Chapter 39
The minute Sophia and I enter the apartment I know something is off.
I can feel both our hackles rise. Somewhere, Penny is crying.
Loud, heaving sobs. Hound nowhere to be seen—
“Oh god,” I murmur, horror eating at me as we both hurtle past the kitchen and toward her room. It’s not a big apartment. I’m running for less than five seconds. Still, they are the worst five seconds I’ve had since I saw my father die.
I make it to her bedroom door before Sophia and I slam it open.
There, on the bed, is Penny. Face mask on, mixing bowl filled with pasta clutched in her grasp, watching a movie with two people soaked by pouring rain, yelling about letters.
When she sees Soph and me, both breathing raggedly at her bedroom door, she pauses the movie and wipes her eyes.
“Hi, guys,” she sniffs. “Spaghetti?”
Sophia curses on an exhale, leaning on the doorway. “You cry like you’re being axe-murdered, you know that?”
She nods quietly, lip trembling before more tears begin to crest.
“Oh jeez,” Sophia sighs before bypassing me to crawl into bed with Penny. She takes the pasta bowl—larger than her head—and twirls herself a bite.
“What happened?” I ask. Penny was supposed to be staying at Claude’s until I figured out if a deviant really did break into our place to scare me off the scent at Harker.
“Claude and I broke up. He met someone in Paris. The worst part is, she sounds really great. She works in fashion and has a poodle named Butter.” Tears stream down Penny’s face. “That’s a great name for a poodle.”
“Can you stop being so sweet for like five minutes?” Sophia asks, mouth full of spaghetti.
“I’m so sorry, Pen,” I say.
“It’s okay.” She sniffs and Sophia hands the bowl and fork back to her. Penny spools another bite into her mouth. “What are you guys doing tonight? We could watch a movie?”
Sophia and I make eye contact, and I try to think of the easiest way to let her down. She’s already so fragile.
“It doesn’t have to be a romantic one,” Penny adds, tucking her blond hair behind her ears.
“Penny, we—”
“Are going to Fever Dream and you’re coming.”
If my eyes were fists, Sophia would be laid out. “Penny doesn’t want to go to a club.”
Penny slinks deeper into the bed. “I’m not really club material.”
My relief is tangible. “See?”
“Nonsense. You’re young and smoking hot and newly single. That’s the definition of club material. They make these places for you.”
I’m going to strangle her. “Sophia, can I talk to you for a moment? In the hall?”
Sophia climbs from the bed with a petulant groan like she’s about to be grounded. She follows me down the hall until we’re both standing safely out of Penny’s earshot. “What are you doing? We can’t bring Penny on a recon mission to fucking Fever Dream.”
“Will you chill? It’s filled with mortal girls just like Penny every single night. She’ll be fine as long as we’re there to protect her. Like you said, it’s just recon. And maybe a little dancing.”
“Do you care about anything? Harker has been compromised. Someone is trying to brew a syrabraxa. Two girls are missing—they could be dead.”
Sophia’s face hardens. “Yeah, and we’ll probably be dead soon too.
That’s the nature of the job, babe. In the meantime, your best friend is hurting and needs you.
You want to leave her here to sob through Nicholas Sparks movies and eat her weight in spaghetti?
I hardly know the girl, and even I don’t want to do that. ”
I hate that she has a point. I hate that I have far less time with Penny than she deserves. I hate that figuring out what’s going on at this school means I’m likely to leave her and everyone else too early, the way my dad left me.
“We aren’t sure yet if this White Stag is behind anything. We don’t know if he’s a deviant, or if he’ll even be there,” Sophia adds. “You think he hangs out at his own club every night?”
It crushed Penny when I almost excluded her from Halloween shopping. And now she’s hurt and vulnerable…My gaze drops as I mull all this over. The lure Reid gave me sparkles on my wrist.
And an idea forms.
One that’ll have to do for now. “Fine. But no poppy around Penny.”
“ ’Course not. I’d never get fucked-up on a recon mission.” She turns on her heel, and we walk back down the hall into Penny’s room.
“Okay, no more moping,” Sophia says. “We’re going out.”
Penny’s eyes light and she puts the bowl of pasta on the bedside table. “Really?”
“Really. I have a gift for you too,” I tell her, pulling the lure from my wrist and handing it to her.
She takes the delicate charm bracelet, eyeing each nautical trinket and dangling gem. “It’s beautiful. A breakup bracelet?”
“A strength-when-things-are-hard bracelet.”
Penny’s teary smile seizes my heart.
