Elvendude Page 12

  "The ladies' locker room is through there," he said. "While you get changed—"

  "I was rather hoping you would show me the club first," she interrupted, glancing past his large frame, toward the equipment room. "So far I haven't really seen anything, um, unique about this place."

  Peter held back the laughter that threatened to burst past his lips. As he put his arm around her shoulder and gently led her to the locker room, he said, "Ah, but you will see, soon enough, what our club has to offer. It would be much better to try the equipment firsthand. Explanations do no justice to what we have. Twenty minutes of your time, that's all we ask."

  "Twenty minutes?" she said hopefully. "Is that all?"

  "Trust me," he said. And she disappeared into the locker room.

  Moments later, she emerged wearing a pink Spandex leotard, the price tag still dangling from the sleeve, looking for all the world like a giant wad of bubble gum.

  "Okay," she said. "Where do we begin?"

  "This way," he said cheerfully. "First, we must weigh in."

  She made a face. "Do we have to?"

  Peter flashed his famous placating grin. "How else are we to know how much progress we've made?"

  She stopped, looked up at him with an arched eyebrow, her suspicion renewed. "In one day?"

  Peter replied, "I told you we were different. What do you have to lose?"

  The scale creaked and groaned before the needle finally settled. She weighed in at 285 lbs. And a half.

  "My God!" she wailed. "I gained a pound and a half!"

  Peter chuckled despite himself.

  She glared at him. "What's so funny?" Bridget shrieked.

  "You will lose that pound and a half, and more, before you leave today," he assured her.

  "In twenty minutes?"

  He smiled. "Trust me."

  For twenty minutes precisely, she walked on treadmills, marched on StairMasters, pedaled on Aerobicycles, and sat in on the last five minutes of a group aerobic workout. Literally. After everyone else had left, Peter found her sitting forlornly on the carpeted floor, sobbing.

  "I'm never going to lose weight!" she wailed. "Besides, it hurts!"

  "Of course it does," Peter said, standing over her with his arms crossed. "You know the expression: no pain, no gain. In most clubs, it's just pain with no gain. Here, you get both." He held a hand out. "Come. Let's weigh in. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised."

  With great effort, and with both hands, Peter helped her up. "This is pointless," she muttered. "I think I'm going to have the lipo done after all."

  "Perish the thought!" Peter said, shaking his head. "You don't even know how much you've lost today!"

  "I haven't lost a damn thing," she said. "I can tell. I never do. This whole health club nonsense is just that . . . nonsense."

  She grumbled and moaned and bitched and raved like that, all the way to the scale. Then she stepped on it.

  Bridget stared at it. "No. This can't be right."

  "Oh, it's correct, my dear. In just under twenty minutes, you've already lost eighteen pounds."

  The scale read 267. And a half.

  "It can't be," she said, but her smile threatened to squeeze her eyes shut. "Eighteen pounds? Eighteen . . . pounds? Eighteen eighteen eighteen eighteen POUNDS! I don't believe it!"

  She leaped off the scale and gave Peter an enormous bear hug. Afterward, he had some trouble breathing.

  "Eighteen pounds! In twenty minutes!" She moved around with more energy now than she had during her entire visit.

  Peter beamed. "See. I told you it was different here. And what's more, and I haven't shared the good news yet: you can eat absolutely anything you want to! Lasagna. Cream pies. Twinkies. Ho-Hos. Cookies. Corn dogs. Scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage. Pizza. Pepperoni, hamburger, anchovy, cheese lovers, meat lovers, Canadian bacon. Oh, my dear Bridget, you can eat all the pizza you want to. And then some!"

  She sighed. "This is heaven. Where do I sign?"

  "Right this way," he said, leading her to his office. "This will take no time at all."

  Peter Pritchard watched Bridget's retreating back as she left the club, noting with some frustration the bounce in her step, the jaunty walk. She even said hello to a total stranger coming in. Unfortunately, the human actually felt good about herself, an unpleasant but unavoidable by-product of their operation.

