Bewere the Night

WATCHMEN by Aaron Sterns

The illuminated advertisement on the front of the cigarette-machine is a slivered beacon of blue sky and clouds amongst the smoke and strobe lights; a slice of heaven obscured by a couple deep in conversation: the guy all pained mouth and gesturing arms; the woman silent, staring. They are oblivious to the throng around as if enclosed in a vacuum. I stare at them from my post, trying to work out what they’re saying—their voices drowned out by the brain-regressing bass pounding up through my feet—but an image of Lisa arguing with me kicks in and I have to flick my eyes away across the dancefloor. I try to suppress a surge of anger.

The straining flux of dancing bodies moves in waves of artfully-ripped faded clothing, bleached hair and pale flesh made gaunt and alien-blue by the overhead fluoros. The sunken dancefloor—the Pit—is huge, nearly fifty feet across, and it’s hard to survey its entire length. I glance over at the other black-clad figures on their raised podiums: impassive dark statues almost lost in the belching haze of smoke machines and cigarette smoke, legs spread and hands clasped over their groins as if cupping themselves. They seem like ciphers to me, unsmiling names; protective of their cohesion. I’m still the interloper.

Two girls walk past below, staring up. One is breathtakingly beautiful: tight tan in red lycra, angry auburn hair and clear eyes. She smiles and I reflexively smile back, feeling instantly guilty. She pauses, tracing the neckline of her dress as if considering approaching my podium to stand at uncomfortable groin height and flash her hungry smile up at me, then runs a finger down her perfect cleavage. Unsettled, I’m about to look away when she flicks down the right side of her top to reveal a dusky nipple. She teases it to quick stiffness then disappears into the crowd, hungry eyes melting into the crush of bodies. Her friend follows.

The two-way almost slips from my sweaty hand as I try to track their passage towards the front of the club. I lose them amongst the squawking, impatient drinkers clamoring at the huge main bar for the attention of the bargirls. Disappointed, I glance up at the semi-circular balcony and its darkened tiered couches overlooking the main bar, the figures standing at its edge separated from death only by a thin brass railing. But the massive scale of this cavern has lost its novelty value by now and my gaze drops.

An angry voice pierces the oppressive techno music and I search again through the disorienting sweeping lasers. The man by the cigarette machine throws his hands in the air and stalks off. The girl stares transfixed, tears on cheeks. Just broken up, presumably. I shake my head and start to look away.

But the man can’t let this go. He whirls and punches his girlfriend. Hard.

She crumples to the ground. The guy looks at her without expression, then reaches down and grabs her by the back of the neck and the waistband, lifting her off the ground to swing like a battering ram into the illuminated blue cigarette-machine. The crack sounds even above the deafening techno bass. The machine short-circuits and spits flame.

I slam into him too late and we skid through the crowd. His nose smacks into someone’s shin in a spray of blood, and when he struggles against me I snap him in the nose again with the two-way, pinning him around onto his front so I can cradle his throat in the crook of my arm and lace the other arm behind his head. He tries to claw up at my arms, my eyes, but I put him out with a vicious tensing of my biceps, cutting off the circulation in his neck. I rest his deadweight on its side and bring the cracked and blood-flecked radio up to my mouth to call the others.

A group of middle-class yuppies ring me, too scared to help but perversely rooted in place by the bloody spectacle. I stare back from my crouch, wondering if the guy has friends here, if someone will launch from the crowd to kick at my face. I can’t see the girl past the gathering designer jeans but don’t want to risk leaving him alone: sleeper-holds aren’t debilitating enough; when they wake they wake instantly, mad and in control—

—and then splitting the crowd like huge black-clad figures of death, smooth-shaven and short-haired, barely contained. They push the crowd back, striking one guy who won’t move with an open hand to the face, sending him beneath their feet. A fury of movement around and then Lucs over me, omnipotent Lucs, always uncannily first on the scene, grabbing the unconscious boyfriend from me, eyes almost gleaming red in the searching light. Raph beside him, staring past me. I follow his gaze to the prone of the girl: her head split like a melon, open and weeping, curled brains nestled within.

