Sarain opened her eyes to see a frantic Winston trying to shake her awake. Panic was in his eyes, and Sarain knew that it had to be for more than just concern over her struggling in her sleep. Alorea stood waiting in the doorway, a look of impatience on her face.
Finally Winston explained, “There are vil sangs upstairs looking for us!”
“Are you sure?” Sarain groggily asked.
Alorea stepped forward and replied, “They’re pretending to be regular men, but I can tell the difference. They keep sniffing the air.”
Sarain looked at Winston and stated, “I thought you said we’d be safe here.”
“And we will if you just hurry up!” Winston pressed anxiously.
He took her by the hand and yanked her up out of her floor bed, then rushed her out of the room. A couple of women went in to the room after them to clean and discard of any sign of them, and anything with their possible scent on it. The smells of strong perfume oils floated from the room, incense was burning, and Sarain realized that the place was kept smelling so strongly of fragrances to mask the smells of others. Whether it was a hygiene thing or not, the aromas would definitely cover over any trace of their scents. Alorea led Winston and Sarain across the hall to a small storage closet. Sarain had seen a few of the rooms before and knew that they were generally the same sizes. The closet seemed out of place. Then Alorea went to a large cabinet shelf, and pushed on its side until it rolled away. Behind it was a small hidden room. In the business of a brothel, the women were constantly finding times when they would have to hide important clients, and this was what this room was for.
Winston stepped into the small dark room, and tugged on Sarain’s hand to follow. She looked down realizing that Winston still held her hand and jerked it away from him. She went into the dark hideaway, and Alorea closed up the entrance with the cabinet behind them. They waited there in the dark while the vil sangs searched the large brothel. They couldn’t hear any signs of them yet, but it would only be a matter of time before they would come sniffing around the storage closet.
The room was tiny and Sarain could feel that Winston kept bumping into her. “Stand still,” she whispered to him, then with a sudden realization she asked, “Can’t you see perfectly fine in the dark?”
“Sorry,” he quickly responded, instantly stopping.
Sarain slowed her breathing to keep quiet. Then the sound of the storage closet door opening echoed in her ears. Someone was rustling around on the other side of the cabinet, searching and sniffing for any sign of her and Winston.
After a minute another set of footsteps entered the small closet, and was followed by a voice asking, “Is there any sign of them?”
“No, they’re not here. Winston must have found another place to hold up in, we should check all the warehouses,” a voice replied.
“If that is what Garnok orders; he was looking into anywhere the girl might go,” the first voice said.
“I hate taking orders from that little bastard,” the second voice stated.
The two men then retreated from the room, but Sarain and Winston remained waiting silently. They had to wait for Alorea or one of the other girls to come back with an all clear.
The room was pitch black, but when Sarain shifted restlessly she caught a glimpse of something blue behind her. Winston’s eyes were glowing, probably from the fear of getting caught. But the image of it made Sarain uncomfortable; she didn’t need a reminder of her unpleasant company. She tried to ignore him, but he took notice of her reaction. Winston closed his eyes as they waited, but Sarain never looked behind her again to observe this action.
Eventually Alorea came back, moving the cabinet away to let them out. Sarain stepped out first, with Winston following soon after. They both looked to Alorea who explained, “They finally left. They searched all over, tore apart some rooms, and scared a lot of customers.”
“Did they hurt anybody?” Winston asked with concern.
“No, just the business. I think some clients won’t be coming back,” Alorea replied with stress.
“Maybe we should leave,” Sarain suggested.
“No, they shouldn’t come back, and they would have searched here regardless,” Winston responded.
Alorea nodded in agreement with Winston, she appeared to be quite a fan of his. Sarain wondered if Winston had ever been a client of hers, and was curious to how many of these women he had slept with. Were they all willing to satisfy the needs of a vil sang?
Alorea brought them back to their room, which had been cleaned; Sarain’s self made bed on the floor had been picked up, and the sheet covering the mirror had been removed. Sarain avoided looking into the mirror, and without being asked, Winston automatically took a sheet from the bed and covered the reflective glass. Alorea looked at him puzzled when he did so, but didn’t ask why. He gave Sarain a quick glance as though seeking a sign of approval, but she looked away when they made eye contact. Something about the action, even though it was an act of kindness, didn’t seem right to her, perhaps it was the fact that he was being kind.
Alorea excused herself to tend to her customers, still trying to calm the frustration from the disturbance that the vil sangs had caused, leaving Sarain alone with Winston. He went over to sit on the bed then quickly asked, “Did you want it?”
Sarain looked at him confused, and shook her head no, saying, “I don’t know what has gone on, on that thing.”
He laughed and sat down, then said, “They are actually very sterile here. These rooms are kept cleaner than your average hotel.”
“Well, I’m not big on hotels either,” Sarain muttered.
The room got quiet, and Winston waited a moment to see if Sarain would say anything else before he finally spoke again, “You really aren’t a big talker, are you?”
“I don’t hang around people,” she said faintly.