  She won't be feeling too good about herself tomorrow, when she comes in to do it all over again, Peter thought. And next time, it won't be nearly as easy. I'll see to that. And she'll only lose two pounds. Then we'll see how much she likes herself then!

  With elven magic, one could remove as much fat as necessary. Or as little, depending on the circumstances. Peter mastered the technique, a method of un-kenning that he stumbled across by accident, a year before. This was the secret of the New You Fitness Center. The workouts served other purposes.

  Time to see how the synthetic nodes are doing. . . .

  Peter left the main exercise floor through a locked door, behind which was a flight of stairs. Locking the door behind him, he descended into darkness.

  The stairway led to a dank hallway, illuminated by red light bulbs and an occasional flickering fluorescent. Peter and his kind preferred artificial darkness, with just enough light to do their work. Since no humans were permitted down here, they weren't too concerned about being discovered; the building inspector had come and gone for that year, and the health inspector never made surprise visits, at least during the year they'd been in operation. No one asked to see the basement. The building itself was a defunct two-story office complex, a victim of the eighties recession, located in a vast warehouse district in western Dallas. Its extensive basement once housed a vast data library and mainframe computer. All that remained was the raised floor, cables and other IBM bric-a-brac.

  Rathand sat at a crude control panel composed of illuminated crystals, hand-carved oak knobs, and a set of crude capacitors made from thick glass jars. He wore a severe black business suit with the tie loosened and hanging limply around his neck. The elf made minute adjustments with one of the knobs, watching the light travel up one of the long fingerlike crystals. Peter saw from the primitive dial that Bridget's negative energy during the grueling workout had been strong.

  They used the rig to collect negative energy from the fitness center, as well as other places in the city. The contraption was a purely Seleighe invention, put together and understood only by Rathand, which Zeldan reluctantly admitted the need for some months back. Mutant technology such as this, which implemented elven magics along with other physical rules of the universe, human and elven, was not something Zeldan felt comfortable with.

  The pain and unhappiness Bridget just supplied us with should fuel us quite handily for the next few months, Peter thought with glee.

  One of the unfortunate by-products of the invention was that it made reading Rathand's mind very difficult. But since Rathand was a slave of the Unseleighe, and had shown no signs of breaking his conditioning, Zeldan felt confident enough to put his tools to use. And to keep Rathand on the "payroll."

  As a double guarantee, Zeldan had implanted a red crystal in Rathand's head. The crystal was connected directly to the elf's pain centers, and would, if Zeldan were ever killed, result in Rathand's death as well. This made it very much in Rathand's best interest to protect Zeldan and to do his bidding. The pain from the crystal was quite severe.

  "Most excellent," Peter said, savoring the moment. He opened his eyes without realizing he'd closed them.

  Rathand whirled around. "Zeldan. I didn't hear you come in." Grinning broadly, he tapped the dial on the console. "Who was that, anyway? We haven't had this much negative power to tap since that accountant went on that shooting spree in the mall in Plano!"

  Peter, or Zeldan, now that he was down here in the lab, nodded in agreement. "A most disturbed, and angry, human being. We need more like her. Perhaps a special advertisement in the paper, fifty percent off for people weighin
g over two hundred pounds."

  Business at the New You had been good but needed improvement. A building of this size had a great deal of overhead, and lately Zeldan had barely been breaking even. They needed more money, and more negative power. The more mistreated the human, the more negative power they had to offer the artificial power nodes. Granted, these nodes were no replacement for those he left behind in Underhill. Once tapped, they tended to deplete quickly and had a limited time before they began to weaken without recharging. But they were better than nothing.

  "This society of humans must truly be demented if they treat these people with such cruelty." Then, with a wicked smile, Zeldan added, "I'm starting to actually like it here."

  Finally, after spending a human year searching for that thrice-damned King Aedham! Zeldan thought. I've found something worth staying around for. Human pain.

  His inability to find Aedham Tuiereann, and his periodic fits of rage over this failure, was something he'd much rather forget. The only clues to the potential whereabouts of the Avalon elves was the discovery of nodes beneath the West End Marketplace.

