Paul pulled on the pants, got them sort of closed. “This guy must be thin as a rail,” he said. He managed to get into the shoes, too, which were of leather so soft it made his skin crawl. Could these people have somehow gotten something from a vampire? From what he’d seen in Paris, the vampires were much more capable of mixing with humans than he’d believed. His sense of it was that the Asians were more ancient than the Europeans and far less able to be seen on the streets. Maybe the Americans were younger and more humanlike still. Hell, maybe they would even fit into a hip crowd like this.

He looked more carefully at the shoe. Gucci sure as hell didn’t make them out of human skin, so that theory was out.

The clothes actually fit pretty well, although they seemed decades out of date. The jacket had a wide collar, and the trousers were subtly flared. They belonged to a man with big shoulders like Paul’s, a tall man and a strong man. But a slimmer one.

He regarded himself in the mirror. “Jesus,” he said, “I look like a million bucks.”

Leo decided that she utterly loathed him. “You look just fabulous,” she lied.

“Whose clothes are these, anyway?”

“A friend of ours. Listen, I’ve got an idea. The next set doesn’t come up until after dinner. Want to see the rest of the club?”

A guided tour from this babe? “You better believe it.”

She walked through another wall. Expecting to be blasted by music again, he followed her. But he was not blasted. In fact, he wasn’t in a room at all. He was in a Japanese garden, outside—at least it seemed like outside. The sky was velvet swarming with stars, a sickle moon just turning yellow as it slid toward the horizon. Bamboo chimes made restful sounds; water hurried over stones. Crickets chirped; a bat whispered past his face. Here and there in the dark, he could see pale bodies. There were at least a dozen people here, all covered by black cloaks, lounging on benches or on the grass. A guy with glasses and an old-fashioned doctor’s kit went among them like a waiter, discussing in quiet tones, then ministering to them out of his case.

Paul smelled opium . . . real good opium. He was already contact high and passive-smoke high, and maybe high on something he’d ingested in the food or those damn drinks he’d been given a million years ago. But he really loved opium, and it was one hard drug to come by these days. It took him back to quiet times in the Cambodian jungle, those magical times when they were more-or-less safe, and they could sweetly indulge.