We take the boyfriend up the stage stairs, a warning procession past groping couples on low-slung seating, and shoulder through the milling dancers to a door reading STAFF ONLY. Lucs bursts through the swinging door using the boyfriend’s head and dumps him on the corridor floor. The doors close after us like a dampening field. An overhead light glares above and my vision swims as I adjust from the dimness outside, getting a brief glimpse down a corridor extending away in progressive darkness. Raph barks something into his two-way.

Lucs in my face: “What happened?” Angry goatee and sharp slicked crewcut: I’m bigger, nearly six-four, but step back anyway.

“They were arguing—just a domestic—right near me, and he snapped her and … and before I could get to him he rammed her into the smoke machine. The sound … fuck—”

He grabs my shirt-front, silencing me: “This is what we do.”

I shrug him off and nod, straightening my shirt. “I know.”

He looks down at the sprawled body; the guy waking now, eyes flitting open and straining at the light. A kick to the side of the head and he is out again. “Take his foot” and we drag him down the corridor and the stairs at the end, the soft thud of his skull on each concrete step keeping beat with the muted, somehow-threatening music through the walls next to us. His head leaves a soft trail of blood. Raph walks ahead and unlocks the door at the bottom of the stairwell. I hear a car pulling up outside, then voices through the wood. A few steps from the bottom my boss pushes me away and reaches down to grasp the shuddering body, standing up with a hand on either side of the guy’s head, a raggedy-doll in his grasp. Lucs holds my gaze and then snaps his wrists, sending the guy’s arms and legs flailing to flap against the huge chest. A moist crack from the guy’s neck and Lucs lets the slide to the floor. I feel like I’m going to vomit.

Raph opens the door to waiting uniforms and a huge white van. Silent revolving lights on its roof spark blue and red eerily around the alley. One of the uniforms walks up, a cop: “This the fucker?” Lucs drags the to the van’s back-doors and throws it inside. A soft thud. The back hadn’t been empty. His partner closes the doors and they drive off, still without the siren, faces swiveling at me as they turn onto the street.

Lucs waits in the doorway, shirt flecked with blood. I look at the empty street and the fading ghostly lights and then back at him, my head spinning. The reek of the alley is like a cocoon. Nausea floods my stomach.

On the way to my post I stop at the staff toilets to scrub the blood off my face. I grip the sink and stare at the mess of flyers pasted above the mirror: amongst them are missing persons photos, a mix of male and female faces, mostly young. Someone has mockingly drawn moustaches on a few. The door opens behind me. Raph’s hulking brother Gabe. “We know you get this, David. We wouldn’t have let you in otherwise. You think this is any different from what you’ve done?” He stares at me for a moment then leaves.

The dark figures across from me now seem ominous, always on the periphery of my vision as I scan the Pit. The feeling that they’re all watching me, silent, unnerving, is greater than ever and my heart quickens. As much as I want to drop the two-way and rip off my shirt and leave, I can’t. The warning in Lucs’ eyes as he broke the guy’s neck is enough to stop that.

Old Max from the Terminal, where I first started bouncing, had warned me the security at the Metropolis were “hard cunts”; a tight-knit, dangerous crew. When I was still at the ratty Village sports bar I’d see them come in for a quiet drink, these huge refugees from the Meatpacking District dressed in black talking amongst themselves at the bar. I’d tense up, expecting them to cause trouble, but they never did, just stared at any patron stupid enough to come near. They were there the night I lost it, beat the fuck out of this asshole guido: some drunk gangster wannabe who told me he didn’t take shit from steroid meatheads telling him when to leave and then tried to pull a piece when I didn’t back down. All the shit I’d put up with, all the abuse and violence and threats working as a bouncer, all the shit from my father against Mom and me, became too much and I dropped him with a sharp left—the first time I’d ever hit anyone on the job, the punch feeling like it’d been pent up forever—then grabbed him by the throat and dragged him out to the back alley, and the guy had tried to fight back and I took the hit then splayed his nose across his face—actually feeling the cartilage disintegrate beneath my fist—and rode him to the ground, hitting again and again and again until his face was slurry against the cobblestones.

He’d lain there blowing bloody bubbles into the air and as I hunched crouched over his crumpled I could see nothing in his hand—it’d been a bluff, there’d never been a gun—and I felt my chest constrict, the world spin. I’d gone too far. I’d be going to jail. My life was over. I dropped to my knees, feeling the shock burn through me.

