5. Dana
dana
. . .
“See you tomorrow?” Nick called, pulling his dorky, loosely knit beanie missing several stitches down to cover his ears.
I nodded, clapping him on the shoulder. The urge to poke fun at him about the ugly hat again was undeniable… But somehow, I resisted. I wasn’t really interested in another lecture about how his girlfriend made it and that I was just jealous that I didn’t have a hot little human willing to make me presents .
Nevermind that he didn’t need the damn thing anyway; it wasn’t like he could catch a cold. None of us could.
Human diseases didn’t affect vampires, and thank fuck for that. I’d been really dicey in the early nineties with protection and doing a lot of hooking up. Those were the days.
Really, the worst thing that could happen to a vampire was being bloodbound. But we had no idea what caused that, just that it was incredibly painful and—as far as we knew— incurable .
“Yeah, thanks for the good work tonight, man.” I said to Nick, holding the door open for him by the safety bar.
“No worries, Dana,” he said, adjusting the strap of his backpack as he made to go, pausing to look back at me. “By the way, did you manage to catch up with that girl from earlier? Y’know, tiny dress and doe eyes?”
I barked a laugh. Every person who worked here—vampire and human alike—was a fucking gossip. There wasn’t much that happened in this club that we didn’t all know about, thanks to the constant flow of information. Usually, I didn’t mind so much. It was useful for keeping our staff safe, knowing who was too drunk to go into the back and who wouldn’t be invited to renew because of bad behaviour or weird vibes.
Most importantly, it kept people honest .
I was almost grateful for our little rumour mill. But now that I was the subject of the gossip? I found myself wishing everyone would mind their fucking business.
Especially Nick and his stupid knitted hat and pointed I-know-you-were-into-her stare.
The only upside was that his interest was piqued for something fun this time. It’d been fucking miserable when the staff were fishing for information about how we were doing after Cherie passed.
Especially since, if I was honest? It was like losing my wife had fundamentally changed something in me. Broke it. Something I wasn’t sure would ever be right or whole again. She wasn’t just my sire, Cherie had been my partner for two entire human lifetimes.
We’d seen the invention of the internet together for fuck sakes.
You didn’t just… get over something like that. It left marks, a space that I had no idea how to fill.
As time passed and the others moved on, I wondered if I’d be able to conceal the truth from them.
That whoever I was before died right along with her.
With a good-natured shove toward the stairs, I raised an eyebrow at Nick. “Got a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of her. She’s the friend Babydoll’s been harping on about.”
Nick swore with a low whistle. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the gentle giant looked crestfallen. “No go then?”
“N?o vá,” I echoed, but not without a flicker of disappointment.
I was only interested in a long drink and a quick fuck, but it was pretty hard to tap and dash on a girl who was about to become your new employee. At least she would be if I had any say in the matter. We were desperate for a good, reliable bartender, and now that one had breezed through the door—and looking like that ?
It’d be bad for business to take no for an answer.
Luckily for us, I was very persuasive when I wanted to be.
“You’ll get the next one,” he said half-heartedly, patting my elbow. “Night, Dana.”
“Later, Nick. Get home safe.”
He turned, disappearing up the steps with his voice floating back to meet me where I stood at the door. “But, hey! Dana! Never say never; eternity is an awfully long time to beat yourself up.”
I didn’t bother to reply, letting go of the bar so the heavy metal slammed between us and heading back through the inverted-cross door toward the private rooms.
My love life—or recent lack thereof, really—was no business of his.
Well, unless you counted my coven. But that was… different. Settled. I liked to have a side piece or two to keep me busy.
To keep life interesting .
Though, even I had to admit, it seemed like those days were behind me.
Out of habit, my eyes flicked from booth to booth as I took the long, semicircle hallway toward the main club. We’d never had after-hours stragglers before, but until I’d walked the entire floor, I wouldn’t be able to relax enough to head to my office to tackle the veritable mountain of paperwork awaiting me.
It never occurred to me just how much of the mundane day-to-day shit Cherie had been doing. She’d always made it look so easy—which wasn’t even in the stratosphere of words I’d use to describe what it was like to run an operation like O.
There was purchasing, staffing, coming up with the acts, dealing with the clients and the girls... A never-ending checklist of things to complete that were constantly being rearranged by whatever fire was burning the hottest at the moment.