  Those nodes might have served Zeldan's purposes, had they not been so polluted with human energies already. The humans had been at the site for a few hundred years, and during the last century the factory had left a residue of human thoughts that, given Zeldan's hatred for the race, was too distracting.

  The power they preferred generally resulted from pain and, in extreme circumstances, torture. Zeldan kept tabs on the West End nodes, but had found no sign of the Seleighe. Spell signatures unique to the Avalon clan had failed to turn up. They were either not here or in clever hiding. Zeldan thought the latter more likely. Failure was an embarrassment, and when it became clear that Adam would not be an easy elf to find, he turned his attentions to other pursuits.

  He might have returned to Underhill to rejoin his tribe of Unseleighe, but he had yet to find the last Tuiereann. Gating back and forth required more energy than he had and would prove a considerable drain on the nodes he'd seized at Avalon if he ever wanted to return here. His clan thought him mad to stay in the humans' realm for so long, but then they were not bound by their family's vow of revenge. He had unfinished work here; the fall of Avalon was not yet complete.

  A Tuiereann still lives somewhere in this human city. If I have to stay here for a century to find him, then so be it!

  For a time, he and his four Unseleighe warriors lived in hiding, masquerading as homeless street people, feeding on the humans' pain. He discovered crack cocaine and heroin, and the powerful grip they had on humans. They learned to feed on this particular kind of human pain, renewing their dark souls with the suffering of humanity, but it was a hit and miss arrangement, and often they simply had to do without. In short order, living on the street became tiresome and made his search for Aedham more difficult. Zeldan was a King himself, and he grew weary of living like a pauper, even if it meant the occasional banquet of an addict dying of withdrawal. Then he had an idea.

  For a time he made drug connections with dealers on the street, kenning huge amounts of human currency, gold, and silver, and within months he was buying from one of the biggest cocaine brokers in South America, Rodriguez Cruz.

  Cruz had been in the business for a long time and seldom had let someone like Zeldan into the fold until they had proven themselves, usually over a period of years. But Zeldan was elven, not human, and worked his magics to penetrate his layer of safety, convincing his lieutenants that Zeldan was legit and for real, and not a cop. They liked being paid in gold, which was fortunate, as this was one of the easier substances for Zeldan to ken. Gold was a basic chemical substance, and much simpler to forge than a detailed hundred-dollar bill with serial numbers. In less than ninety days, Zeldan was a trusted partner in their distribution network.

  Cruz owned ten or more cocaine factories in Colombia, which produced pure cocaine hydrochloride. With four refurbished DC-6's, and four U.S. pilots down on their luck and looking for easy money, Cruz ran a three-pronged pipeline from Colombia to West Palm Beach, to Miami, and to a tiny town called Tempest, Texas. Every few months Cruz flew in two hundred kilos of Colombian cocaine to a clandestine landing strip near Tempest, approximately fifty miles from the United States-Mexican border. Cruz had grown weary of the ground crews he hired out of Tempest, who usually smoked pot and drank cases of beer while waiting for the DC-6 to land, and often were next to useless by the time the plane landed. They needed to move fast and efficiently, and in their condition, neither was possible.

  Zeldan had an idea. He offered Cruz his crew of Unseleighe workers. Cruz agreed, having everything to gain. Zeldan's minions moved quickly and had the plane unloaded in ten minutes. The DC-6 was back in the air before the engines had time to cool off.

  Zeldan's quality work crew enhanced his position with Cruz, and the drug lord started cutting him some lucrative deals in return for transport of the merchandise within the United States, the riskiest part of the trip.

  Soon, Zeldan's elven minions were selling coke in quantity. Their business expanded, and with their elven magic, they stayed out of police trouble most of the time. He might have kenned all the money he wanted and lived like the true king he was, but it would have cheated him of the human pain that went along with drugs, the pain his tribe thrived on.

