Branding the Bat (Kinky Kritters: Las Vegas #2)

Chapter One

Kinky Kritters always went a little feral on Halloween.

The bass thumping up through the shaft vibrated the Sero’s soles.

Even before the doors opened his sensitive bat ears picked up the voices talking over each other.

The subtle energy of a hundred shifters deciding to be someone else for one night, as though they weren't already someone else every day of their lives was tangible.

He adjusted his black lace mask and checked his reflection in the polished steel of the elevator doors.

The mask covered the top half of his face.

Very mysterious. Very dramatic. Very pointless, given that Amani would identify him in under three seconds.

The doors opened, and Sero stepped into chaos.

Kinky Kritters on a regular Thursday was busy enough.

Kinky Kritters on Halloween was a different animal.

Lady Leo had outdone herself, if Lady Leo was the sort of person who personally hung cobwebs from the ceiling, which Sero doubted.

More likely she'd pointed at things and someone had scrambled up a ladder.

The effect was impressive regardless: the club's usual low amber lighting had been swapped for deep purples and shifting greens, and someone had strung tiny orange lights along the bar that made the bottles glow like potions.

Fake spiderwebs stretched between the ceiling beams, which Sero found mildly offensive on behalf of the tarantula he sometimes saw in there.

The play areas in the back had been roped off with black and silver curtains, and from behind them came sounds that were not at all seasonal but were very much on brand.

Every seat at the bar was taken. People spilled across the floor in costumes that ranged from clever to absurd to barely-there.

A polar bear in a Hawaiian shirt. A pair of coyotes in matching leather harnesses with devil horns.

An enormous man Sero was fairly certain was a Kodiak, one of the security guys, wearing a tiny plastic tiara and a sash that said MISS CONGENIALITY in silver glitter.

The music was louder than usual, thudding with a dark electronic pulse that made Sero's chest vibrate.

He loved it. He'd never admit that to anyone, but he loved it.

Sero didn't come to Kinky Kritters often, twice a month, maybe, when the solitude of his apartment started to feel less like preference and more like habit.

He wasn't social by nature. Bats weren't. They roosted, they fed, they flew in the dark, and they came home.

The human form complicated things, obviously.

He couldn't exactly hang from a closet rod and eat mangoes in the dark without questioning his life choices.

But the impulse toward quiet was still there.

He preferred small dark spaces where he could be alone.

Except when he didn't. Except on nights like Halloween, when the hum of other bodies felt good instead of grating, when the music loosened the grip he usually kept on himself.

He'd told himself he was going out because he didn't have work until Saturday, and because sitting in his apartment watching another nature documentary about meerkats was going to make him want to shift and fly into a wall.

But the truth was simpler: it was Halloween, and he wanted to be around people who didn't need him to pretend.

He found an open seat at the far end of the bar and waited.

Amani was working the crowd with his usual fluid grace, reaching for bottles without looking, pouring with one hand while gesturing with the other, laughing at something a customer said while already turning to the next one.

He was twenty years old and moved like someone who'd been born behind that bar.

Which, given who his mother was, wasn't far from the truth.

Amani wore tiny black shorts that ended right below his perfect ass cheeks, no shirt, and Sero squinted, a pair of clip-on vampire fangs. They made him lisp slightly when he talked, which he was doing constantly, and which the fangs did absolutely nothing to slow down.

"Hey, Thero!" Amani spotted him from six feet away, grinning around the plastic fangs. "I didn't think you'd come out tonight. Latht time you were here you thaid you hated partieth."

"Take the fangs out, Amani."

"No. They're fethstive."

"They make you sound like you're having a stroke."

Amani pulled the fangs out with a pop and dropped them on the bar, still grinning. "Better? I knew it was you, by the way. The mask is pointless."

"I'm aware." Sero pulled it off and set it beside the fangs. "How'd you know? I genuinely thought I might have a shot tonight."

"I don't meet that many bats. Plus, I'm a lion.

" Amani tapped the side of his nose. "Things that fly catch my attention.

It's a predator thing. Nothing personal.

What are you drinking tonight?" He was already reaching for a glass.

