“ID?” Eleazar echoed.
“Yeah, a license. Can’t go in if you are underage.”
“I assure you I’m certainly not ‘underage,’” Eleazar said, giving the mortal a gentle push to let him pass.
The man stepped aside and hesitated. “Wait,” Vito said, eyes still slightly glazed from the bishop’s compulsion. “You need a stamp to get in.”
Eleazar looked at the device the man held in his hand. Another probe into his mind and he understood. He extended his arm and waited as Vito pressed a red-ink silhouette of a female’s profile into the tan flesh of his wrist.
Eleazar frowned at the mark, anxious to find a washroom to wash it off.
“One more thing,” Vito said as he swung the door open. “No touching the girls unless you pay for it.”
The bishop scowled at such an implication.
Loud music reverberated through all the walls. A robotic voice chanted, followed by a raspy female voice singing about sex, chains, and whips. The intensified emotions throbbing from the mortals in the room could bring a lesser immortal to his knees.
Only males gathered on the floor, each staring desperately at the stage where a female undulated in a scant strip of lace. Crowds milled around a bar. Tables filled the dim room. Men of all ages occupied the seats; some dressed in street clothes and others in formal attire.
Lust. The stench of the emotion was suffocating.
A blue-lit stage, wide in the rear and shaping forward like a T, extended between the tables of men. There was a pole running from the platform to the ceiling. A bare-breasted woman dangled from the pole. Mortified by her lack of modesty, Eleazar looked away.
His stare then caught on another topless woman in sharp, shiny, red boots. Her legs were spread, her rear pressed into a seated man’s face. The woman’s white hair appeared blue in the light reflecting from the stage. She wore some sort of string contraption between her hindquarters. There were dollar bills laced throughout the string and a wad of more sweaty bills in the male’s hand.
There was no logic behind his presence here. He needed to leave. He maneuvered his way through the crowds, using compulsion to deter the woman serving drinks from approaching him and slowing his exit.
The song playing thankfully ended but was then replaced by the bleat of a horn pumping over a woman’s erotic moans and sighs. A voice chimed in over the music. “Next up, the lovely Larissa, dancing to Janet Jackson’s ‘Throb.’”
Eleazar stilled.
He moved in slow motion toward the stage. All was dark.
The pole was mysteriously gone, and a wooden chair sat in its place.
Breathy moans chanted to an erotic beat, increasing in tempo as a tall female wearing a man’s white dress shirt and necktie strutted into the glow of the central spotlight. It couldn’t be.
Her smooth, bare legs caught the light at every shapely slope of toned muscle. High shoes caused her calves to flex as if amid a climax. Those shoes had been created to tempt a male. Those shoes were the embodiment of sin.
He still wasn’t convinced it was her. Perhaps an English woman with the same name.
A wide-brimmed, masculine hat shadowed her face. He could not quite make out the color of the female’s hair, as it was tucked within the fedora.
When she reached the chair, she stood behind it, facing the audience, and grasped the high back with her hand, spinning the wooden seat around to face her. She made to straddle the seat but instead hovered over the wood, legs spread, her pelvis undulating slowly. Eleazar locked his jaw and swallowed.
The music was not music at all, but rather a collection of fast beats accompanied by sighs a woman would make in the throes of passion. The eroticism of the song was so blatant it almost had him blushing. More than five centuries old and blushing!
When she finally did lower her bottom onto the seat, Eleazar also found himself sitting but had no recollection of locating a chair. His mouth had gone dry at the sight of her dainty hands gripping the wood.
Never in his long life had he reacted to a female in this way. He noticed the loosely cuffed sleeves of the shirt draping over her petite wrists. He wanted to find the man whose shirt she wore and rip his throat out.
She stood again, twisting the chair as she did so. She glided around the piece of furniture as if she walked on air, straddling the chair again, now with her back to the audience.
Eleazar quickly scanned the crowd, a growl slowly building in his chest as the other men in the audience admired her.
Arching back, her head tipped and the hat fell. Long, black hair cascaded to the stage floor like a waterfall. He recognized her hair, knew it better than he had any right to. It smelled of mixed berries and was softer than silk. It was thick enough to fill his fist. He saw his fingers running through the raven-colored strands and knew the soft weight of it upon his palms. A punch of fury hit him as she shared her luxurious hair with such depraved mortal men.