Continuity Note: This story takes place between the first and second episodes of the fourth season.
The Song used in this chapter is When You're Evil by Voltaire.
Chapter 3
Sydney immediately began searching for Juliana. Marshall had been right, in the dim light, with all the makeup, and hair styles and costumes, it was hard to make out who was who. She saw a few people who looked like they could be her, but she wasn't sure.
Thank god for Marshall's tech.
"Vaughn, time to go Matrix." She said. He was the one with the shades. She'd given them to him because it made his gown seem more like the coat that Keanu Reeves had worn in the second two matrix movies.
She subtly pointed out the possible suspects and he used the camera to take pictures, sending them to Marshall.
In the van parked outside, Marshall watched as the computer spat out negative match after negative match. "Damn," he thought. "Goth girls are hot!"
Finally, he found the girl they were looking for.
"Got it!" he shouted into the comm., making sure Sydney could hear him. "She's the one across the room, on those risers by the dance floor!"
The computer beeped, showing him something that made his eyes widen. "Oh boy."
"She's over on the risers." Sydney said. "Vaughn, go offer to buy her a drink. We can slip the tracer on her then."
Marshall's voice shouted dimly in her ear. "Hang on." She headed into the restroom, and ducked into a stall, pulling out her cell phone. If anyone heard her talking, they'd just think she was on the phone.
Vaughn started over towards the risers quelling an awkward feeling. He'd just killed his wife a little less than a year ago, and now here he was about to flirt with someone? Then came the guilt. Suppose Juliana decided she really liked him? Was he just doing exactly what Lauren had done?
He angrily shoved his misgivings aside. For one thing, he was just buying a girl a drink. For another, she was a minor, there was not really going to be any flirting going on.
Where'd she go? Crap. While he'd been angsting she'd left the risers. There was a crowd forming around the stage, and he turned his gaze towards the commotion. A man wearing a skull sweater had started playing guitar.
"When the devil is too busy, and death's a bit too much," the man sang.
Great, Goth music.
"They call on me, by name you see, for my special touch."
Where had Juliana gone? He reached up for the shades to try filtering out the distractions.
"To the Gentlemen I'm misfortune. To the ladies I'm surprise."
Oh. Okay. That wasn't weird at all.
"What's wrong Marshall?" Sydney asked, as she entered the bathroom.
"Syd! The girl talking to-"
"You don't have to shout I'm away from the noise."
"Oh, sorry. Anyway the computer recognized the girl talking to Juliana. Her name's Lane Geerson, she was with the group in Sunnydale."
Sydney paled, and thanked him quickly, exiting the stall.
Vaughn met her on her way out. "Syd you're not going to believe this," he said, his mouth close to her ear so she could hear him. "I went through the other frequencies on Marshall's shades. There's at least five people in this room alone who aren't giving off any body heat."
"And it's so easy when you're evil,"
Nadia stayed by her post at the bar. Almost everyone in this room seemed to stop by here sooner or later, and if Juliana did, she'd be ready. Vaughn had lost her, and now he was talking heatedly with Sydney.
She let her gaze float over the crowd, most seemed to have gravitated towards the stage. If Juliana was in there it would be hard to discreetly find her. Several others caught her attention, however briefly. There was a fading-bleached blonde haired man in a black leather duster sitting at the bar with a shorter girl wearing sunglasses and fake pointed ears. There was a fairly normal looking boy sitting with an only slightly less normal looking girl. They were both scanning the crowd as carefully as she. She made a mental note about that. Also the couple necking in the shadows, except that to her, it didn't quite look like the woman was volunteering.
"This is the life you see, the devil tips his hat to me,"
God Juliana loved this song. It had cracked her up the first time she'd heard it, even more when her parents had been horrified by it. They hadn't realized it was sarcastic. They'd even tried to forbid her to listen to it. Yeah right. That worked about as well as their attempts to keep her from smoking pot had.
"March with me!" Voltaire said, and raising her fist in the air, she started to march in place with her gothic brethren.
"I pledge, my allegiance, to all things dark and I, promise on my damned soul, to do as I am told! For Beelzebub has never seen, a soldier quite like me…"
She was starting to feel kind of weird. Juliana couldn't quite figure out why, or exactly how to describe the feeling, but for some reason she was reminded of the dreams she'd started having two years ago.
She started to go back through the crowd away from the stage. What the hell was wrong with her? Her stomach was twisting in knots and she hadn't even had anything to drink yet!
"Can I get you a drink?"
Okay that was just a little weird. The guy who'd approached her looked like he'd never worn a gown before. And shades in this place? Poser. But he was cute, in a past 30 kind of way.
"I don't drink."
"I'm the fear that keeps you awake, I'm the shadows on the wall, I'm the monsters they become, I'm the nightmare in your skull,"
William had been doing a fine job of ignoring the many vampires in the club. It grated, he wanted to beat the unliving crap out of them and stake them. But Dorian had convinced him that in this case, discretion was the better part of valor. There were a few of her own kind of Vampire in the club that night, and they did not like attention being drawn to the undead.
Dorian grasped his hand tightly. "How're you holding up?"
"I'm all right." He sighed. Lorne had long since fled the scene, he said he had no desire to read Voltaire that night. "Just doesn't feel right. There's a bloke feeding over in the corner, and I can't do anything about it because I might give the wrong vampires away."
"Speaking of which," she muttered, as a young man in one of the more unusual outfits in the place approached them. He couldn't have been more than 5'5'', but the soles of his boots added at least two feet to his height. He was also wearing a pleather one piece jumpsuit, whose sleeves formed strait jacket straps.
"Gotta be Malkavian." She said. "Wait here."
The other half of the club was more Industrial than Goth. Here the rivet-heads and punks ruled. In particular, a girl with hot pink hair, lounging in one of the seats on the balcony above the dance floor.
"Du, du hast, du hast meche," blared from the speakers as Dorian approached the seneschal of DC. Her escort could never have negotiated the stairs, so he didn't bother.
"Unknown Gangrel isn't enough to get the prince's personal attention eh?" she asked, sinking into the chair across from him.
The seneschal took a drag from the joint he was smoking and looked at her. "Nope." He said. "hell, I don't really give two shits about it either. Just wanted to make sure you knew this was a Camarilla city. You follow the traditions you'll have no problems, long as you're just here tonight. Wanna stay any longer and THEN maybe you get to talk to Nevermore."
"It gets so lonely, being evil."
Enough was enough. William had been called many things in his time. But a coward, was never one of them.
"What I'd do to see a smile, even for a little while."
He grabbed the feeding vampire by the throat and pulled him into the deepest shadows.
"And no one loves you when you're evil."
With the element of surprise, he had little trouble putting the wooden stake to it's proper use. He glanced around, making sure that no one had seen what had happened. Fortunately everyone, even the other Vampires were too busy paying attention to the performer.
Except for the shocked blond punk/goth half native American Slayer.
"Holy shit," Lane gasped. "SPIKE?!"
"Bloody Hell."
"I'm lyin' through my teeth, your tears are all the company I need."
To be continued…