"I can make you a black cat. Bourbon, a little spice, a little sweet.

Named it after a friend." He nodded toward someone across the room.

Sero turned on his stool to follow Amani's gaze.

A man stood at the edge of the crowd, talking to two others but not really paying attention to either of them.

He was lean and angular, dressed entirely in black: black shirt open at the collar, black jeans so tight they might as well have been painted on, black boots that looked expensive enough to have their own insurance policy.

On his head, a pair of black cat ears. The fake kind, mounted on a headband.

They should have looked ridiculous. They didn't. The man beneath them was too sharp for ridiculous.

High cheekbones, a jaw that could cut glass, and a restless, prowling energy that made Sero think of a panther.

Except he wasn't a panther. There was a panther in the club.

Sero had heard about the auction winner from the previous month, a lawyer named Mordechai something-or-other, supposedly terrifying.

This man was smaller than that. Leaner. A housecat, Amani had suggested.

As if sensing the attention, one of the fake cat ears swiveled in Sero's direction. The mechanical kind, wired to respond to sound. The man himself didn't turn. Just the ear.

Sero's mouth went dry.

"Sure," he said, not looking back at Amani. "The black cat. That'll work."

"You're staring," Amani said, and Sero could hear the grin without seeing it.

"Not really. Just not used to seeing housecats in here. Normally the cats who come to play are like you and the other big cats. He almost seems safe in comparison."

Amani's laugh pulled Sero's attention back. He turned to find the lion leaning over the bar toward him, forearms crossed, expression somewhere between amused and warning.

"Trevor isn't harmless. Far from it, actually.

He's one of the more creative Doms we get in here, and he's got a sadistic streak that would make some of the bears blush.

If you're feeling a bit like a masochist tonight, I'm sure he'd take you under his paw, so to speak.

" Amani cocked an eyebrow. "If you're looking to do more than just drink while you're here. "

Sero considered the possibilities. He wasn't particularly into pain, not intense pain, anyway.

Everyone at KK enjoyed some level of it; that was sort of the point.

But playing with a sadist was a different thing entirely.

That was stepping off a ledge and trusting someone to catch you, or at least to make the fall feel good.

He didn't know if he was ready for that.

He didn't know if he was even interested.

Except he was still looking at Trevor, who was stalking through the crowd with a cat's studied indifference, weaving between bodies without touching any of them.

There was something magnetic about the way he moved, playful and predatory at once, as though the whole room was a piece of string and he was deciding whether to pounce on it.

Amani set the drink in front of him. Dark amber, a curl of orange peel on the rim.

"Go slow tonight," Amani said, his voice dropping the teasing edge.

"You know the rules. Two-drink limit on alcohol, and I enforce it, so don't try to be clever.

And if you play with anyone," he held Sero's gaze, "you know your safe word. "

"Lioness," Sero said. Everyone's was. It was the club's universal safe word, the one that stopped everything, no questions, no negotiation.

Lady Leo's rule. Sero had never used it.

He'd also never needed to. He'd been careful about who he played with, and he'd never gone far enough to feel out of control.

"Good boy." Amani patted the bar in front of him and moved on to the next customer, a thick-necked man who looked like a bull and ordered a cosmopolitan with no apparent irony.

Sero sipped his drink. The bourbon was sharp and warm, smoothed by something sweet, honey, maybe, or brown sugar.

It spread through his chest and settled there.

He wasn't a bourbon guy. He was a fruit-juice-and-Shirley-Temples guy, which he knew was ridiculous for a grown man, but his body ran on fruit.

Bat metabolism. Bourbon hit differently when your usual intake was mango and dried figs.

He drank and he watched.

Trevor wove through the crowd like he was cataloguing it.

He'd stop at one group, say something that made them laugh, then drift to the next without committing.

A hand on someone's shoulder. A whispered word in someone's ear.

Sero tracked the reactions: a flushed face, a bitten lip, a straightening of posture.

Trevor left a wake of attention behind him wherever he went, and he seemed to know it.

Seemed to enjoy it. There was an arrogance to it that Sero recognized, the confidence of someone who knew exactly how attractive he was and had learned to use it.