Exhausting .
My nose turned at the sticky, overly sweet smell of perfume lingering in the air, undercut by the salty alkaline tang of spilled blood. Luckily for me, the cleaning crew would be in soon with their arsenal of steam cleaners and industrial-strength disinfectants to clear the club, getting it ready for another night of mayhem when we reopened tomorrow night.
Nick’s words weighed on me like a physical thing. I know he didn’t mean to, but pointing out my obvious interest in Vi… It ate at me as I moved through the familiar task of pulling back curtains, stacking sticky cups, and rearranging discarded throw pillows—anything I could do to make things a little easier for the barbacks flitting between the alcoves collecting empties.
It’d been a long time since I’d felt attraction for someone. Well before Cherie had gotten sick. My wife had been as smart as she’d been unlucky, carefully concealing her illness until it’d progressed to the point that she had no choice but to tell us.
Not that there was much that could be done for a vampire once they’d become bloodbound.
Believe me, we fucking tried.
But, there were four surefire ways to kill a night child.
A stake through the heart.
Decapitation.
Burning.
And starvation .
Sunlight was really less of a concern than movies and books made it out to be—I could see why the idea that blood-sucking monsters exploding into a cloud of dust if they stepped outside during the day was pretty attractive to terrified, uneducated people, but it was utter fiction.
Humans never were good at being kind about things they didn’t understand.
Sure, the sun was our natural enemy, but we wouldn’t immediately drop dead with a little exposure… Just a wicked sunburn and a headache to match.
Thank god for vampricine, a specially made glass that’d been developed a few hundred years ago that protected us from the sun’s harmful rays. Shaders, its digital version, is what made the Lower City a safe haven for my kind.
The chances that a human would be fast enough to stake you, smart enough to trap you in a fire, or strong enough to decapitate you were small. And even smaller was the threat of starvation given how easily accessible our preferred food source had made themselves.
In the old days, we had to hunt or make agreements with willing humans to accept our venom—a natural aphrodisiac-like drug—in exchange for enough of their blood to sustain ourselves. But now? Synthetic blood products were all the rage. You could get through your entire immortal existence without ever tasting the real thing.
It’s part of what made O a premium experience. We offered a safe place to play and feed with willing participants. For a cost, of course.
The last few centuries, being a vampire hadn’t been so bad. Never feeling cold or getting sick, being able to experience all life had to offer without the drag of age wearing you down… until the Blight.
The disease had exploded into the population, thinning our numbers and turning covens against each other as their sires and initiates became bloodbound en masse. A few hundred years ago, less than one percent of the vampiric population would develop the illness, making it impossible for the affected night child to synthesize blood. The human equivalent would be as if the body stopped processing the nutrients in food—slow, agonising starvation and eventual organ shut down until your miserable death.
It was painful.
It was incurable.
And it took my wife from me only six months ago.
A fact that’d painted my entire life in a wash of grey since she admitted, through gritted teeth, what was happening.
Dropping a girl like Vi—temptation down to the smell of the vanilla and honeysuckle blood in her veins—into the middle of my club felt like fate laughing in my face. Like Cherie herself was telling me it was time to get on with it. Enjoy life again.
I could practically hear my sire’s laugh, her lilting French accent teasing as she bent to whisper in my ear.
You’re welcome, Dana.
But I didn’t feel grateful . I felt cheated .
I finished my sweep of the private rooms and headed to the main bar, the light pop music playing from Ren’s phone speaker familiar as I picked through the room, putting a couple of missed chairs up onto tables.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Ren laughing at something Vi said, making my head turn. The chair paused midair, held aloft as I took in the scene.
Ren and Vi were backed against the shelves of glittering bottles, the vampire’s hands framing either side of the human as she ran her nose along her neck.
I couldn’t quite make out what Ren whispered in her ear, but judging by Vi’s sharp intake of breath and parted lips, it wasn’t a stretch to assume that workplace decorum had long since left them.
Vi’s hips moved, grinding against Ren’s knee between her thighs with a breathy moan that made the hairs on my arms stand up with electricity. Every crumb of my attention was fixated on the girl, her eyes swinging from Ren to find mine.
