Daemon’s Mark by Caitlin Kittredge (web ebook reader .TXT) 📕

their weight in gold. I have to beg the high rollers for a drag.” She got up and appraised me. “You look rode hard and put up wet, lady.”

“Shipping container,” I reminded her. “And there was the whole thing of me getting kidnapped, before my little cruise.”

“Yeah, well. Welcome to the club.” She stuck out a hand armed with cheap acrylic tips in a purple that made me think of gangrene. “I’m Lola.”

“Like the Kinks?” I just couldn’t stop myself. My mental filter, what little I’d had in the first place, was completely gone.

She frowned at me, smoke coming out her nose. “What?”

“You know’ Well, I’m not dumb/but I can’t under stand/how she looked like a woman/but talked like a man/oh, my Lola. ”

Her eyes, done in the same shade of shadow as her tips, narrowed. “You trying to say something, Princess Vanilla? Because I’ll tell you—you could win first place in a drag show with the shape you’re in.”

“I’m just exhausted,” I said. “I apologize. I’m Luna Wilder.”

“Don’t tell me your real name,” Lola said. “I don’t want to know, and you don’t want the johns to know, so come up with something fake. Fast.” Lola’s accent was pure New York, all flat vowels and clipped syllables, and she puffed on her cigarette like she was attempting to create her own little smog cloud.

“Johns?” I said. Of course I knew what was waiting for me here, in the Ukraine, but it still seemed unreal. Maybe if I just willed myself hard enough I’d wake up somewhere that wasn’t an annex of hell …

“Customers? Clients? Daddies?” Lola said. “You’re a whore now, sweetie pie, and you better cozy up to the idea before you end up like my last roommate.”

“I’m not a whore,” I said, raising my chin. “I’m a cop. I was kidnapped. And you’re not a whore, either. What were you back in the States?”

Lola shook her head. “Oh, no. None of that matters here. You keep your head down and you live. You fight, and you die. They drag you out of here and take you to sport, like they did Charity.”

“Okay, what’s ‘the sport’?” I said. “Ekaterina talked about it, and one of the girls I was in the container with got left for it. Please, just give me the rundown on what’s going on around here and I swear I won’t make trouble for you.”

Lola sighed, stubbing her cigarette out into a cup of tea that already had several dead soldiers floating in it.

“You’re gonna make trouble one way or the other, lady. I see it in your eyes. Were?”

“Insoli,” I said. “What are you?”

“I’m a seer,” said Lola. “A piss-poor one, too, or I would have figured out that guy in the Village who wanted to buy me a coffee was a rat-bastard Russian gangster kidnapper. You think I’d be smarter, right? I watched the Dateline specials, both of ’em, and that Lifetime Television movie. Jesus.”

I took a seat on the least offensive of the chairs, a zebra stripe, and sighed. Something soft, that didn’t grind my bones and muscles, felt close to heaven.

“Up,” Lola said. “That chair is for customers. They see you in it and it’s an ass-beating. Besides, it’ll be dark soon and business will pick up. We need you dressed and changed by then or Madame Scarface will send both of our asses down to the ring.”

She strode over to the armoire and started jerking things off of hangers. “What are you, a six? Maybe an eight with your legs?”

“Six,” I said. “I’m not wearing any of that.”

“Unless you want to be in a bloody heap on the basement floor, you’re going to put it on and you’re going to shake what your mother gave you,” said Lola.

“Okay,” I said, taking a red stretch vinyl dress out of her hands. “I’ll clean up and put this on if you explain to me what you mean by that statement.”

“Bathroom is in there,” said Lola, pointing through a beaded curtain. The plumbing must have been state of the art when Khrushchev was in power, but now it was rusted and filthy beyond belief. Still, spinning the tap produced a trickle of orange water from the showerhead and I stripped off my filthy clothes, shoving them into the overflowing trash can.

“How long have you been here?” I asked Lola, who leaned against the doorjamb, lighting another cigarette. I didn’t even care that she was looking—the temptation of hot water was too much to take.

“A year,” she said. “Maybe more. No family, you know. No one misses me. My boss probably figures I quit, my so-called friends got one less person to pass the roach to, and no one else gives a flying fuck.”

“And what goes on in the basement?” The water left me feeling only marginally clean, but I dried myself off with an itchy towel and slid into the dress, which was too tight and smelled like stale tobacco.

“The basement? That’s where you go if you’re no good at this,” Lola said, exhaling.

“What, does Mrs. Bates live down there?” I combed back the tangles in my hair and twisted it up in a knot.

“Makeup under the sink,” Lola said helpfully. “The basement is where the ring is, and it’s where they take the girls who fight the johns or make trouble, or are just too used up.” She rolled her cigarette between her fingers.

“Fucking, fighting and gambling under one roof. It’s a regular one-stop vice shop in here.”

The mirror over the sink was cloudy and cracked, like someone had put their fist into it. It was easy to see why they might have. I turned to Lola instead. “What happens to the girls who go into the arena?”

“They fight or they die,” said Lola. “It’s all the same to the customers, and Ekaterina and her brother make more money if the fight is to the death.”

“Brother?” I said, going to the window. The street I could see beyond the front gate was