Or your mistress? asked the silent Master.
Sorin dismissed the other lawyer, Mr. Harris, whose skin had gone very pale. Perhaps he realized his possible future, as well, if he was not careful.
“You would exchange blood with one of the Groupies to become a permanent part of us?” Sorin asked, knowing that, in spite of his marital infidelities, Mr. Crockett fancied himself a “family man” and this was the reason he had never become more than a human Servant. “You would give your soul?”
In the Master’s cloud, Sorin detected the hint of fangs, of a terrible virtue not even he could look upon directly.
Mr. Crockett hesitated, still too attached to his humanity, and that was all the answer Sorin and the Master required.
Like the gaping jaw of a god, the cloud descended around the Servant’s head. His eyes bulged as he suffered a glimpse of pure terror. Knowing that paradise was about to be washed from his memory, Mr. Crockett’s lips opened in a scream that never came to be.
One fraction of a second later, it was over.
The lawyer crumbled to the ground. Efficaciously, Sorin enlisted Groupies to prepare the mind-wiped man for return Above. There, Mr. Harris would be his keeper, making certain Milton Crockett adjusted to life as it used to be.
Although the mind wipe had taken his memories of the Underground, it had at least left him his soul. And Sorin knew Mr. Crockett had come out the loser.
Task completed, the vampire rested near the waterfall once again, in no mood to summon Vashti, even if she was casting seductive glances at him from a satin bed where three other Groupies painted blood pictures over each other with fine-haired brushes. Nearby, two Elites, whose money ensured the success of the Underground, languished. They wore no clothing, save for the jewels pasted on the female’s skin. They were smoking from a hookah pipe, the concoction laced with blood to add flavor.
Jesse Shane, Sorin thought, running his gaze over the blond film legend’s sleek muscles. The actor would be released in fifteen years. The other cocoa-skinned vampire, Tamsin Greene, was their newest Elite, born almost a month ago, transformed from a superstar singer/actress to a myth. Robby Pennybaker, the child actor who had caused such a disturbance, had been an Elite, as well.
Excepting Robby, the Elites found the Underground to be the answer to eternal fame. They had literally sold their souls for the Master’s edification, sacrificing them so they could receive Dr. Eternity’s treatment.
First, at the height of their careers, they staged their own sensational murders—ones that would guarantee infamy. Yet they were not truly succumbing to death. Far from it. Dr. Eternity exchanged blood with them, then continued to infuse them with his fluids each month since the Elite were not true children like Sorin, who had been gifted with merely one bite. Continual maintenance kept the emotionally unstable Elite under the Master’s control, making them inferior in Sorin’s mind.
After the initial stage of treatment, the Elite stayed Underground for years and years, knowing that Above, fans mourned their memory, wishing for them to return while worshipping their pop-culture images, keeping their legends alive. Just when public hunger reached a climax, the Elite underwent Dr. Eternity’s final magic, a surgery that shaped him into “another” celebrity, a new creation with a different stage name, a budding star who would claim an eerie resemblance to his true self. The Elite was then released back Above to use his enhanced, naturally magnetic life force in a fresh career. In the end, he would build on his old talents while enjoying the new.
Hollywood was full of Elites, “the new so-and-so,” “the next him-or-her.” In fact, one of their earliest clients had recently been released Above a second time in anticipation of another chance at fortune and glory. She had returned Underground when the public began to notice her chronic youthfulness, and that was the cue for Sorin to arrange another death. Her second passing had been of a milder form since the first had already set the proverbial stage for her legend to be established, and she was now continuing a prosperous career.
The Underground was where a star’s drug addictions became blood addictions. It was where they gave up their human entourages for the haremlike conditions of massages and Turkish baths, pampering, bodies frozen in perfection. The Underground even used Servant psychiatrists to fulfill the Elite’s never-ending emotional crises.
It was heaven for so many of them.
Sorin breathed the incensed air, the languid pace of lovemaking behind the veiled curtains of silken beds, the laughter of Elites and Groupies drinking blood from golden cups, feasting on kisses and bites.
His Underground. A pleasure to die for.