style="font-size:15px;"> She delicately pushed away from the wall and with vampire-borne balance and strength, landed lightly in front of me. With the end of the alley at my back, door to my left, brick wall to my right, there was nowhere for me to go.
She took a moment to smooth her hands over her gown, then looked me in the eye.
"I wasn't expecting to see you again. You have made it clear on your few visits that you do not approve of us, Miss…Watson, isn't it? Or, ah, Wilson, yes?"
"One of those." I tried for nonchalance, but my voice shook. I had no doubt her heightened senses could hear my racing heartbeat.
Her smile was sudden and terrifying as she leaned in close to me. She was slightly shorter than me and I was acutely aware that her mouth was close - too, too, too close - to my throat.
"Miss Wilson, I do not like you," said Magdalene, barely above a whisper. Yet I could hear every word. Piercing terror tends to heighten even human senses like that.
"I'm not that f-f-fond of you either." I'm not brave, but sometimes defiance is the only weapon you have left. Besides, I was hanging onto the hope that Magdalene, who normally had such good business sense, would not commit blatant murder at her own door. That would surely be bad for trade.
Magdalene tilted her head slightly, regarding me with cold displeasure. "Do you think," she said, "That you would be missed, should something unpleasant happen to you?"
"Yes," I managed, firmly, then my voice started quivering again. "D-do you think your volunteer blood d-donors would come back here if they found out you'd broken that p-particular rule?"
"How would they ever know?" Her smile grew uglier, revealing her teeth, displaying that expression that said I was nothing more than a potential, passing snack. Not even needed for nourishment or survival. All my blood would do for her is make her feel alive again for a little while.
Then the club door was opened by Becks, the whip-thin, professionally unimpressed door person. I hadn't yet figured out if Becks was male or female and reckoned that on the whole it didn't matter except to Becks and whoever Becks slept with.
"Gary said to tell you he's in the upstairs bar," Becks said, regarding me blandly from behind a long, black fringe. I couldn't tell if the look was tinged with contempt, like most of the looks Gary and I got here. Becks is hard to read in pretty much every way imaginable.
Door-person looked at Boss-lady, who had adopted a bored expression. "I will see you in my office," Magdalene said to Becks, with a sudden shift in tone to 'approving', resulting in the latter's inscrutability receding for a smug moment. Becks was, of course, a member of the Gold Bug and naturally considered it an honour to be a blood hit for the boss.
Magdalene ignored both of us and leapt high up the wall and followed the route Gary had taken to the roof, leaving me with what I suppose she considered the caterer's entrance. Belatedly, I realised I should have given her the damned bag and its grisly contents.
The opportunity to offload the bag passed as Becks also vanished, leaving the doorway empty. Leaving still looked like the smart thing to do, but I'd have to traverse a long, dark, dog-legged stretch of alley to get back to a busy street. My skin crawled at the idea of walking the distance on my own, even though it was still light. Bad things don't only happen in the dark, and there were vampires even worse than Magdalene out there. Several of them would be making their way to the Gold Bug for an early bite. Mundy, for a start, assuming he was still alive.
Despite our encounter, I decided that Magdalene wasn't immediately dangerous to me. She knew better than to go spooking the volunteers, who preferred their dangerous experiences to be thrilling without being fatal. It had taken months, according to Gary, for the Gold Bug to recover from the last drained body found in the nearby street.
Mundy, however, had less business sense than Magdalene.
The conclusion was that I would, perversely, be marginally less vulnerable in the club. At least there I could seek out Gary, hand over this awful bag to anyone who'd take it, and have Gary accompany me out of Chinatown.
Screwing my courage to the legendary sticking place, I went inside.
In Becks' continued absence, I darted down the stairs to the basement. The potential fire hazard candles no longer decorated the entry. I missed them. The much less volatile set of low lights embedded in the concrete steps lacked ambience and, more importantly, the potential for self-defence offered by a naked flame. Fire is not the vampire's friend.
This entry had once led to a private members club. Now the steps opened onto a regular cocktail bar designed in wood and red velvet to capture the lucrative custom of your bog standard wine-and-spirits crowd. Soft music played and irregularly placed shelves held up ancient curios. If my great-great-great grandmother had run a bordello, this is what it would have looked like, a strange combination of gentility and opulence with a suggestion of impropriety.
I hurried through the bar to a dark curtain at the rear which drew aside to reveal a long, narrow staircase. Dodging around the thick golden rope that would later bar it firmly from "non-members", I headed upstairs. I bumped into Jack, the skinny inner-sanctum bouncer, coming down as I ascended past the ground level and onto the first floor. Jack barely acknowledged my presence as I squeezed past him.
Finally I emerged into the upstairs lounge. It was decorated in solid, antique furniture, the back of the room divided from the rest of the space by a heavy black curtain. There were booths behind there, I knew, and a faint smell of old blood. Also several first aid kits, kept discreetly out of view. At the top of the stairs was a black-painted window which overlooked a dead end, Gary had told me. I'd once seen it from above, a debris-filled space between buildings, its ground level access long since cut off by the press of time and real estate.
Inside the lounge, a deep, low heartbeat reverberated through the top of my head and the soles of my feet. Just like it used to be, only two floors up.
Gary stood at the bar between two other people, his expression studiously bland. The very pale, unbreathing person on his right I recognised as Beryl. She cultivated the prim look of an academic and had a preference for the shy punters who came to the club. She was looking at Gary like he was a bad smell.
On Gary's left stood a man I knew as Mr Smith. He had a beating heart, technically speaking, but as he was the representative of Magdalene's shady business partners, I knew a pulse didn't make him any more trustworthy than her undead clients. Probably less. At least I knew what the vampires got out of this deal.
I thrust the bag at Gary, pleased to be rid of it. "I want to get out of here."
"What happened?"
"Magdalene tried to wind me up. It worked."
That's when Magdalene, with immaculately terrible timing, appeared from yet another staircase on the other side of the room. She had, I gathered, taken the private way to her ground floor offices then walked up to make her grand entrance.
Magdalene's eyes wandered dismissively past me, for all the world as though the alley incident had never occurred, and then she strode up to Gary. Despite the fact that she was shorter than he - and Gary is not tall - she somehow managed to tower over him. The unspoken "What the hell do you want?" radiated from her large, soft frame.
"You know Lissa's not a member, right?" Gary asked, a hint of defiant tension in his tone.
For a moment she tried to look like she didn't