Then someone had grabbed me: one of the Metropolis guys—Mikhaels, Lucs’ second—and started pulling me away up the street as two cops ran around the corner. They’d paused and looked at Mikhaels.

Then one had nodded, letting him lead me away—trembling as the adrenalin wore off and the delusions of power faded—as they went on to the barely-alive man.

“This is how it works,” Lucs had said when I fronted before him at the Metropolis. “The cops look after us. We look after them. Way of the world. Work for us we make sure nothing ever comes of it.”

I’d never seen them go this far until now. They must’ve been holding back the whole time, waiting until I’d proven myself enough to be accepted into the crew. Until they could trust me. Now they’re showing their true selves: the real way of the world.

And Gabe’s right: it’s not like I can throw stones. It’s not like what I did’s any different.

But I sometimes wonder now how convenient it is Mikhaels’d been there that night, remembering him looking at me from across the bar just before I’d beaten the man; as if he’d instigated it somehow, his presence drawing out the darkness in me.

Maybe I just can’t confront the truth: that I’d nearly beaten someone to death. It’d be much easier to blame anyone but myself—

Dammit. There’s always too much time in here to think: an endless stretching of seconds, minutes, hours into meaninglessness; aided by the curtains shut against the outside sky, encouraging timelessness and the rejection of reality. Fuck it. The guy deserved it. He killed that girl. Lucs was right to snap his neck. The prick would’ve just bought his way out of it before some bullshit judge in a bullshit courtroom under a bullshit legal system. Weaseled his way to leniency as criminals always did. The system didn’t work so what choice is left?

But what’s really scaring me—and why I should’ve run as soon as Lucs turned his back after killing the guy, why I should never have come here in the first place—is that seeing Lucs deal out such justice makes me think of her. Of Lisa and that fuck Paul. My hands shake. Sweat rises on my face and across my back. Because I should have fucking—

A drunk is dancing with a chair he has dragged onto the dancefloor as if it’s his partner. He clutches it in his arms and pirouettes, then throws it onto the ground and awkwardly leaps over the seat. The crowd around him seem to enjoy his absurd parody of some forties musical star—even the muscle-shirted Greek guy takes the hit in the shins good-humoredly—and I’m roundly booed as I jump off my podium and grab the chair, handing it to Raph who has appeared from across the Pit to back me up. But I need the distraction of work. I push the drunk past the bar to the front door and he gibbers at me: “I was pretty swish out there though wasn’t I?” Infectious humor that catches me off guard. His eyes are dilated, oversexed on E’s as well: he wants to touch me as I walk him out, feeling my shoulders through my shirt. I just shrug him off. He’s harmless.

Then he catches a glimpse of Raph behind me and starts pulling away, seeing something I don’t, some revelation his drugged-out brain throws up. “Keep him away from me! Don’t you see what he is?”

Raph, following a few feet behind, stares back stonily, eyes drilling into the patron. The drunk gets more and more agitated and I tell him not to worry, to just walk out, but he seems oblivious to me and then tries to run as we enter the foyer, dodging to his left and around a group milling outside the toilets. Raph is already blocking his way to slam him in the chest, and we drag the guy kicking and swearing out the front to dump him on the pavement. He rolls into a ball at Raph’s feet, wrapping his hands protectively around his head, and then there is a bark behind me: “That’s enough, get back inside.” I turn and Lucs stands glaring at us, two doormen behind like twin Cerberus statues at the gates of hell. There are people in line staring at us, elderly couples and families from surrounding cafés, theatergoers passing by. Too visible.

Raph slinks beside me as we head back to our posts, his bleach-blond hair and powerlifter-traps like talismans splitting the crowd before him. He leans in as we reach my post: “These sheep don’t understand anything else”, then leaves me staring after him.

I continue my watching, unnerved and searching for order in the madness, in the frenetic, restless movement; for some shifting code, some meaning in the faces that coalesce into momentary distinction only to become unformed clay when I look away—brown eyes, blue eyes, blond hair, black hair, blue hair, in an interchangeable melange. I search for joy, for revelation, for knowledge in the faces, for some reason why they come here to waste away their lives with drink and mindless primal movements. All I find is blankness, slack-eyed vapidness. I’m so sick of this.

