The Last Dance, better known around here as the Pyramid. A monolithic structure representing all the decadence that this world has to hold. Truth be told. The pyramid is a better name for it than the one Castlerock has given it, but I guess he’s using it as a subtle joke to the number of mortals that have at times danced their last in here before they were fed upon by us. Or perhaps he’s just being poetic. It doesn’t matter, it’s a huge structure whose base is 200 meters squared, the apex of which is about 7 stories up. Flanked on all 4 sides by looming piers hosting spotlights, it’s the largest and most garish of all the clubs in Gotham. It’s also the biggest draw for the kine here. It’s the place to be if you’re young and trendy, someone who is going somewhere or just someone who looks like you’ll be. With more dance floors than I have fingers for, more side alcoves and private booths for individuals to step into and enjoy themselves and a benign management who look aside at the drugs that are sold and consumed within their premises, it’s not only mortals who are drawn here. More than half of the city’s Kindred come here for their dinner or a late night snack, the Last Dance fits its name by being open till the light comes out. With Kindred management and a set of high profile bands and new stories that run cover for the Masquerade, it’s also perhaps the safest place for one to pick up a kine and take bite. Even the client policy is relaxed for the Kindred, though Castlerock does try to keep a modicum of respectability in his dress code. And hell, even if you don’t like the place, it’s in the middle of the Rack Of course, one could acknowledge the fact that the Rack seems to have moved to center around this place, or perhaps it’s just me.
Center of nearly 3million kine in Gotham’s inner city and god knows how many more in the suburbs, the line to get in stretches 3 blocks back. And if you’re tired of waiting, there’s always all the other clubs and bars for the kine to dance the night away in a haze of sweat and adrenaline to the latest pop idol. I’ve been standing outside of the main entrance for the last half hour with my cigar, hoping that he’ll come out. My luck isn’t that good today, not that I really expected it to be. I look up, vainly trying to spot Pierre before I turn back to the doors, drawing upon the cigar again and holding the smoke in my mouth. Sandy is already in place as is Janus, it just leaves me. I let the smoke trickle out at last, crushing the cigar out on the hood of the car I’m leaning on before slipping the butt into a pocket. I let the car pass before I move forwards, headed straight to the entrance. Damn the Prince and damn the Archon. I have better things to do than chase down a lone Setite even if the orders do come from a Justicar.
The bouncer on the door notices me well before I cross the packed parking lot and make it to him, he’s already out of my way and warning the others to let me be. I had to make a point the first time I came here, now they realize that for me the dress code is whatever I want it to be. His arm looks to be healing well, it should, it was a clean break. I’m pass them in a blink of an eye, through the ever open front doors and into the foyer. 3 lines stretch to the exit where employees at the till sell the entrance tickets whilst half a dozen other employees battle to keep up with the demands of their clientele, desperately taking payments and handing back coats and jackets. I don’t bother with either, stepping pass the crowds and into the main hall. Clients of “my” ilk get in free.
Right in front of me as I get out of the passageway is a 30 foot tall set of television sets, the latest pop idol gyrating to some nonsensical song in larger than life Technicolor. I move forward without another word, gently but firmly jostling a young brunette from her post behind the metal bar that leads down into the main dance floor. Packing at least 200 kine in all their sweaty, smelly and frantic indulgence of life under the giant screen, the dance floor ripples and rolls with the flood of humanity. I let my gaze flicker over the mass, pass the screaming and humping humanity, searching. I spot her relatively easy, flowing to the movements of the song with her hands up in the air, pushing herself backwards against a child who looks barely old enough to have started shaving. She’s surrounded by a crowd of loving and lusting men (and a few women), all entranced by her beauty and movements. As usual, Sandy is heating up the dancefloor and in position here. I look up, letting my eyes meet one of the 123 security cameras that inhabit this place, both overtly and covertly. The security system is next to none in the mortal world, not surprising with the layout of this building. I let my eyes rest on the camera a moment more, hearing the whispered acknowledgement through my earpiece from Janus before I move. He’s in position in the security room, situated directly behind the unknowing controllers and watching for our prey.
