I smelled Vale before I saw him, already attuned to his strange half-Abyssinian odor. The vial he presented was cool in my hand, refrigerated instead of warmed. I sucked in air through my teeth.
“It’s cold, I know. Sorry about that, ma petite. Can you choke it down?”
I popped the cork, held my nose, and tossed back the slightly clumpy blood, thankful that in Sang, for some strange reason, there were no germs, no blood-borne pathogens, no way for me to get sick from old blood. Even if it was like slurping a liquefied scab.
The taste was rancid in my mouth, and when Vale pressed a glass of red wine into my other hand, I rinsed and swallowed before thinking. The blood was so bad that the wine wasn’t disgusting.
“Thanks for that.” He took the wineglass from my hand and finished it off himself, which caught me by surprise. I wasn’t accustomed to daimons and humans wanting much to do with Bludmen or anything our foul, murderous, bloody mouths had touched. Being half-Abyssinian must have made a big difference to his worldview.
After slipping the wineglass onto a passing daimon waiter’s tray, Vale gestured with his chin to the golden girl dangling from the hoop. “That’s Limone. She is bad news.”
“Bad news how? Does she feed on pain?”
He chuckled. “Thankfully, no. But she is the cruelest daimon here. I would avoid her if I were you.”
I cocked my head, watching Limone swing and spin and flip through her ring. “It’s a shame that someone so beautiful should be so nasty.”
Limone struck a final pose as the ring smoothly rose into the ceiling like a full moon, taking her with it. The crowd whispered excitedly as a trio of daimons dressed as parrots ran out onto the stage. I stifled a chuckle, considering how insulted the tightrope girl in Criminy’s caravan would be if she knew that the Parisian daimons were pulling her shtick and making a total joke of it. Emerlie had favored the brightest costumes in the show back home. Although I’d never really liked the nosy busybody, she’d been a hell of a performer, riding her unicycle on a slender rope in leather tutus of lurid green and pink while the humans below trembled in fear for her.
My heart wrenched momentarily. Would I ever see Criminy and the caravan again? And what about Cherie? She should have been there at my side, her arm linked through mine as we witnessed the cabaret for the first time. We were a duo. Partners. Best friends. And there was no way for me to find her unless I could persuade the cabaret’s mistress to hire me and let me stay here while I searched for clues. If only I had let the slavers steal me, too. Now all I wanted was to be one of the girls who disappeared, because it would get me one step closer to Cherie.
But first, I had to secure a place right here, at Paradis.
“So how do I nail this job interview?”
Vale turned, looking me up and down with a critical eye that seemed more for his personal enjoyment than any professional critique. “Beauty won’t be the issue. Neither will temperament or skill. What you must do is make Madame Sylvie feel that she can’t do without you. That if she doesn’t hire you, you will run along to the next cabaret and bring in such a crowd that she’ll stand in her office and weep.” He put a finger under my chin and tilted my head up, and I jerked my face away and snapped at his fingers in faux annoyance. He grinned. “That. That, right there. Dance the line between dangerous and desirous, and she won’t be able to turn you away.”
“And don’t kill anyone.”
“Well, obviously, ma petite. Professionals rarely eat their customers.”
Vale snatched another glass of wine from the tray of a passing daimon man dressed as a waiter. With a shouted “Merci!” he flipped a franc onto the platter as he led me away. I walked backward, watching the coin twirl for a moment, and my hand clamped down on Vale’s wrist and drew him to a halt.
“Wait, I thought you said you didn’t have any silvers.”
Vale grinned, light eyes dancing above the wine like footlights. “I don’t have any silvers. I do, however, have a limited supply of francs.”
“But you said . . .”
“I said if you delved too deeply into my business, I would gladly toss you into the sewer.” He looked around the room, posh and sensuous down to the carvings in the scarred bar. “Although I suppose up here, I’d have to settle for dumping some third-tier gin on your pretty head. Rest assured I don’t have enough for a third glass. Yet. Come, now. Madame Sylvie should be in her office, counting her own silvers. Let’s catch her while she’s still optimistic, yes?”
He reached for my hand, and if he felt the same strange chemistry I did at the touch, he didn’t show it. In moments, I understood that it was a utilitarian gesture, that it was the only way to stay connected as the crowd pressed dangerously close. We wove in and out among tuxedo-clad, overexcited gentlemen, and I pinched my nose closed against their extreme edibility. When I felt a hand caress my bustle, I had to bite back a snarl. Getting into a fight and throwing hot, tempting blood into the mix of posh black and white was no way to get a job.