Rebekka crossed her arms over her chest, rubbed her palms against the material of her blouse. This was the first time she’d been to the brothel since escaping from the Iberá estate after being held there in the hopes she would lead the patriarch to Tir.
For the Iberá patriarch, the hunt was now over. She had no fear of being made a prisoner at the estate again, though a tightness swelled in her chest at a remembered conversation. He wanted the red zone eliminated. But as horrible as the brothels were, if he succeeded, the prostitutes would find their contracts sold.
Some would be sent to other cities. Some would be placed on ships like the
Pleasure Venture
, or sold to brothel caravans like the one she lived in until her mother’s contract was bought by a vice lord in Oakland. And some would simply disappear, sold to places like the maze, or to hunters like Feliss’s father.
If only she could heal them completely, free them from being trapped between forms and make them whole, able to
shift
. If only—
“Are you okay?” Feliss asked, drawing Rebekka from the turmoil of her thoughts.
“I’m fine. Levi found his brother. He wanted me to tell you he’ll be back after he sees Cyrin home.”
Feliss looked down but not before Rebekka saw the doubt, the hopelessness, in her friend’s eyes. She took Feliss’s hands in hers and gave them a gentle squeeze.
“He’ll be back.” If they’d been alone, Rebekka would have added,
He won’t forget his promise to buy out your contract so you never have to let another man touch you if it’s not your choice
. But they weren’t. And she couldn’t. Like the human brothels of her childhood, there was jealousy and plays for power here, too.
Feliss pulled free when the sharp clap of hands summoned her into the parlor. Rebekka retreated to the small room that served as her workplace unless someone came to get her. Most of the time she healed using her touch and her will, but she also kept supplies on hand, salves and bandages, formulas meant to reduce pain or cleanse.
Word of her return spread. Within minutes a male Lynx arrived, shuffling in painfully, his human testicles swollen and bruised and his buttocks smeared with blood. He was followed by another prostitute, and another, a steady stream testifying to the brutality of those who visited the brothels.
She’d lost count of how many she’d healed by the time one of the pure Weres who served the dungeon madam arrived. “You’re needed in the next building.”
“Give me a moment more.”
He nodded and left. She finished healing a Cat whose teat hung by a thread of flesh, nearly bitten off by a drunk patron in the bar.
Rebekka rose to her feet, swaying with crushing fatigue. The Cat looked at her without expression, turned away, and left without comment, emotions deadened except for an underlying hatred of all humans.
Rebekka drew in a deep breath, trying to suck strength in with the air. Her gift wasn’t inexhaustible. There were limits and she had far exceeded them already with the healing of the Weres in the woods.
She forced herself forward. Passed by the leather-and-fur parlor where Dorrit dickered with a client as female prostitutes stood in a line, Feliss no longer among them.
The bouncer who’d brought the message peeled away from a spot near the doorway to accompany Rebekka down a hallway with glass-fronted windows. Inside the rooms, prostitutes performed the acts required of them while humans paid to walk back and forth, watching from the hall.
Rebekka kept her attention focused forward but it didn’t save her from getting a glimpse of Feliss on her knees before a burly, unwashed man. From seeing his fingers wrapped in Feliss’s hair as his cock thrust in and out of her mouth with no care for the pain he caused or the damage he might do.
It was a relief to turn onto a hall with the doors closed, to have several moments away from the brothel atmosphere as she and the bouncer entered the stairway, climbing upward before stepping onto the connecting walkway and going to the next building.
They descended once again, and, even muted by the walls separating the passageway from the dungeons, Rebekka could hear screams and cries and the sounds of paid-for violence.
Instead of remaining in the parts of the brothel off-limits to clients, the bouncer punched in a code and opened a door leading to the area set aside for play. The scent of sweat and blood and sex hit Rebekka.
“This way,” he said, placing a hand on her back and guiding her, his presence a deadly deterrent.
They walked past men and women gathered around prostitutes bound onto pieces of equipment, gagged and made helpless.