  Zeldan gained confidence in his abilities to control, and began including humans in the drug sales. Certain humans were all too happy to do the chore—and take the fall that went along with it. Not only would humans do the dealing, they would even stay off the stuff for the sake of the money they earned. This amazed Zeldan; he knew that most humans were utterly weak, but there were a few exceptions. And these exceptions were making him rich.

  Still, collecting the negative energy they lusted after was a problem. Cocaine dealing, while useful in destroying human lives, supplied only a marginal amount of the force they required. They needed a central location where people would go, and return to, time and again. He also needed a means of storing, beyond the Unseleighe's own dark souls, these powers.

  To find the tools he needed, he made a brief trip back to Underhill. The Unseleighe had long been allies with several tribes of dark demons, evil entities that were more spirit than flesh.

  Morrigan, a solitary Unseleighe witch and governess of demons, offered a plan: certain quartz crystals, available in Underhill mines their clan controlled, possessed the properties Zeldan sought. These he could use as reservoirs of dark energy. Morrigan even offered a bonus: a captured Seleighe Duke they had succeeded in turning to the dark side of their work. Morrigan suggested that Rathand, a former Duke of Outremer, might be able to improve on the crystal storage system.

  Once Zeldan explained his drug operation, she had asked him, "How would you like an elixir to add to this drug and create an Underhill version of it? One which will inflict untold anguish, make the humans surrender their souls to you, and still be nothing like the drugs the humans have ever seen?"

  Such a substance would have advantages from a practical standpoint as well. An alien substance would baffle the humans' law enforcement. "New" drugs, altered versions of existing vices, entered the drug market all the time under street names, such as Dragon, Lucky Seven, Clown and Mister D. And if the drug were appropriately addictive, it would not only crack the drug market, it might create one of its own.

  Zeldan named the new drug "Black Dream." Morrigan offered Black Dream elixir, access to the mines, and a limited supply of crystals. For a price.

  Morrigan's tribe had run into the same vacuum in Underhill as Zeldan's forces had: no new challenges. Also, her people thrived on negative psychic energy more than the Unseleighe, and felt the deficiency much more than the elves. So in trade, she wanted a cut in whatever power he harvested from the pathetic humans. A pipeline, so to speak, from the human well. With enough Black Dream to guarantee an ample supply of agony.

  They had sealed the agreement over a decapitated Avalon elf, a symbol of their mutua
l hatred for the Seleighe.

  That had been only a year ago, human time, and while the Black Dream project provided an enjoyable diversion, the Avalon elves remained at large.

  Rathand said, "I believe Morrigan is going to call us through the Terminal."

  "She is?" Zeldan said, mildly annoyed. In the room's center was a rather large crystal, surrounded by a geometric pattern of smaller ones. They referred to this as the Terminal, which served as a direct line of communication to Underhill. It worked on similar principals as the Gate, but used far less energy and was nowhere near as disruptive to the senses. Morrigan had been calling more often lately, leading Zeldan to wonder if she was checking up on him. While he liked the benefits of their business deal, Zeldan suspected that she wanted far more power than she originally asked for.

  The Terminal flickered to life, much like a television screen, but the image extended over four different facets of the huge crystal, giving her face a fragmented look. Morrigan had the power to choose whatever appearance she liked, and why she chose this particular look confounded Zeldan from the very start. Her face was round with fat and a double chin, and she had a nose that might be mistaken for a beak. Bright red hair circled her face with a crimson halo, with wild, flaming eyes to match. And this, Zeldan guessed, was a good day, since he heard no victims screaming in the background.

  "Zeldan," she said brusquely, with a voice like a chainsaw. "The next shipment of elixir is ready for transport. I trust all is well with your end of the operation?"

  "Oh, indeed it is," Zeldan said, stepping closer to the Terminal. While on his end of the link he had the psychological advantage of looking down, he knew it would have no effect on her, since she was looking down on her end. He found her assumption of command of him unnerving, and had to constantly reassure himself of his superiority.

  She's not down here in the trenches like I am, shoveling this shit heap called the human race. She'd better be damned glad I've got the courage to take these chances for the both of us!