“Why is that? Because you can be around people without getting close to them, if that is what you’re worried about,” Winston asked.
“I prefer not to be noticed. It’s better for my line of work,” she answered.
“Well you stand out more than you realize,” he said being observant.
The silence was uncomfortable, but the conversation was making Sarain even more uneasy so she decided to change the subject by asking, “What are we going to do now? We can’t hide here forever.”
“I thought about that, you should leave town. Sephor’s not going to stop looking for you, so it’s better if you get far away quick,” Winston instructed.
“I don’t think I can do that,” she told him.
Winston gave her a puzzled look and asked, “Why not?”
“I can’t leave knowing what he is doing, and with what he did to Kit. I have no reason to run,” Sarain explained.
“Even with knowing that he plans to turn you?” he questioned her further.
“I would kill myself before he’d have the chance. But I have to try and stop him, regardless of how large his army is,” she declared.
“Well your best odds would be to destroy the club. Destroy the hive and the bees will scatter, then it will be easier to pick them off one by one,” Winston advised her, “Do it during the day, when they will all be forced to go underground. I can get my hands on some explosives. The further you can get it in, the more likely you can take some of them out in the process. Now there are other exits besides the club, but those can only really be used at night, and it’s at those exits that we should wait to start picking them off. But even still, it will be dangerous.”
“I’m not worried about that, but why are you so willing to help me?” Sarain asked with curiosity.
“I’m just helping myself, they are after me too now, and the sooner I can get Sephor and his army off my back, the sooner I’m a free man,” Winston replied.
“They weren’t on your back until you helped me,” she noted.
“Maybe, but I wasn’t free. Sephor had me doing his dirty work, and once he got his hooks in me, I was to forever be stuck doing whatever he would ask of me. It wasn’t like I was just some employee who went home at the end of the day, I was his slave,” he enlightened.
Sarain hadn’t seen it that way before, she had always figured that since Winston was half demon he had to be a villain, but perhaps he was just another victim. Like Nate and like Kit. This made her wonder about the rest of Sephor’s army, from the tape she had been forced to watch in the tunnels, she had learned that Sephor was driving his people crazy before turning them; there was no volunteering, but now as brainwashed vil sangs, they acted on orders without further thought.
“How did Sephor start and choose who would be in his army?” Sarain asked Winston.
“Well, he started by collecting up regular vil sangs, not those robotic versions he’s making in his dungeon. He promised people like me power and protection, you know, strength in numbers. Once he lured us in he started up The Purge, and used it to bring in your more unfavorable cliental. He liked criminals, because they were already prone to violence, and wouldn’t be missed when they went missing. Then before I knew it he had a hoard of full blooded demons helping him turn these criminals with his ‘special’ method. It was like these demons popped up over night, following his every command like he was truly one of their own. I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Winston relayed, a little fearful.
“I have,” Sarain muttered with the flash of a colossal beastly man in her mind. After a minute she asked him, “What else can you tell me?”
“Well, he uses his blood to turn each and every person. He likes to sweep in and choose his ‘children’, as he puts it, after each batch of torture. He likes to turn and torture them in groups, so they bond with their pain and also so they get numbed by being forced to watch,” he replied.
“What about the club employees?” Sarain wondered.
“They’re completely legit; all human. The club needed to appear like any other. And the employees were to be left untouched, and they were to have no knowledge of the demon activity; Sephor couldn’t risk his plans getting out,” Winston explained.
“What about Nate?” Sarain asked, remembering that he had worked there.
“Nate?” Winston repeated, at first not recalling name, then after a moment a look of recognition came over his face, and he said, “Oh him. Yeah he was an employee, he was still kind of new, and didn’t know the club rules too well. Like if the office door was closed during club hours that he shouldn’t come in, but he did one night, and saw one of the other vil sangs coming out from the hidden door under the desk in there. You know the one. Anyway, he tried to play the whole thing off like he didn’t see anything…”
“I saw nothing,” Sarain mumbled, recalling a dream. Winston stared at her oddly after she spoke those words, enough so that she asked him, “What?”
“It’s just that he kept repeating that phrase over and over even after they dragged him down into the tunnels,” he relayed still looking at her strangely.
Sarain wasn’t surprised, it wasn’t the first time that something she dreamt turned out to be factual, but she shrugged it off to Winston, not wanting him to know this about her, and said, “Well, it sounded like the likely response. Continue.”
So he did and added, “Anyway, once Sephor found out about it, he wasn’t willing to risk the kid talking. So he had him taken to the dungeon and put in with the next batch of ‘crop’.”
Sarain nearly found herself laughing; everything that had happened, all that had led her to this moment was because Nate opened a door. If he had just left it alone, there would have been no trail for her to follow. Who knows what Nate even thought the passageway led to; she severely doubted that he would think it was to a demon lair. If Sephor had just let him walk instead of having him brought down below, things probably would have stayed normal, and Sarain would have never troubled him.
It was funny how one simple act set off a chain reaction of events.