just saying it to have said it,” Sam said. “You could leave Lahn at the hotel.”
She didn’t have to give him her answer out loud. Lahn had a knack for getting lost, and Samantha had only very, very rarely been separated from her for fear of the sword getting misplaced and then never being found again. It was a good play, and maybe she was too protective of Lahn, but it didn’t change her perspective at all.
“So what else?” Sam asked.
“Could just wait for her,” Samantha said.
“You know…”
She grinned up at him, then turned, heading back for the car.
“That just might work?”
<><><>
He got that she was the one who had to put up with the steering wheel, but Samantha was simply not able to appreciate how uncomfortable a stakeout was in her Mustang for someone as tall as Sam. He shifted again, trying to find a place where there was enough space for his knees, then sat up.
“Where?” Samantha asked.
“That’s her,” he said, indicating the woman walking down the sidewalk behind them. He opened his door and got out, and she shied closer to the buildings, not making eye contact.
“Ashley?” he tried. She skittered further away, her back to the bricks, and stared at him.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Found her, then,” Samantha said. “We’re here to help.”
She fished in her purse and pulled out mace.
“Stay away.”
Sam didn’t move in on her, letting her edge past and continue on into the building. She cast several looks over her shoulder, and she stood in the doorway facing them for a moment before she let the steel door fall closed.
“Suppose she’s not in trouble yet?” Sam asked.
“Could be,” Samantha answered. “It isn’t the nicest part of town. Could be she’s just that scared of strangers.”
“Or she’s too afraid of whatever it is we’re supposed to save her from that she wouldn’t talk to us,” Sam said.
“Could be that, too,” Samantha agreed. “Especially when you consider she’s working in a building booby trapped for psychics.”
Sam tipped his head. She had a good point.
“I think you need to go in there,” he said, getting back in the car. She stood at the open driver’s side door for a minute, watching, then sat down.
“I know.”
“I can stay out here. You’ve left Lahn with me before.”
“I know,” she said again, starting the engine.
“Where are we going?”
“Back to the hotel,” she said with a sigh. “I need to get dressed.”
<><><>
In truth, she wasn’t unarmed. The spellcasting ability she had, just in the human languages, was enough to topple buildings this size, warded or not. Add in her angeltongue capabilities, especially the inspired stuff, and she was a formidable opponent without laying a hand on a soul. It didn’t change how naked she felt, walking into the club in just her black dress.
She looked at the stamp on the back of her hand that indicated she was old enough to drink and that she had paid the cover charge, but it was just an overly-stylized design with no deeper meaning or power, from what she saw. Someone would have had to get very creative with the symbolic magic to give that drawing any power.
Inside, green and purple strobes gave the space a seizure-inducing sense of indistinction. She couldn’t see the people around her clearly, not to mention where the walls and doors were. She didn’t think it was right to call the event going on inside a rave, because the music wasn’t right, but she didn’t have a better word for it, either. The women were young, skinny, underclad, and drunk. The men were slightly older, college and young adult, well-dressed, and only slightly less drunk. If she had stumbled into the place by accident, she very well could have enjoyed herself, though it would have been with an eyeroll at the design choices. Someone had thrown a lot of money at the place, clearly, and the right people were showing up to sustain it as a popular business, but there was no sense of genre or continuity.
The bar was lit with blacklights, and three girls in cutoff shirts and denim sailor hats were working it. A black woman with giant frizzy hair and purple lipstick that glowed in the blacklight asked for Samantha’s order, and she paid for a double shot of tequila, tipping it back and moving on. One of the men at the bar noticed her and gave chase.
“I’m Grimoire,” he said, grabbing her elbow and trying to shake her hand by the wrist.
“Sure you are,” she answered. His teeth were too big and his glasses too thick. He grinned wider.
“What’s your name?”
“Harder to get than that,” she said. The magic of the black dress was weak, here, where the darkness made clothing unimportant. He’d just been scouting the bar for women who were getting drunk the fastest.
He laughed too loudly and gave her arm a tug toward the dance floor.
“Do you want to dance?” he asked.
“I’m looking for someone,” she said. “I think she works here. Maybe you can help me?”
“Sure,” he said, the grin edging even bigger. “What does she look like?”
“Is that going to help?” Samantha asked.
“What?” he asked, his mouth too close to her face. She turned her head to the side and yelled louder.
“How do you get a job here?”