I froze like a deer in headlights, unsure if I should leave them to their moment. But any question I could’ve asked died on my tongue as Vi smiled, her head tilting to the side to bare her creamy pale throat to Ren.
“Bite me,” she whispered, voice soft and needy, thin with the whispered gasp that escaped her as Ren tightened her hold. She pressed her thigh against Vi’s centre more firmly, earning a delicious noise of pleasure that I wanted to replay for hours. “And then share me with Dana.”
“Of course, Pet…” my covenmate hummed, the tightly coiled muscles of her back shifting under her button-down as her lips pressed into the supple flesh. “But first, it’s only fair we show Dana how prettily you fall apart for me, isn’t it?”
“Dana?” Vi called, and the image fractured and pixelated, warped like an old television screen.
I blinked hard, rubbing my eyes.
What the fuck was that?
“Earth to Dana,” teased Vi, leaning over the counter to get a good look at me with her head tilted adorably to the side. Surely it was a coincidence that that move gave me a clear look down the front of her dress… right? “You okay, boss?”
“Er—” I cleared my throat, glancing around the room and finding it different than it’d been a moment before. The chairs already flipped onto tables, stools on the bar, and the rest of the room already broken down for the night, with the curtains of the stage drawn heavily in a swath of decadent maroon velvet.
God, Dana. You’ve been working too much. Get a grip.
But, something stuck out to me. And it wasn’t just the hint of Vi’s lacy black bra.
“What do you mean by boss ?” I asked, trying to ignore the way I could practically taste the hallucination I’d just had in the air, a whisper of Vi’s desire coating the back of my tongue like perfume.
She sighed dramatically, nudging Ren with her hip and catching the vampire off guard, her eyes lingering on the side of Vi’s face appreciatively.
“I mean…” Vi said slowly, milking the way my covenmate’s body stilled with attention. “I guess I didn’t totally hate working the bar tonight…”
“Helps that your coworker is so good-looking, right?” Ren interrupted hopefully with a crooked smirk.
Vi rolled her eyes, continuing like she hadn’t been interrupted. Ouch, what a blow to the ego. But, I could see it for what it was—a tease.
Ren seemed to catch it too, scrubbing a hand through her hair that way she always did when a hot girl was around that she wasn’t sure how to talk to.
“And I do need the money, so…”
“Sooooo,” I echoed, almost a little disappointed that I wasn’t going to have to put the charm on her after all. “You’ll take the job?”
“Yeah,” Vi said with a little shrug that made the hollow of her collarbone more prominent. Wildly, I wondered what it’d be like to slurp blood out of it. Her blood. I was so focused on my own totally inappropriate fantasy that I nearly missed what she said next. “I’ll take the job.”
My mind strayed immediately to my… daydream? Vision?
At the way she’d looked at me when I caught her and Ren together.
Like she wanted me to. Like she needed me.
It’d been so fucking long since I’d been needed.
I swallowed, pushing the thoughts aside to focus on the task at hand.
“Praise and virtue!” Ren cheered, putting her hand over her heart. Her tattooed fingers dug into the front of her shirt as she leaned back against the counter as though she’d faint. “Finally, a competent bartender.”
“Hey, Blondie is perfectly capable,” I reprimanded my covenmate.
Okay, maybe that was a bit of a stretch. Hard to be competent when you’re always an hour late, if you showed up at all. But Cole—Blondie to everyone inside of the club—filled a very important demographic for us that Ren and even Vi couldn’t.
The twink market ? .
There was a reason he was popular at the club— head —and I wasn’t talking about foamy beer tops.
“Picking favourites already?” Vi teased, pulling her lip between her teeth to stifle a laugh, which only made me want to pull it free with my own. To tug her reddened lip into my mouth for a suck that brought the blood to the surface before I?—
Dana, you’re not fucking your employee.
And why not? a little voice that sounded an awful lot like Cherie asked. Ren does it all the time.
I shoved the thought aside.
“Depends,” Ren tossed back, leaning into Vi’s space. If it bothered her, she didn’t show it, the opposite really. Swaying towards the vampire like they were magnets. Attracted to each other by some external force. “You won’t leave me hanging, will you, Vi?”