A hole opens in the crowd and I wonder for a moment if the dancers are ducking someone’s vomit. I look closely at those ringing the gap to see if they have that coy disgusted fascination, like dogs trying to avoid their own shit in the backyard. Then I see the swinging arms and sudden surge of bodies across the space and even as I raise the two-way hear a voice, Gabe’s perhaps, rattle in my hand: “Security to Dancefloor, Security to Dancefloor,” and I jump off to push roughly through the crowd, chest and shoulders hard and unforgiving, distantly savoring the passing looks of dumb shock. I emerge into chaos and grab two of the fighting patrons, tearing apart their clutch by pushing one away, grabbing the other around the neck. The guy I’m holding starts lashing out instead with his feet. “Settle down,” I yell with a jabbed compression of his neck for emphasis and he subsides. I look around and Gabe, Mikhaels and Raph are also restraining fighters. We stand each with subdued patrons hanging in our arms searching for further threats, for something missed.

I’m about to turn and haul off my captive when from nowhere comes a fist swung wild and hard to smash into my temple. I hear the disembodied thump rather than feel it—having had much worse before—and swivel to focus in on the terrified tanned face. I drop my forgotten captive and like a berserker lost in fury pummel the face. On the edge of vision I see the other security react as if under fire, choking out their quarry and launching into the crowd with random punches, staining the beer-soaked floor with spatters of blood.

And then I’m sitting on my attacker’s chest, yelling at his dazed face: “Why the fuck did you do that? We were breaking it up!”

Spit splays into his mouth as he tries to speak, no air in his lungs. “Be— Because you … hit me.”

I grab his shirt: “Like fuck I did!” and bring his face up to mine.

He persists: “So—Someone hit me.”

I stare into his glazed, convincing eyes and then a hand lands on my shoulder; quick spin and armlock, bending the elbow back to breaking point, my fist cocked—and Lucs stares back at me, a hand raised instinctively to protect his face. I let him go.

He moves in close, goatee like a pointer: “Kill him.”

I step back though it’s hard to hear him above the music, above the screams of the crowd. “What?”

He surges in again: “Now, while there’s still confusion, while there’s justification.” I push him away, open-handed against the hard solidity of his pecs. “Damn you,” he says slit-eyed, “stop fighting it.”

I stand over the bleeding kid and, eyes still on Lucs, reach down to haul him up: “Get the fuck out of here.” The kid looks at me in disbelief so I slap him across the cheek, bringing sudden clarity to his eyes. I look back at Lucs as he watches the patron disappear into the crowd. Lucs glares at me and walks away, saying something to Mikhaels.

His second looks at me then heads towards the front doors, pushing past the doormen and disappearing outside. I wonder what the hell Mikhaels is doing, leaving the club halfway through the night. I don’t understand anything about this place any more.

I watch as Gabe and Raph drag away the injured. But the patrons soon start dancing again, the music an unstoppable Pied Piper-calling to their gyrating and fondling, to the slackening of the vague, drugged faces. Their shoes smear the forgotten blood into the polished floor.

I’m dismissed from my post at the Pit and sent upstairs as punishment. Danteis, who I’m relieving, passes me on the stairs with a nod, grateful to be heading down to the world of the big boys for a change. Heaven, the upstairs bar and club’s wasteland, looks much easier to patrol than downstairs: a bar and small dancefloor on one level, leading up to another small bar, some pool tables and a series of isolated grimy couches ringed around a balcony overlooking the Pit. I stand midway up the stairs that split the levels and look out over the sweaty, milling drinkers by the larger bar.

I can’t take in anything. I feel strange, panicky. The faces around me, the colors of the lights and bright yellow walls seem to warp and shift. I wonder if it’s the cocktail of drugs I’m taking: uppers to get through the night; stanozolol to maintain my size, my intensity. I feel like I’m tripping.

A girl wearing only a black bra-top and set of tiny shorts walking up the stairs towards me catches me glancing at her. “You want a fucking picture?” She is gone before I can respond, before I can even take offense at her insult. She passes me later, smirking over her shoulder, knowing her allure, as she heads downstairs, tight, arrogant ass rolling beneath the black leather.

