High Voltage (Fever #10)(64)
“Then you’ve had dealings with them.” I settled on the large flat cushion near the fire.
He dropped down to a boulder near the flames and laughed darkly. “That I have, lass. They’ve been trying to capture Sean and me for quite some time. When that failed, they began to offer various enticements. We’re enemy number three. Mac’s enemy number one. I hear Jayne is enemy number two. But I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s much I need to tell you.”
Wrapping myself in the woolen throw, I drew nearer to the fire to listen.
In a gadda da vida, baby
ELYREUM IN “FAE” LOOSELY means “the forbidden garden” or “dark paradise,” depending on who you ask, and it was overload.
The only thing about the club that wasn’t in-your-face erotic, enhanced by opulent illusion, was the exterior, faking normal in a faking-normal city.
Once you passed through those tall gold and alabaster doors, reality fell away and the dream began. The music was surreal, sensual, erotic, with a rhythmic, driving beat that made me think of an old Enigma CD blended with Puscifer.
The club was an anachronistic mix of exotic natural beauty and ultrasleek technology. Blossoms tumbled from stately urns, scenting the air with night-blooming jasmine, amaryllis, lily, and winter hazel. Lush vines bursting with black and red poppies twined around grand Romanesque columns. The place smelled of verdant forest, steamy tropical hothouse, and sex.
The walls, ceiling, and floor of the foyer were giant, borderless LED screens smeared with Fae/mortal porn unfolding in graphic detail, (God, I so did not need to see that) in off-putting, larger-than-life format, with Fae-enhanced color, texture, and sound.
As I stalked across the anteroom, two enormous, stunning Fae males having sex with seven humans ground and pumped beneath my feet and, I swear, both Fae turned their heads in the floor to look up my dress. When I stomped sharply on one of their eyes, the bastard laughed.
Exiting the foyer into the second anteroom beyond brought us out on a balustrade draped with yet more vines and drugging blossoms from which we could view the entire club. They’d further taken a page from Chester’s by dividing Elyreum into numerous, individually themed subclubs, staged around a single, central dance floor that was packed with humans and Fae gyrating, grinding, having sex.
I’d never seen so many castes of Seelie before, vibrantly etched in the dazzling, seemingly Photoshop-enhanced shades of the Four Courts: the blush and rose of Spring threaded with metallic green; the dazzling, countless golds of Summer; Autumn’s copper and crimson fire; a thousand frosted shades of Winter’s ice. Tall, tiny, large, dainty, some flew, some glided, all hunted.
I narrowed my eyes. I’d dialed back the volume on my sidhe-seer senses the moment we stalked into the club, muting the cacophony of so many Fae clustered in close quarters.
Mac told me she hears the individual castes as melodies, pieces of song that play inside her head. I do, too, but my perception of the various castes is heavy on the percussion, a kind of Godsmack’s battle of the drums meets Roisin Murphy’s “Ramalama (Bang Bang).” There’s some serious dissonance for you.
Tonight I was getting something else, too, a thing I’d never noticed before…or never heard. There was a low, annoying buzzing sound beneath it somewhere. A sort of distracting static on my channel.
Something about the dance floor wasn’t quite right. I nudged my volume up a hair, to no avail. I dialed it higher, and still nothing. I cranked it even higher until the presence of so many Fae was deafening, charring a hole in my gut. With supreme force of will, gritting my teeth against the savage onslaught of primitive drums beating in my blood, telling me to Kill, kill, I punched it up yet one more notch, going wider open than I’d ever before been. I’d never needed to.
Oh!
There wasn’t a single person on that dance floor.
It was empty. I could see that now.
But no other human could. Holy insidious illusions, the Fae had gotten better at glamour! The Shedon needed to know about this!
Like the foyer, the dance floor was fashioned of brilliantly lit LED screens, featuring still more graphic images of humans having sex with Fae streaming across the surface.
I dialed my volume higher, wincing as the presence of so many Fae crashed and banged inside my head with the storm and thunder of the “Ride of the Valkyries” meets the worst, most bone-chilling parts of “The Requiem.”
Oh, God. There were no Fae having sex with humans in a TV screen at all!
It was only humans. And they weren’t images on the surface of an LED screen, they were real live people.
Trapped beneath it.
Some were clawing at the bottom side of the floor, trying to escape. Others…oh, God, others were dead. There was a tangled, seething mass of humanity, some fucking, some fighting to escape, amid hundreds of corpses.
What was this? If you stepped on that treacherous dance floor, were you abruptly sucked below, never to be released again? Forced to make the choice of either dying trying hopelessly to escape or dying doing something that felt good, while the icy Fae sat by, soulless, emotional vampires feeding off the passion of human suffering, savoring each morsel of torment? I’d thought only the Unseelie were so depraved!
Was this what happened when the Light Court ran unchecked by a queen? They devolved to the worst possible version of themselves, like the worst of humans cut loose when the world went to hell, and indulged their basest urges to riot, loot, and pillage? How many people had we lost over the past two years in this damned club?