The human shook her head, wavy hair bouncing as her eyes tracked along the bare hollow of Ren’s inked throat where her shirt was unbuttoned. “Not a chance.”
“You’ll need a stage name,” I said, mostly to remind them that I was there. And only a little jealously. “You know, for safety.”
“Safety?” she asked, brows furrowing as she turned her head to look back at me.
“All the humans have them,” I assured. “We had a bit of an issue a few hundred years ago with a patron stalking one of the—” I cut off at the anxiety flashing across Vi’s face. “ Anyway . The process stuck, so… stage name.”
Babydoll breezed through the curtain that led to the back, her sparkly pink duffle bag slung over her shoulder and golden hair pulled into a sloppy bun at the top of her head like she’d been waiting for the right moment to make a grand entrance. “Call her Striker.”
“Striker?” Ren repeated with a laugh, cutting a confused glance between the girls. “Are you into bowling or something?”
“Baseball,” Vi said, her chest puffing proudly. “Season’s tickets to the Nightwalkers for the last five years.”
“And she played in college,” Babydoll added.
I had to cover my laugh with a cough at the predatory gleam in Ren’s eyes. If she wasn’t crushing on the new girl before, being obsessed with her baseball team would’ve definitely sealed the deal.
“It was only a partial scholarship,” Vi said, waving her friend off dismissively. “No biggie.”
Ren, practically drooling, opened her mouth to continue the line of questioning, but I cleared my throat to stop her.
There was onboarding to do if we were going to take on a new employee, forms that needed signing, wages to be agreed on. Which meant that she’d have to make time for flirting later.
“Can you come in at one tomorrow, Vi? The girls will be rehearsing, but we can fill out your paperwork and get everything settled before open.”
She nodded, grabbing her sparkly handbag from under the counter, the heels she’d entered the club in dangling from her fingers. “You got it. See you tomorrow, Ren?”
Ren nodded, giving her a quick two-finger salute. “Until next time, Striker .”
Vi’s head tilted, eyelashes fluttering in the most obvious flirting I’d seen without money being exchanged. “I think I preferred your other nickname for me, Sir .”
I could practically hear whatever was holding Ren back from fucking her on the bartop snap. The threads of a rope unravelling rapidly.
“My mistake, Pet .”
Babydoll looked between the two of them, golden eyebrows lifted in a way that told me there’d be a fair share of gossiping on the way home. “Let’s, uh, go?”
I’d been so distracted that I jumped when I turned to follow the girls up to lock the door behind them and found Garrett leaning in the doorway.
My brother-in-law had a definitive air of unkemptness about him that’d become his signature well before Cherie’s funeral. His dark, shaggy hair pushed back from his face in loose waves. The white T-shirt stretched across his thick middle, wrinkled and dull. His eyes landed on Babydoll’s lean legs for a couple seconds too long before flicking to Vi.
“Didn’t expect to see you here again,” he called to the girls with a grin that was more of a grimace, his fangs glinting in the glow of the neon.
“Well, I do work here, Gary ,” Babydoll said coolly, shouldering past him with her hand linked with Vi’s to lead her upstairs.
He hated the nickname, but it was one of the few holdovers that Babydoll had kept out of spite. They’d had a tumultuous little affair that ended when Babydoll found him in the back rooms with Peaches. She’d avoided him ever since, not exactly an easy task as the brother of her former boss.
I had no idea what had drawn her to him—okay, that was a fucking lie— money . For a while, he’d had a lot of it, and then like with most things in Garrett’s life, time, his coven, his family, he’d pissed it away for gambling and drugs.
Luckily for the rest of us, Babydoll was a paramount professional and didn’t rise to his bullshit whenever he deigned to darken our doorstep.
“Surprised you let her walk around dressed like that,” He commented as his eyes followed the girls through the door.
“What’re you doing here, Garrett? We’re closed,” Ren called flatly.
His attention snapped back to us, smile not quite meeting his eyes. He looked… tired. Or maybe just a bit run down. I was sure the long hours at the gallery were a helpful distraction from his grief, but… at what cost?
I couldn’t really judge him for throwing himself into work with what I’d been doing myself but… at least I’d tried.
Bitterness rose up in me, my eyes narrowing on my brother in law.