“You’re not naïve, David.” I jump at the voice in my ear; Lucs has sidled up beside me while I’ve momentarily closed my eyes. He stares out over the drinkers, eyes reflective and distant, silent for a moment. I follow his gaze. “Look at these weak cockroaches,” he finally says quietly. “Most of them can’t even string two words together; fill them with alcohol and they become zombies, mindless scum.”

“And that justifies killing them?”

He turns to me, as if contemplating this for the first time. “This is the way it’s always been. You know that. There has always been those like us willing to seek the truth, to unlock the darkness inside.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Think about it, David. Think of how you feel about them. How you feel about your girlfriend. Remember that night at the Terminal.”

“What do you know about my girlfriend—” I start to demand, having never told them about Lisa. Then he touches my shoulder.

Sudden pain along my chest and arms, as if I’d done a heavy workout, the muscles burning and flaring. I want to recoil but the muscles on my arms and chest ripple in sympathy. I shudder as a wave of pain surges through me; like something opening out inside.

Just like I felt after beating the gangster. Jesus. I’d forgotten that, suppressed that weird feeling as I’d knelt on the cobblestones.

I break his grip and back away, spooked, mouth groping for a reaction. I grab my chest but the pain has just as quickly receded.

Lucs stares at me as I back down the stairs. What the fuck was that? What’s wrong with me? He watches me go.

I stumble downstairs, knocking patrons out of the way as if they aren’t there. The radio bucks in my hand but I don’t hear what’s said. Lucs perhaps, telling the others. One of the doormen—that asshole Pēteris who hated me from the moment I arrived, as if I didn’t deserve to be here—appears from the foyer near the front door and stands waiting for me. I double back, heading for the back. I traverse the edge of the dancefloor, trying to keep out of sight of the other security perched like gargoyles on their posts.

I reach the Stage unharmed and burst through the double doors into the muted corridor to rest panting against a damp wall, waiting for my smoke-stained eyes and nose and throat to clear. My pulse throbs in my head, keeping complicit time with the music rumbling through the walls.

The one hanging light casts weird shifting sprays of illumination down the corridor. I touch my chest again, recalling that strange pain. I must be going insane, too many late nights, the shock of seeing someone killed. Maybe it’s the drugs finally getting to me.

Yet Lucs’ words nag at the back of my brain.

I force them from my mind. All that matters is getting out of here and I push off the wall and head for the back door.

I round a corner. Too late realize I’m not alone.

A figure is coming towards me, filling the narrow space. When I see the size of the guy I instinctively put one foot back, planting myself.

Gabe. He’s big—bigger even than me—and in the tight corridor he almost scrapes the roof with his head. I tense and wait for him. Then I glimpse over his shoulder another darkened figure bent over something on the ground, something framed by yellow—it is blond hair, it is a woman. Tight black shorts. Bra-top.

There’s blood on her neck.

As I stare at it my vision narrows, focusing solely on its dark stain.

I forget about Gabe, about the club, about the patron being killed.

Pulsing sounds in my ears, strong, blotting out everything else. Spit fills my mouth. I can smell the blood. It floods my senses. My head spins at the thought of reaching out and touching it, feeling its dark slick against my skin, of tasting it. That feeling of a hollowing-out inside me again, of surging within. Of power. Something related to the blood …

I imagine Lisa before me.

I tear my gaze away to look at the hunched-over figure, but the shifting light edging past Gabe’s head and shoulders and underneath his arms warps everything and it seems the figure’s face is somehow stretched and lupine.

“Thought you were a patron,” Gabe says, breaking through my concentration. “Just as well.” He points at the blackening egg on my temple. “You got hit before.”

Disarmed, I raise my hand to my head slowly and feel the lump. My refined senses dissipate, leaving me feeling washed out and empty. I must be going insane. I look at the other security—it is Raph, his brother—but his face is normal. For a moment I’d thought …

“You can’t let that happen again,” Gabe’s saying. “They must fear us.”

I stare at him then look at the girl.

“She overstayed her welcome,” Gabe explains.

Raph hauls the black-shorts girl up underneath her arms and drags her to the back door. But there is blood on the wall behind, splattered like the blood on Raph’s cheek. He waits for Gabe to go down the stairwell and open the door and, as I stand watching, the girl’s head lolls to one side on a too-pliable neck and her mouth, split at the corners as if punctured by something, gapes open, drooling a line of spittle onto her top. Raph sees me looking at her face and stares back openly. He reads something in my eyes that satisfies him and dismisses me, dragging the girl outside.