Spiral stairways and hanging walkways dance across above of me, darkened alcoves and semi-hidden passageways snake through this establishment like an ants nest. The internal lay-out has often been described as being drawn by a 3 year old child on drugs, the winding corridors and dynamic lighting leaving clientele and employees equally bewildered. There’s a place for every type of taste in here I’m told, you just have to find it – and that in itself is a monumental task. There is no way to describe the maze that this place is, clients ask for directions to their favourite spot and stick to them or get totally lost. Employees are often not much better, each dealing with their own fixed areas of responsibility and mostly unable to navigate this place either. But it all just adds to the mystique of this place, the draw as more than one drunk individual will tell you.
I get down to work, tracing my way through the press of humanity as I tread pass them. Long years tracking through forest after forest and too many cities to count have given me a sense of direction and navigation that is sorely tested in these bounds. I’ve been in here 5 times and I’m still uncertain if I’ve seen it all. I’m sorely tempted once again to have this place shut down for a night, just to give me and my team a chance to learn it’s layouts without the ever present press of the kine but I don’t have the pull to force something like this here. Not without digging myself deeper into debt than I care to at least, not to an Elder. Not to a Toreador Elder. So I make do, pushing and dodging my way pass the kine, blocking a spilled glass of beer without thinking and splashing it back onto it’s holder. It wets her white t-shirt, pasting it to her bare breasts in a rather appealing way from the glances I note as I move pass. I’m gone before she can do anything more than raise a hand in protest.
My senses are struggling to cope with the continuos assault that this place places on me. My eyes battle to adjust to the ever present illumination, strobe lights adding and taking away from the darkness and the most complex and technologically proficient set of lighting systems alter the degrees of illumination without pause. Lights go on and off, changing colour and intensity with each passing second, faces and figures coming into focus and then dropping into shadow darker than night in a blink of an eye sometimes. My ears feel like a dozen gunshots are going off at once, the music piped into corridors and pathways so that there is no place at all where you can escape the assault of music. The dancefloors are the worst, the volume pumped up to the maximum so that even the worst insults are nodded and smiled to. And I thank god that I don’t need to breathe as the smells that enter my nostrils are bad enough. It’s a mixture of sweat and blood, tears and phlegm and all those other beautiful bodily secretions and excretions from hundreds of different individuals, all of which is too many kinds of mouth lotions, perfumes and colognes are trying to cover. Add the smell of spilled alcohol in all it’s possible formats, clothing both washed and unwashed and ozone from the electronics that litter this place and you begin to get an idea of the lousy state of the air that the ventilation system leaves to hang around. Touch and taste aren’t any much better. I don’t know what he secretes and anyway, if he has passed through any of these places so have another 100 more kine. Touch is useless, there are too many people to note any new vibrations or to judge one from another and the press of humanity here has forced me to dress down on the number of weapons I’ve brought.
No, finding him is going ot be a matter of luck and persistence I feel, at least within this compound. All that of course dependent upon him being in here to begin with. Still, where else would a Snake go? I just hope my luck is in tonight, I hate pyramids. I’ve never had any good experiences with them, and this one impresses me much less than the one’s I tracked through in Egypt. There’s nothing to do about it, I grit my teeth, knuckle down and breathe slowly, sifting through the various scents as I let my eyes dance over the lithe forms around me as I traverse the interior.
Hours pass, with little or no changes in the club. Patrons come, go and in-between get drunk, get high and get pulled (or pull as may be). The never ending throng shifts and shimmers under the lights of the sky and I become just another patron. In the hours I’ve spotted 2 of the Archon’s goons and another 2 individuals who have the same look around them as the others. Probably his ghouls too, hard looking, competent and professional. And as out of place as I am in this mad, party environment. I’ve also seen the Security slowly, slowly get an idea that something more than the usual ruckus of the nights den is going in here. Not that it matters, if Castlerock intends to get involved I’ll tell him to bring the matter up with the Archon. In the same time I’ve also as far as I know recrossed my own path twice, though I’ve never taken the same route once. Just way too many combinations of paths, alleyways, bars and dancefloors under one roof.
