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He pushed past knots of revelling kids, surreptitiously brushing arms, thighs, buttocks, building up an image of the congregation in his minds eye. Or less like an image, not so static, more like… music.
He put his hand on the back of a young man who stood with his friends in a loose circle.
“Excuse me.” He mouthed beneath the volume of the thumping sound system, smiling his apology, pretending the gross invasion of privacy was an unavoidable consequence of the crush of the crowded clubbers.
Beneath the cotton of the man’s shirt, damp with sweat and heavily scented with too much cologne, Vincent felt the bones of the man’s back as they moved subtly within his frame. He felt the muscle writhe. He felt the meat.
Eventually Vincent completed his mental map and took up a position in the corner. The initial preparation was over and it was time to move up a gear.
He had his back to a speaker cabinet, the sound levels of which had usefully cleared the immediate area of wallflowers.
Vincent could hunt with his ears as well as the rest of his senses, but it would have been inordinately difficult in the insane noise level of the club.
Instead he let the powerful throb of the music move through him, accepting and absorbing it until it was as much a part of himself as a heartbeat.
Smell, this time, his nose would be his primary. Vincent tipped his head back and took a big lungful of the nightclub air.
The top layer was all cigarette smoke, heavy and cloying and laced with another narcotic. Someone was smoking a joint in an out of the way corner. He drilled down through the smoke-smell, concentrating to break through the all pervasive pollutant.
Below the smoke there were perfumes, the scents of flowers and spices. They weren’t the natural clean scents though, the hundreds of varieties of aftershaves and eau de toilettes all bore the same distinctive soap-and-spirit signature. Propellants and alcohols and base chemicals all tainted the distilled fragrances that had been wrenched from flowers and other natural donors to become plastic shadows of themselves. They were poor artificial imitations of clean signatures and repellent.
Vincent wanted deeper. These surface layers were useless to him, crude and common as they were, gross and unspecific.
Down, down, he went, sifting through the scents to the truthful ones, seeking the honest ones that would show him the way.
The tightly packed kids writhing to soulless, manufactured music were hot and sweating freely. This was more like the picture Vincent was looking for. Heavy and rich, the assorted personal smells of the dancers mapped out the dance floor and bar in broad strokes. Vincent began to pick out individual signatures. He caught the scent of a red-headed girl who he had brushed against in his initial survey, she was up against the bar trying to catch the tender’s attention. He identified the individual members of a stag party and over there a dour man, intoxicated, looking for a fight as he stared into the crowd. The scent of impending violence from this last was sharp and distinct and Vincent enjoyed its pungency as one of his favourites. It was usually both a warning and a welcoming and the most frequent precursor to spilt blood.
Against this outline Vincent focussed on the deepest scent-layer, drilling down to the details.