“They’re really hot, aren’t they? They all are,” he told her. “What’s your friend’s name? Maybe I know her.”
“You come here a lot?” Samantha asked. He nodded, a huge motion.
“Sure. And I know a lot of the girls.”
“I’m looking for Ashley.”
His grinned turned lascivious.
“She’s great. Maybe the three of us could…?”
More than anything, Samantha wanted to put a blade to his throat. She regretted not arming herself with inert steel.
“You know where I can find her?”
He shook his head.
“I’d try downstairs.”
“Thanks, Chachi,” she said. He gave her a confused look and she slipped free, weaving through the crowd to put as many people between them as possible. Sam checked with her a bit more invasively and she gave him a wave. She was fine. Annoying and scary sometimes intermingled in a place like this, but she wouldn’t even have to break a guy like that to make him go away. Just his glasses.
She scouted the wall, keeping her eyes a bit dull and her posture a bit down - this was where her original superpower, invisibility, really became evident - and found a doorway with a muscled man sitting next to it on a stool. That would make it either the offices or something else interesting and probably worth seeing. She walked up to him and made shy eye contact, pressing her lips and looking back at the floor, then opening the door and walking downstairs. Jason had seen her do it a dozen times and still didn’t believe how well it worked. It worked because it wasn’t an act. That was how she really felt around people when she wasn’t acting on higher authority. People didn’t notice the shy, the insecure, the uninteresting.
The stairway was rather wide and smelled of stale wine and staler sweat. She made her way carefully into the basement, hearing voices down a long hallway, but not passing anyone. She found a wide space that was broken up by free-standing rooms maybe fifteen feet on a side. She looked closely at the first one, finding a credit card reader next to the locked door.
“Mmm,” she muttered, continuing on. It was the third room before she noticed the names, scrawled in stylized black text on the dark doors. Without much effort, she found the one where Ashley would be. She dug a credit card out of her purse and swiped it, mostly just to see what would happen. The door beeped quietly and Samantha tried the handle, but it was still locked. A young man came walking quickly down the hallway and Samantha looked at him passively, waiting for him to speak.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“I was hoping that I could see Ashley,” Samantha said. He gave her a quick little smile and checked an electronic screen in his arms.
“She’s busy tonight. Can I interest you in someone else?”
Samantha hesitated, then plunged ahead.
“Who would you recommend?”
“You want someone like Ashley?” he asked, checking his list again. She let him infer his own answer, waiting as he tapped the screen a few times, then gave her a smile that reeked of business and put his arm out.
“Kathleen is available tonight, if you’d like.”
Samantha followed, glancing at the man with bemusement as he waited for her to swipe her credit card and open the door, then turned to leave. Samantha went in, again wishing she’d brought a blade. Closed rooms made her nervous, when she didn’t have a good picture of what was inside.
Being in the room made Samantha’s skin crawl. She knew the scents, the colors, the furniture. She’d seen what went on in places like this. Sam wanted her to leave, but she perched on a chair, instead, and waited. A few minutes later, a beautiful woman who did strongly resemble Ashley entered from a second door.
“Hi, honey,” the woman said. “I’m Kathleen.”
“I’m Sam,” Samantha answered. Kathleen smiled prettily, exposing perfect teeth, and came to sit on the floor in front of her, eyes suggestive.
“What can I do for you, honey?”
Samantha felt like climbing the wall. She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to be there.
“I just want to talk.”
<><><>
Sam was in pain, sitting in the car waiting. His knees, hurt, his back hurt, and he needed to get out and stretch, but worse was sitting through the sticky, sweaty, sick trepidation as Samantha sat, alone with someone - a woman, he thought, one that she felt pity for despite a deep mistrust and fear, meaning she was probably quite self-confident and pretty - and forced herself to be collected and insightful. She was doing her job. Well. He knew that. But he wished he could have traded places with her.
He couldn’t have gotten downstairs. He’d felt the flick of insecurity and social fear as she’d made her way past whoever was standing guard, sure sign she’d flipped the switch and gone invisible. And he probably would have punched the prick at the bar in the face for whatever he’d said to her. But having gotten downstairs, she was somewhere he would have done much better.
They both knew that, even if she wouldn’t have admitted it to herself, yet.
Then something went wrong. He felt the violent urge that was her wishing she had a knife - again - and then quick motion. Retreat. Shame. Anger. Hands on her back. This wasn’t fear; he wasn’t actually worried, but he was at his sharpest alertness, waiting.