I break out of the corridor that I’m in into a blessed shelter of silence. It’s not actually silence, you can hear the dull thrum of the bass in the song that is beating in a nearby dancefloor and the laughter and voices of the patrons float in from the corridor I come in. But it all sounds a million miles away in this small aclove I’m in, one inhabited by a group of patrons who lounge in the plush, leather chairs. It must be an acoustic trick, one that filter out the sound from outside. Like some of the valleys I’ve been into or a certain auditorium in Greece. I’ve never been here before though automatically I log the path I took. It might be nice to drop in here once more if I have to come here ever again. I take a few deep breaths, slowly setting myself as I look around the room, allowing my eyes to drift over the patrons within as I lean back gently against the wall I find my back placed against. Instincts took over even when my mind was pre-occupied. I see no one I know within though a few of the occupants of this room are not so much lounging as drugged out of their minds.
I take a few more restful moments within the room before I step towards the other corridor that leads out of this place, blending into the crowds once again as I search for the Snake. Damn it, this is taking too long. Another 2 or 3 hours and the night and this place is going to come to a close. I’ve already wasted an entire night on a wild goose chase. Damn it, this is not worth it no matter how much of a pain in the ass this particular Setite is.
I step to the side, taking a turn to the right as a man stumbles pass in the crossways. As he passes I catch the faintest whiff of his odour. The scent is pretty much normal for a mortal male in his 20’s, full of hormones still with alcohol, a cologne and too much oil from too much junk food. Pretty much that is, except for the sharp, bitter taste so much like bitter almonds, a scent that hangs in the air a moment longer than his presence stays. It’s the same smell that I noticed in the room earlier, that I’ve noticed almost in a number of other kine throughout the night. It’s not a natural odour either, it’s as if the body is trying desperately to get rid of something that is foreign to it, a drug that is reacting with the body. A drug…
It takes me another 4 steps down the corridor that the kid came out from before it strikes me, the trail that I should have been following all along. It’s pretty simple, at least I think, I hope it is. I start pulling air into my dead lungs more often, concentrating on filtering out the different smells even as I begin to move through the press of bodies, searching. Searching for a sharp, bitter taste that hangs in the air. Luck, instinct, intuition, training, perseverance, all of it a single moment to get me here. Now all I need is a bit more luck, just a bit more and maybe this might be over.
It’s not long more, not long at all before I find the next taste. And then the next, and then the next. They’re all there, all the little trails to him, all his customers (or is it victims) taking their drugs and sweating it out. I search for him, locating him, cutting down on the places, the times, the routes he can use. Tracking him, doing what I am trained to do, what I’m paid to do.
I see him in a moment, a man too pale, a man who’s out of place. Movements too smooth, figure too thin, his eyes just too knowing. He holds all the marks, all the mannerisms of one of us. You just need to know what to look for, just need to watch for us as we slink into the darkness, as we search for our next prey. But Setites are the worst or at least close enough to not matter. They revel in the darkness, in the evil that they bring, they don’t become it, they strive to bring it to others. And it shows, it shows in the way they look, they move. A newly embraced vampire might still be human for the most part, nearly impossible to discern but an Elder, a Sabbat or a Setite, no there’s no hiding for them. There’s something about them all and it’s this more than anything else that I latch onto, that latches onto me as I move forwards.
He turns then, turns to stare straight at me. Swarthy skin, normally brown but now pale due to lack of exposure. It’s not a nice hue at all, it looks sickly. Fitting. He dresses well, good clothing material but nothing out of place, nothing that would differentiate him too much except for a jacket. A jacket he keeps on, to keep his drugs, to keep a weapon perhaps. Brown eyes meet my black one’s, acknowledging what I am, what is about to happen. I tense, wondering what he’s going to do. If things get ugly, it will definitely be messy.
It doesn’t. He turns, moving away from the man he was talking to and steps out onto a walkway, a walkway that leads right across a dancefloor. By the time I catch up with him he’s in the middle of it and as I place my hand on his shoulder to turn him to me, his hands are in view and there’s a small smile on his face. I get worried and I keep my eyes on him even as I close up. His voice is the first surprise, it’s not the smooth as silk tone that I expected. No, his voice is gravelly, harsh. “Ah, Sheriff. I was just looking for you.”
I don’t say a thing, I don’t see a reason too as I stop facing him. I keep my weight on the balls of my feet, my hands hanging loosely as I wait. This place is too open, too public for me to try anything, not unless I have to.
