Negative publicity. That’s something you and I know a bit about, don’t we, brother?”
Dimitri laughed at his own joke as he took Lucien’s arm, attempting to steer him toward the booth of middle-aged men being nuzzled by the reed-thin young girls.
“Maybe later for that, Dimitri,” Lucien said. “I’d rather speak privately to you for a moment first. We have much business to discuss, I think, you and I.”
“Nonsense,” Dimitri said. “Pleasure before business! I know what you’re talking about … and why you’re here.” He slapped an arm around Lucien’s shoulder and began steering him toward the booth he’d just vacated. “An unfortunate thing, about these young dead girls. And I’ve asked around—believe me, it’s not good for the club, having a maniac like this loose—and I can assure you, no one knows a thing about it. If they did, don’t you think I’d have taken care of it already? You know me, Lucien. Anything to improve the bottom line!”
Lucien tilted his head toward the girl who’d approached him as he’d come in, the one in the metal halter top. She was now gyrating by herself on the dance floor, off in her own little drug-induced stupor.
“And her? You aren’t doing a very good job of keeping hard drugs out of the place,” he remarked. “Surely that can’t be helping to improve the bottom line.”
Dimitri followed his half brother’s gaze.
“Oh, drugs,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “Well, what are you going to do? They’re everywhere. The government should legalize them already, then tax them and use the money to pay off the deficit and get the addicts the help they need. But why are we talking about such a depressing topic? Come, you haven’t seen Stefan in ages. And you have to meet my very latest project.”
“Your latest project?” Lucien raised an eyebrow. “It isn’t this … lounge?”
“Not at all!” Dimitri guided him toward a table at which sat a somewhat seedy-looking young man and his even seedier companion, both of whom were wearing extraordinarily tight trousers and shirts open to mid-chest beneath leather motorcycle jackets. They were flanked on either side by pencil-slim young women who did not appear to be wearing much in the way of clothing at all but had exceptionally flat chests and very straight hair.
“A new business venture,” Dimitri announced enthusiastically. “Gregory Bane, meet my brother, visiting all the way from Romania, Lucien Antonescu.”
“Hello, sir.” The thinner of the two young men stood to shake Lucien’s hand. Lucien knew why he was being so obsequious even before he felt Gregory Bane’s skin … or saw the slim dragon tattoo that decorated the inside of his pale wrist.
“A pleasure,” Lucien said unsmilingly.
“It’s all mine,” Gregory Bane said, his eyelids fluttering nervously.
Lucien wondered how long it had been since the boy had turned and who’d turned him. Not Dimitri, surely. His brother was many things … but not that. More than likely he’d seen an opportunity and had one of his many paramours do it. The boy was, Lucien supposed, good looking by the standard set by his current crop of female students, who tended to be slim and unwashed.
The other boy, who wore his dragon like Dimitri’s, in the form of an iron symbol on a leather wristband, stood and extended his right hand. …
“Uncle Lucien,” Stefan said a little diffidently.
But then again, the boy had never been all there, Lucien thought as he shook his nephew’s hand.
Whether that was because he’d seen his father murder his mother before his very eyes—it had been a different time and place, when uxoricide hadn’t been all that uncommon, but still, Lucien hadn’t approved—or because he’d been turned too young, Lucien had never been sure.
The young man was a definite disappointment. Dimitri was forever formulating some scheme or another to give him some direction. But he’d never even allowed the boy to use his last name. How could he expect Stefan to exercise any sort of career initiative?
What game was Dimitri playing at now? Lucien wondered. And what did the paunchy financial analysts from TransCarta have to do with it, if anything? Was it all really just part of his half brother’s new “business venture”?
Or something more insidious?
Oh, Dimitri acted the part of welcoming family, all open arms. … He even ordered bottles of Veuve for the table, though champagne was never Lucien’s favorite. He’d never been fond of bubbles, which vanished immediately on the tongue. He preferred heavier, meatier wines that coated the mouth like … well, a meal.
But it all seemed a little like the champagne, or the young human women who’d draped themselves over Gregory Bane and the hapless Stefan—not to mention over the hedge fund managers in the booth next door—who said nothing but disappeared often to go to the ladies’ room, then came back wiping their noses, their minds as empty as that of the girl who’d tried to get him to dance with her.
Too showy. Not enough substance. Just a lot of air.
After a while, Lucien felt he had seen enough. If there were answers at his half brother’s club, he wasn’t going to get them this way.
He excused himself, saying that he had to go.
Dimitri showed him out through a back exit, since the front was now too crowded with drug-addled partygoers for him to leave without having to push his way through.
“Where are you staying while you’re here?” Dimitri asked—too casually—blowing smoke from his cigar toward the starry night sky, which was just visible from the dark alley in which they stood.
“Emil found me a place,” Lucien said. The less said about where, Lucien figured, the better. He trusted his brother. …
But only to a point.
Dimitri gave a chuckle. “Emil,” he said. “Is he still with that idiotic wife of his?”
“He is,” Lucien said.
“Marriage,” Dimitri said. “Now that is the one thing you and I do have in common. No need to get tangled up in that. Well. Again.”
“It’s never seemed prudent,” Lucien carefully agreed.
Dimitri stared at him for a second or two before bursting into surprised laughter.
“Prudent,” he cried. “Listen to you! You haven’t changed, have you? Not in all this time.”
Lucien shot him an appraising look.
“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose either of us has.”
Dimitri stopped laughing abruptly and pointed at Lucien.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” he said in a deep voice. “I hope you didn’t come here to stir up trouble, Lucien. Because we’ve been doing perfectly fine on this side of the Atlantic without even a hint of trouble from the Palatine … and without any interference from you.”
His eyes, normally every bit as dark as his half brother’s, glowed as red as his cigar as he said the word interference.
A second later, a layer of the trash, dirt, gravel, and broken glass lining the alley floor just in front of Lucien began to rise into the air, then swirl more and more rapidly together until it was a towering, violently destructive tornado headed straight at him.
Lucien threw an arm up to guard his face from the debris.
That was when Dimitri found himself thrown back against the side of a Dumpster, as if an unseen wind had lifted him and blown him there. His fall was broken by some empty liquor boxes someone had flattened and stacked before the Dumpster for recycling. Otherwise, he would have slammed against the steel receptacle with as much force as if he’d been shot from a nail gun.
As he lay there, stunned, the vortex