Chapter III
III
The music pulls her in and under.
A heavy beat that pulses through the club, too loud to hear, to think.
Everywhere Alice looks she sees bodies pressed together, most of them dressed in black leather and black cotton and black lace.
Chalice.
That’s what the place is called.
It’s straight out of a paranormal romance, dark velvet swallowing the corners and mirrors draped with cotton shrouds. Lamps with crimson-tinted bulbs and alcoves running down the walls like cubbies in a crypt.
Alice skirts the crowded club, searching for Lottie.
She passes through a pool of black light, and suddenly her hands are splattered neon in a way that makes her want to rush into the nearest bathroom and start scrubbing at the skin. But no one seems to notice the blood spray on her skin, or if they do, they don’t care.
To her right, two guys are locked together against the wall, limbs tangled, hands, too, a band of red, a band of white, the air around them thick and sweet, and Alice tenses when their mouths break apart and she sees the tips of pointed teeth.
There and then gone, as he buries his head in the curve of the other guy’s neck.
And maybe, just maybe, she’s found the right place, the real thing. Hope rises in her as she hooks her finger under the white wristband, and snaps it off, then heads for the bar.
No stools, so she leans her elbows on the counter and flags the bartender down, a wiry woman with contacts that make her eyes look black from edge to edge. Alice slides her phone, face up, across the bar.
“Have you seen this girl?” she shouts over the blaring beat.
And maybe it’s the contacts but the bartender doesn’t even seem to look, just shakes her head and says, “You gonna order something?” jabbing a pointed crimson nail at the board behind her head, where everything has a name like Violence or Heartbreak or Hunger.
Alice orders a Heartbreak, ends up with a shot glass of something that looks like blood but smells like sugar.
Tastes like it, too. She gags, spits the contents back into the glass, squeezes her eyes shut and realizes that she is, of course, an idiot, that this place might as well be the film set for a teenage urban fantasy, that there’s nothing real about the people here, it’s clearly another dead end and—
“First time?”
Alice opens her eyes, and turns, and for a second, she’s looking right at Lottie.
Lottie, leaning an elbow on the bar, her smile cocked and her curls now tinted red instead of violet. But then Alices blinks, and it’s not her, just another curly-headed girl, her skin too fair, and her eyes a lightless, ordinary shade.
Ordinary, but pretty all the same, ringed the way they are in black, tiny jewels winking at the inner corners.
A white band loops around one wrist, and gold rings glint on every knuckle, catching the club’s odd light as she reaches out and brushes a fingertip along Alice’s cheek.
A dark bead hovers on her skin, as if she’s pricked her finger on a thorn.
Alice stares down at the smudge, and frowns.
She didn’t realize she was crying.
The girl looks down, too, perplexed, then lifts her finger to her lips, as if to lick the blood away—bur Alice is racked by the sudden fear that it will do something to this girl, hurt her, change her, so she snatches her hand before it reaches her tongue.
The girl flinches. “Your hands are cold.”
“Are they?” asks Alice, and she could have wiped her blood from the girl’s skin, but she doesn’t.
She can’t. The sight of it churns the hunger up, and before she knows what she’s doing, Alice lifts the girl’s fingers to her lips, and when she doesn’t resist, Alice puts the index finger in her mouth and licks it clean.
Her blood, which doesn’t taste the same, but still rings her hunger like a bell, and she doesn’t mean to bite the girl, but as her teeth skim the soft meat of her fingertip, her jaw commits a small, defiant act, and tightens.
Alice has barely bitten down, but she feels the skin break, easy as a peach under a paring knife.
The girl gasps, lets out a nervous laugh.
“Wow, those are sharp,” she says as she draws her hand back, but she doesn’t seem mad—if anything, her pupils have gone wide, the air around her tinged with want, and then she’s drawing Alice away from the bar, away from the twisting bodies in the center of the club, away from the throbbing beat and into a corridor, and then her mouth is on Alice’s mouth and her hand (the one with the white band) is sliding beneath Alice’s hoodie, and her heart is pounding through her ribs when she brings her lips to Alice’s ear and says, sincerely, “Bite me.”
And maybe it’s the way she says it, or maybe it’s the club lights, turning the world crimson, but Alice feels a trapdoor fall open deep inside her as she brings her mouth to the waiting slope of the girl’s throat and lets her teeth slide in.
Blood wells and breaks across her tongue.
The girl gasps, and that sound unlocks a deeper kind of want.
Alice turns, pressing her back against the nearest wall.
Ringed hands grip Alice’s arms, and she says something Alice can’t hear, not over the heartbeat flooding back into her chest, and even though it’s only been hours since she fed, she is ravenous, a broken vessel trying to fill itself up faster than it leaks, and maybe if she just drinks enough the hunger won’t be able to catch up with her, maybe her heart will keep beating, maybe it will be enough and—
Someone wrenches Alice backward.
She stumbles, straightens in time to see the girl’s legs go out, her body sliding down the wall before a guy with spiked black hair shoves past Alice and steadies her.
Alice stares in horror. What has she done?
The heartbeat trails off in her chest, and in its wake, the club comes rushing back, all that bad techno and cheap red light.
The guy is sitting the girl who isn’t Lottie down in a chair, and the mean bartender is rounding the counter, asking if she’s all right, and he’s saying, “Yeah, she just had too much too fast, you know they always forget to eat.”
And Alice is still dazed, unsure what she’s done, and how she could have lost herself so quickly, and she’s staring at the girl, the one who wanted to be bitten, but she looks pale, and frightened now.
Before Alice can ask if she’s okay, the guy with the spiked hair has Alice by the arm, and he’s leading her away, past the covered mirrors and the black-clad crowd, past the two guys from earlier, who are still kissing, only this time she’s close enough to see the way the plastic fangs flex when the one with the red band clenches his teeth.
Fake.
All of it’s fake.
But she’s—
“You’re in the wrong place,” snaps the spiky-haired guy as he steers her toward a back door, and out, into the quieter, colder night.
And Alice wants to say No shit, but she’s still blood drunk and a little dazed, so it takes her a moment to realize what he just said, and what he didn’t say, because if there’s a wrong place, then maybe there’s a right one, too.
He’s already turning away when she calls out, “Wait!” She catches the door before it closes. “Where do I go?”
The guy looks back. “No idea,” he says. But that’s not good enough.
“Please,” she grabs his wrist, and he stiffens a little, either because her hands are cold, or because he knows, and if he met her eyes, she’d try to make him tell, but he doesn’t, just looks past her into the alley and says, “Try following the music.”
She lets out an exasperated sigh. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“No idea.” The guy shrugs. “But it’s what I was told to say, if someone like you came round.”
The words hum beneath her skin.
Someone like you.
Meaning, there are people like her somewhere.
He pulls free of her grip and turns away.
“Hey,” she says, digging the phone from her pocket. “Have you seen this—”
But the back door is already swinging shut, taking the club’s red lights and low beat, and leaving Alice out in the cold.