Servers moved among the clients, selling liquor that would erode all boundaries and control by morning, the waitresses and waiters themselves available for a price.
Jewels glittered in the low lighting. It took money to play here, not as much as in the buildings across the street with their private entrances and suites so the rich and powerful could do exactly as they wished with no audience and no threat of discovery, but enough to make this a favorite of the younger sons of wealthy families, many of them guardsmen.
Ahead a crowd gathered in front of an open-faced dungeon. As Rebekka neared she heard girlish laughter, then several female voices shouting in unison, “Twenty-eight!”
It was followed by the sound of a whip cracking, by delighted giggles, and another count. “Twenty-nine!”
At “Thirty!” the crowd began wandering off, the show complete.
Rebekka’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of the Lioness, Kala, chained to the gray wall. Her back was raw hamburger with tawny fur mixed in, her tail striped with blood and bent at odd angles, cut and broken by the whip. Clear, curved nails extended from human hands, claws unsheathed in reaction to the pain.
A human woman stood admiring her work, hands bloody as they caressed the whip she held. Her friends protested when the bouncer went to Kala, unlocking first one manacle and then the other. He ignored them, and when Kala slipped into unconsciousness as he scooped her up in his arms, they, too, wandered off, reliving their fun in animated conversation.
Hate raged in Rebekka, listening to them. For a shimmering instant she allowed herself to imagine healing Kala, making her purely Were so the Lioness could hunt down these women and slaughter them.
The force of the desire to see it shocked her. A chill swept down her spine, stripping away some of the shield she’d managed to erect against the demon’s mention of her father. A single act of violence was all that was required to turn her gift into a thing causing pain and suffering.
Kala’s low moan allowed Rebekka to block out thoughts of the demon and once again escape into purpose. She followed the bouncer to a camouflaged door and keyed in the code, opening it so he could enter. After placing Kala facedown on a blanket left ready on the floor, he asked, “You want her tethered?”
Rebekka glanced at the restraints set in the floor, then at Kala’s stillunretracted claws. Healing unconscious Weres and animals was always dangerous.
Awake she could touch emotion, instill calmness and trust long enough to repair damage and end pain, though she rarely needed to do so with the prostitutes since they knew her. But without the connection, she risked being attacked with the sudden return of her patient’s consciousness, especially when rage and remembered suffering would be at the forefront of their minds.
Kala moaned again. “Can you stay a few minutes and hold her arms to the floor?” Rebekka asked as she knelt next to the Lioness.
The bouncer answered by crouching down and pinning Kala’s wrists. Though he appeared fully human, he was stronger than one. A big cat of some kind, she guessed, but like the reasons for his being in the red zone, he wouldn’t reveal his animal form unless forced to.
Rebekka placed her hands on Kala’s back and closed her eyes. She called her gift to life by willing flesh and muscle to mend, urging skin to be covered in sleek fur.
When it came to those trapped between forms, she could heal their injuries but couldn’t alter how they wore the mixture of animal and man. She could offer those like Kala a choice between appearing fully human or fully animal, but it came with the risk of being punished by the vice lord. And beyond that, few wanted to live out the rest of their lives in animal form, or take a human’s when they saw little advantage to it.
The Lioness returned to consciousness with a snarl, with a furious struggling that ended when her head whipped around at the sound of Rebekka’s voice saying her name, projecting calm and urging her to relax and allow healing to take place.
Kala subsided, claws retracting but body remaining tensed in pain. “You can let me go now.”
The bouncer looked to Rebekka for conformation.
“We’ll be okay alone,” she said.
He released Kala and stood. “How long?”
Rebekka fought the anger that came with knowing he meant
how long until Kala can be sold again
. She hated that in using her gift, those who worked in the brothels would endure more in a night than they could otherwise. That seeing Kala return to the dungeon, restored to health, perpetuated the belief among humans that Weres could take more abuse and would heal rapidly from it.
The pure Were did heal by shifting between forms. Rebekka’s bouncers were rarely injured severely enough to need her.
