Read Online Turn Coat by Jim Butcher - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    Thomas dragged his eyes away, and let that inhuman stillness fill him again. The women blinked a few times, then continued on their way, their expressions vaguely puzzled.
    “Hey,” I yelled through the music. “You all right?”
    He nodded once, and then twitched his chin up at the highest platform in the building, on the far side of the dance floor. “Up there.”
    I nodded, and Thomas took the lead. We negotiated the maze of catwalks and stairs. They had been purposefully designed to be just barely too narrow for two people to pass one another without touching, as I found out when Thomas and I passed a girl in leather shorts and a bustier, both of which strained to match themselves to a body whose curves were made ripe and inviting by the red light’s primitive rhythm. She slid by Thomas, her eyes locked on his chest, as if she was about to lean over and bite him.
    He ignored her, but then the girl reached me—and I take up more room than Thomas. I felt her hip brush me, and she arched her back as I stepped past her, turned sideways. Her breasts pressed against my sternum, pliant, resilient warmth, and her lips were parted, her eyes too bright. Her hand brushed over my thigh, a touch that could have been accidental but wasn’t, and my body was suddenly demanding that I stop for a moment and see where this would lead.
    You can’t trust your body when it tells you stuff like that. It doesn’t understand about things like actual affection, interaction, pregnancy, STDs. It just wants . I tried not to pay any attention to it—but there were other people on the catwalks, and evidently there was no such thing as a less than gorgeous woman inside Zero’s walls. Most of them seemed perfectly happy to make sure I knew it as they went by.
    So did some of the men, for that matter, but that was less of an issue, as far as my focus went.
    It probably didn’t help matters that we were walking by things that I hadn’t ever seen before, not even in movies. There was this one girl doing a thing with her tongue and an ice cube that—
    Look, just trust me on this one. It was distracting as hell.
    Thomas was walking faster as we approached the stairway