The stairs went by again, and then the disgust at the misshapen darkness inside the club, and then cold air.
She was outside.
He waited, watching the slim black figure walk down the street toward him and get into the car.
“First time I’ve ever been kicked out of a club,” she observed.
“There’s an accomplishment for you,” he answered as she started the engine. “What did you find out?”
“They’re prostitutes,” she said simply, trying to disguise the disgust and bad memories associated with the idea. The tone was so steeped in lie that Sam almost felt like the statement itself was untrue. It was a fine shade of truth, telling the difference. She pleaded with him across the bond not to make a big deal about it. It was the same recoiling sensation he felt from her so often, now.
“Okay,” he prompted. She shook her head, backing up to give herself room to get out of the parking spot.
“I doubt any of them want to be there. It’s a loathsome place.”
“Why all of the secrecy?” Sam asked.
“Don’t know yet,” she said.
“So what happened?”
“I asked her why she was doing it,” Samantha said.
“You saw her again?”
“No. Another girl. She…” There was a moment as she decided between telling him the story that she wanted to tell him, for herself, and the one that she needed to tell him, to move them forward and keep them working. He didn’t want to be patronizing, and that struggle, gentle and sincere, took place in plain sight, for her. She nodded. And sighed.
“She thought I wanted to hear… about it. That that’s… what I was there for.”
People were screwed up. He let her talk.
“She was trying to work me. Like a machine that you just have to find the key for. She was mad at me for…” She took a deep breath and the engine revved as a flash of anger went by and subsided again. “She was mad at me for not being easy.”
Sam managed not to laugh out loud, but it wasn’t hidden from her. The silent response was bitterly angry and ashamed all at once, and he wished he could take it back. Perfect honesty was hard.
“I told her I knew Ashley, and she started talking about rates and special… things. I couldn’t make her understand that I wanted to know about her.”
If the woman hadn’t been so pretty, Samantha probably would have managed a lot more tact. She had a gift for getting the information she wanted from people by being kind to them, but she had a thing with beautiful women who were sexually aware.
Mostly that she hated the way she felt them, but he would have never ever said that out loud, or even thought it out loud. Almost to a woman, they terrified her.
“How did you get kicked out?” he asked, giving her permission to move on, back to business.
“I told her that I thought that someone was making her do it, and she said ‘well, if that’s what you’re into’ and I asked what they had to use against her, to make her have sex with strangers, and that’s when she started yelling.”
Sam tipped his head back and forth, envisioning how that had gone.
“At least you didn’t accuse her of having daddy issues,” he said.
“Freaking missionary pervert. That’s what she called me,” Samantha said, with a flicker of humor now. “They came and got me and kicked me out and told me not to come back. That I wasn’t welcome.”
“What do you want to do next?” Sam asked. Her unspoken response was immediate and passionate. Angry, bitter, and darkly humorous. He waited.
“How would you feel about kidnapping Ashley tomorrow?”
He waited again, but she didn’t take it back.
“You’re serious?”
“You come up with a better plan by morning, I’m all ears,” she said.
“Better than…”
“Kidnapping her, yes.”
He prayed all the way back to the hotel that he would be able to concoct something better than that.
<><><>
He didn’t.
He sat in the front seat of the Mustang the next morning, boggling that he had let Samantha talk him into this. The truth was that she hadn’t talked him into it; he had failed to talk her out of it. Since the night before, she’d been a bit manic, and he was worried that this was going to blow up big time, but, yeah, he didn’t have any better ideas. They needed to get her to talk to them so that they could figure out how to help her. How to save her.
If unraveling the magic on the warehouse were that easy, a demon would have found his way into Samantha’s apartment months ago. And the directive identified Ashley by name. Sam had found her, staring off to sea. This was the girl they were supposed to save.
Whether she liked it or not.
Freaking missionary perverts, indeed.
Sam watched as Ashley got out of her car in a parking structure down the block, and Samantha took her cue to start up the car. He painted Ashley for her to track down, keeping a tight psychic eye on her as she walked down stairwell after stairwell, and they arrived outside of the structure as she exited it.
She noticed the Mustang and started to fish in her purse again for the mace, but Sam was too quick.
“We need to talk to you,” he said. “I’m sorry. No one is going to hurt you.”