It was different for the prostitutes who couldn’t change. Rebekka’s function in the brothel was a guarded secret known to few outside those connected to them.
A hard, cold fist wrapped around Rebekka’s heart, squeezing mercilessly, whispering in a demon’s voice, telling her that using her gift extended pain, allowed for the oily spread of human evil.
No!
she told herself, slamming the door against the insidious doubt caused by Abijah’s words. What happened in Were brothels was no different than what she’d witnessed when she lived with her mother among human prostitutes.
“How long?” the bouncer asked again.
“I don’t know.”
He scowled and gave Kala a hard look. “I’ll be back in an hour if you’re not out on the floor.”
Kala shrugged, though the hiss of pain following it revealed that it cost her. The bouncer turned and left the room.
Rebekka placed her hands on Kala’s back again. Closed her eyes and resumed concentrating on the weave of flesh and muscle, the return of fur.
Time ebbed and flowed, meaningless except her strength drained away with it.
Exhaustion returned like pounding surf as she used the last of her reserves to mend the bone in Kala’s tail and close the gashes left by the whip.
She would have stretched out on the floor if the Lioness hadn’t guided her to the cot kept in the room for use after a grueling healing.
“Thanks,” Rebekka murmured.
“I’m the one who should be thanking you. Do you want a blanket?”
“I’m fine.” She wouldn’t be allowed to sleep long, but if she was lucky, it might be a while before another emergency arose.
Kala knelt next to the cot. Rebekka forced her eyes open. Like Feliss, Kala looked fully human from the front. She was beautiful and sleek.
And very interested in Levi, who worked as bouncer, guard, or bartender, depending on the need.
“Is he working tonight?” Kala asked.
Rebekka didn’t need to ask who. “No.”
Feliss was the only other person beside Rebekka who knew Levi’s brother had been held in the maze, and even she didn’t know Levi had also once hunted there, or that he’d played a part in today’s destruction of it. Like Cyrin, when Levi was a prisoner, he’d had the head of a lion. In human form, he was unrecognizable even to the brothel clients who also visited the gaming clubs and had once watched him on big-screened television sets.
“He’s working another job?” Kala asked.
“No,” Rebekka said, deciding she needed to tell Kala something or the questions would never end. “He’s in the woods but I don’t know where.”
“And Feliss? Is she with him?” It was said in a light tone, but the look in the Lioness’s eyes didn’t match it.
Only years spent among Weres kept Rebekka from reacting to the hidden menace with fear. “She’s in Dorrit’s lineup tonight.”
Kala’s nose wrinkled. Her lips pulled back in a show of distaste and disdain that was shared by all of the prostitutes who no longer had to work in the brothel catering to the lowest class of humans and Weres.
The Lioness leaned forward, the intensity of her gaze warning Rebekka she’d have to be careful not to let her body tell the truth while her words said something else.
“I heard a rumor today,” Kala said, whispering despite it only being the two of them. “I heard Levi intends to buy out Feliss’s contract and set her up somewhere as his little snack.”
Kala made a show of licking her lips.
“I don’t think the rumor is true,” Rebekka said, and thought she must have done a credible job of lying when Kala leaned back and cocked her head, then shrugged and stood.
“I’m glad. She’s prey and always will be. Bad enough he takes what she offers him, but for Levi to elevate her above the other females he mounts and treat her like a mate . . .” Kala’s lips pulled back once again in disgust. “It’s perverse.”
Rebekka closed her eyes as Kala left the room. Sleep descended, claiming her until she was roused by a bouncer from Dorrit’s house.
“You’re needed,” he said, accompanying her through the dungeon and then the passageway connecting the two buildings.
Rebekka heard drunken sobbing and pleading well before she reached the parlor. When she got there, two bouncers held a man between them. He was on his knees, begging for his life.
Dorrit stood in front of him, boar tusks and small black eyes in a round human face giving the impression of cold savagery. She lifted her hand, halting Rebekka and the bouncer in the doorway.