Blood Engines(28)
“No, that’s not what I need to talk to him about,” Marla said. “We have some mutual friends. I just want to chat with him.”
“He’ll be down later, probably,” she said, shrugging. “Just have fun in the meantime, grab something to eat.” She nodded to Jared. “You should probably beat your boy, too—he looks like he’s about to wiggle out of his skin.”
“He’s not my boy,” Marla muttered, drawing her cloak around her and stepping into the kitchen, which adjoined the living room. There was juice and bottled water on the counter, and a buffet of sorts laid out on a sideboard, with asparagus, bowls of M&M’s, hummus, pita bread, artichoke dip—all finger food. Jared was still following her, and in the kitchen, Marla turned on him. “Look, aren’t there rules about unwelcome advances?”
He looked wounded. “You said you wanted to see me whipped. There are rules about messing with someone’s head, too, you know.”
“I meant you deserve to be whipped, you annoying little shit,” Marla said.
“You’re right, mistress.”
“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “Gods, you’re a fuckwit.” He clearly enjoyed being scolded, so she clenched her teeth and went through the French doors onto the back deck.
It was a little slice of paradise back here, Marla thought, suddenly jarred from her irritation. This was a hidden garden courtyard in the midst of the city’s streets. Marla took in all the amenities: a multilevel redwood deck with stairs leading up to the second floor; a hot tub big enough for ten; in the far corner, a majestic oak tree strung with electric fairy lights, branches spreading out as if administering a benediction; a pagoda-shaped fountain, furry with moss, standing on a mound of smoothly polished rocks in the adjacent corner; and a fourteen-foot privacy fence around the whole thing. Even the people in the hot tub, and the others standing in loose knots and talking, wearing sarongs or towels or nothing at all, seemed like a natural part of the garden. It was altogether beautiful.
That’s how Marla knew there was a spell on the place. Though she could just barely believe in her own innate capacity to appreciate landscape and architecture, she knew she’d never like any landscape better with people in it. Marla sniffed the air, not trying to smell, exactly, but to sense at least the essential nature of the spell; sniffing helped her concentrate, because it seemed to somehow externalize the metaphysical process.
The spell was simple, not really powerful enough to qualify as mind-control—it was simply calming everyone down, instilling in them a fleeting sense of gestalt with the other partygoers. Sort of like a mild airborne dose of ecstasy. Marla’s pet riot-cops back home used a much stronger version of the same spell for crowd control. There was an element of sexual enhancement here, too, a little nudge to the libido that Marla felt between her own thighs, but not as much as she might have expected, given that Finch probably drew his power from the sexual energy around him. She supposed that providing people with a fabulous house and a host of new partners to have sex with was enough to get everyone’s urges ramped up, even without the help of magic.
Marla glanced back. Jared was still there, looking both eager and downcast, and Marla briefly considered giving him what he wanted—a few lashes, a boot to the ass, then an order to go fuck someone else. A spark of anger floated up through the top of her calm then—she wanted to be irritated, she got her edge from being irritated, and Finch’s randy-sheep spell wasn’t going to change her. She needed to find the host of this party and find out what he knew about the Cornerstone, and then she could go.
Both to get away from the tagalong submissive, and to see what else there was to see of the house, Marla went down the low stone stairs into the dark basement. Her vision adjusted instantly to the gloom, and it was light enough that she didn’t need her night-eyes.
The basement—or dungeon, she supposed, though it wasn’t a real dungeon, being dry, well insulated, and lacking vermin—could have served well as the set for porn movies, except for the low ceilings. Everything was black, even the carpet and the support pillars, and especially the equipment, which was of a better quality than Marla had expected. One could improvise a spanking horse from a sawhorse and some padding, after all, but Finch had invested in a black-leather number with chrome accents. Marla hoped the young man currently chained over it, receiving the attentions of his broad-shouldered companion, appreciated the luxury and the lack of splinters. A woman lay bound to a gyno table, which was suspended from the ceiling by heavy chains—the table was also black leather with chrome accents. That seemed to be Finch’s motif. Not exactly original, but she supposed pinstripes or polka dots would have been out of place.