Chapter Eight

Chicago ’s club scene is wide and diverse. You want to listen to extemporaneous jazz? We got that. You want a traditional Irish pub? A Turkish-style coffeehouse? Belly dancers? Japanese garden party? Swing dancing? Ballroom dancing? Beat poetry? You’re covered.

You don’t have to look much harder to find all sorts of other clubs—the kind that Ma and Pa Tourist don’t take the kids to. Gay clubs, lesbian clubs, strip clubs, leather clubs, and more subtle flavors within the genre.

And then there’s Zero.

I stood with Thomas outside what looked like a fire-exit door at the bottom of a stairway, a story below street level in the side of a downtown building. A red neon oval had been installed on the door, and it glowed with a sullen, lurid heat. The thump of a bass beat vibrated almost sub-audibly up through the ground.

“Is this what I think it is?” I asked him.

Thomas, now dressed in a tight-fitting white T-shirt and old blue jeans, glanced at me and arched one dark eyebrow. “Depends on if you think it’s Zero or not.”

Zero’s one of those clubs that most people only hear rumors about. It moves around the city from time to time, but it’s always as exclusive as a popular nightspot in a metropolis can possibly be. I’ve been a PI in Chicago for better than a decade. I’d heard of Zero, but that was it. It was where the rich and beautiful (and rich) people of Chicago went to indulge themselves.

“You know somebody here?” I asked. “Because they aren’t going to let us—”

Thomas popped a key into the lock, turned it, and opened the door for me.

“In,” I finished. A wash of heat and smoke heavy with legally questionable substances pushed gently against my chest. I could hear the whump-whump-whump of techno dance music somewhere behind the red-lit smoke.

“It’s a family business,” Thomas explained. He put the keys back in his pocket, an odd expression on his face. “I met Justine at Zero.”

“There any more of the other side of the family in there?” I asked him. White Court vampires were the least physically dangerous of any of the various vamps running around—and the most scary. Creatures of seduction, they fed upon the emotions and life energy of those they preyed upon. Their victims became addicted to the act, and would willingly offer themselves up over and over, until eventually there was nothing left to give. The poor suckers in thrall to a White Court vampire were virtually slaves. Tangling with them in any sense of the word was a bad idea.

Thomas shook his head. “I doubt it. Or Justine wouldn’t have chosen to meet us here.”

Unless she’d been forced to do so, I thought to myself. I didn’t say anything. I like to stay cozy with my paranoia, not pass her around to my friends and family.

“After you,” Thomas said, and then he calmly stripped his shirt off.

I eyed him.

“The club has an image they strive to maintain,” he said. He might have been just a little bit smug, the bastard. His abs look like they were added in with CGI. My abs just look like I can’t afford to feed myself very well.

“Oh,” I said. “Do I need to take my shirt off, too?”

“You’re wearing a black leather coat. That’s wardrobe enough.”

“Small favors,” I muttered. Then I went through the door.

We walked down a hallway that got darker, louder, and more illicitly aromatic as we went. It ended at a black curtain, and I pushed it aside to reveal a few more feet of hallway, a door, and two politely formidable-looking men in dark suits standing in front of it.

One of them lifted a hand and told me, “I’m sorry, sir, but this is a private—”

Thomas stepped up next to me and fixed the man with a steady grey gaze.

He lowered his hand, and when he spoke, it sounded rough, as if his mouth had gone dry. “Excuse me, sir. I didn’t realize he was with you.”

Thomas kept staring.

The bouncer turned to the door, unlocked it with a key of its own, and opened the door. “Will you be in need of a table, sir? Drinks?”

Thomas’s unblinking gaze finally shifted from the guard, as if the man had somehow vanished as a matter of any consequence. My brother walked by him without saying anything at all.

The bouncer gave me a weak smile and said, “Sorry about that, sir. Enjoy your evening at Zero, sir.”

“Thanks,” I said, and followed my brother into a scene that split the difference between a Dionysian bacchanal and a Fellini flick.

There was no white light inside Zero. Most of it was red, punctuated in places with pools of blue and plenty of black lights scattered everywhere so that even where shadows were thickest, some colors jumped out in disquieting luminescence. Cigarette smoke hung in a pall over the large room, a distance-distorting haze under the black lights.

We had entered on a kind of balcony that overlooked the dance floor below. Music pounded, the bass beat so loud that I could feel it in my lower stomach. Lights flashed and swayed in synchronicity. The floor was crowded with sweating, moving bodies dressed in a broad spectrum of clothing, from full leather coverings including a whole-head hood, at one extreme, to one girl clad in a few strips of electrical tape on the other. There was a bar down by the dance floor, and tables scattered around its outskirts under a thirty-foot-high ceiling. A few cages hung about eight feet over the dance floor, each containing a young man or woman in provocative clothing.

Stairways and catwalks led up to about a dozen platforms that thrust out from the walls, where patrons could sit and overlook the scene below while gaining a measure of privacy for themselves. Most of the platforms were furnished with couches and chaise longues rather than tables and chairs. There were more exotic bits of furniture up on the platforms, as well: the giant X shape of a St. Andrew’s cross, which was currently supporting the bound form of a young man, his wrists and ankles secured to the cross, his face to the wood, his hair falling down over his naked back. Another platform had a shiny brass pole in its center, and a pair of girls danced around it, in the middle of a circle of men and women sprawled over the couches and lounges.

Everywhere I looked, people were doing things that would have gotten them arrested anywhere else. Couples, threesomes, foursomes, and nineteensomes were fully engaged in sexual activity on some of the private platforms. From where I stood, I could see two different tables where lines of white powder waited to be inhaled. A syringe disposal was on the wall next to every trash can, marked with a bright biohazard symbol. People were being beaten with whips and riding crops. People were bound up with elaborate arrangements of ropes, as well as with more prosaic handcuffs. Piercings and tattoos were everywhere. Screams and cries occasionally found their way through the music, agony, ecstasy, joy, or rage all indistinguishable from one another.

The lights flashed constantly, changing and shifting, and every beat of the music created a dozen new frozen montages of sybaritic abandon.

The music, the light, the sweat, the smoke, the booze, the drugs—it all combined into a wet, desperate miasma that was full of needs that could never be sated.

That’s why the place was called Zero, I realized. Zero limits. Zero inhibitions. Zero restraint. It was a place of perfect, focused abandon, of indulgence, and it was intriguing and hideous, nauseating and viscerally hungry.

Zero fulfillment.

I felt a shudder run through me. This was the world as created by the White Court. This is what they would make of it, if they were given the chance. Planet Zero.

I glanced aside at Thomas and saw him staring around the club. His eyes had changed hue, from their usual grey to a paler, brighter silver, actual flecks of metallic color in his eyes. His eyes tracked over a pair of young women who were passing by us, dressed in black lingerie under long leather coats, and holding hands with their fingers intertwined. The women both turned their eyes toward him as if they’d heard him call their names, and stared for a second, their steps slowing and faltering.