Jenna Black - Replica

Angel’s face was devoid of the tattoos and face paint that were so popular among the Basement’s younger crowd, but her body was a different story. The henna-colored designs started just under her collarbones and crawled down her body and arms in bands and spirals. Nowhere near as colorful and elaborate as some of the other body art Nate had seen in Debasement, Angel’s tattoos were nonetheless some of the most striking: a series of repeating, tribal-looking patterns that somehow managed to fit together perfectly, like a monochrome Persian rug woven by a detail-oriented master.

“Angel,” he said with a polite nod, while not taking his eyes off of her. “So nice to see you again.”

She smiled at him, then gave the guy sitting next to him at the bar a pointed stare. The guy was a drunk twentysomething Employee, but he wasn’t so plastered he couldn’t read the very obvious hint in Angel’s eyes, and he hastily vacated his barstool. Still smiling, Angel took a seat. Viper put a shot glass filled with viscous, crimson liquid on the bar before her. Nate had no idea what it was, and had no inclination to find out as Angel lifted the glass to her lips and drained it. It left a thick coating on the sides of the glass. Clearly, it was supposed to look like blood, but Nate was ninety-nine percent sure it wasn’t. It was the remaining one percent that made him decline when Angel arched a brow at him and said “Want one?”

“I think I’ve had enough to drink already,” he said, and wondered if he was slurring a bit. His head did feel a little fuzzy around the edges, and he hadn’t been keeping careful track of how much alcohol he was taking in. Kurt would never have let him be so careless.

“Suit yourself,” Angel said with a shrug. “I heard you wanted to talk to me. How can I be of service?”

There was a strange glitter in Angel’s eye, and Nate didn’t like the hard edge in her voice. She was possibly the most intimidating woman he had ever met, and Nate had always had a healthy respect for her, but on the few occasions when he’d talked to her in the past, she’d always seemed perfectly pleasant. She wasn’t a kiss-ass, but she did treat her well-heeled customers like honored guests, going out of her way to make sure they were having a good time, the better to make sure they kept bleeding dollars all over her club.

With the way Nate had been throwing around dollars tonight, he’d have expected her to give him the royal treatment, but she was looking at him with thinly veiled scorn. The sense of hostility Nate was picking up from Angel made him distinctly uncomfortable, but without Kurt here to help him navigate the dangerous waters, he had to just suck it up and do what he came to do.

“I’m looking for the Bishop,” he said, using Kurt’s street name. No adult in Debasement used real, honest-to-goodness names. They went by their first names as children, until they’d “earned” their street names. Many Basement-dwellers—Kurt included—didn’t even know their surnames, much less use them. Kurt had gotten a kick out of using his street name for a surname when he had registered with Paxco as an Employee. He had never explained to Nate how he’d earned that particular street name, but Nate knew it had something to do with his former profession, and his imagination provided some ideas. There were definitely some B words he could imagine Kurt being known as the Bishop of.

Angel threw her head back and laughed, the sound loud and raucous enough to draw a few stares. Nate felt the blood heating his cheeks, but he wasn’t sure what he was embarrassed about. Or what Angel found so damned funny. He ground his teeth to keep from saying something stupid and waited for her to stop laughing at him.

Angel’s laughter eventually died, though razor-sharp amusement still glittered in her steel gray eyes. “You stupid fuck,” she said, smiling like she was making friendly conversation. “Half of Paxco wants a bite of that boy. Unless you’re the Chairman in disguise, there’s at least a dozen people who could make it even more worth my while to help them find him.”

Something uneasy slithered down Nate’s spine. Nate’s first trip to the Basement in his alter ego as the Ghost had happened the week after his eighteenth birthday, and he and Kurt had been to Angel’s once or twice a month since then. Never had Angel shown the slightest hint that she might know who he really was. But there was something disturbingly sly about her words and the way she was looking at him.

Angel couldn’t possibly know, could she?

But no, that was impossible. If Angel knew who he was, she’d either be trying her hardest to get him out of her club before something bad happened to him and she got blamed for it, or she’d have sent word to the biggest, baddest power players in Debasement and gotten them into a bidding war for the right to kidnap him. He wasn’t sure anyone in Debasement had what it took to hold him without being destroyed—he wouldn’t put it past his father to firebomb an entire block to punish anyone who dared attempt a kidnapping—but there were certainly some who would love to try.

He was drunk and paranoid, Nate told himself. The only reason he was sensing something “off” about Angel was because Kurt wasn’t here with him to act as a buffer.

“You’re a mercenary,” Nate said, “but there’s more to you than that.” The Angel of Mercy moniker was mostly sarcastic, but Nate had always gotten the impression there was a hint of truth in it. She might not technically qualify as one of the good guys, but somewhere beneath her fierce exterior, she had a heart. At least, Nate hoped she did.

“The others who might pay more for the information want to arrest him,” he continued. “I just want to talk to my friend, make sure he’s all right. See if there’s anything I can do to help him.”

Angel shook her head. “What makes you think he wants your help? If he’d wanted to talk to you, he would have contacted you by now. Take a fucking hint.”

Nate couldn’t help flinching a little at the words.

“Go home, Ghost,” Angel said, her voice lower and now almost kind-sounding. “You’re already in over your head. Go any deeper, you’ll drown. Take some advice from someone who’s been around the block a few thousand times.”

“I’m not giving up,” he said, his fists clenching at the thought. “He means too much to me.” That last part slipped out without conscious thought on his part. Most likely, he was revealing more than he should, letting Angel get a glimpse of his vulnerabilities. But at this point, he wasn’t sure he cared.

Beside him, Angel sighed loudly. “Fine, then,” she said. “Come with me.”

She slipped off the stool and started making her way through the crowd without awaiting a reply. Nate blinked in surprise.

“Where—?” he started to ask, but Angel was already out of earshot.

Surprise had given her a head start, but it wasn’t hard to follow that table-saw hair. Nate received a couple of angry grunts and glares as he pushed his way through the crowd in Angel’s wake.

Angel’s club took up the first three floors of the apartment building. She’d had the apartments ripped out of the first two floors for the main body of her club, but on the third floor, the apartments had been transformed into seedy little rooms where club-goers could engage in more private indulgences. It was in one of these third-floor rooms that Nate had first met Kurt. The memory of that first meeting was seared so firmly in his brain that he knew exactly which room it was, even though all the rooms on the third floor looked identical and there weren’t any numbers or other identifying marks on them.

When Angel stopped in front of the room and looked over her shoulder at him, unease flared inside him. Why would she lead him to this room, of all places?