“You should get back to your post,” Gabe says.

I hesitate, looking towards the back door. Instead I nod and head back into the club.

When I return upstairs Lucs is still on the stairs. I don’t ask how he knew I’d return. He doesn’t say anything for a while, then: “You okay?” I nod. He stares at me for a moment, then nods also. “I’ll check back soon.” He leaves.

I try to watch the crowd but I’m too fucked up, the scene in the corridor still whirling through my mind. In need of air I head up to the top bar to stand beneath the air-conditioning vent jutting from the roof, savoring its cool whisper over my sweating, fevered face.

I open my eyes and see Kelly standing at the bar, the one bargirl I actually liked and would speak to on occasion. But looking now at her tanned shoulders and the tight lycra top hugging her breasts only makes me think of Lisa, remembering the jut of her breasts above the bedclothes when I came home from work, the feel of her skin against me.

We’d met while I was still at the Terminal trying to work as many hours as I could to cover the rent. Some guy had been hassling Lisa in the nearby street as I was heading home for the night and for a moment I’d seen my father looming over my mom and I’d intervened without thinking. The guy—some crazy ex—had trash-talked to save face but when I advanced on him he soon disappeared. Lisa and I started going out soon afterwards. She used to call me her “protector.” Things went well for a while and she even moved in, but then it all began to change. She started complaining about my temper affecting the relationship. Or how I was spending too much time in the gym, only concerned with putting on size. How I talked about the scumbag patrons I had to put up with every night, the contempt in my voice never far. How I had no plans for the future, as if working my ass off night after night meant nothing. She started spending more time at the dance studio for what I thought was an upcoming show: her first. I tried giving her space to prepare. But after she found out I beat that guy and was now working at one of the big clubs in the Meatpacking District without telling her, I returned home one night to find all her stuff gone. She hadn’t even left a note. And then I found out about Paul. The other lead. Some lean-limbed, shaggy-haired dancer she must’ve been fucking for months—she’d mentioned him once or twice but I didn’t read anything into it, didn’t want to seem jealous. I didn’t know the bitch was about to leave me. I eventually found her new apartment and I’d pass by on the way home from work, sometimes sitting outside for a while. I felt stupid, jealous. But I couldn’t stop myself. Then one morning, about a week ago, I watched this Paul guy walk out of her apartment with her, intimate hands brushing her face as he left. The shock was quickly overtaken with anger, burning rage. I couldn’t believe the fury I was feeling. I wanted to rip them apart. It scared me. I didn’t know how far I would go. So I drove away. I chickened out. And now I can’t stop imagining what I could have done. Should have done.

I stare at Kelly and feel a rising anger and hatred. She smiles over at me but I turn away and descend past the vomit and beer-stained couches and stand at the balcony looking out over the huge gothic expanse with its sudden three-story drop to the Pit, crisscrossed and bisected by lasers and spotlights like prison-camp searchlights that pierce the hanging smoke. The dancers are a sea of sweaty, jerking bodies, a blind mass of conformity. I feel like jumping, smashing into them from above, shocking them out of their trances. Destroying their oblivion.

It would be so easy.

But I had the chance to run. And I couldn’t.

Something distracts me. A frenzy of movement in the far-right corner couch, a couple in oblivious ecstasy, the girl with goth-black hair and raised skirt, her face slackened as she straddles a greasy guy, some mafioso scumbag. As I approach I see the slimy length of his penis jamming up inside her with every raise of her fleshy white cheeks.

I should tell them to zip up, walk them outside.

I wonder if Paul’s cock looks like that.

I grab the girl’s shoulder and roughly pull her off him, baring her seeping cunt. She tries to break away and stumbles backwards, hitting the brick wall. I let her fall and she lies spread-eagled, blood trickling down her face. I stare at its darkness. Everything shuts down.

Then I’m grabbing her by the throat, leaning in. She smells like metal, copper. Life.

