Free night moves - a holden chancery story by sierra dean

Chapter One
     
    October 4, 1983
    Leo Castelli Gallery, SoHo, New York
     
    Whoever invented the mullet deserved to die a slow, painful death.
    Holden stared at a man on the opposite side of the clean, white gallery. The man’s hair was bleached blond and trimmed short on top, but kept long in the back where it was stiff with hairspray. Holden didn’t bother to repress his shudder as he looked away.
    In the back of his mind he was already writing a new headline: How to style your hair if you never want to see a woman naked again .
    Art Cooper, Holden’s editor-in-chief at GQ , would hate it.
    Art wanted stories with depth. He wanted the magazine to mean something and set a standard for a new wave of professional men.
    Holden wanted to make the haircut go away forever.
    He took a polite sip from his glass of champagne. The bubbles felt nice on his tongue, but the taste of alcohol had long ago stopped having any enjoyment for him. Booze, like all varieties of food, had started to taste more like paper when he lost his humanity and became a vampire.
    It wasn’t all bad. The taste of blood had become so much sweeter than any delicacy he could have sampled in his human form.
    And considering how poor he’d been as a mortal, the food available to him had been dismal at best.
    But these days he faked it around the living, because people tended to find it strange if he didn’t eat or drink. He had to make the rounds with the social elite, and while models wouldn’t blink at someone skipping a meal, the folks who made big advertising investments in the magazine wanted to chew the fat with someone who would, well, literally chew the fat.
    Oh, the sacrifices he made.
    He finished off the champagne with a long swallow, a buzzy feeling swimming through him before fading completely. He vaguely remembered what it was like to be drunk. He hadn’t known that sensation in a very, very long time.
    Holden moved through the gallery like a shark in shallow water. He wasn’t necessarily hunting anyone, but if an easy meal were to stumble into his path, he wouldn’t turn it down.
    Every now and again the photos hanging on the walls drew his notice, large black-and-white prints depicting beautiful, naked bodies. Earlier that year Robert Mapplethorpe had caused quite a stir on the art scene with his evocative nudes depicting a female Olympic bodybuilder.
    This series, an exhibit mixing old and new prints, was an attempt to capitalize on the photographer’s burgeoning fame. The pictures were so lurid they could be borderline obscene, and around the room Holden could make out tittering giggles and muffled gasps. Not everyone in the room was a seasoned art snob, and the average looky-loo might be shocked by what they were seeing.
    Grabbing another glass of champagne from a passing tray, Holden continued to prowl around the gallery. He’d done a lap already, earlier in the evening, and there was a particular section of the gallery he was keeping an eye on.
    The figure of a woman stopped in that area caught his attention.
    He walked up next to her and paused, taking a sip of his drink and gazing at the huge print in front of her, wearing a bored expression he’d perfected over the decades.
    He felt the weight of her glance on him, then she looked back to the photo. He smiled faintly, because though she didn’t respond outwardly, he heard her pulse kick up.
    She was excited.
    “How well has this worked for you so far?” Her voice was smoky and deep, like Kathleen Turner’s.
    “About as often as introducing myself the old-fashioned way,” he replied.
    She gave him a once-over, and in spite of her elevated heart rate, she remained totally cool on the surface. Holden liked it when women pretended they weren’t interested. The extra effort it took to woo them made the reward that much sweeter. Literally.
    Just like fast food was an easy but often unpleasant meal choice for humans, blood given too readily didn’t have the same lush flavor.