The King of Clubs 1 by Savannah Skye

Author:Savannah Skye [Skye, Savannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Humans were only allowed into the Castle of Clubs as special guests who entered through the main gate, or as the sort of very special guests who entered through Traitor’s Gate and never came out again. But I had an advantage. The name of Julius opened pretty much any gate or door in the place, it satisfied every guard I said it to and terrified any who stopped me to ask what I was doing there.

Connery walked beside me as I strode through the corridors, following the general flow of traffic.

“Mind if I say something?”

I shrugged. “You don’t usually bother to ask.”

“You are amazingly confident.”

I felt a little tingle of happiness at the flattery and suppressed it on the instant. “Shouldn’t I be?”

“You are a human walking through vampire central, and you don’t seem remotely afraid.”

“Would it help?”

“No.”

“Well then.” The point of fear is to make you cautious. Vampires respect boldness, so being afraid would be actively dangerous. I don’t scare easily.

Along the top of the great hall on which the castle and the life of the people within centered, was a gallery from which members of the public were allowed to watch the rituals of royal life.

“I don’t think they do this as much in New York,” commented Connery, as we peered down into the chamber below. “But the Court of Clubs has always been big on ceremony. Not sure if it’s a British thing or just something come up with by some previous King to keep everyone busy and stop them from trying to kill him every five minutes.”

The people below us were the most richly dressed vamps I had ever seen. I mostly dealt with the lower end of the vampire scale, and nine times out of ten the people I was chasing down were dressed in leather or silk, depending on what vampire cliché they had decided to obey. But these people were something else. The members of the Court of Clubs looked like they had seen a documentary about bird of paradise and thought; ‘I can top that’. It was not just the gaudy array of flamboyant costumes in a rainbow of shades, it was that there seemed to be no such thing as ‘fashion’. No one was wearing the same style. Some women were decked out in enormous crinolines that they struggled to get through the doors, looking like tethered balloons made out of frills and lace. Others wore sleek, body hugging dresses, a long slash cut up the thigh, held in place only by careful arrangement of their cleavage. The men veered from crushed velvet pantaloons to skintight leather pants and from silken shirts, that were more ruffle than shirt, to rubber vests. One man had just put on a pair of knee-high boots and posing pouch, then coated himself from head to foot in gold body paint.

“What do you think?” asked Connery, observing my stunned gaze.

“I wish they dressed like this in the House of Commons.”

But for all this flamboyance, it was amazing how restrained the atmosphere was.

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