“I was hoping to talk to you in private, Dana,” he said, crossing the room to pull down a stool and sitting heavily. His pointed look at Ren was a clear attempt at dismissal that she ignored entirely. “You haven’t been returning my calls.”
Garrett wasn’t a small man, towering over me at six-foot-five and damn near three hundred pounds. Even perched on the stool, he was over a head taller than me. It would’ve been intimidating—if I didn’t know that he was a seedy little bitch.
That said, I did feel a little guilty for avoiding him. I’d been dodging his attempts to reach me for weeks… So, really, it was just a matter of time before he arrived on our doorstep.
He was going through the loss as much as we were, but I just… couldn’t.
Couldn’t stomach talking about her.
Thinking about her.
Or looking at him and seeing the way he tilted his head, almost like I was seeing her profile.
Fucking familial resemblance.
“Yeah,” I hummed noncommittally. “Sorry about that. Can we get you a drink?”
Ren’s irritated eye roll made it clear that she didn’t have any desire to serve him, but, our personal feelings aside, family was family. Even if that family did try to make a spectacle of our sire’s funeral.
“All the live ones gone?” he asked, sucking his teeth.
“Pretty sure,” Ren said distastefully. She didn’t share the cynical fondness for Garrett that I did. I couldn’t blame her, he’d never given her any reason to think he was more than a thrill seeking shitbag. “Pouch okay?”
He wrinkled his nose. “Barely, but fine. I’ll slum it.”
Ren turned to get his drink sorted, muttering under her breath about freeloading. Garrett never had much money, despite a fairly high-profile job at the gallery. Hard to, with his raging gambling addiction and unmedicated mania.
It wasn’t that I didn’t feel for the guy; I did. But you could only go through trying to get someone on medication and into a ten-step program so many times if they didn’t want to follow through.
“Hard to be a freeloader in my own bar, isn’t it?” he asked smugly, taking the offered drink from my covenmate and swirling the deep red liquid in the domed glass. Satisfaction dripped from his frame like he’d just revealed some great secret, his ego almost a physical thing as his head swivelled on his thick neck to look at me.
Fucking great. Another night of dealing with his delusions, that’s just what I needed.
“This isn’t your bar, Garrett,” I said flatly, trying and failing to keep annoyance out of my tone.
I really didn’t have time for this. Not with inventory overdue and needing to escape up to my office to get started on Vi’s contract. Briefly, I wondered if I could shove him off on Ren.
It would mean owing her one, but maybe it’d be worth it if I didn’t have to sleep in the bar again.
“Well… That isn’t entirely true now, is it sugar?” he gibed, that fucking smarmy smile of his taking on a new, entirely more irritating quality. “Never did find Cherie’s will, did ya?”
I scoffed. “You and I both know that she’d never give this place to you . I helped her build it.”
“Funny thing that.” He downed the glass with a smack of his lips. Once upon a time, maybe about eight months ago, Garrett would’ve been considered handsome. It was amazing what the better part of a yearlong unchecked breakdown could do to a man. “The courts don’t really care about what she would’ve wanted. Just that I am the sole survivor of her family line.”
Vampire wills and estates were… messy. Not even a marriage certificate was enough to guarantee without an ironclad will that your coven would become the beneficiary of your estate. They always looked for next of kin—that was to say, the closest related vampire—unless there was a document that stated otherwise.
Talk about bullshit.
Bullshit that up until this moment, I hadn’t thought I needed to worry about.
Garrett wouldn’t be cruel enough to try and take Cherie’s club, my coven’s home, out from under us?
Right?
“You son of a bi—” Ren started, only for Garrett to speak over her.
“But you know, Dana, I'm not a monster. I’m not going to kick you out. I just need you to pay me twenty-five percent off the top each month, and I’ll leave you be, nice n’ easy.”
“We’re a fucking bar, Garrett. We don’t have those kinds of margins.”
“I don’t see how that’s my problem, sugar,” he replied, pushing his empty glass toward Ren as he stood. “I’ll be back to collect my first payment at the beginning of the month.”
“And if I refuse?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest furiously.
Which, realistically, I’d have no choice but to do. There was no way we could afford to?—
“I’ll sell the club,” he said with a shrug, offering a nasty little wave over his shoulder as he headed upstairs. “Always hated this fucking place. Your choice, sis.”