Something on the edge of vision: the guy fumbling for something in his jacket. I swivel as he lunges at me and something wet slices my face, like a spray of cum, like he has opened my face with his cock. I touch the blood on my cheek and the guy stares at me in shock, as if surprised he has cut me, virgin knife held before him like a talisman. I tense and spring and he instinctively arcs the knife back to defend himself. But he is too slow. I grab his wrist then slam the heel of my other hand into the crook of his elbow. His arm jackknifes into his skull and he falls back onto the couch. There’s a moment of silence before the girl slumped at my feet wakes up and starts screaming. The guy sits completely still, arms hanging by his side; dripping, alien cock pointing up from his open zipper. The knife is buried to the hilt in his right eye. The socket leaks blood and a clear viscous fluid.

I stare at him, shaking my head in disbelief, in horror.

A figure by my side. Lucs, taking my arm. My muscles burn at his touch and I try to pull away but his grip is iron. Behind him, Raph and Gabe close the area, moving in on the witnesses, silencing the girl. One of the patrons tries to run and Gabe chases him up the stairs, slamming him into the ground.

“You are ready now,” Lucs says.

He leads me with his steel grip past the upstairs bar and downstairs. Patrons jump out of the way when they see the blood dripping down my face, staring after us dumbfounded. We head for the stage doors. The club sinks away as the doors close behind. Down the barely-lit corridor and towards the back door.

The outside air is cool on my face. But I don’t get a chance to savor it because there’s movement in the darkness of the alley. Figures emerging from an alcove: Mikhaels holding a blond-haired girl by the throat, one hand over her mouth. She is dressed in blue silk pyjamas and shivers in the night air.

I look at her face.

Oh God. It’s Lisa. She stares at me with terror-filled eyes.

I try to pull away, to run for the street beyond, but Lucs’ fingers dig into me like claws. “You know what to do,” he says, something wrong with his voice. “Become one of us. Finish the Change.” I turn and his eyes have become black holes in his face, dilating with darkness. His teeth fill his mouth.

I thrash against him in horror, feeling his fingers sink into my skin like needles of fire, but I have to get away from him, have to escape what he’s—

And then the other figures appear: hunched shadows in the darkness of the alley. Gabe, Raph, Danteis, Pēteris, all grinning. Waiting.

I can’t look at Lisa, forcing my eyes away from her, searching for a gap in their numbers, some way to escape this. Lucs senses my resistance still in the face of the inevitable. His voice like gravel in my ear: “Then if you will not kill her, if you can still resist … ”

Pēteris reaches back into the alcove, drinking in my despair, and pulls out a struggling man dressed only in tracksuit pants—dragged out of bed also; thin but muscular, like a skinned rabbit, impossibly-defined abs a downward-V.

So this is what she wanted. This is who she chose instead of me.

I feel the hatred hit.

“You are a god now,” Lucs says. “Take what is yours.”

My anger surges beyond control. As I stare at Paul the darkness kept deep inside me opens out like spreading wings and a searing pain suddenly runs in rivulets down my arms and across my neck and up my face. Agony floods my throat and I throw my head back to cry out and my jaw dislocates with a wet clicking sound and I can only manage a strangled guttural croak. I feel my nerve-endings fry as my hands and arms and chest ripple and bubble like melting plastic, my back pop and break and fill out impossibly, my fingers lengthen into claws and brow form over and become stretched and lupine and teeth distend my mouth. Then my vision goes black and suddenly all-encompassing as my eyes dilate, the weak moonlight from above sending shards into my brain.

I see the shallows of blood pumping beneath Paul’s skin. Can smell its hot, sweet scent. Can smell my girlfriend beyond.

I look at Lisa in Mikhaels’ arms and inexplicably a part of me senses I have started crying. Burning tears that score my face. I wish I could tell her I’m sorry, that part of me will be forever destroyed by this. That I loved her.

But when I see her weak, pleading eyes, like an animal at the slaughter, the realization eclipses everything.

She deserves this. They all do. They are only prey.

The growl sounds deep in my throat and is joined by the growls of my Brothers. The man before me pisses himself in fear, the acrid stain blossoming across his track pants. Once I have tasted his flesh, once I have drunk my fill of his life I will kill the woman behind him also.

This is the way it should begin for me. Ending the life I once had. Embracing my rightful place in this world.

Her blood takes me.