“Let me get to the point. You do not want to be here and I don’t want to have to get my hands dirty. So let us trade, I have some information that you could find valuable. In return, you let me go and I shall leave your city.”
I just look at him for a moment, not exactly surprised since you would expect a Serpent to try to talk his way out of something. More curious. “What makes you think you have anything I want?”
There’s a flicker of a smile on his face as he leans on the balcony, gazing down at the heaving dancefloor and speaks to me. It’s not easy to catch his words, not with the music blaring but I get it anyhow “Because it is about the Archon… and the forthcoming siege.”
“Start talking.” He’s got me alright, he knows it too. “We have a deal then?”
“You get 30 minutes if you’re information is good. If not…”
“Of course. You’re Archon has been holding back on you. The Siege will commence in the next week and he knows it. He aslo knows the number of packs that you’ll be facing. His boss has a mole inside and he’s been fed the information”
“And how do you know this?” Christ, looks like everybody has a mole except for me. Guess that comes from coming in late into the game.
He smiles at my question, turning away from me and walking to the end of the walkway, turning around at the end to give me a really sweet smile. I let him go. There’s little I can do. And then I hear the voice, the Archon’s voice right behind me. I guess the smile wasn’t for me. “You let him go!!! You had him and you let him go. When I report this…”
“Shut up.” That stops him, long enough for me to block him going after the Setite and to face him down and keep talking. Guess he’s not used to people telling him to shut up. “You lied to me. And to the Prince. You’ve put this city in risk by withholding information.” I try to keep my voice neutral, level. Try is the operant word here. I feel the Beast rising in me, angers’ flames fanned by it’s approach, urging me to do something that I will certainly regret. I don’t bother clamping down on the Beast, I let it rage, I let it appear in my eyes. But I don’t let it have control.
The Archon is good, very good. But for a moment there’s a look of surprise and “oh-shit” that crosses his face. It’s long enough for me. “Did he tell you that? I thought a Sheriff would…”
“Shut up. Now start talking before I lose my patience.” Anger flares in his eyes, anger and surprise as I order him around. As I bully him around. He’s Brujah with a bad temper, he’s a Brujah Archon with a bad temper and I’m a Gangrel Sheriff and we’re both standing in clear view of at least 100 mortals. He forces his temper down and opens his mouth again to say something stupid before shutting it. He’s noticed the look in my eyes, the Beast that is just a moment away from rearing free. As a Brujah he knows all about Frenzies.
“Alright. But if the Justicar hears of this...”
“Just talk.”
He shoots me a glare but he slowly begins to talk, slowly, spilling the beans on all of it. 6 packs, 4 veterans and 2 newer packs. Black Hand assassins to take out the leaders, uncertain number. The attack to happen in 3 days and a secret weapon. There’s no word on what it is, what this weapon might be. Just that it’s something that will knock us down quick, fast and with enough strength to make sure that this isn’t a long, protracted siege. He spills all he knows and in the end there’s only one question left.
“Why?”
“The city is lost, everyone knows it. We lose this city, we sacrifice it for now and take Phoenix back. Maybe even Detroit and then cut off we have all the time we need to take this back. And with so many Veteran packs here.”
“They aren’t anywhere else.” I have to acknowledge their thinking, it might even be right. But my job is to keep this city together and all the thinking in the world won’t let me do that. The Archon falls silent, looking over my shoulder before turning to me and breathing out slowly, sighing I realise. “Damn, we almost had him.”
I don’t say anything about that, brushing my left arm for a moment with my right hand. I turn away, leaving the club. I don’t have time for these games anymore. And in a room, in a small security room Janus wll have seen the signal. Frequency 3, turn it on, hook it up and then send Pierre after the bug I placed on the Setite. He’s had his 30 minutes, time’s up. I couldn’t take him in here, it was too dangerous. But there’s nothing to stop Pierre from finding him and finishing this ugly piece of business up. I leave the Archon alone, to stand there thinking about his lost Setite and the fact that the Setite knew what he knew. Looks like everyone has moles these days. It doesn’t matter to me I guess, I’ve still got a job to do and it’s just gotten a lot harder.