“Up, up,” Sophia cajoles, yanking back the covers on Penny’s side. “Show me the closet. A rich girl like you must have a killer collection of high heels.”
Our cab lets us out nearly a block away due to the mayhem outside Fever Dream.
Girls crowd the sidewalk in dresses as short as they are sheer and heels higher than my ankles could ever withstand.
And the men—some suit-wearing, slicked-back old-money types I imagine will grow up to be little carbon copies of Stan and Caspar, others artistic, avant-garde, tattooed, and hair-dyed.
High-profile DJs, artists on the cutting edge.
The line for entry wraps around the industrial-style building, which appears to be eight or nine stories high.
Wannabe patrons spill out into the street, orange cones blocking the path of honking cars and fed-up cabbies who should know the city well enough to avoid this stretch on a Saturday night.
The moon is high and wide and the air crisp with cigarette smoke and the tang of spilled liquor.
Sophia and I sandwich Penny between us, arms looped as we clop down the sidewalk in our heels.
I feel a bit like a trio in a spy movie.
Sophia with her endlessly long copper-toned tresses and gold hoops paired with wide-leg pants and a matching halter top.
Penny with her voluminous blowout, siren’s charm bracelet, and baby-blue dress from the night of her birthday dinner.
And me in Sophia’s asymmetrical white skirt-and-top combo.
The skirt hangs off my hips at an angle, high-waisted on one side and sloping below my hip bone on the other.
I don’t love how the fabric is so sheer that you can see the white panties I’ve worn underneath, but the way it glitters is kind of extraordinary.
Every streetlight and high beam sends the entire ensemble flickering with delicate rainbows like a flurry of bubbles in generous sun.
And the top is the same—boatneck and sleeveless, cropped above my navel, sheer enough that every bra looked clunky underneath so I opted for Sophia’s white heart-shaped pasties.
One of the rare times I’ve been grateful for my Itty-Bitty Titty Committee membership. And Sophia’s too, I guess.
When I try to maneuver the three of us to the back of the line, Sophia says, “Don’t be silly,” and drags us—even Penny, who doesn’t “believe in the concept of line-cutting”—around to the front, elbowing our way past soaringly tall models and men in gold chains.
We get enough dirty looks that I shove my hand into my purse to feel my daggers prickle against my fingertips.
Without a whole lot of room to hide weapons in this nearly naked outfit, I stashed them in a sparkly black shoulder bag that I’ve tucked under my arm.
But Sophia steers us to the front with neither brawl nor catfight. The bouncer is a wiry guy with shoulder-length hair that’s black as the night sky and nothing but disinterest in his violet cat eyes. My body hums in his presence. A vamp perhaps. Not a trace of deviant activity, my ass.
But alas, Lurch is not tonight’s target.
At least, I don’t think. Sophia says something to him I can’t hear over the crowd and the music pulsing from inside.
Though the vamp bouncer’s stony expression doesn’t change, he stamps us with the shimmering white antlers before letting us in, red velvet rope lifted and all.
“How’d you do that?” Penny asks as the steel door is wrenched open for us.
“Baz and I go way back,” Sophia jokes.
She must’ve never seen his fangs. I wonder what she’ll think when I tell her he drinks blood instead of gin and tonics.
I don’t know why I expected Fever Dream to be low-ceilinged and sleek. No amalgam of Half City nightclubs could have prepared me for what we find when we cross the threshold.
The building may actually be nine stories tall, but there are no other floors.
Just this one room beneath a soaring, eye-weakening ceiling so high up I have to crane my neck all the way back to take in the whole thing.
Carved concrete columns line both sides of the club, supporting arches that reach up toward the roof and surround the mind-numbed revelers.
It’s more like an industrial warehouse than a nightclub, but with something vaguely ancient brimming inside too.
With the pillars and Grecian stonework and cavernous roof, it’s like if you were to host a rave in the Acropolis.
And at the center of it all is a stage for the DJ, raised too high for the patrons to reach, lit on all sides like a holy, glowing altar.
Sophia pulls us through the undulating mass of sweaty bodies grinding and swaying to insistent techno.
The lights glow a deep, carnivorous red and then strobe black and white until everything moves like a flip-book.
The scent of liquor and dope burrows under my skin.
The thrusting rhythm seeps into my bones.
“Come on,” Sophia yells, already swaying her hips and tossing her hair. The look of overstimulation bare on Penny’s face has me concerned, but a minute later she’s jumping with Sophia, and they’re twirling each other, and I’m grateful we brought her. Sophia was right—she needed this.